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In previous posts, we've discussed the importance of writing about your ancestor's physical appearance and how to find details about their physique , if you don't have photos to aid your writing. Today, let's give you a quick list of adjectives that can help you describe your ancestor's hair color and style if perhaps you have a photo to draw inspiration from. Hair color is the easiest to assess in color photographs. It's more challenging in black and white images. Pick the adjectives that best create a mental picture for you. Hair Color blonde strawberry blonde golden blonde mousy ash brown brunette jet black salt and pepper ebony raven flaxen tawny chestnut russet sandy auburn copper silver snowy sooty black Hair texture is often overlooked but an essential aspect of describing hair. Be sure to use one of these words to narrow down what type of hair your ancestor had, or didn't have: Hair Texture Bald Wispy Fuzzy Wavy Frizzy Wild Untamed Unmanageable Str...

Descriptions of our ancestor's physical appearance can help us see them in our mind's eye. But how can we discover what they looked like if we don't have videos or photos to provide evidence? Discover some of the best resources for physical descriptions. Then use these clues to improve your family history writing projects as we discussed in  How To Describe Your Ancestor's Physical Appearance .  Military Draft cards are a gold mine of information. Sadly, they are primarily descriptions of males as men were required to register during the Civil War, WWI and WWII in the US. The features recorded include: height (tall, short, medium) weight (slight, medium, stout) hair color eye color race physical markings - tattoos, scars, large moles physical deformities (if applicable) You can access military draft records on Ancestry , FamilySearch , and Fold3 . Passport Applications are incredible because they are not reserved primarily for males. Additionally, some passports come ...

Do you ever come across a research problem that makes your head spin? That’s what happened with one of our viewers, and we’ll take you on the journey to puzzle it out. When a friend started climbing her family tree, she ran into problems with Winfield Underwood. She reviewed all of the previous research others had accumulated on FamilySearch, FindAGrave, and Ancestry.com and couldn't make heads or tails out of the conclusions. Winfield had multiple sets of parents, and she couldn't determine which set was the correct pair. How could she determine who was the right parents when she didn’t feel experienced enough in genealogy to make those determinations? I was asked to take a look at the tangled tree to see if I could puzzle it out. This case study is the foundation for a multi-part series of videos on our YouTube Channel under the heading Research Over My Shoulder .   In order to make sense of the situation while reviewing Winfield's tree, I used a clue web . Some folks cal...

Fiction novels are compelling not because of the world building, but instead, they have engaging, fully-fleshed out characters. In short, good stories are about people. So why is it that family histories are usually about facts rather than the people behind the facts? What's more, how can we change that? One quick trick is to describe the physical appearance of your ancestors. But wait, I don't know what my ancestor looked like. How can I describe their appearance? That's a great question, and we'll circle back to that in a second post, but for now, let's talk about how to add descriptions about your ancestors. The trick is to realize that you don't have to be gifted at writing to describe your ancestor well. The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, ...

Whether you are trying to solve a complex research question or discovering a new ancestor for the first time, you need to be sure to find as many records that document your ancestor as possible. But what sources are you overlooking or missing? In the video series, Research Over My Shoulder , Episode 6 talks about what easy records we are missing for our ancestor's research? You can jump to the video link here. In this case study, I am investigating Winfield Underwood, born in 1857 in Taylor County, Kentucky and died in Whitesboro, Texas. Previous research discovered Winfield’s Person Page resulted in some earlier researchers attaching sources to him. After peer reviewing their work and then organizing the sources, I was ready to look for what was missing from the research. Watch a video on Peer Reviewing a Family Tree Watch a video on Organizing Sources on FamilySearch I had previously found: an index to a birth record an index to a marriage record death record for son Logan Underw...