• In preparation for the Civil War sesquicentennial from 2011 to 2015, the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) and Cleveland State University's Center for Public History and Digital Humanities launched a website about Ohio’s role in the Civil War. You can submit content for several areas of the site. See the OHS newsletter for more information.
  
  
• FamilySearch updated several collections on its free Record Search Pilot site: the 1920 US census index (Texas, Ohio and Iowa were added), Massachusetts marriages, Spanish civil registers, Brazil Catholic church records, and Mexico Catholic baptisms. To see details of each collection, click the appropriate region on the site’s map, click the collection title, then click About This Collection.
  
  
• Pedigree database site OneGreatFamily created a page to help you discover Mayflower ancestors. You’ll find a list of passengers and information about their journey, and if you have a tree on the site (requires a subscription or a free trial), you can see if your branches match up with a Mayflower tree. Follow the directions on OneGreatFamily's Mayflower page to get started.
  
  
• If you’re going to the National Genealogical Society (NGS) annual conference in Salt Lake City April 28 to May 1, NGS has arranged air travel discounts of 2 to 7 percent with Delta/KLM/NWA, and car rental discounts of 8 percent with Thrifty. See the NGS website for how to take advantage of these deals.

Friday, November 20, 2009 6:41:39 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]

• Databases recently updated or added in FamilySearch’s free Record Search pilot include the Indiana marriage index, Netherlands parish registers (images only so far), 1920 US Census index, Brazil Catholic church records (images only so far), and Italy municipal records (images only so far).

To see details of each addition, click the relevant region on the Record Search Pilot map. Then click the title of the collection in the alphabetical list. (Look for more FamilySearch search tips in the January 2010 Family Tree Magazine, on newsstands Dec. 15.)

• Dick Eastman started a free site called GenQueries for posting your surname research queries (for example, “Seeking information about Eugene and Lilly WOODFORD family, lived in Marion Co., Indiana, in 1900”). You also can advertise genealogy services or societies, and search others’ ads. Read about GenQueries on Dick’s blog.
  

• I read about this on the ArchivesNext blog: The Amsterdam, Netherlands, city archives has a scan-on-demand program. You can search the archives’ online records inventory, and if a particular item hasn’t been scanned, ask staff to scan it. You also can search an index to find already-scanned records. There is a fee to obtain a scan, which helps fund the program.
  

• Genealogy and family networking site MyHeritage launched a Family Statistics feature for the family tree sites on MyHeritage. The feature generates statistics, such oldest living relative or most common birth month in the family, based on data in the tree. Family Statistics works for sites on the free basic plan as well as the paid plans.
  

• Registration is now open for the 2010 National Genealogical Society (NGS) annual conference, April 28 to May 1 in Salt Lake City. Registration fees range from $175 to $245 for the full conference, or $95 to $115 per day—it depends whether you’re an NGS member, whether you want the syllabus in print or on a CD, and whether you make the March 8 early bird deadline.
  

Friday, November 06, 2009 5:24:18 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]

• The current long list of six locality descriptors (small farm, large farm, parish, clerical district, county, country) will be reduced to four (large farm, clerical district, county and country).

• The current list of only one or two locality descriptors for “move-ins” from other clerical districts will be expanded to three or four descriptors wherever possible.

• Current errors regarding place names (caused by early extractors who couldn’t read the language) will be corrected in a later dataset.

• Variants and diminutives of some names will be corrected and standardized in a later version.

• Magneson hopes to post updated Sør-Aurdal data by the end of 2009. The next clerical district data to appear will likely be Nord-Fron, Sør-Fron, Norde Land and Søndre Land, beginning in early 2010.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 7:53:13 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]

• Got St. Louis-area ancestors? Consider subscribing to Genealogy and House History News, a free monthly e-mail update listing additions to the Missouri History Museum's Genealogy and Local History Index (click the “Sign up for the E-mail List” link). If you find a relative, you can order a photocopy of the record.

• On Kimberly’s Genealogy Blog at About.com: Genealogy, Kimberly Powell reports that almost 200,000 Scottish burial records from the 1800s are now online on a UK pay-per-view site called DeceasedOnline. See Kimberley’s post for details about the collection.

• FamilySearch has added a few more databases to the Record Search Pilot, thanks to its hard-working indexing volunteers. You can search indexes and view images of Protestant church records from France (1612-1906).
  

The 1920 US census index (but not record images) was added for Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Carolina.

You can browse images of church records from Italy, Slovakia, Argentina and Mexico (these indexes are still being processed).

To find records associated with the place your ancestors lived, click Browse our Record Collections on the Record Search home page, then click an area of the map.

• Happy third birthday to RootsTelevision! The free genealogy TV Web site shared a list of its most popular videos, several of which relate to family history happenings that broke into “mainstream” news. See the list on the Og Blog.

Friday, October 02, 2009 7:20:23 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• Subscription site Ancestry.co.uk (sister site to the US-focused Ancestry.com) has added London parish records, which among other events cover deaths from the bubonic plague and the 1666 Great Fire of London. They’re part of a collection of London records from 1538 to 1980.

• Google Books, where you can search millions of out-of-print books, is partnering with On-Demand Books to let you use any Espresso Book Machine to print books in the public domain that Google has digitized from. (There aren’t a lot of places to find these book machines—click here for locations.) Learn more on the Google Books blog.

• Visit the Family History Expos blog for a list of 10 great tips for using social networking sites to do genealogy research and connect with your family.

• FamilySearch Indexing has launched new indexing projects from Indiana, Idaho, Canada, Spain, Guatemala, and Peru. The 1920 census index for Ohio is undergoing preparation for publication on the free FamilySearch site. Hooray! (We’re from the Buckeye State.) The 1920 census for Texas; Carroll County, Ind., marriages; and several international collections also are being readied for release.

• World Vital Records lowered the price of its World Collection subscription to $99.95 (from $119.95). This collection gives you access to all the site’s US records, plus those from Canada, the UK, Ireland and other countries. See the November 2009 Family Tree Magazine for our guide to using World Vital Records.

• Don’t forget to visit the Michigan Genealogical Council Web site for information on an online petition in support of the Library of Michigan, as well as links to news of budget-related library cuts across the country.

Friday, September 18, 2009 3:29:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• Our online Hispanic Heritage Toolkit has resources and tips for learning about Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Central and South American ancestors.
  

See our advice for research in the Caribbean, too.

• Visit the free FamilySearch Record Search Pilot to look for ancestors in the 1930 Mexican census; Mexican baptisms, marriages and burials; and church records from several Mexican states. (Scroll down on this page to see the list).

The site also has a growing collection of church, civil registration and census records from the Caribbean and Central and South America.

• Ancestry.com and the free Ancestry Library Edition (see if it’s available at your library) have border-crossing records from Mexico covering 1903 to 1957. These records are on microfilm at the National Archives.
  
  
• Those with Mexican ancestry can use our Mexican Research Guide, available as a $4 download in our online store.
  

• The Smithsonian lists some events and educator resources, and takes you on a virtual Hispanic heritage cultural tour.

• PBS is airing "Latin Music USA," a documentary series, Mondays, Oct. 12 and 19, from 9 to 11 p.m. ET.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 2:50:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3]

• records from Brazil; Mexico; British Columbia, Canada; the Czech Republic; and Hungary

• 1892 New York state census (some counties are missing from this census; see the FamilySearch wiki page about the collection for a list)
  

• Philadelphia, Pa. marriage indexes, 1885 to 1951

Monday, September 14, 2009 1:51:51 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• Subscription family tree site One Great Family exhibited this year as part of a new marketing effort to reach the genealogy community.

One Great Family automatically merges trees when it finds the identical person on both, which sounds a bit scary—but where the trees differ, the site maintains the differences and each member sees the version of the tree he believes is correct. President Rob Armstrong says no one can change your view of your tree, but everyone can see your version and accept your view if they choose. A subscription costs $59.95 annually; a free one-week trial offer is available.

• A new company called Geneartogy uses your ancestors’ names and photos to create frameable, decorative trees on canvas (you also can get the designs on smaller plaques). Prices range from a $98 extra-small plaque to a $408 extra-large canvas, with an additional cost for framing.

• Next year’s FGS conference is slated for August 18-21 in Knoxville, Tenn., home of the East Tennessee Historical Society’s excellent museum and research library (and close to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park). Many classes will cover the historic and cultural roots of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as the in- and out-migrations of those states.

(The 2010 National Genealogical Society conference, by the way, is in Salt Lake City, so you could double up on a trip to the Family History Library.)

• If you’re new to genealogy conferences, you might be curious about the long panel of ribbons dangling from some attendees’ name badges, like so:

(This is podcast host Dear Myrtle’s badge.) Ribbons designate society memberships, honors and more. All registrants got an “Ancestry.com member” ribbon (whether or not they actually were members) and first-time attendees got “First FGS Conference.” FGS board members, speakers and  genealogical societies delegates received ribbons. I got “Podcast Fan” and “Keeping up With Blogs” at a social networking forum. Some highly involved folks had to take special measures to secure their ribbons:

Wednesday, September 09, 2009 4:31:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Volunteer indexers from the Arkansas Genealogical Society have completed a quarter of the project so far--that’s 442,058 records linked to 199,431 digital images of original marriage certificates from the counties of Ashley, Baxter, Boone, Chicot, Clay, Crittenden,Desha, Drew, Fulton, Jackson, Johnson, Lee, Logan, Madison, Monroe, Montgomery, Nevada, Perry and Pike.

Friday, September 04, 2009 6:01:08 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

• Hundreds of genealogists—your truly included—are packing their bags for the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Little Rock, Ark., Sept. 2 to 5. I’ll write more about the conference in a separate post next week, but in the mean time, you can check out the conference Web site and blog.

• The National Archives’ marriage records (1815 to 1866) from the Virginia Field Office of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) have been digitized and are now available free at the FamilySearch record search pilot site.

• Subscription genealogy Web site Ancestry.com and its related international sites will be down for scheduled maintenance for about three hours starting Tuesday, Sept. 1 at 1 a.m. Mountain Time. Portions of RootsWeb, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com and FamilyTreeMaker.com—which live on Ancestry.com servers—also will be unavailable. 
  

• Mark your calendars for National Museum Day Sept. 26, when hundreds of museums across the country will offer free general admission to you and a guest when you present a Museum Day admission card, downloadable from this site.

• A Deerfield, Ill., documentarian has created a show called “The Legend Seekers,” which traces family legends of regular people. You can submit your family story at LegendSeekers.com, see others' stories and get research tips. Chicago-area residents can watch an episode on WTTW Channel 11 Aug. 30 at 12:30 p.m. and 3:30 a.m. Aug. 31. (It’ll also run on WTTW Prime—Comcast Channel 243—at 9:30 p.m. Aug. 31, and 4:30 and 9:30 a.m. Sept. 1.)

Friday, August 28, 2009 4:20:36 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• FamilySearch and Svensk Arkivinformation (part of the National Archives of Sweden) are starting a huge project to create a free online index to 418 million names in Swedish parish registers of births, christenings, marriages and burials. Volunteers will index registers from the start of recordkeeping (between 1608 and 1686, depending on the parish) through 1860.

• StoryCorps will bring its mobile oral history recording booth to the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) conference that starts Sept. 2 in Little Rock, Ark. See the FGS blog for details on booking a time slot and preparing to tell your story.

• Heritage Travel, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is launching a free online travel community called Gozaic with several “circles” for those interested in history-related travel. Those include Civil War Buffs, Abraham Lincoln, Family Heritage Travel, Journeys into Hidden America and others. Visit the pre-launch site to learn more.

• On a celebrity baby blog this week, actor/producer Lisa Kudrow describes her next project as “a genealogy series in which we take stars to their ancestral landmarks ... different countries and places where they see documents and they see homes or buildings or things that have to do with their family.” (Scroll to the bottom of the post to see the full statement.)
  

Maybe the postponed US version of “Who Do You Think You Are?” will see the light of our TV screens. (Last we heard, it didn’t make NBC’s fall lineup, but might show up as a mid-season replacement.)

Friday, August 21, 2009 5:13:47 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2]

• New records this week on the free FamilySearch Record Search Pilot  include an index to Cheshire, England, Non-conformist records (1671 to 1900), and index to the 1895 Minnesota state census, and images for the 1905 New York state census (the index is still in progress).

New indexing projects are underway for Italy, New Zealand, Perú and the United States; volunteers who can help with foreign language projects are needed. Go to the FamilySearch Indexing site for more information.

• Library and Archives Canada’s online Canadian Genealogy Center—one of our 101 Best Web Sites for 2009—released an index of 206,731 Canadians naturalized from 1915 to 1932. You can use the information in the database to request the original naturalization records.

• The International Association of Jewish Genealogists conference is coming right up Aug. 2-7 in Philadelphia. Besides genealogy classes and an exhibit hall, you can use a Resource Room stocked with research materials and computers. Extracurriculars include walking tours, bus tours and cemetery research trips. Visit the conference Web site for registration information.

• A Twitter retweet from @mdiane_rogers led us to a free database from professional genealogy firm Price & Associates of indentured immigrants who arrived between 1607 and 1820. You can search by first and last name, date and place of of birth, and other parameters. Sources of the information are listed on the site.
  

• Ancestry.com has upgraded its “hinting engine” for FamilyTreeMaker. Now a faster, higher-capacity engine will automatically search Ancestry.com and display a leaf next to a name in FamilyTreeMaker's pedigree and detail views if there's a potential match. The new engine also searches Ancestry Member Trees instead of One World Tree data.
  

Friday, July 24, 2009 7:25:54 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

• Members of FamilyHistoryLink (FamilyLink’s social networking site lunched in 2007) received e-mailed announcements that GenealogyWise, the social networking site FamilyLink launched last week, will replace FamilyHistoryLink. FamilyHistoryLink will shut down as of Aug. 15; members are advised to download and save any important messages. We wondered last week if this would happen.
  
  More than 5,000 people have signed onto GenealogyWise; they’ve formed 2,360 groups and contributed more than 10,000 items (photos, videos, blog posts, etc.) to the site.

• GenSeek, FamilyLink’s Web 2.0 version of the Family History Library online catalog, should launch this fall, according to a FamilyLink announcement posted on Dick Eastman’s blog. About the same time, the GenSeeker Project should hit the road to spread the word to local librarians and historians.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 3:36:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com, has a poignant new ad campaign you’ll probably catch on some media or other (if you’re worried you’ll miss it, see it on Ancestry.com’s YouTube channel). 

• Ancestry.com also has developed an Ancient Ancestry Finder that guesses your haplogroup (ancestral origins) based on a few questions. It’s fun, and the haplogroups have cute names such as "Boatbuilders" and "Inventors," but keep in mind it's not necessarily accurate. At the end, you get a pitch to buy a $79 DNA test to determine if the Finder is correct.

• If you’ve been thinking of trying the databases at NewEnglandAncestors.org, now might be the time. The New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering $15 off new memberships during July.

• This week, FamilySearch enhanced its free Record Search Pilot with 12 new collections, which have records from Argentina, Australia, Mexico, Netherlands, and Spain. New United States collections were added for Delaware, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Utah.

International indexing projects now underway involve records from the Czech Republic; Baden, Germany; and South Africa—click here if you’re interested in volunteering.

• Following on the heels of Footnote’s partnership with newspaper publisher Gannett, ProQuest announced it’s adding Gannett papers to its Newsstand data service (offered through libraries). ProQuest will offer the papers back to 1977; Footnote is digitizing older editions.

• The Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC) at the Houston Public Library's downtown Julia Ideson Building is changing its research hours during a renovation. Now through Aug. 31, HMRC is open Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 1 to Oct. 31, it'll be open by appointment—call (832) 393-1313 to make one.

Thursday, July 02, 2009 4:18:55 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2]

• The Connecticut State Library, which is facing a staff reduction due to the state's Retirement Incentive Plan, will be closed on Mondays for the summer. Starting July 1, the library’s new hours will be Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

• After record additions throughout the first half of the year, the 1911census.co.uk site (developed by subscription and pay-per-view site FindMyPast.com with the British national archives) now has the complete 1911 census for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. It also includes full details of British Army personnel and their families stationed overseas.

Read more about 1911census.co.uk in our post from last week.

• The free FamilySearch Record Search pilot added 6 million new records this week, including Louisiana and Idaho death records; the 1920 census for Delaware, the District of Columbia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire and New Mexico; and digital images of church records were also added for Mexico (the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur).
  

• We hear that MyGenShare.com is almost ready for beta testing. Founder Barry Ewell said the launch was delayed until late summer to expand the site’s educational resources and take advantage of better technology to improve user experience.

Friday, June 19, 2009 7:11:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• New content on subscription site World Vital Records includes pre-1700 New England marriages and names of about 8,500 Union soldiers who were for various reasons omitted from the original Roll of Honor (a listing of Union burials in national cemeteries).

One addition, the Protestation Returns, which record religious loyalty oaths from males in England from 1641 to 1642, is free for 10 days (from May 28).

• Ancestry.com passed 8 billion records in its databases (a record in this case is a name, not a document). The vital records collection is biggest, with 1,100 million records and 38.9 million document images; followed by censuses at 900 million records and 27.7 million images.
  

On deck at Ancestry.com: Improving the census collection (1790 through 1900 censuses should be updated by year’s end), newspapers from 50 new cities and early city directories.

• FamilySearch has added volunteer indexing projects from around the world, including Argentina; British Columbia, Canada; France; and NorthDakota, South Carolina, Ohio and Indiana. For details about the records and years being indexed, see the FamilySearch Indexing Web site.
  

Click here to volunteer to index some records.

Friday, May 29, 2009 6:35:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• Look for subscription historical records site Footnote to make its 1930 US census free for a limited time later this summer. The site also will come out with a collection of American Indian records within the next few months.

• Swedish church records subscription site Genline is introducing a transcription feature. Once you find an ancestor’s record, you can easily transcribe the name and make it available to other users. As names are transcribed, they’ll be available for searching. Right now, you browse Genline by parish, but this means that eventually, you’ll be able to find ancestors without knowing their parish first.

• FamilySearch indexers have finished the New York 1892 and Rhode Island 1925 state censuses; these will be posted soon on FamilySearch’s record search pilot site.

• We heard about some changes coming soon for genealogy resources catalog directory site Live Roots. One sounds really useful: A way to save online searches to a “project” so you’ll know which sites you’ve checked, when, and how many results were returned, and you could easily repeat searches. You could create as many projects as you want—one for each county, say, or each surname.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 9:22:29 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]