By Jena Crable
For many U.S. genealogy wayfarers, their journey usually includes a stop in Canada. Surprisingly, this is true for persons with and without French-Canadian roots. Not surprisingly, living along the 3,000-mile border that separates the U.S. from its northern neighbor are innumerable families who share common ancestries as a result of their desire for greater economic, religious, or political freedom–in one country or the other.
October is National Family History Month. Do you have the genealogy and family history resources that genealogists and enthusiasts in your community need? And do they know how to get started?
Help your family historians and researchers make deeper historic connections while exploring their roots. Gale Genealogy Connect – the ideal complement to fact/people-based genealogy sources – fills in the rich context and real stories surrounding chronology that pre-dates accessible public records.
Get started in genealogy with the 3 W’s:
By Rachal Mills Lennon
Excerpted from the book, Tracing Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes
The history and culture of the American South are unique, owing chiefly to the intermingling of the races and the diverse ethnic
backgrounds of countless families. Modern Southerners proudly boast traditions–real or not–of Native American ancestry. Odds are, these traditions lead directly back to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes. The Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians dominated a broad swath of territory from North Carolina to Mississippi before their forced removal westward. Long hailed for their adaptability to “white” ways (hence the designation “civilized”), these nations have gained near honorific status among Southeastern genealogists.
Read moreTracing Native American Genealogy in Federal Records of Five Civilized Tribes
By Joe Garonzik
The two-volume Virginia Historical Index (aka “Swem’s Index” or “Swem”), originally published in 1934, encompasses the contents of the following seven serial publications: “The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography” (VMHB),Vols. 1-38; the “William and Mary College Quarterly” ( aka the “William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine” W&MCQ), Series I, Vols. 1-27 and Series II, Vols. 1-10; “Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine” (TQ), Vols. 1-10; the “Virginia Historical Register and Literary Advertiser,” Vols. 1-6; the “Lower Norfolk County Virginia Antiquary,” Vols. 1-5; “Hening’s Statutes at Large,” Vols. 1-13; and the “Calendar of Virginia State Papers,” Vols. 1-11.
By Joe Garonzik
The Connecticut genealogist, Donald Lines Jacobus (pronounced ja cob’ us), was the founder of the modern school of scientific genealogy and the greatest American genealogist of the 20th century. Jacobus and his protégés taught us how to research and write family histories, how to solve genealogical problems, what sources should be used, how to interpret them, and why we must abandon unsupported findings which, in many instances, were built upon flights of imagination as much as on facts.
Read moreWho was Donald Lines Jacobus, and why should you care?
By Joe Garonzik
In 1663, England’s King Charles II ceded the Carolinas to Anthony Ashley Cooper and seven other proprietors who had supported the Stuarts in ending the Cromwellian Revolution and returning Charles II to the throne. Notwithstanding the 16th-century exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh and legendary Virginia Dare, it was a group of Virginians who established North Carolina’s oldest settlement along the Albemarle Sound in 1653–a full decade before the installation of the Lord Proprietors.
The Crown divided the Carolinas in 1691, although North Carolina would not receive its own governor for another 20 years. British, Huguenot, German and Swiss populated the North Carolina tidewater during the first half of the 18th-century. New Bern, established primarily by Germanic immigrants under the impetus of Christopher de Graffenried, would become the largest city in the colony. Large numbers of Scots Highlanders and Scots-Irish, many by way of the Great Wagon Road through Pennsylvania and into the Shenandoah Valley, populated the western part of the colony. Eighteenth-century North Carolina was also noteworthy for its large Quaker population and for Wachovia, a Moravian settlement in Forsyth County.
By Michael Tepper
Researchers often run into problems when they are on the trail of an immigrant ancestor. The most common misconception about passenger lists is the belief that people had their names changed when they got to Ellis Island. In fact, immigrants did not change their names unless they applied for a change of name by deed poll at a courthouse or when they were naturalized. During processing at Ellis Island, officials had the actual ships’ manifests in front of them. They called each immigrant by name, according to the manifests, and often put a check next to the name after it had been called. So the passenger records are an exact reflection of the immigrants’ identities before they crossed the Atlantic, not after.
Read moreGenealogy Tips to Handle the Pitfalls of Passenger Records