Elizabeth Shown Mills, author of Evidence Explained and past president of the American Society of Genealogists, is writing a series of columns for The New York Times. These are titled “Advice on How to Research Family History” and there are three so far this month:

• November 6th, Part 1: online sources, physical public records and the DNA of living relatives;
• November 13th, Part 2: “memory holes” created by the Holocaust, record-keeping systems and other issues;
• November 20th, Part 3: tracing an ex-slave businessman, unearthing pre-Ellis Island names and other issues.

There will be at least one more next week on November 27th, on special problems researching the American frontier and finding an ancestor’s place of origin. These articles appear in the relatively new “Booming” section of the Times, about baby boomers, which is published each Wednesday.