Grab a glass of your favorite wine (or beverage of choice) and jump into researching your female ancestors!
In Episode #54 of our podcast, we discuss the struggle in finding our female ancestors with Lisa Lisson, genealogist, writer, educator and author of the blog Are You My Cousin? We all have women in our tree that are brick walls. They are lacking last names, birth dates, death dates, or fathers and I for one have thirty two of these sweet ladies begging to be researched. Most of them are collateral but some are direct lines in my tree.
We discuss with Lisa some interesting ways to find these women and track down their families. Sometimes you have to use math (not my favorite) and sometimes you have to use a recipe. Yes, you read that right. Be sure and tune in to find out about that one.
Lisa has a fabulous blog post on researching female ancestors which you can find here. One of the ways she mentions, which Amy and I both use, is researching the males in your female ancestors lives. We are talking about brothers, cousins, and even her children. All of which can lead you to a new discovery.
Don’t forget to think about social history. What time period did your ancestor live and what was happening in the town during that period of history? Could she have been part of a community organization that kept records such as her church, a temperance society, the red cross or was she a suffragette? There could be records housed at the local library, church, or court house. You never know what you might find.
We hope you will enjoy this podcast episode. We have added a few books on researching your female ancestors in our Book Page. Also, please subscribe to our NEW weekly “Quick Tips” emails where we will send you a short and to the point email with a research tip on the subject of our recent podcast or another fabulous research find we just have to pass along.
Until next time, CHEERS!