Cousin Larry and the Wood family

Thanks to Cousin Larry, we know a lot about my hubby's Wood ancestors. He's a meticulous researcher and doesn't let up even when the going gets tough. Surprisingly, he found out that a distant cousin of his and hubby's (who married into the huge Foote family of Wethersfield) lived and died in my town. So now I can do some local research the old fashioned way--in my local library--instead of mousing around the web.

UPDATE in 2022: I was never able to find this Foote ancestor's grave, despite searching locally and in the state library. 

National Archives and Family Historians

Browsing the National Archives site, I found "Resources for Genealogists and Family Historians." Lots of "how to" links explaining use of the archives, plus genealogy tips, info on upcoming events, new data and old-reliable collections often searched by people climbing their family trees (like me). Just bookmarked this for fast future reference.

Old Abbreviations Describing Death

Searching online for genealogy blogs, I ran across Life of Riley, which has a very useful post today about old abbreviations. A sample, copied from today's post:

• d.s.p.l. - died without legitimate issue
• d.s.p.m.s. - died without surviving male issue
• d.s.p.s - died without surviving issue
• d.unm - died unmarried

2022 update: Unfortunately, this blog is no longer active. Instead, I've bookmarked the History Detectives site which has common abbreviations plus many well-known terms defined.

Linkpendium has more than 10 million links?!

UPDATE 2022: One reason I like Linkpendium is its categorization of genealogy links, by state, by worldwide surname, etc. Every month it adds new links. So many links, so little time. There are well over 10,000,000 links to family history resources at this time! 

Twitter Genealogy

2022 update: For fun and informative Twitter chats about genealogy, try #GenChat (alternate Friday evenings, US time), #AncestryHour (Tuesday afternoons, US time), and several other live chats that take place only on Twitter.

Watch for the tags #Genealogy and #FamilyHistory for tweets about these topics.

I'm on Twitter as @MarianBWood - see you there!

Google Your Family Tree

Dan Lynch's book is now out of print, but Google Your Family Tree was a wonderful reference tool when I was digging deeper into online searches for ancestors, ancestral communities, and specific aspects of family history. UPDATED 2022.

Online Searches for Family History Topics

2022 update: The author of Google Your Family Tree was speaking at a local genealogy club in 2009, and I was in the audience. Last time I heard that talk, his Google tips helped me find my first cousin, living only 100 miles away. 

I learned a lot about using search operators. Here's my 2017 post about that topic, explaining the use of:

AND

OR

"" (quotation marks)

- (minus sign)

* (wild card)

AROUND(insert number here).