The Thanksgiving holiday weekend has given many genealogy buffs some well deserved web surfing time. It’s the perfect opportunity to check on those long-lost queries posted to various forums years ago, especially since email addresses are likely different, and any follow-up messages have not found their way to you.

If you posted queries to message boards like Ancestry, RootsWeb, GenForum, Cousin Connect, or the many others available online, you can utilize their search features to locate your posts, and find out if you missed any responses. You might even try “googling” your ancestor’s names, which many FULL STORY »

Finding details on the everyday lives of our ancestors is always a bonus to genealogy research. Hopefully they had more happy times than tragedies, but if tales have been passed down about bad times, the website GenDisasters.com might prove worth a visit.

With the tagline “Events That Touched Our Ancestors’ Lives,” the website is further described as “a genealogy site, compiling information on the historic disasters, events, and tragic accidents our ancestors endured, as well as, information about their life and death.” It features articles (some with photos) from disasters in the U. S. and Canada dating as far back as 1755, when an earthquake shook FULL STORY »

The patience of the genealogist is something to admire. They undertake years of careful research, type it all up, add in the many preserved precious family photos collected from aunts and uncles near and far, and print it all out to share with others. So how do you reward this kind of dedication from which the entire family reaps the rewards?

Christmas is here, so why not consider gifts of a genealogical persuasion. But what do you get a genealogist, you ask? What about a subscription to an online database for more researching, or perhaps some updated software for keeping the research organized? The list can go on and on. FULL STORY »

The holidays are harvest time for family genealogists. By necessity, they must take advantage of relatives gathered for good food and gift swapping, and get them talking about family history. So, if you missed the chance to mingle with relatives on Thanksgiving, you’ll get another chance very soon when Christmas rolls around.

While many people enjoy talking about their ancestors lives, others simply refuse to reveal family information. Whether they fear skeletons in the closet, or feel its disrespectful to speak of FULL STORY »

Local and county histories have been published across the country for well over 100 years. Just imagine all the names they contain! Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to search through them all from one convenient location?

Say no more, because the Family History Archive has you covered. The joint effort between the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Brigham FULL STORY »

The internet’s largest genealogical resource is on another roll. Ancestry.com has added one database after another (at last count, there were 24,000) since its debut on the web, and now one of its latest projects is also growing by leaps and bounds.

This week Ancestry.com announced that more than 275 million individual profiles and more than 3 million family trees have been created on the site since it debuted new tree-building and sharing tools in July 2006. FULL STORY »

Genealogy networking is all the rage on the internet, and one fast-growing website in that genre is announcing its latest improvements.

The free to join FamilyLink.com is part of the even faster growing WorldVitalRecords.com family of websites.

This week FamilyLink debuted a brand new look. While it’s still in its beta phase, FULL STORY »

Newspaper research is one of the most important areas of interest for genealogists, and thanks to a pair of database-rich websites, this kind of research might be made a lot easier.

On Monday, newspaper record giant NewspaperARCHIVE.com announced its partnership with World Vital Records. The agreement FULL STORY »

Call us old fashioned, but many genealogists enjoy sitting down with a magazine devoted to our lifelong hobby. Sure we love the internet for research, and use it more and more everyday, but there’s something about sitting in your favorite chair with a cup of coffee and devouring every page, that makes a genealogy magazine so attractive.

Lucky for all of us, there are several to choose from that come out frequently, and are available on the newsstand or by subscription. All of these publications have been around FULL STORY »

Many genealogists rely on their computers to organize all of their family tree research. Some of them will want to make note of updates announced this week for two popular genealogy software programs.

One of them is Ancestry.com’s Family Tree Maker 2008. The new release is the latest version of a product that made its debut back in 1989. The company calls it the world’s No. 1 selling family history software. A company news release reports that the product has been entirely revamped with many new FULL STORY »