• The city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Historical Society have teamed up to publish an online database of LA city officials back to 1850. Click Search Office Holder to search by name. To browse, click an election year on the left, then click the tabs for elected officials, committees and appointed officials, and expand the lists in each category. If you have an ancestor who served as a public official in LA, you might find it helpful to download the site's Introduction and User Guide via the links on the left side of the page.

• The Federation of Genealogical Societies announced it has received a donation of $135,000 to its Preserve the Pensions project fund, which will help digitize War of 1812 pension records and make them freely accessible online. The donation was made by the estate of the late Jon Stedman in memory of his mother, Ardath Stedman. View the records digitized so far online at Fold3.com.

• Brigham Young University's 44th annual Family History and Genealogy Conference is taking place July 31-Aug. 3 at the BYU Conference Center in Provo, Utah. Attendees can choose from more than 130 classes, including hands-on workshops on German Gothic handwriting and how to build a genealogy website. Registration costs $180 and you can stay on the BYU campus for $100 (includes lunches). Click here to register.

Friday, June 29, 2012 10:44:37 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Pennsylvania
• Ohio (yahoo!)
• Tennessee
• Virginia
• Colorado
• Vermont

Friday, June 29, 2012 9:08:39 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

Classes cover topics including naturalizations, land records, city directories, guardianships, pre-1850 censuses and more. Click here to see the full program.

Benefits of the workshop:

• Learn from experts how to research your ancestors in essential genealogy records.
  
  
• Watch eight 30-minute video classes on how to research genealogy records for half the cost of buying each class individually.
  
  
• View classes whenever you have time, even download them to watch later.
  
  
• Ask questions and exchange ideas in exclusive daily chats and message board discussions.
  
  
• Log in anytime that's convenient over the week, from wherever you can connect to the internet.

Thursday, June 28, 2012 9:31:46 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Canadian passenger lists and ocean arrivals: These name the masses of people who arrived by ship at port cities across Canada

• The 1871 Census of Canada: This was the first census Canada conducted as a nation. It reveals household members, ages, jobs, parents' birthplaces and more.

• Birth, marriage and death records: These come from British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

• Military records: These come from the War of 1812 and World War I, as well as lists of officers from 1832 and 1863 to 1939.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 2:10:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• Origins.net, which has genealogy records subscription sites for British and Irish records, plus a Scottish research site, has launched a new records image viewer. It'll allow easier searching, including for users on Macs.
  
  To test it out, Origins.net is inviting you to browse the Children’s Employment Commission of 1842 records free. The viewer requires the free downloadable Java plug-in, which most browsers have pre-installed. (You can access the Origins.net image viewer Help page here.)

• FamilySearch has updated the historical records search at FamilySearch.org with more records for Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, England, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovakia, Spain and the United States. You can check out the list of updated databases here.

• Meanwhile, FamilySearch has extended the deadline to submit presentations for its RootsTech 2013 conference to June 30. If your presentation has to do with "limited, late-breaking technology research," you have until Oct. 15. Visit RootsTech.org to download the submission guidelines and submit applications to present.

• The Indiana Historical Society's (IHS) Midwestern Roots conference takes place Friday and Saturday July 20 and 21 in Indianapolis. Attendees can choose from more than 30 sessions from presenters including genealogy blogger and tech guru Dick Eastman, GeneaBloggers founder Thomas MacEntee, Hey America, Your Roots Are Showing author Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, findmypast.com's Joshua Taylor and other well-known genealogy experts. There'll also be a book fair and marketplace.
  
  Full conference registration costs $150 for non-IHS members—but the early bird price ends next Wednesday, June 27. Click here to learn more and register.

Friday, June 22, 2012 12:32:47 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• Find Your German Roots Independent Study Course download, with four lessons to help you use genealogical records and more to determine who your German ancestors were and from where in Germany they came. 

• A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Germanic Ancestors e-book download by Chris Anderson and Ernest Thode, with expert instruction on researching German ancestors.

• Tracing German Ancestry in Eastern Europe download, with guidance on tracing the German ancestors from Slovakia, Romania, Russia and other places beyond Deutschland's borders.

• Genealogy Cheat Sheet download, a quick reference designed to deliver the information you need to understand the records of your German ancestors
  

Best of all, this collection of German genealogy guidance is on sale for $49.99—64 percent off the price of buying each item individually.

Learn more about the German Genealogy Value Pack in ShopFamilyTree.com.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012 4:37:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• MyHeritage announced that it has reached the milestone of one billion MyHeritage.com profiles. The billion profiles are in nearly 23 million family trees. MyHeritage.com has more than 63 million registered users who add about a million new profiles every day. About half of the billion profiles belong to living people.

• Elyse Doerflinger of Los Angeles and A.C. Ivory of Salt Lake City, both college students, have received the Suzanne Winsor Freeman Memorial Student Genealogy Grant.
  
  Each received a $500 award. Family Tree Magazine interviewed both in an article highlighting young genealogists. Freeman's family and friends established the grant program after her death in 2010 to assist young students in advancing their genealogical education.

• Virtual pin map website Uencounter.me, which lets you "pin" residences, vacation spots and other places to a map you can share with others, has created a Genealogy pin. You can use it to pin ancestral hometowns and migrations on an Ancestry map, and see others' nearby pins. Read the full announcement from Uencounter.me here.
  
  
• The Michigan Department of Education and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources have agreed to move selected Family Heritage Collections currently housed in the Library of Michigan into the reading room of the Archives of Michigan. The move will take place this summer.
  
  The Library of Michigan was dissolved in 2009 along with the rest of the state's Department of History, Arts and Libraries. The library's functions became part of the Department of Education, and the Archives of Michigan is now part of the Department of Natural Resources. You can read more about the move in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources' announcement.
  

Friday, June 15, 2012 10:08:24 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

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

Thursday, June 14, 2012 8:51:45 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Tracing Canadians in the War of 1812: Find resources for tracing Canadians in the War of 1812, including Library and Archives Canada's projects to digitize War of 1812 records.

• Military Records at the National Archives: This is a list of the National Archives' microfilmed military records, including those related to the War of 1812. You can find copies of the films at the Family History Library, and many are digitized on genealogy database websites such as Ancestry.com, Fold3 and FamilySearch.

• At Your Service: Compare your ancestor's birth date to this chart to see if he might have fought in the War of 1812 (or another war).

• War of 1812 Prisoner of War Records: If your War of 1812 ancestor was taken as a prisoner of war, start your records search with these resources.

• War of 1812 Records: Our AncestorNews columnist links to several of her favorite, free War of 1812 online databases. (Note that the Library of Virginia database linked on this page is down June 12 due to a power outage at the library.)

Here are some resources from ShopFamilyTree.com that you might find helpful.

• Online Military Records: Document Your Family's Service on-demand webinar

• Research Strategies: 10 Lesser-Known Military Conflicts article download (one of the conflicts is the War of 1812)

• The July/August 2012 Family Tree Magazine (now mailing to subscribers and on sale in ShopFamilyTree.com), with David Allen Lambert's guide to War of 1812 genealogy
  

• US Military Records: Trace Your Ancestors’ Service Family Tree University course, taught by Diana Crisman Smith (see FamilyTreeUniversity.com for the upcoming course schedule)
  

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 1:43:44 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released its 2012 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. Among the sites named is the Ellis Island Hospital Complex on the south side of Ellis Island, where 1.2 million immigrants were treated in a state-of-the-art U.S. Public Health Service facility. The deteriorating complex is now the subject of Save Ellis Island's fundraising campaign to restore the buildings.

Read our article about the Ellis Island Hospital Complex on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.

• The SFgenealogy website has added a free, searchable San Francisco Colma Cemetery Index. The database includes more than 305,000 burial records (1887-2001) for the Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, with more cemeteries to be added. If you have San Francisco ancestors, be sure to check out the site's mortuary records, birth and death indexes, and other resources, too.

• Genetic genealogy company 23andMe, exhibiting at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree this weekend, announced it'll release four new genealogical features for beta testing in the coming weeks. Those are family tree building on the site; Ancestry Painting, which breaks down your ancestry based on approximately 20 world regions; the My Ancestry Page, a "dashboard" summary of your ancestry; and the Relative Finder Map View plotting where in the world your matches are.

Learn more about these upcoming features on 23andMe's Spittoon blog.

Friday, June 08, 2012 1:55:58 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Texas Genealogy Crash Course
  
• Wednesday, June 27
• 8 p.m. Eastern (7 Central, 6 Mountain, 5 Pacific)
• 60 minutes

Friday, June 08, 2012 11:15:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

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

Thursday, June 07, 2012 12:33:37 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

• Think you have a relative who served in a household of Britain's Royal Family? (Perhaps as Chocolate Maker to the Queen or Strewer of Herbs?) In celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, British genealogy website findmypast.co.uk, in association with the Royal Archives, has added a collection of Royal Household Staff Lists. It covers royal residences across the United Kingdom such as Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and St. James’ Palace, and includes 50,000 staff records from the reign of King Charles II to King George V (1660 to 1924). Details you might learn include the person's occupation, age, length of service and salary.

• The Civil War Trust is holding its annual photo contest. You can enter your Civil War battlefield photos in five categories for prizes including publication of your image, a trust membership, and registration to the trust's annual conference. Enter before Aug. 26 by uploading photos to the Trust's Flickr group—be sure to tag your image as directed in the contest rules. (Last year's winning photos are pretty impressive—view them here.)

• UK cemetery site DeceasedOnline.com has added records for 120,000 mostly rural Scottish burials. The records comprise from 99 cemeteries and burial grounds, with the oldest dating back to 1526. That brings the total of Scottish cemeteries with records on the site to 250. Once you search for a record, you can use pay-per-view credits or subscribe to view the full information it contains.

Friday, June 01, 2012 2:14:49 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• War of 1812 Pension Application Files: These pension and bounty land records are being digitized as a project with the Federation of Genealogical Societies. So far, only 3 percent of the records are digitized in Fold3's collection—but who knows, you may get lucky.

• War of 1812 Service Records: These records consist of cards compiled from muster, pay, receipt and other rolls for soldiers and sailors who served in the war. For each person named, you'll usually learn his service dates, terms of service, monthly pay, where he served, and other notes.

• War of 1812 Prize Cases, Southern District Court, NY: These records relate to British vessels seized by American privateers and US Navy vessels. "Prize courts" helped dispose of the ship and its cargo as war prizes, and the records document questions asked of sailors, witnesses and others.

• Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1805-1821: This correspondence came from Army officers and enlisted men, the Secretary of War, President and other officials, and it deals with Army personnel and administrative matters.  The records are part of NARA record group 94.

Friday, June 01, 2012 1:09:53 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]