As you will see from this very abridged bio, Mr. Headley is not someone who does things halfheartedly!

“Robert Headley was born in a small town on the Northern Neck of Virginia in 1938. He received his B. A. degree in anthropology from the University of Florida and his M.A. in Anthropology and Ph. D. in Celtic languages from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Dr. Headley worked as a research linguist for the United States Government from 1959 to 1995 and has published numerous books and articles on Southeast Asian languages as well as the major Cambodian – English dictionary. He became interested in documenting the history of the rapidly disappearing American movie theaters in 1968, and after six years of research published a book, EXIT, on the history of movie theaters in Baltimore.  In September 1999, EXIT was selected by the Enoch Pratt Free Library Staff as one of the Best Books on Maryland of the 20th Century. He was a member of the Theatre Historical Society of America and served as editor for the society’s journal, Marquee, from 1981 to 1987. Dr. Headley has lectured on local theater history at the National Archives and Johns Hopkins University, He has also served as a consultant for several exhibitions and documentary films on movie theaters including “The Movie Palaces” made by the Smithsonian Institution.  This research has culminated in a book, Motion Picture Exhibition in Washington, D.C., which traces the history of motion picture exhibition in Washington and adjacent Maryland and Virginia from the 1890s to the 1990s. Dr. Headley has added numerous anecdotes gleaned from  oral history interviews with over 40 individuals who were associated with the local movie industry between 1906 and 1990. 

His hobbies include going to movies, collecting minerals, and writing on the genealogy and local history of the Northern Neck of Virginia. He has authored three earlier books on Virginia genealogy. He was on the staff of the University of Maryland Archives, College Park, Maryland from 2003 to 2013. He is currently compiling a dictionary of the Rhade language of Vietnam.”

The post Meet Author Robert Headley appeared first on Genealogical.com.

Genealogy Pointers: You have devoted nearly four decades to this project.  Given all the changes in genealogy and technology since you began, if you were starting from scratch today, how much time would you need to get to the Sixth Edition?

Paul Heinegg: It’s difficult to estimate the time it would take me to do this if starting from scratch. I spent a lot of time finding my way around the records. All research builds on former research. Knowing what I know now, I would avoid a lot of wasted effort.

The Family History group in Utah’s placement of all the Virginia and North Carolina county court records, deeds, wills, tax records, church records, N.C. Revolutionary War pay vouchers, etc., on Internet accessible files would certainly take many years off the work.  And the Library of Virginia and N.C. State Archives have placed lots of their records on the Internet. And, of course, ancestry.com, fold3.com and other such sites have made all the census and Revolutionary War records available.

Internet access to all these documents means, not only that there’s no need to travel to the archives and research only during library hours, but one can at a moment’s notice go back and check a document. (Notice that someone is not in a particular Virginia county tax list in the 1780s where you expected? Just look in all the adjoining counties. Or maybe he’s just across the state line in North Carolina. Takes maybe 15 minutes on the computer.) Many times you go through decades of court records, then go through a tax record and find that the family name you’ve been seeing (and thought was a white family) was African American.

GP: You cover this in considerable detail in your Introduction, but can you boil down for us the major findings of your work?

PH: That most free black people who originated in Virginia’s colonial period would descend from white women was determined by the colonial legislature when it passed a law in 1662 which stated that a child’s status was determined by the status of the child’s mother. The child of a slave was a slave, and the child of a free woman was free. Although a number of slaves were emancipated in the seventeenth century, a law of 1723 all but eliminated emancipation of slaves in Virginia. 

The colonial court records read something like a local newspaper. In addition to settling legal questions, the courts were charged with regulating the morals of the county. So, one gets a fairly good idea of what life was like for most people–as opposed to what one would read in a history book which, by necessity, must concentrate on the major personalities and events in our history.

The court records show how the institution of slavery developed in the colony. There were no slave quarters for the first slaves to go to in the 17^th-century. And the slaves did not immediately develop a culture. That would only come when there were enough slaves in the same area to form a community. Before that happened, they worked with, slept with, got drunk with, and stole hogs with white servants. Their common enemies were their masters. One can see in the court records how racism developed to defend slavery rather than slavery developing from racism.

The great historian Edmund Morgan’s book from the 1970s, AMERICAN SLAVERY-AMERICAN FREEDOM, is very applicable now. His theory was that after Bacon’s Rebellion, Governor Berkeley and the other planters (who saw the lower classes as a completely different people from them) realized that they needed to make slaves into the lower class (or caste?) They convinced the poor whites that, poor as they might be, they were still white, free and above the slaves. Slaves could own property before (?) the Rebellion, but the governor took it away and gave it to the poor whites.

Bacon’s Rebellion in the 17^th century is what made the U.S. different from England–no class system here. I saw first-hand in Saudi Arabia how they did the same thing. Hire foreign workers to do the dirty work, then all Saudis are on the same level–or think they are–even if a few are billionaires. “Never mind, we Saudis are all equal.” (Low level workers would think nothing of walking into the Saudi V.P’s office to complain.)

GP: Are there other new emphases?

PH: Another point I stress in the Introduction to the 6^th edition has to do with the law binding the children of white women by men of African descent until the age of thirty-one. That law applied to their daughters and granddaughters as well. This law had a far greater impact on women than men. When a man completed his indenture, he had the skills needed to earn a living in a trade or as a farmer—-even if his most productive years were behind him. Women who were bound out until the age of thirty-one were likely to have children during their indenture. Each child added another five years to their service, in many cases making them servants for life and tying them to the slave population.

Gideon Gibson, an apprenticed son of Elizabeth Chavis in 1672, had descendants who attended Yale University (as whites) in the 1850s [Sharfstein, The Invisible Line, 54-6]. Many of the apprenticed descendants of his relative Jane Gibson were illegally held as slaves for most of the eighteenth century. Thirteen successfully sued for their freedom in 1792 and 1795, but the others were enslaved for life [See the Evans family history].

Jane Webb, the daughter of a white woman by a slave, sold her service to her master for seven years in exchange for permission to marry her master’s slave in Northampton County, Virginia. Her son Daniel Webb was a “free Negro” landowner in New Hanover County, North Carolina, in 1765 and left a New Hanover County will in 1769 [DB E:274].

One of Daniel’s sisters, Ann Webb, married a slave named Weeks and they were the ancestors of the Weeks family of Northampton County. Another sister, Elizabeth, sold her service to her master for sixteen years in exchange for marrying a slave Ezekiel Moses, and they were the ancestors of the Moses family of Northampton County. Still another sister Dinah married Gabriel Manly, the “Mulatto” son of a white woman in Northampton County. They moved to Norfolk County by 1735, soon after the completion of his thirty-one-year indenture, and were landowners in Bertie County, North Carolina, by 1742.
 
Jacob Chavis, a free-born “Black” man, owned over 1,000 acres of land and two slaves in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, by 1774. His relative Sarah Chavis left a Charlotte County, Virginia will in 1811 asking her executors to free her husband [WB 3:184].

 William Chavis of Granville County, North Carolina, also owned over 1,000 acres of land and a number of slaves. And the county allowed him a license to operate an inn frequented by whites. One of his customers had his money stolen by another customer. Asked to testify for him in court, Chavis responded, “I am a Black man & don’t care to undertake such a thing.”

This latest edition incorporates the Library of Virginia’s digital chancery case files as well. Among them is another family history which illustrates the different circumstances of male and female free African Americans.

Jane Gibson, a relative of the above-named Gideon Gibson, had a “dark Mulatto” daughter named Jane who married Morris Evans, a “Mulatto” man who died in York County in 1742. Their sons were landowners in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, but many descendants of their daughter Frances were held as slaves, some until they sued for their freedom in 1795 and others until Emancipation. This story was revealed in a Library of Virginia chancery case in which an 81-year-old Robert Wills testified in 1791 about events in colonial Charles City County,  which is a burned-record county.
   
Asked if there were any other free familes descended from Jane, Wills testified that her descendants included the free Scott, Bradby, Smith, Redcross, and Morris families of Charles City County and the Bowman family of Chesterfield County, “many of them are black, some nearly white and others free mulattoes…from a promiscuous intercourse with different colours [Lynchburg City chancery file, 1821-033, Library of Virginia digital site].
   
Rachel Alford, a “free Christian white woman,” was living in Fauquier County, Virginia in 1769 when the court ordered the churchwardens to bind her “Mulatto” son Gge as an apprentice. We know who her husband was because she bought him from his master and set him free, according to a Fauquier County deed in 1795.

John Day, a “man of color,” enlisted in the Revolution in Granville County in 1777 and died at Valley Forge in 1778. His brother Jesse Day authorized an attorney to collect a warrant for 640 acres for John’s service, but the attorney stole the money. Jesse’s heirs sued and won their case against him in 1830.

Some court records which would record the origin of families have not survived. However, the papers which counties used to authorize their free Negro registers have been published recently on the Library of Virginia’s African American Narrative Digital Collection. 

When Easter Atkinson registered in Fredericksburg, elderly residents of King George and Fauquier counties recounted how she was the daughter of Mildred Atkinson, a “Mulatto” woman who was the daughter of Easter Atkinson, a white woman from Fauquier County.

Most early court records for Henrico and Chesterfield counties have survived, but the courts did not record the origin of the free Ligon family. That is detailed in the documents filed for the registration of Jeremiah Ligon (who served in the Revolution). The papers contain the testimony of a man who stated in 1800 that he had known the family for the past 40 years. Jeremiah’s father William Ligon was a free “Mulatto” and his mother Hannah a free “Black woman” who had both served apprenticeships in Chesterfield County. 
   

Ephraim Hearn of Gloucester County, who served in the First Virginia Regiment, was taken prisoner in Charleston in 1780 and was placed aboard a prison ship until the general prisoner exchange in 1781. He was described as a “free mulatto soldier” in the Virginia Gazette. The colonial court records for Gloucester County have not survived, but the register of Abingdon Parish records the birth of Ephraim and two other children of a “Mulatto” woman named Jane Hern.

The Jacobs family was freed by the will of their master in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1700. They were in North Carolina by 1745. Thirteen members of the family owned land in New Hanover County, and seven served in the Revolution.

Six members of the Tann family served in the Revolution and 3 were among more than 30 free African Americans from North Carolina and Virginia who died in the service.

GP: What were some of the surprises that came with the research?

PH: The first surprises were that:

Some of my wife’s family were free before Emancipation

That many families in her home county of Northampton, N.C., and adjoining Halifax County owned their own land before 1800.

That they made up about 10% of the free population of those counties in 1800 and about 12% in 1810.

That was about 10 times the population of “other free” persons in many other N.C. counties.

The white population of those counties must have made them feel welcome.We can only speculate why. (This was all the more surprising since the area was completely segregated in 1987 when we visited for a family reunion.)

I was later to learn through my research that this area of N.C. was considered the frontier in the 1720s when a number of free African American families owned land there. Perhaps the children and grandchildren of their white neighbors had grown accustomed to having free African American neighbors?

New settlements welcome new settlers, so they can reach an economy of scale–to get their goods to market, etc.

This all changed in the 1830s after Nat Turner’s Rebellion and other developments detailed by historian John Hope Franklin. In the decades before the Civil War free African Americans were told in no uncertain terms (the free Negro codes) that they were no longer welcome and many moved West.

Another interesting finding pertained to special schools for free blacks. During Reconstruction, the South set up separate school systems in each county: white and “colored.” This meant that the former “free colored” population would attend school with the former slaves. While the former “free colored” population bore no particular animosity toward the former slaves, and some were married to former slaves, they objected to being classed with people who had been considered property and were still considered someone’s former property rather than people. Attending school with former slaves meant a considerable loss of status for them.

The Democratic Party (Dixiecrats) in North Carolina took advantage of this by allowing the former “free colored” population in Robeson County to set up their own separate schools in exchange for their votes to pass legislation to make North Carolina a Jim Crow state. The head of the Democratic Party in the county needed an excuse, so he called the third school system “Croatan Indian” after a popular legend at the time that Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colony in 1587 on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast wasn’t actually lost. The colonists (instead of being killed by the Indians as were the colonists in the former attempt at a colony there) met up with friendly Indians with whom they mixed and were the ancestors of the former “free persons of color” of Robeson County. (The white residents knew this to be a  made-up story and called them the pejorative “Cros” after Jim Crow.)

However, anthropologists saw an opportunity to make a name for themselves or were fooled and set about finding lost Indian tribes among all the former “free person of color” communities in Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina where they named the groups after the last Indian tribe to have inhabited the place. (Anthropology was not then the discipline it is today.)

Many of those communities adopted an Indian identity which, after many generations, is as real to them today as it would be for a person who was an Indian.

And this interpretation is favored by many in the general population, perhaps because it means the United States did not really annihilate all those Indians. We allowed some to remain and live among us.

The fact that the communities owned land, had a different culture from slaves, and generally had lighter skin color than most slaves were arguments enough for many.

These beliefs/ culture remain with us today and obscure the true history of these free African American communities.

The post Interview with Paul Heinegg, Author of the New 6th Edition of <i>Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia & South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820</i> (Part Two) appeared first on Genealogical.com.

Paul Heinegg: I was working in Saudi Arabia in 1985, living in a community in the middle of the desert (much like a military compound) with about 200 other U.S. families when a co-worker came back from vacation and told me how he was looking at his grandmother’s photos and realized we were second cousins. We then realized that he had visited his great grandfather, who was my grandfather, at my home in Brooklyn when we were both about 12 years old. He had done some preliminary research, and I promised to do more when I took my vacation. On vacations we stayed in Queens, N.Y., with my mother-in-law. I visited the main branch of the N.Y. Public Library’s genealogical section on 42nd Street. That was about the time “Roots” made genealogy popular among the general population.

GP: What direction or blueprint did you have for how to proceed with your work?

PH: The following year I recounted the aforesaid story to my mother-in-law, an African American from North Carolina, and she asked me to look into her own roots. Our whole family became fascinated when we found that she had relatives who were free before Emancipation. (My wife has an ancestor with the uncommon name of Tann. We found him in the 1850 and 1860 census for North Carolina.) After some research of North Carolina records available in New York, I went to the NC State Archives in Raleigh to do further research. Fortunately, the archives was closed that day, and I had to be content with browsing the shelves of the state library. There I found Weynette Parks Haun’s abstracts of the county court records which contained several decades of colonial history of some of my wife’s ancestors. I realized then that the county court records would be my main focus.

Once my research was seriously underway, I employed the following methodology:

• determine all the names of the families counted as “other free” (non-white) in the 1790-1820 census and colonial tax records for North Carolina and Virginia.
• read all the colonial and early national court records for North Carolina
• write the family history of all those families
• read all the colonial and early national court records, tax lists, free Negro registers, newspapers, church records, etc., for Virginia
• rewrite the family histories based on that new information

Following this process, I ran across new family names all the time. And since people are often not identified by race in the records, a rerun of that entire process turns up new information (as it did for this 6^th edition).

About 2015 the Library of Virginia started going through their collection of loose county papers (not in bound volumes) and published over 16,000 digital images on their African American Narrative site. Those images are one of the new sources for this edition.

The other major source for this edition are the files of all the Virginia county court, wills, deeds, and tax records that I borrowed from the Library of Virginia on interlibrary loan for the previous edition and was able to go through again right on my computer thanks to Familysearch.org. They also put all the North Carolina deeds, wills, estate records, apprenticeship records, and payment vouchers for Revolutionary war service on digital media accessible from home computers.

GP: It’s my understanding that you did not originally intend to look into so many Free African American families. How/why did that change?

PH: Once I had a general picture of my wife’s ancestry, I became more interested in the fact that about 10% of the free population of her home county of Northampton, North Carolina, was counted as “other free” in the 1800-1810 census. I have always enjoyed solving puzzles, and the puzzle of the origins of such families consumed me for the next 3 decades.

GP: You were living in Saudi Arabia when you published several of the earlier editions of the book. How were you able to get your hands on the information you needed? Wasn’t that very difficult?

PH: Distance was a barrier, but not an insurmountable one. I bought copies of the court records that Weynette Haun had abstracted and purchased the microfilm copies of all the other colonial court minutes and colonial tax records from the NC State Archives for $10 a reel. I also rented microfilm of the early N.C. and Va. census, marriage and Va. parish registers from a company called Heritage Quest, which sent their microfilm to me in Saudi Arabia.

I started by making files of all the census records and tax records so that I would recognize the family names when reading through the court records. (Many colonial and early national records don’t identify people by race unless they applied to the case law—e.g., someone not paying the discriminatory tax on their wives, for example.)

At that time I had no intention of publishing. It was just a puzzle to be solved for my own satisfaction. I made individual files of all the families and put them in general genealogical format to put all the information in perspective. After I had over 300 pages of family records, I realized that I had to share this and with great difficulty set about learning to write about them. (I am an engineer, more comfortable with equations than sentences.)

To be continued April 26,  2022

Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, From the Colonial Period to About 1820. Sixth Edition, Three-Volume Set

The Third Edition of Paul Heinegg’s Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia was awarded the American Society of Genealogists’ prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award for the best work of genealogical scholarship published between 1991 and 1994. The new Sixth Edition is Heinegg’s most ambitious effort yet to reconstruct the history of the free African American communities o…

$105.00 – $174.00

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The post Interview with Paul Heinegg, Author of the New 6th Edition of Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia & South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 (Part One) appeared first on Genealogical.com.

Dr. David Dobson has published over 150 books for Genealogical.com (trading as Genealogical Publishing Company and Clearfield Co.,). His books cover a wide range of Scottish and Irish source records, immigration, and a number of how-to books. His most recent book is the much-touted guidebook Scottish Genealogy: The Basics & Beyond. In preparation for the recent NGS Virtual Conference, David recorded a short interview about his new guidebook, and Scottish sources in general. If you missed it the NGS Conference, here’s your opportunity to meet and learn from one of Scotland’s leading genealogists and immigration authorities.

Scottish Genealogy

Scottish Genealogy: The Basics and Beyond is the culmination of over fifty years of historical and genealogical research by Dr. David Dobson in archives and libraries throughout Scotland. As one would expect in a Scottish genealogy guidebook, this publication identifies the major sources and repositories for those just getting started on their research. But what makes this book stand o…

$18.95 – $29.50

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The post Hear Dr. David Dobson Speak about his Scottish Genealogy: The Basics & Beyond appeared first on Genealogical.com.

• Roots for Kids: A Genealogy Guide for Young People. Third Edition
• Roots for Kids: Finding Your Family Stories

As part of our RootsTech Connect exhibit back in February, we asked Susan to talk about the power of family stories to inspire and motivate people to explore their own history. In case you missed it, here’s Susan speaking about one of her favorites subjects.

The post Meet Author Susan Provost Beller appeared first on Genealogical.com.

We asked Mr. Greenwood to explain to participants at RootsTech Connect how The Researcher’s Guide came into being and why it is still relevant. If you did not catch Val’s presentation between February 24th and 27th,  not to worry. You can watch it today—or at your convenience—below.

The post Meet Author Val Greenwood appeared first on Genealogical.com.

Val D. Greenwood, the author of the new 4th edition, of the acclaimed Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy, has devoted much of his adult life to advancing the study of genealogy.

Mr. Greenwood is a native Utahan, a child of the Great Depression who started school during WWII. The fifth of six children, he grew up on a family farm a few miles south of Salt Lake City. He was educated at Brigham Young University (BS, 1962) and the University of Idaho (JD, 1974).

While teaching genealogical research at Ricks College (now BYU-Idaho) in Rexburg, Idaho, many years ago, he became frustrated because there was no good text on American genealogical research. The book he wrote to fill that void was entitled The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. It was published in 1973 by Genealogical Publishing Company in Baltimore, Maryland. Through three editions, the book has sold well over 110,000 copies and has been the standard textbook on the subject for many years.

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Val Greenwood worked for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint all of his working life. In addition to teaching at Ricks College for six years, he worked for both the Family History Department and the Temple Department, serving in the latter as a director for the last several years prior to his retirement in 1999. He was also a member of the Utah State Bar until his retirement.

Val became an accredited genealogist (AG) in 1965, and assumed the role of an emeritus AG in 2014. He received the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society and was also named a fellow of the Utah Genealogical Association. He served as president and a member of the board of the Utah Genealogical Association.

In addition to The Researcher’s Guide, he has also written books of Old Testament stories for adults and has served in positions of leadership and responsibility in his church.

“Genealogy Pointers” recently sat down with Mr. Greenwood to discuss the new edition of The Researcher’s Guide.

That interview follows below:

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Genealogy Pointers: What inspired you to do a 4th edition of The Researcher’s Guide a full 17 years after edition No. 3?

Val Greenwood: There were several motivations: First, I knew that the third edition was woefully out of date, and I felt bad that it was no longer the same valuable resource that it had once been. Second, in the third edition, I had not updated addresses (as for periodicals, etc.) and some other things that needed to be updated even then. I felt like I still needed to bring all of those things up to date. Third, computer technology and the Internet have truly become major forces in the world of genealogy in those intervening years, and I felt I needed to bring my book into the world of genealogical research that is today’s reality, making the book the valuable resource it needs to be. Fourth, Michael Tepper (managing editor of Genealogical.com) told me that he didn’t think I could do it. I felt like I could and that I needed to prove him wrong－both for myself and for him. Fifth, I could not think of a better use of my time.

GP: What were the biggest challenges you faced in putting together the 4th edition?

VG: My most significant challenge was that of trying to hit a moving target. Many parts of the book had to be rewritten a few times just because things are changing so fast. I found myself going back to make both additions and deletions in the text as I tried to work with and keep up with the metamorphosis that was taking place. Some websites that I cited disappeared while others merged. Even the major family history sites changed some of their features, in the name of enhancement, making strategic changes while I was in the process of writing the book. And I am sure that some things that I finally settled on are already outdated. That is the reality we live with in this age of galloping innovation. It is exciting to see this progress, but it is also frustrating when you are trying to write something that will have meaning for any length of time.

GP: Besides re-writing or updating everything that was in the 3rd edition, you have added two new chapters on genealogy and technology. Since most researchers spend a lot of time online nowadays, do you recommend that they read those chapters first?

VG: I do not recommend this. I believe that there are other important things that the researcher should understand in order to make the best possible use of available technology. Chapters 1 through 8 of The Researcher’s Guide lay a critical foundation for proper use of the technological resources that are available.

I think it is unfortunate that many people who get excited to trace their family history jump right onto the Internet without understanding the basics and thus wind up doing a less than adequate job. They do not understand why or how to keep proper records of their research, they overlook important information, and—because they do not understand the rules of evidence—they rely too heavily on circumstantial evidence of family connections. I do not say this to be critical of these people because they are doing the best they know how, based on their lack of an adequate foundation.

It is unfortunate that so many people are not being taught the important basics. Everything they hear and read suggests that everything is simple and that all of the answers are now on the Internet. Too many are led to believe that all they need to do is get on line and they will be able to find whatever it is they are looking for. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were that simple?

GP: What are your biggest concerns about the ways that people pursue their family history today?

VG: I think I explained my main concerns in the answer above. In addition to that, I believe people are not being taught how to keep proper records of their research or even of the need to keep records at all. They are not being taught how to evaluate the evidence they find. Also, they are not being taught what resources are available to help them and how those resources can be used in their research.

GP: You wrote the first edition of The Researcher’s Guide over 40 years ago. Besides technology, why would you encourage owners/users of the earlier editions to obtain a copy of the new one?

VG: Certainly, technology is the main reason, but there is much more than that. And I need to note there are other books, some of them quite extensive, that are devoted solely to technology. The advantage I have is that I integrate technological information into my instruction as it relates to both the specific record types and available research aids that people should be using in their research. The new 4th edition provides information about many new—or relatively new—resources and research aids now available for our use that were non-existent when the earlier editions were written.

GP: Final question. You were trained as an attorney. How does your personal background in the law inform your approach to genealogy?

VG: That is an interesting question. It was actually my interest and involvement in genealogy that was the primary reason I decided to go to law school. There are many records containing invaluable family history/genealogical information whose very existence we owe to legal matters. To name some of the most obvious, there are wills and other probate matters, adoptions, citizenship, property disputes, divorces, etc., etc. When we come to understand something of the legal processes involved in these matters, that is a significant benefit to us as we seek to understand the implications and the meanings of the records that those processes generated. Without introducing too much complexity, I have tried to pass on in my book some of the intricacies of the legal processes involved and how our understanding of these intricacies can make us better genealogists.

I should also note that the study of law teaches a person to look at problems and at information in a different way and thus understand how to better analyze various situations and circumstances. That is good training for whatever one does in life, and it is especially valuable for the genealogist. I have attempted to use this approach to research in The Researcher’s Guide, and many of the explanations and instructions in the book reflect this analytical approach.

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