Upcoming presentations The merry month of May has arrived and, with it, the National Genealogical Society conference and about nine kazillion sets of syllabus materials for the upcoming summer institute season. Yea, it’s a busy time for The Legal Genealogist and, as always, I want to invite you to come along, to the extent possible, on the trip. May 2024 • Tuesday, 14 May, 7 p.m. EDT: The Central Jersey Genealogical Club is hosting the virtual presentation Writ in Stone: Cemeteries and Genealogy. The link will be sent automatically to members. For membership, see the Join page. • Thursday-Sat ..read more

A deep dive into the way the law impacts records May 1. Law Day in the United States. And a day when The Legal Genealogist is hard at work, putting together the lesson plan for a special two-part offering that just might be what you need. It’ll start in just three weeks, and there are just a few seats left, so… The course is called Decoding Records: Using the Law and it’s offered through the Family History Academy. It’ll meet on two consecutive Thursdays, 23 May and 30 May, 7-9 p.m. EDT, and the course cost is $127. What we’re going to do — so the description says — is “dive deeper into recor ..read more

Upcoming presentations Spring has sprung — or is giving it a good shot around most of the United States — clearing the way for one of the first in-person appearances of 2024, and a whole lot of virtual events as well. Yeah, there’s a lot coming up fast on The Legal Genealogist‘s calendar and, as always, I want to invite you to come along, to the extent possible, on the trip. First, the in-person event: come on out and join me and the Austin Colony chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution for the spring seminar on Saturday, April 13, 2024, at the Balconies County Club, 8600 Balcones ..read more

… not a legal transfer It’s a question that comes up a lot in the emails to The Legal Genealogist. This time, it came from a genealogical society that wants to honor a long-time volunteer. “This volunteer has written many columns for our newsletter over the years,” the inquiry began. “We’d like to collect the best and publish them in a book to honor her work — and maybe raise a little bit of money for the society.” The issue, of course, is copyright: who owns the right to publish those columns in this form? And the answer is almost inevitably the same: it’s not the person or society asking the ..read more

The language of the law. Part Latin, part Greek, part law French, even part Anglo-Saxon. And all confusing. “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” It’s a wonderful sentence, one that made The Legal Genealogist giggle in the movie theater and that continues to do so even today. You remember it, I’m sure, from the movie The Princess Bride, when one of the characters has said, for the eighty-‘leventh time, that something was inconceivable, and Mandy Patinkin — playing swordsman Inigo Montoya — responded. Because the event had happened, it couldn’t have been i ..read more

You snooze, you lose Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Saturday, March 9th. The Day not to sleep in if you’re hoping to get in on an unparalleled opportunity for genealogical education and fun — the last of what The Legal Genealogist calls summer camps for genealogists scheduled for this year. Because tomorrow, Saturday, March 9th, is registration day for the all-virtual 2024 Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR), which kicks off with orientation on Sunday, July 21st, and classes to be held Monday-Friday, July 22-26, this year. The Legal Genealogist will be back at IGHR for this virtua ..read more

Institute courses that deserve another look Registration is already open for one of this year’s summer institutes for genealogical education, and registration will open for another on Saturday. These two — what The Legal Genealogist calls “summer camps for genealogists” — offer a wide variety of courses, some of which are well known and tend to fill up very quickly. My own courses, at both the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) where registration is already open, and at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR) where registration opens this Friday, March 9, te ..read more

BIG news from FamilySearch at RootsTech FamilySearch today opened public access to an experimental search function that can search every word of text — including every name — even in handwritten documents that haven’t been indexed by the hordes of volunteers who generally go through records to make them searchable by name. It’s using artificial intelligence to read the handwriting and return results in thousands upon thousands of record sets that aren’t yet every-name-indexed on FamilySearch — and would never otherwise be every-word-searchable. No, it’s not every record FamilySearch holds. Ri ..read more

Registration opens Tuesday, February 20 So you didn’t make it to the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy in January. And you sat there the whole time watching people who share your interests learning new things and having fun… without you. And you’re starting to feel distinctly left out … Never fear. There are lots of options for expanding your genealogical education in 2024, and the first of this summer’s institute programs — two weeks of sessions at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) — will open for registration tomorrow, Tuesday, February 20. For the first week — all virt ..read more

When we don’t get what we asked for Reader Barbara Dottino had an unpleasant surprise when she asked the U.S. Social Security Administration for a copy of a relative’s SS-5 form. She wanted a copy of the original application for a Social Security number. But that’s not what Barbara received in response to her request: “I recently requested an SS-5 and they sent me an OAC-790,” she wrote. “On this document it indicates that the original SS-5 was sent to PC on 5/29/1969. Where is PC? I thought the SS-5 would show her parents names, etc. They indicated that this is all that available. How can tha ..read more