Finding My Roots (Part III)
This past April (2018). I took myself on a little vacation. Perhaps a vacation is not the best word, for the primary purpose of my trip was to visit my father’s grave, something I...
Finding My Roots (Part II)
Now (if you’ve read the first entry in this series) you know a bit about my mother’s family and the difficulty in finding out more about my maternal Greek ancestry. Invasion, massacre and civil...
Finding My Roots (Part I)
Two weeks ago, I took a week-long trip to southern New Jersey and Philadelphia to try and discover more about my ancestral roots. This is the first of a series of articles detailing that...
The Original 13
Growing up, from time to time, I would stay with my aunt and her family in Germantown, Pennsylvania. I won’t mention how many years ago that was, but I will tell you those visits...
Verbal Family Histories
All the advice for people starting to research their family history says to go and ask family members what they know. I was lucky that my grandparents provided me with a lot of information...
The Importance of Family
As a professional writer, I typically work from home. Writing is a very solitary profession, and I find that, unless I am interviewing someone for a book or article, or visiting a specific location...
Looking among the living for clues to your past
When we think of genealogical research, most of us typically focus on finding past records, locating deceased relatives and making sense of historical documents. But family historians often overlook an important resource in their...
The search for identity: one adopted man’s struggle to find his roots
The cover story of a recent edition of Sports Illustrated begins: “Aaron Levi wanted to know who he was, where he came from, where he belonged. From an early age he had questions about...
DNA testing: a lifeline for adoptees searching for their roots
One of the most promising applications of DNA testing is its potential to provide information to a population with limited access to genealogical records: adoptees. While adoptees can obtain certain records, the venture...
What land records can reveal about your ancestors
Land records are an important, and sometimes overlooked, source of information in genealogical research. Land records are not simply descriptions of the details of a plot of land. Besides providing evidence of where...
