It's a blustery Autumn day as you wait with your friends for the morning school bus. You've tried to give extra care to your appearance today and your hair is just not at its best. Maybe you should have gotten a haircut last week--or maybe you shouldn't have gotten a haircut last week. On top of that, acne has erupted on your face and your favorite shirt didn't make it through the wash this week.  Of course. . . It's School Picture Day! Funny that decades later I remember that Freshman year picture day so well.  My only consolation was that most of us had similar experiences and a couple of months after the yearbook came out, no one remembered what you looked like the previous year anyway.   Wouldn't you love to find your parents or grandparents in a record of their school years? Who knew that school yearbooks would become another valuable resource for genealogical research? Use yearbooks:  to prove family relationships  to establish time and location ...

Electric Fan Vectors by Vecteezy When it's hot, we get out the fans to cool off.  MaryLynn Recently, a submitter on Facebook declared she was going to stop researching individual people and start researching families. She discovered that she had more success by looking for the family first.  Most researchers probably reach this conclusion as a necessary research method because it is the way to identify ancestors, especially when common names are involved. Finding Patterns Researching ancestors' siblings can help explain use of given names that do not follow a certain pattern. In my Stowe family, there are two men with the name George Marshall Stowe; one was my grandfather and the other was his uncle. Neither "George" nor "Marshall" had ever been used as given names and Marshall was also not a surname in the family. I had always wondered about the source of the names. One day I decided to look at my 2nd- great-grandmother's siblings and discovered that on...

Courtesy of Pixabay Mystery Match - What To Do Next You've checked your DNA results, possibly at a new test company, and you find an unfamiliar match sharing a large segment of DNA. While some of the companies assign a relationship, "1C,2R", that may not be accurate due to variables such as "half" siblings or cousins.  There are several tools available to help calculate relationships; one we have seen in presentations and online is the Shared cM Project 4.0 Tool v4.  https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4 You can locate yourself in the white square marked "Self" just off the center.  Relationships that share, or are descendants of one or both of your parents are in light or blue gray.  Relationships with which the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) is one or both grandparents are in green, great-grandparents are in orange. The numbers in the squares represent the average shared cMs for that relationship as well as the low and high range.  Notice that ...