• Discover Your Roots Kit (great for beginners, and it's 30% off)
• 10 Years of Family Tree Magazine (2000-2009) DVD (40% off)
• 2008 and 2009 Family Tree Magazine annual CDs (60% off)
• State Research Guides hard-bound book (60% off)

Monday, March 18, 2013 3:08:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• RootsTech, the FamilySearch genealogy conference taking place in Salt Lake City March 21-23, has announced its lineup of 13 sessions you can watch free online. They include the opening day keynote by FamilySearch CEO Dennis Brimhall and storyteller Sid Lieberman; Researching Ancestors Online with Laura Prescott; and From Paper Piles to Digital Files by Valerie Elkins.

Click here to see the list of sessions that will livestream and the times you can watch (note that you'll need to translate the times from Mountain Daylight Time to your own time zone).

• The Irish Genealogical Research Society has launched a new website, IrishAncestors.ie,  that broadens access to resources from the group's library. The public area of the website offers resources including a fragment of the 1871 census for the parish of Drumcondra, County Meath, a database of Irish marriage records and more.

• FamilySearch has added 1.7 million indexed records and record images to collections from Australia, Austria, China, Dominican Republic, England, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru and the United States. US records come from Arizona, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, North Carolina and Tennessee.

You see the list of updated collections here and click to search or browse them for free on FamilySearch.org.

Friday, March 15, 2013 3:28:54 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• UK and Irish genealogy website Origins.net is offering access to its collection of Irish directories from March 16 until March 18 at midnight GMT (that's about 8 p.m. ET in the United States). Recently added is Thom's Irish Almanac and Official Directory for 1845 to 1900. You could learn the person's exact occupation, as well as address and parish of residence. Note that the most "disadvantaged" classes—small tenant farmers, landless labourers and servants—are usually absent from these directories. Learn more about Origins.net's Irish Directories collection and start searching here.

• Ancestry.com is opening up its US passenger lists and border-crossing records through March 17—search here whether your ancestors came from Ireland or elsewhere. The search here initially netted zero results for my name search on Edward Norris born in 1827, but after I clicked Edit Search to bring up the advanced search window, and then clicked Search again, it worked.

Friday, March 15, 2013 9:28:52 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Cemetery records: Check the woman’s tombstone and note surrounding ones, which may belong to her family.

• Church records: Witnesses on a woman’s or her children’s religious records may be her relatives.

• Court records: Women typically didn’t leave wills (in many times and places, married women legally couldn't), though a widowed or unmarried woman may have. Your female ancestor or her relatives may be named in her father’s or husband’s will. Also check divorce records, which may have been filed even if a divorce wasn’t granted.

• Home sources: Examine letters, needlework and quilts, recipe books, address books, baby books, wedding albums, Bibles and calenders for names of—and details about—female ancestors. 

• Land records: Women rarely owned land but may be named in deeds. A married woman may have signed a release of dower when her husband sold land. Those selling land to a couple, especially for a small sum, may be the woman’s relatives. Also consider that the neighbors may be her family.

• Marriage records: These might include a license, certificate, return, church register, banns, bond or newspaper announcement.

• Military pensions: A woman could file for a military pension when her husband or unmarried son died of war-related injuries. Widows had to send marriage records to prove the marital relationship. 

• Naturalizations: Until 1922, wives automatically became naturalized when their husbands did. Unmarried women rarely sought naturalization. Post-1922, look for separate records for married women.

• Newspapers: Pay special attention to society columns, announcements of births, engagements or anniversaries, and obituaries.

• Vital records: A woman’s death record may name her father (later records are more detailed). Birth records often give the mother’s maiden name.

• Finding Female Ancestors Family Tree University Independent Study Course from Family Tree University
• Secrets to Tracing Female Ancestors video class
• Research Strategies: Female Ancestors 7-page digital download
• Female Ancestors Cheat Sheet
• The Hidden Half of Family: A Sourcebook for Women's Genealogy by Christina K. Schaefer (Genealogical Publishing Co.)

Thursday, March 14, 2013 6:10:17 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Almost 3.5 million Irishmen entered the United States between 1820 and 1880. Most stayed in large East Coast cities, partly because they couldn't afford to continue west and partly because they could create close-knit communities with others from their place of origin.

• In 1847, the first major year of famine emigration, 37,000 Irish Catholics arrived in Boston, according to the History Place, where they packed into slums. A sobering statistic from the site: "Sixty percent of Irish children born in Boston during this period didn't live to see their sixth birthday. Adult Irish lived on average just six years after stepping off the boat."

• The same year, about 52,000 Irish arrived in New York City. About 650,000 Irish arrived there during the entire Famine period.
  

• About 11.9 percent of the US population reported Irish ancestry as part of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey in 2008, making this the country's second-largest heritage group.

• Griffith's Valuation: Ask About Ireland has a free search of Griffith's Primary Valuation, a valuation of property in Ireland between 1847 and 1864. It's an important resource for 19th-century Irish research, especially given the destruction of census records from that era. The March/April 2013 Family Tree Magazine has a tutorial for this site.

• Census of Ireland, 1901 and 1911: The National Archives of Ireland offers these censuses for free, along with a trove of historical information. Our video class will show you how to mine the clues in these censuses, even if your ancestors left Ireland before 1901. 
  

• findmypast.ie: This new subscription site (with a pay-as-you-go option) has records of births, marriages and deaths (aka BMDs); courts and prisons; military; immigration; land and estates; as well as newspapers, directories and Griffith's Valuation.
  

• Information Wanted: Also free is this database of "missing friends" from the Boston Pilot newspaper, which published notices from those looking for lost friends from Ireland. The column ran from 1831 to 1921; this site has 1831 to 1893 plus 1901 and 1913.

• Irish Genealogy: This site from the Irish Minister of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht is dedicated to Irish genealogy and genealogical tourism. You can search nearly 3 million pre-1900 church records free, and view the actual record if it's been digitized.
  

• Ancestry.com: Subscription site Ancestry.com has Irish records including Griffith's Valuation, tithe applotment books (a tax paid to the Church of Ireland from 1823 to 1837), Ordnance Survey maps, BMDs and more.
  
  
• FamilySearch: Free Irish record collections here include civil registration indexes, prison registers, tithe applotment books and more.
  

• NARA: Passenger Lists: The National Archives' Access to Archival Databases has passenger indexes including Records for Passengers Who Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine. It covers 1846 to 1851 and lists people of all nationalities, not just Irish.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013 8:21:54 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• WikiTree, a free worldwide family tree website, has launched a new feature called Surname Following that lets you get updates when other WikiTree users post content related to names you're interested in. Log in to WikiTree and follow surnames to receive an email alert when related content is added to the WikiTree database or a related question, answer or comment is added to the WikiTree G2G (“Genealogist to Genealogist”) Q&A forum.

• Heads up: The early registration deadline is approaching for this year's National Genealogical Society annual conference, taking place May 8-11 in Las Vegas. You'll save $35 on your conference registration if you sign up before March 19. Click here to register.
  
  
• Speaking of conferences, registration is now open for the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, Aug. 21-24 in Fort Wayne, Indiana (home of the well-known Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center). I'm hoping to be able to carve out some research time while there.
  

• FamilySearch has added 10.5 million indexed records and images to its free historical records search over the last two weeks, including 8,613,673 document images added to the New York Probate Records collection (1629 to 1971). Other notable collection updates are Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Immigration Cards, 1900-1965, and Peru, Lima, Civil Registration, 1874-1996, collection.

Collections for Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, and the US states of Minnesota and Ohio also have been updated. See more details and click through to the updated collections here.

• I got an email about a new iPhone/iPad app that helps you inventory family heirlooms. The $2.99 app, called Heirlooms, lets you store a photo of and information about an heirloom, and share it via an emailed attachment. A free version lets others read the attachment without having to buy the app.

• If you're up against a brick wall with some part of your genealogy research and you'll be in the Washington DC area on Saturday, March 16, the National Archives is holding a “Help! I'm Stuck” Genealogy Clinic. You can visit the Research Center main desk that day to sign up for a free, 20 minute consultation with an archivist between noon and 4 p.m. For details on this and other programs at teh archives, see the Archives.gov calendar.

Friday, March 08, 2013 12:13:51 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]