I help genealogists research their ancestors in Pennsylvania through books, workshops, and a membership community.
Your PA ancestor was alive when America turned 50. Here's how to find them.
Where was your PA ancestor in 1826?Reader, We just spent the spring on 1776. But your ancestor lived through every American milestone after it — and each one left a different paper trail. Over the next six weeks I’m walking the anniversaries: 1826, 1876, 1926, 1976, and then two posts on what makes Pennsylvania research genuinely its own animal. We start with the hardest one. In 1826, the country turned fifty. On July 4 — the exact half-century mark — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died within hours of each other, and Pennsylvania newspapers read it as providence for weeks. Your ancestor was somewhere in that country. The problem is that the records from the 1820s rarely name them. Pennsylvania kept no statewide birth, marriage, or death records until 1906. And the federal census before 1850 named only the head of household — everyone else is a tally mark in an age column. So how do you find a wife, a child, an aging parent in 1826? The record most researchers skip: county tax lists. The census comes around once a decade and names one person. Pennsylvania’s county tax assessments were taken almost every year — and they place your ancestor in a specific township, show whether he owned or rented, name his trade, and mark the year a son turned twenty-one and first appears as a “freeman.” When a man vanishes from the list and his widow appears in his place, you’ve found a death window without a death record. Pair the tax lists with church registers (your real vital records before 1906) and recorded deeds (which name wives and children the census never will), and 1826 stops being a wall. I wrote the full method — tax lists, church records by denomination, land records, and how to read the 1820/1830 census anyway — on the blog: Where Was Your Pennsylvania Ancestor in 1826? Let’s discover your Pennsylvania ancestors. —Denyse P.S. Church records carry the weight in this era, and Pennsylvania was the most religiously diverse state in the country — which register you need depends entirely on your ancestor’s community. Pennsylvania Vital Records Research walks through the vital records and their substitutes denomination by denomination.
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Hi! I'm Denyse Allen, Founder of PA Ancestors
I help genealogists research their ancestors in Pennsylvania through books, workshops, and a membership community.
⏳Chronicle Makers Founded by Denyse Allen Finish What You Started Hi Reader! Here's this week's Finish What You Started: one step toward finishing, one AI item worth your time, and what's on in Chronicle Makers. Don't miss the gorilla Read one record all the way through. Open one record image you saved and never read to the end. Read every word, the column headings and the margins included. Start at the top left, go across and slowly read. We miss what we aren't looking for. In Daniel Simons...
⏳Chronicle Makers Founded by Denyse Allen Finish What You Started Hi Reader! This is the first issue of the new Finish What You Started newsletter from Chronicle Makers. Each Sunday evening you'll receive one thing to move you towards finishing this week, one AI item worth your time, and what family historians are finishing inside Chronicle Makers. Five minute read, and as AI likes to say, no fluff. One step towards finishing Name your one. Write down the name of the one ancestor you would...
Your PA ancestor in 1976 Reader, We’ve walked back through 1826, 1876, and 1926. This week we reach the anniversary you may have lived through yourself. In 1976, the country turned two hundred. The tall ships, the flags on every porch, the bells rung across the country on the Fourth — for millions of Americans, the Bicentennial isn’t a research problem, it’s a memory. Pennsylvania was at the heart of it, with events around Independence Hall and a new home for the Liberty Bell. And that...