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.

Learn More About Me

12:29 PM

How to Keep Track of Genealogy Research Ideas (Even When They're Not About an Ancestor)

Keeping track of genealogy research ideas is one of the most underrated organizing challenges in family history research. It's easy to capture a find — but what about the collections you want to explore, the repositories you need to contact, the search strategies you haven't tried yet? This post is ab…

4:51 PM

The Brick Wall Solution Roadmap: The Genealogy Framework That Turns a Dead End Into a Next Step

If you've hit a point in your genealogy research where you're not sure what to do next, you are in very good company. Almost every genealogist reaches this place — a point where the path forward just isn't obvious and searching a little longer doesn't seem to be helping. Here's something w…

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…