You may belong to a Facebook group that covers your neighborhood or town.  Most of what's discussed probably isn't of interest to people not currently living there--you'll see items for local sale, complaints about traffic or roads, and similar things.  There are usually similar groups for your towns of origin, and I encourage you to join them, because amongst those...

A blog reader (John Durkan) reached out to me to see if I'd ever used Felix Archive's site with Foreigner Files.  I had not, and since this site is out of Antwerp, I never would have thought to look at it given my family's roots being much further east.  But he pointed out how many entries there were for Polish people (40,000, mostly Jewish), so I started looking wh...

This is a reminder to myself to always check back on resources periodically to see if there's more that has been added--either feature-wise or the underlying data.  I'd played around with FamilySearch's Full Text Search when it first came out, but for someone who didn't have ancestors in the United States before the twentieth century, it wasn't very helpful.  But Am...

More and more records from Ukrainian archives are being scanned and made accessible online, but they are not all consolidated in one place.  This means that if you have a particular citation within a branch of an archive in Ukraine, you may not realize it's already been scanned and is easily accessible for you from home.  But there's a portal that has made finding o...