Genealogy
Resources
Charts, Forms, and Tables
Want to get started organizing your people into simple charts that will help you keep track of who your badass ancestors were, when they did stuff, and who their parents were? Use an Ahnentafel chart to keep track of things as you begin gathering information. Start with yourself at position 1, your parents at 2 and 3, and so on. You can even create additional pedigree charts for other people on your sheet—let’s say you’ve discovered the ancestors of your maternal great-grandmother, who sits at 15 on your chart. Begin a new chart with her at the #1 position and carry on from there.
There are plenty of places online that you can find an Ahnentafel chart—they’re usually free to download—and the style you use is going to be a matter of personal preference. Websites such as www.GenealogySearch.org and www.FamilySearch.org have wonderful templates that you can download and fill out to your heart’s content, going back several generations. The grand master of all genealogy websites, Ancestry.com, has Ahnentafel charts and doesn’t require paid membership to use them; on that site they’re referred to as Ancestry Charts but other websites call them Pedigree Charts—they’re all essentially the same thing.
You can also create Family Group Sheets to help sort through which parents had which children. If the couple had more offspring than you can fit on one Family Group Sheet, that’s okay—simply use extra sheets and adjust the number for each kid accordingly. Be sure to record your sources—write down where you found information when you locate it. Note down whether it was a census record, a birth certificate, a family bible, et cetera.
For standard Family Group Sheets, again, you’ll find some of the best and easiest to use versions at GenealogySearch.org, Family Search.org, and Ancestry.com. In addition to these forms, Ancestry also has a number of other useful templates in their Free Charts and Forms sections—use their Research Calendar sheet to account for all of the sources you’ve looked at and when you viewed them, the Research Extract form to summarize long and tedious collections of information into a practical selection of important facts, and their Correspondence Record to keep track of all of the various kinfolk, websites, and historical archives contacts that you’ve gotten in touch with to ask questions about your heritage
Online Resources
Ancestor work can be research-intensive. Consider using some of these free resources for online research in the United States.
• Use Family Search for free research of digitized collections like census records, burial records, and more. This site also allows you to connect with other researchers who are hunting for the same family members. www.familysearch.org.
• HeritageQuest Online is free to try from your home computer courtesy of your library card via participating institutions. HeritageQuest is “powered by,” although not directly owned by, Ancestry.com. This partnership has expanded its half-dozen collections to a lighter version of Ancestry, including the complete US census, military and immigration records, and city directories. Click Search and scroll all the way to the bottom to unlock more US records as well as selected foreign databases. www.heritagequestonline.com/hqoweb/library/do/login.
• Check out the Library of Congress. Though not specifically focused on genealogy, the nation’s library has plenty to offer online, including the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, the American Memory collection, and its own comprehensive catalog. loc.gov/.
• Explore the National Archives and Records Administration. You can read all about the genealogical treasures stored at the National Archives, order military and other historical records, and browse maps and photos. The National Archives Databases include files ranging from World War enlistments to passenger lists for millions of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Russia, among others. aad.archives.gov/aad/.
• The volunteer site USGenWeb, recently celebrated its twentieth birthday, and its state and county pages are even more useful than ever. Just found an ancestor who lived in, say, Jackson County, Georgia? There’s a page for that, as for almost every other place your family may have landed. usgenweb.org/.
• The Ellis Island & Statue of Liberty Foundation has millions of passenger and immigration records. Although not all immigrants came through Ellis Island, if there’s a chance yours did, it’s a wealth of resources to get you started on your search. libertyellisfoundation.org/passenger.
• Cyndi’s List is a massive collection of genealogy websites that you can access, covering over a quarter of a million different links, all categorized and cross-referenced in nearly a hundred different categories. Cyndislist.com.
Enslaved Ancestors Research
If you’ve reached a brick wall in trying to research an ancestor who was enslaved in the United States, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper. Because of the nature of the institution of chattel slavery, researching enslaved ancestors presents a unique set of circumstances that doesn’t apply when you’re researching people who came to the United States of their own volition. The resources in this list are specifically curated to help people of African heritage trace their enslaved ancestors.
Please be aware that the chattel slavery inflicted upon Africans in the colonial era is not the same as the indentured servitude that some white Irish and English people experienced; for resources on indentures, check the next section.
• The Digital Library on American Slavery is a free resource hosted by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This database includes digitized details about American slaves drawn from thousands of court and legislative petitions filed in more than a dozen states between 1775 and 1867. library.uncg.edu/slavery/.
• Tom Blake has spent many years identifying the largest slaveholders within the 1860 U.S. census and matching those surnames to African American households listed in the 1870 census, which was the first federal census to list former slaves by name rather than simply as a quantity. Blake estimates that these large slaveholders held as much as 30 percent of the total number of slaves in the United States in 1860. His website, Large Slaveholders of 1860, is at: freepages.rootsweb.com/~ajac/genealogy/.
• The Southern Claims Commission, while not specifically focused on slavery or African Americans, is a rich source of surprising details about people living in the southern United States. These records include the names and ages of many formerly enslaved people, their places of residence, names of owners, manumission records, ownership of property by enslaved people, conditions faced by free Black people, and a great deal of first-person background information on what it was like to be African-American during both the colonial period and after the Civil War. www.fold3.com/category/27/southern-claims-commission.
• At the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, you can search by voyage, examine estimates of the slave trade, or search a database of more than ninety thousand Africans taken from captured slave ships or from African trading sites. www.slavevoyages.org/.
• The African Origins website has information about the migration histories of Africans forcibly carried onto slave ships across the Atlantic, and compiles geographic, ethnic, and linguistic data on peoples taken from Africa. www.african-origins.org/.
• There are numerous county and state resources in places like Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and a bit of creative internet searching will yield plenty of results. Just key in a Google search for “slave genealogy [state]” or “slave records [state]”.
• Other databases that include things like African American sailors and soldiers from the Civil War can sometimes give insight to the names and locations of people who were previously enslaved and then later became free.
Indentured Servant Research
Indentured servitude was the way many people solved the problem of the exorbitant expense of migrating from their homelands to the new world of colonial America. It’s estimated that as many as 65 percent of the European people who came to the colonies prior to the American Revolution were able to do so because they signed some sort of indenture or work contract. An indenture typically lasted five to seven years, and the person—and sometimes their family, too—worked in exchange for passage. In some cases, indentures were a way to get out of criminal sentencing. Once the contract was up, they were given the freedom to go on about their business, own land, and do all the other things free people did in a fledgling nation.
If your ancestors were indentured servants—not enslaved individuals, (again, a whole different thing)—there are a couple of really wonderful online resources you can access that will provide information to help you get started.
• A professional genealogy firm in Utah, Price & Associates, offers a free searchable database of thousands of indentured servant records. It’s still an ongoing project, but it covers immigration as far back as 1630 up through 1820. The firm’s goal is to eventually have information on as many as 100,000 indentured immigrants. www.pricegen.com/immigrantservants/search/simple.php
• Search county and local historical archives for documents such as apprenticeship bonds and servant registers.
• Jamestown, Virginia, is one of the earliest settlements in America, and was the home of thousands of immigrants from Britain and its neighboring countries. The Virtual Jamestown website has a free database that contains about 15,000 indentured servitude records spanning the second half of the seventeenth century. These records cover more than just Jamestown itself—if your people settled in Virginia, it’s a great resource—and includes some great reference articles about the laws behind indenture, and newspaper postings about runaway servants. www.virtualjamestown.org/
• The late British genealogist Peter Wilson Coldham worked at the British Public Records Office and frequently found references to American colonists among the records. He ended up publishing more than two dozen books about indenture and British migration to America, which included paid servitude and convict transportation. His Complete Book of Emigrants 1607–1660 is one of a series that breaks down immigration by time period, from England to America, and Coldham’s transcription of The Lord Mayor’s Court in London: Dispositions Relating to Americans 1641–1735 covers court cases that include indentures, as well as land grants and merchant disputes.
• The New Early Settlers of Maryland website includes a database of nearly 35,000 immigrants who arrived in the colony between 1634 and 1681. Maryland had a system called headrights for land distribution, which meant that one could obtain fifty acres of land for each person transported. This system made Maryland prime ground for wealthy people who wanted to acquire land and were willing to buy indenture contracts. earlysettlers.msa.maryland.gov/.
Books Every Genealogist Should Read
As you dive into online databases, it’s easy to get lost in the endless webs of information, so sometimes it’s great to get back to the basics. These are three books that anyone serious about their family history should read at some point.
• Who Do You Think You Are? by Megan Smolenyak (Penguin Books, 2010). This is the book that serves as a companion guide to the hit television show of the same name and includes detailed yet easy-to-understand resources on all kinds of topics. Whether you’re trying to figure out how to archive an old photo, decipher a strange word on a census record, or get new ideas for places to search, this book is perfect for beginners and veterans alike.
• The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy by Kimberly Powell (Everything Press, 2011) is exactly what it sounds like! Don’t be intimidated—it’s chock-full of tips on online resources, search keywords to try out, and how to connect with other researchers on the internet and social media.
• The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking (Ancestry Publishing, 2006), is a monster at almost a thousand pages. This is the book that a lot of professional researchers swear by—it’s the quintessential guide to identifying and locating both primary and secondary sources, and it contains content written by some three dozen experts in the field of family history research.
Other books that would be helpful to have on hand include local histories to help you learn about the places your badass ancestors lived, religious tomes, political guides, and even—if you’re lucky enough to find it—other people’s published genealogical studies of your family. Do you have an ancestor who was a member of a prominent family? Get your hands on books that detail that family’s history and provenance—if you can trace your line back to royalty, this information is recorded in meticulous historical detail. If someone in your family did something that made them famous—for good or bad—pick up biographies, which may reveal more clues as to who else they were related to.