Blog posts

Learn how to clean a tombstone safely, why household cleaners damage old stone, and why you need permission before you start restoring a grave.

Learn how to store old family letters the right way, from removing rusty staples to choosing archival folders and transcribing them before they fade.

Learn how to preserve an old family bible with archival safe handling, cleaning, repair, and storage tips that protect its pages for generations.

A beginner's guide to FamilySearch Full-Text Search, showing how to search unindexed land, probate, and court records using wildcards and filters.

See what a real grocery bill cost in the 1900s, from six cent bread to butter at forty cents a pound, based on official government price records.

A genealogy strategy for researching common surnames like Smith or Jones, using cluster research to track neighbors and witnesses instead of the name alone.

What the science says about using DNA tests to prove Native American ancestry, including why autosomal results cannot confirm tribal citizenship.

A step by step guide to finding your biological father using AncestryDNA matches, shared matches, and mirror trees, written for real searches.

A practical triage system for sorting inherited family papers and ephemera into what to archive, what to digitize, and what to let go.

What was daily life like for a coal miner in the 1800s? Learn about the dawn to dusk shifts, black lung risk, and scrip pay behind that one word on a census record.