• Archives.com has added new records including FamilySearch community trees dating back to around 1500, and 1930 census images (the majority of the 1930 census images are now available, with more images from this plus the 1920 and 1920 censuses coming online over the next several weeks).
  

The additions bring the count of records available on Archives.com to more than 2 billion.

• The Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC) is still gathering signatures for its "Stop ID Theft Now!" campaign petition, which advocates using tools already in place to prevent tax-related identity theft, instead of eliminating the Social Security Death Index. See the SSDI Call to Action Kit for FAQs, educational videos, a sample letter to representatives and more. You also can read our past posts about RPAC and threats to the SSDI.

• MyHeritage.com is now offering genetic genealogy testing as part of its partnership with FamilyTreeDNA. Offerings include Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and the Family Finder autosomal DNA tests. Prices start at $99 for the 12-marker Y-DNA test, with discounted prices for MyHeritage subscribers starting around $84. Customers will be notified of DNA matches in the FamilyTreeDNA database. For more information, see the MyHeritage DNA FAQs.

• "Who Do You Think You Are?" is on hiatus for tonight. Next week's episode features Blair Underwood, and the following week we'll see Reba McEntire. You can get your WDYTYA? fix, though, with the books Who Do You Think You Are?: The Essential Guide to Tracing Your Family History and Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing, both by Megan Smolenyak.

• FamilySearch has released its "Are You in It?" video promoting its 1940 Community Census project. I thought it was really well-done—see what you think.
  
  

Friday, February 17, 2012 12:43:32 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

The 1940 census images will be hosted on Archives.gov, the National Archives website. Archives has been awarded the digitization contract for these images.

Indexing will begin as soon as the records are released online April 2. Each page will be indexed twice, with a third arbitrator to resolve difference in the two indexes.

FamilySearch is making upgrades and doing "test loading" to make sure its site can handle the extra traffic the indexing project will generate.

Chris Van Der Kuyl, CEO of brightsolid (the British parent company of FindMyPast.com), described the 1940 project as "one of the most exciting crowdsourced projects on the internet." A video commercial to be released on YouTube will bill it as a "national service project" and genealogical societies will receive incentives for galvanizing members to index.

Part of the funding provided by brightsolid and Archives.com will be dedicated to producing other free digital collections. The idea is that money that might otherwise be used to build competing census collections will now go to creating access to material that's not already online. It's "putting money into the community that would otherwise be duplicated," says John Spottiswood of Archives.com.

To volunteer for 1940 census indexing, sign up on the 1940 Community Census Project website.

We're joining in the RootsTech excitement with conference specials for everyone! You'll get 20 percent off select online genealogy titles at ShopFamilyTree.com.

Thursday, February 02, 2012 3:40:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Genealogy organizations Archives.com, FamilySearch, and Findmypast.co.uk, will work together on the 1940 US Census Community Project. The ambitious project aims to engage online volunteers to publish a name index to the 1940 US Census soon after the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) releases the records to the public April 2, 2012. All three partners will provide access to the free index on their websites. You can sign up to be an indexer at www.the1940census.com.

Last month, NARA selected Archives.com to host the digitized census records. Ancestry.com also has announced it'll offer a 1940 census index and the record images free, at least through 2013.

• FamilySearch's RootsTech conference, taking place Feb. 2-4 in Salt Lake City, is open for registration. The early bird rate of $149 is valid through Jan. 13, 2012.

• The National Genealogical Society 2012 Conference, taking place May 8-12 in Cincinnati, also is open for registration. Early bird prices ($175 for NGS members and $210 for nonmembers, plus extra if you want a printed syllabus) are good through March 20.

• I saw on Dear Myrtle's blog that genealogy expert and Evidence! author Elizabeth Shown Mills now has a website where she explains her research methodologies. You can visit Mills' Historic Pathways site here.

Friday, December 16, 2011 3:26:15 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [3]

• Findmypast.ie, the Irish website that FindMyPast.uk introduced earlier this year, has added a feature that lets you build your family tree on the site for free (you’ll need to register for a free account with the site). According to the announcement, it’s the first step in the site’s development of a fully integrated family tree program where you can store photos and historical information.

• Archives.com has partnered with Family Tree DNA to add genetic genealogy testing to its offerings. Archives.com visitors can now purchase Family Tree DNA’s Y-chromosome, mitochondrial and Family Finder tests (they’re up to 30 percent off on Archives.com for a limited time). Read the full announcement on the Archives.com blog.

• The National Genealogical Society has released its 2012 Family History Conference Program in searchable form. The conferene is May 9–12 in Cincinnati (our hometown—will we see you there?). Registration opens soon: This Thursday, Dec. 1.

Monday, November 28, 2011 12:15:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Researchers will be able to browse, view, and download images from the 1940 census. See NARA's full announcement here.

To kick off the partnership, Archives.com has created a web page about the launch of the 1940 Census.

You won't be able to search the census by name right away on April 2; instead, you'll need to know the enumeration district (ED) your relatives lived in and then browse the records for that district. You can find the ED if you know your ancestor's address in 1940 or in 1930.

Here's a post about an online tool that can help you determine the ED.

FamilySearch is heading up an effort to index the 1940 census records ASAP after they're released, which will let genealogists search by name.

Subscription website Ancestry.com also has announced plans to provide the 1940 census for free, at least through 2013.

Thursday, November 17, 2011 12:07:21 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [3]

The Record Match service automatically searches the subscription collections of the Archives.com and GenealogyBank websites when a Geni member views a relative’s Geni profile. If there’s a match, the Geni member gets an alert and a link to the record. To view the record, he or she will need to register for a free trial membership on the partner site, or be a subscriber.

Archives.com recently announced the addition of the entire set of available US census records, 1790 through 1930. GenealogyBank is known for its collection of digitized newspapers.

Geni CEO Noah Tutak hinted that more such record partnerships are in the works: “By providing records from the person’s profile, first with partners Archives.com and GenealogyBank.com, and with many others to come, we can save genealogists from spending their time conducting separate searches on the many genealogy databases available.”

Read more about Record Match on the Geni blog. 

Friday, September 30, 2011 1:51:07 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

As part of the effort, Archives.com reached an agreement with FamilySearch—the source of the census records—to dedicate a minimum of $5 million to digitizing genealogy records that are not currently online.

The indexes for all censuses are available now, as are images for the 1850, 1870 and 1900 censuses, for a total of more than 500 million names and 3 million images. The rest of the images will be added over the next weeks and months, says spokesperson Julie Hill. Learn more about the site's census collection on its census resource page.

The census search screen looks like this:

You can see it's more streamlined with fewer options than Ancestry.com's census search. You'll also receive fewer results—a search of all census years for the last name Haddad (not exact) living anywhere in the United States, born in Ohio between 1907 and 1911, netted me 30 matches on Archives.com and 63 on Ancestry.com. This might be good or bad for your research—it can be overwhelming to search through a flood of matches, but you also might lose some searching flexibility.

Here's a page of Archives.com search results:

When you click on a match, you first see this page displaying all the indexed fields:

Archives also is introducing a new, Flash-based image viewer that lets users zoom in, adjust contrast, invert colors and more (a basic image viewer will be an option for computers without Flash):

We’re thinking this is what Archives.com product director Joe Godfrey was referring to in May, when he opened the National Genealogical Society conference by announcing the site would “embark on an ambitious content acquisition and digitization plan, focusing in part on the digitization of material not yet online.” 

Anne Roach, who chaired FamilySearch’s 2011 RootsTech conference, joined Archives to lead the project.

The addition of the census will bring Archives.com, which launched in July 2009, into more-direct competition with industry leader Ancestry.com. Until Archives.com adds the rest of the census images, Ancestry.com is the only site providing access to all extant US census records and document images.

Archives.com will keep its subscription price at $39.95 "for the time being," says Hill. "That’s one-eighth the price of an Ancestry.com World membership. If you compare the subscriptions on a line-by-line basis, its remarkable how many high-value collections are available for one-eighth the price.”

Thursday, September 01, 2011 1:26:33 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [12]