For those with an interest in American colonial coins and currency, there are two websites that are a part of a project of the Robert H. Gore, Jr. Numismatic Endowment at the
University of Notre Dame:

• the Coins and Early and Colonial America
• Colonial Currency

If you are going to be making holiday purchases on Amazon.com–please use our link before entering their site. Purchases you’ve made after clicking our link help support Genealogy Search Tip of the Day. Thanks!

Due to several requests, we’re offering another section of this popular class on US land records–join us. The class is informal and there’s no grade!

This 1908 edition of “Courts Having Jurisdiction in Naturalization Proceedings” is available on GoogleBooks. 

If you’ve seen those codes or numbers by the cause of death on a 20th century death certificate and wondered what they mean, this page has links to the “International Classification of Diseases.”

This can be helpful when the cause of death is difficult to read. This 1924 death certificate from Missouri classified the death as “118a.”

The contemporary guide indicated it was a hernia. This death was easy to read, but some aren’t.

A reader reminded me that people can appear in “records” or “indexes” at the “wrong” time for a variety of reasons. Newspapers may have columns of “back in the day” items that refer to things that happened fifty or one hundred years ago–meaning your ancestor who died in 1880 may appear in a newspaper from the 1930s.

Ancestry.com‘s probate database typically only indexes the name of the deceased person–however, there are instances where the name of the executor, administrator, or guardian has been indexed instead.

Ancestry.com‘s United States probate collection is incomplete–they don’t have every probate record for states in their collection, they don’t have every thing online that FamilySearch has microfilmed, and their indexes are not complete. But it is a start for those who have a membership. This page has links to the state specific collections of probate materials at Ancestry.com.  I find it easier to use than navigating their catalog.

We’ve turned our webinar sales page back on now through 30 November. Don’t wait! There are a wide variety of downloadable genealogy presentations–all with a focus on being practical, down-to-earth, and research oriented! Visit the page here.