[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] Let’s review. Day 1: Research Question Day 2: Objective I took a look at my tree on FamilySearch and decided to see if I could find a death date and place for Nicholas Connolly, my great-great grandfather. In the forty years that I’ve been “doing genealogy,” it never occurred to me…
[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] Today’s challenge is to carefully examine the two English census records that provide the information that serves as evidence for my great-great grandfather’s death. Building a strong foundation for new research is very important, right? In the works-for-me research process that I’ve developed over the last few years, this is the…
It took me a long time to wrap my mind around the idea of calculating birth date ranges from an age on a particular day but now that I understand how it works, I find it much more useful than just subtracting an age from a year and it isn’t that much harder to do. Let’s use Frank M. Smith as an example. On 2 July 1885, he stated, under oath, that he was forty-eight years old. [1] Subtracting 48…
I’ve been working on my husband’s Smith ancestors and recently I took a close look at the evidence I’ve found for James Ayer Smith’s birth date and place. Here’s a quick summary of where I’m at: A compiled genealogy suggests James Ayer Smith was born 12 January 1808 in Waterville, New York. [1] An obituary suggests he was born 24 June 1807 in Paris, Oneida County, New York. [2] This is a case of unknown informants providing indeterminable information–direct conflicting…