I have been subscribed for some time to the Ancestry.com Blog, but I must admit that I haven’t studied the content in any detail. Going forward, I will be paying more attention to the content, because it is really valuable.
For example, in the 17 Oct 2013 posting, the blog provides a discussion of The Genealogist’s Toolkit: Ethnic Research.
The toolkit consists of Research Guides and Research Centers. The guides are downloadable PDF documents with information about ethnic research. For example, I have downloaded the guide, Finding Your German Ancestors on Ancestry.com. I have some German ancestors back in Colonial times, and my wife has German ancestors who immigrated more recently.
The PDF starts off with the following statements:
More Americans today link themselves to German heritage than they do any
other ethnicity. Not surprising, since the first wave of German immigration
to the U.S. dates back to the 17th century.
Germans have influenced U.S. culture since their 17th-century arrival, building their first settlement in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. Key social contributions included manufacturing
expertise, the establishment of kindergartens, beer making and the pretzel.
The guide consists of five pages with screenshots from Ancestry.com records, and text to tell you how to find this information.
I have downloaded this PDF and saved it into my Evernote account. That way, I will have it available at home on my desktop, and on location with my laptop and Iphone, as well as on my wife’s Ipad.
FYI, other ethnic groups featured in these guides are African-American, Canadian, Irish, Swedish, UK, Mexican, Jewish, and Italian.
The Research Centers allow you to focus your searches on record collections of a particular ethnic group.
I may be wrong, but it appears that you need to be a subscriber to Ancestry.com to receive emails of the blog, but it does make the Ancestry.com subscription more valuable, at least to me.
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