Articles, field guides and decode keys for the maps, archives and old handwriting your ancestors really left — written for researchers in the US, Canada and Australia.
Sourced from national archives & public-domain collections · free guides & how-tos · no subscription needed
Practical, source-first guides to finding the town, reading the record, and breaking through the wall where the trail goes cold.
There is no single European archive-there are a dozen national portals, each with its own login, language, and date ranges. Here's where the records actually live.
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Reading old church records isn't translation-it's decoding. With an alphabet key and twenty recurring words, the page resolves into exactly…
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Connecting a surname to a European parish feels impossible-but it isn't a leap. It's five well-worn stages, each one handing…
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Most people read the name, the age, and the ship, then close the file. The columns that name the village…
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"My family came from Italy" is where most people get stuck. The document that names the actual village is almost…
ReadWe point you to the records that hold the answers — the Meyers Gazetteer, the German Standesamt, Griffith's Valuation, the Swedish husförhörslängd — not aggregator hints.
Decode keys for the hands your ancestors wrote in — Kurrent and Sütterlin, Cyrillic, old Italian and church Latin — so a page of swirls becomes a name and a date.
Written by people who spend their days in parish books and civil registers. No upsell funnels, no DNA-kit affiliate links — just the working knowledge.
The articles are free. When you want the whole method in one place, the eBook and the country cheat sheets are here.
A free one-page guide to the first records to pull in the US, Canada and Australia — the ones that point straight back to the European town. Yours for an email.
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