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Do you have a favorite few genealogy blogs that you read regularly? Maybe the blogger offers excellent genealogy advice, insightful analysis or a unique point of view. Or the writing especially creative or humorous.\n\nIf so, we want to know about it. In the May 2010 issue, we'll be naming the Family Tree Magazine 40 Best Genealogy Blogs ("Family Tree 40" for short).\n\nFirst, we're asking the genealogy community to nominate the genealogy blogs they read most. Later, family historians will vote on their favorite blogs in several categories.

Previous posts in this column demonstrated the use of family clusters and neighborhood clusters to identify families in the U. S. federal census. In this post, we will use these same techniques to identify the last owners of a family freed after the abolition of slavery.

"GeneaBloggers is a group of genealogists and family historians committed to augmenting their passion by blogging about their research and their families"

The Generations Project is a new reality series that helps those who have questions about their family history investigate their own identities by walking in the shoes of their ancestors. As they undertake these journeys, they often uncover the hidden identities in family pasts, and come to see that in many cases the best way to know who you are is to know who you came from.

In the 1920 federal census for Leon County, Texas, a seventy-four year old African-American man named Jeff Clark lives with his sixty-four year old wife Hattie. Jeff was a farmer who owned his own farm, and worked his own land. The census further records that he was born in Alabama, as were both of his parents. His granddaughter also lived with them.

On 20 October 2009, this column addressed the topic of Y-DNA testing for genealogical purposes. This relatively new development in science holds revolutionary potential for genealogy, especially African-American research. The most recent issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (Sep 2009) contains the case study of an African-American family where Y-DNA testing revealed direct male line European ancestry.[1]

The Maryland Historical Society and genealogist and author Robert Barnes will once again present a series of four Family History workshops this year.

In an earlier entry, this column reported on several resources available for online African-American research in Virginia. Many more resources are now available, some becoming so just in the past three months since that report, necessitating another visit to the subject.

"One of the necessities in my research toolbox is a screen capture application. In my earlier article, I discussed TechSmith's Jing, which has been recently updated. Jing is available for both Mac and Windows and can capture both screenshots and screencasts making it an invaluable tool for anyone. The fact that it's a free tool makes it even better."

This article is part of a continuing series looking at each federal census individually. Please read the others in the archives of this column. The 1870 U. S. Census was the Ninth Decennial Census. This census is probably the single most important census for genealogists conducting research on African-American families

#genealogy

When the 1860 federal census was collected and enumerated, slavery was still legal within most of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. The 1860 federal census enumerated only free people of color in its population schedule; slaves were enumerated namelessly on a separate schedule, identified only by slave owner, age, gender, and color.