• Arkansas
• Missouri
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Washington, DC
• West Virginia

Want to improve your genealogical skills and connect with other family historians—all from the convenience of home? Check out Family Tree University's Fall 2012 Virtual Genealogy Conference, taking place Sept. 14-16. Early bird registration ends Friday, Aug. 10 at 11:59 p.m.—just enter code FTUVCEARLY at checkout to save $50!

• Alaska
• Arkansas
• Idaho
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• New Mexico
• North Dakota
• Oklahoma
• Rhode Island
• South Dakota
• Utah

• This week FamilySearch anounced it has added indexes to Scottish censuses for 1881 and 1891 to its free collections at FamilySearch.org. It also added new records and/or indexes for Canada, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Scotland and the United States. You can get details on the updates and link to the updated collections here.

• Archives.com is sharing another one of its neat infographics—this one about California in the 1940 census. You'll learn interesting tidbits such as: The state had a population of 6.9 million, Betty White was an 18-year-old in Los Angeles, and a new Plymouth Coupe cost $645. You can see the infographic on the Archives.com blog.

• An online name index is now available for the service records of 320,000 WWI airmen in Britain's Royal Air Force (formed in 1918) and its forebears, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. Read about the index here and in this post on the archives' blog.
  
  I didn't find any search instructions, so the method I discovered by trial and error is going to the archives' catalog and selecting the All Collections tab. Click the More Options link, then scroll down in that window and check the Air Force box under Military. Type a name into the search box and click the magnifying glass. You might need to use the filters on the left to limit your results to the AIR (Air Ministry and Royal Air Force) collection.

To browse, go to this page on the British national archives website. Officers' records are arranged by name; airmen records are arranged by service number. Also see this guide to finding records of airmen in the Royal Air Force.

• Alabama
• Arizona
• California
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Michigan
• Montana
• Nebraska
• New Hampshire
• Oregon
• Washington
• Wisconsin

• Alaska
• Arizona
• Colorado
• Delaware
• Florida
• Hawaii
• Idaho
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• Montana
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• Oklahoma
  
• Oregon
• South Dakota
  
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Wyoming

• Alaska
• Arizona
• Colorado
• Delaware
• Florida
• Hawaii
• Idaho
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• Montana
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• Oregon
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Wyoming

• Ancestry.com: You can search name indexes for Delaware, Maine, Nevada and Washington, DC. A chart on the 1940 census page lets you see indexing progress.

• FamilySearch.org: FamilySearch's volunteer indexers so far appear to be outpacing the paid contractors Ancestry.com and MyHeritage are using. You can search 14 states/territories by your ancestor's name: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming.

FamilySearch.org's indexing progress map colors searchable states orange. To search, click the state on the map.

• Archives.com: At this 1940 Census Community Project partner site, you can search name indexes to the same states available at FamilySearch. To access the unindexed portion of the census, this site sends you to the National Archives' 1940 census site (which Archives.com designed and hosts).

• FindMyPast.com: As a 1940 Census Community Project partner, FindMyPast.com has the same states indexed as FamilySearch (though Alaska, a territory in 1940, is missing from the color-coded map on the home page). Update 6/1: FindMyPast also now shows Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana as searchable, though these states are not yet searchable on FamilySearch.org. Look for that to change soon.
  

• MyHeritage: Here, you can search a name index for Rhode Island, and a partial name index for New York.

The 1940 census records also are available on FamilyLink.com, which MyHeritage purchased last year. You'll need to register for a free account on the site (if you don't already have an account there) to view the records.

Archives.com: At this 1940 Census Community Project partner site, you can search name indexes to Colorado and Delaware. To access the unindexed portion of the census, this site sends you to the National Archives' 1940 census site (which Archives.com designed and hosts).

FamilySearch: Digitized records are available here for all US states and territories.

FamilySearch just announced that more than 85,000 1940 Census Community Project volunteers have already finished indexing 20 percent of the census, and thousands more volunteers sign up every week.

Not all the indexed records are available to search online yet. FamilySearch's indexing progress map colors searchable states orange; so far, you can search name indexes for the states of Delaware and Colorado. To search, click the state on the map. (I clicked on Kansas and tried a search because Community Project partner FindMyPast.com has a Kansas index, but the results were people in Colorado.) 

FindMyPast.com: On this 1940 Census Community Project partner site, digitize records are available for most states. Records for Texas, California, Utah, Tennessee, Minnesota, Wisconsin and several others are missing. You can search name indexes for Delaware, Colorado and Kansas—except for Kansas, they're the same states as for FamilySearch, because it's the same index.

MyHeritage: Records for all states and territories are available now for free. This site introduced the first searchable index, for the state of Rhode Island, but hasn't added any other states since. MyHeritage also has updated its mobile app so you can search 1940 census records from your iPhone, iPad or Android phone.

The 1940 census record images also are available on FamilyLink.com, which MyHeritage purchased last year. You'll need to register for a free account on the site (if you don't already have an account there) to view the records.

National Archives: Records for all states and territories are available here for free.

Until the acquisition goes through the regulatory approval process, the companies will continue to operate as separate entities. It's unclear how long the process could take.

In a conference call last night with the genealogy media, Archives.com CEO Joe Godfrey and Ancestry.com president Tim Sullivan addressed issues of concern to many family historians.

Here, I've summarized their comments as they relate to some of the questions I've been hearing from genealogists:

Is Ancestry.com just trying to eliminate a competitor?
Archives.com's parent company Inflection is focusing on public records and people-searching (it owns the people-searching website peoplesmart), diverging from Archives.com's historical records mission. Godfrey and Sullivan say this acquisition makes sense for all parties.

Current plans call for Archives.com to remain largely as is. "We see a different experience in Archives.com. It's priced and positioned differently [from Ancestry.com]. It's another important service that we can continue to invest in," Sullivan says. He vows to invest in Archives.com's content and technology.

The acquisition gives Ancestry.com the opportunity to offer a genealogy product at a lower price point (Archives.com subscribers pay $39.95 a year, to Ancestry.com's $155.40).

Nor is the acquisition a response to the entry into the US genealogy market of companies such as brightsolid (owner of findmypast.com) and MyHeritage, Sullivan says. He emphasized a positive view of the genealogy category's growth and the increase in competition, saying it's an indication of the health of the category.

Sullivan says Ancestry.com may work with Inflection in the future, describing the potential opportunity as "tremendous."

Will the sites be too similar?
Sullivan and Godfrey say there's some overlapping content on Archives.com and Ancestry.com, but that how the user experiences each site's content is different and will remain so. "One thing we won't do is make Archives.com like the Ancestry.com user experience," Sullivan says.

"Even though some content might overlap, the way it is presented will have different value propositions to different users," Godfrey adds.

What will happen with the 1940 Census Community Project?
The project, whose partners FamilySearch, Archives.com and FindMyPast.com are recruiting volunteers to index the 1940 census, won't be affected, say both men.

Godfrey encouraged volunteers to continue indexing. "Nothing will change as far as the partnership, and nothing will change as far as making the index available for free," he says.

Sullivan says that when FamilySearch was seeking partners in this volunteer indexing project, Ancestry.com leadership discussed it at length and ultimately decided that "it wasn't structured in a way that completely was in sync with what we wanted to do with 1940."

He added that Ancestry.com would support Archives.com's participation in the project.

Does this form a monopoly?
They couldn't elaborate on the regulatory approval process for the acquisition, but neither Sullivan nor Godfrey foresees problems. "We're doing this for the right reasons. There's no negative for consumers," Sullivan says.

Archives.com is owned and operated by Inflection LLC, a Silicon Valley-based technology company.

Since Archives.com’s launch in January 2010 (before that, the site was called Genealogy Archives), the site has grown to more than 380,000 paying subscribers who pay approximately $39.95 a year. Archives.com offers access to more than 2.1 billion historical records, including birth records, obituaries, immigration and passenger lists, historical newspapers, and US and UK censuses.

Inflection secured the contract with the National Archives to design and host the archives' website for the 1940 census records, released April 2. Archives.com also is a partner in the 1940 Census Community project, which has FamilySearch volunteers indexing the 1940 census. Ancestry.com is using a paid contractor to create its own 1940 census index. I'm curious to see what happens with this.

From Ancestry.com's press release: "This transaction will enable Ancestry.com to add a differentiated service targeted to a complementary segment of the growing family history category. In addition, Ancestry.com will welcome a team of talented engineers, digital marketers, and family history innovators into the Ancestry.com fold and also gain access to a proprietary technology platform that has supported Archives.com’s rapid growth."

Upon completion of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including expiration of the HSR waiting period, Ancestry.com will continue to operate Archives.com separately retaining its brand and website. Many Inflection employees are expected to join the Ancestry.com team.

We'll bring you more on this story as it develops.

The parish register ledger books document Lutheran congregations throughout the United States from 1793 to 1940.

The records will become available at Archives.com later this year. I'm crossing my fingers it'll be in time for our guide to genealogy research in Lutheran records, which will be in the July/August 2012 Family Tree Magazine.

The guide is part of our new religious records series, which so far has covered Catholic (in the March/April 2012 Family Tree Magazine) and Jewish (in the May/June 2012 Family Tree Magazine) genealogy research.

See the full announcement about Lutheran records on Archives.com here.

These statistics, which Archives.com made nice and pretty for you, explain why:

Ancestry.com:

• American Samoa
• California
• Delaware
• DC
• Guam
• Indiana
• Maine
• Nevada
• New York
• Ohio
• Panama Canal
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virgin Islands
• Virginia
• Washington

FamilySearch:

• Colorado
• Delaware
• Kansas
• Oregon
• Virginia

MyHeritage.com: I can't find an at-a-glance list here. You'll see all states in the search dropdown menu, and when you search on one that's not yet available, you'll get results but with a "coming soon" message. Update: The folks at MyHeritage sent me this list of available records, with more coming soon:

• California
• Illinois
  
• Massachusetts
• Maine
• Michigan
• New Jersey
• New York
• Nevada
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Texas
• Virginia

"As the National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) official development partner on this project, Archives.com is responsible for the website performance and stability. We take full responsibility for the technical issues that have occurred and are very sorry for the inconvenience you may have experienced."

• This Monday at 9 a.m. ET, the 1940 census will be released to the public at 1940census.archives.gov. Archives.com, which designed 1940.census.gov, has put together a cute infographic with information on the census and tips for finding your family. Check it out on the Archives.com blog.

• The founders of Footnote—the site Ancestry.com acquired in 2010 and renamed Fold3—are now working for MyHeritage. Footnote founders Russ Wilding and Roger Bell are serving as chief content officer and VP of product, respectively, at MyHeritage. They'll be instrumental in the Israel-based company's recently announced initiative to develop its US historical records content. Read more about the hire here.

• More than a million Westminster Parish baptism, marriage and burial records dating back to 1538 now available on subscription and pay-as-you-go site findmypast.co.uk. The records come from 50-plus Westminster churches. More Westminster records will go live over the coming months, along with cemetery registers, wills, rate books, settlement examinations, workhouse admission and discharge books, bastardy, orphan and apprentice records, charity documents, and militia and watch records.

• The 2012 Houston, Texas, Family History Expo takes place Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7. The keynote speaker is Family Tree Magazine's own podcast host Lisa Louise Cooke, and instructors include frequent contributor Lisa A. Alzo. You can register online or at the door, for the whole conference or just one day, or even a single class. Learn more on the Family History Expos website.

• Looks like I'll be parked in front of the TV for a fair portion of the weekend. Tonight on "Who Do You Think You Are?" watch actress Helen Hunt explore her roots. Here's a video preview:

• And Sunday, March 25 at 8 p.m. ET, "Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr." premieres. Watch a video preview here. 

• The International Society of Family History Writers and Editors Excellence in Writing competition is accepting entries now through June 3, with a discount on the entry fee if you submit before April 15. You can enter published or unpublished genealogical works in one of five categories. Winners receive a cash prize and a certificate. The awards presentation will take place during the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Birmingham, Ala., Aug. 29-Sept. 1. Get more information on the ISFHWE website.

• Archives.com has hired genealogist Megan Smolenyak as its Family History Advisor. She'll start immediately, talking about the 1940 census. Smolenyak was formerly chief genealogist at Archives.com competitor Ancestry.com.

• FamilySearch added more than 6.3 million new, free records online this week for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Caribbean, Czech Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and the United States. See the list of updated collections and link to each one here.

• Subscription genealogy site Archives.com has added more than 3,000 yearbooks with 300,000-plus pages to its website. Thousands more yearbooks will be added over the next several weeks. You can search by name or keyword, plus place (state and city) and year. Click here to search the Archives.com yearbooks collection.

• Ancestry.com , along with United Vacations and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, is holding a sweepstakes to coincide with the DVD release of the movie The Descendants. (I have to admit I'm not much of a moviegoer, so I don't know whether The Descendants has anything to do with genealogy, but I do know George Clooney is in it.)
  
  Prizes include a "glamping" (glamorous camping) trip to Hawaii, a year-long Ancestry.com membership and The Descendants on Blu-ray. Click here to enter.

• The early-bird registration discount for the National Genealogical Society 2012 Family History Conference, May 9-12 in Cincinnati, ends Tuesday, March 20. Register before then to save $35 and get a printed syllabus if you want one (everybody gets a syllabus on flash drive—yay for saving trees!)
  
  If you'll be there, be sure to stop by Family Tree Magazine's booth (#432) and pick up a free issue, browse our books and CDs, talk about Cincinnati genealogy resources (this is where we're based), get directions or just say hi. Click here to learn more about the conference.

• FamilySearch.org added 31 million new, free records this past week for Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Hungary, Italy, Micronesia, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Russia and the United States. Those with California roots, in particular, will appreciate the more than 24 million Golden State birth records dating from 1905 to 1995. See the full list of updated records and link to each collection here.

• UK family history website findmypast.co.uk will digitize 10 million historical records dating from 1538 to 1945 from the Westminster Archives Centre. The records are expected to launch later this year.

Archives.com has published a free database called Patriots of Color.

These records contain information about men and women of color who fought for American independence as soldiers, skilled craftsmen and servants.

More than two years of research, facilitated by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, was dedicated to verifying the service and complexions of patriots from each of the 13 colonies using records such as pension and bounty land application files, muster and pay rolls, lists of troops, court records, legislative records, census records and more.

You can learn the person's name and alternate names used, complexion, state and type of service, and pension and bounty land warrant numbers (if applicable). Here's an example of a database record:

If you find someone of interest, click the Resources Used button at the bottom for more about the resources you can check to get additional information.

Click here to access the Patriots of Color database on Archives.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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

The census search screen looks like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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