Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2025 i Family Tree

When someone finds out I go to a genealogy conference every year, they give me a quizzical look. “Isn’t genealogy about dead people?” they ask. “How can there be news?” Little do they know about all the exciting tech tools that are announced at each year’s RootsTech <www.familysearch.org/rootstech>. These tools change how we learn about our ancestors, as well as how we preserve and share their stories. The conference also showcases the latest and best strategies for conducting research—a gathering place for some of the brightest minds in genealogy. Even if you can’t attend in-person in Salt Lake City, you can take advantage of more than 200 recorded presentations online (page 7) and promotional offers from leading genealogy companies (page 24). In this issue, we compare and highlight the latest…

AS OF THIS WRITING, ROOTSTECH 2025 is set to kick off on March 6. The in-person event in Salt Lake City is just part of the fun—FamilySearch also plans to add more than 200 new online sessions to the already extensive collection at <www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech>. The On-Demand Library boasts more than 1,500 free genealogy videos, some dating to 2019 <www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/search>. Search for relevant videos by keyword, or filter by language, country, speaker and more. See a tutorial for using the site at <www.familytreemagazine.com/libraries-archives/navigating-the-rootstech-on-demand-library>.…

The top three genealogy websites change so quickly that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them. During the time it took to write this article, millions of new records were added to Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com>, FamilySearch <www.familysearch.org> and MyHeritage <www.myheritage.com>. In fact, each hosts billions of records. Billions. What does that number even mean? It’d take more than 30 years to glance at each of 1 billion records for just one second per record. And at this rate, it would take you about 1,014 years to get through MyHeritage’s current collections; 1,800 years to get through Ancestry.com’s; and an estimated 1,976 years to finish at FamilySearch. You’d have to live nearly 4,800 years to see them all. (And that’s only if they stop adding records now.) Here’s a quick glance…

IT’S HARD TO DENY WASHINGTON’S NATURAL beauty. The Cascade Mountains divide the state into east and west, and the Columbia River serves as its southern border with Oregon. The waters of Puget Sound drew early settlement and connect communities to the Salish Sea and beyond, including into Canada and directly to the Pacific Ocean. WASHINGTON: A HISTORY Native peoples have lived in what is now Washington for thousands of years. By the time of European contact, notable groups included the Chinook, Nez Perce, Puget Sound Salish, Walla Walla and Yakama. The names of many towns and rivers attest to their presence: Walla Walla and Yakima (referring to those respective peoples), and Tacoma and Seattle (both derived from Puget Sound Salish names). The state is home to 29 federally recognized tribes.…

• Unlimited Premium articles on FamilyTreeMagazine.com Get members-only access to thousands of how-to articles on FamilyTreeMagazine.com. • 20 years of Family Tree Magazine Read expert advice from the United States’ premier genealogy magazine, including our list of the 101 Best Genealogy Websites and the best research tips from the past two decades. • Here’s an added bonus! You’ll receive the US State Research Guide Collection with your Plus Membership. It contains all fifty of our US State Research Guides. The collection costs $49.95 by itself! It’s yours for free as part of your Plus Membership. ONLY $49.97 BECOME A MEMBER TODAY!  <www.familytreemagazine.com/digital-magazine-website-vip-subscription/> Visit the Family Tree Shop for more great savings on magazines, webinars and research guides for genealogists!…

In late 2024, an appeals court ruled against website Internet Archive <www.archive.org> in a years-long copyright case. Filed by major US book publishers, the case determined that the Internet Archive unlawfully used in-copyright books as part of its digital-lending program. The non-profit Internet Archive hosts a variety of digitized books, audio, records and other publications—many of them public-domain and some in partnership with libraries and archives. Through its Open Library, users can borrow materials much like they would from a conventional library. In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic when many libraries and schools closed indefinitely, the Internet Archive temporarily removed borrowing restrictions on its materials (including those still under copyright protection). Though the “National Emergency Library” project lasted just a few months, it triggered a lawsuit from book…

* The enslaved were not mentioned in the US census by name. Look for the formerly enslaved beginning in the 1870 census, or in dedicated slave schedules taken as part of the 1850 and 1860 censuses. ** Most records of the 1890 census have been lost. See <www.familytreemagazine.com/records/census/1890-census-substitutes> for advice on “replacing” the 1890 census using other records. § Question asked only of a subsection of the population, rather than of all respondents.…

Each state-by-state guide includes: • How-to tutorials for finding records Notes on how and when key documents were kept in the state, including vital records, state censuses and land records • Historical summaries and timelines Narrative history with special emphasis on events that affected your ancestors, including year of statehood, large migrations, and major border changes • Links to key resources Websites, books, and archives and organizations for further research 1 READ AS PART OF FAMILY TREE MAGAZINE Each issue contains two newly updated guides on a rolling basis. Subscribers collect all 52 guides. 2 VIEW ONLINE FOR FREE <www.familytreemagazine.com/explore-by-state> New states added each month. 3 PURCHASE & DOWNLOAD PDFS <store.familytreemagazine.com/genealogy-research-state-guides> Purchase ($9.99 per guide; $49.95 for full collection) includes perpetual access to the most-recent version of the guide. RESEARCH…

Q Can you do a DNA test on hair? A The short answer? Yes. I was successfully testing hair in the late 90s. However, the question isn’t really “Can hair samples be used for DNA tests?” Since you’re reading this magazine about family history, your question is more accurately “Can hair samples be used for DNA tests for genetic genealogy research?” Again, the short answer is yes. That still doesn’t capture the full story, though. What you really want to know is “Can the lock of my great-grandmother’s hair that I found in an old cedar chest be used for DNA tests for genetic genealogy research?” And the answer to that, my dear genealogist, is probably not. Or at least, not right now. Four—maybe five—obstacles interfere with your success: 1.…

Common Origins of Surnames PLACE NAMES A person may have adopted a surname based on the description of a nearby place, or their place of origin. This could have been a local landmark (like a hill, valley, river or even tree) or a town, region or country’s proper name. For the former, make sure you consider how a name might have been translated to or from an original language. Some examples include Moore (a moor or bog), Torres (Spanish for “tower”) and Li (Mandarin Chinese for “plum” or “plum tree”). Look for suffixes—like -ton in English and -er in German or Ashkenazi Jewish names—that indicate someone came from another place (e.g., Berliner for someone from Berlin). PATRONYMS Family names may have sprung from the father’s given name. Different cultures have…

FOUNDED IN A LIVING room near Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2003, MyHeritage <www.myheritage.com> has swiftly grown into one of the largest genealogy companies in the world. With a global audience and some 33 billion digitized records, the site has firmly established itself as one of the “Big Four.” Over the past several years, MyHeritage has expanded its offerings from historical records and family trees to DNA tests (2016), photo-enhancement (2020) and -dating (2023) tools, and a sister site offering historical newspapers (OldNews <www.oldnews.com>, 2024). The latest new feature, Live Memory (see page 6), uses AI to turn still photos into short videos. We sat down with Daniel Horowitz, a genealogy expert who’s been with MyHeritage since 2006. With nearly 40 years of family history experience, Daniel regularly speaks at genealogy…

Being the keeper of your family’s history is an honor…but sometimes overwhelming. There are so many memories to capture before they fade. Photos and memorabilia to digitize and label. Stories to share with loved ones.You want to use the best (and easiest!) technologies, but you don’t want to keep investing in different tools. Where are you in the following three-step process of saving your stories? Consider our recommendation for a single, easy-touse system that can help you all along the way. 1. Digitize the stuff. Many genealogists have piles of photos, documents and artifacts that capture the faces, places, and stories of the past. These bring memories back to life and reveal loved ones’ personalities. Family documents help build family trees and solve age-old mysteries. But until they’re digitized, they…

Scouting is an important part of Clare Long’s family story. Her father, David Smith, achieved the top rank of Eagle Scout at the age of 14. Later, as a father and scoutmaster, he shepherded her six younger brothers through their own Scouting experiences. As the only girl in the family, Long wasn’t left out. “I was in Explorer Scouts in the early 1970s, when the Boy Scouts of America opened it up to women,” she says. “I was one of the first women, and I went to a camp in Canada.” As her father’s 90th birthday approached in 2022, Clare considered how to honor his life. Then she remembered the box of his Scouting memorabilia they discovered when her father downsized to an independent senior-living community. “He doesn’t hang on…

If you’re among the millions of Americans with at least some Swedish ancestry, you’re in good company. From Chicago to Seattle, through Minneapolis and the Great Plains, Swedish immigrants laid the rails and broke the sod in America. Swedish-Americans flew the Atlantic (Charles Lindbergh) and landed on the moon (Buzz Aldrin), made movies (Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Mark Hamill) and popular music (Harry Nilsson, the Beach Boys’ Wilsons), and wrote literature (Ray Bradbury, Carl Sandburg). The total number of Swedes who left for America over the years was equivalent to about one-quarter of Sweden’s entire 1880 population; by 1910, almost one in five of the world’s Swedes lived in the United States. More than 100,000 of them lived in Chicago alone, and the Windy City ranked behind only Stockholm as…

They’re called vital records for a reason—those birth, marriage and death records that are such critical pieces in the puzzle of an ancestor’s life. But as genealogists, we shouldn't overlook the wealth of family history information set out at another critical juncture in the lives of so many of our forebears: a marriage ending in divorce. Divorce records are often harder to find than other genealogical resources, meaning many family historians put off looking for them. But this article will show why you shouldn’t delay even a moment longer. In this article, we’ll look at the promise of these records, as well as the challenges to finding them and alternate records that can clue us in to a divorce in the family. CLUES IN DIVORCE RECORDS A divorce record is…