Author Description

The major purpose for searching printed secondary works and manuscript sources is to share what other genealogists have compiled on your ancestors. This Research Guide will help you locate clues to keep you going. Find between 30-300 years of traced and often documented genealogy, locate completed pedigree and family charts. It will provide strategies and clues to locating original documents, with signatures, in the possession of living family members usually unknown to you. As families were separated by migration over time, there is no way for you to know in advance who got the family heirlooms, which family members corresponded with each other over a span of years, or where the family Bible finally came to rest. Until you discover these materials reproduced in facsimile in a family history, or quoted in a county biography, or included in someone's manuscript collections or personal papers, or shared by an unknown cousin, you won't know what is available. Let this Research Guide open your mind and research skills to new levels.