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Author: James Tanner

June 28, 2020

Languages, Scripts, and Genealogy

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner was published previously on the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. The United States is a nation of immigrants. About 1.6% of the population are Native Americans. If we persist in doing genealogical research we will all find ourselves trying to read difficult to decipher handwriting and nearly...

Country Research/Records/Research
June 21, 2020

Where was the event? Where are the records?

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner appeared previously in the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. The questions in the title of this post are two separate but closely related issues. To start, I will repeat a general guideline for all genealogical researchers: The place of an event in an ancestor’s or relative’s life...

Country Research/Records/Research/U.S. Research
June 14, 2020

How to Read an Old Document

How to read an old document Genealogists who are involved in doing their own original research inevitably run into handwritten documents that are difficult to decipher. The difficulty arises from a number of factors: the document is written in a language unknown to the researcher the creator of the document had poor handwriting skills the document is written in a...

Research
June 7, 2020

Genealogy and Paleography: How Are They Complementary?

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner was published in the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. William Shakespeare’s Will by an unknown scribe – Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1382708 I can assume that if you have been reading this blog at all previous to this post that you already know something about genealogy. But I...

Research
May 31, 2020

The Basic Steps in Cleaning Up the FamilySearch Family Tree

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner was published on the Genealogy’s Star site and is used with the author’s permission. Whether you are currently deeply involved in researching and adding new names to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree or just now beginning to learn about how to sign on, we all have the same basic challenges. I know I have...

FamilySearch/Research
May 24, 2020

How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part Five

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by James Tanner in the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. Analyzing genealogical records and documents boils down to making decisions about the accuracy of the records and documents. One of the most common categorizations of documents makes a distinction between an original document and a copy. This...

Country Research/Research/U.S. Research
May 10, 2020

How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part Four

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner originally appeared in the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. Courtroom in the Charles E. Simons Jr. Federal Court House, named for District Court Judge Charles Earl Simons Jr. in 1986, located in Aiken, South Carolina Jargon is defined as the use of special words or expressions that...

Research
April 26, 2020

How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part Three

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner appeared recently in the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. It has been a while since I started out with a pancake illustration. This is the best example of what is involved with the levels of jurisdiction in geographical naming conventions. There is a legal definition of the...

Records/Research
April 19, 2020

How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part Two

Editor’s note: This article by James Tanner originally appeared in the Genealogy’s Star site and is used with the author’s permission. The most effective way to learn how to analyze any subject is through the “case method.” This is used almost exclusively in law schools to teach people how to be lawyers although the use of the case method does...

Research
March 1, 2020

Historical Images Tool Finds Unindexed Records in FamilySearch Catalog

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by James Tanner in the Genealogy’s Star blog and is used with the author’s permission. https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/explore-historical-images/ To begin discussing the new Historical Images Tool, I think it is a good idea to know what it does and does not do. To understand what it does do, you need to understand why the tool...

Records/Research
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