Tracing ones lineage often uncovers forgotten facts and interrelated events in the lives of individuals and their families throughout the ages. While transcribing thousands of death certificates for my ancestors and their extended family, the signature of one doctor, John Franklin Noyes, rose to a level prominence in my mind. As one a couple of group of doctors in early small town Utah, Dr. John Franklin Noyes was usually present at significant events in the lives of my family. He certified the deaths of scores of the family. He was present at the time of many of their deaths and at many ...

Over the years, I’ve spent thousands of hours taking photos of tombstones for my genealogy research and to post on Find-a-grave. At times, some of the tombstones have turned out to be those of relatives that I’d yet to discover. The hours spent taking tombstone photos and later cropping and massaging them has been an effort but I’ve been well-paid as I learned a little about the people they memorialized and the communities of their time. Life was different for them than we enjoy. Repeatedly seeing families with numerous infant deaths witnesses that fact, but the family ...

In my younger years, the goal of any on-road excursion was to arrive well under the forecast travel time. Then one day I got smart. With a lifelong interest in genealogy, I’ve always spent a lot of time walking through cemeteries looking for information about my family. Consequently, even the concentration associated with ‘fast’ trips could not keep my eyes from searching out groups of tombstones along the way. I remembered the names of all the little towns and waypoints not with road signs but with images of their cemeteries in my mind. Finally, I succumbed to the ...

I continue to rave about the records that are appearing on the FamilySearch Pilot and Beta sites thanks to all of the volunteer indexers worldwide and the LDS Church . Brickwall after brickwall in my ancestral tree have fallen in the past few months because of the records. I’ve turned into a sourcing maniac too. Many, many decades ago (rocks were still dirt) I started my personal ancestral quest. The idea of adding complete sources to your records was an odd notion at best. Way back then, you’d jot down research notes on your tablet with a charcoal stick and possibly ...

Death Certificates are usually excellent primary sources for death and burial dates because they were created so close to the time of those events. They often greatly err in the record of birth dates, places and parents names. Most death information is provided by someone other than the spouse or parent of the deceased. There memory or knowledge is typically off a little or completely incorrect. Case in point: The parents names listed in the death records of Charles Joseph Gordon Logie are: Charles Logie and “Emily James Logie”. The name of is father is correct, but the ...

I’ve heard from a number of folks who read my earlier posts about Grave Witching to find lost or unmarked graves in cemeteries, farms and other locations. All of them are active ‘witchers’ using the craft to locate lost graves of loved ones, military burials and lost graves in old cemeteries. As noted in the earlier posts, I’ve used ‘witch sticks’ to locate buried water and power lines for decades as a matter of need, without thought that the activity may seem strange to folks who haven’t seen it done. Growing up, I frequently saw people bend a ...

Long enamored with the films, books and documents at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, I’ve lived long enough to enjoy the library coming to me. I first visited the library as a youngster when it was in the office of the LDS Church Historian on 58 East South Temple in Salt Lake City. My mother and I used to make regular day trips to search for our ancestors. At first I enjoyed the photos in the books but was soon filling out family group sheets and pedigree charts with the information I’d gleaned from the books. Learning to use the library catalog wasn’t ...

In the mid-1990’s I happened to visit the homes of my 2nd great grandfather within a day of each other even though they were located on two different sides of America. Tuesday. Copperopolis, Calaveras County, California. In the area on business, I stopped by Copperopolis to take photos of the tombstones of my 2nd great grandparents, David Lewis and Helen Farrar Drew . Their home still existed along the highway through this wide spot in the road. Looking east from the top of the cemetery hill, it was fairly easy to identify it based on photos of it from the early 1900’s. ...

In the mid-1990’s I happened to visit the homes of my 2nd great grandfather within a day of each other even though they were located on two different sides of America. Tuesday. Copperopolis, Calaveras County, California. In the area on business, I stopped by Copperopolis to take photos of the tombstones of my 2nd great grandparents, David Lewis and Helen Farrar Drew . Their home still existed along the highway through this wide spot in the road. Looking east from the top of the cemetery hill, it was fairly easy to identify it based on photos of it from the early 1900’s. ...

Every once in a while we find written entries in our ancestors records that make our day. Yes, it may be ‘THE’ record that crumbles one of our ancestral brick walls or it may be a piece of information that although important, is just a piece of an overall well-sourced record. Then, there are the men who entered information in records with a flare. Sometimes the flair consists of fancy script embellishments, at other times it is concise handwriting that fills the page of a census record. And then, there are the men who spent long hours entering the facts associated with births, ...

Every once in a while we find written entries in our ancestors records that make our day. Yes, it may be ‘THE’ record that crumbles one of our ancestral brick walls or it may be a piece of information that although important, is just a piece of an overall well-sourced record. Then, there are the men who entered information in records with a flare. Sometimes the flair consists of fancy script embellishments, at other times it is concise handwriting that fills the page of a census record. And then, there are the men who spent long hours entering the facts associated with births, ...

Google Maps is going to save me a lot of money. I won’t have to retrace many earlier trips to ancestral homes, ancestral burial locations and the waypoints along their migratory paths. New features in Google Maps provides the latitude and longitude of these locations. All I have to do it point at them and read. In many locations, the resolution of the aerial images is so good that I can point to my ancestors exact tombstone. I’ll miss walking through cemeteries with grandsons just to gather the latitude and longitude information of our ancestors markers, but we’ll ...

I’ve spent several years trying to find the actual burial location of a great granduncle and his family. I knew where they had died but the family was not mentioned in any of the burial records of cemeteries in the area. Last week, I found the mention of the Simeon Cemetery in Cherry County, Nebraska. Where was it? As it turns out, it is located on a farm about 20 miles southwest of where the family died. Of course, my first thought was to see if anyone had walked through the stones and later posted the data about them on Find-a-grave. In my initial search, it wasn’t listed, ...

Some days are better than others even if the cause of the ‘better’ is our own absent mindedness. Witness the discovery today of notes and pages on the shelf of an out-of-sight book case in my office from a multiple day research trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. I try to spend as much time as possible preparing for visits to the FHL in Salt Lake so little of my precious research time is wasted during the visit. The preparation goes something like this: Review of the research notes I’ve recorded on the Legacy database records of my brick-wall ancestors ...

If any of your family members died in Missouri between 1910 and 1959, their death certificate should now be online. The state sent notification out this week that they have added the range of available certificates up to 1959 … an increase of ten years coverage. Several other states also offer death certificates online as well. At least four of them are: Arizona 1844 – 1958 Missouri 1910-1959 Utah 1904 – 1958 West Virginia Years vary by county. There is no cost to print them on your home printer. They have put the images online as a kindness to genealogists and ...