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April 2012 Newsletter

GenealogyBank Adds 24 Million Records in April!

We constantly add more newspapers and obituaries to our online archive. Currently, GenealogyBank features over 5,850 newspapers from all 50 states, with more than 209 million obituaries and death records. Here are some details about our most recent additions (we actually added new content to thousands of titles, but the following is a representative sample): a total of 99 titles from 29 states plus the District of Columbia. We've shown the date ranges so that you can determine if the new content is relevant to your personal research.

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How to Do Genealogical Research; Damon Family Case Study

Sometime during the next few weeks, as we continue to add new content to our online archives, GenealogyBank will reach a milestone: we will have 1 billion more records than the total we launched our website with five years ago. Wow, that's a lot of additional genealogy records! I wanted to see what I could find in GenealogyBank with all this added material—so I chose a family at random and set out on a genealogical research investigation. I picked Minnie M. Damon who married James W. Wright on 31 December 1890 in Keene, New Hampshire.

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Use Variations of First & Last Names

It is generally rare for families to change the spelling of their names (although some immigrant families did so in an attempt to make their names sound more familiar to American ears, so be aware of this possibility). When doing your family history research, however, you may encounter variations on the spelling of your family's name for a reason that had nothing to do with the family: registrars often recorded names the way they heard them.

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Mary Had a Little Lamb...but Newspapers Tell the Whole Story

Here's an interesting historical newspaper story about Mary who had a lamb—yes, that Mary, and that lamb—made famous by the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" nursery rhyme. Did you know this favorite childhood story was based on a true incident? There have been books, articles, and movies about Mary Elizabeth Sawyer (1806-1889) of the "little lamb" fame. But not much has been written about the story of Mary's lamb itself—although its fate was told in a 1913 newspaper article.

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Ask the Genealogist

Q: I have hit that nasty brick wall in two of my family trees and they leave huge holes in the posters—smack dab in the middle. I need parents' names and information on the following three people. PLEASE help me.

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