• 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]

• All 397 US national parks will offer free admission Jan. 14-16 to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. You can visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Georgia, the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama, or the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC—just a few of the many national parks that have ties to Dr. King or the Civil Rights movement. 

Use the directory at NPS.gov to find a park.

• Library and Archives Canada has added digitized images of Upper Canada land petitions (357,831 new images in all) to its website. First search the index here (use the search link at the left; the one on the bottom didn't work for me) to find the microfilm number you need, then use the “microform digitization” research tool to you can browse the image page by page.

• FamilySearch has added 119 million new, free records to the record search at FamilySearch.org (that includes about 64 million indexed names and 55 million browsable images). They come from more than 30 countries including Australia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and the United States. See the full list of new and updated databases here.

Friday, January 13, 2012 4:54:31 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

It was the first official word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona was destroyed, killing 1,177 officers and crew. The USS Oklahoma capsized. About 2,400 Americans were killed.

As the number of survivors of the attack—now around 2,000—dwindles, the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association has elected to dissolve at the end of this year.

Now it's even more important for those who didn't witness the attack firsthand to preserve the memories of that day. Here are a few places to start: 

• The names of servicemembers and civilians who died in the attack are listed here.

• The free Interactive USS Arizona Memorial on Fold3.com lets you search for a name and leave a virtual tribute, story or photograph of a crewmember.

• Virtually visit the National Park Service's USS Arizona Memorial here.

• National Archvies digitized records related to the Pearl Harbor attack, including military dispatches regarding the attack, photos of the aftermath and official correspondence. You also can watch the Archives' video about US Navy deck logs, records that contain sailors' accounts of the day's events.
  
  
• WWII genealogy resources
  

Wednesday, December 07, 2011 9:29:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Run a web search or check the events section in your newspaper for events at museums near you, or tours of private homes. You also can browse the historic house museums in the MuseumsUSA directory. I did a little Web surfing, and my personal jet, if I had one, would fly me to these holiday houses:

• Belle Meade Plantation, Nashville Tenn. A Century of Christmas: 1853-1953, shows how Christmas celebrations here evolved from fresh greens and a simply decorated tree in 1853 to 20th-century electric tree lights and characters.

• Glessner and Clarke House Museums, Chicago. Two museums display different aspects of holiday celebrations. Clarke House exemplifies emerging holiday customs of the 1850s with simple decorations, and more elaborate decor at Glessner House reflects the growing interest in the celebration of Christmas.

• Pabst Mansion, Milwaukee. This beer baron's mansion features a nationally recognized Christmas display representing America's Gilded Age.

• Kimball House Museum, Battle Creek, Mich. A lovely Victorian house museum features lavish decorations.

• Aiken-Rhett House, Charleston, SC. This home re-creates the Victorian Age in its holiday decor.

• Mackenzie House, Toronto. This row house belonging to Toronto's first mayor is decorated in holiday greenery.
  
  
• Christmas at Arlington, Birmingham, Ala. Flowers transform this Antebellum home, built by one of Birmingham’s founders, into replicas of Christmas past.

• A Christmas Story House, Cleveland. So this isn't exactly pre-outdoor electric lights, but it's definitely nostalgic for those who remember Ralphie's quest for an air rifle and Randy's immobilizing snowsuit. You can tour the house where much of the 1983 movie was filmed and and get your own version of the Old Man's leg lamp.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011 11:37:24 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

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 presidential tradition of pardoning a turkey goes all the way back to …. 1989. Yes, George H.W. Bush was the first president to officially pardon his Thanksgiving turkey.

He sent Tom off to a Virginia petting zoo with the words “Let me assure this fine tom he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table. Not this guy. He’s been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here.” (Thus ensuring that some other poor turkey ended up on the White House table.)

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have continued the pardons. Last year, the two turkeys Obama pardoned (one was an understudy for the official ceremony) went to live at Mount Vernon.

Some claim that Harry Truman pardoned the turkey given to him by the National Turkey Federation in 1947, but the Truman Library has found no evidence a pardon occurred.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy announced he wasn't going to eat the turkey he received, but he didn’t actually pardon it. Ronald Reagan spared a turkey, too, but merely joked about a pardon as he was questioned about the Iran-Contra affair.

On FamilyTreeMagazine.com, we bust five more Thanksgiving myths, including the one about the buckled Pilgrim hat of children’s stories.

And go here to read about the real first Thanksgiving in the New World.

Monday, November 21, 2011 1:57:09 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]

These events offer the chance to take in interesting local history, nice scenery and slight spookery. You can find tours by day or night, for free or a fee (they often serve as fundraisers for historical societies).

A Google search or visiting the website of a local historic cemetery or historical society will help you find tours near you. Here are some tours around the country that my searches turned up:

• In Mississippi, there’ll be free tours at the Old Biloxi Cemetery (Oct. 25), Krebs Cemetery in Pascagoula (Oct. 27) and Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay St. Louis (Halloween night). Read more in the SunHerald.com online news article. 

• Watch out for headless horsemen during Sleepy Hollow Cemetery daytime and nighttime tours in Sleepy Hollow, NY, taking place weekends in October. Fees vary; reservations are required. 

• Oct. 29, the Historical Society of Long Beach (Calif.) holds a nonscary tour of Long Beach Municipal Cemetery and Sunnyside Cemetery, featuring actors in period garb delivering graveside presentations (based on sources such as obituaries, newspaper articles and oral histories) about the person who lies at rest. General admission costs $18, with specials for society members and students younger than age 18.

• Riverside Cemetery (which has an online burial database), established in 1887 in Macon, Ga., holds its Spirits in October series Oct. 20-22 and 27-29, with cemetery tours and more. Advance tickets are required; admission costs $10 to $20.

• Capturing the Spirit of Oakland at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta features nighttime tours with historical accounts from cemetery “residents” and candlelit mausoleums. Tickets must be purchased in advance; admission ranges from $10 to $17.50.

• Elmwood Cemetery in Kansas City, Mo., has a free Halloween Tour Oct. 30.
  

• Historic All Hallows Eve cemetery tours with costumed interpreters are happening on Halloween evening at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Va. Adults: $7; children 12 and younger, $5.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011 11:04:18 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Sept. 22, 1861, President Lincoln wrote a letter to Illinois Sen. Orville Hickman Browning defending his response to an order of John C. Fremont, commander of the Army's Department of the West.

Fremont had declared martial law on Aug. 30 and freed slaves in Missouri. Lincoln wanted him to rescind that order because it didn't comply with the Confiscation Act Congress passed on Aug. 6. The Confiscation Act allowed the federal government to confiscate property used to aid the Confederate cause, including slaves. The act didn’t go so far as to free slaves, though; rather, it merely removed their owners’ claim to them.

Sept. 11, Lincoln modified Fremont's order to conform to the Confiscation Act.

He wrote to Browning that "Fremont’s proclamation, as to confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity."  

Civil War resources from ShopFamilyTree.com:

• Life in Civil War America by Michael O. Varhola 

• Civil War Research: Find Your Ancestors in the War Between the States Family Tree University course with Diana Crisman Smith 

• Warman's Civil War Collectibles Identification and Price Guide by Russell E. Lewis 

• Top 10 websites for researching Civil War ancestors download 

• Finding the Civil War in Your Family Album by Maureen A. Taylor 

Thursday, September 22, 2011 3:52:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Neuroscientist-turned-journalist and genealogy buff Madeleine Johnson wrote about how she used a circular family tree chart of her own creation as a starting point to her roots research, and is searching for the story of a great-grandmother who died in an institution.

“Genealogy, distant and recent, gives meaning to personal and shared historical experience,” she writes.

Also check out another post and article she mentions: Going Dutch: I’m one of the Van Dusens of New Amsterdam. So what? in which Matthew Van Dusen says his illustrious ancestry—described in a New York Times article about New Amsterdam’s early settlers—doesn’t increase his own personal importance.

I have to agree with him there, but I do think it's neat to be related to someone you might read about in a history book (I'm not, that I know of). Of course, it's also gratifying to discover and honor the stories of "ordinary" folks in your tree. What do you think?

Wednesday, September 21, 2011 5:17:37 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

Wondering what hot topics your grandparents discussed with the neighbors, or what tunes your mom whistled as a teen? Want to flesh out your family's story with facts about everyday life? Enjoy reminiscing about days gone by?

Our book Remember That? A Year-by-Year Chronicle of Fun Facts, Headlines and Your Memories, by Allison Dolan and the editors of Family Tree Magazine, is an accounting of the whos, whats, whens and wheres of the 20th century:

• In 1930, the average annual income was $1,612, milk cost 65 cents a gallon and a home cost $7,146.
  
• In 1938, a devastating hurricane hit the Northeast coast.
  
• Sales of women's trousers skyrocketed in 1942.
  
• Perry Como crooned “Some Enchanted Evening” in 1949.
  
• Special K cereal and Crest toothpaste hit shelves in 1955.
  
• The FCC chairman called TV a “vast wasteland” in 1961. 

The facts keep coming for each year from 1930 all the way through 2010, categorized into top headlines, prices, government affairs, new products, pop culture phenomena, hit music, popular TV shows and more. It also has pages where you can record your own family milestones and favorites.

You also can download our free "My Life In ..." form from our website that lets you describe your own favorites—clothes, hair, music and more—from three big years in your life (you’ll need to enter your name and e-mail address to access the form). 

Click here to learn more about the book Remember That?.

Thursday, September 15, 2011 9:38:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

We had a great tour guide, a National Park Service ranger who says his colleagues call him Ranger Santa in December (you'll see why a few pictures down).

Here’s the house Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln bought in 1844. They lived there until Lincoln was elected president, when they rented it out and moved to Washington, DC. Robert Lincoln, their only surviving son, kept the home as rental property and donated it to the state of Illinois in 1887.

Here’s the house as it looked in 1860, in a historic image on display at the visitors’ center.

This is the Lincoln’s doorbell.

The rear parlor is where a committee from the 1860 Republican convention formally notified Lincoln he’d been nominated as the party’s presidential candidate.

In the living room, Lincoln would sprawl out on the floor (most of the furniture was too small for him) with his kids and the family dog, Fido.

Upstairs in Lincoln’s bedroom, Santa Ranger pointed out how high the 6”4’ Lincoln’s shaving mirror was hung.

The stove in the kitchen at the back of the house is the one Mary Todd Lincoln used. Our guide pointed out some of the log cabins Lincoln lived in as a boy were no bigger than this kitchen.

The last Abraham Lincoln descendant, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, died in 1985. He was the grandchild of Robert Lincoln, the only son to survive into his 20s.Think you're related to the Lincolns?

Get a quick look the Lincoln family tree here.  You can see more detail on Abe Lincoln's ancestors here. Click the links for first generation (Abraham Lincoln), second generation (his parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln), etc.

These websites will help you research potential presidential roots.

Here’s a fun fact our guide shared: Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a middle name. Find other First Family facts here.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011 9:28:23 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

Participating museums include such history-related sites as the 1810 Goundie House in Bethlehem, Pa.; Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill.; Brooklyn Historical Society in Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Women's History in Billings, Mont.; and the Historic New Orleans Collection in New Orleans.

You’ll need to fill out an online form and select the museum you want to visit from a dropdown menu, and you’ll get your admission ticket via email.

Print the ticket and take it with you when you visit. Each ticket is valid for two people to visit one venue, and there’s limit of one ticket per household.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011 1:38:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

Missouri, a border state, supplied troops (nearly 110,000 to the North and 40,000 to the South) and equipment to both sides. Separate state governments represented each side during the war, and both the Union and Confederacy considered Missouri theirs.

Initially, Missouri tried to stay neutral by remaining in the Union but not contributing men or supplies. After Wilson’s Creek, Union Gen. John C. Fremont imposed martial law, but the remnants of the elected government voted to secede.

The state suffered from its own internal war, in addition to the larger one. “Conflict in Missouri was characterized by savage guerilla warfare that led to the destruction of entire towns,” writes Michael O. Varhola in Life in Civil War America. 

Learn more about Missouri in the Civil War in Varhola's book and at the state’s sesquicentennial website.

Also, the free Missouri Digital Heritage (one of our 101 Best Websites for genealogy) has a Civil War section with several collections of digitized records, newspapers and research guides that’ll help you trace ancestors of the era and walk in their shoes.

See Missouri research resources at ShopFamilyTree.com here. 

Get research guidance for Civil War service members from Missouri and elsewhere in our Family Tree University course Civil War Research: Find Your Ancestors in the War Between the States, with instructor Diana Crisman Smith. The next session starts Aug. 29. (You can use code FTU0811 to get 20 percent off tuition.)

Friday, August 12, 2011 11:09:38 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

Battlefield trees like this one, still bearing scars and bullet wounds, are called Civil War witness trees. (Another kind of witness tree is found in public land states—a surveyor would blaze a tree near a section corner as evidence of the section boundaries.)

I hadn’t heard the term until I read about the Gettysburg discovery, and it makes perfect sense: Eyewitnesses are long gone, but these trees stood on the battlefields when our ancestors dug trenches, reloaded guns, charged the other side, were injured and died.

Many witness trees are famous and were captured in contemporary drawings or Mathew Brady’s photographs, for example:

• Burnside Bridge Sycamore at Antietam, Md.
  
• Appomattox Courthouse Pin Oak in Virginia
  
• Copse of White Oaks near Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Pa.
  
• Southern Magnolias at Andersonville, Ga.

You can see photos of these and other trees at The Bivouac website. 

Sections of the Culp’s Hill tree with bullets will be displayed in a museum at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg Daily blog has posts about witness trees, with lots of photos and directions for finding them.

Here are some Civil War resources from Family Tree Magazine:

• Civil War Genealogy Toolkit: Free article with websites, books and organizations for tracing Civil War ancestors
  
• Life in Civil War America free webinar with the author of the book Life in Civil War America 
• Articles and books on Civil War research available through ShopFamilyTree.com
  

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 9:12:35 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

The Battle of Cold Harbor, May 31-June 12, 1864, was part of Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, during which Confederate troops defended Richmond with six miles of trenches.

I picked up a brochure and map at the small visitor center, then we drove the short park loop and walked a trail tracing over and around the remains of trenches soldiers dug 150 years ago. (My husband gets props for pushing Leo’s stroller up and down the gravel path in Virginia humidity).

The ground looked like corduroy. Markers explained how for days soldiers would crouch in misery in the trenches. They dug “zig zags” between lines of trenches so they could retrieve supplies without getting their heads blown off. They would top the trench with a header log and shoot through a narrow gap below it.

This depression is a rifle pit occupied by a Union soldier. It was the closest position to enemy lines, just 50 yards from Confederate rifle pits.

Most fighting at Cold Harbor took place June 1-3, when Union forces launched assaults. They were unsuccessful. "I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,” Grant wrote in his memoirs. “No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained." 

On June 3 alone, nearly 6,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded, most in just an hour’s time. Both sides’ casualties over the two weeks totaled 16,000. A nearby creek was named Bloody Run. According to the brochure, Cold Harbor was the beginning of modern trench warfare, showing how trenches, supported by artillery, were practically impenetrable.

I have to admit that my eyes tend to glaze over when faced with a battlefield map full of lines and arrows. But standing in the places where soldiers took cover in trenches, hid in rifle pits and charged across fields opened a small window into the past and helped me understand what happened 150 years ago. 

You can listen to a podcast tour of the Battle of Cold Harbor, with vivid battle descriptions, on the Civil War Traveler website. 

See our slideshow of Civil War images on FamilyTreeMagazine.com here and get resources for researching Civil War ancestors here. 

You also can sign up for our Family Tree University course Civil War Research: Find Your Ancestors in the War Between the States with instructor Diana Crisman Smith. The next session starts Aug. 1, and you can use code FTU0811 to get 20 percent off your tuition.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 4:30:47 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [6]

The South used small, fast ships to try to slip past the Union Navy, and over the course of the war, five out of six blockade runners were successful in evading the blockade. But because of the runners’ small size, drastically less cargo got into and out of the South.

The whole country experienced food shortages, but the blockade made things more severe in the South. Prices soared and people got creative about stretching foodstuffs. According to Life in Civil War America, some butchers even sold dressed rats. But in case you’re eating this over lunch, these examples from the book of making do are easier to digest:

When salt was unavailable to use as a seasoning, things with a salty flavor could be used, such as a pinch of wood ashes or a wild plant called coltsfoot, and soldiers sometimes used a dash of gunpowder.

And ...

Chicory, acorns, beans, beets, bran, corn, cornmeal, cotton seeds, dandelion root, okra seeds, peanuts, peas, sugarcane seeds and wheat berries were variously parched, dried, browned or roasted and used to make ersatz coffee. Other versions used tubers like carrots or yams, which were cut into small pieces, dried, toasted ad then ground up.

Thursday, July 14, 2011 11:26:18 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• 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]

June 22, 1861, Jones wrote about a chance meeting with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. It begins “Fighting for our homes and holy altars, there is no intermission on Sunday.”

He goes on to describe a chance encounter with Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the office on a Sunday, helping Davis find a letter in his secretary’s office. You can read the entire diary entry here.

A bit from Life in Civil War America about the Baptist denomination of the time:

On the eve of the Civil War, Baptists were one of the largest denominations in the country and among those that were considerably more widespread and influential in the South than in the North.

At the time of the war, there were some 11,219 Baptist churches in the country, with about two-thirds in Southern states (an especially telling proportion when one considers that the white population of the North was about three-and-a-half times larger than that of the South). Value of Baptist church property was an estimated $19,746,378.

In 1845, Northern and Southern Baptists split over the issue of slavery, and the latter formed a separate denomination under the Southern Baptist Convention. 

Other large denominations at the time included Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Roman Catholics, though Americans were active in many faiths. Interestingly, Abraham Lincoln was the first US president to use the phrase "One nation under God," but he wasn't baptized and never joined a church.

Here's our listing of organizations for researching religious records.

You can nominate a Civil War event for this series—just click Comments below or e-mail me.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 3:45:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

Among the beautiful and historic sites you could visit are Civil War-related places such as Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home, the Gettysburg battlefield and Appomattox Court House. 

You could convince Dad to take the day off work and celebrate a late, budget-friendly Father’s Day (Father's Day is next Sunday, June 19).

Use the Find a Park feature to find parks by name, location, activity or topic. If you scroll down and click a state on the US map, you'll open a page that shows you all the National Parks in that state.

Monday, June 13, 2011 3:06:26 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 Civil War Preservation Trust, a battlefield preservation group, has shortened its name to the Civil War Trust and adopted a new logo. President James Lighthizer explains the changes will “modernize our image to better reflect the Civil War Trust’s mission.” See the new logo and read more about the change here. 

• The University of Texas at Austin has launched a new history website called Not Even Past to provide “dynamic, accessible, short articles on every field of history.” Using the Read, Watch, Discover, Listen and Texas links at the bottom of the page, you’ll find book excerpts and articles from history faculty and graduate students at the university. Content is sparse so far, but this could be a site worth keeping an eye on.

• If you have an ancestor who served during the Korean War (especially a veteran whose personnel file was destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis), today’s Family Tree Friday post on the NARAtions blog might be of interest. The post describes Korean War-era Command Reports, which include reports, operations journals, staff studies and other documents from Army commands, staffs and units, and can help you learn about the activities of your relative’s Korean War unit.

• The nation’s largest online digitized presidential archive will provide access to papers, records, photos and recordings of President John F. Kennedy's time in office. Visit the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum to learn more about the digitization effort and search the archive. View the announcement about the archive here.
  

Friday, January 14, 2011 2:46:09 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Whether it’s trimming the tree, lighting the menorah or preparing a holiday feast large enough to feed a small army, the holidays are that special time each year when we spend  time with friends and family. And all that togetherness makes for great family stories and traditions.

My favorite holiday tradition is opening up just one gift on Christmas Eve, before the entire family is nestled in their beds. This tradition started when my sister and I were very young and could barely wait until 6 a.m. to open our presents on Christmas morning. The gift is usually something small — like new slippers or pajamas — but we get a sample of what’s to come in the morning, when we wake up to the bounty of presents from Santa.

Some of my family’s holiday traditions are generations old. My mother-in-law claims her family has celebrated St. Nikolaus Day since her grandmother emigrated from Germany. Every year she calls us on Dec. 5 to remind us to put out our shoes so St. Nickolaus will bring us presents. And sure enough, on Dec. 6, we receive a package St. Nickolaus filled with goodies.

If your family traditions don’t span back that far, you can start your own holiday legacy by incorporating your ancestor’s likely customs from the Old Country. You can find some inspiration here. 

Does your family have any exciting or unique holiday traditions?

Monday, December 20, 2010 3:54:12 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

In subscription site Ancestry.com’s new database of Sears catalogs from 1896 to 1993, I couldn’t resist browsing the early 1980s doorstoppers of my childhood. As a kid, I’d "shop," choosing one item per page, and use the toy sections to create impossibly optimistic Christmas lists.

But for genealogical purposes, you’ll probably want to look at catalogs further back in time. Of course, you won’t find ancestors. But if your family farmed in the 1940s, for example, you can keyword-search catalogs from that era for equipment they might’ve used. If you fondly remember Grandma making cakes with her rotary egg beater, you can learn when she might've bought it and see an illustration. This one cost 30 cents in the Fall 1929 edition:

Need to date a photo? Search the catalog database for the dress style or an object in the photo. I entered shirtwaist, and among the results was this illustration from the Spring 1905 catalog:

Your searches find keywords in the catalogs’ product descriptions, so you may have to experiment with search terms to find a drawing that matches what’s in your photograph.

The Ancestry.com blog suggests using the catalog pages to spark stories and reminisce with relatives—another handy way to gather family clues. 

You can learn about the history of the Sears catalog, which began as a simple mailer in 1888 and has been called one of the most-commonly read books in rural areas, on the Sears website.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010 9:19:26 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

Venison and wild fowl are the only two foods historians know for certain were consumed at the meal. And the men sent to capture fowl could’ve snagged small, seasonal birds such as quail, pheasant and duck, instead of the harder-to-catch wild turkey.

So why do we make such a big deal out of the Thanksgiving turkey? Why doesn't Grandma serve up venison on her best platter every November?

I did some googling. The pilgrims’ countrymen in England would dine on goose at special meals. Americans who later took up the tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving may have substituted one big bird for another, because wild turkeys were more abundant here than geese.

In addition, large birds were a lot more affordable than giving everyone steaks or butchering all the laying hens. This quote about how the turkey became popular at Thanksgiving, from an article by Michelle Tsai, explains it well:

Among the big birds, turkey was ideal for a fall feast. Turkeys born in the spring would spend about seven months eating insects and worms on the farm, growing to about 10 pounds by Thanksgiving. They were cheaper than geese, which were more difficult to raise, and cheaper by the pound than chickens.

Americans started eating turkey for Thanksgiving in the mid-1800s, after Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. At the time, the holiday was celebrated mostly in New England on a different day in each state.

Hale published editorials and wrote to several presidents. Finally, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln—hoping to boost the war-weary country's morale—supported legislation establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

Supposedly, Hale popularized a holiday menu of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie. But nostalgic images of the Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a huge feast didn’t enter popular consciousness until later in the century.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010 9:18:37 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

Why are historical books important to your research? Because your family didn’t live in a vacuum, says Family Tree Magazine contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson.

I got a sneak peek today at her Historical Books on the Web webinar (taking place tomorrow, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. Eastern time). She says that clues you’ll find in books about the history of the places your ancestors lived include the big events that impacted their lives, what their everyday lives were like and, when you lose their trail, why or where they might've moved.

• 1848 to 1849 cholera epidemic, which killed 4,000 in New York City
• 1888 Children’s Blizzard in the Great Plains (so-called because many children were caught unaware in schoolhouses on what had been a relatively warm day)
  
• 1869 Indian Raids in Kansas
  
• Order No. 11 (a Union Army decree that forced the evacuation of rural areas in four western Missouri counties in 1863)
  
• Great Fire of 1846 in Nantucket

You can get started looking for historical books about your ancestral locales by Googling history of [insert the town name], visiting county pages at USGenWeb, searching library catalogs (WorldCat is a good site for doing this) and searching for period books at sites such as Internet Archive and Making of America.

Nancy will get into detail about what you can find in historical books, and where and how to find them, in tomorrow’s webinar, Historical Books on the Web: Millions of Tomes at Your Fingertips. You can register to attend at ShopFamilyTree.com (you'll receive our new Discover Your Roots guide with your registration)—and use the code HISTORY10 for 15 percent off with our Family History Month storewide sale. 

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 3:47:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• 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]

• Civil War Genealogy Toolkit (free article)
• Researching Civil War sailors (free article)
• Civil War genealogy research guide in the July 2007 digital edition of Family Tree Magazine, available from ShopFamilyTree.com
• 101 Things You Didn’t Know About the Civil War by Thomas R. Turner, Ph.D.
  

Tuesday, September 28, 2010 3:34:49 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• National Archives Charters of Freedom: The Constitution

• The National Constitution Center’s Constitution Day website (you can see which Founding Father you’re most like and take a US citizenship quiz)

• Constitution resources from the Library of Congress

• The National Archives' "Inside the Vaults" video on historical documents relating to the writing and ratification of the Constitution

• National Park Service Independence Hall, where the Constitution was written

• The State of the Constitution: What Americans Know (the results of a survey conducted by James Madison's Montpelier)

Friday, September 17, 2010 11:18:29 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• English research toolkit (contains both free and Plus how-to articles)

• British Genealogy Guide digital download (available from ShopFamilyTree.com)

• Research in Foreign Records: How to Find Your Family Across the Pond Family Tree University course (the next session starts Sept. 13; save 25 percent on any Family Tree University course with coupon code FALL1025 ).

Wednesday, September 08, 2010 10:36:05 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Wondering whom to thank for your Monday off work? Historians disagree on who should get credit for Labor Day. Most think it’s either Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, or Matthew Maguire, a machinist, secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, NJ, and secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. Read more Labor Day history on the US Department of Labor website.

• The National Archives in Kansas City has opened to the public 300,000 Alien Case Files (A-Files) for individuals born in 1909 and earlier. This is part of the group of immigration records transferred last year from the US Citizenship and Immigration services to the National Archives. The files themselves date from 1944 and later, but the records remain closed until 100 years after the birthdate of the subject of the file.

The files aren’t online; you can search NARA’s Archival Research Catalog for your ancestor’s name to see if there’s a file on your ancestor (after clicking a name in the search results, click Scope and Content for a few more details about the subject of the record). You can access the records in person or order copies from NARA.

• Members of the RootsWeb Allegheny County, Penn, Mailing List have posted online Allegheny County Vital Statistic Indexes compiled from Pittsburgh newspapers.
  

Just choose an alphabetical range and you’ll be linked to an index page listing the vital events within that range. You can use your web browser’s Find function to look for a name. Once you’ve found the name, publication and date, click the Quick Links to Newspapers link to find the image of the page with the information you need.

Friday, September 03, 2010 1:59:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• One Hundred Years toward Suffrage: An Overview 

• History.com: The fight for women’s suffrage

• Teaching With Documents: Women’s Suffrage and the 19th Amendment

• 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

• The Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Suffrage: Suffrage History

• Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony 

• Women of the West Museum: The Struggle for Western Women’s Suffrage 

• Exploring Constitutional Conflicts: The Nineteenth Amendment 

Thursday, August 19, 2010 9:28:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Resources for researching social history (free article)
  
  
• Dwelling on the Past (Family Tree Magazine Plus article): History writers’ secrets for researching bygone days.
  
  
• FamilyTreeMagazine.com Social History articles (both free and Plus)
  
  
• Trace Your Roots Online CD from ShopFamilyTree.com

Monday, June 07, 2010 3:41:40 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

• Neat website alert: The Ministry of Food goes with an Imperial War Museum London exhibit about the British public’s adaption to food shortages during World War II. You can see photos from the exhibit, check out Ministry of Food publications on gardening and cooking, and watch video clips.

And here’s a blog by a woman who’s living for a month on a 1940s British ration diet. 

• And another one: Go to What Happened in My Birth Year for a fun way to see top movies, books and events from the year you were born. Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads-up on this site.
  

• Ancestry.com has improved Collection Filters in the New Search. When you’re in the Advanced Search, a pull-down menu lets you give priority to matches associated with various countries or ethnic backgrounds. See how it works on the Ancestry.com blog.

• FamilySearch added records from five new states to the 1910 and 1920 US censuses on the free Record Search Pilot Site. FamilySearch Indexing has started new projects to index records from Germany, Spain, Jamaica, Norway, Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. Interested in volunteering to be an indexer? Click here.
  

Friday, February 12, 2010 12:07:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

"There is not a day or night, nay not an hour, but I wish to fold you to my heart.”

“It seems to me, to myself, that no man was ever before to any woman what you are to me.”

"The Old Year is passing. … It found me careless of the here & the [hereafter]—it leaves me with faith in the one & hope for the [other. It] found [me. my ] heart scorched, bitter, barren, loveless—& leaves it filled with softening, humanizing, elevating love for the dearest girl on earth, Livy—& I, the homeless then, have on this last day of the [die dying] year, a home that is [pre priceless], a refuge from all the cares & ills of life, in that warm heart of yours, & am supremely happy! And so with grateful benediction I give [Godspeed] to this good Old Year that is passing away. If I forget all else it has done for me I shall still remember that it gave me your love, Livy, ..."

"… something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. ... How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness ..."

“I still believe that my sweetheart is the ideal woman…”

Friday, February 12, 2010 9:42:42 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Heritage research toolkits (these contain both Plus and free articles)

• Passenger Arrival Lists (free article)

• Heritage research guides (available as digital downloads) and our Passport to Europe CD from ShopFamilyTree.com

Thursday, February 11, 2010 9:36:13 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Here's an explanation of why the summer of 1816 was unusually cold in the Northern Hemisphere.
• How the effects of the unusual weather were felt around the globe, from the Discovery Channel.

• This National Archives’ Prologue magazine article describes in part the Winter of 1880-1881 in De Smet, Dakota Territory.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder (one of my favorite authors) wrote about the near-constant blizzards in The Long Winter. Read about the book and see a photo of a train stuck in the snow—a phenomenon that cut off many towns from much-needed supplies—in this Wikipedia article.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010 10:25:05 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Nothing could be duller than federal government studies, reports and investigations—unless the local history of your ancestral hometown is buried in those bureaucratic papers. For example, the US Congressional Serial Set is a collection of more than 14,000 volumes containing House and Senate reports and documents from the 15th Congress through 1969.

The reports tend to be studies and investigations of congressional committees; the documents span a broad range of topics, including private citizens' petitions before Congress, as well as reports by executive departments and independent organizations. (The papers of the first 14 Congresses were published as the American State Papers.)

When you click the Search button to search either collection, on the next page, be sure to choose the collection from the pull-down menu under "NOTE."

For years, family historians have been finding genealogical clues in these federal papers. But not finding an ancestor's name in the US Serial Set Index doesn't mean there's nothing of value here. These 14,000 volumes are chock full of information about people, places and events throughout the country.

Searching the index for the name Ring, for example, I found nothing. But searching under Mississippi resulted in a rich source of Issaquena County history: Mississippi in 1875: Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875, with the Testimony and Documentary Evidence.

Senators interviewed dozens of Mississippians, whose testimony provides a vivid picture of their communities during the decade following the Civil War. I found interviews with former slave Henry P. Scott, sheriff of Issaquena County at the time, and other neighbors of Ring, including his attorney, W. D. Brown. Discussed at length were freedman Noah B. Parker, the justice of the peace in my ancestor's neighborhood, and a host of events there.

Excerpts from the testimony of just one witness demonstrate what a deep well of information Mississippi in 1875 holds about Issaquena County:

W. D. Brown — sworn and examined
Q. What is your occupation? — A. I am engaged in planting; I am also an attorney at law.

Q. What is the chief crop of your country, sir? — A. Cotton is the chief product.

Q. To clean the lint from the seed you must take it to the gin-house? — A. You must take it to the gin-house; yes, sir.

Q. Is the packing-press, the baling-press, near by there? — A.
It is generally inside the gin-house now. The old-fashioned press was exterior to the gin; the press is now in the rear portion of the gin-building …

Q. In these isolated houses, do the people have any means of extinguishing a conflagration when it is once started? — A. We have nothing to depend upon. That mode of revenge is regarded as the surest…

The Rings often engaged Brown's legal services, yet when their neighbors were arrested in connection with the destruction by fire of the Ring & Co. store and the deaths of five people sleeping in the living quarters upstairs, Brown represented the defendants!

Given the size and breadth of the US Congressional Serial Set, chances are good you'll come up with some document containing information about the neighborhood of your forebears. You may also get lucky. If an ancestor, through his or her senator or congressman, petitioned the US government for something—a widow's pension or financial reparations for some grievance against a federal agent—that petition will appear in the set.

• Seven Steps to Studying Ancestral Places: This free article gets you started researching ancestors’ hometowns.

• State Research Guides: You can purchase individual state guides as digital downloads, or get them all on CD or in a book.
  

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:45:58 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

See more "Faces of America" clips on PBS’ YouTube channel.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010 2:01:43 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

• Uncle Sam isn’t just a character: During the War of 1812, Samuel Wilson of Troy, NY, provided the army with beef in barrels labeled U.S. The letters stood for United States, but people joked they referred to "Uncle Sam." The term came to mean the federal government; depictions of Uncle Sam appeared starting in 1852. In 1961, Congress officially saluted “Uncle Sam Wilson” as the “progenitor of America's national symbol."

• You can morph into Rosie the Riveter with rolled-up sleeves and a red handkerchief in your hair. The name was popularized in a 1942 song, but there wasn’t any one Rosie. The most famous image we associate with Rosie the Riveter, J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” poster, isn’t her. Miller created the poster for the Westinghouse Co.’s War Production Coordinating Committee, and it was posted at the Michigan plant for only two weeks in February, 1942. He didn’t intend for it to portray Rosie.

Read more on the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Memorial Park website.

• Most Viking costumes involve a horned helmet, but in reality, Viking helmets never had horns, according to the American Museum of Natural History. Instead, these Norse explorers and warriors wore conical leather hats as they raided the European coast from the late 8th to the early 11th century. Fun fact: Vikings were quite clean for the time—they bathed every Saturday. Get more Viking fact vs. fiction here.
  

• The witch of popular culture—black robe, pointy hat and warts a lá the Wicked Witch of the West—got her start in Shakespeare’s MacBeth and the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. But those accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 looked like anybody else. The series of trials resulted in the hangings of 14 women and five men. Another man was crushed to death under stones in an attempt to force him to enter a plea.

Learn more about the trials and see related historical documents in the Famous American Trials website.

• Vampire costumes are big this year, thanks to the book Twilight and the movie based on it. The name of late 19th-century novelist Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire, Dracula, was inspired by a real historical figure: Vlad III (aka Vlad the Impaler), Prince of Wallachia, born in Transylvania in the 15th century. His Romanian surname, Dracula, meant “son of the dragon;” Vlad’s father had joined the Order of the Dragon.

• Thanks to Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Pirates of the Caribbean and other popular depictions, pirate costumes sport colorful bandanas, jewelry, an eye patch, a stuffed parrot and maybe a hook or wooden stump. Your typical early 18th-century pirate dressed for the most part like sailors did. The parrot cliché probably arose because many pirates benefited from the trade in exotic animals; the eye patch and hook/stump because of the risky profession. See more theories in this pirate Q&A.
  

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 10:02:24 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• We wrote about ethical wills (last statements concerning personal values rather than property) in the September 2008 Family Tree Magazine. (Family Tree Magazine Plus members can read the article here.)
  

Ready to get started on one? Personal historian Dan Curtis is offering a free, seven-part online course on writing an ethical will for your heirs.

• The 2010 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, five days of family history classes happening Jan. 11 to 15, is taking registration. Learn more about the schedule, registration fees and course descriptions on the Utah Genealogical Association website.
  

• We don’t hear a lot of news about Chinese genealogy in the United States, but there’s an article about China's ancestral halls on the Wall Street Journal website. (Thanks to Tom Kemp of GenealogyBank for sharing this link.)

Discover more resources for Chinese genealogy in these Genealogy Insider posts.

• The new Amelia Earhart movie is getting tepid reviews (from what I’ve seen, anyway), but the real-life details of her 1937 disappearance might be more interesting. Ancestry.com’s "Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad" collection contains a case file of correspondence concerning an investigation into the theory that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were imprisoned in Saipan. Find out more about the case on Ancestry.com’s blog and on Ancestry.com's “What really happened to Amerlia Earhart?” page.
  

• Genetic genealogy company DNA Consultants has added a blog to its revamped website; posts review news and research on dna testing and popular genetics. That involves some complex scientific terms and concepts, so put on your genetic genealogist hat when you visit.

Friday, October 23, 2009 4:08:48 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• The National Genealogical Society (NGS) has launched a blog called UpFront With NGS, which will complement the society’s monthly e-mail newsletter of the same name. News will be posted regularly on the blog, so you don’t have to wait for the e-mail, and you can leave comments on the blog posts.
  

• Ancestry.com is hosting a free webinar to demo its recently released Family Tree Maker 2010 genealogy software. The webinar is Sept. 30 at 8pm EDT. Learn more about the webinar and link to the registration on Ancestry.com’s blog.
  
  
• The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College has a Web site companion to its special exhibit of the Becker Collection: Drawings of the Civil War Era. The drawings by Joseph Becker and others from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly depict the Civil War, construction of railroads, Chinese in the West, Indian wars, the Chicago fire and more. You can browse drawings by date, place, subject, artist or reference number.
  
  
• Irish-ancestored people, take note: As posted by Dick Eastman, all counties have been added to the National Archives of Ireland's 1911 census Web site. Later this year, you’ll start seeing 1901 census records. The 1901 and 1911 censuses are the only surviving full Irish censuses open for research. Read what’s special about Irish censuses on Dick’s blog.
  
  
• Last, I wanted to point out this fun post by Randy Seaver (a re-post of his earlier post, which I missed the first time around) with links to lists of funny/strange place names.
  

Friday, September 11, 2009 11:16:06 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Carol Clemens' family legend was that her great-grandfather Martin Franchetti was accidentally shot and killed by a stray bullet from a saloon brawl in 1902.

After finding references to seven newspaper articles within a couple of months, she discovered her ancestor was shot during an argument with a former boarder who’d developed a crush on Franchetti’s wife. Clemens says help from the Schenectady County Clerk’s office was invaluable in locating the perpetrator's criminal trial records.

• Cheri Adams couldn’t find anything about her the family of her great-great-grandmother’s second husband. A Google search brought up a New York Times article stating that the husband, Elijah Godfrey, was killed while handling dynamite in his cabin. Another article revealed that the medical examiner thought it was murder. “It seems Elijah had been speaking with authorities regarding stills in the area," writes Adams, "and undoubtedly due to his loose lips, the owners of the stills took revenge.”

• Tom Neel of the Ohio Genealogical Society found an account in a 1915 county history about John Gately, his fourth-great-grandfather from North Carolina. “Sometime after the year 1793,” Gately’s father-in-law, thinking the younger man had stolen his money, killed him.

Neel found corroboration in court records while at this year’s National Genealogical Society conference in Raleigh, NC. Turns out the aging father-in-law had misplaced his stash.

• Domenic Parenty, great-grandfather to Janice Gianotti-Zakis, was "gunned down in the street, defending a woman" in Chicago in 1894. In 2002, she confirmed the story in police records from microfiche at Northeastern Illinois University. Now, her ancestor’s case is chronicled on the site Homicide in Chicago: 1870-1930.
  

• Kathleen Anders wasn’t interested in genealogy when she found a tombstone in a Nebraska cemetery with the names of two young people who died on the same day. On a return trip, the caretaker furnished a file of newspaper clippings: Anders' great-grandfather had taken the lives of his brother and sister-in-law in 1903. Over the next two years, she found the trial transcript and interviewed people who remembered her family.
  

With the mystery solved, she’s turned to ancestors whose less sensational lives still deserve to be known. “I now focus on the other lines of the family that have, in their own right, great stories to be researched and written about.”

• Carol Heap’s grandfather Frederick Hirsch, a Nassau County, NY, police officer, was killed in the line of duty May 6, 1931, by a 19-year-old nicknamed "Two Gun Crowley." Crowley was convicted and sent to Sing Sing prison in New York, where he was executed in the electric chair in 1932. Hirsch's wife raised four young children alone; Heap remembers her father saying he really missed having a Dad.

• Connie Parott received a copy of a relative's 1970s school essay detailing her third-great grandfather's efforts to track down the murderer of his brother Thomas at a Sylamore, Ark., Christmas Eve dance in 1877.
  
  She found several news articles, “but to my amazement,” she writes, “the stories favored excessive details about the murderer, but nothing about the victim. The murderer had accidentally shot himself in the leg while hiding in the woods. His leg was amputated, so the newspapers had a field day describing a one-legged man hanging from the gallows.”

Friday, July 31, 2009 3:47:24 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Allen County Community Album: Images at this Allen County Public Library-hosted site portray people and places in Northeastern Indiana. The library’s well-known Genealogy Center also has an Our Military Heritage site with records and photos from researchers across the country.

• Arizona Memory Project: Collections come from the Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Arizona Jewish Historical Society, state archives, City of Glendale, Gila County and others.

• Documenting Arkansas: This site's content relates to the Civil War, 1927 Mississippi River flood and other events.

• Dominion Institute Memory Project: See 85-plus years of military history through first-hand accounts, photos and artifacts from veterans across Canada.

• Greater Cincinnati Memory Project: This site from my hometown shows you historical photos of schools, churches, homes, city scenes, people and special events.

• Maine Memory Network: More than 200 organizations have contributed materials to this site, which also supports similar projects for Maine communities such as Bath and Isleboro.

• Montana Memory Project: Cattle brand books, the Fergus County Heritage Book and Rocky Mountain College yearbooks are a few of the resources you'll find here.
  
  
• Terrace Park, Ohio, Building Survey: A local genealogist maintains this site on the history of buildings in an Ohio neighborhood. It has photos, deeds, census and land records, residents' names and more.
  

• The Valley of the Shadow: Censuses, church records, letters, diaries and newspaper articles detail life in two communities—Franklin County, Pa., in the North and Augusta County, Va., in the South—before, during and after the Civil War.

Thursday, July 23, 2009 8:57:45 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [6]

• July 18-19

• August 15-16

Thursday, July 09, 2009 2:01:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• In 1777, in Bristol, RI, 13 gunshots were fired on July 4, once at morning and again at evening. Philadelphians rang bells, fired guns and lit candles.

• In 1778, Gen. George Washington gave his soldiers a double ration of rum on July 4 and ordered an artillery salute.

• In 1781, Massachusetts recognized July 4 as a state celebration.

• In 1785, Bristol held a Fourth of July parade—now the United States’ oldest continuous Independence Day celebration.

• In 1817, the Erie Canal broke ground in Rome, NY.

• In 1828, Charles Carroll broke ground on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

• In 1848, workers laid the cornerstone of the Washington Monument.

• In 1870, Congress made Independence Day an unpaid holiday for federal employees.
  

• In 1938, the Fourth became a paid federal holiday (three years later, Congress corrected the omission of Washington, DC, employees from this legislation).

• In 1973, the Boston Pops Orchestra began hosting an annual music and fireworks show alongside the Charles River.

Friday, July 03, 2009 10:48:16 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

Sent to Asia, Mr. Skvarna kept up a sporadic correspondence with her as he flew reconnaissance missions. On May 7, 1945, based in the Marianas, he wrote of receiving a letter of hers that made him “jump with joy” and of a visit he made to a rajah’s palace in India; he also sent photographs of himself and asked for a snapshot of her in return.

“It’s amazing to me that she kept so many of those letters,” Mr. Skvarna said. “It tells you something about the caliber of person she was.”

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 5:32:51 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]