Success in finding ancestors often comes from two things: knowing when certain types of records exist and knowing where to find these records.

Genealogy In Time Magazine has prepared a date guide to English genealogy to help you trace your ancestors from England and Wales. Instead of following the traditional method of looking at types of genealogy records, the guide takes a different approach and looks at genealogy research from a chronological perspective. This more innovative approach has several advantages. In particular, a chronological perspective will help you:

• Identify when certain record sets first became available.
• Help clarify key turning points in your genealogical research.
• Gain a better understanding of the historical context of your ancestors.
• Provide a perspective on how certain events may have influenced the availability of ancestral records.

You can read this genealogy date guide from end-to-end to gain a better understanding of how to trace your English ancestors. You can also use this guide as a handy reference source when you hit a brick wall in your genealogy research. Either way, this guide is organized around a need to solve the problem of how to find your English ancestor.

Source:  Genealogy in Time Magazine

Family History Daily has a very interesting article on common mistakes we all seem to make.  As you know, family history research is a fascinating and rewarding hobby, and it’s getting more exciting all of the time. With new records and tools and research methods appearing every day, there are seemingly endless opportunities to explore and collaborate.

But, as most of us already recognize, there are also endless opportunities to make mistakes. And, in the connected world of online research, those mistakes can spread like wildfire.

One very important part of our family history research that can easily go awry is the connection between generations. More than any other area, this one is the most vulnerable to the kind of mistakes that can completely crush the accuracy of an entire branch of our tree.

To read the entire article and perhaps gain some insight into not making the all-to-common mistakes in connecting generations, please click here.

Good luck with your ancestor hunt!

Over the years Ancestry has made changes to its image viewer.  The latest change is one you just might not realize is there and if you are a long-time user you may be wondering where some features went.  If you are a new Ancestry user, you might thing the image viewer is a bit lacking. It turns out that some of the most powerful features of the image viewer are hiding behind a simple icon.

If you are looking at a census return image, it isn’t immediately obvious what you are looking at, even though the name may be highlighted in yellow.

That information (and more besides) is hidden behind one of the icons on the right-hand side of the page. Look below the green “SAVE” button and you’ll see several icons, including one that has a straight vertical line with an arrow pointing left. When you click that icon, you’ll get an expanded menu with more information and more options. On that expanded menu, you’ll get three tabs.

• The Detail tab (as shown above) provides the information that was indexed for that record.
• The Related tab has links to other records that Ancestry thinks pertains to that person.
• The Source tab includes a source citation, information about where this image came from, and the ability to browse other years and locations in this collection (the options for browsing vary by collection.).

Good luck with your research!