12 November 2008 by Libbi.

Seven new indexing projects were released during the past two weeks:

·        Argentina 1869 Census – Buenos Aires (Part 2)

·        Argentina 1869 Census – Cordoba y San Luis

·        Massachusetts Death Records

·        Massachusetts Marriage Records

·        New Hampshire Birth Records

·        UK – Cheshire – Church Records

·        UK– Cheshire – Land Tax

To help with these or any other indexing projects, go to www.familysearch.org (and click Index Records) or www.familysearchindexing.org.

(Note: Percentages below may refer to a specific portion of a larger project.)

Argentina Censo 1869 - Buenos Aires (Part 2)         Spanish           8%

Argentina Censo 1869 - Cordoba y San Luis            Spanish           8%

Brandenburg Kirchenbücher                                      German           13%

California - 1920 US Federal Census                        English            77%

España Lugo Registros Parroquiales                         Spanish           8%

Florida 1945 Census                                                   English            66%

France, Coutances, Paroisses de la Manche              French             7%

Guanajuato Censo de Mexico de 1930                      Spanish           78%

Guerrero - Censo de Mexico de 1930                        Spanish           46%

Illinois - 1920 US Federal Census                             English            25%

Massachusetts - 1920 US Federal Census                 English            32%

Massachusetts Death Records 1906-1915                 English            21%

Massachusetts Marriage Records 1906-1915            English            4%

New Hampshire - Early to 1900 Births                     English            7%

Nicaragua, Managua Civil Records                           Spanish           8%

Trento Italy Baptism Records                                    Italian              30%

UK - Cheshire - Church Records                               English            10%

UK - Cheshire - Land Tax                                          English            2%

Venezuela Mérida Registros Parroquiales                Spanish           0.4%

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3 November 2008 by Libbi.

Over 30 million names or record images were added to FamilySearch’s Record Search pilot. Significant data was published from 3 U.S. Census indexing projects (1850,1860, and 1870). Digital image collections were added for Massachusetts , Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, Louisiana, Russia, Spain, and Vermont (see the table below).

The entire collection can be searched for free directly online at http://pilot.familysearch.org or through the Search Records feature at FamilySearch.org.

Collection
Digital Images
Indexed Records
Comment

1850 United States Census (Population) - index & images

1,830,275
Added Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia

1850 US Census (Slave)

1,157,705
See description online for state list.

1850 US Census (Mortality)

39,325
See description online for state list.

1860 US Census

20,112,346
All states. Partials for Alabama and Pennsylvania.

1870 US Census

6,866,230
Added IN, MI, OH, and WI

1865 MA Census
15,434

City of Boston

1855 Argentina, Buenos Aires Census,
7,630

See description online.

Brazil, Rio de Janeiro Civil Registration
1,657,420

Covers years 1889 to 2006.

Czech, Republic (Opava) Church Books
18,800

Covers years 1650 to 1900.

Louisiana War of 1812 Pensions Lists
149

Covers years 1812 to 1815.

Russia, St Petersburg Lutheran Church
128,317

Covers years 1833 to 1935.

Spain, Ciudad Real Catholic Diocese
689,338

Records from 1530 to 1930.

Vermont Enrolled Militia Records
598

Covers years 1861 to 1867.

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29 October 2008 by Libbi.

Ancestry.com Launches the World’s Largest Online Collection of Jewish Historical Documents
Ancestry.com Partners with JewishGen and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to Provide Access to Millions of Jewish Family History Records for People around the World

NEW YORK and PROVO, UtahNEW YORK and PROVO, Utah, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ — Today Ancestry.com, part of The Generations Network, Inc., announced it has introduced the world’s largest online collection of Jewish family history records. Ancestry.com has partnered with two leading organizations committed to the preservation of Jewish heritage — JewishGen, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City that maintains the world’s premier Jewish genealogy website, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an overseas humanitarian aid organization committed to providing relief for Jews in more than 70 countries. These partnerships will make millions of important Jewish historical documents available on Ancestry.com, many of which are online for the first time ever and searchable for free. These unique records, including photographs, immigration records, Holocaust records and memorials, can now be searched alongside other records already accessible on Ancestry.com, creating the largest collection of Jewish family history records on the Web with more than 26 million records documenting Jewish life

Details about the new Jewish Family History Collection on Ancestry.com will be unveiled today at a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

“Ancestry.com, the JDC and JewishGen are committed to the preservation of important Jewish historical records, and we’re honored to be working with these well-respected organizations to help in this effort,” said Tim Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of The Generations Network, Inc. “For the millions of people interested in discovering more about their Jewish heritage, these new partnerships make researching family history easier than ever before.”

Many documents digitized as a part of this agreement have never before been available online, including two important JDC collections:

  — Jewish Transmigration Bureau Deposit Cards, 1939-1954 (JDC), a
     collection of records showing the amount of money paid by American
     Jewish citizens to support the emigration of friends and relatives from
     European countries during and after WWII.
  — Munich, Vienna and Barcelona Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee
     Cards, 1943-1959 (JDC), a collection containing records of displaced
     Jews who were provided with food, medical care and clothing and
     emigration assistance by the JDC.
“Since 1914, JDC has helped revitalize Jewish communities throughout the world and has helped save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews,” said Steve Schwager, Chief Executive Officer for JDC. “We are excited to partner with Ancestry.com, providing descendants access to rare new information about their families and themselves. JDC and Ancestry.com are opening up a wealth of previously inaccessible information through the digitization and dissemination of 125,000 records of those who were helped and of those who helped provide relief to others during and directly after WWII.”

More than 300 databases from JewishGen will also now be available on Ancestry.com. These JewishGen databases represent 14 different countries and contain more than 5 million records, such as:

  — The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, an invaluable
     collection with more than 1 million names of Jews represented in nearly
     2,000 Jewish cemeteries around the world.
  — Yizkor Book Necrologies, a list of the names of those murdered in the
     Holocaust which directs users back to the Yizkor Books themselves -
     memorials which offer vivid, first-hand accounts of the Holocaust and
     its aftermath.
  — The Given Names Database, which enables one to learn possible European,
     Hebrew and Yiddish translations of an ancestor’s given name.
  — A Holocaust Database of 2 million names such as Schindler’s List, which
     includes names of 1,980 inmates in Oscar Schindler’s factories in
     Plaszow, Poland and Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia.
  — Jewish Records Indexing (JRI-PL) Poland and All Lithuania Database,
     representing more than 2 million indexed names from databases in
     Lithuania and Poland containing vital information on the regions.
“JewishGen began as a volunteer community devoted to gathering and sharing Jewish records,” said David G. Marwell, Director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “We are excited that, through this new relationship with Ancestry.com, we will be able to broaden our reach and extend our invaluable resources to a much larger group of researchers around the world. The entire community benefits when more people get involved in the fascinating and rewarding activity of researching their family history. ”

In July 2008, JewishGen entered into a groundbreaking partnership with Ancestry.com that provides Ancestry.com with significant resources in the Jewish genealogy world. Under the agreement, not only will Ancestry.com eventually receive access to well in excess of 10 million records, some of which date back to the 1700s, but JewishGen’s user base of more than 250,000 will be alerted to Ancestry.com’s rich resources. Ancestry.com will also provide technical support to the JewishGen site.

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27 October 2008 by Libbi.

Useful site:http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micounty/The Michigan County Histories collection is projected to provide access to
192 histories dating from 1866 to 1926. The collection provides all members of the
community with keyword searching and page-by-page access to digitized reproductions
of Michigan county atlases and histories as a resource for historical and
genealogical research. Initial collection content comprises titles
selected from Frances Loomis’s Michigan Biography Index (Detroit: Detroit
Public Library, 1946), Bentley Historical Library holdings, and the
Research Publications microfilm publication County and Regional Histories
of the Old Northwest. Additional content selected from titles listed in
Michigan Atlases and Plat Books by William Miles (Lansing: State Library
Services, 1975) may be added as funds permit.The collection is a collaborative effort of Michigan’s Council of Library
Directors, composed of the directors of the following institutions, all of
whom have contributed time and funds:

• University of Michigan
• Michigan State University
• Wayne State University
• Central Michigan University
• Grand Valley State
• Eastern Michigan University
• Western Michigan University
• Michigan Tech
• Ferris State
• University of Michigan-Dearborn
• Oakland University
• Northern Michigan University
• University of Michigan-Flint
• Lake Superior State University
• Saginaw Valley State University
• The Library of Michigan.

The collection contents are fully searchable and are freely available to the public.

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20 October 2008 by Libbi.

A new blog focusing on those who haunt graveyards BEFORE they die: The Graveyard Rabbit is worth reading. It started October 18, and the creator has a companion blog, http://graveyardrabbithillcountry.blogspot.com/ Graveyard Rabbit of the Hill Country.

This new blog is the home blog of The Association of Graveyard Rabbits. Founded in 2008 by Terry Thornton of Fulton, Mississippi, the association is currently inviting and accepting members. The association will be composed of members who blog about cemeteries, grave markers, burial customs, and other genealogy-by-graveyard topics. So, if you want to start a blog on that you can become a charter member. If you just want to read about that, then subscribe to the Association’s blog and keep up with the members!

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30 September 2008 by Libbi.

Now and then,  I like to point out unusual genealogy information sources, such as land records, probate court, and so on. The American Memory Project at the Library of Congress is one of the sites that can give you what I call “collateral information”. (That’s not a true genealogy technical term, that’s just me!)

By that I mean, learning about times and places and the forces driving history that might have affected your ancestors. By learning about the world they lived in, sometimes you can figure out where to look next. One such collateral information source is at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html, The WPA snapshot of America at a certain point in time. As the site says:

 Life histories were compiled and transcribed by the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936-1940. The Library of Congress collection includes 2,900 documents representing the work of over 300 writers from 24 states. Typically 2,000-15,000 words in length, the documents consist of drafts and revisions, varying in form from narrative to dialogue to report to case history. The histories describe the informant’s family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet and miscellaneous observations. Pseudonyms are often substituted for individuals and places named in the narrative texts.

Because of that last sentence, sometimes this information, while accurate as far as memory can be, won’t give you the people  and sometimes not the specific places you need. It will, however, give you some facts to go by, and a very good feeling for life in the early 20th and late 19th century.  That may lead you to records sources (say, the American Battlefield Protection Program) you may not have considered before.

———————–

This is my last entry for this week, as I’ll be out of town. You could use the time you would normally spend reading my musings to take the time to check your voter registration record with your local elections office. For many states, this week is the deadline to be registered and to be certain that your data in the system is accurate!

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23 September 2008 by Libbi.

In a press release yesterday, MyHeritage announced it has acquired Kindo.

The Kindo email announcing this said: “We believe that we are much stronger together. The nice and simple web site that you’ve liked with Kindo becomes so much more powerful, if it’s combined with MyHeritage’s technologies for organizing family photos and do family research - like matching of family trees, the genealogy search engine or the huge repertoire of family tree data. The Kindo family will still be there for you, and the Kindo site will still be available for our current users, but the new common team will focus on improving the much bigger MyHeritage platform. We have tried out MyHeritage ourselves and were quite excited. Gareth for example found dozens of new relatives, when he plugged his Kindo tree into the MyHeritage databases.”

Founded in 2007, London-based Kindo was a genealogy-focused social networking site. On Kindo users built genealogy trees  and stayed in touch with their loved ones. Kindo was available in 15 different languages with Arabic, Chinese, Turkish and Russian being exotic examples.

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16 September 2008 by Libbi.

It’s fun, it’s fascinating and it’s almost addictive: I’ve been working on census name indexing with the software from FamilySearch Indexing. I thought it would be something of a chore, and instead found myself loving the data, and wondering about the stories behind them.

For example, in one family, we have Mama and Papa and kids, plus an older lady. The next family has the same last name as the older lady. From the ages, you guess that Mama from the first family is sister to the Papa in the next family, and Grandmama lives with sister, next door to brother. Of course, it would take some research into birth records, marriage records and perhaps even land records to prove that conjecture, but I bet there’s a story there.

Another family has four stair-step girls, a gap of about 5 years, and then a one-year-old boy. Bet there’s the basis of a good novel there!

The process works like this: Each page is indexed by two volunteers, then an arbiter compares the two works, makes corrections, then the final result is uploaded. This volunteer effort is helping to build automated indexes to records from around the world, including census records, church registers, and vital records. The indexes are then put on FamilySearch.org, so that people around the world can access them.  I started out thinking I would do one page a day (40 names) and found I could  not quit with just one. I did five pages my first day. If you volunteered to download the software, and did five pages one day, that’s 240 new names between us. If 200 of us do it, that’s 24,000 new indexed names.

You can choose from these projecrts:

Current FamilySearch Indexing Projects

 
Before beginning to index, you should read the online instructions at: www.familysearchindexing.org. It only takes a few minutes, and  includes:

1. Training tutorials. These will help you understand how to use FamilySearch Indexing.
2. Specific instructions for each project. On this page, you can read about current projects we are indexing. Select a project from the list, and click the underlined text.
3. Ask a Question. Ask questions relating to the software application or specific indexing projects.
4. FAQs. These are answers to frequently asked indexing questions.

Give it a try. I’ll bet you like it!

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10 September 2008 by Libbi.

I love researching in my pajamas, so I love it that my local library has a subscription to Genealogy Bank, which can be accessed by library card holders either within the library or from home. Today it was announced that this online resource has added free Social Security Death Index searches to their extensive collection of newspaper and historial document databases. Maybe your local library also has a subcription, in which case you should definitely take advantage of it.

With more than 82 million death records from 1937 to the present, the SSDI is an essential foundation for anyone interested in their family’s past. Best of all, it can be cross-searched with the thousands of newspapers and government documents available through GenealogyBank, offering researchers unsurpassed firsthand perspectives of the triumphs, struggles and daily lives of their American ancestors. “GenealogyBank’s Social Security Death Index is unique with weekly updates, easy-to-use format and comprehensive coverage,” says Tom Kemp, Genealogy Director for NewsBank, inc. “It’s simply the most comprehensive index online. Making it available for free is our way of giving back to the genealogy community.”The SSDI has long been valued by genealogists as the basis for family history research. The SSDI contains over 82.6 million death records from all 50 states, plus Guam, Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories; as well as the records of over 17 million Americans born in the 19th century and more than 200,000 who died overseas.Exclusive features include the full date of death (including day of the week) and the deceased’s age (expressed in years, months and days).

“GenealogyBank’s convenient format saves users time, money and countless headaches,” adds Kemp.Genealogy sites and blogs are welcome to link to GenealogyBank’s Social Security Death Index. And for users looking to take their research to the next level, GenealogyBank is the ideal resource for discovering the stories behind your family’s past. It provides access to millions of newspapers articles, obituaries, government documents and more spanning four centuries. Each of these original images can be printed and preserved for family scrapbooks.

About GenealogyBankGenealogyBank, a division of NewsBank, inc., supplies individuals interested in family history research with over 300 years of U.S. newspapers, government documents and other historical records in all 50 states. GenealogyBank contains over 231 million family history records including obituaries; birth, marriage and death notices; and much more. GenealogyBank can be found at: www.genealogybank.com.

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9 September 2008 by Libbi.

Back in August I did a blog entry about “going back to school” as a genealogist by taking some online courses. Brigham Young University offers several free courses, and DearMYRTLE and I agreed we would take the one on Military Records.

This self-paced course can be completed in one day, as it has one lesson of 28 screens with several self-tests along the way. The tests not only give immediate feedback, but also explanations of why your answer was right or wrong.  It also has several appendices with resources and examples.

The best part about this course for me was Appendix A, the Sample Outline, which gives you a good roadmap to what, how, where and why to search military records for genealogical information.

The worst part about the course for me was the directions for using the Family History Library Catalog to locate an index of WWI records. It says:

“The Family History Library has the WWI Draft Records on microfilm. They may be located by:

• Searching the Family History Library Catalog under the following locality: United States, Military Records, World War, 1914 – 1918, Draft
  Selecting the state, county, and city where your ancestor lived between 1914 and 1918 “

After much clicking I finally came to this page: http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library/fhlcatalog/supermainframeset.asp?display=titlefilmnotes&columns=*%2C0%2C0&titleno=371164&disp=Draft+registration%2C+World+War+I++.

It wasn’t easy.

The course also doesn’t note that some military records are available online, at least in transcribed form, from commercial sites such as Ancestry.com.  I was able to find my father’s WWII record, as below, using Ancestry’s search, and much faster than using the FHC technique above.

Still, I learned a lot about military records and a printout of the Appendix A will accompany me in my future search for ancestors’ military careers.

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