• A couple of weeks ago, I was editing our Cincinnati City Guide (look for it in the May/June 2012 Family Tree Magazine), which is where we’re based and my maternal side comes from. Birth and death certificates from 1865 to 1912, I noticed, are in an online database from the University of Cincinnati. I found my great-grandfather's birth certificate (below), along with those of his siblings.
  
  

• There's also a local index to gravestones in area German Catholic cemeteries, where I found the family's burials (I need to plan a trip there come spring).

• Then I tried out the Genealogy Today data service after I saw an announcement the Surname Search was updated. I try out resources on my family names, though I never expect much when I type in Haddad. But this time, the hit I got partially answered a longstanding question. The site has indexes from biennial reports of a Texas orphanage, which list my grandfather and his two siblings as "inmates." I knew my grandfather and his brother were there, but their sister's whereabouts at that time had been a mystery.

• Next, I Googled the report titles and discovered them listed in a finding aid on the Texas State Library and Archives Commission website. I zipped off an email requesting copies, and had the scans in less than two weeks. Next up: requesting my great-aunt's 1913 admission records. 

• I also noticed a beta collection of city directories on Ancestry.com. Texas is among the handful of states included, with several directories for Corsicana. They list my grandfather as a helper at a local bakery that's still open and is pretty famous.
  
  
  

• Another email, and I learned the bakery's records don't go back to the 20s. But I ran a web search and found a transcript of a 1971 oral history with the bakery owners cataloged on the Baylor University Libraries' website. I emailed a request and had a digitized copy of the transcript within a day. Impressive! One of the bakery owners started work there as a schoolboy, about the same time as my grandfather, and now I have an idea of what the work was probably like.
  
  
  

Monday, February 06, 2012 11:06:56 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [4]

Content additions include:

• Allen County Public Library’s Internet Archive records
• Social Security Death Index
• Geni.com's World Family Tree.

The new features are:

• Historical Record Storage & Sharing Platform: You can self-publish high-resolution documents to Mocavo.com for free. They're automatically digitized using Optical Character Recognition, and if you choose, your documents will be searchable by all Mocavo users.
  
  
• Mocavo is releasing iPhone and Android applications (not yet available, but promised within the next 30 days) that let let you upload photos of documents and family pictures to the aforementioned document sharing platform. You also can use the app to search with Mocavo's Search engine.
  
  
• The Mocavo Discovery Stream will deliver a constant source of new user-generated content—whether people are uploading family trees and documents or finding matches using the search engine—similar to the Facebook newsfeed or Pinterest.

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

Friday, February 03, 2012 3:19:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Ancestry.com, WeRelate.org and BehindtheNames.com have started a project to compile a database of surname and given name variants that should be searched along with whatever name you type into a genealogy database.

Traditionally, the Soundex system and/or a site's own algorithms determine what matches you see, but these still can return matches that don't make sense and miss good matches.

The project will improve searching on WeRelate.com, but any genealogy data site will be able to use the Variant Names Project database to improve its searching.

You can help build the database by adding alternate spellings for the surnames in your family tree. First, you'll need to create a free WeRelate account by clicking create account at the top of the page.

On the Variant Names project home, select given name or surname, enter the name and hit Go.

You'll see a list of potential alternate spellings with checkboxes. The checked names are included in online searches for the name you entered. (In addition, rare names that share a Soundex code are also included.) Unchecked names aren't included.

Review the list and think about variations you've found in your research. You'll uncheck variants of the name that shouldn't be included in searches, check names that should be included, and add other names in the text box at the bottom of the screen.

The starting-point lists came from an algorithm Ancestry.com and WeRelate came up with to find similar names for the 200,000 most-frequent surnames and 70,000 most-frequent given names in Ancestry.com's databases. Names also were added from BehindtheName.com, a site about the etymology of given names, as well as name dictionaries.

Monday, January 30, 2012 3:47:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Our friend Photo Detective Maureen Taylor is holding a funny family photo contest. Upload your photo with a little information, and get your friends and family to vote it the "SOS" (Silly Old Snapshot). Prizes include a free photo consultation sponsored by VoiceQuilt.com, a copy of Fashionable Folks: Bonnets and Hats, and more. Get details here.

• Ancestry.com has added more than 7 million records from 300 years of Pennsylvania history. The records, from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, are in the databases Pennsylvania, Naturalizations, 1794-1908 and Pennsylvania, Church and Town Records, 1708-1985.

• Subscription site British Origins has added the Middlesex Baptisms Index: 1538-1751, which records nearly 100,000 baptisms—about 300,000 names when you add in parents and sponsors—in Middlesex and London.

• Free genealogy search engine Mocavo has made two big hires: Michael Leclerc, who spent 15 years with the New England Historic Genealogical Society, as Chief Genealogist; and Ryan Hunter, a former Wall Street analyst who covered companies including Ancestry.com, as COO.

Friday, January 27, 2012 3:57:39 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Genealogy data service Genealogy Today has launched a redesigned home page, easier site navigation and an improved search. This site focuses on smaller datasets, such as Masonic rosters, rural school and college catalogs, insurance claims and church catalogs, published between 1830 and 1930. The search works faster, with a form that offers more options and filters. In your search results, free and paid resources are  combined into a single results set that highlights new and updated items, and identifies free resources and those on other websites. 
  
  
• Registration is open for the 2012 Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, taking place Thursday through Sunday, June 8 to 10, at the LA Marriott Burbank Airport Hotel in Burbank, Calif. Early-bird registration discounts are available through April 22. Register on the SCGS website.

• The Federation of Genealogical Societies has opened registration for its 2012 annual conference, too. It's scheduled for Aug. 29 to Sept. 1, at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, Ala. (We'll be there!) Early bird registration is available through July 1. Register on the conference website.

• WikiTree.com, the family tree site covered in the December 2011 Family Tree Magazine, will be available only by invitation from a current WikiTree member. "We’ve had users abusing our wide range of free services and treating the site like their personal back-up service. Not only does this drain our limited resources, it hurts other community members and what we’re trying to accomplish," says WikiTree creator Chris Whitten. "By making membership strictly invitation-only, we can give our community some breathing room to clean up the genealogical messes that irresponsible users have left behind." If you want to join, you can request an invite using a link on the site's membership page.

Friday, January 20, 2012 2:33:12 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

Improvements include:

• All subscriptions now include access to all maps, nearly 42,000. No more having to add maps to your map collection and no more limitations on how many maps you can view.
  
  
• All maps from from Arphax's Family Maps books and Texas Land Survey Maps books published so far are included, plus select historical maps and atlases
  
  
• It's easier to annotate maps with Custom Markers, as well as move, edit, and delete your markers
  
  
• Uploading images to associate with Custom Markers is simple in the Map Viewer
  
  
• You can do a Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) search of US populated places and cemeteries, with links to Google Maps for items found

Subscriptions are based on quarterly, semiannual or annual renewal. Regular prices range from $49 to $129, but the site is offering reduced grand opening rates.

HistoryGeo works for PC and Mac users and web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. Learn more about the service with these how-to videos.

Look for more about HistoryGeo in an upcoming issue of Family Tree Magazine.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012 2:32:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• PBS' Winter-Spring 2012 lineup includes a 10-episode celebrity genealogy series called "Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr." premiering Sunday, March 25 at 8 p.m.
  

Gates will delve into the genealogy and genetics of famous Americans including Kevin Bacon, Robert Downey, Jr., Branford Marsalis, John Legend, Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters and Rick Warren. The show's website is here, though is hasn't yet been fleshed out with any content.

• A few updates to the genealogy web search engine Mocavo.com: You can now upload files to your account using Dropbox; just follow these instructions on the Mocavo.com blog. Also, if you log in before you search, you can mark off Mocavo.com search results you've already looked at with an "I've Read This" button, and you can rank matches as “The Person I’m Looking For," “Maybe A Good Match," “Not Who I’m Looking For” and “Broken Link.”
  

Finally, the site has introduced Mocavo Plus, an advanced version the site's developer says will get you more-relevant matches with features such as wild card searching, date-range searching, GeoSearching (in the US) and more. Subscriptions cost $9.95 per month or $79.95 (a sale price) per year.

• The California State Genealogical Alliance (CGSA) has started two new blogs: the CSGA Blog, with a goal to keep the California Genealogical community informed, and the Csgacopyright blog, which helps the genealogical community understand copyright issues. Learn more about the CGSA on the organization's website.

• The National Archives and Records Administration has launched "Know Your Records" online videos from the popular genealogy how-to workshops hosted at its facilities on topics such as such as census, immigration and military records. Catch the videos on the archives' YouTube channel.

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) announced its schedule of upcoming workshops at its Boston research library. If you'll be in the area, you can learn about the library's resources, local history, researching African-American ancestors and more (NEHGS also is organizing a research trip to Belfast in May). Check out the schedule on the AmericanAncestors.org website.
  

• Genetic testing site 23andme, which provides test-takers with medical- and ancestry-related analyses, has generated some controversy in changing site policies. Now, those who let their 12-month subscriptions lapse will lose access to their Relative Finder matches, Health Reports and other features that rely on their genetic data. They'll still have access to the raw data. Read more about the controversy on the Your Genetic Genealogist blog.

Thursday, January 05, 2012 9:42:06 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Besides obituaries, newspapers are sources for birth announcements, social column notes and other news stories mentioning your ancestors—even if they weren't prominent community members. 

I still get nostalgic over my first big genealogy find, a 1924 Dallas Morning News article about my grandfather who grew up in an orphanage and was putting himself through college (you can see the article here). I discovered it by chance on GenealogyBank soon after the site launched. 

Newspaper microfilm from the Arkansas state archives helped me fill in details (otherwise absent due to missing court records) about my grandfather's arrest and trial for bootlegging.

In the Newspaper Research 101 course, taught by James M. Beidler, you'll learn:

• what type of information to look for in newspapers
• how to find and access papers most likely to mention your kin
• how to effectively search digital and microfilmed papers

Learn more and take advantage of this once-in-a-blue-moon Newspaper Research 101 tuition on FamilyTreeUniversity.com.

Thursday, December 15, 2011 9:43:07 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Due to sensitivities around the information in this database, the Social Security Death Index collection is not available on our free Rootsweb service but is accessible to search on Ancestry.com.

The SSDI is a database of deaths reported to the Social Security Administration, for the most part since 1962. A subscription is required to use Ancestry.com's version of the SSDI, and genealogists including Randy Seaver and Sheri Fenley report that Social Security numbers aren't provided for deaths within the past 10 years.

You might think genealogists wouldn't be concerned with such a recent death, but someone who died in 2002 might've been born in 1920, and his or her application for an SSN (called an SS-5) could name parents born in the 1800s. Plus, the SSDI is useful for tracing family lines forward in time to find distant cousins.

Randy lists other sources of the SSDI, which include the free FamilySearch site.

If you don't have a deceased person's SSN, you still can request his or her SS-5. You'll need to provide a birth date, any other names the person used, and the parents' names, and pay $29 instead of $27. You now can request an SS-5 online.

The "sensitivities" RootsWeb refers to are likely related to a recent news story about criminals using SSNs of deceased individuals to commit tax fraud. (Couldn't the IRS prevent this by comparing SSNs on tax forms to numbers in the SSDI?)

Read more on recent SSDI changes, which include a reduction in the number of new deaths that'll be included in this database, here.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011 10:54:22 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [7]

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is joining Historypin, a site that lets users virtually "pin" historical photographs, videos and audio recordings to Google maps.

Users can enhance their pins with descriptions and stories, and compile them into collections and tours centered around a place, time or storyline.

Visit the National Archives on Historypin here. I scrolled down and clicked an image of Samuel Morse's 1848 patent for the electromagnetic telegraph, which opened information about the patent:

Here's the patent on a map of Washington, DC, at the location of the old Patent Office:

Another cool thing you can do is use a transparency slider to overlay a historical image on top of a Google street view of the same scene today. This shows a view from the old Patent Office toward the Treasury building:

Also in NARA's collection, you'll find Mathew Brady Civil War photographs; photos of streets, buildings and historic events in Washington, DC; and images from the recently concluded History Happens Here augmented reality contest. Future additions will include Documerica images, more Mathew Brady, and Brooklyn Navy Yard photos collections.

Go here and type in a place your ancestors lived to see what's pinned there. You don't have to join Historypin to see the pins, but if you join, you can add your own images (you'll need a free Google account).

Historypin is also accessible via a Smartphone app. It's a project of the British non-profit We Are What We Do that seeks to bring generations together around the history of their communities.

Here are images Historypin users have pinned around Cincinnati, where Family Tree Magazine is located. Once I get started exploring these, I'm not sure how I'll stop myself:

Wednesday, November 30, 2011 11:53:41 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

The acquisition doesn't include FamilyLink's We're Related Facebook app, MyHeritage spokesperson Schelly Talalay Dardahsti tells me. FamilyLink CEO Paul Allen won't be joining the MyHeritage team.

MyHeritage will add its first U.S.-based office in Utah, the home of FamilyLink.

The acquisition adds something MyHeritage lacked: the historical records genealogists use. FamilyLink's records will complement the family trees on MyHeritage.com. “We’ll be able to find your mother’s yearbook, your great-grandfather’s will and your ancestor’s immigration record. We’ll do that on a massive, global scale," says MyHeritage founder and CEO Gilad Japhet.

This is MyHeritage’s seventh and largest acquisition since 2007. Read the full press release here.

Monday, November 21, 2011 4:56:57 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Ghost towns happened when the industry that sustained the population died (as with many mining and logging towns in the Old West), when the railroad or highway bypassed a town, or when a public construction project (such as a dam) or a natural disaster wiped it out.

A ghost town might still be marked by abandoned buildings and/or maintained as a tourist attraction, or there may be no visible sign the town ever existed. Did your ancestor live in a ghost town? Here are some online resources to help you learn more about it.

• Susan’s Genealogy Blog: Ghost Towns: Tips from genealogist Susan Farrell Bankhead on locating ghost towns and finding records from them.

• Ghost Town USA Home Page: On this genealogy-minded site, you can check out a state-by-state list of towns and maybe find the one where your ancestor lived. 

• GhostTowns.com:  See locations of US ghost towns on a map.

• Silver State Ghost Towns: Lots of photos of Nevada ghost towns, plus some from Arizona and California.

• Ghost Towns and History of the American West 

• Legends of America: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps 

• American Ghost Towns 

• America’s Coolest Ghost Towns
  

Monday, October 31, 2011 10:48:32 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

• The Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness website, which we’ve recommended in many a Family Tree Magazine article, is offline due to the owner's computer and health issues and will be for “some time,” according to a report on Dick Eastman’s blog. Read a similar report on the Vermont Genealogy blog. 

• Arphax Publishing has announced its HistoryGeo online service, which we blogged about last month, is now available for Charter Members to join. The service gives you online access to land-ownership and other maps—for starters, all maps in Arphax’s Family Maps and Texas Land Survey Maps series. Enhancements to the Viewer and additions to the Map Library are in the works. Here’s a YouTube video that explains how the service works.
  

• If you’re visiting the National Archives in Washington, DC, you can use your phone to play a mobile history game, earn points and possibly win rewards. Go to the Scvngr gaming site to download the free iPhone or Android app  (or text CIVWAR to 728647), then complete challenges within four blocks of the National Archives D.C. headquarters. Examples include locating Civil War photographer Mathew Brady’s studio and finding Red Cross founder Clara Barton’s office. So far, you can redeem points for a discount in the National Archives Shop.

• Randy Majors announced enhancements to his Historical US County Boundary Maps site,  for helping you figure out which county had jurisdiction of the places where your ancestors lived. For example, type a place and a year, click Go, and be zoomed to that place with an information panel above the map. See what else is new here. 

Friday, October 21, 2011 2:01:42 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

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

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

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

Read more about Record Match on the Geni blog. 

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

BackUpMyTree automatically finds family tree files on your computer and creates a remote backup. It’s compatible with major genealogy applications such as Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree, Personal Ancestral File and RootsMagic.

So far, BackUpMyTree is storing more than 9 terabytes of genealogists’ data. MyHeritage.com will continue to support the backup service and keep it free. This marks the growing site’s sixth acquisition to date.

BackUpMyTree creator Cliff Shaw (who also created the GenCircles website and the Family Tree Legacies program and records database, which MyHeritage purchased a few years back) will focus on another venture, genealogy search engine Mocavo.com. 

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 10:00:55 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Arphax publishes books of land-ownership maps for US counties—500 to date. Now the company is building an online service that will let you search and view maps; create a map collection; create animated, personalized maps; and network with other members.

Subscribers will get access to 2,000 “big-picture” maps (state- or county-wide), then can search the library of about 40,000 “premium” maps (a number that will grow) by surname or place to add to their own map collection.

You’ll be able to create animations of family migrations and other geographic events; attach custom map markers, your own images and links to other web pages; and collaborate with other researchers. 

This is what the map viewer looks like:

It lets you zoom in and out, navigate to your ancestors' county, add markers, take snapshots of a place, search for maps related to places your ancestors moved, and view migrations. You can make your map markers private, public, or viewable by select others.

The HistoryGeo.com site suggests this application for the custom animated maps: “Watch an animation of both your mother's and father's families as they cross our country, with paths intersecting where you were born.” You could take this further back in time to “watch” when your great-grandparents’ lives intersected, getting research clues such as where to look for marriage or land records 

The service is still being set up, so a limited number of charter membership subscriptions are available ($42 for six months and 500 premium maps for your personal collection; $54 for six months and 1,000 premium maps). You also can register as a basic user to get a feel for the site. Once you register, click Launch Map Viewer to get started.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011 11:53:10 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• The National Genealogical Society 2013 conference will be in Las Vegas (May 8-11).

• AncestorSync, the folks in the booth next to me, is a way to share genealogy data or sync desktop and online trees without downloading a GEDCOM and uploading it somewhere else (or manually adding the same ancestors in multiple places). So far, it works with Ancestral Quest, Legacy, Mac Family Tree, PAF, RootsMagic and The Master Genealogist desktop programs, and FamilySearch, Geni and OurFamilyology online tree sites, with more to come.

• The Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania (GSP) is having a Pennsylvania Family workshop with Ancestry.com Nov. 5. Twelve presentations include experts from Ancestry.com plus additional speakers including Lisa Alzo and Dear Myrtle.

GSP also is working on a new website, so keep an eye on GenPa.

• 1,000 Memories is a website where you and relatives upload photos, audio and video, and written stories about ancestors—a way of sharing the photos that you inherited, and seeing the ones handed down through your cousin Edna’s branch.

• Sort Your Story is software that helps you organize your data and digitized documents. You enter your data in the software’s profiler and use the software to organize documents. The profiler also helps you see what information you’re missing for each person in your tree.

• JustaJoy.com is a service that links orphaned heirlooms with the families that originally owned them. The site works with antiques dealers who have items with family connections—currently, it lists items associated with 40,000 families. You can search the site to see what’s associated with your surname, but you need to join to view information about the listings.

Friday, September 09, 2011 9:06:04 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [14]

• The Genealogist's Google Toolbox (book signed by Lisa)
• Google Earth for Genealogy DVDs (2 volumes)
• Search Engine Tips & Tricks on-demand webinar
• Google Tools for Genealogists independent study course from Family Tree University
  

Friday, August 26, 2011 5:05:04 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [10]

• FamilySearch added to collections from seven countries, including 6 million record images from Mexico. Other additions include parish register records from Belgium and England, and church book records from Russia. New records were added from eight US states: Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. Click through to the new and updated collections from here.
  

• UK family history site Genes Reunited has released a variety of military records from WW1 and the Second Anglo-Boer War. Collections include Royal Naval Officers' Medal Roll 1914-1920, New Zealand WWI Soldiers, Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914-1919, and records with 258,800 names of men and women who fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902.

• Subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com has expanded its US school yearbook collection, adding nearly 25,000 new yearbooks. It now totals more than 35,000 books with 155 million records from 1884 to 2009. The books come from high schools, junior highs, academies, colleges and universities. They're also are available on the Canadian-focused Ancestry.ca.

• Jill Barone of St. Petersburg, Fla., won the Red Star Line Museum's "Do You Know This Girl?" social media contest. Barone wins a trip to Antwerp, Belgium, for the official pre-opening festivities of the Red Star Line Museum in May 2012, and a $1,000 shopping spree at Diane Von Furstenberg's Antwerp boutique. The museum will open in spring 2013.

Friday, August 26, 2011 1:14:46 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

In this blog post Aug. 11, Geni announced that free, “Non-Pro” members can no longer add new profiles to the “historical” tree (any public part of the Geni tree) or merge profiles. Free members still can add to their private trees.

Geni Pro subscribers, who pay $4.95 per month for a one-year membership, now “have full permission to add on to, edit, and merge profiles in the historical parts of the tree,” according to the blog post.

Pro users also can search through all the 110 million public profiles on Geni to find relatives to add to their trees. Free members can search and find only their close relatives in the historical tree, as well as profiles they added and profiles they follow.

"Close relatives" means 4th cousins and closer, as well as third-great-grandparents and closer. In-laws are included.

“I'd like to make it clear that Basic (free) users did not lose their ability to view or edit any profiles as part of these changes," says Geni CEO Noah Tutak. “In fact, we did not change view or edit permissions at all. What we did is align permissions in the historical, public sections of the tree, beyond close relatives.”

But comments on Geni's blog post are largely negative. A common theme: Many members, some of whom have added hundreds or thousands of profiles to the site, feel Geni is cutting them off (without advance notice, according to the comments) after encouraging them for years to build its historical tree.

“Losing control” of their public data strikes fear in the hearts of genealogists. They don’t like to idea of others merging their ancestors without having to compare notes first. They have visions of mistaken merges and incorrect names and dates replicating themselves across the internet.

Tutak thinks Geni’s changes will reduce such errors. “These changes were designed to restrict merging to a smaller group of more engaged users, with the goal of increasing data quality,” Tutak says. “If a merge is made in error, the same set of tools are available now as in the past to correct mistakes. In the near future, we'll provide even more robust tools to undo merges that will make correcting these mistakes, which are extremely infrequent, even easier”

Several Pro users commented that they’ll no longer be able to entice relatives—who aren’t likely to purchase Pro subscriptions—to collaborate on building their family trees.

“A member with a free account can build out a large enough tree to get a good feel for the quality of Geni's tools and decide whether or not they would like to use Geni for their entire tree,” says Tutak.

“The number of users contributing to the world [public] family tree is a small percentage of our overall user base, and so far we haven't seen a slowdown in the growth of the tree due to these changes.”

Family tree sites have struggled for years with how to build accurate trees that are large enough to attract additional contributions—that’s why we're still waiting for the trees feature on the new FamilySearch.org to be publicly available. Skewing benefits toward paying users—who, theoretically, are more heavily invested and knowledgeable—is one approach. It’s also likely to anger free members. Many comments on Geni's blog predict that the site won't survive this change.

You can read genealogists’ opinions on the changes at Genea-Musings  and Dear Myrtle. 

Tuesday, August 16, 2011 12:57:49 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• Genealogist Michael Hait has started the Ancestry Errors Wiki to keep track of the site’s “errors in imaging, programming or organization.” For example, one contributor noted that on Ancestry.com, “In the 1840 U. S. federal census, the city of Lexington, Fayette County, Kentucky, is incorrectly listed in Edmonson County, Ky.”

You can search the wiki or use a drop-down menu to find errors by state. Have you discovered such an error? Click here for instructions on adding a page to the wiki.

• Ancestry.ca now includes UK Railway Employment Records, 1833 – 1963, a collection containing the employment-related records of British railway workers dating back to the early 19th century. These records from the British national archives give employee names, home station, date of birth, information on their career progression, salary increases, rewards, conduct, and notes from superiors. Search the database here. 

• Switzerland genetics company iGENEA reconstructed Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun's (aka King Tut) DNA profile based on a 2009 study of his DNA. The company determined King Tut belonged to the Y chromosome haplogroup R1b1a2, the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in Western Europe—meaning half of all men in Europe are related to him.
  

But less than 1 percent of Egypt’s modern-day residents belong to this haplogroup, according to iGENEA, and it’s unknown how King Tut’s ancestors got to Egypt. The company is hoping its search for King Tut’s closest living male relatives will lead to an answer. If you order a test from iGENEA and match King Tut on 16 markers, the site promises your money back and a free upgrade. 

• The 31st annual International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conference starts next Sunday, Aug. 14, in Washington, DC. Online registration is closed, but you can register on-site. Click here for more information. 

Friday, August 05, 2011 1:06:05 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

Most researchers agree it’s important to cite sources, but the hows, whens and wheres have caused a bit of a stir. Genealogy blog readers may notice what my mom and dad used to call a “discussion” over the importance of adhering to the finer points of source citation style (which might be intimidating to newbie or casual researchers) versus just getting the source information down.

Another component to the issue (and something else that can make source citation look complicated) is evaluating a source's reliability:

Is the information likely to be correct because the source—say, a birth certificate—was created when the birth, marriage or other event happened? Or is the source less reliable because it’s a transcription of a digitized book written years later by someone who read a newspaper article about the grandson of the person whose neighbor was actually there? Do several less-reliable sources that provide consistent information equal a reliable source? Can you ever really prove when certain events happened in your ancestor’s life? What does it all mean??

These folks weigh in with their opinions and encouragement:

• In his Citation blog category, the Ancestry Insider writes in depth about source citation principles and the quality of source information given on genealogy records sites such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

• Source Citations in Genealogy: Church or Cult on the Clue Wagon blog encapsulates the above-mentioned discussion. The comments here include 10 commandments of source citation from Evidence Explained author Elizabeth Shown Mills.

• The Genea-Musings Source Citation posts describe sourcing in genealogy software and online family trees, review presentations on citing sources, link to others’ posts on the topic and more.

• On his Planting the Seeds blog, Michael Hait explains why the way you format source citations is important. 

• James Tanner on Genealogy’s Star writes here about genealogical evidence as opposed to proof. Dear Myrtle links to several of his related posts here. 

• On Luxegen Genealogy and Family History, Joan Miller writes about how to educate new researchers regarding citations, and her Good/Better/Best citation philosophy.
  

• Posts in the GeneaBloggers Source Citation category link to the site's quick reference citation guide and a discussion of blogs' reliability as sources. 

Source citation doesn’t have to be scary. The key is to note every bit of information available about the record, website, book, newspaper, person or other source you used, and make sure it doesn't get separated from the information the source provided. Whenever possible, get the original record rather than stopping when you find an index or a transcription.

Use your knowledge as a researcher to decide whether the information in the source makes sense, and how far you can trust that source. If you have any doubts, don’t add the information to your tree, but use it to form a hypothesis you can keep researching.  

Related resources:

• Family Tree Magazine free, downloadable Source Citation Cheat Sheet
  
  
• Source Documentation 101: How to Cite Genealogy Sources Accurately and Effectively Family Tree University course
  
  
• Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills, available in ShopFamilyTree.com 

Thursday, July 14, 2011 9:08:57 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [8]

• Subscription genealogy site Archives.com has added 17 million new US vital and military records. Vital records come from Texas, Colorado and South Carolina; and the military records provide information about individuals who served in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and National Guard during the Vietnam War and Gulf War eras. Click here to see more details on the Archives.com additions. 

• FamilySearch has updated 55 of its online record collections, for a total of 25 million new images of records from 16 countries. Many of the collections haven’t yet been indexed, so you’ll need to click through to the individual database and browse by place, year or however the records are organized. Click here to see a list of the record additions and link to the updated collections. 

• Deceased Online, a pay-per-view site for burial and cremation records in the UK, is adding millions of records from Scotland. You can check out participating cemeteries and crematoria here. 

Friday, July 08, 2011 3:14:20 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [6]

And the grand prize winner is … Patricia Skubis! Her long-lost Danish relative Tage will travel to the United States so they can meet in person for the first time. Patricia also will receive a year-long VIP membership to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-Plus subscription with MyHeritage.com.

Patricia belongs to a Danish family that immigrated to the United States in 1888. Another branch had headed for Australia in 1873. Skubis made contact 27 years ago with Alison Rogers from the Australian branch, but they were unable to find a connection. Here’s Patricia’s account of how it finally happened (look for more details in an upcoming issue of Family Tree Magazine):

In March of 2011, a family in Denmark researching the Thygesen name posted information on MyHeritage and I received a Smart Match notice. I wasn’t sure we had a match. The parents’ names were the same but the children did not match. So I asked the submitter for more information. With the additional information I thought we did indeed have a match.

I went online to the Danish Church Records [on the Danish archives’ website] and found Tyge Jørgensen’s children between Neils Madsen Thygesen, born in 1794, and my great-great-grandfather Martin, born in 1805. What a great surprise I received when I found that the next son after Neils was Peder Andersen Thygesen, the great-great-grandfather of Alison Rogers.

Tage and I are fourth cousins once removed. Our great-great-grandfathers, along with Alison’s, were brothers.

Each of our two runners-up will receive a digital subscription to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-plus subscription on MyHeritage.com. They are:

• Linda Mehlinger, whose mystery started with her Louisiana-born great-grandmother’s photo of a lady and five schoolgirls in a rickshaw being pulled by a Zulu warrior. Through research including searching the 1910 census on Ancestry.com and contacting other genealogists via a mailing list, she discovered a cousin in South Africa who had pictures of the same people.

• Pam Ingermanson, whose Norwegian ancestors settled in Idaho. After hours upon hours of research, she connected with a cousin who descended from a brother who ended up in Ohio. The branches of the family had lost touch over the years.

You can read the winners’ full stories, as well as those of other entrants, in their comments on the MyHeritage.com Blog. 

Thank you to everyone who entered this contest. Both our team at Family Tree Magazine and our contest partners MyHeritage.com were touched by your stories of reconnecting with family, and we're impressed by your diligent research. You’re truly an inspiration to your fellow family historians!

Thursday, July 07, 2011 9:05:15 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

• If you have an iPad or iPhone, here’s a more educational way than Angry Birds to pass the time, especially on the Fourth of July: MultiEducator’s History on the Go apps  use images, contemporary accounts, multimedia presentations and documents to help you learn about the American Revolution, Civil War, Constitution and Federalist Papers, and more. They’re available for about $5 through the Apple iTunes store (the Constitution app is free).

• Genealogy search engine Mocavo.com, one of Family Tree Magazine’s 101 Best Websites for 2011, has added new features. You can now upload your family tree GEDCOM to Mocavo (via Facebook), and within a few weeks, you’ll begin receiving e-mailed search results for your ancestors. (See how the upload process works on Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings blog.)
  
  You also can opt to have your tree included in the Mocavo.com search engine. (The site will automatically exclude living people.)

• The Civil War Trust, a battlefield preservation organization, has announced Campaign 150: Our Time, Our Legacy, a campaign to raise $40 million for the permanent protection of 20,000 acres of battlefield land over the next five years. An average of 30 acres of battlefield land are lost each day, according to Battle Cry of Freedom author James McPherson.

Friday, July 01, 2011 1:18:41 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

The quiz, by One-Step Tools webmaster Steve Morse and friends, is designed to guide you through the site’s tools that help you determine your ancestor’s 1940 census enumeration district (ED). This is important because, when the 1940 census comes out April 2, 2012, you won’t be able to search by name. Instead, you’ll need to find the records for the ED where your ancestor lived and view pages until you find him or her.

(If you don’t mind waiting an as-yet-unknown length of time for a searchable name index to be created, probably by FamilySearch and/or a commercial entity such as Ancestry.com, you may not need to worry about the ED. I say “may not” because if your ancestor gets mis-indexed or the census-taker recorded his name in an unexpected way, you still might need to browse the records.)

Anyway, I tried the quiz for a spin and did indeed find the 1940 ED I needed. Here’s how it worked for me:

Question: Do you know where your family lived on April 1, 1940, the official 1940 census day?

Answer: I chose yes. This was my hint to check the address in my ancestor’s 1942 declaration of intention to naturalize:

Question: Did the family move between 1930 and 1940?

Answer: Yes.

• in a rural area or a small urban community (under about 5,000)?
• in an urban area of 5,000 or more?
  
• in an institution (hospital, jail, orphanage, etc)?
  
• outside the US proper but under US jurisdiction? 

Answer: They lived in Cleveland, Ohio, an urban area of 5,000 or more.

Question: Check to see if the city is on the One Step 1940 Large City ED Finder Tool. Go to this tool, choose the state or possession, and look in the city dropdown box. Do you see your city listed there?

Answer: I clicked the link to the 1040 ED Finder, chose Ohio from the state dropdown menu, and yes, Cleveland was in the city menu. 

Question: OK, now to use the above One Step tool, choose the state and city and then enter the street and cross streets for the house at which your family lived.

Answer: I went back to the 1940 ED Finder, which looked like this:

I chose my ancestors’ street, Franklin Blvd, and was directed to choose a cross street.

Um, cross street? Luckily, at the bottom of the page you can enter a house number and generate a Google, Yahoo! or MapQuest map of the location, like this one:

I chose 47th W. as the cross street and was rewarded with:

The "View microfilm " link gives you a message that the 1940 census images are not available. Looks like Morse is planning to link the ED numbers to the record images when they're released on NARA's website ext year.

I tried other quiz answers, too: 

• Basically, if you don’t know where your ancestors lived in 1940, you’ll get suggestions for records to check.
  

• If you know where they lived in 1940 and they hadn't moved since 1930, you’ll be directed to the site’s 1930-to-1940 ED Conversion tool (EDs changed from census to census).
  

• If your ancestors lived in a small-ish town or rural area, the area may not yet be covered in the One Step 1940 ED Finder, in which case you’re directed to National Archives’ ED maps (not yet online). Those will be easier to use if you know the street address. 

• If you don't know the address in the small-ish town or rural area, you can use the One Step ED Definition Tool to choose a state and county, then search on a community name. If the name is in the definitions, you’ll get back a list of possible EDs where you can start your census search. 

Now, the trick is not losing the sticky note I wrote the ED on.

You can read all about the 1940 census in the May 2010 Family Tree Magazine's Complete Census Guide. Family Tree Magazine Plus members can read the 1940 census article here.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011 2:42:50 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• On its History Happens Here site, the Missouri History Museum is sharing the Civil War saga of soldier James Love and his letters to fiancee Eliza Mary "Molly" Wilson. Museum staff post each new letter 150 years to the day after it was written. Catch up on the letters you’ve missed here. 

• The free FamilySearch site has added records for 10 countries. The additions come from Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the United States (Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin). Click here to see details and links for the updated collections. 

• British subscription site FindMyPast.co.uk has published the records of over half a million men who served in the British militia, the precursor to the UK’s Territorial Army. The militia was made up of men who held everyday jobs, but took part in regular military exercises and on occasion, fought. You can search the Militia Service Records, covering 1806 to 1915, here.
  

• The National Genealogical Society has created The NGS Weekly, a “newspaper” that pulls feeds from various genealogy blog posts. You can subscribe to get e-mail notifications when the page is updated.

Friday, June 24, 2011 1:21:58 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

We’ll also discuss rapper 50 Cent’s journey to South Carolina to learn about his roots, the Early American Roads and Trails website, and our state research webinars.

You can listen through iTunes and on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 1:19:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• The renowned genealogy portal site Cyndi’s List has been upgraded with improved navigation, a custom database, and a custom administrative interface to make using the site quicker and easier for both visitors and Cyndi. Visit the site at CyndisList.com.

• British subscription/pay-per-view site GenesReunited has added passenger departure lists from British ports from 1890 to 1960. These records, also on FindMyPast.co.uk, cover the period of mass migration to Australia between 1947 and 1960, when an estimated 710,000 people traveled there from Great Britain. Search the departure records at GenesReunited.co.uk. Read the GenesReunited press release about the new database here.

• MyHeritage.com released an update to its free Family Tree Builder software. You can learn more about version 5.1 and download it at Myheritage.com. 

• Who’s the only man to be both father and son to US presidents? The answer is in the fun fatherhood facts gleaned from family tree site Geni’s database, which Geni is sharing in honor of Father’s Day (this Sunday). Another sampling: Worldwide, fathers average 3.5 children apiece, with Malaysia coming in at the highest, 3.8, and Germany bringing up the rear at 2.7. See all the Father's Day facts on Geni’s blog.
  

• The Britain-based Guild of One-Name Studies plans to offer a special membership rate of $26 for membership through Nov. 1, 2012. The offer will be available next Friday, June 24, to Sunday, June 26, on the guild's website. The guild is a clearinghouse for information about surname studies. Click here to see if its registry your surname is included in .

Friday, June 17, 2011 11:38:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

Many genealogy sites (and other sites that aren’t for doing genealogy per se, but are nonetheless handy for family history) have embraced Web 2.0; this year’s 101 Best Websites roundup tilts a bit in their direction. Unlike last year, when we singled out free websites, the 2011 list includes both free and subscription sites.

The 2011 list appears in the September 2011 Family Tree Magazine (which starts mailing to subscribers any day now, and will be available for purchase June 28), and we’ve also posted them free on FamilyTreeMagazine.com so you can click right through to these great tools for family tree research. 

The sites are divided into 11 categories (for “mega-mart” sites, USA-focused sites, tech tools, sites for researching immigrants, etc.). Just click a category name to see the sites in that category.

You’ll soon begin to see the selected sites wearing “101 Best Websites” badges. Congratulations to all of them, and a big thank-you for making it easier to discover our family histories.

For more help researching your family tree on the web, see the Online Genealogy store at ShopFamilyTree.com.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011 4:41:52 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Family chart-printing service Generation Maps has changed its name to Family ChartMasters to better describe the company’s services. Visit the website at FamilyChartMasters.com. 

• The AARP is holding a sweepstakes with genealogy prizes including a five-hour research consultation with professional genealogist Megan Smolenyak, signed copies of Smolenyak’s books, Family Tree DNA testing, an Ancestry.com subscription and a $1,000 gift card. You don’t have to be an AARP member to enter, but you do need to be age 45 or older. Click here to enter. 

• Genealogy wiki WikiTree has announced that Tami Osmer Glatz (who’s written articles for Family Tree Magazine including the January 2011 guide to FamilySearch Centers) is the site’s new Cousin Connector. Her role is to suggest merges between trees and improving the quality of merged ancestor profiles.

• Thousands of historical Massachusetts and New England maps from the Perkins Collection, the archive of a family-owned surveying business, is now part of Historic Map Works. Available as a home subscription and through many libraries, Historic Map Works links maps with geocode data so you can search them by modern address, keywords, town names, or year. You also can order prints from the site.
  

• A new photo gift site called Snapily lets you create photo greetings with 3D effects (you move the card and decorative illustrations look 3D) and flip-animation (you tilt the card back and forth, and switch between two photos). Visit the website to see what each effect looks like. Prices for photo cards start at $2.99. 

Friday, June 03, 2011 9:30:32 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Everyone’s invited to participate in the Great Illinois Genealogy Scavenger Hunt, going on now through June 30.

All you have to do is find information on Illinois genealogy resources—websites, databases, how-to articles, etc.—and say why a resource should be included in the Research Wiki.

First, visit the Illinois pages of the FamilySearch Research Wiki to see what content is already there (your submitted resources should be original). Then submit your resource using the entry form.

Prizes include a RootsTech 2012 conference registration and a one-year ISGS membership. In addition, a prize will be awarded each day between June 1 and June 30, 2011 to someone drawn at random. For complete details, consult the contest rules.

See a full description of The Great Illinois Genealogy Scavenger Hunt on the ISGS website.

Need ideas for Illinois genealogy resources? See our $3 Illinois State Research Guide digital download, the Illinois section of the Family Tree Sourcebook (which has research tips, resource listings and county-by-county records guides for every US state), and the other how-to products in the Illinois section at ShopFamilyTree.com.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011 8:57:42 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

This free site from GeneaBloggers has profiles and presentations of genealogy speakers, a calendar of speaking engagements, calls for papers for upcoming genealogy conferences, and posts about building speaking skills.

E-mail GeneaBloggers if you’d like to post your genealogy speaker profile to the site.

If you’re looking for a speaker for a genealogy society meeting or other event, you can browse the profiles here or use the search box at the top left of the site to type in a genealogy topic or a speaker’s name.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 9:06:34 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

For Web Search, Ancestry.com will index other genealogy web sites. When you do a search on Ancestry.com, if there’s a relevant match in a record on a site that’s been indexed, that match will be included in your search results along with the historical records on Ancestry.com. Web Search will be a free service.

Here’s what a Web Search result looks like (image, arrows and callouts are Ancestry.com's).

So you can tell which records in your search results are from Ancestry.com and which are from another site, you’ll see an icon and the word “Web” in front of the name of the collection.

The Web Search results include the essential information from the other site (theoretically, enough to help you decide whether the record refers to your ancestor) and a link to visit the website.

“In the same way you should always check the image when you look at an index, make sure you go to the web site to see what other information is there,” advises Ancestry.com in its announcement. “You will usually find additional information.”

You also can click to save the information to your tree.

You don’t have to subscribe or have a guest account with Ancestry.com to use Web Search or get to the source website. But if you want to save the web record to your online tree, you’ll of course need at least a guest account. 

Webmasters who don’t want their genealogy websites indexed in Web Records will be able to contact Ancestry.com and opt out.

See more details and a Q&A on Ancestry.com’s Web Search info page. 

Many genealogists see Web Search as Ancestry.com’s shot at a do-over of its Internet Biographical Collection, which was pulled down shortly after its introduction in August 2007 amid negative feedback over copyright and other concerns. More on that in this post. 

Friday, May 13, 2011 12:37:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

"This will entail a long-term, multi-million dollar effort," Archives.com product manager Julie Hill told me. "Users will begin to see these records coming online in the next couple of months."

If you're attending the NGS conference (going on now), you can sample the records already available on Archives by picking up a complimentary six-month membership card at the Archives booth (#229 and 231).

Archives also is making a special $1,000 grant award at the conference to an organization or individual working to preserve historical records and/or advance family history research. To apply, stop by the Archives booth for an application. Learn more on the NGS conference blog.

Thursday, May 12, 2011 1:51:59 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment created the National Jukebox website with 10,000-plus rare historic sound recordings produced in the United States from 1901 and 1925.

At the press conference unveiling the site, musician and actor Harry Connick Jr. performed “I’m Just Wild About Harry” (wish I could’ve been at that press conference!). You can listen to composer Eubie Blake’s version in the National Jukebox.

Search the recordings or browse by genre, artist, target audience (where you can click to the music of Germans, Swedes, Poles, Italians, Jews and other ethnic groups). Listen to recordings on a streaming-only basis. You also can access label images, record-catalog illustrations and artist bios, and create your own playlists.

"This collection includes popular music, dance music, opera, early jazz, famous speeches, poetry and humor. It is what our grandparents and great-grandparents listened to, danced to, sang along with," says Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.

The site represents the largest collection of such historical recordings made publicly available online for study and appreciation. In its agreement with Sony, the Library of Congress gets usage rights to Sony Music’s entire pre-1925 catalog.

I enjoyed George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." What tunes are you listening to in the National Jukebox?

Thursday, May 12, 2011 12:24:33 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

The site has more than 4,000,000 records dating from 1400 through the 1920s, including:

• Landed Estates Court Records (1850-1885), detailing more than 500,000 tenants living on estates all over Ireland
  

• Griffith's Valuation (1847-1864), which lists approximately 80 percent of householders in Ireland and names more than 1,400,000 individuals
  

• Directories Collection of national, provincial and local directories, which have information about towns and names of businesses, tradespeople and residents

FindMyPast.ie was developed in partnership with Eneclann, a Dublin-based company that offers Irish genealogy services, as well as digital publications and other services.

You can subscribe to Findmypast.ie for 6 months for 37.95 EUR (about $55) or 12 months for 59.95 EUR (about $88).

Thursday, May 05, 2011 1:26:44 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Mocavo.com crawls websites similar to the way Google does, except it focuses on free genealogy content—making it easier for you to find relevant family history information on the web. You can read genealogy-technology blogger Dick Eastman’s enthusiastic comments about Mocavo.com here. 

Click here if you’d like to suggest a site to Mocavo’s developers, who plan to update the site more frequently. 

Get Family Tree Magazine Web Guides, Family Tree University courses and other online genealogy helps from ShopFamilyTree.com.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 9:33:36 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Canadian author and genealogist Dave Obee recently opined on his Facebook page, “I've been hearing about the pending death of the book for several years now. One of these days, the prediction might turn out to be true.”

Obee’s comment kicked off an interesting online conversation. For many genealogists, the surge in online books can sound like a threat to the paper tome. But, as with all things, the market drives business and innovation, and the convenience and flexibility of digital books is very appealing. Here are some Tech Tips to help you dive in and reap the benefits of this growing phenomenon:

Get Started
Allison Stacy, editor of Family Tree Magazine, made this great video for getting started with Google Books.

See How Other Genealogists Use Google Books
Miriam Robbins Midkiff, author of the popular genealogy blog AnceStories: The Story of My Ancestors was featured in this video produced by Google.

Search Within a Book
After conducting your initial search and selecting a particular book, you can search within that book by simply typing specific keywords in the search box found in the column on the left side of the book’s page. This box searches only the book currently being viewed and makes quick work of finding a desired surname on individual pages of a large volume. (Find this tip in my new book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox.)

Keep Up To Date
The Inside Google Books blog is a great way to keep up to date on the latest news at Google Books. Add the RSS feed to your iGoogle page or favorite reader by simply clicking the Feedburner button found in the column on the right.

Google eBooks
Have you noticed that the Google Books homepage looks different these days? That’s because they have introduced the Google eBookstore to the offering. Here’s a terrific little video that explains the benefits of online books in a fun and simple way:

Google eBooks
Don’t skip Google eBooks just because they offer books for sale. Try this handy tip to unearth free gems:

1. Go to Google Books.
2. Click blue Go to the Google eBookstore Now button
3. Type family history in the search box and click the Search All Google eBooks button.
4. Click the Free Only link in the light blue box at the top of the page.
5. You’ll get a results list full of free books, many hard to find self-published family histories.

Look Elsewhere
When it comes to digital family history books, Google Books isn’t the only game in town Check out the Family History Archive, then watch the video below to learn more about how to use this robust resource.

I've had such a great time sharing Tech Tips with you these last 2 months. Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll join me at the free Family Tree Magazine podcast and Genealogy Gems podcast for more lively conversation about genealogy!

—Lisa Louise Cooke

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 9:12:39 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• Griffiths Valuation, 1847-1864: Over 2.5 million records that provide a snapshot of ancestors who rented land or property throughout Ireland in the 1850s
• Tithe Applotment Books, 1824-1837: In 1823, a law was enacted requiring all land holders to pay a tithe to the Church of Ireland, regardless of their religious affiliation. With details like tithe payer, acreage of their land and amount of their tithe, these 600,000 records in effect provide a census of pre-famine Ireland.
• Ordnance Survey Maps, 1824-1846: The first detailed mapping of Ireland undertaken during the 1830s and 1840s, the later part of which was produced during the height of the famine.
• Lawrence Collection, 1870-1910: This collection of 20,000 photographs showcases the length and breadth of Ireland, through the eyes of William Lawrence's photography studio in Dublin.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 1:06:22 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [4]

Smart Matching finds matches between the people in users’ family trees on MyHeritage. To date, those trees total more than 680 million people in 17 million trees.

The updates include a new presentation of Smart Matches, plus more efficient organizing and reviewing of matches. The new Consensus Page aggregates data from all Smart Matches, presenting a “big picture” for each match. It summarizes the names, birth and death dates and places, marriage info, etc., and indicates the number of times each piece of information has been used in other family trees.

SmartMatching works in “real time” as users enter new information into their trees, as well as offline. Users are notified of new matches by e-mail. The service is free for MyHeritage.com basic members, but those on MyHeritage.com subscription plans also get enhanced options for contacting other tree owners and confirming or rejecting matches. If both tree owners confirm the match, the trees are linked, rather than merged, so each owner retains control of his tree.

See more about SmartMatching here.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011 3:05:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Perhaps most thrilling for Canadian researchers, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), the country’s main repository of historical records, has announced plans to put most of its services online within the next seven years—in time to celebrate the confederation’s 150th anniversary in 2017. That plan includes several goals, among them:

• Starting this year, you'll be able order digital copies of documents in LAC’s collection; paper copies will be phased out by April.

• You’ll be able to access the entire contents of the National Union Catalogue, representing more than 30 million catalog entries, using online search engines. (Learn more about the Catalogue—comparable to Americans’ National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections—on the LAC website.) 

• Over the next year, LAC will double the volume of its already exceptional online content, adding millions of genealogy images in partnership with Ancestry.ca (sister site to Ancestry.com).

The Canadiana Discovery Portal is a beta site that lets you search more than 60 million pages of Canadian content from archive collections in libraries, museums, universities and government agencies across the country. Just type a search term, such as a name, place or topic, into the box on the home page. You’ll get digitized books, photos. audio and video You can sort results by relevance or newest/oldest, and filter by language, media (image, audio or video), contributing archive or date range covered.

You can raise your glass to this: Ancestry.ca is honoring the 225th anniversary of Molson Brewery with “mug-rattling” family stories of the Labatt and Molson families, Canada’s most famous brewers. One such tale you can read about in old newspapers: Harry Markland Molson, great-grandson of John Molson, perished with the Titanic in 1912. 

If you're looking for some guidance in your Candian roots research, here are some of Family Tree Magazine’s resources to check out:

• Canada's Grosse ille immigrants (free article)
• Canadian Immigration Resources (free article)
• 10 Free Canadian Genealogy Sites (free article)
• Canadian Genealogy Toolkit (both free and Plus articles)
• Canadian Genealogy Guide Digital Download (available from ShopFamilyTree.com) 
• May 2009 Family Tree Magazine, with our guide to researching immigrants into Canada, available from ShopFamilyTree.com
  

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 11:55:24 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Each month, a recipient will receive up to $1,000 to help fund a family history research or historical preservation project. The first grant will be awarded at the end this month.

The company is seeking any project that “contributes to the promotion and advancement of family history research and preservation.” That might be document preservation, historical artifact restoration, record transcription or promotion of historical events.

Both individuals (whether amateur or professional) and organizations (such as libraries, historical societies and archives) are eligible to apply.

You can learn more about the grant program on the application page and send questions to grant@archives.com.

See Archives’ full announcement here.

Thursday, January 13, 2011 4:22:30 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

All programs with at least 10 reviews and user ratings of 4 or higher out of 5 received the Users Choice Award. Those are (in order starting with the highest-ranked):

• RootsMagic (Windows) 

• Brother's Keeper (Windows) 

• The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (Mac or Windows) 

• Genbox Family History (Windows) 

• Legacy Family Tree (Windows)

• Personal Ancestral File (Windows) 

• Reunion (Mac) 

• Family Tree Builder (Windows)
  

You can get quick facts about these programs, as well as links to Family Tree Magazine reviews, from our free online Genealogy Software Guide.

See the full GenSoftReviews User Choice Awards announcement here.

What's your favorite genealogy software, and why? Click Comments to let us know.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011 9:34:25 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Massachusetts Genealogy Crash Course: Find Your Bay State Ancestors takes place Tuesday, Jan. 18, at 7 p.m. Eastern (6 p.m. Central, 5 p.m. Mountain, 4 p.m. Pacific). Our expert presenters include

• David Dearborn, staff genealogist with the New England Historic Genealogical Society
• Midge Frazel, cemetery expert and Family Tree University instructor
• David Lambert, New England Historic Genealogical Society online genealogist since 1993

You’ll learn essential Massachusetts history, tricks for locating records, details on vital and immigration records, primary ethnic groups and records they may have left, and the best websites for Massachusetts research. Here's a peek at some of Frazel's favorite sites:

• Cape Cod Gravestones 
• Falmouth Genealogical Society Cemetery Transcription Project 
• Massachusetts Cemetery Directory (has maps with county names and the towns in them) 
• South Middlesex County Registry of Deeds 
• Norfolk County Registry of Deeds 
• Massachusetts’ Ethnic Mosaic (interactive map of ethnic groups in the state) 

Your registration for the live webinar includes:

• Participation in the hour-long presentation and Q&A session
• Access to the webinar recording to view as many times as you like
• PDF of the presentation slides
• PDF of our Massachusetts State Research Guide

The 20 percent off early-bird special ends soon, so register today.

Tuesday, January 04, 2011 2:19:35 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• FamilySearch has added records to its overhauled website, including the Social Security Death Index, US state censuses and vital records, and records from Canada, Spain and Venezuela. Click here to see the full list  and search the collections here. 

• FamilySearch also has started several new volunteer indexing projects, including US censuses, tax and vital records, and its first project in Polish. See the FamilySearch blog for details on each project and a contact link if you can volunteer.

• FamilySearch’s RootsTech conference, taking place in Salt Lake City Feb. 10-12, has announced its lineup of keynote speakers. They include two technology types you might not expect to hear at a genealogy conference—Shane Robison, Executive VP and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer for Hewlett-Packard; and Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive (where you’ll find digitized books and the Way Back Machine, among other delights)—as well as Curt Witcher, manager of the nationally known Allen County (Ind.) Public Library Genealogy Center (which has digitized documents and databases on its website); and Jay Verklar, CEO of FamilySearch International. Learn more about these speakers and get conference details on the RootsTech website. 

• British genealogy site Genes Reunited has added the original householder schedules for the entire 1911 UK and Wales census. The records are available by subscription or on a pay-per-view basis.

• A.C. Ivory, one of the young genealogists profiled in the November 2010 Family Tree Magazine (in one of my most favorite articles I’ve worked on), has given his Find My Ancestor website and blog a new look. You’ll find new downloads and resources, a new logo, easier navigation, social media integration and more.

• Those named to new positions in the genealogy world include Matt Wright as editor of the Federation of Genealogical Societies’ electronic quarterly, FGS FORUM; and Laura Murphy DeGrazia and Karen Mauer Green as co-editors of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society’s New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. 

Monday, January 03, 2011 5:26:38 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

This CD offers the instruction you need to find ancestors online, including the best websites to search, effective search techniques, time-saving computer tricks, social networking sites and more. You’ll also find online searching caveats, such as this research trap to avoid: 

Trap: It doesn't matter whether online information comes from a record, a transcription or an index.

Fact: An online record is an original document that's been digitized for viewing on the Web. For example, Ancestry.com,  Footnote.com and FamilySearch.org have posted images of original census enumerations. When you pull information from one of those images, you’re looking at the original record.

You have to be more careful with online transcriptions, which have typed text from original documents. You'll find transcriptions of passenger lists (on the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild site, for example), tombstone inscriptions (at Find a Grave and Interment.net) and all sorts of other records. Remember that typographical errors easily can sneak into transcriptions. Even a careful transcriber might not correctly read the handwriting on an original document. Always verify spellings and dates by checking the original record. 

Online indexes can help you find references to your ancestors in state vital records, books, periodicals and other sources. An index will contain only a fraction of the information recorded in the original source. When you locate your ancestor in, say, the Periodical Source Index (searchable via HeritageQuest Online, free through many libraries), jot down all the information, and then look for the genealogical or historical journal where the data appears. Or if your ancestor's name is in an online death records index, note the certificate number and request a copy from the state vital-records office.

The Trace Your Roots Online CD is available from ShopFamilyTree.com.

Friday, December 17, 2010 4:28:21 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

Ancestry.com says its users asked for more flexibility in entering place and date information: What if you don’t know when and where an ancestor was born—but you do know he lived in a certain place at a certain time?

So you’ll soon be able to enter a place into a “Name a place your ancestor might have lived” field. That will search Ancestry.com records for any life events—birth, residence, marriage, military service and death—that match that location. User testing revealed this moved relevant matches up in search results, says Ancestry.com product manager Anne Mitchell.

The new form also adds a “Calculate it” button, which will estimate a birth year based on when your ancestor lived in the place you specify.

If you do know when your ancestor was born, married, died, served in the military or lived someplace else, you can click an “Add an event” link to add one of these life events and the place and date of that event.

Finally, the links to clear the form and show the Advanced Search form have moved to the bottom of the Basic Search form, next to the Search button.

The changes will begin rolling out to some US members today and become available to all users over the next few weeks.

Visit Ancestry.com’s blog for more information and to see what the new form looks like.

Thursday, December 09, 2010 10:09:12 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

You can preview the new site now at <archives.gov/open/redesign/preview> (click on the image for the new site). Note that the search on the preview site won’t work.

NARA developed the new site with help from users through surveys, voting, card sorts (a way of figuring out how users would organize the site) and usability testing. It’ll feature:

• A new home page, selected by public vote in July

• A new interactive map of NARA’s facilities nationwide

• Historical documents and streamlined access to military service records (turns out that 81 percent of Archives.gov visitors are looking for this information)

• Topically organized sections focused on the needs of both casual browsers and professional researchers (the current site divides articles for genealogists, researchers, members of the general public, etc., leading to multiple sections on the same topic)

• Easy links to NARA's social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and blogs.

Read more about the redesign process on NARA’s website.

Monday, December 06, 2010 3:51:36 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Online registration is now open for the National Genealogical Society (NGS) 2011 Family History Conference. The conference will be May 11–14 at the North Charleston Convention Center in Charleston, SC.

Registration for the full event ranges from $175 to $245, depending whether you’re an NGS member, whether you make the early bird deadline (March 11), and whether you want a printed syllabus. You also can register for a single day of the conference, which costs $95 to $115.

• Tickets also are on sale for the Who Do You Think You Are? Live! 2011 show Feb. 25-27 in London. This event, affiliated with the British version of the “Who Do You Think You Are?” tv show, draws about 10,000 attendees. To save a little on tickets, follow the discount code link Kimberly Powell gives on her About.com Genealogy blog. 

• Family networking site MyHeritage.com has launched Family Tree Builder 5.0, the latest version of its free genealogy software. New features include to-do lists, a Tree Consistency Checker (helps find mistakes in your family tree data by automatically identifying errors and inconsistencies in 40 categories), improved privacy settings, support for your DNA test results, custom reports, and the customizable family tree charts announced recently.

Learn more about Family Tree Builder at MyHeritage.com.

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society, which announced its new AmericanAncestors.org site in August, has officially deactivated the NewEnglandAncestors.org website (the old URL redirects to the new site). You can get a tutorial on searching the AmericanAncestors.org databases in the March 2011 Family Tree Magazine, on sale Jan. 11.

Friday, December 03, 2010 2:08:44 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

The new record collections now available on Archives.com include:

• 40 million indexed vital records from states including Texas, Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and Utah. These represent a 25 percent increase in the site’s US vital records. Information you’ll get varies by state, but generally includes the child’s name, sex, birth date and place, and parents’ names.
  

• 110 million newspaper pages from Newspaper Archive, dating back to 1753 and containing billions of indexed names.

• 300,000 indexed burial records through a partnership with cemetery mapping company Names In Stone. In the search results, users can view burial information and click the View Full Record link to see supplementary fields and a cemetery map on NamesInStone.com (no additional payment or membership required).

Since its July 2009 launch, Archives.com users have spent more than 2 million hours on the site and performed 50 million searches. Users can search all records, search by record type (such as marriage) or state, or search by collection name. A subscription costs $39.95 per year; a seven-day free trial is available.

Thursday, December 02, 2010 8:38:48 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• Congratulations to Lisa Louise Cooke on the 100th episode of her Genealogy Gems podcast! This special episode celebrates the first 100 with a look at some of Lisa's favorite gems, interviews and milestones, plus some messages from listeners.

• Season 2 of Brigham Young University's genealogy show, "The Generations Project," airs Monday, Jan. 3 at 7 pm Mountain time on BYUtv. You can stream the channel online, or look for it on cable for your area. Learn more about the show on its website.

• FamilySearch Beta has added or updated 34 collections of genealogical records—that’s 15 million indexed records and 2.5 million images. The information covers 13 countries: Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Jamaica, Canada and the United States. Click here to see a list of the new/updated collections. 

• New York’s Larchmont Historical Society has created an online Photo Index of Fallen World War I Soldiers from New York State. The images, digitized from the book Soldiers of the Great War, don’t show all the state’s fallen soldiers, including those whose photos weren't available and those who grew up in New York but enlisted elsewhere. You can read more about the site and get search tips from the ResearchBuzz blog. 

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society is holding a technology-focused Weekend Research Getaway Jan. 27 to 29, 2011. The weekend will combine guided research at the NEHGS Research Library in Boston with educational lectures about using technology in your family search. Registration costs $300, or you can buy a day pass. See the program and register at AmericanAncestors.org.
  

• Ancestry.com and National Geographic Digital Media have developed an online family history “experience” on the National Geographic Genographic Project website where visitors can learn more about researching genealogy and search their roots. They’ll be able to start an online family tree, get tips on doing family history, and links to Ancestry.com’s subscription record collections. The Genographic Project is a DNA study of the genetic makeup of populations around the world in order to chart the migration history of the human species.

Friday, November 19, 2010 12:27:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

The site also launched a professional poster-printing service for any chart produced on the website, as well as a chart design service.

If you have your family tree information on MyHeritage, you can click on the Family Tree tab on your family site, then select Charts and Books. Choose from 18 chart types, including new bowtie and hourglass designs. The MyHeritage version of the hourglass format is unique in that it can include the ancestors of any spouse.

You also can customize your chart with border designs, frames, backgrounds, decorations, colors and fonts. You can opt to include information such as names, birth dates, wedding anniversaries, photos and personal notes.

This is an example of a bowtie chart, with a nuclear family in the center and each parent’s ancestors on the sides.

This all-in-one chart shows collateral relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings.

You can export your chart for free in high-resolution PDF format to print or share via e-mail.

You also can order a professionally printed poster starting at $20. A variety of paper types (standard, matte photo, glossy photo, vinyl or canvas) and sizes (including huge wall charts for family reunions) are available, with optional lamination. 

MyHeritage provides free hosting for family websites up to 250MB and trees up to 250 people, with more storage and features for $6.25 to $9.95 per month. You can start a MyHeritage tree by uploading a GEDCOM or typing in names.

Learn how to make the most of your MyHeritage membership with Family Tree Magazine’s MyHeritage Web Guide download, available from ShopFamilyTree.com.

Thursday, November 18, 2010 11:18:50 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

GEDCOM (for GEnealogy Data COMmunication) is the language genealogy software programs use to communicate with each other—when you export family data from your genealogy software, you create either a file native to that program or a GEDCOM file that other genealogy programs and websites can read.

(Get help creating a GEDCOM from FamilyTreeMagazine.com's free GEDCOM Basics article.)

But the GEDCOM file format has some shortcomings—one being that it hasn’t been updated in 14 years.

“In the meantime, genealogists have incorporated tools with expanded capabilities reflecting changing technology," says Russ Worthington, a genealogy lecturer and software “power user.”

GEDCOM files you export from your genealogy software may leave out some of your research. “The current GEDCOM file exchange strips out much of my hard work, leaving only some of the data I've typed and attached to each well-documented ancestor,” says genealogy blogger DearMYRTLE. “We experience similar problems when uploading and downloading our genealogy data with popular genealogy websites."

More GEDCOM problems are pointed out in this DearMYRTLE blog post.

The BetterGEDCOM wiki allows genealogy software programmers, website developers and end users to collaborate on developing better data exchange standards. Organizers hope this will facilitate sharing between researchers who use a variety of technology platforms, genealogy products and services. 

"We also seek to account for language and cultural differences as we develop data standards for recording family history information." says Greg Lamberson, the technician who developed the wiki’s initial pages. "Input from BetterGEDCOM participants the world over is a vital component."

BetterGEDCOM plans to codify standards, giving genealogy software developers a framework to resolve problems, and will seek recognition by international standards organizations.

Click here to visit the BetterGEDCOM wiki; the “Where do I start?” section on the home page and the “What is BetterGEDCOM?” link on the left are good places to begin. Anyone can join the effort—just click Join at the top to register.

Confused by computer file formats? Consult our free computer file format glossary on FamilyTreeMagazine.com to learn what your mystery file is.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010 9:35:46 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

One of the most interesting parts of the FamilySearch Blogger Day was a talk by Dan Lawyer, the guy in charge of what he termed the “big renovation project” that is the FamilySearch.org makeover.

“Genealogy is hard” is a conclusion his team reached after studying how genealogists were using FamilySearch. Which isn't news to family historians who've done some research, but Lawyer pointed out three factors that can make it difficult:

• Life circumstances may not allow people the time or other resources needed to do genealogy.
  

• Logistic and technical hurdles, such as getting online and knowing how to use a computer.
  

• The way genealogy is often presented to a newcomer can make it appear not-so-engaging.

Do you agree with these findings? Click Comments at the end of this post to let us know.

So the goal for the renovated FamilySearch site—which FamilySearch Beta will become—are:

• Make genealogy easier.
  
  
• Make the site suitable for beginners and advanced researchers—so you don’t have to be a genealogist to use it, but even advanced researchers will find it useful.
  
  
• Facilitate giving and getting research help on the site, as well as learning how to research.

Though researchers have been using the beta site for months (as of earlier this week, it had 35,000 visitors from 17 countries in October alone), it’s still being tweaked.

User input into the site is spurring improvements in features such as, to name some minor ones: the hard-to-find arrows that let you expand search results (see the tiny gray triangles on the right side of the screen shot below) and the loooooong Advanced search panel on the left side of the search results (it continues beyond this screen shot).

Within the next three to six months, Lawer says, updates will include adjusting search forms, adding browsing filters, boosting the quality of results, and adding how-to content. (Interestingly, but not surprising to me, was the finding that new genealogists don’t look around the site at that how-to content until after they’ve used the search function.)

The Pedigree Resource File from the current FamilySearch.org will be added to the beta site's Family Trees search, which already contains the Ancestral File.

The beta site will probably become the official FamilySearch site sometime between December and February, Lawyer said. “New” FamilySearch, the online tree-building software available to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, likely won’t become part of the site for some time, as developers work out a way to handle conflicts among different users' trees for the same lines. 

See my Bloggers Day disclosure in this post.

Learn more about "classic" FamilySearch and other popular genealogy websites in our Web Guides digital downloads, available from ShopFamilyTree.com.

Monday, October 25, 2010 12:29:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [8]

• In the early 1900s, lamination—now an archival no-no—was a celebrated new tool at repositories nationwide. Thousands of historical documents were laminated, including the Emancipation Proclamation. Find out how archives are working with these documents in the December 2010 Genealogy Insider column. 

• About 125,000 US troops, both Army regulars and new volunteers, served in the Philippine Insurrection from 1899 to 1902. The 1900 US census has information on military personnel stationed in the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
  
  Read more in our December 2010 guide to records from America’s lesser-known military conflicts. 

• The Washington State Digital Archives holds more than 90 million records, with 28 million searchable online. Find more state genealogy resources in our guide to 75 of the best state sites for genealogy research (also online). 

• The Irish National Museum has a firkin of butter buried in a peat bog (once a common storage practice) in the late-17th or eary-18th century. The grayish substance no longer resembles butter. Brush up on butter in the December 2010 History Matters column. 

• To help kids learn about your family’s genealogy, you can get Hearth Song’s stick-on family tree wall mural to personalize with relatives’ names and photos. Get more kid-friendly genealogy ideas in the December 2010 article Legacy Lessons.

• Some 250,000 Scots-Irish are thought to have arrived in the United States between 1717 and the American Revolution, with later waves in the 1740s, around 1754, and between 1771 and 1775. Many headed for central Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the Carolinas, eventually migrating into and across the Appalachians.
  

Learn how to trace these ancestors (also called Ulster Scots) in our December 2010 guide to Scots-Irish Roots.

• Most PCs come with Window Movie Maker, which makes it easy to turn digital photos and videos into family movies. See a tutorial in the December 2010 Toolkit.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 12:15:50 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• filling out forms
• calculating cousin relationships
• myths to avoid
• choosing genealogy software
• using popular websites
• researching at the library, courthouse and cemetery
• using genetic genealogy

• a seven-day free membership to Family Tree Magazine Plus
• a seven-day free trial to genealogy records site Archives.com
• $25 off a Family Tree University course
• 15 percent off a purchase at ShopFamilyTree.com

Thursday, October 14, 2010 9:30:39 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• The UK family history subscription and pay-per-view site Findmypast.co.uk has launched a collection of transcribed Devon parish records in association with the Devon Family History Society. The records include baptisms from 1813 to 1839, marriages from 1754 to 1837, and burials for 1813 to 1837.
  

• Mark Tucker, author of the Think Genealogy technology blog, has announced he’s creating a “cousin calculator” app for the new Windows 7 phone (slated for release sometime in October or November). You can read more about the app on Think Genealogy.
  
  
• The Illinois State Genealogical Society will honor five individuals for their genealogical achievements at its fall conference Oct. 23:

• Cheri Hunter of Decatur, Ill. will receive the Community Service Award
• Fred Katko of Peoria, Ill., will receive the Special Recognition Award
• Christian Bender a student from Oglesby, Ill., will receive the Youth Award
• Curt Witcher Senior Manager for Special Collections at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind., will receive the Distinguished Service Award
• Margaret Collins of Springfield, Ill., and Daniel W. Dixon, of Auburn, Ill., will receive the Individual Writer Award as co-winners.

• Genealogy Gems podcast host Lisa Louise Cooke has released volume 2 of her Google Earth for Genealogy video series. The video helps you use Google Earth’s mapping features to learn more about your ancestors. Here’s a sneak peek:
  

• In a late addition to today's roundup, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society announced today that all issues of the society's NYG&B Record (563 issues dating back to 1870) are accessible to society members on the society's website. You can search every word of the issues, or use a new surname search engine.

Friday, October 01, 2010 10:30:31 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Space-saving ideas for your genealogy stuff, from Family Tree Magazine contributing editor Rick Crume

• My update on the new FamilySearch Beta website

• Lisa’s overview of the Digital Library of Georgia website

• Digital photography tips from contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson’s Family Tree University class Digital Photography Essentials 

• Grace Dobush talks about new scanners that are small enough to take along on your next research trip

Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:16:11 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Tips and websites for determining whether you’ve found your Harry Smith (or whomever) from author and professional genealogist Sharon DeBartolo Carmack

• A look at the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness website (where you can request a free library or cemetery lookup in a distant locale) with podcast host (and Genealogy Gems podcast producer) Lisa Louise Cooke. (See our full list of 101 Best Websites for 2010)
  

• Tips for breaking down genealogy brick walls from the Brick Wall Busters: Solutions to Real-Life Stumpers webinar.
  

• A discussion on news from the blogosphere with yours truly

• A sneak peek at the upcoming November 2010 Family Tree Magazine with publisher and editorial director Allison Stacy

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 4:50:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• More than 30,000 early-20th century marriage records from Troy, NY, are indexed online at the Troy Irish Genealogical Society. You can read more about the project, a collaboration between the society and the Rensselaer County Clerk’s office, at the New York History blog.

• Families is a new app for the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad that works in conjunction with  the windows-based family tree program Legacy Family Tree. You can transfer Legacy family files from your PC to your mobile device, then view and edit them. (You’ll need to download a free program called Families Sync to your PC in order to transfer the files.) Families is available at the Apple App store. Learn more on the Families website.

• The National Archives’ Prologue magazine produced a fascinating video short from a recent issue about the Magellans of the Sky, a group of eight Army airmen who set out in 1924 to be the first people to circle the globe by air. You can watch it on the archives’ YouTube channel.
  
  
• British subscription site Findmypast.co.uk has added 180,000 records to its collection of Chelsea Pensioners British Army Service Records. The additions cover men pensioned out of the British Army between 1760 and 1854 (their pensions were administered through the Royal Hospital at Chelsea). Records covering 1901 to 1913 are slated for release in September.

Friday, August 06, 2010 1:40:59 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

• Hear about our 2010 list of 101 best websites (we focused on free sites this year) for doing genealogy. You can see the list in the September 2010 Family Tree Magazine and on FamilyTreeMagazine.com

• Discover some of the best preservation resources online

• Learn how to submit photos of your Civil War-era ancestors for our 2010 commemorative Civil War calendar

• Meet Lindsay, Family Tree Magazine’s summer intern and resident genealogy newbie

• Find out about the Family Tree Sourcebook, a genealogy records reference appearing in bookstores this fall

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 2:55:51 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• How to navigate Ancestry.com
• Tricks for finding databases with the genealogical information you need
• Strategies to locate hard-to-find ancestors in the site’s record collections
• Things Ancestry.com doesn't want you to know!

• Participation in the live presentation and Q&A session
• Access to the webinar recording to view again as many times as you like
• PDF of the presentation slides for future reference
• Bonus handouts

Thursday, July 22, 2010 8:37:48 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• FamilySearch Essentials: How to Access Records from 100 Countries Without Leaving Town webinar recording, available from ShopFamilyTree.com

• Make the Most of FamilySearch.org webinar recording, available from ShopFamilyTree.com
  
  
• FamilySearch Web Guide, available from ShopFamilyTree.com
  

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 4:09:49 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• Finding African-American Ancestors in Newspapers, a Family Tree University course taught by African-American genealogy expert Tim Pinnick
  

• Tracing Slave Ancestors Resource Toolkit (free article on FamilyTreeMagazine.com)
  
  
• How to trace slave ancestors, available as a Family Tree Magazine Plus article (click here for information on Family Tree Plus) and in the July 2009 Family Tree Magazine
  
  
• African-American Research Guide, a digital download from ShopFamilyTree.com

Monday, July 19, 2010 9:33:06 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Little-known strategies for finding family in FamilySearch databases (free article)

• How to find the books and microfilm you need in the Family History Library catalog (free article)

• FamilySearch Essentials: How to Access Records from 100 Countries Without Leaving Town webinar recording, available from ShopFamilyTree.com

• The January 2010 Family Tree Magazine with our FamilySearch Web Guide, available from ShopFamilyTree.com both in print and as a digital download 

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 12:42:52 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• FamilySearch has added records from Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Spain, and the United States to its Record Search Pilot site and Beta Search site. US additions include indexes to the 1910 census for several states, Massachusetts death records, Minnesota probate court wills.

• Michigan residents can access state history-related documents (such as personal narratives, memoirs, pamphlets and political speeches) and historical essays through Gale’s collection Michigana, Sources in U.S. History Online, available as part of Michigan eLibrary. (Some eLibrary material is accessible to only those who log in with a Michigan library card, driver’s license or state ID.)

• Got Scottish ancestors? The pay-per-view service DeceasedOnline, a database of burial and cremation registers for the UK and Ireland, recently added 192,000 burial records from 10 cemeteries in Aberdeen, Scotland. You can search for free; viewing records costs about $2.20 to $3.

Friday, June 18, 2010 2:55:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• How did the DeadFred photo-reunion website get its name? 
  
  
• Can you get copies of materials from the Library of Congress (LOC) without being there in person? 
  
  
• If I get my DNA tested, does that mean the FBI can look at my profile and compare it to criminal cases?
  
  
• How many DNA markers should I have tested?
  

• The LOC is the largest library in the world.
  
  
• It has more than 60,000 genealogies from around the world.
  
  
• It has 20 million cataloged books.
  
  
• Its unmatched US city directory collection covers 1,200 cities, towns and counties across the country.
  
  
• The library building  has 20 reading rooms.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Thursday, June 17, 2010 9:18:43 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• 10 best websites for military research
• Military records toolkit
• Four resources for military ancestors
• Common abbreviations in military records
• Civil War genealogy toolkit
• WWI genealogy resources
• Military Records category of this Genealogy Insider blog
  

• Online Military Records: Document Your Family's Service webinar recording
• May 2008 Family Tree Magazine with our guide to online military records
• July 2007 Family Tree Magazine (available as a PDF digital download) with our Civil War research guide
• The Everything Civil War Book By Brooke C. Stoddard and Daniel P. Murphy, PhD

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 10:13:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• more prominent browsing by place (right down to a county, which got applause from the audience), record category and collection
  
  
• a simplified basic search form that asks for name and place of residence (it includes a calculator to help you determine a birth year based on your ancestor’s age at a specific time)
  
  
• pages with historical information and basic facts about counties, as well as additional resources outside of Ancestry.com.

Thursday, April 29, 2010 12:21:25 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

• Going to the National Genealogical Society conference starting April 28 in Salt Lake City? Stop by the Generation Maps exhibit hall booth Wednesday, April 28, from 2 to 5 p.m., for a Family ChArtist debut party. They’ll have refreshments, discounts, drawings, and demos of this online service for creating family trees.

• Archives.com (formerly GenealogyArchives) released a free internet search feature that scours several online genealogy resources, such as FamilySearch. To use this search, go to Archives.com and run a search on the homepage (if you’re a member of the site, you must be logged out). Web results will be listed below a summary of Archives.com results.

• You can get a seven-day free trial membership to search Archives.com’s own collection of 1.2 billion records and create a family tree on the site. Regular subscriptions cost $39.95 per year.

• British subscription and pay-per-view genealogy site Familyrelatives.com released a new batch of school and clergy records. School records might range from student registers to mini-biographies. Clergy lists name 200,000 members of Anglican and Catholic clergy for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
  

• The Library of Congress will preserving every public tweet since Twitter’s inception in March 2006—that’s billions and billions of Tweets. See the library’s announcement for more details and some interesting discussion.

Friday, April 16, 2010 1:05:26 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Remember that tonight's "Who Do You Think You Are?" episode repeats the Sarah Jessica Parker March 5 premiere. The next new episode will feature Susan Sarandon on April 23. Check out our "Who Do you think You Are?" category for more news and episode recaps.

• Subscription site World Vital Records has added records of Italian and German passenger arrivals from the late 1800s, mostly through the port of New York but also through Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. Note you can search these passenger records free through the National Archives and Records Administration's Access to Archival Databases service.

• The Georgia Historic Newspapers site has added a free Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive with digitized pages from 14 newspapers published in Atlanta from 1847 to 1922. You can keyword-search the full text of the whole collection or an individual title, or browse issues by title and year. (You may need to download the DJVu Plugin to view articles.)

• The Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research in Houston, considered one of the country's best public libraries for genealogical research, is facing a reduction of operating hours due to budget cuts. Hours will likely change to 10 a.m. to 6 p.m on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and closed Friday and Sunday. (Current hours are Monday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Tuesday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Friday and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.)

Friday, April 09, 2010 9:06:18 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• in the print May 2010 Family Tree Magazine,
• in the digital version of the May 2010 Family Tree Magazine,
• on its own as a digital download

• an in-depth description of how to use the site and its collections
• a quick-start guide and need-to-know statistics (such as the site’s contact information, major content areas and any fees)
• step-by-step search demos
• a cheat sheet of quick links, resources, hacks and shortcuts
• hyperlinked URLs so you can click through to all the websites recommended in the guide

Monday, March 15, 2010 12:10:16 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

When Ellis Island launched its database of New York City passenger arrivals from 1892 to 1924, genealogists viewed it as the greatest advancement since pedigree charts. The ability to freely search records of 22 million immigrants, passengers and crew—and view digital images of the lists—was a huge research boon. But as great as the site was, people became frustrated with its limitations: Searching on just first name, last name and gender wasn’t adequate for finding everyone’s immigrant ancestors.

Those limitations inspired the first One-Step tools. Although EllisIsland.org has since expanded its search options (they now include features that debuted on the One-Step site, such as name-spelling flexibility, birth year, ship name, town of origin and ethnicity), Morse’s White and Gold Ellis Island search forms still offer extra options for ferreting out hard-to-find immigrant ancestors. For instance, the Gold Form lets you search for town names that sound like your search term; both forms let you search on port of departure and age.

By default, both forms hunt for matches that start with your search term. That way, if you search on Glasgow in the town field, you'll catch both Glasgow and Glasgow, Scotland—whichever way it was recorded.

A key distinction between the forms: The White Form employs the same search engine as the Ellis Island site. The Gold Form uses a different search engine, which works faster when you search on name fragments.

Morse advises using the Gold Form for most searches, and the White Form when you need a “fresh perspective” for your search.

Morse unveiled the Gold Form to provide maximum flexibility in searching all 25 million people in the Ellis Island database. It melds the best of his old Blue and Gray forms, offering added parameters for searching all the records—including traveling companion, exact arrival date and marital status. Want to search for everyone from a particular village? Specify the town, but leave the name fields blank.

• Best websites for immigration researchers (free article) from last year's list of 101 Best Web Sites for Genealogy
  
  
• Free passenger list transcription forms
  
  
• The Family Tree Guide to Finding Your Ellis Island Ancestors by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, available (and on sale!) from ShopFamilyTree.com
  

• Online Immigration Resources: Retracing Your Ancestor's Journey webinar recording, available from ShopFamilyTree.com

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 1:42:11 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• The source information panel has moved from the right to the left side of the page (you can click an arrow to close the panel).

• The filmstrip of record images at the bottom of the viewer defaults to closed (use the Open filmstrip link to open it).

• A Find pop-up box lets you search for a name or other word in the record.

• Controls to manipulate the record image (such as magnifying and rotating it) were separated from out and moved from above the image to the vertical toolbar on the left.

• Sharing features (such as adding a note to the image and—new in the viewer—posting it to your Facebook page) are above the image.
  
  
• The breadcrumb trail showing you which collection you’re in, and letting you navigate within it, is above the sharing features. (Previously, this breadcrumb trail was located inconspicuously above the filmstrip.)
  

Tuesday, March 09, 2010 12:25:47 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Creative Gene by Jasia Smasha
• footnoteMaven by footnoteMaven
• GeneaBloggers by Thomas MacEntee
• Genea-Musings by Randy Seaver

• The Association of Graveyard Rabbits by several authors
• Granite in My Blood by Midge Frazel

• Ancestry.com Blog by various authors

• The Genetic Genealogist by Blaine Bettinger

• George Geder by George Geder
• Scottish Genealogy News and Events by Chris Paton
• Small Leaved Shamrock by Lisa
• Steve’s Genealogy Blog by Stephen Danko
• Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog by Schelly Talalay Dardashti

• Family Matters by Denise Barrett Olson
• Genealogy Guys by George G. Morgan and Drew Smith
• Genealogy Tip of the Day by Michael John Neill
• The ProGenealogists Blog by various authors

• California Genealogical Society and Library Blog by Kathryn Doyle
• Sandusky History by the staff of the Sandusky (Ohio) Library Archives Research Center
• Midwestern Microhistory by Harold Henderson

• The Ancestry Insider by theAncestry Insider
• DearMyrtle by Pat Richley-Erickson
• Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter by Dick Eastman
• GenealogyBlog by Leland Meitzler

• The Family Curator by Denise Levenick
• Shades of the Departed by footnoteMaven

• Ancestories: The Stories of My Ancestors by Miriam Midkiff
• Apple’s Tree by anonymous
• BeNotForgot by Vickie Everhart
• Educated Genealogist by Sheri Fenley
• Greta’s Genealogy Blog by Greta Koehl
• Heritage Happens by Cheryl Fleming Palmer
• Herstoryan by Herstoryan
• Janet the Researcher by Janet Iles
• Kinexxions by Becky Wiseman
• Little Bytes of Life by Elizabeth
• Our Georgia Roots by Luckie Daniels
• WeTree by Amy Coffin
• West in New England by Bill West
• What’s Past is Prologue by Donna Pointkouski

Monday, February 22, 2010 12:12:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [3]

• I hope you didn't travel to Washington, DC, for genealogy research this weekend. Because of a snowstorm predicted to deliver up to 24 inches of snow to the area, the National Archives research rooms in DC and College Park, MD, closed at noon today, Friday, Feb. 5, and remain closed on tomorrow. The Library of Congress closed at 1 pm today and will stay closed Saturday.
  

• British subscription and pay-per-view genealogy site FamilyRelatives added 5 million new parish records with information on baptisms, marriages and burials in counties in England and Wales, dating from the early 1500s to almost 1900.

• FamilySearch is producing a short film based on a Hawaiian woman’s search for her grandmother, a resident of the Molokai Leper Colony, to show at this year’s National Genealogical Society conference. The conference takes place April 28 to May 1 in Salt Lake City and features FamilySearch-sponsored special events (you can read about them on the conference blog).

• Registration is open for the 30th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Los Angeles July 11 to 16. Registration costs $265 (pay another $150 for a spouse/partner) until May 1. Student discounts are available, and you can purchase single-day registration. Click here to see pricing.
  
  
• Israel-based family networking site MyHeritage has acquired OSN, a network of 10 family sites (including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland, and the Dynstree.com in the United States). According to the announcement, the acquisition makes MyHeritage the world's largest international netwrok dedicated to families. Read more about what this means for the geenalogy industry on Craig Manson's Geneablogie. 
  

Friday, February 05, 2010 2:05:53 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• The Smithsonian Institution has an online African-American cultural heritage tour, plus resources for educators and calendars of commemorative events.

• Library and Archives Canada created an introduction to Black History Month with online resources relating to black history in Canada, and information on educational events organized by Black History Ottawa.

• The National Register of Historic Places website features places in the United States important to African-American history, including the Dunklin, Mo., home of former slaves Charles and Bettie Birthright, and Jazz pioneer John Coltrane’s house in Philadelphia.

• Yahoo! has an online timeline starting with the first slaves arriving at Jamestown, Va. and continuing all the way up to today.

• The Root editor, historian Henry Louis Gates, put together a timeline of African-American history highlights since 1960.

• Links to several YouTube videos about black history and notable African-Americans, such as Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks.

• Free FamilyTreeMagazine.com articles on websites for African-American genealogy, steps for tracking ancestors in the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules, and tips for finding free African-Americans.

• You can download our PDF guide to researching your African-American ancestors for $4 from ShopFamilyTree.com.

Monday, February 01, 2010 11:00:47 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Welcome to our first news roundup of 2010!

• The 2010 National Genealogical Society (NGS) conference April 28 to May 1 in Salt Lake City, will highlight genealogy technology with a GENTECH Hall sponsored by FamilySearch. (GENTECH is a technology-focused genealogical society that merged with NGS in 2005.) There, nearly 100 technology-oriented exhibitors will feature software, gadgets, social collaboration sites, 60 computers for attendees’ use, and more. A GENTECH lecture track will cover cloud computing, blogs, data storage, social networking, photo editing and other tech topics. Learn more on the conference website.
  

• Genealogy Gems podcaster Lisa Louise Cooke has released the first-ever genealogy podcast app for iPhone and iTouch. The Genealogy Gems Podcast app provides users with streaming genealogy audio and video, and exclusive bonus content including Cooke’s 20 page e-book 5 Fabulous Google Research Strategies for the Family Historian. You can get the app at the iTunes app store. 
  

• Ancestry.com and the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) will sponsor a Family History Day event Saturday, Feb. 20, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Westin Copley Place in Boston. The day will include six classes, a Q&A with Ancestry.com experts, one-on-one consultations with NEHGS genealogists, and the chance to have your photos and documents scanned on professional scanners. Attendance costs $30; click here to register.
  
  
• The 55,000-member Civil War Preservation Trust announced it helped permanently protect 2,777 acres at 20 Civil War battlefields in five states during 2009. The trust's lifetime total comes to more than 29,000 acres of protected battlefield land at 109 sites in 20 states.

Friday, January 08, 2010 10:44:41 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Learn the history and traditions of Hanukkah, from the History Channel

• The story of how Hannukah has evolved over the years

• Listen to or read this NPR “All Things Considered” interview with a rabbi about the different spellings of Hannukah (I recommend listening to get the full effect of the pronunciations of Hebrew letters)

• This article might make you hungry with descriptions of potato latkes and how they became a traditional Hanukkah food (according to this author, there’s more to it than just eating a food containing oil)

• This site is all about Sufganiyot, nuggets of fried dough filled with jelly or custard

• Online resources for Jewish research (free article)

• Ties That Bind: seven research strategies from Schelly Talalay Dardashti (accessible to Family Tree Magazine Plus members)

• Jewish heritage research guide (digital download from ShopFamilyTree.com)

Thursday, December 10, 2009 9:03:57 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Member Profiles, where you can manage your account, view search history, save records and more

• Ancestor Alerts, which you set up via your profile—enter basic information on a person you’re searching for, and get an e-mail alert when the site finds potential matches in its databases

• a Search Guide to help members search the site and learn about its records
  

• new collections including 200,000 US census records and 100,000 census record images (note that except for the 1860 and 1930 census indexes, which come from Footnote, this isn’t a complete collection—for example, the 1900 census record count is 6,519)
  

More than 200,000 Canadian immigration, passenger and vital records are coming soon

• an FAQ for membership questions and to contact site support
  

• an overview of the site’s collections 
  

• made the records search in the members-only area more sophisticated, with more fields and the option to choose date ranges
  

Wednesday, December 09, 2009 12:28:21 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

• Look for our article on midwifery and how our ancestors were born in the March 2010 Family Tree Magazine (on newsstands Jan. 5).
  
  
• Examining clues in old hospital records (free article)
  
  
• Medical Attention: How to find ancestors’ medical records and put their illnesses into historical context (Family Tree Magazine Plus article)

Monday, November 30, 2009 10:01:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

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

Friday, November 20, 2009 1:41:39 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Ratified Indian Treaties dating back to 1722
  
  
• Indian Census Rolls featuring information including age, place of residence and degree of Indian blood
  
  
• The Guion Miller Roll, an important source for Cherokee ancestors
  
  
• Dawes Packets, containing original applications for tribal enrollments, as well as other documents relating to the Five Civilized Tribes

As with Footnote’s other records, members can search, annotate and add comments to records. Visitors also can view pages for other American Indian tribes, which feature a timeline and map, photo gallery, stories and members’ comments.

The records are available with a $79.95 annual subscription to Footnote (a free seven-day trial is available). Access the collection here.

Related resources on FamilyTreeMagazine.com:

• American Indian Genealogy Websites (free article)
  
  
• American Indian Genealogy Books (free article)
  
  
• Indian Territory (Family Tree Magazine Plus article): Our November 2009 guide to researching American Indian ancestors
  
  
• Oklahoma State Research Guide (digital download from ShopFamilyTree.com): Includes information on records related to the many tribes removed to Oklahoma

Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:01:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• The Genealogical Records Committee National Index (also called the GRC Index) was already on the site, but if you’ve used it before, it has a different interface as part of the Research System. It indexes 20,000 volumes of transcribed gravestones, family Bibles and other records (and not just from the Revolution era) DAR members have collected.
  

• The Ancestor Database of ancestral data from applications of DAR members (who must prove their descent from a Patriot).

• A Member search, which lets you enter a deceased DAR member's number for limited information on her ancestors.

• The Descendants index, still under construction, lets you search for names in generations between the DAR member and the Revolutionary War ancestor. It includes much 18th and 19th-century information.

Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:47:56 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [4]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 06, 2009 12:24:18 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

1. Go to ShopFamilyTree.com. Click My Wish List in the top right corner of any page.

2. If you’ve ordered something before, you might already have an account, and you can log in here. If you don’t have an account, click the “Not Registered? Click Here” link to create a user name and password (you don’t have to buy anything to register).

3. Once you’re logged in, click the Wish List link to go right to your list.

4. Set up a list by entering a description (such as “Diane’s Christmas list”), an expiration date, and deciding whether to keep it hidden. If you check the “private” box, you won’t be able to e-mail the list to others, but you can view and make purchases from it. Click submit.

5. Whenever you’re browsing around in the store and see an item you’d like, click the Add to Wish List button. You’ll be taken to the entry in your list.

Thursday, November 05, 2009 9:39:19 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Familybuilder DNA has added Groups, a feature that let customers collaborate on genetic genealogy research. They’ll be able to create and join groups focusing on commonalities such as haplogroup, national origin, surname, birthplace, etc. read more on Familybuilder.com.

• Historical newspaper and records site GenealogyBank has added content from more than 36 newspapers in 21 states. Here’s the full list of new expanded titles.

• Dick Eastman blogged about a National Library of Wales project to put 190,000 Welsh wills online. You can search the documents, which date from the 14th century to 1858, free on the National Library of Wales' website. You’ll find more details about the wills in Dick’s post.

Friday, October 30, 2009 2:48:23 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 2:53:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• The My Genealogy toolbar has dropdown menus of categorized links to genealogy websites. Download it from here or here. It works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

• The Malhamdale Local History Group of Yorkshire, England, created a toolbar with links to the group’s site and other genealogy websites. It works with Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox (though Firefox users are directed to a help page).

• The Manchester and Lancashire (England) Family History Society launched a genealogy toolbar that provides links to more than 200 useful British genealogy sites. It’s regularly updated, and you can configure settings such as which web site categories to display.

• The Family Genie toolbar works with Firefox (it’s supposed to work in Internet Explorer, but CNET reviewers couldn’t get it to). It has first- and last-name search boxes and a single dropdown menu of search engines, as well as a menu of bookmarked genealogy sites.

• If you’re an Ancestry.com member, you can download the Ancestry.com toolbar for quick access to links on Ancestry.com. It also lets you easily save links and add photos and text from any web page to your Ancestry tree.

• Google is a handy genealogy tool for searching on ancestors’ names, getting language translations, locating addresses and more; and you can make more use of it than ever with help from resources such as our Googling Your Genealogy webinar and the book Google Your Family Tree by Daniel M. Lynch. The Google toolbar isn't just for genealogists, but you'll appreciate the shortcuts to the search engine’s features.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:35:46 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [10]

• I read an interesting post on the Archives Next blog about NARA’s record digitization agreements with firms such as Footnote and Ancestry.com. The blogger outlines possible good, bad and ugly outcomes when NARA is finally legally able to post online the record images obtained through contracts with third parties. 

• Pedigree database subscription site OneGreatFamily ($59.95 per year) plans to improve its search function by installing the Perfect Search Database Search Appliance from Perfect Search Corp. Each week, OneGreatFamily makes more than 18.8 trillion comparisons of names, dates and other details in members’ family trees, says CEO Alan Eaton. The new search tool should increase searching capability, improve indexing, and to deliver results faster.

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) has added several genealogical journals to its online subscription ($75 per year): Besides its own New England Historical and Genealogical Register, they are The American Genealogist, The Connecticut Nutmegger, New Netherland Connections and The Virginia Genealogist.

• Also from NEHGS: Fellow actors, Boston natives, best buddies and  People magazine sexiest men alive Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are 10th cousins once removed. Their common ancestor is William Knowlton of Ipswich, Mass., a bricklayer who died in 1655. Read the full story in the Boston Herald.

Family Tree Magazine Plus members can read our article about Matt Damon’s roots—including his link to Ralph Waldo Emerson—here. 

Friday, October 16, 2009 2:49:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

All-around
These bloggers give you a little (or a lot) of everything: news, research advice, their own family stories, photos, opinions and more. There’s no one quite like the Genealogue, so we thought about that blog for awhile. It landed in this category because the Genealogue posts a satirical take on genealogy news, holds occasional research challenges and blogs about his own family history every so often.

Personal/Family
These blogs primarily cover the blogger's (or, in a case or two or more, bloggers') own research and ancestors. Family historians write what they know and what’s important to them, so this is our biggest category.

Local/Regional
Most posts in these blogs cover resources, genealogy events and history for a city, town, state or region.

Cemetery
These blogs focus on cemetery research, gravestone photos and the like.

Photos/Heirlooms
Content on these blogs is primarily about sharing, researching and preserving family photos and/or heirlooms.

Heritage
Here, blog content focuses on a particular heritage group, such as African-American, Jewish or Irish. We had some tough decisions in this category, as some family-related genealogy blogs by nature also examine that family’s ethnic heritage.

News/Resources
Blogs in this category deliver a range of genealogy news and information about new resources.

How-to
These blogs have instructional content on genealogical resources and methodology. In some cases, bloggers wrote about their own research and ancestors, but framed posts in an instructional manner.

Genealogy Companies
Blogs in this category are written on behalf of a genealogy company, and contain helpful (but not overly advertising-oriented) information on the company’s products, as well as other resources.

Genetic Genealogy
Blogs that are primarily about genetic genealogy and family health history.

Monday, October 05, 2009 9:37:39 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, September 18, 2009 10:29:24 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, September 09, 2009 11:31:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Summit Memory, an online scrapbook from the Akron-Summit County Public Library in Ohio, now has several digitized historical atlases and maps from the 1800s and early 1900s. Access them in the site’s online map room. Check out the photos and other resources while you're there.
  
  
• British subscription and pay-per-view site FindMyPast.com has completed a new transcription and added higher-quality images for its 1901 census for England and Wales. Images for the 1881 census are next on the site's to-do list.
  
  
• A New York Times article on the transfer of early- to mid-century Alien Case Files to the National Archives quoted Schelly Tallalay Dardahsti, Tracing the Tribe blogger and author of our September 2009 Jewish research guide, about the importance of using original documents. Read the article here.
  
  
• Subscription family tree site OneGreatFamily.com is publishing its free newsletter as a weekly genealogy blog you can subscribe to vis RSS. It’ll include research tips, helpful Web sites and suggestions for using OneGreatFamily.com.
  
  
• The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has launched a blog called NARAtions, which focuses on the future of online public access to records at NARA.

Friday, August 14, 2009 11:40:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• a map module that lets you display where your family lived over the years, map relatives’ addresses and quickly find your photos associated with a particular place
  
  
• a new toolbar that provides direct access to family Web sites on MyHeritage; birthday reminders; and a text, audio and video chat system called Family Chat
  
  
• an improved album lets you organize photos, videos and documents, and adds slide shows

Thursday, August 13, 2009 9:17:24 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]