(Digital Download) PROVE IT: 132 Questions to Test What You Really Know About Your Family History

132 questions. Eleven chapters. No records required.

You think you know your family. This book finds out.

PROVE IT is a quiz you can play on your own or around a kitchen table — multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blank, riddles, and a few questions that ask you to spot what is wrong before anybody tells you. You answer all of them with nothing but what you already think you know. No subscription, no computer, not a single document in front of you.

But the questions are not the point. Every answer explains the reasoning behind it, so a question you get wrong becomes a lesson instead of a scold. Take the game away and what is left is a stack of research strategies: where to find a birth month for somebody born in a state that did not register births, how to document a marriage when no marriage record survives, the five places to look before you accept that a burned courthouse took everything.

The eleven chapters

Before You Begin · Reading the Census · The Trouble with Names · Birth, Marriage, and Death · Land, Deeds, and Property · Wills and Probate · Researching Enslaved Ancestors · Soldiers, Citizens, and the Government · The Language of Old Records · DNA · Evidence, Proof, and Knowing When You're Done

Play it with your family

One person reads, everybody else answers out loud. Two relatives will remember the same event two different ways, and that is useful information rather than a fight. Scattered through the book are boxes marked Talk About It — unscored, no right answer, there to make somebody at the table go quiet for a second and then start telling a story nobody has heard before.

In the back

A scorecard, a glossary of old record language, an If You're Stuck On index that points you straight at the questions dealing with your particular brick wall, a note on verification, and where to go next.

Want a physical copy?

This listing is the instant digital download. If you would rather hold the book — and for playing it at a reunion or handing it to a relative, you probably would — the paperback is available on Amazon.

Written by V. H. Carlos — Victoria Carlos, genealogy strategist and president of Osisi & Co., who grades every conclusion in every client report from A to F for a living.

Instant digital download. 132 pages, delivered as a PDF and an EPUB.