100th Anniversary of the Panama Canal: History in the News

Introduction: Duncan Kuehn is a professional genealogist with over eight years of client experience. She has worked on several well-known projects, such as “Who Do You Think You Are?” and researching President Barack Obama’s ancestry. In this blog post, Duncan searches old newspapers to learn more about one of humankind’s greatest engineering feats: the... (Read More)

News from Soccer’s Previous World Cups in Old Newspapers

Introduction: Duncan Kuehn is a professional genealogist with over eight years of client experience. She has worked on several well-known projects, such as “Who Do You Think You Are?” and researching President Barack Obama’s ancestry. In this blog post, Duncan shows some of soccer’s most famous and infamous moments from previous World Cups, as... (Read More)

DNA Testing & Genealogy: Is It Working for You?

Clearly DNA testing is revolutionizing 21st Century family history research. DNA Testing Helps Orphan Find His Family There are heartwarming stories about successful DNA tests—like that of 80-year-old Patrick J. Holland, who was raised in an orphanage and through DNA testing finally found his family. Here is the full report on this touching family... (Read More)

Job Names in Historical Newspapers: Researching Old Occupations

Introduction: Mary Harrell-Sesniak is a genealogist, author and editor with a strong technology background. In this guest blog post, Mary provides a fun quiz to test your knowledge of terms used in old newspapers to describe our ancestors’ occupations—and then provides illustrated definitions of those terms. Genealogy research often finds terms used for occupations... (Read More)

Passenger Lists to America

Newspapers routinely published the list of passengers on board ships bound to and from America. Here are just a few examples of the thousands of passenger lists published in newspapers that can be found in GenealogyBank. Newspapers published not just lists of immigrants coming to America but also regularly published passenger lists of American’s... (Read More)

1st genealogy published in America – 7 May 1724

The first genealogy published in America appeared in a newspaper 284 years ago – today – May 7, 1724.   It appeared in the American Weekly Mercury. It was a genealogy of King Philip V of Spain. Genealogy articles routinely appeared in colonial newspapers. The first genealogy published in book form was in 1771... (Read More)