The partnership is kicking off with projects to release records from these organizations over the rest of 2012:

• New York Genealogical and Biographical Society
• Illinois State Genealogical Society
• Williamson County (Texas) Genealogical Society

Thursday, August 30, 2012 5:06:24 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

The new website will help FGS, a kind of umbrella organization for genealogical societies, to deliver timely and relevant information about genealogy industry trends and society management to FGS member society leaders.

Features of the new site include:

· Content organized based on the FGS tagline "Learn, Connect, Succeed."
· Members-only content including back issues of the FGS FORUM magazine and discussion boards for genealogy society leaders.
· Members-only review programs for society by-laws, websites and newsletters.
· Free downloads including the FGS Voice archives and Society Strategy Papers.

Visit the new FGS website here.

Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:57:21 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

FamilySearch has also added records from countries including Chile, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Portugal and Sweden. You can see the list of updated and new databases here.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 7:39:44 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

You'll need to register for a free account with the site in order to view the records. Click here to start searching.

Ancestry.com also is introducing a feature called the Ancestry.com Time Machine: Answer a few questions about your interests, and get back a video of what your experiences might be like in 1940.

Ancestry.com | census records

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 7:18:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

In this guest post, Presenter Lisa A. Alzo breaks down her sessions on Canadian immigration records and tracking down evasive female ancestors at the Family Tree University’s Fall 2012 Virtual Genealogy Conference:

When I started my genealogy research over 22 years ago, I began with a female ancestor: my maternal grandmother. This was before the Internet and without the luxury of FamilySearch, the Ellis Island Database or Ancestry.com. Nothing like starting out with a challenge! But I used the information available to me—family documents, interviews, church records, court documents and microfilm—as well as made trips to the library and visited the places she had lived. I was thus able to learn the details of her life, which I chronicled in my book Three Slovak Women. In my Virtual Conference session, “Secrets for Tracing Female Ancestors”, I will reveal my secrets for locating and using online and offline resources, and will share other tips and tricks you’ll need to find the elusive women in your family tree!

As a child, my family would visit my father’s cousin in Ontario, Canada. At the time I fleetingly wondered why he lived so far away, but never questioned it until I became a genealogist and began tracking down clues about my Alzo ancestors. Curiosity led me to investigate sources in Canada, with some very interesting and surprising results! If you have ancestors who immigrated to Canada (or even think it’s a possibility), then join me for the session Canadian Immigration Records, where I’ll walk you through the basics of searching in the Great White North. You’ll learn about websites, databases and printed resources to help you locate passenger lists, border crossings and other immigration records, as well as search secrets to draw your ancestors out of hiding!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 3:45:13 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• Danise Barzano, living in Ottawa in 1901, gave her occupation as "baseball field" (“terrain de baseball”).
• Saint John, New Brunswick, resident John Corbett offered his job title as “lunatic keeper” in the 1901 census.
• Also in 1901, Torontonian Mary Brown was a “pig nurse.”
• William H. Butler of Ottawa was a “bell hanger” in the 1881 census.
• Also in 1881, John Dade was working as a “lamp lighter” in Toronto.
• John Middleton, a 19-year-old resident of Algoma, Ontario, was listed as “criminal” in 1901.
• The 1901 occupation for Georgia Wilcox, a 38-year-old BC resident, was “idiot”—a historic reference for a patient in an asylum.

• Quiz: match up old-fashioned jobs with what the work entailed
• Genealogy Q&A: What's a smack owner?
• 21 old names for occupations
• top 10 sources for finding your ancestors' employment information

• December 2011 Family Tree Magazine, with a guide to researching the employment of ancestors in the railroad, mining, automotive and other industries
• April 2005 Family Tree Magazine (digital edition), with a guide to researching ancestral employment records of all sorts.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012 10:27:04 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Now that the 1940 Census Community Project is complete (just a few states remain to be processed) FamilySearch's next big volunteer indexing project is the US Immigration & Naturalization Community Project, which will make passenger lists, naturalization records, and other immigration-related records free to search on FamilySearch.org. If you want to participate, visit familysearch.org/immigration to learn more about the project.

• British genealogy subscription and pay-per-view website FamilyRelatives.com has relaunched itself in an upgraded beta website. The site's new "at-a-glance" design should help users easily find the site's record collections.
  
  And in September, it'll launch Family Tree Connect, social networking features such as photo-sharing, personal calendars, family tree building and cloud access.

• Subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com has announced it won't release a new version of Family Tree Maker this year. Instead, it'll make key updates to the current version, Family Tree Maker 2012, and release those updates free (so you need to be on Family Tree Maker 2012 to receive the updates). You can read more and see what the first of these "bonus" updates will be on the Ancestry.com blog.

• FamilyRelatives.com has more than 850 million records from more a dozen-plus countries including Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, United States and the "Rest of the World" (ROW). Records include parish records; births, marriages and deaths; military records, trade directories and more.

• The Federation of Genealogical Societies has published a new edition of its Bylaws Workbook: A Handbook for New & Established Societies, compiled by Marcia S. Lindley and revised by Roberta “Bobbi” King. This workbook will help genealogical societies create bylaws that prevent confusion and disagreement. It's available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Friday, August 24, 2012 2:14:19 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Birmingham Genealogical Society
• Jefferson County GenWeb
• Jefferson County, Ala., Resources at RootsWeb
• Birmingham, Ala., FamilySearch Center
• Alabama Online Historical Newspapers
• Hueytown Historical Society

Thursday, August 23, 2012 4:04:01 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Tips for getting reluctant family members to cooperate
• Best practices for working with librarians, court clerks and others important to your research
• What to do when other researchers won’t correct wrong ancestral information
• Resolving genealogy conflicts
• The dos and don’ts of sharing and collaboration (including respecting copyright and the right way to get and give credit)
• How to handle common pet peeves courteously but effectively

And you'll get the opportunity to submit your own genealogy etiquette dilemmas when you register and during the live webinar.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 3:46:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]