Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog

My mother-in-law's grandmother's sister Fannie Fern Crandall was not someone we heard much about, and we never thought to ask. The n...

Simon James (1771-1822) could dig a grave, weave a piece of cloth, preach a good Baptist sermon -- and, when necessary, wrestle a ghost into...

Few things genealogical are more fun than finding a probate that reveals a supposed bachelor marrying, fathering five children, and dying --...

After a fifteen-month nap (er, hiatus) I will try restarting this blog on a weekly basis. * The big genealogy news is Karen Jones's pl...

Genealogy is about remembrance, not just descendants. Or as Tom Jones puts it in Mastering Genealogical Proof , genealogical questions are ...

Samuel W. Boren's 1898 Pittsburgh death certificate said that he was 69 and that his parents were both named Boren. Ten years later his ...

Has anybody out there still not subscribed to the smart, knowledgeable, uncluttered weekly collection of links from the University of Wisc...

Digitized newspapers are everywhere, but so many different outfits -- both free and commercial -- are getting in on the act that it can be h...

Trying to pinpoint a landless research target in the 1850 census between his landowning neighbors, I realized I needed to see if they were a...

Cindy Freed at the group blog In-Depth Genealogist calls attention to a Civil War database of Pennsylvanians whose religious convictions pr...

Many genealogists think of Pennsylvania and New York as exceptionally difficult places to research. But really, they are just places with di...

Those who have research targets who were Methodists in western Pennsylvania need to know about the denominational archives at Allegheny Coll...

No vital records, no church records, no helpful probates or deeds, no useful pension records, no useful guardianships -- how is a Pennsylvan...

* The summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a well-cited article by Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five...

Thanks to Kerry Scott for mentioning Diarmid Mogg's Small Town Noir blog on Facebook for us slowpokes to notice. It focuses on small-ti...

I can't think of many nonfiction books that were so gruesome and depressing that I deliberately quit reading them, but I almost did that...

Do you have what it takes to spend 40 years researching a missing grandfather? Don't miss Joseph F. Martin's wonderful story of his ...

"Perhaps more frequently and firmly than many genealogical sources, land records enable kinship determination." That's Nicki P...

Late last year there were several interesting posts at H-Connecticut on overland migration routes through New York state and Pennsylvani...

Lafayette College economist Howard Bodenhorn has studied patterns of criminal sentencing in mid-19th-century Pennsylvania, and the National...