Time Travel to 1940

“One hour, okay?”  He looked at me skeptically. “Then you have to come back to me. We have places to go!” “One hour – got it!” Wow, even time travel has restrictions. I turned on the machine and within a minute I was back in 1940 and walking the streets of Philadelphia. I didn’t have much [...]

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Relatively Speaking: The 1940 Census

In only 35 days genealogy geeks everywhere will rejoice in the release of the 1940 Census. It will be the first Federal Census in which my parents make an appearance. When I came up with 12 Genealogy Goals for 2012, goal #3 was to “Find all my relatives in the 1940 census.”  But just how [...]

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Who Needs an Index?

Genealogists are eagerly awaiting the release of the 1940 U.S. Federal Census in April 2012 so we can track down the information on all of our relatives. While Ancestry will have the images available for free, they will probably not be indexed for some time. For me, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing…my family’s track [...]

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Losing My Census in Search of a Brother That Never Was

Have you ever looked at a genealogical record and seen what you expected to see rather than what was actually there? Recently I started organizing data in anticipation of the 2012 release of the 1940 Census, and that includes reviewing addresses and enumeration districts from the 1930 Census.  This is how I realized that for [...]

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Double Counted in the Census

Imagine yourself as an immigrant to America in the early 20th century.  You are happy with your decision to leave your homeland for a new life in America. Perhaps after a few years you saved enough money to send for your wife and children to join you. You have found a job, and you have [...]

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Climbing up Gene Kelly’s Family Tree

This month’s COG (for which I am late…the dog ate my homework, Teacher Jasia!) asked us to Research From Scratch by starting a search on someone else’s family tree.   When I began my own family research about 21 years ago, there were not any records available on the internet.  Lately I’ve wondered how much I [...]

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The Boy Next Door

In 1944’s movie musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland’s character is in love with the boy next door.  She sings about him in the appropriately titled “The Boy Next Door”, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane: The moment I saw him smile, I knew he was just my style, My only regret [...]

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The Case of the Missing Grandmother

This week Randy’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun asked us to do a scavenger hunt to find a family member in the census.  All of my great-grandparents were immigrants, and I’ve found them on the census records long ago to initially start my research (so many years ago that, at the time, the last available census [...]

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A Census Quirk on Ancestry.com

While researching the 1910 Census on Ancestry.com, I came across an unusual error.  Since others may find similar issues with their research, I thought I’d share my way to “get around” the error.  My search was for some families in Philadelphia, PA with the surnames Miller and Mach.  When I click on the census image [...]

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The Slesinski Sisters: Part 2 – The Research

In Part 1 of “The Slesinski Sisters” I presented some photographs passed on to me by my grandmother that showed her mother and aunts: Laura, Josephine, Mary, Jane, and Sophie Slesinski, from “somewhere” in Poland.  The remaining photograph that I inherited from my grandmother is shown below.  All I had to begin my research were [...]

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Famous Lives

Sometimes we forget that “stars” are people, too.  And as regular folks just like us, their genealogy can be traced with the resources we all use online. I was saddened to hear of the death of actress and dancer Cyd Charisse on June 17.  I knew her date of birth to be March 8, which [...]

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Census Records: What’s in a Name?

When I first got started in genealogy, I thought the Soundex was an amazing thing. It helped me find many incorrectly written names, often simply mis-pronounced by the foreign speaker or mis-understood by the American census taker. But, the Soundex only gets you so far…some errors are just too much to overcome. For example, the [...]

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