• PBS has gathered its African-American history content into one place to help you celebrate Black History Month. Watch programs including Freedom Riders and Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr., take a quiz about miletones in African-American history, get ideas for celebrating the month with kids and more.

• Know a young genealogist who could use $500 toward genealogy education, plus a free registration to attend the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree? Applications are being accepted for the 2013 Suzanne Winsor Freeman Memorial Student Genealogy Grant, created to honor the mother of The Family Curator blogger Denise Levenick. It's open to any genealogist who is between the ages of 18 and 25 and has attended school in the last 12 months. The recipient must attend the 2013 Jamboree in Burbank, Calif., to receive the award. Application deadline is March 18, 2013, at midnight PST. Learn more here.

• MyHeritage offering deep discounts on genetic genealogy tests, provided in partnership with Family Tree DNA. The Family Finder autosomal test, for example, is $169 (instead of $289) for a limited period on MyHeritage.com and its websites World Vital Records and Geni.com. Subscribers can get an additional discount. See all the details and available tests on the MyHeritage blog. (And learn more about how autosomal DNA testing can advance your research in the December 2011 Family Tree Magazine) 

• Findmypast.com is giving its registered users the opportunity to watch the BBC show Find My Past, which reveals how ordinary individuals are related to people from significant historical events.  With a free findmypast.com registration, you can watch episodes that first aired during the past 30 days. Thereafter, episodes will be available to the sites subscribing members. Learn more on findmypast.com.

Also new in findmypast.com's World subscription is a collection of 200 British newspapers from England, Scotland and Wales from 1700 to 1950.

But I didn’t forget all about genealogy. Monday was our practice day at the sitter with Norah and her big brother, so I used my “me time” to go to the library.

Courtesy of the Kenton County (Kentucky) Public Library’s Northern Kentucky Newspaper Index and Northern Kentucky Genealogy Index (you can search both free online, then email yourself a list of results), I have a long list of newspaper and record look-ups about my maternal relatives. It's been on my to-do list for a shameful length of time.

Since I only had a couple of hours at the library, I prepped by organizing my lookups according to the newspaper and date (for articles) or the church and volume number (for church records). That way I’d be able to find all the articles on one roll of film, then move right on to the next. I also highlighted the most important items so I’d be sure to get to those if time ran short.

Even though I knew where the library is, I checked out the visitor info onlinee (good thing— the regular lot was closed due to construction). I couldn’t find the details about making copies, so I gathered up change and singles just in case. Turns out I should have brought a flash drive for the microfilm reader that makes digital copies. Live and learn. 

The librarian showed me the newspaper and church record microfilm, gave me a refresher on the microfilm readers and changed my dollars for dimes (required to make paper copies). I got all my priority articles and one church record in the two hours. I wrote the newspaper or record title, date, volume number, etc. on each printout.

As a woman on a mission, I only glanced at the rest of the local history collection. Oh, the time I could spend there if I had all day.

Now, I’m reading the newspaper articles and trying to sort out who’s who and how (or whether) they’re all related in this big family full of Josephs, Bernards and Marys. Every time I read in an obituary that the deceased was survived by “a wife and children” or see a married woman identified as “Mrs. Joseph so-and-so,” I want to pull my hair out. Names! I NEED NAMES!

So I’ve still got some work to do. In the mean time, I’m glad to be back with you!

• The Chronicling America free, searchable database of historic US newspapers, has posted its 5 millionth newspaper page. Launched by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2007 as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, the site digitizes newspapers published between 1836 and 1922. It now has more than 800 newspapers from 25 states. 
  

• Old Weather, a joint project from the National Archives and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will have citizen scientists transcribing historic Arctic and worldwide weather data from digitized Navy, Coast Guard, and Revenue Cutter ship deck logs. Digital images of the logbooks will be available on the project's website and on Archives.gov. The records offer access to weather data and climate patterns from your ancestor's day, as well as details on US maritime history, military operations and scientific exploration. Learn more about the project and participate at OldWeather.org.
  

• A new volunteer genealogy lookup site called Gen Gathering has announced it's looking for volunteers to do simple lookups for others in their home libraries or nearby repositories or cemeteries. You also can use the site to find volunteers who might be able to do lookups for you.  Learn more on the Gen Gathering website. 

• A new Windows phone app called Relative History ($4.99) from Papillion Producitons lets you view genealogy information from GEDCOM files on Windows phones. You can learn more about it and see screenshots and reviews here.
  

• Congrats to D. Joshua Taylor who recently was elected to fill the two-year term as president of the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FYI: Josh is giving our Top 25 Tips for Discovering Your Colonial Ancestors webinar on Nov. 13). FGS board members and directors newly elected or re-elected are Lisa A. Alzo, David E. Rencher, Janice A. Fritsch, Cherie Bush, Kris W. Rzepczynski and Melissa Shimkus.

• Did your ancestor attend Mercer University in Macon, Ga.? Now you can search an online archive of the Mercer Cluster, the university's campus newspaper.  The Mercer Cluster Archive, a project of the awesome Digital Library of Georgia, provides access to papers from 1920 to 1970. 

• The University of Wyoming Lab School's Tassakooma and Yearling yearbooks are now available online for the 1920s, part of the 1930s, and 1953 to 1964. Learn more about the yearbooks here. To access the online collection, visit the University of Wyoming Libraries catalog and then search for either Tassakooma or Yearling.

• Look for a new blog soon from the Library of Congress: To complement its Civil War in America exhibition, the LOC will debut a new blog in November to chronicle more than 40 folks from the North and South whose lives were affected by the war.
  
  Posts will use first-person accounts such as diaries, letters and published memoirs. “Bloggers” will include people such as Robert E. Lee, Clara Barton, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant,  Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Keckley, Eugenia Phillips and John F. Chase. You can find the blog starting Nov. 12 at blogs.loc.gov.

• Military records website Fold3 reached a milestone this week when when the site exceeded 100,000,000 images of historical records. Read more about this achievement on the Fold3 blog. The site, which launched in January 2007 as Footnote, has worked with partners including the National Archives, Allen County Public Library, FamilySearch and others to digitize records. Ancestry.com purchased the site in 2010 and last year rebranded it Fold3.com.

The Virtual Conference, sponsored by Flip-Pal mobile scanner, is next weekend, March 9-11.

You can log in anytime over the weekend to take classes, participate in live chats with genealogy experts, visit the exhibit hall and more. (And there's a swag bag—who doesn't love swag?)

Newspapers are invaluable for getting details about your ancestors' lives and for tracing brick-wall ancestors (case in point: last Friday's "Who Do you think You Are?" with Blair Underwood). But historical newspapers can be hard to find and use—so you'll want to hear about the tools Lisa uses.

Learn more about the Spring 2012 Virtual Conference at FamilyTreeUniversity.com.

Thanks to a sponsorship from GenealogyBank, registration in the four-week session starting Feb. 20 is just $39.99 (down from the regular $99.99). So if you've been thinking about taking this course, now's the time.

You can learn more about the class and see the syllabus here. Past students have been surprised at the number of newspapers that have been published in the United States covering African-American communities.

Also check out Tim's Newspapers forum at Afrigeneas, one of our favorite genealogy websites for those tracing African-American roots.

The issues span 1899 to 2005 (those from 1917 to 1925, and January to April 1932, are missing).

You can keyword search the full text or browse by year. An advanced search lets you designate words as exact, exclude words, and run a proximity search to find two words appearing within a certain distance of each other on a newspaper page. (In the advanced search, multiple library collections are selected by default. To search just the Indianapolis Recorder, scroll down, check the box to deselect all the collections, then check the box next to Indianapolis Recorder.)

You can share links to articles via social media or email, or bookmark them in your browser. You can save articles by right-clicking or control-clicking and selecting Save Image As (an alternative would be to take a screenshot).

Click here to start searching the Indianapolis Recorder archives.

Learn more about finding ancestors in African-American newspapers in the Family Tree University course Finding African-American Ancestors in Newspapers: Research Strategies for Success, taught by Tim Pinnick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Here’s what’s on tap for this edition:

• tips for searching online newspaper collections
  
• what PERSI is and why you should use it
  
• finding historical books on the web
  
• News From the Blogosphere

New to podcasts? Cooke explains here what podcasts are and how to use them. 

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• The Family History Library (FHL) is starting to roll out online microfilm ordering in the United States and Canada, meaning you soon won’t have to visit a FamilySearch Center to order microfilmed records (you’ll still need to go in person to view them, of course). First, you’ll find the film you need in the FHL online catalog, then you'll order it here. California, the Pacific Northwest and other points West were first to get online ordering, with the rest of us still to be added in phases.

• UK subscription genealogy site FindMyPast.co.uk is adding a million 20th-century merchant navy seamen records (Britain’s Merchant Navy Day, is Saturday, Sept. 3). The records name crew members of UK merchant ships from 1918 to 1941, offer physical descriptions and include photos.

• Genetic genealogy company FamilyTreeDNA discovered through its Family Finder test that NFL players Xavier Omon of the San Francisco 49ers and Ogemdi Nwagbuo of the San Diego Chargers are half brothers. You can read more about their story on ESPN.com. 

• As an update to our November 2011 online newspapers article, which highlighted the subscription website Paper of Record in addition to other online sources, Rick Crume gave me a heads up about some improvements to the site: First, highlighting of your search terms has been restored on the digitized newspaper pages in your search results. Second, you now have the option to search a broader date range than five years within a single title.

What a find! The article has so much "what was he like?" detail that I wouldn't have found elsewhere. So I wanted to share some resources from contributing editor Rick Crume’s November 2011 Family Tree Magazine cover story on researching ancestors in online newspapers. 

In the article, Rick provides a chart with the essentials on 15 large online historical newspaper collections—some free, some by subscription or with society memberships, some available through libraries—including:

• 19th Century US Newspapers
  
• Accessible Archives 
• Ancestry.com
  
• Chronicling America 
• Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876
• Footnote.com
• GenealogyBank 
• Google News and News Archive 
• New York Times Archive 
• NewspaperArchive 
• Old Fulton NY Post Cards  
• Paper of Record  
• Proquest Archiver 
  
• SmallTownPapers 
• World Vital Records 

He also notes where the sites' collections overlap, and offers some advice on finding other, smaller collections of newspapers:

• Your public library might provide online access to newspaper databases or have historical papers on microfilm. Check at the reference desk.
  
  
• Portals that can link you to more online newspaper archives include Cyndi’s List, Free Newspaper Archives, Online Historical Newspapers and XooxleAnswers: Newspaper Archives.
  

• Search the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper directory for microfilmed papers you can order via interlibrary loan.

• Surf websites of state archives for their newspaper holdings, which may be available for loan to your local library.

The November 2011 Family Tree Magazine also has articles on using published family histories, researching English roots, finding cultural and ethnic heritage organizations, tracing ancestors in Chicago and Portland, Ore., using Mocavo.com and more. The issue hits newsstands next week, but you can order it now from ShopFamilyTree.com. 

For even more help finding ancestors in old newspapers, check out Family Tree University's Newspaper Research 101 class.

• Stanford University has put together a cool visual timeline of US newspaper publication from 1690 to today, using data from the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper directory. The map shows where newspapers were published during various years and eras, with different-sized and –colored city or town markers to indicate the number of papers published there and foreign-language newspapers. Click on a marker and the names of papers published there appear below the map.

Here’s more information on our blog about Chronicling America. Genealogy expert Timothy Pinnick recommended the site as a resource for finding African-American newspapers in our February 2011 podcast. 

• If you’re escaping the heat inside tonight and wondering what to do, give GeneaBloggers Radio a listen. The weekly Friday night internet radio show, hosted by Thomas MacEntee, starts at 10pm EDT, 9pm CDT, 8pm MDT, and 7pm PDT. Tonight’s episode is about capturing your personal family history. Click here to learn more about it and tune in. 

• Tomorrow, July 30, the National Archives’ College Park, MD, research rooms will be closed due to construction. 
  

• Traveling to the National Archives in Washington, DC, in September? Look into attending the archives’ genealogy programs on Freedom of Information Act requests (Sept. 6), military records (Sept. 7), census searching strategies (Sept. 10) and more. On Sept. 10 from noon to 4 pm, you can make a 20 minute appointment with an archivist for individual help. See the list of September programs and descriptions here.
  

Google will continue to support the existing News Archive, so you can still search it. But it won’t add any search enhancements.

This article from the Boston Phoenix has more on what Google’s doing instead. 

See other sites where you can search online newspapers in this free FamilyTreeMagazine.com article, and look for even more help using online newspaper databases in our November 2011 issue. (We’ve also got a Family Tree University course on newspaper research.) 

In other (happier) Google news, now you can get definitions for words in Google Books right then and there. Just select the word and a little pop-up menu gives you options to define it, translate it, or search for it in the book, Google or Wikipedia. You have to be in “Flowing Text” mode for this to work; click here for more details. 

It’s DNA Day! Today only (Friday, April 15), genetic genealogy company FamilyTreeDNA is offering a promotional code you can use to get a discount on several types of DNA tests. See FamilyTreeDNA’s Facebook page for details.

Family Tree University professor Tim Pinnick sent us a note that he’s moderating the new African-American-American Newspapers forum on the Afrigeneas website. Stop by to ask questions and share your finds from Black newspapers. 

FamilySearch announced this week that it’s released 500,000 new US county marriage records, as well as records from Costa Rica, England, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Spain, in the Historical Records Search. Click here to see the list of the updated collections. (Look for our guide to the new FamilySearch.org website in the September 2011 Family Tree Magazine.)

Subscription genealogy site Archives just announced the addition of 3.5 million new US vital records to the website, including the obituary index from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio (also searchable here). Other updated collections come from Texas, Kentucky, Maine, South Carolina, Arizona, South Carolina and Colorado.

iArchives, the records digitization arm of subscription site Footnote, announced plans to collaborate with the Federation of Genealogical Societies to digitize 180,000 War of 1812 pension applications. They’ll eventually be available on Footnote. Read more details on the FGS Voice blog.

• The New Jersey state archives has released a database of 3,427 New Jersey residents named on cards recording those who died in World War I. Your search results link to the original card, sometimes with a photo, and information about the deceased and his service.

• The Digital Library of Georgia, one of the December 2010 Family Tree Magazine’s 75 best state websites for genealogy, has added the Athens Historic Newspapers Archive. You can keyword-search or browse (by title and year) five newspapers published in Athens from 1827 to 1922. 

• The Illinois State Genealogical Society (ISGS) just unveiled a new website featuring links to ISGS records projects, links to other Illinois resources and a new members-only section. Visitors also will find archived ISGS Newsletters back to 2008, listings of Illinois genealogy events, free databases and more.

• A highly combustible nitrate negative caused the evacuation of the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City (not the same as the Family History Library) this week. You can read more about the incident, which ended with everyone safe and sound, on Dick Eastman’s blog. How do you know if you have any of these dangerous nitrate negatives (produced between 1890 and 1950) in your home? This Now What? answer will tell you.
  

• The Library of Congress has posted a collection of nearly 700 ambrotype and tintype Civil War portraits to Flickr. You’ll notice that letters on hats and belt buckles are reversed in the images because they're “direct positives”—images directly from the camera.

• Library and Archives Canada has put the 1916 census of the Prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) online. You can’t search by a person’s name, though. Instead, search the database by province, district name, district number and sub-district number. Or, click here to browse the microfilm reels page by page. 

• Another new database from Library and Archives Canada is Medals, Honours and Awards, containing more than 113,000 references to medal registers, citation cards and records of military awards. It also has digitized images of some medal registers. You can search the database by name, regiment, rank and more; if you find a match, you’ll learn the medal awarded, the related battle or conflict, and a citation for the record containing the information. Because no service files exist for the Canadian military in the 1800s, these records may provide the only proof of service for 19th-century conflicts. 

• FamilySearch has added nearly four million new digital images—nearly 1.7 million of them indexed—to its historical records collection. The additions include records from South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Guatemala, the Netherlands and the United States. Visit FamilySearch for a list of the collection titles with the new images, and how many of the records are indexed. Unindexed collections aren’t searchable, instead, you’ll need to browse those collections and view the records to find your ancestor’s name.
  

• Richard Heaton e-mailed us about his site called Last Chance To Read, a searchable collection of thousands of pages of scarce British and Irish newspapers and other publications, most printed between 1710 and 1870. Once you register for a free account, you can do a search and order PDF copies of articles for about $4.75 via PayPal. See included titles here (scroll down).  

• RootsMagic released a free update to version 4, version 4.0.9.8., which update adds several user-requested features and fixes a number of issues. Users may be automatically notified to download the update; if not, open the program and go to Help>Check for Updates or click here.
  

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

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

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

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

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

Mainstream newspapers carried a wide range of stories covering the African-American. A considerable number of white newspapers in both the North and South carried columns or special sections of news specifically for black readership. Stories ranged from items about local residents to those on a state or national scale. The Joliet Evening Herald News in April of 1926, for example, ran an article on the awarding of a charter to the first black Boy Scout troop in the city.

Obituaries or stories reporting the deaths of black community members can be found with regularity. Researchers report great success in finding items such as these on their ancestors. In most cases these ancestors have not lived a life of great acclaim, but have merely established themselves as amicable neighbors.

In general, it's not unusual to find obituaries in mainstream newspapers to be more extensive than those in African-American newspapers. I would guess that this is particularly true in cases when the white paper is published in town, while the black newspaper is national in scope and published elsewhere.

A case in point would be the death of African-American Nancy Greenly of Kankakee, Ill., in 1920. Her death notice in the Chicago Defender on January 17 consisted of one paragraph on page 7, compared to front-page coverage of the event in eight rich paragraphs in the Kankakee Daily Republican.

• Ancestry.com has completed its acquisition of Genline.se, the leading Swedish family history Web site. Ancestry.com acquired all shares of Genline for approximately 53 million Swedish kronor, about $7.2 million.

• Ancestry.com also has updated its New Search screen to add maps you can click to browse data collections associated with a state or county, as well as access to your recent searches and recently viewed data collections. To use these features, click the search tab on Ancestry.com’s home page (if you see a New Search link in the upper right, be sure to click it—these updates aren’t in the old search). See more details and screen shots on the Ancestry.com blog.

• Historical newspaper subscription site GenealogyBank has added new content from 186 newspapers in 40 US states. You can view the titles that have been added or expanded on GenealogyBank.com (starred titles with have the just-added content). GenealogyBank’s search page has a dropdown menu that lets you search just new content: 

• British subscription site FindMyPast.co.uk has made it easier for you to find birth records on the site. More than 100 million records were re-indexed.  Now, your search results will be in a list of individual names, rather than a range, so you won’t have to view pages and pages of records in order to find your ancestor. In the advanced search, you can now search records from one or more counties. Search FindMyPast.co.uk birth records here. Fully indexed marriage and death records should follow later this year.

• Subscription site Ancestry.ca has launched 16.3 million Parisian birth, marriage and death records dating from 1700 to 1907. French is the second most common ancestry in Canada. Use these links to access the records:

Paris, France & Vicinity Marriages, 1700-1907
Paris, France & Vicinity Births, 1700-1899
Paris, France & Vicinity Deaths, 1707-1907

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society discovered that President Obama and the just-elected Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, are 10th cousins. You can read about the finding on Kimberly Powell’s About.com Genealogy blog.

• Historical newspaper and records subscription site GenealogyBank added newspapers from 10 states: Connecticut; Iowa; Michigan; New York; North Carolina; Ohio; Oregon; Tennessee; Texas and Virginia. See the full list on the GenealogyBank Official Blog.

• Miriam Robbins Midkiff, who created the Online Historical Directories site, has started a similar Online Historical Newspapers website with links to online collections of historical papers organized by state and county.

• A coalition of preservation groups including the Civil War Preservation Trust, National Parks Conservation Association, National Trust for Historic Preservation and Preservation Pennsylvania are opposing efforts to open a casino a half-mile to the south of Gettysburg National Military Park. Click here to read the announcement and see a map of the proposed casino location.
  

• Footnote hinted on its Facebook page about a new Civil Rights-era records collection to launch in February in partnership with Gannett. Get a glimpse here.

• The free FamilySearch Record Search pilot site has added 25 million new records for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, England, Germany, Guatemala, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States. They include 1920 US census indexes for Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Wisconsin, South Dakota and Maine; 1935 and 1945 Florida state censuses; Indiana marriages and more.

• Subscription site GenealogyBank is adding 280 new African-American newspapers. The first 50 were released this month; see the titles, where they were published and the years of coverage on the GenealogyBank blog.

• The Victoria County (Texas) Genealogical Society’s website won the 2009 Website of the Year award from the Texas GenWeb Project. The Victoria County site offers local records, historical information, links to resources and more.

• Ancestry.com released the free Tree to Go iPhone app that lets you view your family tree, edit information, add relatives and upload photos on your iPhone or iPod Touch. You’ll first need a tree on Ancestry.com to use the app. Read more on the Ancestry.com blog.

• Ancestry.com also announced it’s getting rid of its Member Connections feature (note this is different from Member Connect, which was launched last year). It would let you let you enter an ancestor’s name and get a list of Ancestry.com members also researching that person, but now you can do pretty much the same thing by searching Public Member Trees.
  

• The National Archives in Washington, DC, is holding a public meeting next Friday, Jan. 29, at 10:45 am to discuss how the archives meets the needs of the research community. Get details on the NGS UpFront blog.
  

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) is publishing a new scholarly journal called American Ancestors Journal, which will be included as supplement in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. It’ll contain articles with a national scope, emphasizing New York State and out-migrations from New England. You can download the first edition as a PDF here. 

Subscriptions to these publications are included with an NEHGS membership, which starts at $75 per year.

• Search three Georgia newspaper archives free at the Digital Library of Georgia: the Macon Telegraph, the Columbus Enquirer and the Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive (this includes several titles published in Milledgeville). You can search the full text of the papers or browse by date, and view pages with the DjVu browser plug-in.

• Subscription site WorldVitalRecords has added newspaper content from Alaska, California, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Mexico and the UK. Click here to see the titles and other details. The papers are accessible with a World Vital Records subscription ($39.96 per year).

• David Ferriero was sworn in this week as the 10th Archivist of the United States. The new director of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was formerly the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries, and he’s served in leadership positions at other academic libraries. You can read more about Ferriero on NARA's website.
  

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

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

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

Let me know if you guys ever do an article on gruesome heirlooms—my family has this shirt that my great-great grandfather was wearing when he was shot and murdered. (Gross! And weird—who keeps that kind of stuff?)

Basically, all I know is my great-great grandfather was a pig farmer who had a farm in Lockville, Ohio. According to the story, my great-great-grandpa turned to go back into the house after refusing to sell land to this guy, and when he did, the guy shot him in the back. Yikes! And that's how my grandpa ended up with a bloody shirt in a trunk in his basement.

Murder at Lockville.

LANCASTER, June 23.—[Special.]—George (sic) Tisdale, a farm laborer, shot George L. Boyer, a prominent famrer, at Lockville, this county, this morning. As the two sons of Tisdale were quarreling with a son of Boyer about hogs that had trespassed on Boyer's farm, he came up to protect his son, when Tisdale came out of his house and shot Boyer in the right breast, Boyer dying in five minutes after.

• Researching an Ancestor's Murder
• Forum: What did your ancestors die of?

• 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.”

• The Genealogy Guys will record their podcast before a live audience at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference. The audience will get to submit questions for possible inclusion in the podcast. The conference is Sept. 2 to 5 in Little Rock, Ark.; the podcast recording is 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3. Look for location information at the conference.
  
  
• Geni is offering a free two-week trial of its Geni Pro premium service, which includes more stats, matches and member collaboration than the free basic service. (Geni Pro subscriptions are normally $4.95 per month.)
  
  
• Ancestry.com’s subscription-based Canadian site, Ancestry.ca, has added French Deaths by Guillotine 1792-1796, with 13,000 names of French citizens executed during the Reign of Terror. The names come from a book written in 1796 by a French journalist.
  

• ProQuest, the creator of the HeritageQuest genealogy service, ProQuest Historical Newspapers and other databases for libraries, is working on a new search platform that’ll make I easier to find information related to your genealogy search. Expected launch is 2010.

The company is also adding Boston’s Jewish Advocate (1905 to 1990), Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent (1887 to 1990) and the Detroit Free Press to Proquest Historical Newspapers.

• The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF), which is building a huge database of DNA results linked to individuals’ family trees, is moving a set of its 100,000 archived DNA samples to room temperature storage with a technology based on organisms’ ability to survive in a dehydrated state. Other copies of each sample will remain in cold storage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Use the basic search form (below) to search by surname, first and middle names, and the death date. You can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard at the beginning or end of a name. A Browse button by each field lets you select from an alphabetical listing of all available terms for that field. The Search button is at the bottom of the form.
  
  

• Click the Advanced Search link to add age, birth date, cause of death and other terms.

• At the bottom of the basic search form, click a letter of the alphabet to browse entries for surnames beginning with that letter. (I wasn’t able to get any of these surname listings to load.)