San Antonio Genealogical & Historical Society

Using Census Records to Trace Your Family's Immigration and Origins You can extract way more from U.S. census records than you think! h...

How to Research Colonial Ancestors Nearly 250 years ago, America declared its independence from the Br...

Twenty-five miles west of San Antonio, there is a small Texas town where the limestone buildings look like they belong in northeastern France, where a French dialect was spoken in the streets for over a century, and where the Catholic church has been holding Mass in the same limestone sanctuary since 1870. Castroville, Texas — the Little Alsace of Texas — is one of the most remarkable and least visited historic towns in the entire state. 🤠✨
Castroville was founded in 1844 by Henri Castro, a French-Portuguese empresario who brought over 2,000 colonists from the Alsace region of France and the Rhine provinces of Germany to settle his land grant on the Medina River southwest of San Antonio. The Alsatian settlers built their new community in the architectural tradition of their homeland — thick limestone walls, steeply pitched gabled roofs, and the compact European street plan of a people who came from a landscape of villages rather than the open range. They maintained their Alsatian dialect as a spoken language in Castroville for over a hundred years after settlement, making it one of the longest-surviving European immigrant language traditions in Texas history.
💛 Did you know Texas has an Alsatian French settlement that has been preserving its European heritage since 1844? Have you ever visited Castroville? Tell us in the comments — and follow Texas Then & Now for more stories about the hidden Texas towns that belong to the whole world.
🤖 AI-assisted image and content. The history is real — we just found a new way to bring it to life. As always, we encourage you to dig deeper into these stories yourself.
👇 Drop your Castroville connection in the comments!

Do you have a FEMALE patriot in your family?

(from https://www.dar.org/library/research-guides/dar-publications )

Women in the Revolutionary Era
America's Women in the Revolutionary Era 1760-1790: A History Through Bibliography
Revolutionary WomenAmerica’s Women in the Revolutionary Era 1760-1790: A History Through Bibliography, edited by Eric G. Grundset, is an authoritative guide to women’s and girls’ lives in the era of the American Revolution. DAR Library researchers made an effort to locate every relevant published resource about Revolutionary women possible, including books, articles, dissertations and online documents, in order to aid researchers, understand existing literature and illuminate gaps to encourage future research. This encyclopedic bibliography is sorted in several ways to make it as useful as possible, including by topic, geography and a chronology that shows how historians’ understanding of these women and girls has developed over time.

The book documents sources about America’s women from the famous to the obscure. Researchers discovered references to some unique women, such as one woman who lived as a hermit in a cave on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts, along with documentation about famous, influential women and, most importantly, a great wealth of resources describing the daily lives of regular women of different races and classes. This focus on “average” women was a driving force of the research behind the book, which aims to find resources that paint a holistic picture of life in the revolutionary era.

Volume one contains many subject chapters including ones on general studies, African American Women, Native American Women, women in the family and society, women as mothers and their children, women’s health, women’s work in the home and elsewhere, women’s rights, religious experiences, women’s cultural life and activities, the creative activities of women in literature and writing, historical fiction, women and textiles, and women and girls in the many aspects of the war effort.

The second volumes takes a geographical approach to the broad subject incorporating materials from volume one with other locally-specific studies. It is arranged by state and region and provides extensive listings of books, articles, dissertations, theses, and other writings on the roles of women and girls across the emerging United States.

Volume three provides a listing of all of this information by author and a separate chronological section showing the development of the published literature in this field of study from the late eighteenth century to the present.

For those of you who are interested in using AI as a genealogy research assistant, I'd like to direct you to Genetic Genealogy Research Partner Pro, a ChatGPT add-on built to support rigorous, evidence-first genealogy with care and flexibility, efficiently.

It can help genealogists at any level with tasks such as:
* Analyzing and troubleshooting GEDCOM files
* Interpreting DNA match data (strictly non-medical)
* Evaluating relationship hypotheses
* Providing historical context tailored to specific regions and eras
* Clarifying conflicting evidence or records
* Building structured, step-by-step research plans
* Adapting its depth across six user-experience levels

You can choose Quick Mode for concise responses or Deep Mode for a full narrative breakdown that combines reasoning with contextual history. It provides the kind of analysis that resembles that of seasoned researchers like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and CeCe Moore, yet it focuses on your own family story.

I didn't create this, I have no financial interest in this, I give no guarantees or any kind. I simply pass it on to you because I find it interesting and hope that it helps someone out there.

ChatGPT ChatGPT helps you get answers, find inspiration, and be more productive.

Our new book, "Family Memories of World War II," is a collection of family memories in 52 articles by 37 authors. The articles describe training and combat actions, land battles, naval engagements, island assaults, air contests, and POW experiences. The book includes multiple articles and references to guide further individual WWII genealogy research. Soft cover, 198 pages, full color covers, fully indexed by names, military units and ships, battles, and locations. On sale at the SAGHS library or at the online store.