Free military records of your ancestors or more recent service members are available to everyone through state and federal archives and libraries. Digital collections of scanned records are increasingly online. Here’s a smattering of state-level records. Go to Florida Memory at the state archives site to search World War I…
Have you searched for an ancestor by name in the U.S. Census and not found a record, even though they were born before 1940? If you found her in the 1930 Census but not the 1940 one she could have died or changed her name in the intervening years. But…
You’ve tested your DNA through Ancestry.com and now you want to send a message to your Ancestry DNA matches through the application’s messaging program. There is one method that many researchers have found is more likely to reach the recipient. Before you reach out, formulate your questions and conduct enough…
Search for your ancestors and relatives who were married in New Jersey. This is an enormous aid to adoptees whose birth parents were married but for whom you have the last name of just one party. And if the adoptee was born in New York City, the given surname may…
Adoptees searching for relatives in the New York boroughs have a new (free!) resource to verify and supplement the (fee-based!) Ancestry.com, New York City Marriage Indexes. The marriage index images for all five New York City boroughs from 1930-1972 are now online, an addition to the 1908-1929 collection that was…
SFGenealogy.com asked me to pen a short guide, How To Do Your Own Adoption Search In California, which highlights some of the recommendations I offer on AdoptionSearcher.com. I didn’t mention petitioning the court to open closed adoption files because this is generally not successful. However, courts in closed states have released…
Birth family are the people you’re biologically related to — mom, dad, siblings and children. The link for adoptees and birth mothers and fathers is usually severed soon after birth. How can the U.S. Census help these relatives find each other? Even though the census is available through 1940, only,…
An adoptee can begin her search for an adoption record even if she doesn’t know her birth parent’s name. A few states will open adoption records and give you the original birth certificate. Almost all allow release of some information from the closed record. This is called the non identifying…
Adoptee or biological parent names may be published in newspapers’ birth announcements. But even if a newspaper has been digitized that doesn’t mean that it is searchable. If you’re looking for births, deaths, marriages or divorces which may have been published on a specific date, go to the vital records…
Adoptees are confronted with the investigative challenge of how to search for a birth parent when you don’t know their name. Well, let’s say you are looking for a birth mother who was born 50+ years ago and you only know her birth name. Even when the adoptee’s original birth…
