So… just how much did it hurt last week, sitting there at home and watching all those posts — photos, videos and more — of genealogists getting together in person at RootsTech in Salt Lake City?

To The Legal Genealogist, seriously, it seemed like days and days of a major family history lovefest — a whole host of folks seeing old friends, meeting new ones, learning all kinds of new things…

And we were at home.

Sigh…

But missing one opportunity like RootsTech doesn’t meet missing out entirely on the personal touch, and particularly not the personal touch in genealogical education.

Because there is that one genealogical institute — that one weeklong immersive dive into a topic of our choice — that is meeting in person this year. In July. In Pittsburgh.

The GRIP Genealogy Institute — formerly the Genealogical Institute of Pittsburgh — has an entire week of in-person classes scheduled for July 13-17 with the opening social on July 12th, on the beautiful campus of the University of Pittsburgh.

And registration is open now at the GRIP website. (The registration button for GRIP In-Person will ask you first to log in if you’re a member of the National Genealogical Society or to create a free account if you’re not.)

Think about it. A whole week with people who won’t roll their eyes if you talk about your fourth great grandfather. Who’ll understand instantly if you lament the loss of the 1890 census. Who are your tribe. Yours… and mine.

I’m actually going to be there as a student in July this year — there’s a course I’ve wanted to take for ages — and there are some really good options: eight courses in all. Some neat new stuff like Surrogates and Substitutes – the 1890 US Census Exemplar, co-coordinated by Cecelia McFadden and Kate Townsend, or Skill-Building Practicum for Genealogical Research Success, coordinated by Sunny Jane Morton, or Advanced AI Techniques for Genealogists: Expanding Your Research Skills, coordinated by Mark Thompson.

But you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I mention one that’s near and dear to my heart not just because I’m teaching two sessions but because it’s just so darned important to so many of us as researchers: Records Loss: Overcoming Destroyed, Missing, or Non-Extant Records, coordinated by Kelvin L. Meyers.

Working around the problems of records loss in fires, floods, wars and even from plain human neglect is a huge problem in genealogy. Knowing where to look, what alternatives might exist and how even to use things like DNA is crucial to breaking through the barriers thrown up by records loss.

The whole class is a favorite of mine, and I’m honored to be part of the instructional team. Read more about it here.

If that doesn’t float your boat, get the personal touch in one of the other courses this July.

Now, if you just can’t — and I get it, travel is expensive!! — check out the June virtual courses. They run June 22-26, and again there’s a great course list (including — koff koff — my own Women and Children First!: Research Methods for the Hidden Half of the Family, where we’d love to see you via Zoom).

But if what you want is that personal touch, well, maybe I’ll see you in class in Pittsburgh in July.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “For that personal touch,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/ : posted 12 March 2026).

Rabbit rabbit rabbit!

It’s the first of March (even if this email doesn’t go out until the 2nd because of a tech glitch!), a day on which The Legal Genealogist expected to be explaining gleefully that, no, she wasn’t going to be at RootsTech this year and, in fact, there wouldn’t be many upcoming events this month — all because of a long-planned milestone-birthday-bucket-list trip to Turkey and Egypt culminating in a Nile cruise.

Sigh…

There still won’t be many upcoming events this month… and at the moment I’m not 100% sure the trip will be happening either. The cruise company is communicating optimistically but notes that’s based on “hoping the situation de-escalates quickly.”

Sigh…

Okay, pity party done. Let’s talk about what is coming up on the schedule because, as always I’d love to have you come along, to the extent possible, on the trip.

March 2026

• Monday, 9 March, 6:30 p.m. EDT: The Ashtabula County (OH) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation Silent Storytellers: A Genealogist’s Guide to Cemetery Photography. For more information about this event, see the society’s Facebook page, and to join, see the society’s website.

• Wednesday, 11 March, 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EST): The Wenatchee Area (WA) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation When Worlds Collide: Resolving Conflicts in Genealogical Records. For more information about this event, see the March presentation page, and to join, see the society’s website.

April 2026

• Wednesday, 8 April, 2 p.m. EDT: Legacy Family Tree Webinars is hosting the virtual presentation Advertising the Law: The Gems in the Legal Notices. For more information and to register, see the webinar page.

• Saturday, 11 April, 10 a.m. EDT: The Bucks County (PA) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation NARA Mythbusters: Your Family IS in the Archives. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Thursday, 16 April, 7 p.m. MDT (9 p.m. EDT): The Virtual Chapter of the Utah Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation In That Case: Using Published Court Cases. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Saturday, 18 April, 10:45 a.m. CDT (11:45 a.m. EDT): The Genealogy Friends of Plano (TX) Libraries will host the virtual presentation Inventing America: Records of the U.S. Patent Office. For more information and to register, see the Saturday Seminars page.

• Monday, 20 April, 2 p.m. CDT (3 p.m. EDT): The Virtual Chapter of the Mid-Continent Public Library Midwest Genealogy Center branch is hosting the virtual presentation Who, What, Why, When, Where, and How of American Divorce. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Saturday, 25 April: The Virginia Genealogical Society will be hosting its virtual 2026 Spring Seminar. Details and a registration link will be forthcoming later this week on the society’s events page.

Come on out and join us, if you can, for one or more of these events and note, in some cases, that registration will be free or at a reduced cost to members of the host society — and some are limited to members only… There are some reaaaaaaally good reasons for joining genealogical societies… Just sayin’…

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Coming up: March-April 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 1 March 2026).

Upcoming presentations

Rabbit rabbit rabbit!

It’s the first of March, a day on which The Legal Genealogist expected to be explaining gleefully that, no, she wasn’t going to be at RootsTech this year and, in fact, there wouldn’t be many upcoming events this month — all because of a long-planned milestone-birthday-bucket-list trip to Turkey and Egypt culminating in a Nile cruise.

Sigh…

There still won’t be many upcoming events this month… and at the moment I’m not 100% sure the trip will be happening either. The cruise company is communicating optimistically but notes that’s based on “hoping the situation de-escalates quickly.”

Sigh…

Okay, pity party done. Let’s talk about what is coming up on the schedule because, as always I’d love to have you come along, to the extent possible, on the trip.

March 2026

• Monday, 9 March, 6:30 p.m. EDT: The Ashtabula County (OH) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation Silent Storytellers: A Genealogist’s Guide to Cemetery Photography. For more information about this event, see the society’s Facebook page, and to join, see the society’s website.

• Wednesday, 11 March, 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EST): The Wenatchee Area (WA) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation When Worlds Collide: Resolving Conflicts in Genealogical Records. For more information about this event, see the March presentation page, and to join, see the society’s website.

April 2026

• Wednesday, 8 April, 2 p.m. EDT: Legacy Family Tree Webinars is hosting the virtual presentation Advertising the Law: The Gems in the Legal Notices. For more information and to register, see the webinar page.

• Saturday, 11 April, 10 a.m. EDT: The Bucks County (PA) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation NARA Mythbusters: Your Family IS in the Archives. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Thursday, 16 April, 7 p.m. MDT (9 p.m. EDT): The Virtual Chapter of the Utah Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation In That Case: Using Published Court Cases. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Saturday, 18 April, 10:45 a.m. CDT (11:45 a.m. EDT): The Genealogy Friends of Plano (TX) Libraries will host the virtual presentation Inventing America: Records of the U.S. Patent Office. For more information and to register, see the Saturday Seminars page.

• Monday, 20 April, 2 p.m. CDT (3 p.m. EDT): The Virtual Chapter of the Mid-Continent Public Library Midwest Genealogy Center branch is hosting the virtual presentation Who, What, Why, When, Where, and How of American Divorce. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Saturday, 25 April: The Virginia Genealogical Society will be hosting its virtual 2026 Spring Seminar. Details and a registration link will be forthcoming later this week on the society’s events page.

Come on out and join us, if you can, for one or more of these events and note, in some cases, that registration will be free or at a reduced cost to members of the host society — and some are limited to members only… There are some reaaaaaaally good reasons for joining genealogical societies… Just sayin’…

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Coming up: March-April 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 1 March 2026).

Ordinarily, about this time of the year, The Legal Genealogist would be joking about how it could possibly be February already and moaning about where the time has gone.

But The Legal Genealogist lives in Virginia.

In the part of Virginia that got a kazillion inches of sleet and freezing rain on top of snow.

Which means The Legal Genealogist hasn’t even been able to step out on the deck to feed the poor birds for forever already yet for fear of sliding off, down the hill and onto the ice of the pond.

In other words, thank heavens it’s February because January had to be 8,462 days long.

With that whine out of the way, it’s time to look at the real calendar and take a look at what’s coming up on the schedule. As always I’d love to have you come along, to the extent possible, on the trip.

February 2026

• Wednesday, 4 February, 11 a.m. EST: Your DNA Guide is featuring a special virtual class — Terms & Conditions May Apply: DNA Testing Websites — through its Study Group. Study Group classes are currently wait-listed but for more info and to join the waitlist, see this page.

• Saturday, 7 February, 10 a.m. MST (noon EST): The Colorado Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists is hosting the virtual presentation Staying Out of Trouble-The Rights and Responsibilities of Today’s Genealogists as part of its annual meeting. For more information and to register, see the Annual General Meeting page.

• Saturday, 14 February, 11 a.m. EST: The Hudson County (NJ) Genealogical & Historical Society is hosting the virtual presentation Breaker Boys and Spinner Girls: Child Labor Laws and their Records. For more information about this Members-Only event (and to join!), see the Upcoming Society Events page.

• Saturday, 21 February, 7 p.m. MST (9 p.m. EST): The Legal Genealogist is Texas-bound, as the Genealogical Society of Kendall County will be holding its 22nd Annual Hill Country Family History Seminar at St John Lutheran Church Family Life Center, 315 Rosewood Ave, Boerne, TX. I’ll be presenting four topics: Linking the Generations with Court and Land Records; NARA Mythbusters: Your Family IS in the Archives; After the Courthouse Burns: Rekindling Family History through DNA; and Where There Is – or Isn’t – a Will. For more information and to register, see the seminar page.

March 2026

• Monday, 9 March, 6:30 p.m. EST: The Ashtabula County (OH) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation Silent Storytellers: A Genealogist’s Guide to Cemetery Photography. For more information about this event, see the society’s Facebook page, and to join, see the society’s website.

• Wednesday, 11 March, 3 p.m. PST (6 p.m. EST): The Wenatchee Area (WA) Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation When Worlds Collide: Resolving Conflicts in Genealogical Records. For more information about this event (and to join!), keep an eye on the news and events page.

Come on out and join us, if you can, for one or more of these events and note, in some cases, that registration will be free or at a reduced cost to members of the host society — and some are limited to members only… There are some reaaaaaaally good reasons for joining genealogical societies… Just sayin’…

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Coming up: February-March 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 4 February 2026).

Today, the 27th of January, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.¹

And today The Legal Genealogist received an email from Jennifer Mendelsohn and Dr. Adina Newman, Co-Founders and Lead Genealogists of the Holocaust Reunion Project.

A project whose mission is to “harness the power of commercial DNA testing, combined with expert genealogical research, both to reunite Holocaust survivors and their children with living relatives and to illuminate the family history that has been lost to genocide.”²

This is a project I support 100% and have personally contributed to.

Please read their words:

Today we pause to mark the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and recognize International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But with each year that the Holocaust gets further and further in the past, the Holocaust Reunion Project’s resolve to make family connections for survivors only grows stronger.

 

Last week, the Claims Conference reported that there are now approximately 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors living in 90 countries around the world. More than 23,000 survivors have passed away in just the last year.

 

We at the Holocaust Reunion Project are keenly aware of the international reach of our efforts to help survivors and their children locate missing family and rebuild their shattered family trees.

 

Just recently we have reunited:

 

• The children of survivors in Baltimore and Boston with a first cousin once removed in Australia. He, too, is the child of survivors. Neither had any idea of the other’s existence.
• The daughter of survivors in Connecticut with her first cousins once removed in Uruguay. She had a faded letter her survivor father had received from his sister in Montevideo but had no idea how to track down the family. We made it happen.
• An 89-year-old survivor in Israel with her first cousin’s son in Georgia. The survivor knew she had family somewhere in the U.S.; they were instantly connected via a DNA test provided by the Holocaust Reunion Project.
• A 95-year-old orphaned survivor in Texas with relatives in Portugal and Australia.

Today we reflect on the almost incomprehensible human tragedy of the Holocaust. We mourn those lost. We honor the courage and strength of survivors. And we renew our pledge to continue this holiest of work, helping broken families heal.

I share this email with you to ask that you join me in reflecting, mourning, honoring — and supporting this effort to help broken families heal.

The contribution link is here: https://holocaustreunions.org/donate/

Together, on this day, in a tangible way, we can remember.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “On this day, remember,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/ : posted 26 Jan 2026).

SOURCES

Here, in 2026, on this federal holiday marking the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., there is an apology worth repeating.

It begins with a story from some years ago. The Legal Genealogist‘s first cousin once removed just couldn’t understand the whole notion of genealogy when it came up in a conversation years ago.

He could not for the life of him wrap his head around the idea of wanting to get to know distant family members … or what he thought of as ancient family history.

I remember trying to explain to this man who had walked my mother — his first cousin — down the aisle at her wedding to my father. “Some people collect coins,” I remember telling him. “Others collect stamps. Me? I collect relatives.”

Everyone laughed.

Then his face grew very serious. “What do you do,” he asked, “when you find one that … well … you’d rather not have?”

“Throw him back,” I said. And I remember smiling — not really believing I would ever find such a one.

Until I did.

A fifth cousin. One I never met. One I never wanted to meet. A fifth cousin whose acts were so abhorrent and so incomprehensible to me that — as hard as I have tried — I simply can’t come to terms with having him anywhere in my family tree, even at the far distant remove of fifth cousin.

Fifth cousins means we share a pair of fourth great grandparents. William Killen and his wife — name unknown — were both alive in 1830;¹ neither can be found in 1840. The different children of theirs that we descend from were born in the 1790s.²

That’s a long time ago. And there’s been a lot of water under the bridge separating my branch of the family from my fifth cousin’s branch of the family. Until I really got into genealogy, I’d never even heard the name.

But the evidence still says that Edgar Ray Killen of Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi, was my fifth cousin.

Now… I don’t need to “throw him back.”

Life took care of that for me, eight years ago now, when he died in Parchman, Mississippi.³

Parchman.

Where the Mississippi State Penitentiary is located.

And where Edgar Ray Killen died, at the age of 92, after having spent only the last 12-plus years of his life in prison for a crime that is just unthinkable.

Edgar Ray Killen, you see, was a Baptist preacher — and a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, area. He was the Klan’s chief recruiter in that area. And one night in June of 1964, he sent a bunch of Klansmen out with a Neshoba County deputy sheriff to waylay three young civil rights workers who had come to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer drive to register Southern black voters.⁴

Those three young men disappeared that June night. Their bodies were found weeks later buried under an earthen dam. Their names were Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner. Goodman was just 20 years old when he died; Chaney was 21; Schwerner was 24. Their deaths were investigated by the FBI under the case name MIBURN — Mississippi Burning,⁵ a name that inspired the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning” — and pushed forward the cause of civil rights in the United States.

Killen wasn’t with the Klansmen when the young men died. Other Klansmen said he’d arranged to go to a local funeral home to attend a wake in order to set up an alibi. When he originally stood trial in federal court in 1967, one member of the jury held out and caused a mistrial — she said later she could never vote to convict a preacher. He wasn’t brought to justice until 2005, when the State of Mississippi finally indicted him for murder.⁶

Because Killen hadn’t been at the scene, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder. But the trial judge sentenced him to the maximum 20 years in prison for each of the three deaths with the sentences to run consecutively — a total of 60 years in prison for a man then 80 years old.⁷ It was clear he would die in prison, and die in prison he did, eight years ago this month.

So… what do you do when genealogy leads you to a relative like this one? When you find one that … well … you’d rather not have?

When you know that this fifth cousin died miserable and alone in prison, rather than spending his twilight years at home, but you also know that that doesn’t begin to make up for the fact that his actions directly contributed to the deaths of three young men who were doing no more than exercising their rights as Americans — and encouraging others to do the same? When you know that nothing can make up for the fact that those young men died a horrific death — while he lived, free and clear and an outspoken unrepentant racist, for 41 years to the day after the crime before the law finally caught up to him?⁸

I don’t know how others will choose to deal with it. I only know how I will choose to deal with it, here on this Martin Luther King Day in 2026, eight years after the death of Edgar Ray Killen.

I can’t make it right. I can’t make it up to the families of those young men. But there is one thing I can do that, I can hope, may prove to be some small comfort to the members of those families.

I can let them hear something from a member of Edgar Ray Killen’s family. Something, I suspect, they’ve only heard once before in the going-on-62 years since the Freedom Summer of 1964. Something that, perhaps, they particularly need to hear now in this troubled time in which we live, even if just from me once more.

To the families of the victims, Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner, from this member of the family of this perpetrator, Edgar Ray Killen:

I am so very sorry for what my family did to yours.

May you know that their lives were not in vain.

May their good deeds be remembered.

May their memories forever be a blessing.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “An apology worth repeating,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 19 Jan 2026 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 19 Jan 2026).

Original post: Ibid., “A long overdue apology,” posted 12 January 2019.

SOURCES

There’s no doubt about it.

The very best part of genealogy is the stories.

Stories in The Legal Genealogist’s family take us back a long way in America on the maternal side and in Germany on the paternal side.

Stories that begin, in this country, in the late 1600s. Stories in Germany that we can take all the way back to the late 1500s.

Some of them, astoundingly, given my family’s tendency never to let the truth get in the way of a good story, that may even possibly be true.

And some of the possibly-true ones — that is, the ones that I’ve managed to document with something other than a marginal note that one of the family storytellers told me so — had very big milestones in 2025 or will have big milestones here in 2026.

These “big milestones” are events that were exactly 50 or 100 or 150 or 200 or 250 years ago — or more! — during the year.¹

And they’re the kinds of milestones that we shouldn’t allow to pass without pausing to reflect.

Looking back

In 2025, for example, there was good documentation of a 300-year milestone: the birth on 6 January 1725² of my sixth great grandfather John Pettypool.³ In the 200-year milestone category, a death, of my fifth great grandmother, Mary (Boswell) Buchanan, died 7 October 1825 in what is now Mitchell County, North Carolina.⁴ In the 100-year milestone category, the single most powerful event of my own ancestry: the emigration from Germany to the United States of my paternal grandparents, Hugo Ernst and Marie (Nuckel) Geissler and their then-three-year-old son (my father), setting sail from Bremen on 26 January 1925 and arriving in New York on 6 February 1925.⁵

Looking forward

In 2026, we have some milestones coming up as well.

In the 300-year milestone category — with good documentation even! — there’s a death: my eighth great grandfather William Pettypool died in early 1726 in Prince George County, Virginia. His will, executed in 1721, was admitted to probate on March 14, 1726, by his widow Elizabeth. In the will, he named his wife Elizabeth, sons William (Jr.) and Seth (my seventh great grandfather), daughters Anne Massey (recorded as Mercy) and Mary Broadway, and grandchildren, Anne’s two children, William and Martha. Elizabeth declined to serve as executrix and son William served instead.⁶

In the 250-year milestone category, it’s particularly appropriate in America’s Semiquincentennial year that the choice be another death: this time a fourth great grand uncle, Richard Baker. He was born 23 December 1753, most likely in Culpeper County, Virginia. As far as we’ve been able to determine, he was the 10th of 13 children born to my fifth great grandparents, Thomas and Dorothy (Davenport) Baker.⁷ He was serving with his older brother, my fourth great grandfather David Baker, in the 3rd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line when Washington’s Army began to cross the Delaware just after dark on Christmas Day 1776. They were headed to what is known today as the Battle of Trenton. And it was there, David reported in a pension application decades later, on the 26th of December 1776, that Richard Baker was killed in that action.⁸

In the 200-year milestone category, we’ll go with a marriage: on the 27th of October 1826, my third great grandfather Johann Heinrich Hüneke and his first wife Rebecca Schrader were married in Bremen, Germany. Both bride and groom were shown as age 23, and he was shown as a cigarmaker.⁹ Rebecca had two daughters before she died in 1833.¹⁰ He then married my third great grandmother Dorothea Mahnken in December 1834,¹¹ and their daughter Johanna Henriette was my second great grandmother.

In the 150-year milestone category, we have to go with another marriage: on the 26th of October 1876, in Cherokee County, Alabama, my second great grandmother Martha Louise (Shew) Baird married Abigah C. Livingston.¹² It was his first marriage; it was probably her second, though no record of her marriage to my second great grandfather Jasper Baird has ever been found. My great grandmother Eula was Martha Louise’s only child by Jasper, but Abigah fathered a whole host of kids to fill the house and was the only grandfather Eula’s children — including my grandmother — ever knew.

In the 100-year milestone category, there’s no contest, and it has to be a birth: my mother, Hazel Irene (Cottrell) Geissler was born on March 21, 1926, in Midland, Texas. Despite the fact that that date was 23 years after Texas began statewide recordation of births, there is — sigh — no birth certificate that was ever filed for my mother, which is why I usually end up citing her death certificate.¹³ One of these years, and I suppose a centennial year would be a good choice, I’m going to order her passport file from the State Department, since I understand that my grandmother filed an affidavit to help my mother get her passport.¹⁴

And in the 50-year milestone category, once again no contest and a birth: my niece Gina, whose details shall not be further published without her permission since she is, I am glad to report, very much alive for us all to celebrate this milestone birthday.

Each of these, a story of its own, to find and to tell — each, in truth, one of the real reasons why we do genealogy at all.

Why I write this blog.

Why I have to tell the stories.

To make sure that those I remember aren’t forgotten… that these milestones continue to be remembered down through the generations.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Milestones, 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 11 Jan 2025).

SOURCES

And here we are again, at the beginning of another year.

Which, of course, means that things are ramping up for 2026 here at The Legal Genealogist.

Here’s a look at what’s coming up on the schedule, and as always I’d love to have you come along, to the extent possible, on the trip.

January 2026

• Tuesday, 6 January, 7 p.m. MST (9 p.m. EST): The Boulder Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation The Robot Genealogist: Separating Fact from Fiction in AI-Assisted Research. For more information and to register, see the event page.

• Saturday, 10 January, starting at 9 a.m. PST (noon EST): The San Diego Genealogical Society is hosting its virtual all-day Annual Meeting and Seminar where I’ll be offering four presentations: “Don’t Forget the Ladies” – A Genealogist’s Guide to Women and the Law; Living with Legal Lingo; A Sentence of Transportation; and Using Google Books to Find the Law. For more information and to register, see the the seminar event page.

• Thursday, 15 January, 7 p.m. CST (8 p.m. EST): The Saskatchewan Genealogical Society is hosting the virtual presentation DNA Doesn’t Lie, But Should We? Ethics and 21st Century Genealogy. For more information and to register, keep an eye on the Upcoming Events page.

• Monday-Friday, 26-30 January: The Salt Lake Institute of Genealogist (SLIG) opens the 2026 institute season (alternatively known as winter camp for genealogists or summer camp for genealogists depending…) with its line-up of courses for the Virtual 2026 Institute. I’m particularly excited about my new course, Lives in Context, where I’ll be joined by LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson and Linda Harms Okazaki for a week-long deep dive into using all kinds of resources for all kinds of families to add depth and breadth and color to family history. As the description notes, “Genealogy is so much more than names, dates, and locations. Family history can come alive when the lives of those named ancestors are put into the full context of their times and places.” There are a few seats left, so for more information and to register, see the course information page. For more on SLIG in general, see Salt Lake Institute of Genealogist (SLIG).

February 2026

• Wednesday, 4 February, 11 a.m. EST: Your DNA Guide is featuring a special virtual class — Terms & Conditions May Apply: DNA Testing Websites — through its Study Group. Study Group classes are currently wait-listed but for more info and to join the waitlist, see this page.

• Saturday, 7 February, 10 a.m. MST (noon EST): The Colorado Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists is hosting the virtual presentation Staying Out of Trouble-The Rights and Responsibilities of Today’s Genealogists as part of its annual meeting. For more information and to register, see the Annual General Meeting page.

• Saturday, 14 February, 11 a.m. EST: The Hudson County (NJ) Genealogical & Historical Society is hosting the virtual presentation Breaker Boys and Spinner Girls: Child Labor Laws and their Records. For more information about this Members-Only event (and to join!), see the Upcoming Society Events page.

• Saturday, 21 February, 7 p.m. MST (9 p.m. EST): The Legal Genealogist is Texas-bound, as the Genealogical Society of Kendall County will be holding its 22nd Annual Hill Country Family History Seminar at St John Lutheran Church Family Life Center, 315 Rosewood Ave, Boerne, TX. I’ll be presenting four topics: Linking the Generations with Court and Land Records; NARA Mythbusters: Your Family IS in the Archives; After the Courthouse Burns: Rekindling Family History through DNA; and Where There Is – or Isn’t – a Will. For more information and to register, see the seminar page.

Come on out and join us, if you can, for one or more of these events and note, in some cases, that registration will be free or at a reduced cost to members of the host society — and some are limited to members only… There are some reaaaaaaally good reasons for joining genealogical societies… Just sayin’…

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Coming up: January-February 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 4 January 2026).

So many reader questions come in that are beyond what The Legal Genealogist can answer in this blog, because they’re asking for legal advice. Um… that’s not what this blog is all about. Not what this blog can do.

It’s necessary, or at least advisable, to explain every so often some of the limits on what I’m up to here at The Legal Genealogist. You know, the little things, like making sure I don’t get sued and the furniture isn’t trashed in a brawl.

So here, at the beginning of my 15th year of blogging, let me take the opportunity to repeat these…

The rules of my road.

I’m not your lawyer.

I have a law degree. But I’m not your lawyer. I’m not in active practice as a lawyer, I’m not licensed in your state, and I’m not giving legal advice online. We don’t have an attorney-client relationship, so anything you say can be held against you. If you get sued because of something I say here, I won’t represent you. I won’t even testify for you. I will, however, be enormously amused.

Seriously, this blog is general commentary on lots of things, including general commentary on the law. If you’re looking for more than general commentary on the law, you need to consult a lawyer in your home state. If you think this is more than general commentary on the law, you do need to consult a professional… but not of the legal variety.

I could be wrong.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m (gasp) human. Which means, at any given time, on any given matter, I could be wrong. If I’m wrong about a fact, I’d like to know it.

I hadn’t been blogging three weeks yet before I was delighted when my dear friend, the late Donn Devine, told me about early Delaware statutes I hadn’t been aware of, or, later, when Peter Hirtle set me straight on how the King James Bible is covered by a Crown patent. I wasn’t quite so happy to discover something important that I’d accidentally omitted in a blog, nor was I pleased the time when I discovered that a whole bunch of links in a post were just dead wrong. But… sigh… I’m human.

So tell me when you know more than I do or I’ve just plain goofed. As to everything else, don’t buy what I say uncritically; check the sources I cite and make your own decisions. You may well come to a different conclusion.

No advertising.

It appears that people selling (probably counterfeit) Coach bags and (undoubtedly overpriced) sports jerseys think that the comments area on genealogy blogs should be their personal playgrounds. Uh uh. Not here. And especially not the dolt who thought this lifelong New York Giants fan would be happy with a comment touting Tom Brady jerseys. Well, maybe… depending on whether I could dictate what was on the jersey…

No politics.

It appears that the extreme fringes of the political spectrum have people sitting out there, trolling every single nook and cranny of the Internet, looking for places where they can pop up and spew their conspiracy theories. The political situation here in the United States has only made it worse, and nobody with an operating brain expects 2026 to be any better.

Bleah. A pox on all your houses. If you haven’t got anything substantive to say about genealogy, it ain’t going live here. And if it sneaks by me at first, it’ll get deleted when I spot it. (But see below as to “My turf. My rules.”)

No flaming.

Play nice. We’re not all ever going to agree with each other on everything. But disagreeing doesn’t have to be disagreeable. So no personal attacks, ever.

My turf. My rules.

And last but hardly least, I pay the bills for this website. I don’t accept advertising, I don’t have any corporate sponsors, and I don’t charge admission. Which means that this is my turf. Which means that I get to set the rules. (Even the privacy rules, set out on the privacy policy page.)

So no, I’m probably not making your comment live if you don’t provide a real email address. I can stop you from commenting if I think you’re being an annoying pest. I really don’t have to talk about an issue if I choose not to. And I don’t have to stop talking about something that I do want to talk about (that includes the very few times I can’t help myself from saying something you might construe as political or that may actually be political — it is after all that kind of time in the country where I live…).

In other words, your freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can interfere with mine. It means that you’re free to do exactly the same thing … on any website where you pay the bills and you set the rules.

How the World Sees Genealogists (Image used with permission of Jim Owston)

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Rules of my road: 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 3 Jan 2026).

For most folks in the United States, this is the second day of January 2026.

For The Legal Genealogist, it’s the second day of 1930.

No, that’s not a typo. I really do mean 1930.

The year that books like Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Carolyn Keene’s first Nancy Drew books starting with The Secret of the Old Clock and the original German language edition of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) were all published for the first time.¹

The year that “Georgia on My Mind” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” were first available as sheet music.²

The year that the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers and the Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front first hit the silver screen.³

Because, as of the second the clock ticked over to 2026, all kinds of materials legally published in the United States at any time during the year 1930 — thousands and thousands of books, sheet music, films, photos and more — entered the public domain.

A whole year’s worth of materials, wonderfully free for all of us to use in our research, our blogs, our presentations, our publications without having to try to find the copyright owner and secure permission. Remember, that’s what public domain means: when copyright expires and a work goes into the public domain, we’re allowed to use it freely, any way we want, for any purpose (with some limits⁴), without needing permission from or payment to the creator of the work.⁵

This really is A Very Big Deal — and it really shouldn’t have been one.

Because of the way the copyright law works, providing protection only for a set number of years, a number of copyrights should have expired every year and we should have been getting a whole year’s worth of materials released into the public domain every year. But that copyright clock stopped ticking in 1998 — nothing published after 1922 was being released from copyright. For years and years, we were forced to say that things went into the public domain only if “legally published in the United States before 1923.”

There’s a whole long backstory as to why it stopped ticking, centering on the fact that the Disney people wanted to keep copyright protection on Steamboat Willie — the film where Mickey Mouse made his debut — to keep it out of the public domain. So it lobbied to get the copyright statute changed to add 20 years of protection to all then-copyrighted works. The amended law provided that the copyright clock would stop, dead, on anything then-copyrighted and wouldn’t start to run again until 12:00.01 a.m. 1 January 2019.⁶

At that point, the statute said, after those additional 20 years, for most things, the clock would start moving again and, as it ticked over into 2019, we were supposed to get an entire year’s worth of published works — everything legally published in the United States during 1923 — transferred into the public domain.⁷

Of course, since copyright law is a matter of statute, and any statute can always be amended, at any time up until midnight on 31 December 2018 — “the end of the calendar year in which (copyrights) would otherwise expire” — Congress could take it back. So, as 2018 drew to a close, all of us who watch copyright issues held our collective breath.

And — somehow, astonishingly — Congress didn’t manage to foul it up. On 1 January 2019, thousands and thousands of items passed from copyright-protected status into the public domain. And we could all then say that the public domain included “everything legally published in the United States before 1924” (instead of the “before 1923” we’d been saying for 20 years).⁸

And then we started worrying. Because, of course, copyright law is a matter of statute, and any statute can always be amended…⁹ In any given year — ulp — Congress could still foul it up.

Amazingly enough, it didn’t do it. The clock kept right on ticking and, as of 1 January 2020, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1925. Then in 2021, it was works published before 1926. In 2022, it was works published before 1927. In 2023, it was works published before 1928. In 2024, it was works published before 1929. And in 2025, it was works published before 1930.

And — may miracles never cease — Congress didn’t manage to foul it up last year either. In copyright terms, 1930 has arrived. As of 1 January 2026, we can now say that copyright has expired for works published before 1931. And on 1 January 2027, we can hope to include works published before 1932. And so on.¹⁰

For now, at least, that copyright clock is still ticking…

Welcome to 1930 — and the wealth of now-out-of-copyright materials produced that year.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Welcome to 1930!,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 2 Jan 2026).

SOURCES

Fourteen years ago today, on the first of January 2012, the very first post appeared here at The Legal Genealogist.

It explained that:

My purpose in writing The Legal Genealogist is, in part, to help folks understand the often arcane and even impenetrable legal concepts and terminology that are so very important to those of us studying family history. Without understanding the context in which events took place and records were created, we miss so much of both the significance and the flavor of what happened.¹

It didn’t stop there. That first post went on to say:

But this blog won’t just be about the law. As the title goes, it’s “genealogy, the law, and so much more.” With your help, it ought to be a lot of fun to see just what “so much more” will be (and how much trouble we can get into finding out!).²

I hope you’re still having as much fun as I am — here at the start of a 15th year of this blog — in figuring out just what “so much more” will be (and how much more trouble we can get into this coming year…).

Happy New Year!!!

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Happy New Year 2026!,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/ : posted 1 Jan 2026).

SOURCES