Six Feet Deep
Multi-part investigations that follow a mystery from first clue to final discovery.
Field Notes
Discoveries and observations from cemeteries, archives, and ground-level investigations.
The Toolbox
Research tools, methods, and practical guides to help you dig deeper with confidence.
Quick Digs
Short discoveries, mini-breakthroughs, and brief stories that still reveal something meaningful.
Genealogy & Tech Updates
Updates on new tools, record releases, DNA tech, and innovations shaping modern genealogy.
Obscure Lot
The search for the lost burying ground of the Clinton County, Ohio, Infirmary, where at least 250 people were laid to rest between 1840 and 1903.
Gist Settlement
The Highland County, Ohio, settlement founded by people freed under Samuel Gist’s will, and the ground they lived on.
WPA Veterans’ Graves
What the WPA’s survey of veterans’ graves in Clinton County, Ohio, recorded, and what it missed.
New posts in this category are on the way.
A Strand of Hair, Sixty-Two Cousins: What DNA Can and Can’t Settle
New DNA work on Thomas Jefferson’s hair adds weight to a 200-year-old paternity question. The same kind of evidence helped me find an ancestor’s missing father and relatives the records had scattered. DNA suggests; records confirm.
A Court Was Asked Whether AI Wrote a City’s Emergency Clauses
A Clinton County judge accepted an expert’s opinion that two city emergency clauses were likely drafted with AI. What he wrote next is worth reading closely. The tool is not the question. The checking is.
A Measuring Wheel, a Laser and Radar: Three Ways to Count One Cemetery
In 2006 a high school history class counted 94 grave markers in the Gist Settlement Cemetery with a measuring wheel. A laser and ground-penetrating radar later produced different numbers. Each answers a different question.