During our discussion of immigration and naturalization records at our last Genealogy Networking Group meeting, we also touched on Alien Registration records. Those of us with immigrant ancestors who had not become citizens by 1940 or who entered the United States during the war will want to look into these little known but information rich…
At our Genealogy Networking Group last week we discussed naturalization records: what they are, information they contain, and where to find them. Naturalization records are created when an immigrant ancestor applied to become a United States citizen. Several important facts to know about naturalization records are: Many laws have been passed over the years governing…
At a recent meeting of the Lake County (IL) Genealogical Society, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom gave a fantastic talk about passenger lists. There’s a lot more to them than just finding your ancestor’s name and date of entry into the United States. I can’t reproduce her entire talk, but here are a few tidbits that are…
At a recent meeting of the Lake County (IL) Genealogical Society we heard Teresa Steinkamp McMillin talk about finding your ancestor’s town of origin. She called this “the holy grail of genealogical research,” because once you find that, you can research your family in their homeland, across the ocean. But how to find the town…
At our last Genealogy Writing Group we also talked about passenger lists, immigration, and finding the “holy grail” of genealogy: the home town or parish in the country of origin. I don’t have any magic tricks for answering this question; usually finding immigration information is the result of lots of hard, diligent work. But we…
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