One of the good things to come out of our COVID year was the explosive popularity of online programming. Genealogy Garage—the library's monthly genealogy session—has taken the plunge, too, and we now…
The notion of having one’s own savings account is commonplace to us modern folk. But for former slaves—many of whom had never even seen money—it was an alien concept. And, in a country that runs on…
I recently completed an online heraldry class conducted by the University of Strathclyde, and I learned a great deal that will be helpful to me as a genealogy librarian. Heraldry is the study of…
Insurance companies have long provided policies to cover losses of property but, before the end of the Civil War, this also included pay-outs for injury and death of the formerly enslaved. This…
These annual precursors-to-telephone directories display a person’s home address, but also often a spouse name, occupation, and work address. And since they were largely published every year, they can…
To the bane of many genealogists, the eleventh census of the United States was heavily damaged by a fire at the Commerce Department in 1921. Less than one percent of it survived, which means we have…
My grandmother was born June Eileen Lavonne Nystrom, and her husband called her Patty. I know this because my mom told me, and my mom knows this because her mom told her. However, when I first…
