Casting Your Net Fishermen in a Rowboat Throwing the Net by  fabianoshow   How many family trees have you started? I tend to want everyone together in one tree, but there are lots of reasons to have separate ones. My latest project is working on a tree for our grandson which was started by his Goldsmith grandfather. Since there will be little to no overlap between Steve's Eastern European Jewish tree and mine, it seemed simplest and most logical to just work in his tree, with his DNA matches. It's a fresh challenge and quite exciting so far. I wrote before about digging up records for the base of the tree, which has worked well.  When Steve's AncestryDNA results came in, it was fun to place all the closer cousins in the tree. Just the usual challenges finding all the living people; thank goodness for good hints including other people's trees with records. I never copy anyone's tree; instead I call up the records and analyze those, then enter the data directly from ...

By MaryLynn Strickland 1 Are you looking for the Clements family who immigrated to Minnesota in the 1880s?  Or maybe the Pheil family who left Germany for Virginia in the 1700s?  Are you frustrated encountering all those McBees you aren’t related to while you seek the ones you need? Or are you a wealth of knowledge about the Wood brothers who lived in Franklin County, Vermont?  Have you connected with unknown cousins because of DNA matching, giving you previously unknown surnames to research?  If you answer yes to any of the above, you need to be using the society’s Surname List. One of the popular items at early society meetings was a long narrow box, like a library card index drawer, filled with surnames that had been collected for many years.  You could browse through the box and take down contact information.  One drawback to the surname box was that only one person could access it at a time and there were a lot of cards!  Another drawbac...