about me

Meet the Author

I'm Jennifer, and I'm an Occasional Genealogist... sort of. For over ten years I've been a professional genealogist. I started researching my own family nearly 30 years ago. Like many of you, I started as an Occasional Genealogist. I had to squeeze research in while in school and while working full-time. Then I got my first genealogy job and for awhile, it was genealogy all the time. Now I have two kids. I do other people's genealogy constantly but my own? Coming up with ways to do great genealogy, despite all the interruptions, is now mandatory.

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2:57 PM

Make Your Genealogy Skills Go Pro

How do professional genealogists accomplish so much more? Is it simply knowledge; do they know more than you? Is it just experience? Have they been clued-in to some secret or magic formula? The magic theory seems to be pretty popular. In fact, it seems to be the belief held by many peop…

9:01 AM

Digitizing Family Media and Why It’s Essential for Your Genealogy Research

Today's post is a guest post written by Paul Schneider of Remember Whenever , a media transfer company based in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He's going to share his expertise in this post to help you understand digitizing family media like video and audio tapes, DVDs, slides, film, and more—specifically fo…

10:17 AM

Building a Genealogy FAN Club : The Basics {+ my top recommendations}

Already know what a genealogy FAN club is? This post covers the very basics of how to create and organize one. This is the follow-up post to " What Is a Genealogy FAN club? " and continues providing what it is and is not as well as organizing ideas. As a reminder, there are multiple terms we…

6:30 AM

What Genealogists Can Learn from Tax Records

Tax records weren’t created for genealogists—but if you know how to read them, they can be surprisingly revealing. The key is knowing: what kind of tax you’re looking at, the law that applies at that time and place and analyzing it (based on the above two), so you can understand what it m…

6:00 AM

Why Some Records Aren’t Digitized—and What You’re Missing If You Only Research Online

It’s 2025. Shouldn’t everything be online by now? Not even close. Here are four reasons records don't get digitized plus some ideas for how to find them irl. If you've ever felt stuck in your genealogy research, the issue might not be your skills or your ancestors—it might be the limits of the …

6:41 AM

The Two Most Basic Things You Need to Bust a Genealogy Brick Wall

Before you can do anything else to bust a brick wall, there are two things you must have, information and knowledge. This sounds really simple and it shoukd be. But people rush ahead and get stuck for years because they don't START with these absolute basics. Genealogy knowledge is the foundation for bu…