Crowe’s Nest by Elizabeth Powell Crowe

Eight years ago today, I arrived in Paris with a group of students (including my two children) for a two-week tour of France. That Bastille Day was great fun. The original one maybe not so much. Still, if you have some French genealogy, you might want to check out these sites today:

• Footnote has some documents related to the Bastille
• This site has a list of all those executed by the guillotine. It’s in French, so you may need to translate  it.
• The French president’s site has a page (in English) on the history of 14 July.
• Cyndi’s List has a whole page of links related to France.
• This clip from Casablanca  c’est formidable!
• And this site has the French National Anthem‘s history and lyrics.

In my book I discuss the usefulness of Mortality Schedules to the U. S. Census. If you expected to find an ancestor in a certain place in a census, and don’t, the next step is to find the mortality schedule, which lists those that died in the year of a census, but were not alive when the census taker arrived.

Mortality schedules contain information that, in some cases, give the only record of a citizen’s death. The census enumerators were instructed to give great care and obtain accurate information, especially for these mortality schedules.

GenealogyBuff.com has a tool for researching census mortality schedules that have been transcribed and posted on the web. MortalitySchedules.com  is a directory of these schedules which provides a search function to find surnames in online transcriptions of the Federal Census Mortality Schedules taken during census years 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880.

Bill Cribbs, the owner and webmaster for both GenealogyBuff.com and MortalitySchedules.com, spent many days combing cyberspace to find transcriptions of these records. Most of these online transcriptions were made by individuals who volunteer their time and effort freely. A volunteer will normally transcribe an individual county or, in most cases, one census year for that county. Thousands of transcriptions are located on many  servers across the web.

“I compiled a directory of every schedule that I could locate. There are still more to be found and they are being added to MortalitySchedules.com as they are discovered,”  Cribbs said.

The site is free to use and is made possible by the promotion of Ancestry.com and links to Rootsweb.com.

Sometimes it’s hard to find the standard documents of an ancestor’s life: birth certificate, marriage certificate, death certificate. People moved around a lot in the 19th & 20th centuries; courthouses burn or get flooded; paper disintegrates. So, when you hit a brick wall start looking for less common documents: Newspapers, letters, diaries, even Congressional hearings.

In this month’s Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives,  an article  shows how a Congressional committee heard testimony that included some interesting genealogical gems. Two quotes from the article:

“The committee interviewed 153 black and white witnesses from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Indiana. Many of these witnesses augmented their personal testimony with affidavits, letters, and other forms of evidence provided by members of their local communities who were not called to testify.”

“The Kansas Exodus, as demonstrated by these diverse documents held at the National Archives, is a clear example of how federal records related to a known historical event can be used to find genealogical information. [Emphasis mine--EPC] Genealogical researchers must be highly imaginative in their quest to find information on their ancestors. . . An adequate knowledge of history can help steer the researcher to these potential sources.”

Good reading!

An excellent monthly newsletter with tips on research, sources and techniques, “Ancestor Searching” is part of the Huntsville (AL) Public Library blog, The Bones Collector.

This blog by Richard White, Computer Genealogy Librarian, Huntsville-Madison County Public Library, has useful information such as how to map out your ancestors’ migrations, planning genealogy trips, using LDS Family History Centers and more.

Huntsville is where I was born, grew up, and reared my children, and my mother was very involved in the Huntsville Heritage Room on the third floor of the library. I spent many hours there as she pored over microfilms and manuscripts, looking for my father’s ancestors who spent a several generations in “Lower Alabama” before moving on to Mississippi. The HHR has genealogy material from all over the US, and is truly a gem!

The blog also has links to genealogy happenings in the North Alabama area. If you’re planning to go see the Space and Rocket Center or Space Camp on vacation, swing by HPL. You’ll be surprised at all the genealogy you can find there!

African-American genealogy does present special challenges, but they are not insurmountable. Try these sites:

The Freedman’s Bureau Online  The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was  established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865. The Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine. The Bureau also assumed custody of confiscated lands or property in the former Confederate States, border states, District of Columbia, and Indian Territory. The bureau records were created or maintained by bureau headquarters, the assistant commissioners and the state superintendents of education and included personnel records and a variety of standard reports concerning bureau programs and conditions in the states.

Ancestry.com Many libraries and local Family History Centers have subscriptions to this collection. The African American collection represents a significant step forward in black family history, dispelling the common misperception that no early black records were kept and that tracking Black family roots is virtually impossible. Representing the 19th and early 20th centuries, the collection has more than 55 million historical documents, including military, census and labor records, as well as a myriad of other black family history records such as photos and narrative accounts from former slaves.

Nantucket Historical Society has these resources: Isabel Kaldenbach’s “inventory of Black Nantucketers,” available at the NHA Research Library, located in the blue file under “Black Nantucket Genealogy,” and now available online. This resource was created by laboriously compiling information from many primary and secondary source materials.

Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 1742-1998, by Franklin A. Dorman.

Frances Karttunen’s article, “The Other Islanders,” available here online.

The National Archives published a special edition of Prologue on African-American research, available online.

Afrigeneas  provides resources, leadership, promotion and advocacy for the mutual development and use of a system of genealogy for researching African related ancestry. Volunteers  on the site post forum messages, transcriptions, articles and more.

 AccessGenealogy has a special African-American section.

Those will get you started!