by Katie Rebecca Garner | Oct 23, 2026
As Halloween approaches, people are putting up spooky decorations (which may or may not be related to death or the undead) and planning to visit haunted houses. Halloween is also the perfect time for genealogy: the research of dead ancestors. The ideal record type for...
by Katie Rebecca Garner | Oct 16, 2026
Everyone in my family loves chocolate – some claim to be chocoholics. When I randomly found a Hershey/Hirschi line in my FamilySearch Family Tree, I began to claim that “chocoholism” ran in the family. However, I could never easily find this Hershey/Hirschi line...
by Katie Rebecca Garner | Oct 9, 2026
Along with its huge collection of newspapers, another important source of genealogy records GenealogyBank offers is the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). This is a database of people with Social Security numbers whose deaths were reported to the Social Security...
by Katie Rebecca Garner | Oct 2, 2026
Genealogists spend a lot of time searching for – and then studying – death records. This pursuit may seem morbid to non-genealogists, but family historians know the important information death records can provide about your ancestors. To go beyond vital statistics and...
by Katie Rebecca Garner | Sep 25, 2026
On a spring evening in 1787, the quiet countryside of Christiana Hundred, Delaware, was shattered by the cries of a violent quarrel. Inside a small farmhouse, Sarah Kirk and her husband, James, exchanged blows that would end with his death and her eventual execution....
by Katie Rebecca Garner | Sep 18, 2026
Many records are created around a person’s death: death certificate, obituary, burial records, probate records. Probate records pre-date many other kinds of death records. When a person dies owning property, the probate process distributes that property among...
