The Kitchen Table Genealogist

The encyclopedias tell you everything that exists. This book tells you what to do on Tuesday. Somewhere in your house there is a shoebox: photographs nobody can name, a funeral card, a certificate folded in a drawer. This book turns it into a documented family tree, three to five generations deep, in ten evenings at your own kitchen table, most of them two hours, most of them free. A working method, not a reference manual, in the order professionals actually work: Evening 1: the house search, and the two documents everything else stands on Evening 2: the living witnesses, recorded before the records that cannot wait are gone Evenings 3 to 5: death records first, then the census backbone (including the 72-year rule and the burned 1890 census), then the marriage and birth records that weld the links Evening 6: the boat they came on, the free passenger searches, and the truth about the name "changed at Ellis Island" (it was not, and knowing why will help you find them) Evenings 7 to 8: the draft cards that caught tens of millions of men with their birthplaces, and the newspapers that caught everyone else Evening 9: DNA, deliberately late, with an honest briefing on what the match list can tell you and what you should decide before you spit Evening 10: building the sourced tree that outlives you Then the craft chapters (reading the old handwriting, writing letters archives actually answer, city directories, dating mystery photographs, finding the village on the map) and the Brick Wall Clinic: the burned courthouse, the woman with no maiden name, the man who appears from nowhere, too many John Smiths, the records that disagree, and the family story that turned out not to be true. Built free-first throughout: the National Archives, FamilySearch, Chronicling America, and your library card do almost all of the work, and the book tells you plainly what a subscription buys before you buy one. A complete worked example follows one family from shoebox to old-country village so you can watch the whole method run. Educational guidance only; access laws for restricted records vary by state, and the book routes legal and medical questions to the professionals who own them. The shoebox has been waiting, in some cases for a hundred years. Ten evenings. Go get it.