Genealogy Insider - Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Footnote, Gannett Kick Off Partnership With 60s Flashbacks
Posted by Diane

Subscription historical records site Footnote struck a deal to digitize newspapers from Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the United States with 84 dailies including USA Today.

With the upcoming 40th anniversaries of the Apollo moon landing July 16 and the Woodstock music festival August 15-18, Footnote started with newspapers covering these events—Florida Today and New York’s Poughkeepsie Journal.

You can relive these two landmark events free (or experience them for the first time) at Footnote’s Moon Landing and Woodstock pages.

Footnote will continue to digitize the full run of these and other Gannett newspapers.

Footnote | Genealogy Web Sites | Newspapers | Social History

Wednesday, July 01, 2009 8:02:47 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, June 29, 2009

New Online Local History Collection Launches for Libraries
Posted by Diane

A local history-focused genealogy database may be coming soon to a library near you.

Arcadia Publishing and the electronic publisher Alexander Street Press have launched a new site called Local and Regional History Online: A History of American Life in Images and Texts.

It’ll eventually contain more than a million photos, postcards and maps, plus stories of immigrants, laborers and newsmakers, from all over the United States and some parts of Canada. They're from Arcadia’s 5,000 photo-rich local history books. Click here to see titles of books included so far.

If your library subscribes, you'll be able to use Local and Regional History Online at the library or from home through the library’s Web site.

You can search texts for a name or other term, or search for a book title, author, place it’s about, subject, “featured” person, historical event, date range, organization name or ethnic group. You also can browse these categories.

I was lucky enough to try out the search. If you get to use the site, search for ancestors’ names, but also try names of churches, schools, parks, organizations, employers, neighborhoods, streets, ethnic groups, events and other topics.

This may be a glitch, but my search results didn’t link directly to the page with the match—instead, I was taken to the main page for the book with the matching term. Then I searched again to go to the right page.

Note that many Arcadia books are available for limited preview in Google Book Search, which is how I found this 1920s photo of my great-grandmother’s house in Bellevue, Ky.

Learn more about Local and Regional History Online here. Thanks to Family Tree Magazine contributing editor Sharon DeBartolo Carmack for this tip.

Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | Social History

Monday, June 29, 2009 9:10:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

FamilyLink Ponders GenSeek Road Show
Posted by Diane

Paul Allen, CEO of FamilyLink, has posted a request for “GenSeekers,” people willing to step out of their lives for a year and drive around the country to meet with genealogists and archivists in small communities. The goal: raise awareness of GenSeek.

GenSeek is a forthcoming site that’s a partnership between FamilyLink and FamilySearch. The site is expected to feature a Web 2.0 version of the Family History Library catalog, along with the opportunity for libraries and other repositories to list their own content.

You can get a notification when GenSeek is ready for launch by entering your e-mail address here.

The GenSeek partnership was announced at the National Genealogical Society Conference in May 2008. This past March, FamilyLink president Steve Nickle gave genealogy Gems Podcaster Lisa Louise Cooke late May as a target release date.

If Allen’s vision works out, the GenSeekers will have all expenses paid, be outfitted with mobile technology, and have a team back at the office to help plan meetings and publish the seekers’ findings. But will the Genseekers have anything to demo?

FamilySearch | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, June 29, 2009 4:14:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, June 26, 2009

Genealogy News Corral: June 22-26
Posted by Diane

Here are some of the news items we rounded up this week:

To keep tabs on this weekend’s Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in Burbank, visit the Genealogy Gems blog, Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and Genea-Musings. Twitter users can search for #scgs09.

The Federation of Genealogical Societies 2009 conference early bird registration deadline is next Wednesday, July 1. Make the deadline and you’ll pay $175, a savings of $50. Register online or by mail (must be postmarked no later than July 1).

The conference is Sept. 2-5 in Little Rock, Ark.

The New England Historic and Genealogical Society is organizing a few genealogy research trips, led by expert genealogists. Groups are headed to St. John’s, Newfoundland, July 12-19; the NEHGS Library in Boston Aug. 10-15; Edinburgh, Scotland, Sept. 20-27; and Salt Lake City Oct. 25-Nov. 1.

Find more details and prices on NEHGS’ events calendar.

Keep an eye on Miriam Midkiff's city directories portal Online City, County and Rural Directories. This week, she's added links to directories from more than a dozen US states and several Canadian provinces.

In response to a survey, FamilyLink updated its We’re Related Facebook application to let users put pets at the bottoms of their pedigree charts. (I'm not sure what the chart-with-pet looks like, so if you've done this, send me a picture.) It sounds fun—let’s just hope no one gets Bruno and Great-grandpa Charlie mixed up.

Genealogy Events | Genealogy societies | Genealogy Web Sites | Social Networking

Friday, June 26, 2009 8:13:56 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

New Live Roots Tools Manage Your Genealogy Research Projects
Posted by Diane

Genealogy Today enhanced its Live Roots genealogy metasearch site—one of our 101 Best Web sites for genealogy in 2009—with tools that help you manage your research projects.

We told you a bit about these about last month. The new tools will help you keep track of resources you turn up using Live Roots, as well as your offline searches.

For the site to remember your research information, you first need a free Team Roots membership. Then you can use the project management tools via four new buttons that appear throughout the site:

Follow: bookmarks resources
Comment: lets you comments on resources
Record: keep a research log of Live Roots and other searches
Share: e-mail notices about resources to friends and family

You can create as many projects as you want—say, one for your mom’s grandfather, who seems to have disappeared between 1885 and 1900; another for your dad’s paternal line in New England; a third for your spouse’s Missouri family; and so on. Within each project, you can track your:

Recent Activity: a running history of your interaction with Live Roots features
Ancestor Notecards: profiles of your brick wall ancestors, which remain are accessible throughout Live Roots (so you don’t have to retype the name every time you search)
Related Resources: items you’ve "followed", so you can quickly revisit them; you can search across the transcriptions you’ve followed
Research History: your research log
Personal Library: catalog your own private collection
Research Notepad: a simple way record miscellaneous genealogy notes, such as a to-do list or the phone number for the library in Granddad’s hometown
External Resources: lets you configure links to your research activities on other sites, such Flickr or Twitter

See more information on Live Roots’ new project management tools here.

Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | Research Tips

Friday, June 26, 2009 3:55:31 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

101 Best Web Sites for Genealogy in 2009
Posted by Diane

Our 2009 list of 101 Best Web Sites for genealogy is now online!

For this year's edition of our annual list, we went with 10 categories of 10 sites each, plus one site (maybe you can guess which one) that’s in its own class. We also turned the focus a bit more to the Web 2.0 sites that are changing how you do online genealogy.

We also adjusted our system for indicating free and fee-based sites: Sites that are mostly free but for which you might eventually get out your credit card for some thing or another are marked by one dollar sign ($). Subscription sites and those where you must pay for any meaningful content get a double dollar sign ($$).

Go on over to the list and click through to these great genealogy resources. Got any favorites you’d add, or beefs with any of our picks? Post your feedback to our 101 Best Sites forum.

Family Tree Magazine articles | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:52:34 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Chronicling America Helps You Find Even More Old Newspapers
Posted by Diane

We’re big fans of the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site, where you can both search digitized newspapers published in 11 states and Washington, DC, between 1880 and 1922, and search a directory of historical newspaper titles by date and place.

I used the directory to compile a list of papers that might have articles naming my Bowie County, Texas, ancestor in 1913 and 1914. It even gave me information on repositories that hold each title, which years they have, and whether the paper’s on microfilm or in print.

The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, partners in the National Digital Newspaper Program, awarded new digitization grants to the University of Illinois, Urbana; Kansas State Historical Society; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Montana Historical Society; Oklahoma Historical Society; University of Oregon, Eugene; and University of South Carolina, Columbia.

That means you’ll start seeing newspapers from these states on Chronicling America. The site recently added its 1 millionth newspaper page; a number that eventually will grow to 20 million pages dating back to 1836.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | Research Tips

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 2:35:15 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, June 15, 2009

Flexible Family Trees Among Arcalife Features
Posted by Diane

We recently got a guided tour of Arcalife, a family tree-building site based in Britain that launched in beta at February’s Who Do You Think You Are? Live show in London. The site is growing by as many as 3,000 members a month, and is gaining a foothold on this site of the Atlantic.

You get 500 MB of storage with a free account. Paid accounts come with more storage and features.

I’ve been playing around with Arcalife, and though (as for most any beta site) some functions are under construction, it looks promising. You can or will be able to do some cool things, including:

Build a flexible family tree with people on “nodes” you can move around to change the shape of your tree. You can add siblings, step-parents, partners and other family members who wouldn’t make it onto traditional trees, and set up a profile for each one. You also can modify two individuals’ relationship.
Print your tree with an easy-to-use tool that lets you resize the tree, print on multiple pages, and see where the edges of pages will fall.
Invite relatives to add to their Life Archives (or you can do so on behalf of deceased people) by following writing prompts designed to tease out everything from “Rules We Live By” to “First Real Job.”
Also under Life Archives, fill out Life Experiences for your ancestors and use them to generate a scrolling timeline set to music. (The timeline feature is “limited” for free accounts.)
Create a memoir in easy chunks by answering a series of questions.
Upload photos and video in the Media Archive (under Life Showcases) and turn them into a gallery or “Life Cube” slideshow (also limited for free accounts). You can import photos from Facebook and other social networking sites.
Search the FamilySearch Record Search Pilot and the rest of the Web from within Arcalife.
Generate a virtual time capsule of images and stories, choose people to send it to and designate a future date to unlock it.
You’ll eventually be able to use fee-based services for conducting oral history interviews, printing large family trees, converting photos or videotapes to digital and more.

Genealogy Web Sites | Social Networking

Monday, June 15, 2009 6:53:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

1911 Wales Census Is Now Online
Posted by Diane

FindMyPast.com has added the 1911 Wales census to www.1911census.co.uk, its partner site with the British national archives. The census lists 2.4 million Welsh residents.

You can search the index by person or place, then purchase credits redeemable for viewing a transcription of the record (10 credits), or the record itself (30 credits).

Due to high demand, Britain's 1911 census records are being made public as each region’s census is digitized, ahead of the previously scheduled 2012 release date (with some sensitive information about illnesses and the children of women prisoners held back).

The first release was in January. In addition to Wales, records for all England’s counties are now online.

census records | Genealogy Web Sites | UK and Irish roots

Tuesday, June 09, 2009 5:36:05 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Familyrelatives Adds British Landowner Records
Posted by Diane

British database site Familyrelatives.com added Britain’s Victorian “Doomsday Book” showing who owned land in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland more than 100 years ago.

The book, published in 1873, includes landowner returns that provide the name and address of every owner, the amount of land held, and the yearly rental valuation of holdings that are larger than an acre.

More than 320,000 landowners owned an acre or more, representing 1 percent of the population of the United Kingdom at the time. Nearly 850,000 owned less than an acre. London was excluded from the returns.

To search, click the Search tab on Familyrelatives' home page, then scroll down to the Land Records heading and choose a country.

The Doomsday records are available only with a Familyrelatives.com subscription (about $50 a year); not as a pay-per-view option.

Genealogy Web Sites | Land records | UK and Irish roots

Tuesday, June 09, 2009 2:46:27 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, June 05, 2009

Genealogy News Corral, June 1-5
Posted by Diane

Got several genealogy news items to cover this week, so without further ado:

The National Archives of Ireland free 1911 census site added records for Cork, Donegal, Galway, King's County and Wexford to those already online (from Antrim, Down, Dublin and Kerry).

Get more details on the site in this Genealogy Insider blog post.

Millions of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services' alien case files (also called A-files) dating from 1944 and later were signed over to the National Archives (records will be relocated to the National Archives’ San Francisco and Kansas City facilities later this year).

Henceforth, USCIS can forward files 100 years after the birth date of the person whose file it is. The USCIS press office tells me you’ll still be able to order the 1944-to-1951 A-files through the USCIS Genealogy Program (through which you also can order naturalizations and alien registrations).

Subscription newspaper and records service GenealogyBank added or expanded newspaper collections from 22 states. The new content is listed by state here, or go here to view the complete list of newspapers.

Subscription site Ancestry.com is letting you preview upcoming changes to the family tree pages—to see them, click Family Trees on Ancestry.com's home page, then click the light blue bar at the top that says “Check out the new look.” (You must have a tree on Ancestry.com to see the preview.)

The new look will make pages load faster, be easier to navigate and display more information, says Kenny Freestone on the Ancestry.com blog. Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings describes the changes in detail.

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites | immigration records | UK and Irish roots

Friday, June 05, 2009 6:46:42 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Friday, May 29, 2009

Genealogy News Corral May 25-29
Posted by Diane

News from the genealogy world wasn't overly earth-shattering this week, but we do have some updates that might interest you:

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.

Ancestry.com | FamilySearch | Genealogy Web Sites

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

Comments [0]

Friday, May 22, 2009

Genealogy News Corral May 18-22
Posted by Diane

Here are some quick genealogy news updates for the week. We hope you have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, and get an opportunity to reflect on your ancestors’ sacrifice for their country.

Historical records subscription site Footnote is giving away several lifetime memberships. To be eligible, you have to create or find an I Remember page on Facebook (using Footnote’s recently released app) and get five people to click the I Remember button for that person. See more details here.

British subscription and pay-per-view site Familyrelatives.com added more than 200,000 Canadian civil service records from 1872 to 1918. The records reveal the civil servant's name, position, department, length of service, salary and date of appointment. The earliest ones also provide civil servants' national origins and religion.

FamilySearch has added a total of 3.5 million-plus new records to 13 collections on the free FamilySearch Record Search pilot. The additions come from Brazil, the Czech Republic and Italy; and the US states of Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The State Library of North Carolina and the North Carolina State Archives have posted a free collection of North Carolina family records including nearly 220 family Bible records and the six-volume Marriage and Death Notices from Raleigh Register and North Carolina State Gazette: 1799-1893.

NBC’ continues to string along genealogists eager to see its “Who Do You Think You Are?” The on-again, off-again series didn't make it onto the network's fall lineup, but still may show up as a mid-season replacement, according to California-based Genealogy Gems blogger Lisa Louise Cooke.

Canadian roots | Free Databases | Genealogy Industry | Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives

Friday, May 22, 2009 9:38:34 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Find Revolutionary War Officers Free at GenealogyBank
Posted by Diane

GenealogyBank.com, the subscription site best known for its collection of digitized historical newspapers, has added thousands of US military records to its historical documents collection and made a portion of them free for a limited time.

The records include US military registers, which provide the name, birth date, location, rank and date of death of officers who served in the US Army, Navy or Air Force from the American Revolution to Korea.

In honor of Memorial Day, you can access the list of Revolutionary War officers for free (you'll need to register first).

It looks like search results mix the military registers with other historical documents. (So far, I've gotten error messages when trying to view images of the registers. I wonder if the site is overwhelmed.)

According to GenealogyBank's anouncement, it looks like we can expect millions more records added to the site this year.

Genealogy Web Sites | Military records

Thursday, May 21, 2009 8:31:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Where to Find a Genealogist-for-Hire
Posted by Diane

When it starts accepting clients in June, Ancestry.com’s ExpertConnect service (read our post about it) will be just one option for hiring people to do research tasks, such as photographing a gravestone or photocopying a record. Here are a few others:

Genealogy Freelancers: This site lets you post your project details and get bids from professionals around the world.

Genlighten: Here, you also can collect bids for research tasks. The focus here is on lookups, record retrieval and similar services.

Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness: These volunteers have signed on to do simple research favors for free (except expenses such as mileage and photocopying fees). You’re encouraged to return the favor by helping out someone else.

Repositories sometimes keep lists of nearby professional researchers (contact the genealogy department). For example, if you want to hire someone to copy your ancestor’s Civil War pension file, see the National Archives’ list of local researchers by topic and location.
For long or more-complicated research projects, you can find directories of professional genealogists on the Association for Professional Genealogists Web site, ProGenealogists, and the Board for Certification of Genealogists.

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | Research Tips

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:59:01 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Genline Updates Mean More Swedish Records
Posted by Diane

Swedish records subscription site Genline has added a bunch of records, made some user-friendly upgrades and formed a partnership that’ll help you discover free and low-cost photos and documents from all over Sweden.

Yesterday, I got a tour of the updates from Peter Wallenskog from Genline’s board of directors. Here's an overview:

Record additions underway include birth, marriage and death records through 1920. Coming soon: parish books and vital records up to 1937.

Household examination books (akin to censuses), which you currently find by browsing, are being indexed by farm name. Many farms were owned by the same family for generations. About 40 percent are already indexed; that’ll probably be 90 percent by the end of the year.

Genline is adding very high-resolution, clear images, with tools so you can enhance them by increasing contrast, remove specks, and more.

A transcription feature, introduced just a few days ago, lets users build a personal name index to Genline records by transcribing names as they find them. Other users can search on those names, vote for one or another transcription, and contribute their own version of a transcription.

Familjeband is a Swedish family history site where users build family trees, upload photos and communicate on a message board. Through an agreement with local groups in the Sverges Hembygdsforbund (Swedish Local Heritage Movement), Genline is helping develop a section of Familjeband called Bygdeband (now in beta), where these local groups are uploading photos, letters, probate papers, deeds and other records. Related records are linked, and a map shows places associated with records in the database.

Familjeband is accessible through a free registration and is in Swedish. Later this year, it’ll get an English interface, and records in Genline will be linked to related records in Familjeband. Eventually, it’ll cost a little—maybe $4 a month, says Wallenskog—to access records in Familjeband.

Genline also hopes to partner with Swedish heritage groups on this side of the pond to add records and photos to Familjeband. So far, groups from Kansas are uploading documents from Swedish schools and churches.

Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy

Saturday, May 16, 2009 3:25:54 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Friday, May 15, 2009

Sir Walter Raleigh and North Carolina Genealogy
Posted by Diane

Raleigh, NC, is named for Sir Walter Raleigh. He’s the English explorer whose royal charter to colonize “the Colony and Dominion of Virginia” (which at the time extended far beyond present-day Virginia) resulted in the lost colony of Roanoke Island in 1591—but also paved the way for later colonization in the New World.

Sir Walter’s statue outside the convention center looks like he’s surveying his dominion.

The area’s first permanent European settlers came south from the colony of Virginia around 1650. The Province of Carolina was established in 1660. In 1712, North Carolina split off’ it became a royal colony in 1729 and was the 12th state to ratify the US constitution in 1789.

Here are some North Carolina genealogy links:

Genealogy Events | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, May 15, 2009 4:41:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

News From the National Genealogical Society Conference
Posted by Diane

This morning we had tons of booth visitors, fresh from the opening presentation by actor Ira David Wood III. He’s played Sir Walter and Old Tom in The Lost Colony, an outdoor show since 1937 produced by Roanoke Island Historical Association.

A few news bits so far:

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.

FamilySearch | Footnote | Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy

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

Comments [0]

Monday, May 11, 2009

Live Roots Enhances Search of Online Databases
Posted by Diane

An update to last week’s post about searching popular genealogy database sites (both free and fee-based) from Live Roots’ search page:

The Live Roots webmaster has since added advanced search features to help you find resources in the subscription sites Ancestry.com, Footnote, World Vital Records and GenealogyBank.

To access these features, go to Live Roots' partner sites search page and click the plus sign below the name of the site you want to search. Remember, you won’t get to see full details for matches in subscription sites if you’re not a subscriber. (Visit a Family History Center for free access to many subscription databases.)

The online catalog for the BYU Family History Archive collection is Live Roots' next big addition.

Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, May 11, 2009 4:02:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, May 08, 2009

Genealogy News Corral, May 4-8
Posted by Diane

Here are the news bits that came across our desks this week

Subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com launched a collection of German phone directories dating from 1915 to 1981. The books, which are, of course, in German, list names and addresses of more than 35 million people who lived in Germany’s major cities, as well as many businesses.

British subscription and pay-per-view site FindMyPast.com added merchant seaman crew indexes with 270,000 names of seafarers between 1860 and 1913. British ships created these lists every six months, including everyone from captains to able seamen, from engine room staff to stewardesses.

The 1916 census of Canada is now available free at Family History Centers through their on-site Ancestry.com service. (Meaning this census isn’t on the FamilySearch pilot site—you must go to a Family History Center to search it.)

The National Archives granted its first Excellence in Genealogy Awards to Myron McGhee of Decatur, GA, who took first place, and Stephanie D. Smith of Richtor Park, IL, who took second. Read about their entries on the archives’ Web site.

The heritage travel Web site Go With a Purpose launched a new section called Go Connect, where users can upload photos with their reviews of historic destinations. Learn more on the site’s blog.

A late addition: The New England Historic Genealogical Society is adding digitized back issues of the journal The American Genealogist, to its subscription databases at NewEnglandAncestors.org. Vols. 1 through 8 (published as Families of Ancient New Haven) and Volumes 9–13 (dated from 1933 through 1937), are available now in separate databases. Additional volumes will be added. NEHGS memberships start at $75.

Ancestry.com | Canadian roots | Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | UK and Irish roots

Friday, May 08, 2009 7:02:07 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, May 04, 2009

Live Roots Adds Family History Library Catalog Search
Posted by Diane

Just a heads-up that you can now search the Family History Library (FHL) Catalog from within the Live Roots online genealogy resource directory.

Go to Live Roots’ search page and scroll down to the list of partner sites. Type your search into the FHL box and select the type of search. The place and keyword searches are my favorites—the place search finds all kinds of records associated with the place you enter; a keyword search finds resources with you search term in any part of the catalog listing.

Then click the Search FHL Catalog button.

In the search results, click a record title for more details. You’ll see the listing from the FHL online catalog, except that the right side of the page has tips for accessing the record (including visiting a Family History Center near you).

In these instructions, you can click Help (at the bottom) for an in-depth explanation of FHL catalog listings.

Other Live Roots partner sites include the subscription sites Ancestry.com, Footnote, Genealogy Bank, World Vital Records (you need a subscription to those sites to view results from their premium databases), eBay, Twitter and others.

Note that for some of these partner sites, particularly the genealogy database services, you may get better results by going to the site and using its search form. The addtional search fields for life dates, place, nationality, etc., will help you target your search.

For more information on Live Roots, see our previous blog posts.

FamilySearch | Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | Research Tips

Monday, May 04, 2009 2:38:42 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, April 27, 2009

Be First to Try FamilyTeller Online Community
Posted by Diane

We first met Matt Unger over the Internet when associate editor Grace Dobush covered his Papa’s Diary Project blog—where he transcribes and annotates his grandfather’s diary one day’s entry at a time—for the May 2008 Family Tree Magazine.

Unger sent us a note this week—seems he heard from a lot of people asking for advice on creating similar projects with their own family materials. They inspired him to put his Web development and publishing background to work on an online community called FamilyTeller.

In Unger's own words, FamilyTeller “will allow people to more easily scan, organize, annotate and share family artifacts on the Web.”

Can you beta test this new service? For a discounted subscription rate, you’d get assistance digitizing and uploading documents and photos, automatically catalog and organize them, try a few transcriptions, create a blog-style Web site to share with your family, and more—as well as, of course, provide feedback on your experiences with the site.

Benefits include lifetime discounts on subscription and service fees, plus the chance to influence what the site will be like.

Wanna try it? Fill out this online form and Unger will contact you.

Celebrating your heritage | Genealogy Web Sites | Social Networking

Monday, April 27, 2009 2:20:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, April 24, 2009

Attention Googlers: Workshop is Tuesday
Posted by Allison

How many times a day do you search Google? Today, I'm up to only 7. But some days—when I'm not away from my desk so much—I'm searching the Web 20 or 30 times.

Because so much of my job is about finding and sharing information, I'm constantly seeking new and better ways to search. On Tuesday, I'm going to share the secrets I've learned in an online workshop called Googling Your Genealogy: 7 Essential Strategies.

If you've never attended an online workshop (or "webinar") before, it's kind of like attending a in-person genealogy seminar--only "cozier," because you can do it from the comfort of your own computer. You'll be able to listen, view the presentation slides, even ask questions. Learn more about the experience on our Online Workshops page.

The workshop is at 7 p.m. EDT and registration costs $49.99. I hope you'll join me!

We'll be doing more online workshops in the future, so if there's a topic you'd like us to offer, go ahead and e-mail me.

Genealogy Events | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, April 24, 2009 9:26:22 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Genealogy News Corral, April 20-24
Posted by Diane

Here's our roundup of the week's genealogy news bits:

The New England Regional Genealogy Conference is now underway in Manchester, NH. If you're in the area, stop by today or tomorrow to take classes, check out the exhibitors and participate in the Ancestors Road show.

Subscription records site WorldVitalRecords.com enhanced its record image viewer to let you view newspaper images at up to 200 percent (before the most you could get was 100 percent). You also can print the zoomed record, save images to your computer and share images with friends and family.

Roots Television (genealogy tv you watch online) is bringing back the Down Under series, which has genealogists discovering intriguing stories about tombstones and those who’ve passed on.

FamilySearch online indexing volunteers reached a big milestone this week, transcribing their 250 millionth historical record. Record #250 million was part of Nicaragua civil registrations, extracted by three online indexers from Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras.

FamilySearch Indexing, begun in January 2006, now has more than 100,000 volunteers worldwide typing away.

This also from FamilySearch: Its expanded the Knowles Collection, a free database of Jewish records from Britain, to 40,000 names. You can download the database in GEDCOM or Personal Ancestral File format from FamilySearch’s Jewish resources page.
Update: Ancestry.com has change its Ancestry.com blog to disable commenting on posts once they've reached two weeks old. That's so staff can "track all comments in a more timely manner and reply as needed." See more on the Ancestry.com blog.

FamilySearch | Genealogy Events | Genealogy Web Sites | Videos

Friday, April 24, 2009 8:06:38 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

See World's Historical Documents Free on New Site
Posted by Diane

The World Digital Library, a free, online collection of documents, photos, maps and art from countries and cultures around the world, launches today.

You can choose from seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) for viewing descriptions of the materials. Text on the records themselves isn’t translated.

On the home page, click on the map to see a sample of content from that region. Use the slider on the timeline at the bottom of the screen to change the era from which the samples are taken.

Links at the top of each page let you search the record descriptions or browse by place, time, topic, type of item or originating institution.

Images from Syria, where my great-grandparents were born, include a late-19th century panorama of Beirut—showing what it would’ve looked like about the time they lived there.

More examples of digitized content: centuries-old calligraphy from Iran, an 1851 John Tallis and Co. map of Brazil, the 1866 book The Gabrovo School and Its First Trustees from Bulgaria, and a photo of African-American major league baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson from the United States.

There’s some content from nearly every UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) member country. (On the country listings page, you can click to see content from each place.)

World Digital Library is hosted by the Library of Congress, with support from UNESCO and partner institutions around the world. Partners are seeking more materials and the means to digitize them, especially for the developing world.

Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy | Libraries and Archives

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 2:10:18 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Friday, April 17, 2009

Genealogy News Corral, April 13-17
Posted by Diane

The Washington Digital Archives—a Family Tree Magazine 101 Best Web Sites pick several times over—has added WWI service statement cards resulting from a 1919 Congressional act directing the US Department of War to provide states with summaries of each WWI veterans' wartime records.

Card images are online. Click here to search (scroll to the bottom of the page), then click a match to download (I was missing a necessary plugin, but another button let me open records in JPG format). There’s also a glossary to the military abbreviations in the records.

Add the Minnesota Historical Society (whose Web site also is a 101 best site) to the list of state archives facing slashed budgets. The governor’s proposed budget would close three sites and lay off or cut hours for nearly half the staff, according to this Star Tribune article. The society also is coping with charitable giving reductions.

Pat Richley, the long-time Dear Myrtle genealogy blogger, has partnered with Moorshead Publications to start the Internet-Genealogy blog. She’ll post her takes on the news and information from the company’s history and genealogy titles.

MyGenShare, a free Web site where you can get and share knowledge-based genealogy articles, podcasts and videos, is set to launch in May (the launch was originally slated for last fall). You can sign up to get an e-mail when the launch happens.

Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives

Friday, April 17, 2009 6:32:47 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Ancestry.com Web Sites Down (and Now Back Up)
Posted by Diane

Tweets are flying around Twitter that Ancestry.com and its sister sites RootsWeb and MyFamily.com are down, for the first time in anyone’s memory here. We've been trying for about a half hour.

Snowstorms took out some trees and power lines in Provo, Utah, last night—maybe that's the culprit. We'll update you when we find out what's going on.

Just spoke with spokesperson Anastasia Tyler. All Ancestry.com properties have been experiencing an outage for a couple of hours now, and a team is working to fix the issues. Tyler believes no data loss would have occurred. Stay tuned for more details.

Update: Looks like the sites are working again.

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, April 17, 2009 2:57:28 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Find Genealogy Resources From Facebook
Posted by Diane

Genealogy Today’s Illya D'Addezio just released a full version of Live Roots for Facebook. It’s not in the Facebook application search yet, but you can download the Live Roots app to your Facebook profile now by clicking here.

In a nutshell, Live Roots is a searchable guide to online and offline genealogy resources that launched last fall.

The online catalogs it searches are listed here.

D'Addezio says he’ll add a few more enhancements to between now and Monday, and that any updates to Live Roots will automatically be live in the Facebook version.

Once you’ve added the app to your Facebook profile, you can search Live Roots from the comfort of Facebook by clicking the Applications link in the bottom left corner of your profile.

Genealogy Web Sites | Research Tips | Social Networking

Thursday, April 16, 2009 4:45:27 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Friday, April 10, 2009

Genealogy News Corral: April 6-10
Posted by Diane

Here's a roundup of news bits from this week:

The Library of Congress launched its own YouTube channel with historical footage from its collection of 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings. It has 70 videos now, with more to come. Learn more on the library’s blog.

The New Jersey Historic Trust will devote funds to the restoration of Ellis Island’s immigrant hospital complex (located on New Jersey’s side of the island). Save Ellis Island is raising money overseeing restoration of the historic buildings. Glimpse the hospital's past in the November 2008 Family Tree Magazine article on the documentary "Forgotten Ellis Island."

UK-based subscription site FamilyRelatives redesigned its Web site to make it easier to find databases. Changes include a simpler look and new menu that categorizes databases geographically. Records come from Australia, England, Ireland and a few from the United States (US records are free to registered users), with Canada, Wales, Scotland and New Zealand collections to come.

A FamilyRelatives subscription costs 30 pounds (about $44) per year. Many records are also available on a pay-per-view basis. See more details on Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and some screen shots on Genea-Musings.

Genealogy Web Sites | Historic preservation | Videos

Friday, April 10, 2009 7:44:47 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, April 09, 2009

GenWed Has Free Marriage Records, New Blog
Posted by Diane

The marriage records site GenWed just started a genealogy blog called Tracing Your Routes. They jump right into the fray with a review of points on both sites of the debate over the quality and reliability of online sources.

At GenWed, by the way, users submit ancestors' marriage information or digitized documents to a free database. Sources include license applications, certificates, banns (church notifications a couple intends to wed so the congregation can speak up if a spouse or some other problem is lurking in the closet), newspaper announcements and other records.

The site reports more than 25,000 free records for marriages in a range of states and counties, plus more than 30,000 links to “mostly free” marriage records and indexes on other Web sites.

On GenWed’s home page, scroll to the bottom to find the search box for GenWed’s free database, or click on a state name (on the right) to see links to marriage resources for that state.

FYI since we know many of you are keenly interested in the free links: The links under “Professional Searches” lead to fee-based sites, as do the “Search XX State Now!” links at the top of the state pages. You’ll also find ads with Ancestry.com search boxes and links marked with a $ that lead to subscription databases.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | Vital Records

Thursday, April 09, 2009 3:38:09 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Genealogy News Corral: New Online Records
Posted by Diane

This week’s roundup (late from last week or, as I prefer to see it, early for this week) focuses on record additions to genealogy database sites:

The free Western Maryland's Historical Library added Washington County documents including tax records (1803 to 1804), sheriff’s prison records (1804 to 1806) and court records 1778 to 1793.

New on FamilySearch's free record search pilot: 1920 US census indexes (no record images for this one) for Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and Massachusetts; and Arkansas marriages (with images) from 1837 to 1957 in Clay, Crittendon, Desha and Monroe counties.

Subscription site Footnote ($69.95 per year) added Cherokee resources including the Guion Miller Rolls (info and free index on Archives.gov) and Cherokee Indian Agency records, plus Civil War Union service records from Kentucky, Southern Claims Commission approved claims from Alabama and Georgia, and two historical newspapers.

What’s up Footnote’s sleeve? Vietnam service awards and photos, Eastern Cherokee Applications of the US Court of Claims, and Southern Claims Commission approved claims for Virginia and West Virginia.

Subscription-based Family Tree Connection ($29.95 per year), which focuses on smallish record sets, has more names and images in its collections of WWII ration books and association reports and rosters.

Subscription site World Vital Records ($39.96 per year for US records or $119.40 per year for worldwide records) added Connecticut city directories from the Godfrey Memorial Library.

Subscription site Ancestry.com ($155.40 per year) is adding family histories (usually, at least one per day; see the recent additions page for titles) and updated obituary collections from the US, UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand.

Coming soon: a recently discovered 1890 census fragment listing black farmers in Delaware, South Dakota territorial and state census images, returns from US military posts (regular reports that include names of people stationed there), and WWII draft cards from Illinois.

If you know of content additions not included here, by all means, click Comments (below) and share the news.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, April 08, 2009 3:09:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Monday, April 06, 2009

Campaign Urges Families to Preserve Their Heritage
Posted by Diane

The founders of the International Association of StoryKeepers and the Treasury of Family Heritage family networking site launched the Great Heritage Campaign March 31 to encourage families to preserve their traditions and stories.

Treasury of Family Heritage co-founder Dennis Stack calls the campaign “a call to action for members of the heritage industry to help bridge the disconnect between its various elements and to drive the movement in an interactive way.”

He adds that his site is a “key piece” of the campaign, serving as a platform where families and heritage-related businesses can connect and preserve stories.

To use the Treasury of Family Heritage, you set up a profile (choose from a family, business or social page), then upload video, audio, images or stories. Packages range from free to $15 per month, depending on storage size.

In the crowded area of family networking/storykeeping sites (Geni, MyHeritage, Genetree, TribalPages, to name just a few), genealogy sites with networking components (Footnote, Ancestry.com, FindMyPast, etc.), wikis (WeRelate is one), and genealogy applications for general social networking sites (including FamilyBuilder’s Family Tree and FamilyLink’s We’re Related), will the Great Heritage Campaign direct attention to the Treasury of Family Heritage? We'll have to wait and see.

The Great Heritage Campaign doesn't seem to have its own Web site, but you can watch a video on the Treasury of Family Heritage site.

Celebrating your heritage | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, April 06, 2009 3:45:27 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

We're Honored!
Posted by Diane

We’re excited to be on ProGenealogists’ list of the 25 most popular all-around genealogy blogs, based on Technorati ratings, overall content and industry experience of the bloggers.

(As a former high school student, I know “popular” doesn't always correlate with “helpful”—but I hope in this case it means lots of researchers are finding good advice on the Genealogy Insider blog.)

Subscribe to all the blogs on the list to stay updated on genealogy news and resources. Thanks to ProGenealogists—a professional research firm with experts in a range of areas—for including us! We got this special badge to wear, too.

Genealogy Industry | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, April 06, 2009 1:44:20 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Obama Cousin Prank Pays Off for FamilyLink
Posted by Diane

FamilyLink pulled a fast one on the 19 million users of its We’re Related Facebook application today.

We’re Related users received notifications that Barack Obama had confirmed them as a fourth cousin once removed. Genea-Musings' Randy Seaver posted his notification and the linked pages explaining the “relationship.”

A Learn More link at the bottom of the explanatory page fessed up about the April Fool's Day prank.

Some think the joke is funny, some don’t (and some who didn't click through probably believe it). Either way, FamilyLink is getting a lot of buzz. According to the AllFacebook blog, We’re Related is experiencing five times its usual traffic today.

FamilyLink CEO Paul Allen linked to We’re Related users’ Tweets on Twitter.

Genealogy Web Sites | Social Networking

Wednesday, April 01, 2009 9:19:54 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The First 30 Days of Your Genealogy Search
Posted by Diane

Genealogy Gems Podcast host Lisa Louise Cooke (who also hosts our Family Tree Magazine Podcast) is the expert guest on ChangeNation’s First 30 Days Podcast.

Take a listen to pick up Cooke's insights on starting a family history search, interviewing relatives and how doing genealogy changes your life a little.

And Genealogy Gems was named by the Salt Lake City Genealogy Examiner site as a great resource for starting genealogy. Congrats!

Genealogy Web Sites | Podcasts

Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:37:45 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, March 27, 2009

New Ancestry.co.uk Collection Details London History
Posted by Diane

British subscription site Ancestry.co.uk—sister site to US-based Ancestry.com—has launched a records collection spanning 400 years of London history.

Titled London Historical Records, 1500s-1900s, the collection will include more than 77 million records from parishes and workhouses, plus electoral rolls, wills, land tax records and school reports. It'll predate civil registration—England's equivalent to US vital records—by 300 years.

Right now, just the workhouse records are online. The Board of Guardians oversaw these institutions where impoverished men, women and children worked long hours for meager food and shelter. Records name those born or baptized in workhouses from 1834 to 1934, and those who died in a workhouse from 1834 to 1906.

The other records will be added regularly over the next year. Learn more at Ancestry.co.uk.

London was the center of Britain’s global empire for centuries. Ancestry.co.uk estimates 165 million people around the world, including more than half of British citizens, have an ancestor in the new collection.

Ancestry.co.uk costs 83.40 pounds (about $120) per year. You also can pay as you go by purchasing a voucher good for a limited time. (See subscription and pay-per-view options here.)

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites | UK and Irish roots

Friday, March 27, 2009 12:59:30 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Footnote Launches 1930 Census, New Look, New Search
Posted by Diane

Historical records site Footnote just announced its new Great Depression Collection, anchored by an interactive version of the 1930 census that CEO Russ Wilding calls “a gathering place for the American story.”

Footnote members can attach family photos and stories to names on the census images and automatically create Footnote Pages for them.

That opens up at least one back-door genealogy research avenue, suggests spokesperson Justin Schroepfer: If someone left a note on your ancestor’s neighbor’s listing, you could contact the member through the site and possibly get in touch with the neighbor’s descendants.

Also in the Great Depression Collection are digitized and indexed documents from the era, including newspapers with articles on President Roosevelt’s New Deal and ads revealing how much your ancestors paid for groceries.

Along with this release, Footnote revealed a new home page and new search. Duplicate home page links to the same place have been eliminated for a more streamlined look, and there’s no longer a separate advanced search—you expand the search box on the home page to bring up additional search fields.

Footnote searches for plurals and stem names (such as Michael for Mike), but doesn’t automatically look for alternate spellings. I couldn’t find my Haddad ancestors in the 1930 census until I entered the enumeration district and sheet number as keywords—they’re indexed under Haddah. But you can look for alternate spellings by using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard to stand in for any number of letters.

Look for more search tips in our Footnote Web Guide in the July 2009 Family Tree Magazine (on newstands May 5).

The Great Depression Collection is part of Footnote’s subscription offerings. (There’s a limited-time special offer of $55.95.) Footnote also offers a pay-per-view option for many of its records.

The 1930 census actually went live yesterday, but Footnote postponed the announcement to work out a few bugs (it was killing me to keep my mouth shut, but I distracted myself by updating the abovementioned Web Guide).

Family Tree Magazine articles | Footnote | Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, March 26, 2009 12:36:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Friday, March 20, 2009

Genealogy News Corral, March 16-20
Posted by Diane

Roundin’ up the week’s genealogy news bits. Yee-haw!

GeneaBloggers compiled a list of “10 Companies All Genealogists Should Follow on Twitter.” See anymagazine you recognize?

Click here to see Family Tree Magazine's Twitter page and follow us (you need a free registration with Twitter to follow someone).

Or click here to learn more about Twitter.

The subscription service GenealogyBank created an area of the site dedicated to Philadelphia newspapers. The City of Brotherly Love is where Benjamin Franklin made the Pennsylvania Gazette one of the British Colonies’ most successful newspapers.

LibraryJournal.com has reviewed institutional genealogy subscription services. Since librarians might use the information to help decide which services to offer, take a look and post your thoughts in our Hot Topics Forum. (We’re a little puzzled by Genealogy.com’s high marks—it’s not being updated, and just about all its records are easier to search elsewhere.)

Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter got a makeover (or maybe a makeunder, to those keen on the new subtle colors). Go on over and have a look.

Subscription genealogy site WorldVitalRecords.com added a search by date field (labeled “Year”) to its search forms. See the World Vital Records blog for tips on using it.

Genealogy Industry | Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives

Friday, March 20, 2009 7:34:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [1]

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Ancestry.com Additions Help You Find Living Relatives
Posted by Diane

Funny coincidence.

I was sitting here proofing the final version of our July 2009 Family Tree Magazine article on reverse genealogy (searching for living relatives) when I got an announcement from Ancestry.com about its new/updated collections of recent records. Which could help you find, say, a cousin or second cousin.

Now, through a partnership with the people finder MyLife.com (formerly Reunion.com), your Ancestry.com search results may include links to MyLife.com’s public information profiles on more than 700 million living people.

But wait, there’s more: In the next week or two, Ancestry.com will replace its current US public records database with one containing more than 525 million names, addresses, ages and possible family relationships of US residents between about 1950 and 1990.

Finally, Ancestry.com launched an upgraded collection of obituaries extracted from papers all over the world—helpful because survivors named in relatives’ obituaries may be cousins. (Also see last week's post about Ancestry.com's "1940 census substitute.")

See the details on the Ancestry.com blog.

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites | Public Records

Thursday, March 19, 2009 7:50:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Seeking Michigan Adds Free Death Records
Posted by Diane

The historical records site Seeking Michigan has added Michigan death certificates from 1897 to 1920. You can search athe index and click to view a record—free.

Run a basic search by name or construct an advanced search by typing keywords and assigning a data field for each term (such as first name, last name, city/village/township, etc.). The advanced search is the same for all Seeking Michigan's collections, so scroll to the bottom of each field pull-down menu for fields specific to the death records.

To browse the death records, click View Collection next to the basic search box (or just use this link).

The records are available through a partnership with the Library of Michigan. Also on Seeking Michigan, you’ll find Civil War photographs and records, WPA property invoices (documents describing the land, buildings and surroundings of building in rural Michigan), oral histories, maps and more. Here's an overview of the collections.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | Vital Records

Thursday, March 19, 2009 1:19:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [4]

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Search Wyoming Historical Newspapers Free Online
Posted by Diane

The Wyoming State Library has posted the first set of historical Wyoming newspapers from the Wyoming Newspaper Project.

This project involves digitizing a 70-year collection of the state’s newspapers from 1849 to 1922.

So far, more than 407,000—about half—of the newspaper images are online. They span 1867 to 1922 and include 200 titles such as The Cheyenne Daily Leader, Laramie Sentinel, Natrona County Tribune, South Pass News and Torrington Telegram.

You can run a keyword search or browse by title, year, city or county. You’ll download the pages with matching terms as PDF files.

Newspaper announcements may be particularly helpful for vital information since Wyoming didn’t start keeping statewide birth and death records until 1909, and marriage records, until 1941. Plus, the state's birth records are closed for 100 years.

This clipping is from the March 9, 1886, Cheyenne Sun Individualities section, which reports comings and goings of folks around town.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | Research Tips | Vital Records

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 12:53:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Monday, March 16, 2009

TimesMachine Takes NYT Subscribers Back to Old Editions
Posted by Diane

Our contributing editor David A. Fryxell shared this genealogically cool benefit available to New York Times home delivery subscribers: The TimesMachine (I love puns!), an online archive of digital papers from 1851 to 1922.

New York Times subscribers can log into the site, pick a date and click to flip the pages of that day's edition. If you don't subscribe, you can try it out with a few sample editions.

The TimesMachine is suited to browsing, since it doesn't have a search. But anyone can search past editions of the New York Times using a different tool, the Article Archive.

The Article Archive delivers individual articles in PDF form (1851 to 1980) or text-only (1981 to present). Articles from 1851 through 1922 are free, and articles from 1981 to present are free. If your archive search returns articles dated 1923 through 1980, you’ll be asked to pay before you can download those articles.

Genealogy Web Sites | Research Tips

Monday, March 16, 2009 7:19:18 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, March 13, 2009

Second Life Residents Take Genealogy To a New Level
Posted by Diane

Illya D’Addezio at Genealogy Today sent a note about his new Genealogy HUD for the virtual world Second Life (SL). The HUD (short for heads-up display) lets SL residents seamlessly use the genealogy search engine Live Roots from within SL.

SL is an online role-playing game in which residents have characters (avatars) that interact with each other, participate in group activities, travel, etc.

A child of the 80s, I hear "role-playing" and tend to think of Dungeons & Dragons—but this is more like, well, real life.

"Many people think SL is all about games and role playing, which there is plenty of," D'Addezio says. "But there are also an increasing number of genealogists joining, dozens of genealogy content areas developing, and numerous voice chats taking place on a regular basis.”

Besides letting SL residents access Live Roots, the Genealogy HUD also helps them compile a list of surnames they're researching to compare with other residents wearing the HUD. Learn more and get the HUD at Genealogy Today.

D'Addezio says he’s also building an interactive family history village where “SL visitors will be able to issue actual search queries to many of the Live Roots data partners from within SL, learn about different genealogy companies, purchase books, magazine subscriptions, etc.”

Genealogy fun | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, March 13, 2009 2:38:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, March 09, 2009

Q&A With Beta-Free GeneTree
Posted by Diane

The family networking and genetic genealogy site GeneTree has shed its beta skin and emerged, as the company’s announcement describes, “a simple, intuitive way to regularly communicate with extended family, and to securely share and store family contact information, personal profiles, photos, video and ancestry documents.”

You also can order both mitochondrial DNA and Y-DNA genetic genealogy tests, add the results to your profile and search for people who match.

GeneTree president and COO Matt Cupal and I had a quick Q&A over the phone today:

GI: What would you consider GeneTree’s greatest strength?
MC: Probably the positioning that we’ve had along, which is that it’s a family social network, but it has this unique twist of using DNA to extend your concept of family.

GI: Could you give me a quick rundown of GeneTree’s post-beta features?
MC: We’ve improved a lot of the components of the social network, so it’s easier to invite people and stay connected. For example, the page you land on now is a news feed that tells you everything that’s going on in your networks—that could be more DNA connections, or another family member has added a photo or updated the family tree with more people. That's also e-mailed to you once as week as a digest.

We’ve made some dramatic improvements in our family tree building software. It’s intuitive and easy to use. We’ve also added a GEDCOM upload. We’re working on improving it, always, but right now you can have up to 2,000 people inside your GEDCOM.

One of the really cool things about the site is that you can do collaborative family tree work, so you and your cousins and all your other relatives can be on at the same time and make things happen.

GI: Do many people who haven’t ordered a DNA test from GeneTree have their family information on the site?
MC: About 5 percent of the people who come on the site have actually taken DNA tests. It’s a no-cost system to be a member and have your family information there, and that's by far the majority of members.

GI: How many members are there?
MC: We’re moving toward 100,000, and we’ve got about 1.5 million profiles right now—that’s people on trees.

GI: Now that beta’s over, what developments are you planning?
MC: Surname studies are fairly high on the list. We’re also looking at ways we can expand this to the rest of the world. We’re intrigued by the idea of allowing people from multiple sites to come into the system. Maybe they’re a member of Geni or TGN [The Generations Network, owner of Ancestry.com] or any number of systems—we’d like to enable them to use the DNA facilities.

We want to make DNA more understandable to the general population—those who are strongly interested in genealogy and those who are more passively interested—to help them better understand how they can use DNA.

We’re starting with an educational component. We’re also designing some new DNA tests to be a little more understandable—still based on the same principles, but tests that can grab the imagination of the general populace more than, say, the particular values of your Y-markers.

GI: What’s your take on the genetic genealogy market right now?
MC: Clearly it’s going to be a challenging time this year. Something we’re working on to help offset that is some lower-priced alternatives, so people can get in the game at a lower number and get their feet wet.

We'll keep you updated on these developments. See the genetic genealogy toolkit on FamilyTreeMagazine.com' for more DNA answers.

Genealogy Web Sites | Genetic Genealogy

Monday, March 09, 2009 9:04:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, February 27, 2009

Genealogy News and Resource Roundup
Posted by Diane

Weekend in sight! Here’s a gathering of genealogy updates that made their way across my desk this week:

Subscription and pay-per-view British genealogy service Familyrelatives.com has a new collection of Professional member lists including Engineers Who’s Who 1939 (which has many engineers at work preparing for war) and the 1923 Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

New on subscription site World Vital Records this week are 10 databases of birth, marriage and death information from genealogy books on Ireland, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. See the details here.

FamilySearch has completed its online indexes of West Virginia vital records, as well as South Dakota state censuses for 1915 and 1925. Search them on the Record Search Pilot.

Look up A Look at Cook if you can’t find ancestors in US censuses for Cook County, Ill. For example, in 1920, enumeration districts 819 to 839 for Chicago’s 14th ward aren’t in online databases; this site gives you the National Archives microfilm number they’re on. You also can download street renumbering and name change guides.

Check out upcoming Ancestry.com additions on its Coming Soon page. They include improved US census images, naturalization records, more WWII draft cards, circuit curt criminal case files and more.

Ancestry.com | FamilySearch | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, February 27, 2009 8:39:32 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

South Carolina Slave Records to Go Online
Posted by Diane

More genealogy records are coming to Lowcountry Africana, a Web site and research project to study the Gullah/Geechee cultural heritage of those with African-American roots in South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida.

Working with the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Lowcountry Africana will digitize more than 25,000 documents from Charleston estate inventories dated 1732 to 1867. They include the names of more than 30,000 slaves.

More than 14,000 South Carolina bills of sale (1773 to 1872), most for transactions involving slaves, also will be digitized. They’re already indexed along with other resources on the South Carolina Archives Web site (click Series Descriptions to see what all else is there).

The index and digital images will be free on both Lowcountry Africana and the South Carolina archives’ site. You can volunteer to index the records at AfriQuest, another Lowcountry Africana site.

African-American roots | Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, February 24, 2009 7:08:00 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Newspaper Site Unveils User-friendly Search Updates
Posted by Diane

The historical newspaper and document subscription site GenealogyBank just announced a few changes to its search:

You can simultaneously search all GenealogyBank's digitized newspapers from one or more states by clicking on Historical Newspapers and selecting your states.

To search papers from a city (or two or more) in the same state, start by clicking on the state, then select your cities from the map.

To search specific newspapers, select a city as previously described, then choose titles based in that city. (Looks like you can't search papers published in different cities.)

You can limit your search to recently added content, too, by choosing from the dropdown menu on any of the abovementioned search pages.

To limit your search to article category (such as obituaries or birth notices), click on the category you want on the left side of your search results page.

GenealogyBank subscriptions cost $19.95 per month or $69.95 per year.

Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 6:52:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, February 12, 2009

More Civil War Records on Ancestry.com
Posted by Diane

Subscription site Ancestry.com has joined the records-posting party on this occasion of Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. Here's what's new in the site's Civil War collection:

The Abraham Lincoln Papers includes more than 20,000 letters written to and from the president, as well as drafts of his speeches. (This collection is free.)

New Orleans Slave Manifests, 1807 to 1860, has ship manifests (from National Archives microfilm) documenting more than 30,000 slaves en route to New Orleans from the upper Southern states.

You can browse the record images, but you can't search them yet. World Archives Project volunteers are indexing them as you read this. See some transcribed information free on Afrigeneas.

Confederate Pension Applications from Georgia includes more than 60,000 records documenting pension applications Confederate soldiers and their widows filed in Georgia. (Search some of these free on the Georgia State Archives Web site.)

Confederate Applications for Presidential Pardons contains records of former Confederates who requested pardons.

Lincoln successor Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation of general amnesty for Confederates, but it didn't cover certain groups such as government officials, higher ranking military officers and those with property valued at more than $20,000. Those people had to apply for pardons.

Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles has information on nearly every officer and soldier who fought in the Civil War (compiled from sources such as state rosters and regimental histories).

African-American roots | Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites | Military records

Thursday, February 12, 2009 3:07:35 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

What’s Up at FamilyLink
Posted by Diane

FamilyLink, the company behind the World Vital Records subscription data service and FamilyHistoryLink.com genealogy networking site, has a new, nice-looking corporate site.

Click Projects for information on upcoming products such as WorldHistory.com (now in private beta, it’ll let you view historical happenings by time, place, event or person) and GenSeek (billed as a service that'll "revolutionize" how you do genealogy, GenSeek is rumored to be the Web 2.0 incarnation of the Family History Library online catalog).

PS: For much more on GenSeek, see Tamura Jones' blog.

FamilySearch | Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, February 12, 2009 2:26:48 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [3]

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

ProQuest Expands Historical Periodical, Newspaper and Map Offerings
Posted by Diane

These news items come from ProQuest, which provides libraries with services such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers and HeritageQuest Online that are free to patrons.

ProQuest is getting together with the Center for Research Libraries (a consortium of 240 college, university and other libraries) to offer digital access to 3 million pages of US trade, special-interest and general periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries. Magazines include American Annual of Photography, The Labor Journal, American Jewish Advocate and Woman’s Protest Against Woman Suffrage and others.

Even if these titles don’t mention your ancestor, they'll enlighten you about his of her occupation, hobbies and interests, and suggest where to look next for records.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers is expanding to include The Baltimore Sun from 1837 to 1985. The span covers Baltimore’s role as a busy immigration and trade center, as well as Maryland’s role as a slave-holding border state during the Civil War.

Finally, Historic Map Works Library Edition, which lets you search detailed, full‐color historical maps, has doubled its map collection.

Check your local library’s Web site or call the reference desk see if it offers access to these data services. You may be able to use them from home through the library Web site.

Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives | Social History

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:39:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, February 06, 2009

101 Best Web Sites: African-American Roots
Posted by Diane

In observance of Black History month, this week we’ll highlight Web sites from our “Best for African-American Researchers” category:

Lowcountry Africana: This free site focuses on records that document the heritage of African-Americans in the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and northeastern Florida, home to the distinctive Gullah/Geechee culture. Records include those of the wealthy Drayton family, which owned several plantations, plus Freedmen's Bureau and Freedman's Bank papers.

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1719-1820: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Ph.D. compiled the data on this gorgeous free site. Its powerful search tools comb through information on 100,000 Louisiana slaves.

See the rest of the 101 Best Web sites on FamilyTreeMagazine.com, or go right to the African-American roots sites.

See our African-American genealogy research toolkit here.

African-American roots | Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, February 06, 2009 6:55:06 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, January 23, 2009

News from NewEnglandAncestors.org
Posted by Diane

We’ve gotten a few news items from the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), whose Web site is NewEnglandAncestors.org:

The Connecticut Nutmegger, the journal of the Connecticut Society of Genealogists, is becoming part of NEHGS' online subscription databases ($75 per year).

The Nutmegger database will be released in stages, starting this week with issues from 1968 to 1973. Members of both organizations’ Web sites can search them.

NEHGS’ 162-year-old journal, The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, is helping people find ancestors and save trees. Society members can opt to get the Register in searchable PDF form.

Last, NEHGS did some math and announced it added 5 million names to the site last year, including a million Massachusetts records and more than 3 million Social Security Death Index records.

In 2009, Web site database development coordinator Sam Sturgis is shooting for one or two databases every week.

Genealogy societies | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, January 23, 2009 5:24:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

1911 UK Census Goes Online
Posted by Diane

The 1911 UK census is online for the first time at 1911census.co.uk, a site from the fee-based UK genealogy site FindMyPast.com.

The scheduled release date wasn’t until 2012, but public demand got it moved up. But sensitive information relating to illnesses and to children of women prisoners will be held back until 2012.

The 1911 census covers England, Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, as well as those aboard Royal Naval and Merchant vessels at sea and in foreign ports. It’s also the first British census to include full details of British Army personnel and their families stationed overseas.

More than 27 million people's census entries—80 per cent of the English records—are available today. Over the coming months, 9 million records from the remaining counties of England, Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, as well as the naval and overseas military records, will be added.

You can search 1911census.co.uk by name, place and birth date (you’ll need a free registration). By summer, you’ll also be able to search on an address. Each record page view costs 30 credits; you can buy 60 credits for about $10.30.

The record images are color, scanned from the original census returns, which generally results in better images than scans from microfilm.

census records | Genealogy Web Sites | UK and Irish roots

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 1:20:15 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, January 12, 2009

Online Searching: It’s Complicated
Posted by Diane

The search presentation of Friday’s meeting at Ancestry.com shed some light on what happens after you hit the Submit button, and why your results sometimes don’t seem to make sense.

Not being a computer genius, I offer this layperson's interpretation:

Every variable your search contains—every date in a range, every place of residence, every keyword—computationally is a separate query that runs through the millions of records in Ancestry.com’s servers.

The search engine operates on an algorithm that assigns each record points based on terms in your search that match data fields in the record. Some data fields, such as the name, are weighted more heavily than others (that is, a matching name would get more points than a matching place of origin).

The search engine also assumes some terms are the same, for example, Kathleen and Cathy (who knew there are 800 variations on the name Catherine?), Florida and Fla, Syria and Alssyria. And it tries to account for the variations in spellings, the roaming birth dates and other unexpected information in historical records. Search product manager Anne Mitchell calls this “fuzziness.”

That’s why some records in your search results seem far outside the realm of possibility for your ancestor—the date or place may have been off, but the other stuff was close enough to get the points necessary to make the list.

Frustratingly, sometimes records you know aren't your ancestor get more points than the ones that might be him. You could spend hours sifting through all the search results—it's hard to know when to stop (someone said after two or three pages of results, it's unlikely you'll find the record you're looking for).

Mitchell said that the search engine's algorithm will soon be adjusted to subtract points when a name or date in a record doesn’t match what you typed in. Before, this additional step in the search process would’ve taken too long and made the servers start smoking. But now that the engineers have almost figured it out, your search results should appear in a more logical order, with the best matches higher up on the list.

It’s entirely possible my ancestors’ passenger list has been destroyed and they hid from the 1920 census enumerators, but once the changes go live, I’m going to repeat these frustrating searches.

Something else to think about if you have an Ancestry Family Tree: Family trees product manager Kenny Freestone said the quality of a family tree search—the automated search that give you those “shaky leaf” hints next to individuals in your tree—is more precise than for a ranked search. That’s because the hints are based on several generations of your tree, rather than just one person.

(And, by the way, you now can hide a tree so it’s completely excluded from the index.)

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, January 12, 2009 2:38:50 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, January 08, 2009

101 Best Sites: Texas Archives and a Genealogy Wiki
Posted by Diane

Our look at two of this year’s Family Tree Magazine 101 Best Web Sites picks takes us to Texas and around the world:

Texas State Library and Archives Commission: We categorized this site as “Best for Military Researchers” for its online index of 54,634 Lone Star State Confederate pension applications and Texas Adjutant General Service Records (1836 to 1935). But I’ve also found it helpful for other records: This archives was the source of information on my great-grandfather’s brief stay in the state penitentiary for bootlegging. I was impressed with the online information and staff responses to my research questions.

WeRelate: This is a community Web site just for genealogists that works on the "wiki" principle, where users generate and update the content. Created by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy in partnership with the Allen County Public Library, the free site has pages for 1.5 million people/families.

Users can upload GEDCOM files, upload and annotate scanned documents and photos, share family stories and biographies, and generate maps of ancestors' life events.

Read more about using this and other genealogy wikis in the March 2009 Family Tree Magazine (on newsstands and FamilyTreeMagazine.com Jan. 13).

See the rest of the best on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, January 08, 2009 3:22:21 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

New Online Index Guides You to St. Louis Ancestors
Posted by Diane

Dennis Northcott, archivist at the Missouri History Society in St. Louis (my old stomping grounds) wrote me about the new Missouri History Museum Genealogy and Local History Index.

The index includes references to hundreds of thousands of St. Louis ancestors who appear in more than 225 museum research sources.

That includes St. Louisans’ Civil War-era loyalty oaths, early 20th-century yearbooks, Who’s Who publications, local censuses, WWI service member questionnaires, newspaper clippings, church histories, business letterheads and others.

You can search the index by a person’s name, business/corporate name, or street address (great for researching the history of your house and its former occupants).

You’ll find a search tips link on each search form—Northcott suggests checking out those tips before you start.

Matches give source information for the resource the name or address appears in, then you can click to order a photocopy.

Learn more about the index in Voices, the Missouri History Museum’s online magazine, and see the museum’s Web site for additional St. Louis-area research help.

Genealogy Web Sites | Libraries and Archives

Wednesday, January 07, 2009 1:22:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, January 05, 2009

Popular Family Tree Sites Launch Pay Plans
Posted by Diane

Two family networking and genealogy sites have added fee-based premium plans to their popular free offerings:

MyHeritage, headquartered in Israel, introduced two premium plans to let users access the new features in its just-released Family Builder 3 Web-based genealogy software. Those features include SmartMatching, which compares new family trees to the MyHeritage database of more than 300 million profiles, to find matches so members can merge the information in overlapping trees. (You may remember SmartMatching from the GenCircles pedigree database site—whose creator, Pearl Street Software, MyHeritage purchased.)

Also new in Family Tree Builder 3 is automatic “Smart Search” searching of more than 100 online databases for names in your tree, easy family tree chart printing, and online publishing with videos and documents to your MyHeritage family Web site.

The Premium plan, at $3.95 per month (a holiday offer available through Jan. 15 costs $1.95 per month),  nets you the above new features with an online tree of up to 2,500 people  and 500 MB  of online storage, along with priority support.

The PremiumPlus plan, which costs $9.95 per month, offers unlimited online trees and unlimited storage, plus the priority support.

With a free Basic plan, you can still use the gratis version of Family Tree Builder, with up to 500 people in your online tree and 100 MB  of storage.

Los Angeles-based Geni introduced a new $5-per-month Pro plan with benefits including Enhanced Relationship Paths, which lets you discover your exact relationship to any blood relative on Geni. (The free Basic membership shows you relationship “pathways” to ancestors and close relatives—Enhanced Relationship Paths will be most interesting to those with large trees or who’ve who’ve merged their trees with others’.)

Additional Pro benefits include:

The ability to export your family tree and all connected trees as a single GEDCOM file (up to 100,000 total individual and family records).

A priority support team especially for Pro members.

A Geni Pro badge to sport on your profile and in your family tree.

Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, January 05, 2009 3:46:29 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, December 19, 2008

101 Best Sites: Castle Garden Arrivals and Online Trees
Posted by Diane

Two highlights from our 101 Best Web Sites listing for 2008:

Castle Garden: If your ancestors arrived in New York before Ellis Island opened in 1892, turn to this database on 10 million immigrants who entered through Ellis Island’s predecessor, Castle Garden. Castle Garden opened in 1855, but the records here start in 1830.

Tribal Pages: This innovative collaboration site hosts family Web sites with more than 175,000 pedigree files, plus a database of names in those family trees. You can keep track of birthdays and other events, and generate charts and reports right from the site. Free sites let you store an unlimited number of names in your tree and up to 50 photos; after that, you can upgrade for a fee.

Link to the rest of our 101 Best Sites on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, December 19, 2008 7:57:00 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [1]

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Search Burials and Cemetery Maps on New Site
Posted by Diane

This site is just getting off the ground, but it’ll be really cool if it takes off.

Names in Stone is a cemetery mapping site—you can search for a grave and get a map showing where it is in the cemetery and whose plots are nearby.

Only a handful of cemeteries are covered as yet, mostly in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and California.

You can encourage larger, managed cemeteries to participate, or map smaller, volunteer-run cemeteries yourself and upload the data. (Get instructions on the site. More mapping tips are on an associated blog called Grave Mappers.)

It’s free to search on a name and see available details from that person’s headstone—could be birth and death dates, burial date, parents’ names, military service, etc.—as well as the grave location (shown below), cemetery name, cemetery map, address, GPS coordinates and driving directions.

You can purchase virtual gravestone décor; you decorate the stone yourself by dragging and dropping images of flowers and swags.

Paying members ($7.95 per month, $39.99 per year) can save searches, save a “cemeteries of interest” list, be notified of matches to automated searches and receive discounts on gravestone décor.

Cemeteries | Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 2:10:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Monday, December 15, 2008

101 Best Sites: Illinois Records and Free Data
Posted by Diane

Here are this week’s 101 best Web sites highlights (I’ve got a couple of week’s to make up for, so you may see more soon):

Illinois State Archives Online Databases: Illinois has put many indexes online. You can search statewide indexes of marriages (1763 to 1900) and deaths (pre-1916 and 1916 to 1950), plus veterans' records ranging from the War of 1812 to the 1929 Roll of Honor. An index to the Illinois Regional Archives Depositories (called IRAD) will tell you where to go next in search of records on your Prairie State ancestors.

Access Genealogy: Besides oodles of links, this free portal also serves up census, vital, immigration, cemetery and military records; plus biographies and such Native American essentials as the 1880 Cherokee census and the Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes (aka the Dawes Rolls). They’ve got a nice beginner’s guide, too.

See the rest of our 101 Best Web Sites on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Want to nominate your favorite site? Post the URL in our Nominations for 101 Best Web Sites Forum category and say why you like the site. Note you must be registered with the Forum to post.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, December 15, 2008 9:32:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Google Expands News Archive By 20 Million Historical Pages
Posted by Diane

Google has enhanced its historical newspaper initiative by buying 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages from Canadian company PaperofRecord. The purchase price wasn't available.

The pages—some dating back to the 1700s—will be part of the Google News Archive Search, launched in early September “to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online.”

My search came up with a few interesting early-1900s stories on Haddads (none related, that I know of) in newspapers and books. I found the timeline search more useful—it was easier to pick out results from the era of interest.

PaperofRecord has digitized newspapers from Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe.

According to the Ottawa Business Journal, the purchase—the end of a two-year agreement between the companies—will "essentially shut down" PaperofRecord. Its troubles started when companies such as ProQuest began paying newspapers to digitize pages—the opposite of what PaperofRecord was doing.

In another month or so, PaperofRecord's online database will redirect to Google.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, December 03, 2008 7:11:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Friday, November 21, 2008

101 Best Sites: Irish Maps and Nevada Censuses
Posted by Diane

This week’s 101 Best Web Site’s highlights cover Irish history and Nevada censuses:

Ireland’s History in maps: This fascinating map collection spans the Ice Ages through the years of the Great Famine, with a historical synopsis for each.

Nevada Census Online: This state government site earned genealogists' eternal admiration for creating online indexes to the state’s federal censuses from 1860 through 1920 (except the mostly destroyed 1890 census)—free.

See all the rest of our 101 Best Web Sites picks at FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, November 21, 2008 7:35:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, November 07, 2008

101 Best Sites: Grassroots Genealogy and English Records Catalog
Posted by Diane

I threw two darts at the 101 Best Web Sites article in my September 2008 Family Tree Magazine—here are the two sites we’re highlighting this week:

RootsWeb: This venerable volunteer-run site now resides in Ancestry.com’s domain, but don’t worry—it’s still free. It shares some visual elements with Ancestry.com and the page URLs have ancestry in them, but it has kept its friendly feel and remains an ideal jumping-off point for new researchers. Besides a great Getting-Started guide, you’ll find a ton of mailing lists, message boards, family tree files (in the WorldConnect Project) and more.

Access to Archives: Called A2A for short, this catalog describes historical records in 416 English and Welsh repositories, including local record offices and libraries, universities, museums, and national and special institutions.

See the rest of our best Web sites picks on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy

Friday, November 07, 2008 9:21:04 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, October 31, 2008

101 Best Sites: Show-Me Records and African-American Roots
Posted by Diane

Here are this week's highlights from our 101 Best Web sites for researching your family history. As always, you can click right through to all the 101 picks from FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Missouri Digital Heritage Initiative: I was super-excited about this Web site when it debuted this spring, and I still am. It’s a one-stop shop for digitized historical records, abstracts and indexes from the state archives and other repositories throughout Missouri. If a record you need isn’t digitized, go to the Local Records Inventory Database to find out where to write for county-level records.

AfriGeneas: We’ve named this African-American genealogy resource a top site several years over for its wealth of how-to tips and message boards, census records, slave data, an index of 50,168 surnames and a collection of 16,338 death records.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, October 31, 2008 8:45:27 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, October 30, 2008

New Podcast Helps You Start Your Ancestor Search
Posted by Diane

Having a tough time getting the genealogy ball rolling? Need some family history motivation?

Tune into a new podcast from Lisa Louise Cooke and Personal Life Media Network called Family History: Genealogy Made Easy. The tips are geared to beginners, with success-story interviews that'll also inspire more-experienced researchers.

“My hope is that this podcast will reach out to non-genealogists and show them that discovering their family history is possible," Cooke says. "Getting started is the hardest part.”

Learn more and listen to the first episode here.

You can get an audio player from Cooke’s Genealogy Gems News Blog. Just click the Get! button on the player and add it to your Facebook page, iGoogle page—wherever. It plays not only the new show, but also Cooke's Genealogy Gems Podcast, our Family Tree Magazine Podcast, the Family History Expos Podcast and Digital Photography Life (advice on making the most of your digital camera).

You also can subscribe to Genealogy Made Easy through iTunes.

Genealogy Web Sites | Research Tips

Thursday, October 30, 2008 12:41:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Now in Beta: WorldHistory.com
Posted by Diane

WorldHistory.com, a new service from FamilyLink, launched into private beta testing with interactive maps, timelines, videos, geocoded photos, museum artifacts and family trees.

The video demos (you're looking at one in the screenshot below) show what you’ll be able to do on the site. For example, you can look at a map showing where events happened during a time period you’re interested in. You also can see locations of related events, such as Revolutionary War battles.

Family historians can create family trees that plot ancestors on maps and show events during their lives, and link to photos of the area.

According to at least one Tech blogger, “The company also says they are developing an iPhone application that will show you interesting historical events near where you are at any given time.” Cool.

Joining and using WorldHistory.com is free, for now. (When I signed up for the beta test, I got a message that said I’ll get an e-mail when there’s room for me.)

Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 8:52:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, October 24, 2008

101 Best Sites: Civil War Soldiers and Photo Reunions
Posted by Diane

This week, we’re highlighting these two sites from our 2008 101 Best Web Sites list:

Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System: Start your search for Union or Confederate Civil War ancestors in this database of 6.3 million soldiers’ names (names appear twice if soldiers fought for more than one regiment or used a different name) from 44 states and territories. Names link to information about the regiments and the battles they fought.

DeadFred: If you're starting from a pile of old photos or you’re looking for lost family pictures, this photo-reunion site is the place to click. Search by surname, and if you find a match, contact the submitter for information. DeadFred's collection encompasses some 14,600 surnames and 76,00 records, and it's reunited 1,227 old photos with families.

See the rest of the best on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, October 24, 2008 7:32:06 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, October 17, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Canadian Census and Jewish Resources
Posted by Diane

Here's a look at two of our 101 Best Web Sites picks for 2008:

Automated Genealogy: Those with Canadian roots will appreciate this free, volunteer site with transcriptions and indexes of Canadian censuses.

Transcribed and in various stages of proofreading are the 1901, 1906 (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) and 1911 enumerations. The 1851-1852 census is underway, with an ambitious effort to link to other online records about each individual.

Avotaynu: Use this site’s Consolidated Jewish Surname Index to run a Soundex search of information about 699,084 surnames, mostly Jewish, in 42 databases totaling more than 7.3 million records. You also can subscribe to Avotaynu’s free e-mail newsletter on Jewish genealogy.

See the rest of the 101 best at FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Canadian roots | Genealogy Web Sites | Jewish roots

Friday, October 17, 2008 6:12:21 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Free Database of the Week: Cook County Naturalization Records
Posted by Diane

If your immigrant ancestor settled in Chicago or the surrounding area, here's one for you:

Cook County, Ill. (home of Chicago), has posted a database of transcribed information from declarations of intention filed in the county’s circuit court between 1906 and 1929.

A declaration of intention, sometimes called “first papers,” was the first step toward becoming a US citizen.

Records are still being added. So far, the database contains information from more than 150,000 of the 400,000 declarations of intention filed. A grant from the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission funds the project.

The search is pretty flexible: You can search on a name or part of a name, birthdate, birth place, occupation or other parameters. My search on Syria as the country of birth netted 94 matches.

Click on a match to see the date the intention was filed, birth information, occupation, current residence, port of departure for the United States and date of arrival.

To order the original declaration of intention (for a search fee of $9, plus photocopying charges), click the How to Order link at the bottom of the page.

See Family Tree Magazine's online guide to learn more about finding your ancestors’ naturalization records.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | immigration records

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 6:54:43 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Friday, October 10, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Overseas Cemeteries and Stateside Resource
Posted by Diane

Here are two more of our 101 Best Web Sites for researching your family tree:

American Battle Monuments Commission: Search for almost 125,000 US War dead buried in 24 overseas cemeteries (the Corozal American Cemetery database also names civilians who worked on the Panama Canal), as well as more than 94,000 military commemorated on Tablets of the Missing.

USGenWeb Project: This sprawling, all-volunteer site is packed with how-to tips, queries and records for every state and most counties within those states. Special records preservation projects cover subjects such as censuses, tombstones and family group sheets. Don't miss the easy-to-overlook search of the entire site or any one state.

See the rest of our 101 Best Sites in the Research Toolkit area of our Web site.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, October 10, 2008 8:12:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Online Newspapers
Posted by Diane

This week's installment of 101 Best Web Sites delivers two resources for paging through historical newspapers:

Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection
Click on the county map to see what's available and where to find it in this collection of nearly 450,000 digitized pages from 136 Colorado newspapers, published from 1859 to 1933. Coverage spans 71 cities and 41 Centennial State counties. You'll need Internet Explorer to get the most out of this site.

Newspaper Abstracts
Find your ancestors in the news—without getting ink on your fingers. At last count this volunteer project included nearly 52,000 pages of abstracts and extracts from historical newspapers, with an emphasis on items of interest to genealogists such as obituaries.

See the rest of the best sites in the Research Toolkit area of our Web site.

Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 11:34:27 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Thursday, September 25, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Military History and Records Portal
Posted by Diane

Peruse this week’s highlights from our 101 Best Web Sites for family history:

eHistory: We put this free Ohio State University site in our military research category for rich records of conflicts—including the The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. (the OR), battle overviews, Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War, maps and timelines.

Access Genealogy: Besides oodles of links, this free portal also serves up census, vital, immigration, cemetery and military records; plus biographies and such Native American essentials as the 1880 Cherokee census and the Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes (aka the Dawes Rolls).

You can search by surname, or go to United States Genealogy to browse databases by title.

See the rest of our 2008 101 Best Web Sites picks on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Genealogy Web Sites | Military records

Thursday, September 25, 2008 7:15:42 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Genealogy Resource Confusion? New Online Directory Promises Help
Posted by Diane

Genealogy Today’s Illya D’Addezio tells me he’s in the final steps of creating an online genealogy directory that’ll let you find and access multiple resources from one place.

Using the free Live Roots site, which launches Oct. 10, you can search a variety of genealogy databases and publishers’ catalogs, and learn where information from the same resource exists in multiple places, online and off.

With the same genealogy information frequently printed in books and hosted on numerous Web sites in a variety of forms (indexes, transcriptions, record images, narratives, etc.), this tool may help you sort out the confusion—and show you where to find the actual records all that data came from in the first place.

You'll be able to search Live Roots on a name, place or other keyword, then link to the online resources, learn how to access the offline ones, or click to commission a researcher who can get a record for you.

We’ll spill more details about the site as they’re available.

Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 3:32:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [5]

Friday, September 19, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Free Immigration Info and Swedish Records
Posted by Diane

Here are the two 101 Best Web Sites picks we're highlighting this week:

Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild: This guild of volunteers has tirelessly transcribed more than 8,000 passenger manifests, many from less-famous ports. Search by surname, captain's name, port of arrival or departure, and ship name.

And there's more: The guild’s Compass section offers how-to help for researching immigrants; a new adoption section has advice for adoptees and birth parents who want to reunite with their biological family members.

Genline: Genline delivers images of 16 million-plus pages of church records (virtually everything available) to your computer. Subscriptions start at about $23 for 20 days. You also can go to the resources section to learn Swedish terms you’ll encounter in your research and get how-to articles.

Link to the rest of our 101 list on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Genealogy Web Sites | immigration records | International Genealogy

Friday, September 19, 2008 8:10:07 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, September 18, 2008

I *Heart* Awards!
Posted by Diane

A great big thank-you to Renee Zamora over at Renee’s Genealogy Blog, who honored us with the I Heart Your Blog award!

Now it’s my turn to nominate seven—only seven!—blogs I heart. (I tried to avoid any repeats.) Here are my picks:

Geneablogie
I’ll forgive lawyer Craig Manson for coming up with this blog title before we could. He offers thoughtful takes on topics you don’t see covered many other places.

The Genealogue
I love me some irreverent genealogy humor. Chris Dunham probably spent half his grade school career writing on the blackboard (I’m half afraid of what he’ll say about getting an I Heart Your Blog award.)

Granite in My Blood
I can definitely appreciate someone who appreciates a cemetery. Midge Frazel (who’s related to none other than Isaac Denison) posts a potpourri of intriguing gravestone photos, family photos and research updates.

Library of Congress Today in History Blog
The library's director of communications Matt Raymond researches blog-worthy historical events and then tells us about them . . . not a job I'd love at all.

Photo Detective
Besides writing our Photo Detective blog, Maureen A. Taylor keeps a photo news and research blog on her own site. It’s the first place I heard of a photosynth.

The Practical Archivist
Archivist Sally Jacobs has sound photo-preservation advice with titles like “The Chemical Sandwich of Doom.” And I couldn’t not like her blog description.

Q&Q Blog
I’m a writer, and Brian Klems of our sister magazine Writer’s Digest eloquently answers writers’ questions.

Here are the rules for award recipients:
1. Can put the logo on his/her blog
2. Must link to the person who gave the award
3. Must nominate seven other blogs and link to them
4. Must leave a comment on each of the nominated blogs

Genealogy fun | Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, September 18, 2008 5:56:07 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [4]

Monday, September 15, 2008

Another SSDI-Based Obituary Site
Posted by Diane

Yesterday’s high winds in Cincinnati cut off power to Family Tree Magazine’s offices, closing us down for the day.

But I’m one of the lucky 10 percent of people in the area who haven't lost electricity, so I thought I’d blog (from the comfort of home) about a new Web site that’ll compete with Footnote’s just-launched Footnote Pages.

Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about a memorial site called Tributes, started by the same guy who founded the job-hunting site Monster.com. Tributes' “soft launch” was this summer; the official launch is set for Sept. 23.

Like Footnote Pages, Tributes uses the Social Security Death Index as a foundation for online profiles of the deceased. You can link profiles together social networking-style and enhance them with words and multimedia.

According to the Times, Tributes members can sign up to get e-mail alerts when a person has died based on the person’s last name, school, military unit or ZIP code. “Eventually, users will be able to download their address book to the site to keep abreast of the passing of friends and relatives.” (Though this "death watch" tool might seem a little macabre, it could be useful, say, if you've been unsuccessfully searching for your dad's WWII Army comrades.)

You can create 300-word Tributes obituaries free; elaborate multimedia obituaries costs $80 per year or $300 for an unlimited time period.

Just by comparison, building profiles on Footnote Pages is free. It’s also a little more genealogy-oriented: if you have a subscription to Footnote’s historical records database, you can search it for records related to a deceased person and link them to his or her profile.

Of course, both sites hold the possibility you'll fill in blanks on your pedigree chart by finding an existing, tricked-out profile for an ancestor.

Have you used either Footnote Pages or Tributes, or another memorial site? What did you think? Click Comments to post here, or post in our Web Watch Forum.

Footnote | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, September 15, 2008 6:10:09 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, September 12, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Norwegian Roots and Maps Galore
Posted by Diane

Here's our weekly (roughly; I got thrown off schedule last week) look at two of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Web Sites for 2008.

Digitalarkivet was originally home to 1801, 1865, 1875 and 1900 Norwegian censuses, this national archives site is expanding to also encompass parish records—the most important family research tool in Norway.

Click Database Selector to find databases by county or year, or choose the Search in All the Database link (note this page doesn’t seem to have an English translation, but you can get a serviceable one by pasting the text into Google’s translator and selecting Norwegian as the language to translate from).

The Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection brings digitized historical maps from around the world straight to your computer screen. They’re sorted by category, so first scroll down and click Historical Maps, then a continent or country. From there, you can choose maps of cities, military maps and maps showing historical eras, territorial growth, populations and more.

Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy

Friday, September 12, 2008 8:28:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Familybuilder Announces Low-Cost DNA Tests; Global Network
Posted by Diane

Two big announcements from Familybuilder, the company that created the Family Tree genealogy application for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

First, Familybuilder’s new Global Network brings the Family Tree application outside of social networking sites.

Anyone can create a Family Tree profile on Familybuilder and link it to Family Tree profiles on social networking sites. (More than 20 million Family Tree profiles exist on such sites.) You’ll need a free registration to build a tree or access existing ones.

Second, starting Oct. 15, Familybuilder will offer low-cost DNA tests, focusing on the social networking market. According to a written announcement, “No genealogy service caters to the 300 to 400 million people who use social networks to research their family trees.”

The offerings include a 17-marker Y-DNA test and a mitochondrial (mt) DNA test; both cost $59.95.

FamilyBuilder does have others beat: Compare its 17-marker test with FamilyTreeDNA’s 12-marker test ($149); DNA Testing Systems’ 13-marker test ($200); Chromosomal Labs’ 19-marker test is $260.

A 17-marker test is usually enough to tell you if you’re related to someone, but higher-resolution tests (those that test more markers) are more accurate. For example, it’s possible a 17-marker test may match on 15 of the 17 markers, where a 45-marker test of the same two people might match on 30 out of the 45 markers.

Note that a Y-DNA test doesn’t tell you how you’re related to someone; but it estimates how long ago a common ancestor may have lived.

Many genealogists go straight for the higher-marker tests (my guess is that's the market most traditional genetic genealogy companies concentrate on). Familybuilder says it plans to expand its DNA lineup and is “committed to continuously driving the costs of these tests down over time.”

Genealogy Web Sites | Genetic Genealogy

Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:27:33 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Footnote Launches "Facebook for the Deceased"
Posted by Diane

Russ Wilding, CEO of subscription historical records service Footnote appeared at TechCrunch50 (an annual technology conference) to launch Footnote Pages, what CEO Russ Wilder described as "Facebook for the deceased."

The product would contain profiles of deceased individuals, populated with the 80 million names from the SSDI. Survivors and friends can find their loved one or start a new page. Then they add information and stories about the person; upload photos; and link profiles of people who went to the same school, worked together, were related or were otherwise associated during life.

Here’s where Footnote’s existing historical records collections come into play: You can search Footnote for records related to the deceased person and attach them to his profile.

Using the example of a friend who’d died in a motorcycle accident, Wilding added to his profile a map with the accident location, uploaded a high school photo, and linked him to another student at the school.

You’ll need a free Footnote membership to create a Footnote Page. To access Footnote’s historical records, you’d need a Footnote subscription ($11.95 per month and $69.95 per year).

Marketing director Justin Schroepfer says Footnote was one of 52 applicants selected from more than 1,000 to present at the TechCrunch50 conference. He and his colleagues had to keep a lid on the news due to an agreement with TechCrunch.

After Wilding’s presentation, TechCrunch50 judges critiqued the idea. One suggested the idea of building an online profile for a deceased person might be disturbing.

Similar memorials are already on other Web sites such as Legacy.com; but Footnote takes it a step further by starting with the SSDI and incorporating historical records.

Here’s what Footnote had to say about Footnote Pages in an announcement:

• Even for an audience that might not be as familiar with social networking, these pages allow multiple users to easily contribute content and insights helping to create a more complete picture of the people we care about.

• Maps, timelines, and photo galleries bring these pages to life and add context.

• Footnote Pages helps associate and link pages to others besides the immediate family; such as friends, prominent figures, etc.

• Footnote pages can be used to create tribute pages for family & friends, memorial pages for ancestors or research pages to gather information.

• Pages can also be created to document and discuss historical events, places and organizations (for example, the Vietnam War, the Assassination of John F. Kennedy or the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

Footnote | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 11:13:51 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

SSDI Now Free on GenealogyBank, Too
Posted by Diane

You have another place to search the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) for free.

The subscription historical newspaper service GenealogyBank has made its version of the SSDI—a database of people whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration (SSA)—free. Most deaths listed in the SSDI happened after 1962, but look anyway—my great-grandfather, who died in 1949, is in there.

The SSDI can tell you when and where your ancestor died, and his Social Security number (SSN). You can use the SSN and death information to request his SS-5, the record of his application for a Social Security card. (Learn how in our associate editor's Family Tree Firsts post.)

Other places with the SSDI free include FamilySearch, FamilyTreeLegends, World Vital Records, NewEnglandAncestors.org and RootsWeb. Each site adds new death information from the SSA on a different schedule; GenealogyBank updates its SSDI weekly.

You can search several sites' SSDI databases simultaneously through Stephen P. Morse's One-Step search.

Genealogy Web Sites | Public Records

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 3:27:42 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

We'd Like Your Feedback!
Posted by Grace

As you poke around our new site, please let us know what you think of it by taking our survey! All your feedback helps us make FamilyTreeMagazine.com even better.

Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, September 03, 2008 8:49:36 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, September 01, 2008

Free Database of the Week: Erie Railroad Workers
Posted by Diane

In honor of Labor Day, this week’s free database is the Erie Magazine Last Name Index, created by a Milwaukee-based Erie Railroad fan.

It’s actually not truly a database, since you don’t search it—instead, you browse by last name. Names come from Erie Railroad Magazine, published for workers who helped build the railroad. It started in southern New York (because the upstaters got the canal) and eventually extended into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois (learn more from the Erie-Lackawanna Historical Society).

Look around the rest of this railroad enthusiast's great site, too, for historical information, employee rosters, rail officials’ names and resources for continuing your search for Erie and other railroad ancestors.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, September 01, 2008 3:11:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

101 Best Sites: Canadian Histories and European Places
Posted by Diane

This week’s highlighted 101 Best Web Sites for genealogy take us to Canada and Europe:

Our Roots/Nos Racines: Digitized local histories from across Canada have landed on this site with English and French versions. Topics include the Klondike Gold Rush, Irish immigrants at Grosse-Île, indigenous communities, historic forts and trading posts, and more. Once you've found a volume about the places and times your ancestors experienced, you can search for their names and other terms.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online: Stumped by European place names? This guide to more than 900,000 places in Europe and around the world covers current and historical geography. Many location listings give coordinates, helping you to find them on a map.

To see all our 101 Best Web Sites for 2008, visit the (new!) FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy

Monday, September 01, 2008 3:03:12 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Introducing the New FamilyTreeMagazine.com
Posted by Diane

We got ourselves a new Web site! The brand-spanking-new FamilyTreeMagazine.com launched just a few minutes ago.

Our new setup looks nicer and it's more user-friendly. The improved navigation makes it easy to find the content you want: You can browse the article archives by topic, or search the entire site from any page.

Each article offers buttons to bookmark the page, share it via e-mail or social networking sites, and generate a printer-friendly version. You can even subscribe to your favorite topics via RSS.

Our new home page will highlight more of what’s inside the site, including blog feeds and links to the most recently posted articles.

Even with all those features, what we’re most excited about is the technology behind this new site—it'll be much easier for us to put more great articles online.

If you were comfortable with the quirks of our old site (not unlike a cozy old recliner with a footrest you have to prop up using a two-by-four), these tips might help you get to know (and love, we hope) the new one:

To stop the screens in the top middle of the home page from changing, click on any of the four tabs (Welcome, State Guides, Best Web Sites, Expert Advice) to land on that screen.

Click the Welcome tab for a link to an article with detailed information on the new site.

You can increase the text size through your Web browser. In Internet Explorer, go to Page menu>Text Size. In Firefox, look under the View menu.

You can browse our how-to articles by hovering over a category name in the orange navigation bar, then clicking on one of the blue topics that appear in the white space below it. Then, to see all the articles for that topic, click the “See all” link in the upper right.

If you click one of the category names in the orange navigation bar, you can click “Subscribe to this topic’s RSS feed” to get an e-mail whenever we add an article to that category.

To see the Ethnic Toolkits from our old site, click on Heritage in the orange bar, then select from the blue list of ethnic backgrounds. You also can subscribe to an RSS feed for each of these ethnicities.

Find the list of 2008 101 Best Web Sites under Research Toolkit.

We invite you to take a look around the new site (even we keep finding stuff we didn’t know we had online). Got feedback? You can add it here (click Comments blow), post in our Talk to Us Forum or e-mail us.

Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, August 28, 2008 8:38:37 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [3]

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

This Week's Genealogy News Roundup
Posted by Diane

Here's a smattering of genealogy biz news from this week:

Footnote raises prices: Citing its greatly increased offerings, Web site improvements and the challenging economy, historical records site Footnote has announced it’s raising subscription prices to $11.95 for one month and $69.96 for a year (up from $7.95 and $59.95, respectively). The changes don’t take effect until Sept. 1, so if you’ve been meaning to join, now’s the time.

Ancestry.com World Archive Project hits milestone: Ancestry.com’s volunteer indexing initiative, the World Archives Project (now in beta) has 650 active keyers who’ve already indexed more than 100,000 records—17,500 of those by one lightning-fast typist. The Wisconsin mortality records project is on track for completion in September.

World Archives’ project Indexers will receive free access to the indexes they’re creating; record images will be part of Ancestry.com’s subscription databases. See our blog post for more on the project.

FamilySearch Indexing keeps chugging along: FamilySearch added 2 million-plus new images or indexed records this week to its free pilot Record Search databases.

Among them are Ohio WWII draft registration card images, marriage indexes for 14 more West Virginia Counties, and an index to the Coahulia, Mexico, 1930 census.

FindMyPast adds 3.2 million parish marriages: The UK family history database FindMyPast has enhanced its Parish Records Collection with 3.2 million marriage records dating back to 1538. Burial records already are in the collection; baptism records are still to come.

The parish records are available with an Explorer subscription, which costs 54.95 pounds ($109) for 6 months or 89.95 pounds ($178) for a year. Learn more about this collection in this Genealogy Insider post.

Genealogy Industry | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 2:19:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Prairie Home Companion Star Talks Family History on 50th Genealogy Gems Podcast
Posted by Diane

Congratulations to Genealogy Gems podcaster Lisa Louise Cooke (also host of our own monthly Family Tree Magazine podcast) on her 50th episode!

She celebrates by interviewing Tim Russell, voice actor on Garrisson Keillor’s radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” and Al, The Stage Manager in the eponymous movie. Turns out Russell's also an avid family historian.

In the same episode, Cooke chats with fellow pocasters The Genealogy Guys, DearMYRTLE, and Mike O'Laughlin.

Tune in to the 50th Genealogy Gems Podcast free at Genealogy Gems.

Genealogy fun | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 1:38:23 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, August 15, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Interment.net and SharedTree
Posted by Diane

This week's 101 best genealogy Web site highlights:

SharedTree is a free place to build and share your tree online. Pluses include not having to download anything, GDCOM compatibility, unlimited file size and real-time collaboration with other researchers.

Interment.net is one of the go-to places for searching cemetery records—in this case, 3.9 million transcriptions from 8,375 cemeteries in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand and other countries.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, August 15, 2008 7:12:21 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [4]

Monday, August 11, 2008

Researching African-American Historical Newspapers
Posted by Diane

Tune in to the most recent Genealogy Guys podcast to hear about a new resource for African-American researchers, Finding and Using African American Newspapers by Tim Pinnick (Gregath Publishing).

Genealogists often shy away from searching through old newspapers because it requires digging up the names of sometimes-obscure titles, and often traveling to the library and enduring lots of microfilm-scrolling. And most of us seem to assume our ancestors weren’t newsworthy, anyway.

In an excerpt on his Web site, Pinnick ticks off the benefits of historical newspapers for African-American researchers in particular: articles that associate an ancestor with a slaveholding family, birth and death dates before vital records were kept, freed slaves’ notices seeking information about loved ones, society pages with family members’ comings and goings.

A few additional resources for African-American newspapers (feel free to click comment and add others you know of):

ProQuest Black Newspapers, a database available free through many public libraries—see a description here

Chronicling America, a Library of Congress site with digitized newspapers including Washington, DC’s The Colored American

Freedom’s Journal, published in New York City, is digitized at the Wisconsin Historical Society Web site.

African-American Newspapers (1829-present), information from Princeton University on 200 papers published in 31 cities.

Local and state historical societies are good sources of microfilmed African-American newspapers published in the area (for example, here is a list of 80 titles available at the Kansas Historical Society). You might be able borrow papers on microfilm through interlibrary loan.

African-American roots | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, August 11, 2008 10:22:56 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Friday, August 08, 2008

101 Sites: FamilySearch Labs and Florida Memory
Posted by Diane

Here are this week's 101 Best Web Sites highlights. See the rest of the list at FamilyTreeMagazine.com:

FamilySearch Labs is where you can access cool new tools that one day will be part of the main FamilySearch site. That includes the Web-based tool volunteers all over the world use to index digitized records, a family tree application (currently being rolled out to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ locations) and the Record Search Pilot. Webmasters recently added a global map that lets you search records from particular areas of the world.

Search results from the free indexes on the Florida Memory Project link to digitized originals Spanish land grants, Confederate pension applications and WWI service cards. The Florida Photographic Collection has 143,000 online images.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, August 08, 2008 7:54:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Chinese Genealogy Resources and Ancestry.com’s Jiapu.cn
Posted by Diane

We’ve heard some questions about Ancestry.com’s recently launched Chinese site, Jiapu.cn, and help for researchers who want to use it but don’t know Chinese.

“There isn’t an English version of the Chinese site, just as there isn’t an English version of our Italian, French, German or Swedish sites,” says Simon Zivian, spokesperson for the Ancestry.com’s international business. “These international sites have been launched in local markets for those markets.”

In addition, the jiapu (family histories) on the site are in Chinese.

You can get a rough translation using Google’s Web page translator, but you’d need to search using Chinese characters, and you’d need translation help with the digitized records.

For translation help, I’d suggest contacting a university Asian Studies department or a local Chinese organization to ask for recommendations. Here are a few other Chinese genealogy resources:

Shanghai Library (the Web site has an English version)
The site states a genealogy service is available by telephone or writing but you still may need to have your communications translated.

Genforum China forum

In Search of Your Asian Roots: Genealogical Research on Chinese Surnames by Sheau-yueh J. Chao from Genealogical Publishing Co

China Gateway
Links to repositories in North America, China and elsewhere that have Chinese collections

Chinese Immigration from the National Archives

Chinese-Canadian Genealogy

I did a search for professional genealogists specializing in Chinese research and came up empty. Hit Comment and add a post if you know of one.

Asian roots | Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy

Friday, August 08, 2008 7:25:59 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [4]

Friday, August 01, 2008

Google Creates Wikipedia Rival
Posted by Grace

Wikipedia—the crowdsourced encyclopedia—has a lot of strengths. Calling on the knowledge of all its users, Wikipedia is able to revise and rewrite articles to update them instantly. Because there's no space limit, even Alabama's Boll Weevil Monument, government cheese and Hoovervilles have their own entries.

But it also has one big weakness: Because anybody can edit or write practically anything, it's difficult to have absolute confidence that all its contents are accurate.

Knol, a new project from Google, aims to collect information on every topic under the sun—from experts, not anonymous editors. Google refrains from editing knols (units of knowledge), but other users can submit comments and reviews. Think of it as a more moderated version of Wikipedia's Wild West.

The site debuted (as Wired reported) with articles mainly on medical conditions. I'm curious to see how long it takes Knol to amass an amount of articles to compete with Wikipedia. Knol's articles on genealogy currently are pretty limited. Any volunteers?

Genealogy Web Sites | Research Tips

Friday, August 01, 2008 7:22:02 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Free Database of the Week: Irish Mariners
Posted by Diane

The tip for this free database comes from a post to the FamilyTreeMagazine.com Forum:

At Irish Mariners, researcher David Snook has built an index to 16,000 Irish-born merchant seamen who served between 1918 and 1921, and whose ID cards (called CR 10 cards) are in the Southampton (England) Civic Archives.

Irish Mariners index entries give the mariner’s name, ID number, birth date and place, next of kin and dates of voyages.

Snook also offers contact information and ordering tips for requesting photocopies of the original cards—which bear photos of the mariners—from the Southampton archives. It'll cost around 2.5 pounds (about $5) plus postage and possibly a research fee, depending on the information you provide.

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy | UK and Irish roots

Thursday, July 31, 2008 8:58:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

101 Best Sites Highlight: LOC and Diigo
Posted by Diane

Among our 101 Best Web Sites for 2008, this week we're highlighting the Library of Congress and Diigo:

The nation’s library has digitized more than 9 million documents, photos and maps here—access them through American Memory or the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (which lists the library’s entire collection; results for digitized items link to the image). Need to find a book? The library catalog has just about every book in existence. Click the Researchers link for many other resources including bibliographies and collection guides, information on genealogical materials, links to research databases, and international resources.

Diigo, short for Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff, is a tool that lets you highlight and annotate parts of Web pages for yourself or for sharing with other researchers. You can organize and search your bookmarks, and it all works in your favorite Web browser.

Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, July 31, 2008 2:20:46 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Friday, July 25, 2008

Geni Says Goodbye to Beta, Hello to New Features
Posted by Diane

The free Los Angeles-based family networking site Geni, honored in May as one of Time magazine’s top 50 sites of 2008, has emerged from beta with new features including tree merging and video sharing.

Here’s how tree merging works: When you add an e-mail address to a profile, Geni looks for the address on existing trees. If found, the site sends a merge request to the person asking if they’d like the profiles merged. Conflict resolution tools help find and resolve duplicate people. Find more on tree merging in Geni’s online forum.

Video sharing is free and unlimited, with videos viewable only by your family. As with photos, you can tag videos by event name, creating a kind of virtual multimedia scrapbook of the event. Get more details—including supported file formats and browsers—on Geni’s Forum.

Other, smaller additions include a Recently Online notice of which family members have visited Geni recently, Tree Stats on your home page ,and a Complete Your Family module for inviting relatives to join you on Geni.

Former executives and early employees of such esteemed sites as PayPal, eGroups, eBay and Tribe launched privately held Geni in January 2007. Financial backing comes from venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.

Genealogy Web Sites

Friday, July 25, 2008 3:02:53 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Thursday, July 24, 2008

101 Web Sites: DNA and Mapping Tools
Posted by Diane

Two more great genealogy sites you should check out (for more recommendations, see the full list of this year’s 101 Best Web Sites):

GeneTree combines social networking and genetic genealogy. You can make profiles for yourself and your ancestors, keep track of DNA test results and search for matches. Use the site free even if you didn’t take advantage of GeneTree’s testing services, which include both mitochondrial- and (as of this week) Y-DNA tests.

Search the USGS Geographic Names Information System for towns (even those no longer in existence), landmarks, waterways, cemeteries and more in this database of more than 2 million places. You can map any result using a variety of online tools.

Genealogy Web Sites | Genetic Genealogy

Thursday, July 24, 2008 1:54:12 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Free Database of the Week: FBI Records on Footnote
Posted by Diane

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation July 26, historical records subscription service Footnote is making its collection of FBI Case Files free through the end of August.

The files date from 1908 to 1922 and number 2 million records that might hold some surprises for genealogists.

One 1918 case I happened across in the Miscellaneous Files category involved the discovery of a trunkful of whiskey at the Central Union Depot in downtown Cincinnati. A report named witnesses, the FBI agents who investigated, the man accused of shipping the trunk in violation of the Reed Amendment (which prohibited transporting alcohol to dry states), and the perpetrator's female accomplice. Later documents show the pair was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

Other types of cases include

“Mexican Files,” 1909-1921: investigations of violations of Mexican neutrality
“Old German Files,” 1915-1920: records of German enemy aliens, sympathizers, and others suspected of disloyalty, mainly during World War I
Bureau Section Files, 1920-21: records transferred from the Department of Justice concerning violations of federal laws.

The original records are at the National Archives and Records Administration in Record Group 65.

Click here to search the FBI Case Files database (you also can get to the database using the See All Databases link on Footnote’s home page).

Free Databases | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 4:17:40 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, July 21, 2008

Ancestry.com and FamilySearch to Make US Censuses Free
Posted by Diane

The two largest organizations in genealogy are embarking on a resource-exchanging partnership that will put more records online—starting with US censuses.

Under the agreement, enhanced census indexes will be free for a limited time on Ancestry.com and permanently on FamilySearch. Record images will be available by subscription on Ancestry.com and free at FamilySearch’s 4,500 worldwide Family History Centers, as well as National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) regional facilities.

FamilySearch, which is digitizing census records at NARA, will provide its record images to Ancestry.com. These newer images, created with more-recent technology, are of better quality than those available on Ancestry.com.

Ancestry.com will give FamilySearch its indexes to censuses from 1790 to 1930. FamilySearch Indexing volunteers will use them as a “first draft,” double-checking information and adding data fields (such as birth month and year) to create an improved index.

FamilySearch volunteers already were indexing some censuses, following a two-pass, arbitrated system: Each record is indexed twice by different people; a knowledgeable third person resolves any differences in the versions. The volunteers have completed a 1900 census index, now free at FamilySearch Record Search.

These existing FamilySearch indexes will be merged with Ancestry.com’s indexes. (If a person’s name is indexed under different spellings, both spellings will remain.)

The partnership’s first exchange is the 1900 census. The improved record images are on Ancestry.com now; the merged index will become available in August. Other censuses will be released over the next several years as the images and indexes are completed.

The census indexes on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch will link to record images on Ancestry.com. If someone without an Ancestry.com subscription clicks the image link, he’ll be prompted to join. Subscriptions cost $155.40 per year or $19.95 for a month.

Ancestry.com has long been the target of complaints about its census indexes, so the company and its subscribers will undoubtedly welcome the new-and-improved versions.

Friday, I had a chance to talk with representatives of both organizations, who agreed genealogists will appreciate the broader access to records, improved indexes and higher-quality digital images. On some record images, you even can see previously indiscernible notations, according to Ancestry.com vice president of content Gary Gibb.

Ancestry.com | FamilySearch | Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, July 21, 2008 3:01:01 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [12]

Thursday, July 17, 2008

101 Best Web Sites: Dutch and Civil War Resources
Posted by Diane

Here are details on two more of our 101 Best Web sites (see the rest on FamilyTreeMagazine.com):

Genlias, the enviable Dutch database, is a partnership of public archives in the Netherlands and overseas with nearly 45 million names extracted from some 10.8 million civil register records. (Death records enter the public domain after 50 years, marriage records after 75 years and birth records after 100 years.)

New here are statement of succession records (inheritance declarations used to calculate death duties) dating from 1808. You can get a list of available records by region, too.

Get a jump on your Civil War research at the National Park Service Civil War Home Page. The war's sesquicentennial commemoration isn’t until 2011 to 2015, but preparations have already begun. Now, you can learn about the war's beginnings in "Bloody Kansas" and link to additional online resources. Also get a timeline, find out about Civil War parks and more.

Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, July 17, 2008 1:21:07 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, July 14, 2008

Free Chicago Vital Records Search Goes Online
Posted by Diane

In the March 2008 Family Tree Magazine Branching Out news column, we reported the clerk’s office in Cook County, Illinois—home to Chicago—was digitizing vital records for an online index.

The project is finally finished, and you can search the index at the county's Genealogy Online Web site. Records date back to the 1880s (the Great Chicago Fire destroyed Cook County vital records from before 1871).

First, you’ll need a free site registration. Then you can search birth and death certificates (older than 75 and 50 years, respectively), and marriage licenses (older than 50 years) by name and optional year range, or year and file number.

Online genealogy guru Steve Morse has created an online form that gives you a sounds-like option for names.

Matches show the person’s name, the record date and file number, with an option to download a copy of the record from the clerk's office for $15.

You also could use the index information to order the microfilmed records from the Family History Library (run a keyword search of the online catalog on cook county and birth, marriage or death). The rental fee runs about $5 per roll; visit your local Family History Center to put in your request.

(Update: Click Comments below for expert tips on finding microfilmed Cook County vital records. Also, as a Family Tree Magazine E-mail Update newsletter reader pointed out, records are still being added to the CookCountyGenealogy database.)

Genealogy Web Sites | Public Records

Monday, July 14, 2008 2:20:10 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Friday, July 11, 2008

New Source for British Parish Records
Posted by Diane

The UK fee-based data site FindMyPast.com is adding baptism, marriage and burial records from more than 1,000 parishes across Britain.

The records date as far back as 1538, making them valuable sources for research before civil registration began in 1837. You can search by surname across all the records without knowing where your ancestor lived.

Starting today, you can view more than over 15 million parish burial records and memorial inscriptions. A total of 7 million baptism, marriage and probate records will become available later this year.

The parish records are available with an Explorer subscription to FindMyPast.com, which costs 54.95 pounds ($109) for 6 months or 89.95 pounds ($178) for a year.

You also can search some English baptism and marriages through FamilySearch Labs' Record Search (scroll down and look under Vital Records).

Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy | UK and Irish roots

Friday, July 11, 2008 2:13:41 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, July 10, 2008

New Blog Series: 101 Best Web Sites Profiles
Posted by Diane

I’ll be highlighting two of our 101 Best Web Sites for genealogy (selected at random) each week right here. My math skills aren’t the greatest, but I figure at this rate, we’ll finish up in time to start next year’s list.

Let’s start with Documenting the American South, where the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill library publishes digitized texts, images and audio files.

We called this site one of the “Best for African-American Researchers” because of its strong African-American collections, including information on slavery, biographies and Southern black churches. But it covers a wide range of Southern history topics, including literature, North Carolinians in World War I, and southerners’ letters and other writings.

Next up: Family History Online, a fee-based site that lets you search records compiled by family history societies in England, Wales and Australia. The 67 million records now available include parish registers, memorial inscriptions, censuses, poor law documents and more. (See a breakdown by place under the Databases menu.)

You’ll need to register with the site to search the name index. You see limited results for free; the cost to view full record entries starts at 5 pounds (that's about $10).

The September 2008 Family Tree Magazine (which hits newsstands next week) has the full 101 Best Web Sites list, or click through to them all from FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

And you can visit our Forum to nominate your favorite family history site for honors in 2009.

Family Tree Magazine articles | Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:20:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Ancestry.com Plays up New Search Experience
Posted by Diane

Ancestry.com staffers have been working the PR circuit lately to promote the new "search experience" opened to the public this spring. Makes you wonder whether the old search will be shut down soon—after all, the company wouldn’t run the two searches side-by-side forever.

In an interview last week, product development manager Kendall Hulet told me about 90 percent of people still were using the old search. And on blogs including our own, Ancestry.com’s and the Ancestry Insider, most seem to prefer the old search.

Part of the issue may just be getting used to a new way of doing things, but Hulet knows there still room for improvement.

"There are bugs," he admitted, but emphasized you can use the Tell Us What You Think button to send feedback (comments specifically describing a problem are most helpful). The Ancestry Insider quizzed him about two bugs, including one that causes more false matches with the new search than the old.

I asked Hulet about that bar in the new search results that basically says you’ll be wasting your time if you continue looking at results. Why even include those far-fetched matches?

The warning is an attempt to help people who otherwise would spend hours clicking every single result, Hulet says, while also giving more-experienced users access to any record that has the remotest chance of being an ancestor. “What I suggest to people who don’t want to see all those results is to use more Exact terms in their search,” he added.

Something else to watch out for: In the advanced search, if you click the Exact box for one of your terms, the search won’t find records that don’t include that information. (Sorry for the double negative—say you choose Exact for a birth date. Your search won't pull up a newspaper engagement announcement that lacks birth information.)

Hulet couldn't say when the old search might go away. He did say something you'll be happy to hear—an improved search engine is in the works (though he cautioned the upgrade would take some time).

Hear more from Hulet about Ancestry.com's new search experience on DearMyrtle’s July 1 podcast.

Ancestry.com | Genealogy Web Sites

Wednesday, July 09, 2008 7:43:22 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [9]

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Quick Look: Resources for Revolutionary War Ancestors
Posted by Diane

Happy Fourth of July! To celebrate the birthday of the United States, here’s a quick look at resources for learning about ancestors who witnessed our country’s struggle into existence:

Request a free lookup of Revolutionary-era ancestors in the DAR Patriot Index, a three-volume set with facts on 100,000-plus people, on the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Web site.

Revolutionary War veterans’ pension files are digitized on HeritageQuest Online, available free through many public libraries. (For pension files longer than 10 pages, this collection contains just the genealogically significant documents.)

In Footnote’s Revolutionary Era Collection, you’ll find the full pension files, plus Revolutionary War muster rolls and service records. You’ll need a subscription to access those, but many historical documents here are free, including Constitutional Convention records and George Washington’s correspondence.

Many veterans of the Revolutionary War (and the War of 1812) received government compensation in the form of land. Bounty land warrant records are on microfilm at the National Archives and Records Administration, the Family History Library and some public libraries. You also can find them on the subscription site Ancestry.com.

Many of these warrants awarded land in what’s now Kentucky and Ohio; the Kentucky Land Office made its records free online.

Check out these genealogy and history Web sites, too:

Archiving Early America
(Documents and maps from 18th-century America)

The Battle of Bunker Hill

Charters of Freedom: Declaration of Independence

GenealogyGems Fourth of July Podcast
(A special episode filled with historic speeches and nostalgic patriotic tunes)

Hargrett Rare Map Collection: Revolutionary America

National Society Sons of the American Revolution

NewEnglandAncestors.org

Click Comments (below) to add your own favorite Revolutionary War-era research resources.

Genealogy Web Sites | Military records | Research Tips

Thursday, July 03, 2008 1:39:02 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Listen Up: Podcast Episode 2 is Live!
Posted by Grace

Have you already checked out the Family Tree Magazine Podcast? Episode 2 is live today, and features a sneak peek at the September issue, news from the blogosphere, an inside look at our 101 Best Web Sites awards with David A. Fryxell, plus news about WeRelate, genealogy "wikis" and the Mid-Continent Public Library's new Midwest Genealogy Center.

New to podcasts? It's easy peasy! Click the "Listen to this episode" link following the episode summary. Your browser will open a new window or tab displaying a bar that allows you to pause, play, fast-forward and rewind through the episode. (You can also read our Podcast Primer for step-by-step instructions.) Watch for a new episode every month!

In related news, we're thrilled that DearMYRTLE featured the premiere episode of our podcast in the latest installment of her Best of the Internet for Genealogists awards. If you haven't listened to episode 1, just follow this link to listen. And we can't help but give a plug to DearMYRTLE's own podcast—check it out on her Web site.

Genealogy fun | Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, July 01, 2008 9:28:06 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, June 26, 2008

FamilyLink Launches "Revolutionary" WebTree Service
Posted by Diane

FamilyLink just announced a service called WebTree, billing it as "the most revolutionary family tree publishing site on the Internet."

It’s a free site where you can post and share your family tree, and create heirloom-quality charts to print at home. In the future, you’ll be able to order printed charts, according to FamilyLink founder Paul Allen.

The site hasn’t launched yet, but you can become a charter member now by registering and entering family information. Charter members also will be able to preview new features.

WebTree's pre-launch home page promises an "amazing number of revolutionary features designed to help you with your genealogy."

It also says the service “will never sell your data or burn it to CD,” a vow likely aimed to those who've accused Allen's former employer, Ancestry.com, of reselling user-submitted data.

WebTree states that "you own your data," too, which is a bit of an oversimplification: Nobody owns facts such as names and dates. Additionally, just about anywhere you post your data, you still can use the information however you like—the sticking point is what rights the site claims for using the data you submit.

If it's OK with you, WebTree will make some use of your data. “With permission of the submitters," Allen says, "We will index the files and make them searchable on WorldVitalRecords (as well as on Webtree.com itself)."

World Vital Records is FamilyLink’s fee-based genealogy database service. "As more and more visitors do free searches in this tree collection, we'll be able to let them know about other premium records and databases as well," says Allen.

Genealogy Web Sites

Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:57:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, June 23, 2008

Familybuilder Turns One With Millions Of Profiles
Posted by Diane

It's just one year old, but it has some big numbers: Familybuilder announced that members of social networking Web sites have used its Family Tree application to create more than 16 million family profiles. They add another 2 million per month.

Members of sites including Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Hi5 and Orkut can download the free Family Tree app to their online profiles, set up family profiles and connect with other relatives who're members of the same site.

With around 22 percent of Americans using social networking Web sites (says the Pew Research Center), piggybacking off them is a particularly effective way to market a product.

More than 3.5 million people currently use Family Tree. According to Familybuilder spokesperson Myles Weissleder, Internet traffic information provider Comscore rated Familybuilder's site the 4th-most-trafficked online genealogy service in March. (Other top sites were The Generations Network sites, MyHeritage, Genes Reunited and FamilySearch.)

“As we enter into our second year, we'll be offering more tools and services to make researching family history fun," says Familybuilder CEO Ilya Nikolayev.

That includes a way to link up with family members across social networks, so a Facebook fan, say, could add a Bebo-using cousin to her family profile.

Genealogy Web Sites

Monday, June 23, 2008 9:56:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Search Tips for Online Genealogy Databases
Posted by Diane

The following tips will help you target your ancestor searches in genealogy databases. Try them out on our 2008 list of the 101 Best Web Sites for genealogy—you’ll find these sites in the September 2008 Family Tree Magazine (look for it July 15 on newsstands and on FamilyTreeMagazine.com).

• Read a site's search instructions. They'll reveal tricks such as omitting a given name or including wildcards.

• On Web sites with multiple databases, search individual databases one at a time. Those customized search engines often include fields you won’t get with the site’s global search.

• Make sure the collection covers the right time and place. Go to the page for the individual database and look for background information. You might learn the collection doesn't contain records for all years, or that your ancestor's county didn't keep those particular records—then you can move on to a more-promising resource.

• Database searches call up your ancestor’s record only if an indexer entered the same information you’re searching on—so try different approaches. Start by entering all you know about the person. If you don’t get results, search on fewer terms and combinations of terms (such as the person’s name and residence, or his name and birthplace, or even just his birthplace and year of immigration).

• Seek alternate name spellings. Check the search tips to see whether a search automatically looks for similar names. Even if it does, try odd spellings: A census taker or an indexer might’ve interpreted the name so outlandishly that a “sounds like” search wouldn’t pick up on the misspelling.

• Use One-Step Search Tools, which offer more-flexible searching of several databases in Ancestry.com, Footnote, EllisIsland.org and other sites (to view results from a fee-based site, you need a subscription to the site). For example, the One-Step tools might let you search on a name fragment, more year ranges, or more combinations of terms.

• When all else fails, try browsing (on some sites, such as Ancestry.com, you'll need to go to the page for the individual database). Start with the records for the most-probable date or place. Keep written track of which records you've already examined in case you have to stop and come back later.

Genealogy Web Sites | Research Tips

Thursday, June 19, 2008 3:39:50 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [2]

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

New Database Shows You English Ancestors' Jobs
Posted by Diane

You might be able to learn whether your English ancestor was a clergyman, cowkeeper, winemaker, woolstapler or other tradesperson using the British subscription service FamilyRelatives.com’s latest addition. Pigot’s Trade directories of town and occupational information cover 27 counties back to the 1830’s (so, before official civil registration began).

Records added to date cover 27 counties from 1830 to 1839. Directories contain descriptions of towns with population numbers, parishes and main trades and industries. They also list residents’ names and addresses by occupation.

Search the directories by name or occupation, or browse by page. A subscription to FamilyRelatives.com costs 37.50 pounds—that's about $73.50.

You can browse a name index to a few Pigot's Trade directories free from this RootsWeb-hosted site (there’s a search here, but it didn’t seem to be working).

I dug up a few links to help you learn more about some of those archaic trades your UK and other ancestors practiced:

Genealogy Web Sites | International Genealogy | Social History

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 7:02:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Time Puts Genealogy Site in "50 Best" List
Posted by Diane

Congratulations to our friends over at Geni! The venerable Time magazine picked the genealogy-family networking site as one of the top 50 Web sites of 2008

Time’s writer said Geni turns what can be a lonely pursuit into a collaborative effort with its information-sharing tools. “Geni makes it easier — and more fun — than ever to create and share your family tree.”

Click here to read the Genealogy Insider blog posts about Geni (and a few random posts a geni search of this blog picks up).

Genealogy Web Sites

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 5:59:16 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1]

Monday, June 16, 2008

Free Online Historical Newspapers Through June 19
Posted by Diane

The subscription genealogy database service Ancestry.com is making its entire historical newspapers collection free through June 19 to mark the expansion of its newspaper database by 20 million images.

You need to register with Ancestry.com and provide your e-mail address to access the collection, but you don’t have to give your credit card number.

This addition doubles the size of the newspaper collection with pages from large- and small-town papers, including The Anniston Star (Anniston, Ala.), Modesto Bee and Herald News (Modesto, Calif.), Raleigh Register (Raleigh, NC) Xenia Daily Gazette (Xenia, Ohio), and more. Coverage varies by title.

Search the collection by a name and a keyword. You can add a year range and place, but that didn’t seem to affect my search—even though I checked the Exact boxes, results came from everywhere and all years.

Matches are categorized by newspaper title; click a title to see results for that paper. You'll see a snippet of the page containing your search term (some image links, including those in my El Paso Herald matches, seem to be broken), with the publication year on the right. It would be cool if the results were arranged by year, so you could scroll to the time your ancestor lived in that area, but you’ll have to evaluate each match.

The Refine Your Search options aren’t available for this collection, since the article content isn’t

Free Updates

Navigation

Search

Archives

More Links