Professional Genealogist Kelvin Meyers delivered an entertaining and informative program to family history researchers at the Roy and Helen Hall Memorial Library this past Saturday. Beginning with an interactive game where attendees of the program created fictional children’s names then “married” them to other fictional children in the room, he demonstrated how unrelated individuals quickly become a “neighborhood”. He then gave advice on using these associations to find out information about your own ancestral families. Consider the people mentioned as executors, bondsmen, or trustees, plaintiffs and defendants in court cases, or business partners. Any documents filed under the names of these individuals could name your ancestors as well. Follow you ancestors in ethnic groups, religious groups, or military units. Research the people buried near your ancestors. Look at maps of who owned land nearby and look for documents filed under their names. Kelvin showed examples of how following these types of leads has helped him find and/or confirm information he had already located about his ancestors.

One source he highly recommends for those learning to use community information to trace their ancestors is Carolyn Earle Billingsley’s Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. This book is currently on order for the McKinney Public Library system.