Blog posts

Learn how to trace your family's history through heirloom recipes, from reading old recipe cards to understanding what ingredients reveal about where your ancestors lived and how they survived.

Learn how to find free historical maps for genealogy research, including the Library of Congress Sanborn Maps and the David Rumsey Collection, to see your ancestor's hometown as they actually knew it.

Found a confusing job title on an old census record? This genealogist's guide explains what occupations like cordwainer, cooper, and victualler actually meant in the 19th century.

Learn how to trace ancestors who migrated during the Industrial Revolution using city directories, factory records, and tenement census data. A practical research guide.

Learn how a simple color coded genealogy system can organize your entire family tree by ancestral line, on paper and on your computer, so nothing gets lost again.

Learn how to digitize old family photos the right way, from choosing between a flatbed scanner and a phone app to picking the correct DPI and saving metadata that future generations will thank you for.

Learn how to organize digital genealogy files with a simple, copy paste folder structure. Stop losing photos and documents in a messy archive.

Seven browser extensions that speed up genealogy research, from automatic citation builders to DNA match organizers, with what each one actually does.

Learn how to use ChatGPT for genealogy research, from reading old handwriting to translating records and understanding the world your ancestors lived in.

Is FamilySearch accurate? Learn why shared tree errors happen, how to read the change log, and the polite way to fix mistakes other users made on your ancestors.