Friday, February 1, 2008

Tracing Immigrant Origins

With so much colonial American ancestry migrating from England (75% of my father's side, 40% of my mother's side) before 1700, and then another 25% of my father's side, and 12% of my mother's side, emigrating from England in the mid-19th century, I have not done a lot of research in European resources. All of my German and Dutch ancestry came to America before 1775 as far as I can tell.

The only other European research that I've pursued extensively was in Norway, which is 25% of my wife's ancestry. That turned out very well, and I am eager to try more European research, especially in Germany.

I went looking for some online articles and tutorials about researching immigrant ancestors, and found an excellent FREE series of articles at Genealogy.com - http://www.genealogy.com/uni-immi.html.

This site has

* Introduction to Tracing Immigrant Origins - 12 lessons

* Post Civil War Immigrant Sources - 6 Lessons

* Sources Between 1820 to 1865 - 6 Lessons

* Pre-1820 Immigration - 7 Lessons

* European Sources - 9 Lessons.

These all-text lessons were developed by Genealogy Research Associates (http://www.genealogy.com/university.html#gra) and are very easy to use either one at a time or in a series. After completing one lesson, you will have to go back to the main GRA page and select the next lesson in the series.

I've learned quite a bit just paging through many of the lessons. If you want to hone your knowledge of immigrant origins and how to trace them, consider using this FREE resource.

I no sooner post the above and I see that Michael John Neill has a European Origins Online summary at http://www.rootdig.com/european2.html. This serves as a nice complement to the GRA lessons, which don't deal with online resources.

I welcome any other suggestions to help me with my search for European immigrant resources.

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