Last weekend I had the chance to take a walk through beautiful Manchester Cemetery in Wheeling, West Virginia. This cemetery is fairly old, with almost half of the graves dating ... Read More

If you've ever thought about starting a family medical history but haven't gotten around to it yet, then I'd suggest you read the poignant article "Cursed by Our Genes" by ... Read More

Thanks to Dick Eastman, I learned about this funny little script that allows you to create an epitaph and plop it on an online tombstone to see how it looks. ... Read More

The most popular handwriting style in Elizabethan Europe is a script commonly known as the Secretary Hand. This handwriting appears in official documents such as wills, deeds, and parish records, ... Read More

There is a Harry in her family tree... J.K. Rowling's great-grandfather's name is Frank "Harry" Rowling on his birth certificate. But while J.K. Rowling says that she chose the name ... Read More

I think all of us will agree that genealogical societies are facing a crisis right now as the lure of online genealogy, and the price tag that comes with it, ... Read More

I'm supremely confident that all of my ancestors are out there somewhere just waiting to be discovered. They didn't jump off of a spaceship. They weren't born as a full-grown ... Read More

I've been taking the new Family Tree Maker 2008 beta software for a test drive and thought I'd share my thoughts. This is pretty much a complete re-write of FTM, ... Read More

From Spanish accents to German umlauts, there are a variety of special characters that we encounter among the surnames, place names, and other names in our family tree. In the ... Read More

Even genealogists with a good knowledge of German can have trouble reading old German documents due to the unusual nature of the old handwriting and printed fonts in widespread use ... Read More

On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, two of America's founding fathers died. Former president Thomas Jefferson died at his Monticello estate ... Read More