Best websites to start the year

The big players are useful, but here are others to check out.

“Start Here,” by Sunny Jane Morton in Family Tree Magazine’s January-February issue, starts off the new year with the 25 websites that she says are a must to use.

I will mention here first the ones I was not familiar with, or am not using regularly. About.com contains a lot of how-to articles, many for beginners. AfriGeneas (afrigeneas.com) is about African-American genealogy, again with lots of “forum” learning opportunities. The Genealogical Learning Center at genealogy.com is recommended and contains a lot of classes and other educational items as well as research materials.

The International Society of Genetic Genealogy (isogg.org) is a must for anyone doing genetic (DNA) genealogy. For those with Jewish heritage, JewishGen ( jewishgen.org) is a good place to get started or to continue your research.

Other sites are better known: ancestry.com, archives.com, billiongraves.com, Chronicling of America at the Library of Congress, Cyndi’s List, familysearch.org, familytreemagazine.com (who published the article), Find a Grave, findmypast.com, Fold3, GenealogyBank, the General Land Office site for federal land records, Google, HeritageQuest, Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems, MyHeritage, the National Archives, RootsWeb and the USGenWeb project.

Some of these are free, some are by subscription, and all are worth checking into. The magazine is at newsstands and bookstores now or at familytreemagazine.com.

South Carolina research source

Brent H. Holcomb, longtime editor of the South Carolina Magazine of Ancestral Research, is making a special one-time offer for new subscribers in 2017. The usual $35 subscription will be reduced to $30. The quarterly issues are published in February, May, August and November. Send a check to SCMAR, P.O. Box 21766, Columbia, SC 29221. His website is scmar.com. Holcomb has published hundreds of source books for North and South Carolina, as well as marriage and death notices from ARP, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian religious newspapers.

Did your ancestor get a patent?

Patent records can be researched online, and while you might not think your ancestor or other relatives got a patent, maybe they did. The January-February issue of Family Tree Magazine has a good article, “Reinventing the Past,” covering the subject indepth. You can search best at patents.google.com, where you can search by personal name or county, or check into the U.S. Patent Office site at uspto.gov. Also, ancestry.com has patents through 1909. Don’t hesitate to search, as there are a lot of surprises.