Sometimes I was able to resolve complex problems, like getting water service repaired for a house in Lafayette with a $3,000 reimbursement for the homeowner.

Long long people grace the streets in Jersey City

Here are some suggestions for what to put under the tree.

All roads lead back to Bergen, at least as far as Hudson County goes. Bergen was the first incorporated place in the colony of New Jersey. Where the name came from is uncertain. One possibility is that it comes from the German word Bergen, which…

Updated: Aug. 18, 2024, 8:02 a.m.| Ever heard of Gretna Green? I hadn’t until recently. Gretna Green is a small village in Scotland, just over the border from England and its claim to fame is that it’s been a venue for runaway marriages since the…

My genealogy journey has taken many twists and turns over the years. I began many years ago with several false starts and stops along the way. I would ask my mother question after question, and she would tell me as much as she knew. I made index…

Updated: Jun. 08, 2024, 7:54 a.m.| Since I’ve become a librarian, there have been many serendipitous moments scattered throughout my career. Before this week, the most interesting one had been helping a woman doing genealogy research and in talking…

“Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,” the saying goes. I’ve found such a place, although I admit it sometimes is work. But our ancestors, in most cases didn’t have any such luxury. They all had hard times at some…

I don’t remember when I first began doing genealogy. For many years it was a series of false starts and stops, making index cards with relative’s names and tacking them onto a bulletin board, then eventually taking them down after remaining untouched…

Chalk one up for the genealogists! The U.S Customs and Immigration Service is not raising their fees for genealogical searches and records. In fact, they are lowering their fees. By more than half. If you purchase a product or register for an account…

Years ago, when I was a child, we went to my grandparents’ house for New Year’s Eve. There was always extended family present as well as their neighbors from up and down the block, all squeezed into the small apartment in the house they shared with…

Let’s face it genealogists: We’re hoarders. We hoard ancestors, documents, charts, photos, handouts, books and a host of other things that we keep in the interest of doing our research. And then we put them away. We enter names into our genealogical…

Have you ever gotten lost? In genealogy? Sometimes I find myself miles and generations away from where I began, having followed some tangent and veered away from a goal I’d been pursuing. I’m trying a new technique to keep me on track. Well, it’s not…

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been prevalent in the news, social media, and entertainment a lot lately. But what is it and what does it mean for genealogy? Let’s start with what it is. Wikipedia defines AI thusly: …perceiving, synthesizing, and…

One of the most helpful things you can do to jump start or bolster your research is to ask questions of the older generations in your family. And you want to be sure to do it sooner, rather than later. I speak from experience. When my mother passed…

For some, sports are a way of life. So it was for our ancestors as well. From Little League and Pop Warner, all the way up to the professional level, our ancestors participated in sports, at all ages and levels of play. I can’t tell you how many…

It was not a time machine, nor a TARDIS that caused 11 days to go missing from the calendar in 1752. It was a calendar change, a long overdue one in fact. For centuries, much of the world had existed under the Julian calendar (named for Julius…

It’s déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. The Department of Homeland Security’s United States Customs and Immigration Service has conducted its biennial review and is proposing a whopper of a fee hike for genealogical records. Again.…

It’s déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. The Department of Homeland Security’s United States Customs and Immigration Service has conducted its biennial review and is proposing a whopper of a fee hike for genealogical records. Again. If…

I’m happy to spread the news that the Jersey City Free Public Library is now a FamilySearch affiliate library! Now patrons will be able to access some record sets that are not generally available to users on FamilySearch. FamilySearch is run by the…