Miles' Genealogy Tips

MyHeritage.com buys FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com

2011-11-21T17:32:00.001-05:00

So, by now the news has probably reached everyone that MyHeritage.com has acquired FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com. This is a major announcement from some major players in the online genealogy world. I was first introduced to MyHeritage.com some years back when they purchased GenCircles.com. I have been using MyHeritage.com as well as WorldVitalRecords.com for many years now and have found both to be valuable research tools. Each of these sites have their own purpose. MyHeritage is a social network with a great collaborative tree, photo recognition and smart matching capability. WorldVitalRecords has a large collection of records, including newspapers, yearbook collections, links to Google Books, FindAGrave and many others from the FamilyLink collection. Another thing that I have liked about MyHeritage is the international membership. There are over 60 million users from around the world and the site is published in 38 languages. I have been able to link up with people in Germany, England, Australia and other places through common individuals in our family trees. MyHeritage has offices in Europe, Israel, Australia, and now after this purchase, Utah in the US.

So what does this mean in the realm of online genealogy research? That is a good question. I hope this means that they will allow linking of records to their family trees, much like Ancestry.com currently does. I also hope that this will open up the international records to many more people so we can further our research overseas. Only time will tell, but I do see great things from this merger.

If you would like more information on this story, check out the following weblink:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/21/social-network-for-families-myheritage-furthers-u-s-presence-with-acquisition-of-familylink/

Mapping Your Ancestors

2011-11-15T22:31:00.001-05:00

I hope everyone is doing well as we get closer to the major holiday season. I have been playing with a few websites and recently discovered a few new ways to use Google Earth and Google Maps to enhance my understanding of my ancestors. These are wonderful tools that can help you find where your ancestors lived and see what those areas look like today.

The first site is probably one that you have used before. It is the Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records site which can be found at http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/default.aspx. There are two main parts of the website which I find very useful. The first is the Land Patent search site. A search on this site might result in finding a digital copy of the original land patent your ancestor was granted. This document provides the Section, Township and Range, as well as the specific parcel of land that was purchased. The second area of the website provides the Plat Image which consists of the original survey maps for the land. These old surveys can provide you an idea of the landmarks which were present at the time the land was originally surveyed.
The combination of these two documents provides you with some pretty interesting information. However, there is another site which lets you map these old parcels on a current map in Google Earth. Google Earth is a satellite mapping program which can be downloaded at http://www.google.com/earth/index.html. Google Earth is a wonderful tool which allows you to look at current, as well as historic, aerial imagery. So, how do you take the information from the land patent and find the location on Google Earth? Well, that takes another website called Earth Point. This site does have a subscription service, however the information I will provide allows you to map locations for free. Earth Point can be found on the web at http://www.earthpoint.us/TownshipsSearchByDescription.aspx.

Once there, you can enter the data from the land patent, such as state, township, range and section in the blanks on the Earth Point website. Make sure you have Google Earth running before you click the "Fly To On Google Earth" button. When you click the button Google Earth will pop up and you will see a pink box showing the section where the parcel was located. You can then figure out what pat of the section was granted to your ancestor.

Pretty cool, right? So, maybe now you want to see what that early property might have looked like. Or maybe you have old photos of the house and you would like to post those to a mapping website, like Google Maps, so others can see what the area looked like back in history. There is a fairly new website called What Was There located at http://www.whatwasthere.com/. This site lets you upload your old photos and incorporate them into Google Maps and the Street View. Once you upload the photo to this site you can search the Street View for the proper location and angle to superimpose your photo on the existing property. You can fade in and out to see how well the two pictures match. One thing I would like to see added to this site is the ability to warp the pictures so they fit the current scene a little better. Other than that, this site is a wonderful tool to get a glimpse into the past.

Mapping adds another dimension to your research and brings it to life. Try these new websites and let me know what you think.

Updates for FamilySearch and LDS.org Websites

2011-10-07T16:24:00.006-04:00

Yeah, I know, you all must be asking "What has he been up to now and why does he take such long breaks between blogs?" I have been busy again, or still, and I only seem to be able to write when I get that urge to tell you about something that I find very interesting. I'll let the other bloggers keep you up to date on all the other stuff.

So, here is what I find interesting lately - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is continuing to update and add to their genealogy related websites. First, let's discuss what is happening at FamilySearch.org. I am sure many of you have been using the free records search that is up on the site. I just read that they now have 2.34 billion indexed names and an additional 312 million records imaged but not yet indexed (browse only) on the site from all over the world. Even though this seems like a lot of records, there are still many more records that have not yet been indexed or digitized. If you would like to help add more records to this collection you can volunteer at https://www.familysearch.org/volunteer/indexing. If the records you are looking for are not yet online you can now order them online and have the microfilm delivered to your local Family History Center (FHC). It is extremely easy to place these orders. First go to http://www.familysearch.org and look above the search area under the heading Discover Your Family History. Then click on Catalog to begin searching for the record that you need. Alternatively you can skip the first step and go directly to https://www.familysearch.org/#form=catalog to begin your search. Make sure you check the record to see if it is already in digital format or if it is already in your local FHC collection before ordering. Once you find the film number go to https://www.familysearch.org/films/ to begin ordering the film. Payment options include credit card or PayPal. Then you just have to wait for it to be delivered to the FHC.

That is just one of the new things on FamilySearch.org. Another is the linking of some (not all) indexed records to the new.familysearch.org trees. This is applicable for some records that were used for extractions. The general public won't see this on their search pages but for those member of the LDS church, look to the right of the indexed record for a PID number. When you click on the PID# you will be taken right to the record on nFS. Is this a sign of things to come? I don't know for sure but imagine what will happen if we are able to tie the indexed record directly to a record in nFS. I was previously testing a project from BYU where we were linking people mentioned in journals to the people in nFS. Just wait until we can do that with every record currently on microfilm.

The FamilySearch Wiki (https://wiki.familysearch.org) has now been integrated into the FamilySearch format. The wiki is there to help you learn where to search for various records and to give advice. It is being added to daily so even if you don't find what you are looking for today, check back often for updates. One of the updates I just ran across was the posting for FamilySearch Research Help Communities. These communities are located on Facebook, Skype and FamilySearch Forums. The Skype Groups let you chat with others researching the same areas (https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Join_a_Skype_Research_Community). There are many groups already formed, including Mexico, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Sweden, Wales, and Thailand, as well as many states in the US. Those same basic groups are also on Facebook (https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Join_a_Facebook_Research_Community). Figure out which community is best for you an try it out.

There is also a new page at LDS.org directed towards getting the youth involved in family history research. You can find the site at https://lds.org/youth/family-history. This site has a couple introductory videos related to using new.familysearch.org and FamilySearch.org. These videos are include information on why members of the LDS church do family history and some of the programs that are available for members of the church. However, anyone who is interested in learning how to use the sites will find some information and may be inspired to continue their research.

BillionGraves.com Follow-Up

2011-07-08T21:37:00.005-04:00

Hi everyone, hope you all had a great July 4th weekend. I just wanted to post a quick follow-up to my May 26th posting for BillionGraves.com.

BillionGraves was originally released as an iPhone app. However they have recently released an app for the Android phones. You can find it in the Marketplace under Billion Graves Camera (Android app or iPhone app). I downloaded the Android app the day it was released and took it out for a short test drive. The app lets you take GPS marked pictures and upload them to the BillionGraves website. I will have to say that I am using an LG Ally phone. My experience may not be representative of all GPS enabled phones.

The app was very easy to use. In order to get the best photographs of the gravesites you need to make sure that there are no debris on the graves and that you are not causing a shadow. You also need to make sure your phone's GPS is turned on and working properly. A couple times as I was preparing to take a photo, the phone warned me that the GPS signal was weak. This usually happened while I was standing under a tree. I found this problem easy to resolve by moving the phone a little bit to improve the signal.

I especially like the ability to upload the images right after the pictures are taken. The app gives you the capability to auto upload and auto delete the images so they don't take up critical memory. I found that by the time I got home all the photos were on the website and ready for me to transcribe.

Does this mean I won't be using FindAGrave.com any more? Of course not. But I didn't have the photos since they were all deleted from the phone. So what did I do? I was able to open BillionGraves and FindAGrave in two windows and save the photos from BillionGraves to my computer and then upload them to FindAGrave in just a couple mouse clicks.

I think this app will revolutionize peoples' ability to index cemeteries. We are already planning on having a bunch of Boy Scouts index a nearby cemetery with their smart phones and tablets as an Eagle project.

I hope everyone has a great weekend and maybe you can test the app on your own.

TreeSeek.com

2011-05-27T12:49:00.006-04:00

As we move into this Memorial Day weekend we are reminded to look back on all those who have sacrificed so much for the freedoms we enjoy today. Starting with our Revolutionary War soldiers and ending with those who are currently fighting in far away lands like Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to thank them all for what we have. Besides the backyard cookouts and parades, many people will be visiting the cemeteries of their veteran family members and contemplating their sacrifices. Many more of these cemeteries are being indexed online everyday. In my last blog I discussed BillionGraves.com and their work to geocode all the headstones of the cemeteries. Today I want to discuss the burial records found at TreeSeek.com.

Treeseek.com is an affiliate web site with FamilySearch.org. This website has several very interesting applications. First of all, since it is an affiliate of FamilySearch, it is able to use data that has been contributed to new.familysearch.org (nFS). The site is also able to use data from Geni.com. In order to use the functions on this website you must have a valid new.FamilySearch.org account or an account at Geni.com. I have not used Geni.com so I will focus my discussion on the ability to link to nFS. There is an expectation that new.FamilySearch.org will be open to the public sometime around 2013.

What does TreeSeek do with the FamilySearch data?

First of all, it allows you to create a variety of genealogy charts, including 9 and 10 generation pedigrees, 9 generation fan chart, and name clouds. To begin with you can select an individual in your immediate family or enter the PID number of another person in your tree. Once you have your starting person you can then select the type of chart to produce. The charts come out as hyperlinked pdf files so you can click on individuals in the tree and open a window with nFS to see the family pedigree.

The site also has a World Cemetery Map. The World Cemetery Map allows you to select a country or state and zoom in on a Google Map to see the cemeteries in an area. I found the US info to be good but there is a limit to what is available for other countries and some countries aren't even included in the list. So what can you do once you have located a cemetery on the map? I selected Ohio as my region and found that there are 7343 cemeteries listed for the state. As I zoom in on Ohio the cemetery groupings start to separate out and eventually you will see individual cemeteries marked on the map. If you click on the cemetery marker you will see a pop-up bubble with the name of the cemetery and three hyperlinks. The links are for 1) FamilySearch Burials, 2) FamilySearch Research Wiki, and 3) FindAGrave.

The intent of the first link is to allow you to see everyone in nFS who is buried in that cemetery. However, I did notice a problem with that link. It seems that the burial information in nFS must match the standard place name used by TreeSeek. For example, I have relatives buried in Saint Augustines Cemetery, Minster, Auglaize, Ohio. I had entered them in nFS as being buried in St. Augustine Cemetery. That missing "s" and possibly the use of St. instead of Saint meant that no individuals came up with the search. So, I now have to go through my AncestralQuest file and do a universal change so all the references to St. Augustine Cemetery are in the standard format as Saint Augustines Cemetery, Jackson Township, Auglaize, Ohio. It isn't a real big deal but I will have to go and make sure that all those entries are now corrected when I sync my data to nFS in the future. Once I had a few of the entries corrected I was able to pull up a family buried in this cemetery. There are a couple interesting applications available once you have the individuals listed in the cemetery search. The first is that you can calculate the relationships between any individuals in the list. To do this, select one or two of the individuals and click on the "Find Close Relationships" button. I selected my grandfather and the site informed me of his spouse and parents being buried in the same cemetery. The second is the ability to change or add burial information to any individual in nFS from the site. To do this you just add their name and birth and death dates to the search, wait for the program to find the individual and then tell it to change or add the burial information. I would like the option to use the nFS PID for this search but the search works fine as it is and even listed some possible duplicates that I need to research later.

The second link, FamilySearch Research Wiki, will open up the FamilySearch Research Wiki site to the page that describes the cemetery you are interested in. I don't know how many cemeteries have been added to the Wiki so far, but none that I am using are there yet. Maybe this will inspire some people to begin adding more information to the Wiki site.

The last link on this page, opens up the FindAGrave page with a listing of all cemeteries of the same name. I had to search through eight listings but it was easy enough to find the cemetery I was interested in. Once you are at FindAGrave.com you can search through their burial records to see if there is anyone else of interest to you.

The last application that is found under the Tools section is a Relationship Calculator. You can enter the nFS PIDs for two individuals to see how they are related. This was pretty interesting when I tried it. I entered my father's grandfather and my mother's grandfather and ran the search. I expected the results to be that they were related through my parents marriage but I was surprised. It said they were 3rd cousins and they had the same g-g-g-grandmother! I never knew that.

So, what is my impression of this site? I was pleasantly surprised at the capabilities that were available. The reports produced by the site are limited but they are definitely useful. There are still some glitches such as some links don't work yet. Additionally, it relies on people inputting the standard format for the cemeteries in nFS. But with a little work this site will be an important addition to the nFS family of programs.

BillionGraves.com

2011-05-26T17:31:00.005-04:00

Hi everyone, it is summer again here in the deep South. Almost 100 degrees the last couple days so I decided to stay inside and get some work done. That includes trying out some new websites.

I ran across a cool new site on the discussion boards today. It is BillionGraves.com. This site is meant to be an online searchable database of gravesites. You might be saying, "FindAGrave.com, Interment.net, and half a dozen other sites already do that. What's the big deal with this site?" You would be right about the first part, but there is something new on this site. The site is based on an iPhone app (sorry, no Android app yet but they say they are working on it). This allows the individual pictures to have GPS data associated with them so they can be mapped in Google Maps. You are able to see right where the grave is located in relation to the hundreds or thousands of other markers in the cemetery.

Being a new site, they have only a couple thousand pictures loaded in so far and it looks like most of the cemeteries are in Utah. But at least that is a start. Once the photos have been loaded to the website, you or another transcriber are able to fill in the names and dates on a form that appears with the photo. This is really simple to do and anyone who registers can act as a transcriber. There are about 2500 graves that need transcribing at the time I am writing this blog. I was able to transcribe about 50 in an hour (but I only use 2 fingers to type - imagine what I could do if I could use all 10 fingers typing).

This site has great potential and goes that extra step beyond the other grave indexing databases. As more and more people use their iPhones and, in the future, their Androids to photograph cemeteries the number of cemeteries in the database will increase. However, I do hope that those who take the pictures will consider adding them to the other sites also.

As the weather starts to get nicer around the country I hope more of you will get out there with your iPhones and iPads and start adding more cemeteries to this and other websites. Have fun, get some exercise, and enjoy the time outdoors.

Reaching Out

2011-03-14T18:29:00.009-04:00

Wow, has it really been over a year since I had time to prepare a blog?! I have been telling myself that I need to get back to work on the blogs again, so here it is - the first one for 2011. May there be many more! Parts of this article deal with events associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so some terms may be unfamiliar to non-members. Don't let that bother you. The ideas can be used by anyone interested in introducing more people into the excitement of family history research.

I have been trying to reach out to folks over the last year. As the Stake High Counselor over Family History and Temple Work I have been trying to train members of the priesthood on their duties pertaining to family history. Additionally, I have been working on getting the public involved in their family history through my work as a Family History Consultant and directing the North Florida Regional Genealogy Conference. Some of these are easier than others.

First of all, it is often difficult to get priesthood leaders excited about family history. I am really not sure how to get the fire lit. I have been meeting with them and inviting them to visit the local Family History Center and work with their Ward Family History Consultants. This hasn't been as successful as I would want, but I will continue. Any ideas you may have are greatly appreciated.

Second, the Family History Center use has been picking up over the last year. Part of this is due to my work in reaching out to specific groups. I have been having periodic Genealogy Merit Badge events for the local Boy Scout troops. We have been bringing the Scouts and their parents into the FHC and helping them work on their merit badge requirements. Many of these young men have been excited about what they are finding and that excitement has rubbed off on some of their parents. The biggest tip I can give if you decide to hold a merit badge event is to require the boys to bring their parents. It is difficult to find ancestors for many of these boys since their grandparents may have been born in the 40's or 50's or possibly more recently and the typical records, such as censuses, aren't available yet. The parents should be able to provide information back to the great-grandparents so we can help them find various records more easily. Another idea we have implemented is bringing in the Young Women. This has been a joy and we now have some of them regularly visiting us to do research. One of the girls brought very little information with her to the FHC. She said it was all her dad could tell her. She was feeling very frustrated since the other girls around her were finding information and she was not able to find anything. One of our consultants asked if there was someone else in her family that might know some of the necessary information. She said her grandmother in Massachusetts would know it. Our problem is that we are in Florida and she did not know her grandmother's phone number. We did a quick search in the online phone book and found her number. We then called her grandmother on the cell phone. Her grandmother appreciated being able to help her fill out her family group sheets and pedigree charts. With this information we were able to find more information on the family. The important thing to remember with the youth is to make sure they have some early successes.

Our third idea was to have a family history conference. We had attended a few small local conferences and set up tables in the past. We had also had open houses on an almost annual basis for a little while, but we had never had an actual conference before. We started planning a year ago (about the same time I wrote my last blog). I like to plan big so the event quickly expanded into a regional conference with various sponsors, a number of vendors, and speakers from around the country. We had to find a conference facility large enough to accommodate what we expected to happen. We made a goal of 300-400 patrons and at least a dozen talks. We started to contact local speakers to see if they were interested in participating and gradually moved out to invite a few national speakers. By the time we were ready to have the conference we had nearly 30 talks or demonstrations scheduled for the day with 16 speakers. A week before the conference we had almost 300 registrations. The conference was held last Saturday, March 12, and we filled the conference facility. During registration we had another 70 walk-ins register, pushing our total attendees to approximately 370. We also had over a dozen vendors and genealogy societies with displays in the hallway. So who did we have speaking? I am happy to say that Darius Gray and Margaret Blaire Young from BYU were both there and did a wonderful job during their 5 talks on African American genealogy and writing family histories. Gaylon Findlay from Ancestral Quest was there. He gave three talks on using the AQ program. Denise Mortoff, from California, spoke on DNA and researching various types of records. Our local speakers, such as Ann Staley, Karen Rhodes, and Nephi Watt, also presented top caliber talks.

So, what is the result of all this work? Have we spread the genealogy bug a little further? Will it result in increased numbers of visitors in our FHC? I don't know the answer to these questions. However, the people I have talked to over the last year have been excited to begin their research and have been telling me stories about what they have found.

Here is the moral to the story - Unless you are willing to reach out, take risks, and go beyond your comfort zone, you will not be able to accomplish what is possible! Take the opportunity to speak to more people about your family history, let them see that it is more than just dead people, cemeteries, and stacks of records. Family History should be a living thing. These are our ancestors and they have given us much. Respect their lives and challenge others to learn more about their history.

Good luck and happy hunting!

FamilySearch Online Research Classes

2010-01-10T18:56:00.003-05:00

Hello everyone, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are looking forward to a productive new year of research. I know I will be busy with a lot of things including Boy Scouts, Family History, Stake High Council, teaching Human Ecology at my University, and work but I will try to continue to post to my blogs and website on a fairly regular basis (at least once a month or so). So keep an eye out for what I am up to.

Today's posting is meant to help all of my fellow researchers, from beginners to the advanced, learn more about how to research. A few months ago I wrote a quick discussion about FamilySearch Wiki. Today I am discussing FamilySearch Online Research Classes. These classes are provided online by the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and are meant to teach the basic methods and key resources to start your family history. As I watched several of these, I learned about new websites that I had never used before along with some of the basic skills that I had forgotten over time.

There are eight categories of classes:

England Beginning Research
Germany Research
Ireland Research
Italy Research
Basic Principles for Latin America Research (in Spanish)
Russia Research
US Research
Research Principles and Tools

Each of these classes contains a video and slides of the presentation along with handouts. The England Research class has 5 presentations averaging about 30 minutes each. They walk you through presentations on Census Records, Civil Registrations, Church Records, and other research techniques. The Germany Research class consists of 3 presentations focusing on deciphering handwriting. The Irish Research class consists of 5 classes covering Church Records, Civil Registrations, and Immigration. The Italy Research class is one hour long presentation covering basic research techniques. The Latin American Research class is in Spanish and consists of 3 short presentations. There are two topics covered in the Russian Research class covering History and Geography, and Records and Resources. The US Research class includes four classes covering Courthouse Records, and Civil War, Pre-WW I, and Revolutionary War Military Records. There are also five presentations on general research techniques.

I invite you to view these courses as time allows. I am sure that there will be something new for everyone. Until next time, good luck in your research and may the morter in your brick walls begin to crumble.

Taking Them from Names to People

2009-11-25T18:33:00.026-05:00

Have you ever read the poem "The Dash" by Linda Ellis? If not, you should take a look at it before you continue reading this blog (http://www.simpletruths.tv/dashpoem/). Just remember to come back here and read the blog afterward. For those of you who have read the poem, remember what it says as you read what I have written.

Many times when we start working on our genealogies we have only names and dates. We always want to know their birth date and death date, but there is much more to find. How many times have you seen people listed as follows: August Jacob Wise (1874-1946)? What does this tell us about this person?

Let’s look at his life a little more closely. Everything I have listed below came from records and documents I found on the internet. Records include 1880-1930 US Census, Ohio Death Certificate, Church Records, Newspaper Articles, Immigration Records, and other historical documents.

August Jacob Wise was born 19 June 1874 in Berlin, Shelby County, Ohio. He was baptized at St. Michael’s Catholic Church on 21 June 1874 with Jacob Gaier and Maria Pleimann as his sponsors. The priest at that time was Reverend Wilhelm P. Bigot. August was the son of an immigrant from Westphalia, Germany and local saw mill operator, August D. Wise and his wife Theresia. August D. Wise had immigrated in 1854 at the age of 19, on the ship William Tapscott from Liverpool, England with his parents Justus and Margaretha Wyse and three sisters. August Jacob Wise’s parents were fairly old at the time he was born. His father was around 37 and his mother was about 35. He was the first of two children. His sister Louisa was born two years later. In 1880 he was attending school and living with his parents, sister, grandfather Justus and two teamsters from the saw mill that his family operated.

In 1896 August Wise, along with several others including Frank Willman and Adolph Raterman, founded the St. Michael’s Commandary No. 300 of the Knights of St. John. He was a life long member of the post and was listed as an honored guest at the golden jubilee dinner that was held on 1 June 1946.

August had a close brush with death on 24 April 1897. He was in his horse drawn buggy about 1 mile north of Newport when it started to rain. He was making his way into a barn owned by the Barger family when a lightning bolt struck and killed his horse. He was not injured.

After his marriage in 1903, his family began to grow. They had a total of 7 children born between 1904 and 1919, 6 of which were girls. During his life he served four terms on the village board of education and was an active member of the community fire department. By 1900, the town had changed its name from Berlin to Ft. Loramie and August had become the head sawyer at the mill. His father, age 64 was still in charge of the company. August was now 26 years old, living at home and single. In 1903 he married Catherine Reiss. August and Catherine grew up together in this small town. Catherine’s father, Joseph Reiss, became a fireman and engineer at the Wise Sawmill in the 1860s after his service in the Civil War ended.

After the death of his father in 1902, August took over the operations of the Wise Sawmill and is listed as the proprietor of the mill in the 1910 US Census. By 1920, the Wise Sawmill is listed as one of the major manufacturers in the area. August managed the sawmill until 1942 when he retired at the age of 68.

On 24 April 1946 August suffered a paralytic stroke which rendered him bedfast. I think this is an interesting date since he survived the lightning strike on 24 April 1897. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on 13 August 1946 and died at 11:45 PM on 18 August 1946 after four months confined to his bed. He was 72 years 1 month and 22 days old. At the time of death he suffered from arterial sclerosis and obesity. He was buried in the new St. Michael’s Cemetery on 22 August 1946. His wife is buried by his side.

This is a tribute to my great grandfather August Jacob Wise (1874-1946).

At this time of Thanksgiving, let us remember our ancestors for the people they were, not for the dates they lived. Let us see them in a more complete light as people, not just names. We are what we are due to the decisions they made. For better or for worse, they are all part of us and we are part of them. Take the time to talk to your families and learn something more about each of them as you gather around the dinner table this holiday season.

Native American Heritage Month

2009-11-19T20:30:00.003-05:00

This month is Native American Heritage Month. Many of us have heard family stories about possibly having Native American blood in our lines. Several people I know claim their families connect to Pocahontas. But proving these lines can be difficult. We have a picture of a Native American in one of our family photo albums and have not been able to figure out who he is. It is a mystery to us.

In my regular life I work for the US Department of Interior. We have observances of all these cultural heritage months. As part of the month, we receive e-mails with trivia and questions to test our knowledge. Today I received the following in my e-mail:

Did you know…………………………….Many Native American names are created specifically for the bearer or to describe various stages of the bearer's life? For this reason, there are very few common Native American names. For example, names such as Woo-ka-nay (“arched nose”), which was the real name of the Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose, or Wa Tha Huck, the original name of legendary Indian athlete Jim Thorpe (which means “bright path”).

In some tribes, the use of names is highly restrictive. Certain names can only be used by specific families within the tribe, and can only be transferred by loan or gift. Using a name of this sort without first receiving permission could be considered an enormous faux pas or even theft. At a minimum, it's an affront to a specific culture and race.

For some Native American tribes, personal names are kept very private, sometimes even secret, and reserved for use only among other members of the same tribe. When members of one of these tribes are with people not of their own group, they'll often use “public” names instead of their true given names. Traditions vary widely among tribes. What may be an acceptable borrowing of a name to some tribes may be unthinkable to others.

If you are interested in how Native American Heritage Month was started and what it means, I suggest you visit http://www.nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov/. Another interesting site is the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian which is found at http://www.nmai.si.edu/.

So, how do you go about researching Native American records? This can be a problem for some researchers. I will try to list a few websites that can help in this research. Some of these will be free while others have subscriptions.

Footnote is a subscription site but they offer many free records and are completely free if you visit your local Family History Center. This month they have over 1.5 million Native American records available for viewing. These records include Ratified Indian Treaties (1722-1869), Indian Census Rolls (1885-1940), Dawes Enrollment Cards (1898-1914), Eastern Cherokee Applications (1906-1909), Guion Miller Roll (1908-1910) and Cherokee Indian Agency (1801-1835). They also have several tribal histories documented on individual tribe pages. Civil War and WW II Indian Regiments are also highlighted along with their document. These are all great records to search as you look into your Native roots. To view the records go to this link: http://go.footnote.com/native_americans/.

Another useful site is Access Genealogy at http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/. This site has indexes of many Native American Rolls, such as the Armstrong, Baker, Cooper, Dawes, Guion, Reservation, Ute and Wallace Rolls. There are many helpful documents and a discussion of Indian DNA on the site. It also links to images of Indian Census Schedules from Ancestry.

A site that I use frequently in my research is Genealogy Branches. This site provides lists of sites by subject. Their Native American list is found at http://www.genealogybranches.com/nativeamericans.html. You will find links to Ancestry as well as state archives, GenNet, and other websites.

Cyndi’s List is well known for its expertise in bringing genealogical websites to a common list. The Native American links can be found at http://www.cyndislist.com/native.htm.

And finally, I will discuss a new comer to the stage: FamilySearch Wiki. FamilySearch Wiki is a baby in the genealogy world; it was started recently and is still asking for contributors to provide information for their Wiki. There are several pages concerning Native Americans but they can always use your help to improve them. I suggest that you start at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Indians_of_the_United_States_and_Their_Records.

I hope this article peaks your interest and sends you looking for more information on those links to Native Americans that you have been told about.

Beginning Your Online Search for Ancestors for Free

2009-11-15T11:34:00.002-05:00

I am in the third week of teaching my 8 week family history class. The lesson today is about online research opportunities. We started out with collecting family information from available resources, such as relatives and family records the first week. The second week was about entering your data into a program such as PAF. This week we discuss where to go to find records to develop the story of these individuals after you have begun to compile information for your family tree.

In the past, most researchers would travel to the regions where the family lived, search through libraries and courthouses and hike through local cemeteries. Today much of this information is available online. Online resources allow you to begin your research from the comfort of your own home. Many databases on the internet require subscriptions but if you are willing to spend the time searching them out, there are many sites that you can access for free that provide comparable information. The following sites are all free and include a wide variety of information that will allow you to fill in that dash between the birth and death of your ancestors.

FamilySearch Records Pilot – (http://pilot.familysearch.org) – This site is being developed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It consists of records that have been indexed through their volunteer FamilySearch Indexing (http://indexing.familysearch.org). The site includes millions of indexed records from around the world with more records being added monthly. There are a variety of records such as death certificates, marriage licenses, birth certificates, US and state census records, land records and others available. This site will eventually include records come from most of the Church’s 36 million rolls of microfilm. I recommend that you come back to this site regularly to see if your records have been added.

Cemetery Records - Find-A-Grave (http://www.findagrave.com) is a volunteer site working to index cemeteries in the US and around the world. The volunteers take pictures or provide written indexes of graves within the cemeteries and post them on the website. I have found this site to be very useful in areas where volunteers are actively recording information. Try the site occasionally to see if new cemeteries have been indexed. Also consider volunteering for cemeteries in your local area by taking pictures and posting them to the site. Another potentially useful listing for cemeteries is Interment (http://www.interment.net/). Many states also have similar records sites. For example, Ohio has a county by county collection of cemetery photos at the Ohio Gravestone Project (http://ohiogravestones.org/).

US GenWeb – (http://usgenweb.org) – US GenWeb is a site that includes state sites managed by volunteers. Each state site contains county sites which are also managed by volunteers. I recommend that you begin at the county sites, search their records and post queries concerning the research you are working on. Many of these sites have indexed census, cemetery, birth, marriage and death records as well as a variety of other helpful links.

Immigration Records – There are a couple websites that provide great immigration records. The first one that most people go to is the Ellis Island site (http://www.ellisisland.org). Most people mistakenly think that this is where most of the immigrants came ashore. However, Ellis Island was not a major entry point until the 1890s. The website includes information on all the ships that came to New York from 1892-1924. Another useful site is Castle Garden (http://www.castlegarden.org). This site offers information on 12 million immigrants who entered the US in Manhattan from 1820-1892. Another site that I have found to be useful is The Ships List (http://www.theshipslist.com/). There were many other ports of entry including Philadelphia, New Orleans as well as smaller ones between the US and Canada and Mexico. A full list of these ports of entry can be found at http://www.genesearch.com/ports.html.

Land Records – The Bureau of Land Management (http://www.glorecords.blm.gov) has an online database which includes the images of early land patents from across the US. These records allow you to see when lands were transferred from the federal government to private land owners. The records include boundaries, descriptions of the land and the acreage transferred. Some states have early land grants online also. For example, Florida includes the early Spanish Land Grants online at the Florida Memory Project website http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/SpanishLandGrants/.

Books – There are many books that have been digitized and posted online. A few of the major collections include Google Books (http://books.google.com) and the BYU Digital Books Collection (http://www.lib.byu.edu/online.html), as well as some lesser known collections at Scribd (http://www.scribd.com) and the Internet Archives (http://www.archive.org).

Message Boards – There are a variety of message boards on the internet. Message boards allow you to post queries and discuss evidence with people researching the same names. One of the largest message boards is RootsWeb (http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/). Other sites also have message boards. Be sure to post queries with detailed headers so people can find them easily.

Social Security Death Index – The SSDI provides the Social Security numbers, birth dates and death dates for people who have died since about the 1950’s onward. This database is updated weekly with new deaths. There are several sites that host these records. RootsWeb (http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/) and FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org) both have these records online.

Civil War Records – The National Park Service hosts the Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System, an online collection of Civil War indexes at http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/. These indexes include rolls and unit histories. It provides a good starting place to find out what unit your ancestor fought in, when they enrolled, what rank they achieved and a list of the battles that unit was part of. Once you have this basic information you can research the unit in more detail on a variety of websites. The state of Florida has their Civil War Pension Records online at the Florida Memory Project (http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/PensionFiles/).

Court Records – Some states and counties have begun posting court records online. These records usually only include more recent records but in some cases there are older records for some areas. One example is the Jacksonville, Florida records at http://www.duvalclerk.com/oncoreweb/Search.aspx. To see if your locality has their records online search Google for *** court records (replace the *** with your locality).

Death Indexes – Several sites have death indexes and records available. One site which provides links to a variety of such records is the Online Searchable Death Indexes Guide (http://www.deathindexes.com/). This site provides a list of sites by state. Another site which I have found to be useful is Tributes (http://www.tributes.com/). This site allows you to build a profile page of deceased individuals. Many pages have obituaries and stories about the person’s life. The pages generally start out with information from the Social Security Death Index and rely on contributions by individuals to fill out the rest of the information.

Facial Recognition Programs

2009-09-28T11:08:00.013-04:00

Hi again. I am off work today preparing for a talk at a local genealogical club so I figured I would post a new article to my blog. Have you ever gone through an old box of photos and wondered who those people were? I know that has happened to more than a few of us. How did you solve this mystery? Many times we bring the photos to another relative hoping they remember who they are. Sometimes we find one photo with a name on it and try to match the others to it. Other times we just close the box and put it on the top shelf hoping to one day take up the task again. Some of us might scan them and keep large folders of unknown pictures on our computer (this is what I do).

Today I am going to discuss some options that use facial recognition technology to help you find those mystery faces. A few weeks ago, (ok, maybe it was a few months ago) I wrote an article about MyHeritage.com. This site lets you upload your scanned photos to an online family tree and it searches the pictures for faces. The faces are then grouped by similarity and you can add names to them. This is an easy way to search through your photos. There is a subscription fee and there are limits to the number of photos you can store there. But it is a great help in doing your research since you can tie the photos directly to your family tree for others to look at. This site also allows you to invite relatives to add more information about the people in your tree.

Another online site is the Picasaweb photo albums at Google (http://picasaweb.google.com). This site lets you upload online photo albums that you can geotag and add comments to. It also goes through your photos and groups similar faces for you to add names to. You can select a person from your album and see all the pictures with that person. You can send out invitations to the people in the pictures as well as anyone else so they can add comments. Geotagging is a nice addition also. This allows you to tag the picture to a specific place on Google Maps. With this ability, you can map out all of your cemetery photos and show your vacation photos on a map. One shortfall is that this site has a limit to the number of pictures you can upload and share.

The third program that I will discuss today is the downloadable program Picasa. Picasa is a program developed by Google and can be downloaded at http://picasa.google.com/. This program searches your computer for all the photos and sorts them by similar faces. The interesting thing about this program is the ability to find faces. I have seen it pull faces from photographs hanging on the wall behind the people you intended to photograph. I really like this program since it looks through all of the photos on your computer searching for faces and there is no limit as to the number of pictures it will search. It could take a while to go through all of your pictures if you have a large number of them. I really like this program for other reasons also. As you tag faces, the program tells you who is associated with that person in other pictures. This program also allows for geotagging, placing comments on pictures and acts as the interface between your digital camera and the computer. You can also edit your photographs in Picasa. It does a lot for a free program.

I hope you try out some of these suggestions with your photo collections.

Cocoa Florida Stake Prepares for Genealogy Conference

2009-09-04T15:17:00.007-04:00

The Cocoa Florida Stake is hosting a Family History Seminar on November 7, 2009. This will be a great event with several sessions running through the day. I will be presenting two of the talks. Put it on your calendar and join us in Florida for a day. More info will be available on their website at http://www.cocoafloridastake.org/.

A Second Review of Dynastree

2009-08-31T17:17:00.012-04:00

Hi there, I have been on travel for the last two months with my job and have not been able to keep up on my blog. But I have been thinking about some topics and plan on adding a few entries over the next few days. Here's the first topic:

Back on November 26, 2008, I wrote a short review about a website called Dynastree.com. This site is a social networking site with a genealogy twist. They currently claim over 90 million profiles in their database. At that time I mentioned that the site does make collaboration on family lines simple. You can invite family members to the site to work on the same lines and add information. I also mentioned that the layout was cartoonish with avatars which you could replace with your own photos. As a follow-up to that blog, the people at Dynastree have asked me to take a look at the additions they have made to their site. So, here it goes.

I still like the collaborative ability that this site gives families. I uploaded a small gedcom file and worked on it with my wife. She added family on her side while I added family on my side. I also invited my siblings and a few cousins to join in. They were all able to add family members to the one shared tree. As I mentioned in my earlier posting, other sites such as MyHeritage and newFamilySearch also allow for similar collaborative working within family trees but maybe not in the social networking arena.

You can view your family in several ways, such as tree, ancestor, descendant, circle and hourglass formats. This site uses the international symbols for events, with * for birth, † for death and ∞ for marriage. Clicking on an individual in your tree brings up profile pages for that person. The profile pages include spaces for a portrait, map, life information, links to other family members in the tree, biographies and notes. I like these features but they are not unique to this site. You can find similar profile pages at Ancestry and Footnote.

All of the features that I mentioned above are available in the free version of Dynastree. However, they do have a Premium version that includes features such as automatic matching of profiles of individuals in your tree with others in the database, statistics with data from your tree such as life expectancy, vouchers for up to 3 pdf family tree posters, family blogs and no advertisements on the pages. These Premium subscriptions begin at 13.95£/month and have an annual subscription rate of 54.95£. Notice that the rates are in pounds so you will have to make the conversion. Currently the conversion rate is $1.6312 per pound.

So, what do I think? I like the site for collaboration, but we now have sites, such as MyHeritage and newFamilySearch, which also allow collaboration. I like the profile pages, but sites such as Ancestry and Footnote link images of the source documents to their profiles. Dynastree does not have source documents to assist in your research but they do have some tutorials that help you find sources in other locations. My final verdict, this site doesn’t give me anything that I can’t find at a dozen other sites and the Premium subscription appears to be expensive for just a collaborative site with no records to assist you in your research. However, I believe this site could be beneficial to some researchers and their families so I invite you to stop in and give it a try.

If you would like to try out a no strings attached one month Premium subscription to the site go to their website at https://www.dynastree.com/action/premium/subscribe; and enter the following code in the Voucher block uyN-ZvDX7B-CG. There are a limited number so it is first come first serve.

As always, good luck and happy hunting.

BYU Historic Journals Collection

2009-07-16T21:25:00.007-04:00

I've got a new site for you tonight. This one is an invitation only site but I believe it is a great example of where genealogy research is going in the near future. The site is the BYU Historic Journals Collection. This site opened on July 4 and is currently in beta testing phase. As their news release says "Our "invitation only" public beta has begun! The interface is still a bit clunky, but the site is ready for people to start contributing information, tags, and journals. We are using an invitation system to make sure that we don't get too many users faster than we can handle."

I received my invitation last night and I am user#10 on the system, so they are obviously taking it slow. The development team rolled out their method of linking digitized journals with genealogical information at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries held in Austin, Texas on June 15-29, 2009. So what does this mean? Well, the collection consists of the digitized collections from the BYU Library. This includes The Overland Trails collection and the Mormon Missionary Diaries collection. So far this is about 420 journals. Currently the authors of the journals are cross referenced with the newFamilySearch (nFS) database. That means that you can search by nFS PID# to see if there is

a digitized journal in the collection by that person. But there is more. When you get an invitation to join the beta test you use your nFS login information to create your account. This allows the journal collection to search your ancestors as they are laid out in nFS to see if there are any journals that match your list of people. Another thing that you can do is tag names as you read the journals. If you find a name in the text you can cross reference it with that person's PID# in nFS and they will be linked to that individual for others to search. Can you imagine the power of this type of tool in genealogical research. Consider if we had the censuses or court records cross referenced to individuals by their PID#. We could select the individual and ask to see all of the documents that reference that person. No more searching through various results in the hope of finding the right person.

In a discussion with Doug Kennard, one of the site developers, he stated "We're hoping that people will contribute information about journals they know about and upload scanned images of the journals they do have, since it is my belief that the majority of journals are in peoples' private possession instead of in libraries. We have done the work of developing the site, but we're hoping other people will see the value of adding content and reference information to it. Just like wikipedia bacame a great information resource because lots of people added content to it, we're hoping that lots of people will use this tool that we have built and add content (reference information and scanned journals). If they do, the combined effort will result in huge payoff for everybody who uses it."

The website can be found at http://journals.byu.edu/. A video is available on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9etZDmOQj0. I hope you get a chance to visit the site and find something of interest. By the way I have a few invitations to give out. Only 10, so first come first serve.

Independence Day

2009-06-27T20:18:00.004-04:00

It seems like I have been too busy lately to keep up with my blog. But I finally had to write something, not because of the blog, but because the bishopric called earlier this week and asked me to talk at sacrament on Sunday. I just finished my draft (it is 5 pages long). So, I figured I would post it for everyone to read (remember, it is just a draft). Those of you not of the LDS faith may not understand all of the references but I hope it gives you the incentive to continue researching your family lines. Have a great 4th of July weekend and watch out for the potato salad!

My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy! ~ This is a quote by Thomas Jefferson one of our countries founding fathers.

As we are coming upon the 4^th of July holiday, also known as Independence Day, we will be gathering as families to enjoy food, friends and fun. We will be visiting, swimming, having bar-b-ques, and watching fireworks as part of our celebration of our country’s independence from the tyranny and oppression of England. One of the freedoms our country was founded upon was the freedom of religion. This freedom of religion has allowed for a diversity of faiths, including the LDS Church, to grow within our country.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks stated in the Feb 1992 Ensign “I have always felt that the United States Constitution’s closest approach to scriptural stature is in the phrasing of our Bill of Rights. Without the free exercise of religion, America could not have served as the host nation for the restoration of the gospel, which began just three decades after the Bill of Rights was ratified. I also see scriptural stature in the concept and wording of the freedoms of speech and press, the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, the requirements that there must be probable cause for an arrest and that accused persons must have a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, and the guarantee that a person will not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. President Ezra Taft Benson has said, “Reason, necessity, tradition, and religious conviction all lead me to accept the divine origin of these rights.”

As a note, the author of the Bill of Rights was James Madison (4^th President of the US).

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must……undergo the fatigue of supporting it. ~Thomas Paine

Colonel James Taylor, cousin to Zachary Taylor (the 12th President of the US) fought in the French and Indian War in 1758 and served in the Virginia House of Burgess. After the House of Burgess was disbanded, Colonel Taylor served in the Virginia Conventions of 1775-1776. This is where Patrick Henry made his famous “give me liberty or give me death" speech. He was also a member of the Virginia Senate after the Revolutionary War. Colonel Taylor had a daughter, Elizabeth Hubbard Taylor, who married Thomas Minor. Thomas Minor was an officer during the entirety of the Revolutionary War. He was present for the surrender of Yorktown. He served as master of ceremonies for the reception of Lafayette and also at the age of 83 was the chief pall-bearer at Lafayette’s funeral. He marched in the procession on foot, got overheated, and took cold, which turned into pneumonia and died shortly afterward.

Whose responsibility is it to maintain our freedom? It is all of ours.

Freedom requires responsibility. And yet how many of us are truly willing to take responsibility for our own freedom, for our own lives? How many of us, for example, take true and total responsibility for something as basic and fundamental as our own food, for that essential connection to the earth that sustains our very lives? Almost all of us rely on someone else to provide the food that we eat.

The same ideas of freedom and responsibility relate to our life in the church. We are expected to be debt free, have our own food storage in case of emergency, be self reliant and magnify our callings. We hear these statements often and many of us have tried to abide by these to the best of our abilities. How many of us are relying on aunt Bertha to take care of our food storage, or grandma Bess to read our share of the Book of Mormon? We know that our spiritual wellbeing relies on us performing these tasks for ourselves. However, in one part of our church responsibilities the majority of us are relying on only a few members to perform 100% of the work. That is family history.

Why is family history important? Well on a personal scale it helps us appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors. Remember that story I told about the patriots of the Revolutionary War? Let me explain the importance of these people to my wife.

Colonel James Taylor (7^th great grandfather)
President Zachary Taylor (2^nd cousin)
Patrick Henry (9^th cousin)
Elizabeth Hubbard Taylor (6^th great grandmother)
Colonel Thomas Minor (6^th great grandfather)
James Madison - author of the Bill of Rights (3^rd cousin)

(The Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, [1946], 157). "Among the first in this dispensation to sow seeds of interest in family history were the brothers Orson and Parley P. Pratt, members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Their efforts resulted in a Pratt family genealogy and the performance of temple ordinances for about 3,000 of their ancestors.

"Yet there were many Church members who did not fully understand the responsibility for their own kindred. President Wilford Woodruff was so concerned that he made the issue a matter of fervent prayer. Then, at the April 1894 general conference, he presented a revelation to the membership of the Church. From it I quote: 'We want the Latter-day Saints from this time to trace their genealogies as far as they can, and to be sealed to their fathers and mothers. Have children sealed to their parents, and run this chain through as far as you can get it. . . . This is the will of the Lord to his people' "

In previous years, the church has asked that all members complete ordinances for the last 4 generations. Many members have completed this and figure that is all that they need to do. But what President Woodruff, and many other authorities in the church, has said is that we are told to trace our genealogies as far as we can.

In October 1975, Elder Packer told a group of Regional Representatives:

“During the last two months … I have visited a number of high priest groups. Mostly I have been listening. I have been trying to determine what high priests quorums are doing about this work—and why not! It has been a most interesting inquiry. …

“I visited a high priest group with 39 members, well educated, well-to-do, and many of them retired. During the last year they have been responsible for 1,122 endowments at the temple. During the same period they have submitted, from their own genealogical research, from their own family records, two names—one of which had not yet cleared. This, I find, is about typical.

“Genealogical work in the Church, for the most part, is left to those few members who have taken a keen interest in it, who have found great excitement in it, and who devote themselves totally to it.”

Many of the names provided for our own Ward and Stake temple trips have been contributed by only a few members. I spoke to a member in another ward who had provided 100 names per month for 10 years so that the Wards in her Stake would have names to perform ordinances for. Do you think it is time for the rest of the Stake to step up, take responsibility and become independent in their own family histories?

(Elder W. Grant Bangerter, of the First Quorum of the Seventy spoke at General Conference, April 1982) "I have heard some members say, "But our family names are all done." It is all right to say such a thing as long as you realize you are only joking. "Your genealogy has not all been done. My own grandparents performed 'all' the temple work for their deceased relatives fifty-five years ago. Since that time our family has discovered sixteen thousand others."

The prophet Joseph F. Smith stated, “Even IF...and it's a big IF...all of our ancestors work is done, and there is nothing more we can find to do, we are STILL responsible to LEARN about our ancestors lives.”

I feel that this is what we miss when we think about family history. We should be learning about our ancestors not just collecting names, dates and places. Each of these people had lives, some were patriots, others may have been farmers, while still others might have been horse thieves. But each performed a duty that has helped to make our families what they are today. If we think of them as individuals we will love them and feel the spirit grow in our research and temple work.

Have you experienced or can you imagine the thrill of going to the temple for your own grandfather or great-grandmother? My son Colin and niece Alexis were able to be baptized for family members on their most recent youth temple trip. Nothing is so precious as those experiences we call spiritual experiences. And in no other area of Church activity are such experiences more available than when we are seeking out our kindred dead and going to the temple for them. Speaking of these things, Elder Packer has observed:

“Members of the Church cannot touch this work without becoming affected spiritually. The spirit of Elijah permeates it. Many of the little intrusions into our lives, the little difficulties and the petty problems that beset us, are put into proper perspective when we view the linking of the generations for the eternities. We become much more patient then. So if you want the influence of dignity and wisdom and inspiration and spirituality to envelop your life, involve yourself in temple and genealogical work.” (The Holy Temple, pp. 224–25.)

Just as there is something special about having Sister Neil’s homemade bread during sacrament, there is something special about the temple experience when you go for someone whose name you and your family searched for, prepared, and sent to the temple. In having both we can fill our whole soul with the joy of being part of the glorious work of the redemption of the dead.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks said “Our effort is not to compel everyone to do everything, but to encourage everyone to do something. There are many different things we can do to help in the redeeming of the dead, in temple and family history work. Some involve callings. Others are personal. All are expressions of devotion and discipleship. All present opportunities for sacrifice and service.” (Ensign, June 1989, 8)

If we work on our family history as a family we will begin to build tighter bonds. Some of us may know the family stories. Those stories should be recorded before they are lost. Others are good at using the computer. Take that knowledge and use it to document your ancestor’s lives with the multitude of records that are currently available. Some may have free time that they could devote to extracting documents for others to use through FamilySearch Indexing. While others may be able to attend the temple more often and can take these newly found family members to get their ordinance work completed.

Elder Russell M. Nelson 2008 April General Conf:

Any discussion of family responsibilities to prepare for exaltation would be incomplete if we included only mother, father, and children. What about grandparents and other ancestors? The Lord has revealed that we cannot become perfect without them; neither can they without us be made perfect. Sealing ordinances are essential to exaltation. A wife needs to be sealed to her husband; children need to be sealed to their parents; and we all need to be connected with our ancestors.

Joseph Smith (D&C 128:15) – “Let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation. For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation…they without us cannot be made perfect – neither can we without them be made perfect.”

I think many people may avoid doing their family history because they have been discouraged by the thought of searching for records in cellars and basements of government buildings far away. Travel is a hassle and who wants to search through volumes of old documents in the hope of finding that one page that holds the information they need to continue their family lines.

But Pres George A Smith said – “If we do our part, our genealogies will be unfolded to us – sometimes in one way, sometimes in another. So I want to suggest to you, my brethren and sisters: Let us do our part.”

We need to realize that in this day and age, family history research doesn’t have to be looking through old books in the basement or long trips to our families homelands. Many people can begin their family history at home in their slippers and pajamas on the computer. Genealogy has become one of the largest hobbies in the United States. There are millions of people online posting information on their families which may be able to assist you. Dozens of companies and many national, state and local governments are providing online access to their records archives. BYU and Google have provided online access to hundreds of thousands of out of print books. Never before has it been so easy to find documentation on family history.

Elder Mark E. Petersen has emphasized:

“What is our obligation then? Each one of us—if we pretend to obey the gospel at all—must search out our dead and have these saving ordinances performed for them.

“Many suppose that they are discharging their responsibilities by simply ‘going to the temple.’ But that is not wholly true. We must go to the temple, of course, and often. If we do not as yet have the records of our own dead kindred, then while we search for them, by all means let us help others with theirs.

“But be it understood that if we go to the temple, and not for our own dead, we are performing only a part of our duty, because we are also required to go there specifically to save our own dead relatives and bind the various generations together by the power of the holy priesthood.

“We must disabuse our minds of the idea that merely ‘going to the temple’ discharges our full responsibility, because it does not. That is not enough. …

“God holds each of us responsible for saving our own kindred—specifically our own.” Ensign, May 1976, pp. 15–16.)

Let me leave you with these last facts:

If each of the approximately 50,000 families baptized each year were to send to the temple the names of only their deceased four-generation ancestors and the deceased children of these ancestors, at least 3,500,000 people would receive these sacred ordinances each year.

James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights which entitles all of us to the freedom of religion was 17^th cousins with the prophet Joseph Smith, the person who translated the Book of Mormon.

Patrick Henry, the man who said “give me liberty or give me death” was 18^th cousins with the prophet Joseph Smith who died for his religious beliefs.

Arbor Day

2009-04-24T14:59:00.005-04:00

Hi there, I finally had time to resurrect a short article for the blog. My travel schedule has been hectic lately. I have also been busy with all the new things out there for genealogists to play with, such as the FamilyTree interface for new FamilySearch, AncestralQuest and FamilyInsight. And soon we will start testing some new additions to the FamilySearch Indexing program as well as new beta versions of FamilySearch and Family Tree. I can see that this summer will be busy.

Here in the United States, Friday April 24th is Arbor Day. Take this opportunity to provide a legacy for your descendents and a memorial for your ancestors. Plant a “family tree”. Plant this tree in memory of one of your ancestors or as a marker for a newly born child. As the child grows, so will the tree. Not only is this a great way to remember an event but the tree will help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, provide oxygen, shade, and a home for a variety of animals. Make this a family event and have some fun.

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day With Your Irish Roots

2009-03-16T16:42:00.005-04:00

How in the world can so much time go by without realizing it? I can't believe my last post was February 10th. During that time my family went to the local Scottish Games and my wife talked to the representatives of the Lindsey, Campbell and Stewart Clans. She is descended from all three clans but thinks she will become a member of the Lindsey Clan since they are the closest to her original immigrant. I also attended a conference by Ancestry.com to discuss some of their ongoing activities and their World Archives Project. Visit their website at http://www.ancestry.com/worldarchivesproject for more information on this project. I have also been working on developing a new edition of the new FamilySearch teaching manual for the classes I teach. I am still waiting for FamilySearch to develop an official manual. I have part one in draft format posted at my website http://milesmeyer.googlepages.com/additionalfhcmaterials. If you notice anything that I missed in the document please let me know. It is still a work in progress. I will follow up with a second manual with more advanced options and a third manual discussing FamilyTree.

Now, on to our topic for the day. St. Patrick's Day is coming up. How many of you have found your Irish roots? My wife has traced her Faul line back to Ballywillin, Ireland based on their immigration records. They came to the US before the Civil War and fought on the Union side. These are her black sheep since all the rest of her ancestors were Confederates.

So, where can you look for these Irish roots online? There are many sites but I decided to focus on the National Archives of Ireland in this blog.

The National Archives of Ireland has a searchable database which can be found at http://tinyurl.com/c66k9l. There are several databases on the Archives' website which may be useful in your research. Additionally, they have a link to a large number of websites where additional information can be found. This list is located at http://www.nationalarchives.ie/genealogy/links.html.

I always like looking for black sheep when I do research. It adds a little color to the family. Did you know that Ireland shipped some of their convicts to the Colonies during the mid 1700's? A list of the individuals that were deported from Ireland to what would eventually become the United States during the time period 1737-1747 can be found at http://www.igp-web.com/carlow/deported.htm. Some of these individuals are listed as vagabonds or were arrested for larceny. A few even had their death sentences pardoned so they could be deported. Ireland also transported their convicts to Australia from 1788-1868. The National Archives of Ireland has a searchable index at http://www.nationalarchives.ie/search/index.php?category=18. Check it out to see if any of your surnames are represented.

I hope these links help you get in the spirit of St. Patrick's Day and don't forget to wear your green.

African American History Month

2009-02-19T17:47:00.005-05:00

Hi everyone, I am back. I keep getting side tracked. This time it was the beta testing of new FamilySearch (nFS) and FamilySearch Tree. There are some new things coming with these updates. Can't talk about them, but it makes some of the functions much easier. Also, I have been trying to sync my AncestralQuest file with nFS. The interface between the two works great. I have also been teaching my Family History classes and have been busy getting things ready for them. Now back to business.

February is African American History Month. The theme this year is "The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas."

A proclamation by President Obama states "This year's theme, "The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas," is a chance to examine the evolution of our country and how African Americans helped draw us ever closer to becoming a more perfect union.

The narrative of the African American pursuit of full citizenship with all of the rights and privileges afforded others in this country is also the story of a maturing young Nation. The voices and examples of the African American people worked collectively to remove the boulders of systemic racism and discrimination that pervaded our laws and our public consciousness for decades. Through the work of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, the African American community has steadily made progress toward the dreams within its grasp and the promise of our Nation. Meanwhile, the belief that those dreams might one day be realized by all of our citizens gave African American men and women the same sense of duty and love of country that led them to shed blood in every war we have ever fought, to invest hard-earned resources in their communities with the hope of self empowerment, and to pass the ideals of this great land down to their children and grandchildren."

If you have tried to do African American genealogy research you know that it can be difficult to find records. So I decided to focus on some site that may be helpful in getting the research done.

First of all, FamilySearch Records pilot (http://pilot.familysearch.org) site has the Freedman Bank Records (1864-1874) and the Freedman's Burea Virginia Marriage Records (1815-1866) available online. Additionally, the 1850 US Census Slave Schedule is also available at this site.

Another useful site is Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://www.slavevoyages.org). This site has information on almost 35,000 slave trading voyages with a total of over 10 million slaves who were brought to the Americas. You can research the various ships or look at the slave name database for information.

AfriGeneas (http://www.afrigeneas.com/) is another site that may be useful. Their goal is to encourage and support the research of African ancestored individuals in researching their roots. This site has received awards from DearMyrtle and Dynastree and is consistently listed as one of FamilyTree Magazine's Top 101 Best Websites. This site provides great how-to guides for researching African American ancestory.

Access Genealogy (http://www.accessgenealogy.com/african) has a fairly comprehensive list of websites that are available to assist in your research. It will probably take a while to go through all of the resources listed on this site and hopefully you will be able to find several that are especially of use to you.

I just ran across another great website this morning while doing some research. This website is from Suriname and includes a searchable database of 6,364 emancipated Surinamese slaves from 1832-1863. The site is located at http://tinyurl.com/cgk5y6. The site is in Dutch so you will have to use a translator such as Google Translator or Babblefish.

I also want to highlight a couple of websites associated with PBS. These are African American Lives 2006 (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/2006/index.html) and African American Lives 2 (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/index.html). These sites have copies of interviews for famous African Americans such as Oprah, Chris Rock, Maya Angelou and others. Some of these stories are in video format and just send chills up your spine as you listen to them describe what it was like to find their ancestors. I especially liked Chris Rock's interview. These sites also include lesson plans for teachers to use.

I hope this discussion gives you some ideas on how to expand on African American History Month while doing genealogy research.

Oh Canada!

2009-02-05T10:34:00.007-05:00

Hi again, I know that it has been over a week since my last blog. I have been busy getting a new computer setup in our Family History Center. We have a little problem with it accessing our wireless network properly and it takes some skill to make it work. Hopefully that will be fixed by this weekend when I start my next 8 week Family History class during Sunday School.

I have been following a discussion thread on one of the boards concerning the Canada 1916 census. This census was on the FamiySearch Records site (http://pilot.familysearch.org) for a few days for testing and then was taken down due to contractual agreements. Several users were upset to see it go. After reading this discussion I decided to focus today's blog on online Canadian records.

Canada has a rich supply of online records for your genealogical research. I don't use the Canadian databases much since we only have one small line that settled in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia regions.

FamilySearch Records pilot site currently has two sets of Canadian records indexed. These include the Ontario Death Records (1869-1939 and 1939-1947 overseas deaths only) and the Quebec Catholic Parish Registers (1621-1900). Currently there are no images posted for the Ontario Death Records but the index is fairly complete. Also, the volunteers at FamilySearch Indexing (http://www.familysearchindexing.org) are working on parts of the 1861 census. These volunteers are doing an incredible job and just last month were able to add 40 million new records to the FamilySearch Records site. If you have some free time I would encourage you to volunteer and assist in the indexing of these records.

The Canadian Archives has a large number of records available. There are a couple of sites that I recommend when looking through the Canadian Archives.

The first is Archives Canada (http://www.archivescanada.ca). This site is the gateway for archival resources found in over 800 repositories throughout Canada and is maintained by the Canadian Council of Archives. This site allows you to search archival holdings across Canada, access Provincial and Territorial archive networks, view digitized photographs, maps and documents, and find where materials are located so you can view the actual records. My luck in finding digital records within this database has not been great but I suppose that is because I haven't used it very often to do research. It does give great details about the collections and their locations as well as telling you whether these colections are open to the public or have restricted access.

The Libaray and Archives Canada collection (http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/) is another great site for researching Canadian roots. They have a searchable database called the Canadian Genealogy Center which provides access to many of the records that you will need during your research. You can select to search all records, only those that are online or only those that are not online. For example, I searched for Smith and had 37,000 results but only 8,000 of those were online records. You can also narrow your search by using a range of years or the record type. The site contains birth, death, and marriage records along with military, employment, immigration, census and land records. The images are high quality, easy to read and easy to copy to your own records. Another thing I like about this site is their Youth Corner. This part of the site is currently down but it is expected to be available by the end of the month. The goal here is to promote interaction between the generations.

That's My Family (http://www.thatsmyfamily.info/) is a site run by the National Archives of Quebec. This search tool leads to genealogy and family history databases hosted by federal, provincial and territorial archives and libraries as well as other partners. This is another very useful search tool since it covers a wide variety of records and has a fairly easy to use interface.

I hope that some of these sites prove useful in your research. And remember, it is cold in Canada during the winter, so curl up next to a nice warm fire with your laptop and do some research for your ancestors from the great white north. Eh?

Finding Records Online - Looking in Places You May Never Have Thought Of

2009-01-28T16:53:00.007-05:00

Hey there, long time no see. I have been busy again. I camped with the Boy Scouts on a Navy base last week. I didn't know that so many cargo ships came into port at night and we were right under the flight path for the helicopters. This week we had our Cub Scout pinewood derby. We finally were able to purchase a new aluminum track. It took us all night Monday to put together and then all night Tuesday for the Cubs to race. They had a lot of fun.

Now, since I have some free time this evening I decided to get back to my blog. While I was sitting here trying to figure out what my blog would be about tonight, my wife asked me to help her find a copy of The Lovelace Family and Its Connections from the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1921. She ran across this article as a source while researching her Todd family in early colonial Virginia (She is descended from Captain Thomas Todd [1619-1675]). She happened to find a listing for the article in JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org) which is an online database of journals. Many libraries and some government agencies have access to this database, otherwise it will cost $10 per article to print. In the past, I have been able to use JSTOR to find agricultural journals from the 1800's which helped in my genealogy research. Several older historical and genealogical journals are also included in this collection.

Another useful online database is ProQuest (http://www.proquest.com). ProQuest is also a database that you may be able to access from your local library. One of my favorite collections in ProQuest is their historical newspaper collection. Yes, I know that Newspaper Archives and several other sites also have newspapers online but those are also subscription sites and they may not be available in your local library. I have been able to access the archives of the Atlanta Constitution while researching my wife's Coker lines.

Another site that you may have used but forgotten is the FamilySearch Library (http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.asp). Some of the records indexed here are already in digital format and can be viewed online. I have been able to find copies of the county histories for Auglaize County, Ohio, where both my wife's family and mine originated.

By the way, just to let you know, I was not able to get the article from JSTOR because I forgot my University passwords and my DOI passwords and it has been removed from my DOD access. I guess I will have to get those passwords fixed before next semester when I start teaching again. So I went to my old faithful backup, Google Books and found the article right off the bat and was able to download it.

Tombstone Tuesday - Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #3

2009-01-20T14:15:00.001-05:00

Participate in weekly blog themes: Tombstone Tuesday, Wordless Wednesday, etc. Many genealogy bloggers post photos of grave stones on Tombstone Tuesday or a photo worth 1,000 silent words on Wordless Wednesday. Participate in these informal events or invent your own.

A couple posts ago I wrote an article about Fannie Harris. You may remember, she was the one with the alligators in her picture. Well, today I want to write a little bit about her sister, my wife's 2nd great grandmother, Willie Mae Harris.

The gravestone to the right is about the only real record we have of her. What is so special about this picture is that everyone has told us that she was buried in an unmarked grave and there was no headstone. Well, I guess this picture proves them wrong.

The inscription states "Willie Harris wife of Andrew J Phares, born Nov 17 1862, died Dec 22 1909". This gravestone is located at Evergreen Cemetery in Jacksonville, Florida.

I really enjoy visiting cemeteries. Each time I go to a cemetery to find the resting place of my ancestors I try to take pictures of as many headstones as possible. There are two reasons for this. First, many of the cemeteries I visit are small town cemeteries and eventually you may find that a large number of the people located there are related. If you only took pictures of the stones marking the relatives you knew at the time you visited you would have to return later to get the ones you missed. The second reason is that these pictures may be useful to people who do not live in the area and would not be able to easily travel to gather this information. I try to submit all the photos that I take to various databases on the internet.

Since this post is focusing on tombstones I thought I would add a discussion of where you can find virtual graveyards online.

One of my favorite cemetery websites is Find-A-Grave (http://www.findagrave.com/). This site has over 29 million grave records indexed by name, location and cemetery. Each of these records is contributed by a volunteer who has visited the gravesites. I have provided hundreds of photographs for the area of Auglaize and Mercer County, Ohio. All of the pictures that are provided have to be reduced in size to less than 250K so you will have to process your pictures before you send them in.

Another site that I have enjoyed using in the past is the Genealogy.com Virtual Cemetery (http://genealogy.com/VG/vcem_search.html). I used to use this site quite a bit in the past but have not used it much since Ancestry bought them out.

Interment.net (http://www.interment.net/) contains thousands of transcriptions of cemetery records and tombstone inscriptions, from cemeteries in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs maintains the National Veterans Gravesite Locator database (http://gravelocator.cem.va.gov/j2ee/servlet/NGL_v1). This site allows you to search for burial locations of veterans and their family members in VA National Cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, various other military and Department of Interior cemeteries, and for veterans buried in private cemeteries when the grave is marked with a government grave marker. However, the site does not have information available for burials prior to 1997.

The American Battle Monuments Commission (http://www.abmc.gov/home.php) is another site that lists the graves of veterans. However, this site lists those that were interred outside the US or those that were listed as missing in action. The site has several databases pertaining to specific conflicts. These searchable databases are World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Mexican War, Civil War, and the Spanish-American War.

D'addezio.com provides the United States Cemeteries Database (http://daddezio.com/cemetery/junction/index.html). This site links to other websites that have indexes of individual cemeteries. You can search a list of cemeteries for each state to see if the one you are looking for is online.

Many states have their own gravesite webpages. The one I use most often is the Ohio Gravestone Project (http://ohiogravestones.org/). This site allows you to view cemeteries by county and provides images of the gravestones that have been contributed.

There are many more websites that provide easy access to graveyard information. Try a few of the ones that I mentioned and see if you can find some of your own and make sure to contribute the headstones that you have collected. Happy hunting.

This Day In History

2009-01-19T20:50:00.004-05:00

What world stopping events have you lived through? One of my wife's earliest childhood memories is the funeral for JFK. A memory that stands out to me is the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. We are getting ready for an historical first tomorrow. These historical events are easy to find but how do we find out the trivial events in someone's life, those events that even they may have forgotten over the years. Have you ever wondered what life was like when your grandmother was born, what a house cost when she got married, what the top song was in 1950? This type of trivia is sometimes fun to look at. For example, the top TV shows the year I was born included Star Trek, Laugh-In and The Monkees and gas was $0.34 per gallon.

In honor of the historic events tomorrow I decided to discuss some websites that highlight the historical as well as trivial events in our lives.

The first site is the dMarie Time Capsule (http://www.dmarie.com/timecap/step1.asp). This site is searchable by date and includes items beginning in 1800. The earlier years are pretty spotty and may include events of the year instead of the month, week or day. More recent dates include much more information such as top songs, plays, books, TV shows as well as the headlines and costs of daily items such as gas, milk, homes, stamps and bread. I like to use this site when developing a personal biography of an ancestor.

Another good site is HyperHistory (http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html). This site focuses in on sets of years and presents the top events in fields such as science, culture, religion, people, politics and books over the last 3000 years. The events are color coded so you can see what category it fits in. It covers both US and world events.

The last site I will discuss tonight is BrainyHistory (http://www.brainyhistory.com/). This site lets you search history in several ways. You can select a day in history, for example January 20, and see what happend on that day over history, you can also see famous births and deaths on that given day. Another way to search is by year. This method gives you a chronology of events during a given year beginning in 1AD.

I am sure everyone will now go to their birthdate and see what was happening. Have fun and see what you can remember.

Scanning Old Photos

2009-01-18T22:29:00.020-05:00

When was the last time you used a film camera? I believe that most of us today take digital pictures. We tend to take digital photography for granted. We can take the picture and within a short time we post them to websites such as Picasa, flickr, Facebook, or any number of other sites. We also e-mail copies to friends, send copies on CD, print them with portable printers before we leave, or send them via camera phones to all our friends. But I bet everyone of us still has boxes or books full of pictures and slides. We need to do something with these photos to make them more useful in our research and to make sure that they can be shared with the family.

I bet most of you have a scanner sitting on your desk. I have gone through at least a dozen scanners over the last few years. My wife and I used to have our own business scanning other people's pictures. That worked well during the mid 1990's when scanning and printing technology was more expensive. We had scanners for slides, scanners for photos and scanners for large format images. At that time the scanners were stand alone flatbed scanners. Today many of the scanners are integrated into multifunction printers.

Let's discuss some basics of scanning. When you are shopping for a scanner they always brag about how high their resolution is (dpi). Some will claim 1200, 2400, 4800, 6200 or more dpi. Bigger is better, right? Not in all cases. Truthfully, you will probably never use more that 300 dpi when scanning. You may use 600 dpi if you want to edit small areas or a few pixels at a time but then you are working with a very large size picture and it may bog down your computer processor. For web publishing 100 to 150 dpi are usually sufficient.

Another common question is what format should I save the picture in. There are dozens of possible formats given as options. Each one has a specific purpose. I generally use two different formats depending on the purpose of the picture. TIF files have great detail but they take up more storage space. JPG files look nice and take up less space but they also have less detail. If you are editing the picture I would keep it in TIF format. If you want to e-mail it or post it to the web change it to JPG.

Why would you want to scan all your pictures? The first reason is to preserve a copy of the picture. This picture was a tin-type. We don't know who the boy is yet. If you look closely you will see several cracks in the picture. We scanned the picture and put it back in the book it come from. Within a few weeks the picture had totally disintegrated into a pile of small flakes. The digital copy is all that remains of this picture now. Additionally, pictures in old adhesive photo albums are susceptible to chemical deterioration and will change color over time. Scanning allows you the opportunity to preserve them and adjust their colors to make them look more like the original photograph.

Another reason to scan your photos is to correct any imperfections. Over time pictures discolor, get water stains, crack, bend or rip. We have had to replace many body parts on the photos we worked on. Sometimes people have wanted to modify history in different ways. We have added people to family photos and deleted people from photos. If Uncle Jim wasn't at the last holiday get together we could add him to the picture and if Aunt Jane's ex-husband was in a picture we could erase him. Generally, I don't recommend changing your genealogy related photos in this way though. But you might want to restore the missing parts.

Notice the missing corner and water stains on the photo to the left. With some fairly inexpensive graphics software you can make the picture look almost like the day it was taken. We were able to add the missing foot by taking his brother's foot and enlarging it to more closely fit his dimensions.

Another technique that I use often is to scan the entire page of pictures at once. That way you can go in, crop out the pictures one by one and save them individually. It is much quicker than lining up the scanner each time and scanning one picture at a time. Also, you eliminate the potential for damaging the photos when you take them off the adhesive backed album pages.

Scanning entire photo albums may be time consuming but just think how happy everyone will be when you hand them a CD with all of great grandma Bessie's pictures. Have fun and scan away.

Cabinet of Curiosities Blog Carnival - Family Artifacts

2009-01-17T13:35:00.015-05:00

Show and tell for grown ups, Cabinet of Curiosities is a celebration of the oddities and marvels of natural history, anthropology, archaeology and historic interest that reside in our personal collections. Tell us the stories behind the historical or religious relics, artifacts, mementos, talismans, specimens and ephemera in your steamer trunks, sock drawers and dusty fireplace mantles. Anything that is a conversation piece is fair game for a good storyteller. What's in your attic? Remember, this is show and tell, not merely a bazarre of the bizarre. It's just an old lump of flattened lead unless you can tell us - engagingly - that this was the Minnie Ball that shattered the stock of your ancestor's Enfield at the otherwise unremarkable Battle of Bean's Station back in December of 1863. So what have you got, and what's the story?

Family artifacts and memorabilia are wonderful things. Many of us have items that have been passed down across the generations. A friend of mine has his family’s original bible from the 1770’s. My wife has a necklace that was given to her great grandmother on her wedding day. My family artifact is not in my possession but it is still in the family. This artifact was the original steamer trunk that my 3rd great grandfather Justice Wyse and his family carried over from Germany in 1854. Having this trunk in the family makes you realize that many immigrants had very little when they came to the United States. So I decided to learn more about what their voyage was like.

You may wonder where to start when doing your research on immigrants. Well that depends on when your family immigrated. In my case, since they immigrated in the 1850’s I used the database at Castle Garden (http://www.castlegarden.org). If your family immigrated in 1892 or more recently, you might try the database at Ellis Island (http://www.ellisisland.org/).

Castle Garden, today known as Castle Clinton National Monument, is the major landmark within The Battery, the 23 acre waterfront park at the tip of Manhattan. From 1855 to 1890, the Castle was America's first official immigration center, a pioneering collaboration of New York State and New York City.

Of the 10 million immigrants who entered through Castle Garden, most were German (3,425,000) and Irish (2,541,000). The rest, in descending numerical order, were English, Swedish, Italian, Scottish, Russian, Norwegian, Swiss, French, Hungarian, Danish, Austrian, Dutch, Bohemian, Welsh, Belgian, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, and Australian, plus 162,173 from “other countries.”

Once I found the immigration records I was able to track down the ship they immigrated on. If you want to research more on immigrant ships you could visit The Shiplist at http://www.theshiplist.com.

This picture is of the ship William Tapscott. This is the ship that the Wyse family took in their migration from Europe to the U.S. during March/April 1854. The average travel time for this voyage was about 31 days but could have taken over 45 days depending on weather. The William Tapscott was one of the finest ships of its time. It was one of the largest full-rigged ships built in Maine during the 1850's.

I was able to find more information about what a voyage on this vessel would have been like by looking in the published diaries in the BYU Digital Collection (http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu).

The ship had three decks. The passengers slept on the two lower decks. The second deck was entered through a trap-door hatchway. On each side of the deck, there were numbered cabins. Each cabin contained sleeping “berths”. Each cabin also had light from a large porthole covered with very thick blue glass. Two long tables ran down the middle of this deck. Benches, fastened to the floor, bordered these tables. When the sea wasn’t rough, the porthole window could be left open.

The bottom deck was entered by a trap-door hatchway on the second deck. Like the deck above, there were cabins with berths around the sides. There weren’t any portholes on this deck. For light, there were lanterns. It was very dark. It was described by a passenger on this deck as “… so dark that you could not see for awhile till your eyes got accustomed to the gloom.”

There was a cooking gallery for the common use of all passengers. In the center of the cooking gallery was a very large stove, about 10 feet square. Around this stove was space for passengers to stand and hold onto their pans as they cooked. The toilet closet was a large hole with a bar to sit on. A passenger described the closet as “…The only place I was frightened was when we had to go to the closet, there was just a straight stick across and of course you could see the ocean. How I did cling to my little sister when she was on that bar, for it was a large enough place to let a grown person down, let alone children.”

After plying the oceans for about forty years the William Tapscott was lost in the English Channel in 1888. The figurehead from the ship was salvaged and is now on display at the Bude-Stratton Museum in Cornwall, England. So, as my final step in researching this history, I contacted the Bude-Stratton Museum and was able to get pictures of the artifacts, including the figurehead, that were salvaged from the shipwreck.

Starting with just the one artifact, an old steamer trunk, I have now gained a much more in depth understanding of the trials that the early immigrants had to endure to come to our great country.

Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #2

2009-01-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

Week #2: Participate in carnivals. A blog carnival is a showcase of bloggers’ posts on a given topic. Genealogy bloggers LOVE carnivals because there’s something for everyone. To learn about when these showcase-type events are happening, read others’ genealogy blogs. Someone’s always talking about a carnival.

It took me awhile to get to this blog assignment. I had a hard time finding a carnival that I wanted to blog about but finally chose the theme "Winter Wonderland". Since we live in Florida and my wife's family has been in the Southern states since Jamestown I figured that this would be a challenge. I searched through all of our old photographs, most of which were from Florida and finally found one that represents Florida in the winter.

Here it is, a Christmas tree and the family's first radio! Based on where this picture was in the photo album it was probably taken during Christmas 1930. The previous picture was dated 1930 and the next one was 1931.

Florida is known for its mild winters and the next picture shows just how mild our climate is. This picture was taken December 27, 1929. Notice the top is down on the car.

My wife's family came to Florida in the 1850's and settled in an area they later named Yalaha in central Florida. Supposedly, Yalaha means "yellow orange" in the native Seminole language. Her family was among the first to import the orange stock into Florida. They made a good business growing oranges and asparagus ferns as is testified by several articles in the Florida Agricultural Journal during the 1890's. Additionally the captured small alligators and shipped them to Jacksonville to sell to the tourists during the 1920's.

Just to let everyone know, it does get cold in Florida. We have finally dropped out of the 70's and it is only 47 today. Hope everyone enjoys their winter and keeps warm.

Finding Records Online - Louisiana

2009-01-14T15:02:00.005-05:00

Another week has gone by without an insightful post from me. I need to stop volunteering for so many things. Last night I worked at the Family History Center and did Cub Scouts. Today I did a job fair for students at the Academy of Coastal and Environmental Studies. Last week I did a TV spot for our local Arboretum. All this and working a regular job or two. At least I can tell those people who claim not to have enough time to do family history research that they are not nearly as busy as me ;-)

Now on to the blog for today. I am continuing my listing of state records websites. Today I move on to Louisiana. This one is a little difficult for me since I have not done any research here and therefore have not used the online databases as much as some of the others.

Louisiana has several records indexes online. All of these sites require you to order the actual record for $2 to $5 per copy so you want to make sure you have the right one before ordering.

The first site is the Louisiana State Archives which can be found online at http://www.sos.louisiana.gov/tabid/53/Default.asp. Once on the site you will want to check under the Research Library tab to see what records are available. This site has indexes for passenger manifests, confederate pension applications and vital records. The vital records include deaths (1911-1956) with some areas such as Orleans Parish having some death notices back to 1804. Additionally, you can find Orleans Parish birth records (1819-1907) with some records back to 1790 and Orleans Parish marriage records (1870-1957) with some records back to 1831.

Some additional sites for vital records online include the New Orleans Daily Picayune Death Index which covers the years 1837-1857 and 1870. This index can be found at

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/info/louinfo/deaths/deaths.htm. The New Orleans Justice of the Peace Marriage Records for 1846-1880 can be found at

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/inv/jpmarrindex/jpmarrindex.htm. The New Orleans Daily Picayune Marriage Index for 1837-1857 can be found at

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/info/louinfo/newsmarr/newsmarr.htm.

As you can tell, the availability of online records outside New Orleans is pretty sparce at this time. If you have any sites that you have used to find Louisiana records online please pass them along.

Finding Records Online - Kentucky

2009-01-07T16:35:00.008-05:00

I am back to my listing of web sites offering free access to records within a state. Today I will be discussing some of the databases available for Kentucky.

One of the databases available for northern Kentucky is hosted by the Kenton County Public Library. This site is located at http://apu.kenton.lib.ky.us/gen/gendb.php. Many of the records focus on Kenton County and the area around Covington, Kentucky and include cemetery, church, Civil War, census, birth and death records. If your families ever lived in this area of Kentucky this is a great resource.

A good source for death (1911-1992), marriage (1973-1993) and divorce (1973-1993) records is the Kentucky Vital Records Index located at http://ukcc.uky.edu/vitalrec/. Another death index database can be found on the Rootsweb website at http://vitals.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ky/death/search.cgi. This database includes an index of almost 3 million names between 1911-2000. If you want to see the actual death certificates you can find them at http://kyvitals.com/.

The Kentucky Land Office has a variety of land grant databases on their web page at http://sos.ky.gov/land/search/. This site includes some really great databases including digital copies of the Revolutionary War Warrants prior to 1792, West of Tennesee River Military Patents, Virginia and Kentucky Patents, and several others. These land grant databases include copies of the grants, surveys and other documents supporting land claims.

The Kentucky Cemetery Catalog can be found at http://205.204.134.47/cemetery.asp. This database includes hundreds of thousands of names from cemeteries across Kentucky. All of the information was gathered by volunteers.

The Kentuckiana Digital Library has links to several collections at http://kdl.kyvl.org/. These collections include newspapers, books, images, maps, oral histories, manuscripts and journals. The newspaper archives is a little cumbersome to navigate but once you get through the links you can see the actual pages of the paper with your search term highlighted.

Well, I hope these databases help in your search for relatives from Kentucky.

Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #1

2009-01-06T16:39:00.021-05:00

The Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #1 at Facebook has suggested the following blog "Upload your favorite picture and talk about it on your blog. Answer the who/what/when/where/why of the subject matter and explain why it is your favorite."

As with all records, it is always a good idea to ocassionally look back at your photo collection to see if there are any new clues that we might have missed in the past.

These are pictures of my wife's 2nd great grand aunt, Fannie Harris. Fannie had two sisters, Willie Mae and Grace Harris. Both of her sisters died about 1909. These pictures were probably taken sometime around the turn of the century. The first picture shows Fannie riding an alligator. If you haven't guessed yet, the picture was taken in Florida (see the cabbage palms in the background). This picture is typical of the pictures we have of Fannie. Most of them show her with alligators. I am not really sure why she has the alligators in her pictures but it does exemplify

her strong will and independence. This woman was married twice, one of her husbands was a limo driver and she ran a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida. The hotel was called Hotel Adams and it still stands but today it is more of a flop house located adjacent to the Greyhound bus station. We have had a real difficult time finding records for this family. We believe that her father came to Florida to fight during the Seminole Wars and they settled in a small town called Yalaha in central Florida. The town was named by her brother-in-law's father. Yalaha sits on Lake Harris which was named for her grandfather who surveyed the lake. We have not found any census records with the family listed. The only records we have found so far are city directories from the late 1880's. The difficulty of finding records for this family make the pictures that we do have all the more precious.

Happy New Years!

2009-01-01T19:38:00.012-05:00

1-1-2009 - It seems like just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the beginning of 2008. As we get older the years seem to get shorter and we never seem to be able to keep all of our resolutions we make each year. So, knowing this, what have I resolved to do?

This year I resolve to do better on FamilySearch Indexing. I have been slacking on this in the past and have only completed 3350 records since it first started. I read the news about Alta Mesa Stake in Mesa, Arizona completing over 4 million records last year. That is a huge accomplishment. We need to make sure everyone we know is doing something to help the cause of indexing. It doesn't take much time to complete one set of records each week. If we all did just one set of records (approximately 25-50 names) each week, each one of us would complete 1300-2600 records each year. Those of us who have more time can easily double this number.

This year I resolve to do better keeping my journal. Journals are an important record of our times and will help our descendents understand what our lives were like. Just think how useful it would be to you to have a copy of a journal written by your great grandparents. I do try to keep up with mine but it is hit and miss. Sometimes I go for a week writing every day. Other times it is 3 or 4 weeks between entries. I have only been keeping my journal since July 9, 2006 and it is currently only 72 typed pages.

This year I resolve to exercise regularly. While doing my family medical history (see my blog for December 22, 2008 for ideas) I discovered that the cause of death of many of my ancestors is listed as of cerebral hemorrhages, diabetes, heart disease and various cancers. Many of these diseases can be prevented by being more physically fit. We bought a treadmill for Christmas and I have been using it several times each week. I have already noticed that my belts fit a notch or two smaller.

Sometimes the worst thing to do is be over ambitious in your resolutions. I took a look at my suggested resolutions for last year. The following are what I put in my January 2008 Family History Newsletter as examples of what we can do in the new year - http://milesmeyer.googlepages.com/January12008.pdf

1) To organize and label all your photographs.

• For the techies—scan all of your photographs, label them and create backup copies stored in a safe location.

2) Rededicate yourself to writing in your journal.

• Techies, why don’t you use that new video camera that you got for Christmas to begin creating a video journal.

3) To keep up with the new genealogy resources and attend a genealogy class. It is not enough now to just know all of the research techniques to find records in the court house. The internet is bringing us new ways to research on a daily basis. Learn how to effectively use these new websites.

4) Find sources for everyone in at least one direct line of ancestors.

5) Dedicate a few hours per week or a whole day each month to work on my family research.

6) Keep track of correspondence.

• Techies, make sure you have replied to all of the e-mails and file them away in folders for future reference.

7) Get organized. Look through that pile of papers and see what you may have forgotten about.

8) Genealogy is more than names and dates. Find out about the lives of your ancestors.

9) Put your research to good use. Share it with others.

10) Volunteer to help others. Make your time in the Family History Center a productive time. Help others by joining with sites such as Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (http://www.raogk.org/)

I hope everyone had a good 2008 and wish everyone a great 2009! Only 364 more days until 2010.

New Records Added at FamilySearch Records

2008-12-31T14:47:00.006-05:00

The FamilySearch Records site (http://pilot.familysearch.org) has added the indexed Arizona Death Certificates (1870-1951) and images for Hungary Funeral Notices (1840-1990). The Brazil Rio de Janeiro Civil Registration has also been significantly expanded and the West Virginia births, deaths and marriages has added 3 counties.

If you want to see the Arizona Death Certificates you can look at the link I highlighted in my article on Arizona a few weeks ago (http://genealogy.az.gov/).

Every record you index adds that much more to the records we can access. Make Indexing one of your New Year's Resolutions.

Europeana Digital Library is back up for testing

2008-12-30T14:52:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the Europeana Digital Library. This site crashed almost as soon as it went live due to high traffic volumes. Well, now they have come back online with the test site. You can access it at: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/. This site has over 2 million digital items including images, text, sound and video from museums, archives, libraries and other collections across Europe. This is your chance to try it out. A final version is expected to be available in 2010 with over 6 million digital objects cataloged.

Finding Records Online – Indiana

2008-12-29T14:40:00.003-05:00

I took a few days off for the Christmas holiday, but now I am back again. We had wonderful weather here even though it was quite warm. It was in the upper 70s to low 80s everyday. It was perfect weather to do yard work and wash the car. Looking out my window right now I have chickadees, warblers and tufted titmice sitting at my bird feeder.

Today’s blog will be back on my topic of state records. Indiana has a wealth of records online. Many of these records are available through the Indiana State Library. These databases can be found on the Indiana Memory Project website at http://www.in.gov/library. There is a Genealogy section under the Collections site. The Genealogy Collection includes several useful online databases such as Indiana Marriages Database pre-1850, Indiana Marriages Database 1993-2002, Indiana World War II Servicemen, Indianapolis Newspaper Index 1848-1991, Logansport Newspaper Index 1848-1855, Marion County Death Index 1925-1945, New Albany Newspaper Index 1849-1889, Vincennes Newspaper Index 1804-1827, and the Vital Information Exchange Database.

In addition to the Indiana State Library databases, there are many that focus on specific counties or events. Some of the site I have found include:

Court Records (Clinton County) - http://genealogy.fcpl.accs.net/
Hoosier Heritage Digital Library - http://www.hoosierheritage.net/
County Histories (Fulton County) – includes marriages, deaths, and other records - http://www.fulco.lib.in.us/genealogy/fulcogenealogyfrontpage.htm
Obituaries (Dekalb County) - http://obit.gpl.lib.in.us/
Obituary Index (Elkhart County, Elkhart Truth) (1921-1937 & 1975) - http://www.elkhart.lib.in.us/cgi-bin/index5.pl?&file=obit_db.html
Obituary Index (Clinton County) - http://www.accs.net/fcpl/obit.htm
Obituary Index (Madison County) - http://www.alex.lib.in.us/obits2002/
Obituary Index (Madison County) - http://historical.elwood.lib.in.us/obituaries.asp
Obituary Index (Madison County, Anderson Daily Bulletin) (1921-1967) - http://www.and.lib.in.us/cemetery/obituary.shtml
Obituaries (Marshall County, The Bremen Enquirer) (1884-1967) - http://www.bremen.lib.in.us/historical/bpl_obituaries.asp
Obituary Index (Michigan City, LaPorte County) - http://www.mclib.org/obituary.htm
Obituary Index (St. Joseph County) (1913-2005) - http://www.sjcpl.org/obits/search_form.php
Obituary Collection (Vanderburgh County) - http://browning.evpl.org/
Cemetery Index (Madison County) - http://www.and.lib.in.us/cemetery/cemeterysearch.shtml
Cemetery Index (Montgomery County) - http://history.cdpl.lib.in.us/montcocem.html
Cemetery Index (Montgomery County, Masonic Cemetery) - http://history.cdpl.lib.in.us/masonic.html
Naturalization Records Index (Madison County) (1890-1958) - http://www.and.lib.in.us/cemetery/naturalization.shtml
Allen County Digital Collections - http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/database/index/acpl_digital_library.html
Newspapers (Evansville Press) - http://local.evpl.org/
Military Service Notes (St. Joseph County) WW II, Vietnam, Korea - http://www.sjcpl.org/servicenotes/index.php

Relatively Speaking – Developing a Family Medical History

2008-12-22T19:12:00.002-05:00

It is amazing where you will run into family history related materials. Today I was grocery shopping at my neighborhood Publix. I always go to the advertisement display to grab their sales ad, store magazine and any coupons they might have setting out. As I went through their store magazine I ran across an article titled “Relative-ly Healthy”. You can read the article on their website at http://tinyurl.com/8j4o9w. This article discussed the importance of learning about your family medical history. This time of year when we get together to celebrate the holidays is a perfect time to work on gathering the information we need to compile a family medical history.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 96 percent of Americans believe it is important to know their family history, but only one-third have ever tried to gather and record this information. Many people feel uncomfortable asking for this kind of personal information. If this describes you then maybe you can blame it on your doctor. You can always say, “My doctor wants me to ask so he can take better care of me.”

Another problem that may arise during the collection of this information is a denial or refusal of some family members to discuss their personal medical histories. Some families may associate shame with certain disorders or may have painful memories associated with a condition. You will have to take this into consideration as you prepare. Make sure you explain your purpose, emphasize that this information is useful in determining whether you, or other family members, may be prone to certain conditions. Give them options on filling out the information. Some people may be more comfortable doing it face-to-face while other might prefer to fill out a form. Start with general questions then lead to more detailed personal questions as they become more comfortable. Be a good listener, you may get more information on other family members by just listening to them talk about their histories. And most of all, respect their privacy.

As genealogists and family history researchers we may already know something about our family medical histories. We may have come across information in death certificates, newspaper articles, or old letters and journals. Bring this information along with you when you do the interviews, it may spur someone’s memory. Once you have gathered the information, you should add it to your family tree or use a tool such as My Family Health Portrait which can be found at the US Surgeon Generals website at http://familyhistory.hhs.gov/.

If you need an idea of the questions you should ask, I have developed a family medical history form that is available in Excel format on my website at http://milesmeyer.googlepages.com/additionalfhcmaterials. You can select the family member and fill the form out on your computer or have the family member fill it out and e-mail it back to you. Once you have gathered the information you should provide copies to your health-care providers as well as to your relatives so they can provide copies to their health-care providers.

Try it out and learn more about your family as well as providing you a better idea of your chances of developing various diseases.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

2008-12-21T20:05:00.004-05:00

Well, it has been a few days since my last blog again. It is hard to keep up during the holidays, between the parties and shopping and everything. But tonight I am going to highlight a website being developed by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership with the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website is currently in beta testing and can be found at http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/home.html. This site allows you to search a variety of newspapers published between 1880-1910. Additionally, you can read up on American newspapers printed since 1690.

Currently there are a limited number of newspapers which are searchable. In May 2005, the NDNP began its development phase by making awards to six state projects that were selecting newspapers published in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia from the decades of 1880 to 1910. Since then thay have added newspapers from Washington DC, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Texas. These projects have digitized over 100,000 pages, according to the guidelines outlined by the Library of Congress. I decided to search for some of my Tervort relatives in the Utah newspapers. There is an interesting story of how this family ended up in Utah but I will not go into the details. For the search I chose Utah as the state and entered Tervort as the search term. I ended up with 12 results. These results included the marriage of Moroni Tervort and Rosa Hiatt from the Deseret Evening News; a listing of Frank and Henry Tervort as Republican delegates in the 1896 election from the Salt Lake Herald; and I found out that Moroni Tervort was selected in a lottery as one of 714 Utah citizens to fight in the War with Spain in 1898. He was one of the 4 men selected from Payson. All of these articles add just that much more context to my understanding of the life of my ancestors.

The second part of the database is the chronicling of American newspapers published since 1690. I found this database to be very interesting. I decided to do a search on my hometown newspaper, The Community Post of Minster, Ohio. What I found out was that the paper started out as a German paper called the Minster Volksfreund in 1894. It changed names to The Minster Post and continued as a German paper until 1918 but then changed to an English paper until 1964. After that, they again changed the name to The Community Post which is still being printed. I remember as a child visiting my grandmother and having her read the German articles from the old newspapers. I invite you to check out your local newspapers and learn more about the history of the papers in your area.

Finding Records Online – Illinois

2008-12-16T16:57:00.002-05:00

As I continue to focus on the availability of online records for specific states I noticed that Diane Haddad has also written about the Illinois records today on her blog at http://blog.familytreemagazine.com. I guess great minds think alike, or maybe it is just a coincidence. But before I start the list of databases available online for Illinois, I wanted to add a mention of the 25,000^th record digitized at the FamilySearch website at http://www.familysearch.org. These records are wonderful resources and can be found when you do a search of the Library Catalog. As you search for the microfilm, fiche or book that you need you may come across a document marked “To view a digital version of this item click here.” These records are viewable online and have an every word search capability. This is a wonderful resource so make sure you try it out.

Now, on to Illinois. There are a huge number of records that have been indexed and placed online for the state of Illinois. The Illinois State Archives records are found on two identical sites. One site is located at http://www.sos.state.il.us/departments/archives/databases.html while the other is found at http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/archives/databases.html.

Land Records - The Illinois Public Domain Land Tract Sales database includes nearly 550,000 land sales records from the land sold within Illinois for the periods of 1817-1819 and 1847-1877. This database is searchable and provides information such as the purchaser's name, purchase date, number of acres, price per acre, numeric code indicating the county in which the land is located, legal description (township, section, range), volume and page numbers of original entry, and variously, the sale type, and the purchaser's sex and residence. Photocopies of these records can be ordered from the state for a fee of $10 for 2 record copies.

Slave/Servant Records – The Database of Servitude and Emancipation Records includes 3,400 names of African and Indian servants from 1722-1863. The names of servants, slaves, or free persons and masters, witnesses, or related parties are listed in this database. These records may include bills of sale, birth information, census records from 1810, 1818 and 1820, divorce information, donations of property or chattel, emancipation records, estate records, guardianship records, indenture agreements, inventories of slaves, leases of services, marriage contracts, mortgages of slaves, registrations such as receipts, contracts and other agreements, and wills. Photocopies of these records can be obtained from the State Archives.

Veterans Records – There are a variety of veterans records available on the Illinois State Archives website. These databases include indexes of the War of 1812, Winnebago War, Black Hawk War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, and an index of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home Residents between 1887-1916. Again, copies of all of the actual records can be requested from the State Archives.

Marriage Records – The Illinois Statewide Marriage Index is a record of more than one million marriages within the state between 1763 and 1900. There are a few records up through 1920. These records include the name of the groom and bride, date of marriage, certificate number and county.

Death Records – The Illinois Statewide Death Index includes an index of records from the 1870s to 1916 and currently contains over 1.1 million records. Additionally, there is a second Statewide Death Index that covers the years 1916-1950. These records include the name, date of death, location, age and sex of the individual as well as the certificate number.

In addition to these statewide databases there are a number of county indexes listed on the Illinois State Archives website. These local records indexes include death, birth, naturalization, almshouse, homicide, coroner’s inquest, will, court, probate, farm, guardianship and other record types. This is a great site for anyone who has ancestors in Illinois.

And now I am off to open the Family History Center and to set up for our Cub Scout Space Derby. Another busy night ahead of me.

Finding Records Online – Idaho

2008-12-15T22:40:00.007-05:00

Well, it has been over a week since I wrote my last blog entry. It has been a busy week. I was sick for a few days, had a couple holiday parties at work, my students had final exams which I had to grade, had to build my new treadmill that I got for Christmas (a little early) and this week I am busy getting a rocket project ready for our Cub Scouts and I have to travel to the other end of the state for some office meetings. So, now that you know what I have been up to, I can get started on tonight’s blog entry. I will continue with my theme of highlighting some useful web pages for a state. Tonight I will discuss Idaho’s online records.

There are a variety of websites that are very useful for researching Idaho records. One of these sites is the Idaho State Historical Society Digital Collections at http://idahohistory.cdmhost.com/cdm4/search.php. This collection includes documents pertaining to mining in Idaho, the Idaho Capitol Commission and several photograph collections. I did a quick search and found records which included copies of diaries and historical photographs.

For those of us who had ancestors of ill repute you might want to check out the Idaho Penitentiary Files found at http://idahohistory.net/inmates.html. This document includes the timeframe of 1864-1947 with an additional list of inmate names from 1947-1975. You can download a copy of the index and see if any of your family were horse thieves or crooks. This index may include the inmate’s name, age, birth date, location, file number and a description of the crime they were convicted of.

Another useful database is the Obituary Index found on the Boise Public Library website at http://www.boisepubliclibrary.org/Research/Obituaries. This site includes an index of obituaries from The Idaho Statesman from 1970-73 and 1977-present. This index includes names, dates of publication and page the obituary was found on. They will send you copies of the documents for $5.00.

BYU Idaho hosts several databases that are useful in researching Idaho records. One of these databases is the Idaho Death Indexes at http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/famhist/Death/searchForm.cfm. These records include the time period from 1911-1951. Another is the Eastern Idaho Death Records at http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/famhist/Obit/searchForm.cfm. Both of these sites will provide results with names and dates of birth and death. The Eastern Idaho Death Records give an added bonus with pictures of the gravestones associated with the names.

The Western States Marriage Database is also found at the BYU Idaho website. This database can be found at http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/westernStates/search.cfm. You can search by groom or bride and view the extracted information from the marriage records. These records range from pre-1900 to the 1930s.

An additional database that I found to be very interesting is the Historical Ricks College/BYUI Scroll database. I happened to show this site to a patron a few months ago and she asked me to type in her husband’s name. We found him in several yearbooks and she really enjoyed seeing the pictures of him in college. This site can be found at http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/famhist/scrollSearch.cfm. These records cover the time frame of the early 1900s to the 1970s.

The last database I will discuss is the Southeast Idaho Oral Histories Collection at http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/seidaho/manuscripts/collections/allCollections.cfm. The transcripts are arranged alphabetically by the last name of the person interviewed, followed by the topic that each interview covers. Many of these transcripts cover the time period of the early 1900s to 1930s. It is just interesting to read these to get a feeling of what life was like during the early part of the last century.

Well, that is all I have time for tonight. I will try to continue to blog on a regular basis through the holidays but will probably miss a few days here and there for various reasons.

Have fun with your research and have a Happy Holiday Season.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

2008-12-07T19:30:00.003-05:00

As I mentioned a few entries ago, I was going to work on listing important websites for state records unless something interesting popped up. Well, two things have popped up. First of all, new FamilySearch has released a new update v 0.95. There are some minor changes in the database including the requirement to certify that you are complying with Church policy in submitting names for the Temple including not submitting names of Jewish Holocaust victims and it is now more compatible with Firefox and Safari browsers. But I am not going to spend time discussing those. I am sure some other blogger will address them in more detail.

What I will spend a little time discussing tonight is a new database called Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at http://slavevoyages.org. This site was launched on Friday in conjunction with a conference at Emory University marking the bicentennial of the official end to the slave trade in 1808. The database documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 1500s to the 1800s and includes searchable information on about 35,000 voyages and the names of over 67,000 Africans aboard these ships. It includes the name, age, gender, origin, and ports of embarkation and landing. The database includes information on 95% of all voyages that left from ports in England, the country with the second largest slave trade.

Many of the slaves’ names were westernized after their sale while their names in the database are more closely related to their African names. So therefore this database may not list a specific ancestor of a slave descendent but it will give context about their voyage. For someone who knows that an ancestor was enslaved in a certain location, the database might help them trace from where in Africa they most likely came.

There are two main parts of the database that can be searched in many ways. One part is known as the Voyage Database. The other is called the African Names Database. If you are looking for a specific vessel, know the name of the captain or crew, know the ports of departure or arrival, or know the nationality of the ship, you can use this database to get more information. The African Names Database is a listing of names of a small percentage of the individuals who were shipped to the New World as slaves. All of these search results are linked directly back to a more detailed description of the vessel, its cargo, and trade route. Since there are only a few websites that specialize in this part of our history, it is a major addition and should be used as one more tool in researching African-American roots.

Finding Records Online – Georgia

2008-12-07T09:28:00.002-05:00

There are several places online that house records from Georgia. First of all let’s look at the records that have been completed by the FamilySearch Indexing project. One of the first groups of records that were placed online at http://pilot.familysearch.org was the Georgia death certificates. These death certificates cover the time between 1914-1927. Additionally the FamilySearch website has various US census records that also cover the state of Georgia.

The state of Georgia has been putting some of their records online at the Georgia Virtual Vault at http://content.sos.state.ga.us. This site has a variety of records including the same death certificates as found on the FamilySearch website, Confederate enlistment and pension records, wills and deeds from several counties, Spanish-American War records, militia enlistment papers, trademark papers, historic maps and photographs and several other types of records. You can search all of these databases at the same time and download copies of all the documents for your own records. Searching through the Civil War pension records may result in finding other documents. A quick search led me to copies of marriage records, funeral home records, handwritten letters, and other documents used to prove widow’s rights or pensioner's service. The Virtual Vault also has some older records, including colonial wills from 1733-1779.

Another site for Georgia records is the DocuWeb database found at http://docuweb.gsu.edu/scripts/webmain.dll?Anonymous. This site has indexed records from various counties as well as Civil War Pension Records. To use this site select Browse, then select the record type you want to view. A list of names will appear and you can select the names you are interested in. This site has been glitchy lately and it may take several visits to it to get the records you are looking for. It appears that this site is being abandoned for a new system that is currently not active in the public web.

I hope some of these sites are helpful in your search for Georgia ancestors.

Finding Records Online – Florida

2008-12-04T19:33:00.003-05:00

Florida has a wealth of records for you to find online. Many of these records are housed at the Florida Memory Project. The Florida Memory Project is a collection of historical archives, photographs, and government documents. This site can be found at http://www.floridamemory.com. Some of the documents that can be searched from this webpage include Spanish Land Grants, Confederate Pension Applications, World War I Service Records, as well as others. All of these records are free to download digital copies. This is a great resource for finding your southern ancestors.

The Spanish Land Grants can be found at http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/SpanishLandGrants/. These were land claims filed by settlers in Florida after the transfer of the territory from Spain to the United States in 1821. These grants were used to prove ownership of lands that were granted to settlers by Spain beginning in 1790. These records include descriptions of the property claims and land uses. Some records may include supporting records such as wills, deeds and other correspondence proving ownership.

Florida Confederate Pension Files can be found at http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/PensionFiles/. These records include the complete veterans’ pension request files as well as the widows’ applications. These records start in 1885. The veterans’ claims usually include full name, date and place of birth, unit of service, date and place of enlistment, date and place of discharge, any wounds or outstanding service, place of residence, and other pieces of information needed to verify their service. The widows’ applications include the same information plus date and place of marriage, date and place of husband’s death, and her place of residence.

The WWI Service Cards is located at http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/WWI/. These are index cards with the name, age, serial number, race, place of birth, and residence for those service men and women from Florida during WWI. Additionally, these cards have dates of service, where served, and rank during that period. There are over 42,000 Floridians included in this collection.

Another potentially useful site is the Florida Department of State Library and Archives. This site can be found at http://dlis.dos.state.fl.us/barm/rediscovery/. This site allows you to search over 40,000 cubic feet of state and local government records from 2,700 collections. The search results will link to the collection that is housed in the State Archives. If you get some good hits here you might want to think about making a trip to Tallahassee to check out the archives. You can also search the Archives collection at http://ibistro.dos.state.fl.us.

The Florida Electronic Library is another potentially useful site. This site is found at http://www.flelibrary.org/index.cfm. You will need a library card from one of the libraries in Florida to access this database. Once you are able to access it you will find records such as newspapers, including obituaries, magazines, journals, books and other resources.

In addition to these sources, FamilySearch is beginning to place more Florida records online at http://pilot.familysearch.org. Currently, parts of the 1885, 1934 and 1945 Florida State Census are available to browse.

Well, that should keep all the people in Florida busy for a few days. I think tomorrow I will talk about the records from Georgia.

Finding Records Online – Colorado

2008-12-03T20:51:00.003-05:00

Colorado has a huge number of records available online. There are literally hundreds of different types of records totaling over 565,000 individual records which can be found on the California State Archives website. A list of the indexed records can be found at http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/hrd/index.htm.

The Historical Records Index Search page can be found at http://accipiter.state.co.us/archive/publicrecordsearch.do. This page has a database of over 50 types of records including professional licenses, court cases, military records, wills, voter registration, tax lists, naturalization, Indian records, census, birth, death, divorce, and many more. You can select the records that you want, fill in the form and electronically submit it to the Archives for them to research. There are fees associated with getting the actual records but even just searching the indexes can provide some useful information such as name, record type, county and date of event. More information on the record types that have been indexed can be found at http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/online.htm. Another way to search this site is through the Colorado State Archives Search page at http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/search.html. I would run a search on each of these links because they display the results differently and sometimes additional information can be found.

Another useful site is the Denver Public Library’s Western History and Genealogy site at http://history.denverlibrary.org/research/genealogy.html. Like most libraries, many of their databases require a Denver Public Library card for access. However, you can use the search bar located at the top of the page to search the indexes that are available for free.

I hope these free indexes are useful. Tomorrow I will talk about records from the state of Florida. Have fun digging through all the records.

Finding Records Online – Arizona

2008-12-02T22:11:00.010-05:00

I decided to start a series of discussions on finding free online vital records for each state. I started a list of the websites for each state a little over a year ago and decided that I should share this information for those of us looking for our families. I will try to keep it in some semblance of alphabetical order but since some states have not yet adopted the internet as a place to store records I will have to skip them for now. I may also decide to periodically interupt the state list with some other topic that I feel like writing about.

The topic for today is the birth, death and marriage records of Arizona. The state of Arizona is currently hosting birth and death records on their website at http://genealogy.az.gov. For privacy reasons the records found on this site are restricted to birth records at least 75 years old (1855-1932) and death records at least 50 years old (1844-1957). The site will be updated yearly by adding the next year to the searchable records and older records will be added as they are indexed. The information found within these records was extracted from photo reproductions of the original certificates by volunteers from the Mesa Regional Family History Center.

The search screen for this site is easy to navigate. You can search by name for both birth and death records or you can select either the birth or death records. Birth records are shown in blue font while the death records are shown in red font to make them easy to distinguish. The search results link directly to the images of the records in pdf format. That makes it easy to download and print copies of the documents. This site was first posted in February, 2004 and has had almost 6 million records requests since then.

Marriage records for Arizona and other western states can be found on the BYU Idaho Western States Marriage Record Index web site at http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/westernStates/search.cfm. The site provides an index of extracted records but does not currently host the digital copies of the records. Arizona marriage records start with pre-1900 records and continue through the 1930’s. Some states have records going back to the 1700’s. There are currently close to 700,000 records from all the western states housed in this database and more records are being added daily. They are currently beta testing a new enhanced records search feature.

Each entry on this site may contain names of bride and groom, marriage date and place, county where the marriage is recorded, residency of the bride and groom and other miscellaneous comments. Anyone interested in adding names to the index can contact the Idaho Falls Regional Family History Center.

Europeana Digital Library Opens And Then Closes Again

2008-12-01T08:38:00.007-05:00

Well, I took a few days off for the Thanksgiving Holiday. Thursday was spent with family and eating way too much food. Friday was spent hitting all of the deals during Black Friday. For those of you who have not happened to go shopping on Black Friday it is an experience. We slept in this year and hit the stores at 8:00 am instead of the usual 5:00 am but we still found some incredible deals. Saturday was spent cleaning the house trying to find room for the tree and the items that we bought on Friday. Sunday was spent at church and choir practice getting ready for the Christmas program. But now I am ready to get back into the blogging again and boy do I have a great website to talk about today (even though it is currently crashed).

The Europeana Digital Library is an online depository for over 2 million digital objects, including film, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers collected by the various European Union member countries. This project was started in 2007 and opened its web database on November 20, 2008. However, the site is currently down due to overwhelming traffic. The site was originally designed to handle 5 million hits per hour but on opening day it received approximately 10 million hits per hour. They expect to have the site back up and running by early 2009. Once the site has added the upgrades necessary to handle the traffic you will be able to visit it at http://www.europeana.com/. The site will be in several languages, including English, French and German. For those that are interested in seeing what the site will have available, you can visit their development site at http://dev.europeana.eu/. Once the site is up and functioning it should be a great source for historical information in Europe.

Online Family Trees — MyHeritage.com, Dynastree.com, GenesReunited.com

2008-11-26T16:27:00.002-05:00

I have been using several family tree websites over the last couple months so I decided to discuss three of these sites in today’s blog. The first site is MyHeritage.com. This site is the product of a merger of MyHeritage and GenCircles. I really like some of the capabilities found on this site. First of all, it links to your photo albums on a variety of websites, including Picasa. I have been able to transfer family photo albums from my Picasa collection to this website with little effort. Additionally, this site has a real nice facial recognition program. It searches all of your uploaded photos, finds the faces and catalogs them. You can see all of the faces that the program thinks are the same person, unselect those that are not the same person, and enter the person's name as it appears in your tree. Once you enter the name of the person in the picture you will see the possible matches in your family tree and you can associate the pictures with the person in your tree. You can also move these tagged faces back to your Picasa, Facebook, Flickr or other photo site on the web. The tree view looks like your typical layout and is easy to move around in. If you used GenCircles in the past you will remember that SmartMatching was used to match your trees with the trees of other subscribers. This site keeps that capability and sends you periodic e-mails containing the links to other trees that have matches. You can also invite others to join you and collaborate on your family tree. Every time your friends and relatives add information you are notified so you can see how your tree is growing over time.

Dynastree.com was previously known as ItsOurTree.com. This site is similar to MyHeritage.com in the way that it functions. This one is free to use but appears a little cartoonish in their layout. This site also allows you to upload your family pictures and match them with individuals in your tree but I haven't seen any facial recognition capabilities here. You can also invite friends to collaborate with you and help build your family tree. I know there have been several articles on this site in the last few weeks so you might want to check out the reviews by Dick Eastman http://tinyurl.com/6alyrs and Renee Zamora at http://tinyurl.com/67uv9a to see what they think of the site.

My wife has recently found what she considers to be one of her favorite genealogy sites. This site is called GenesReunited.com. They specialize in genealogies from the United Kingdom. This is a pay site so you have to make the conversion from pounds to dollars when you calculate the cost. She has had a great deal of success on this page finding other researchers who are working on her lines. She found a real interesting family line the other day and discovered that D. Todd Christofferson is a 3^rd cousin on her Vickery line. She was happily surprised to find this link especially since she is a first generation convert to the church. Information is private unless you are invited to see the submitted trees. You can search the website for names and then request permission to see matches from the owner. Once you have permission to view the tree you can move it around on the screen to open up new generations.

Now it’s time to search the web and climb your tree. Have a happy Thanksgiving and be sure to gather as much information from family for your research as you can (between bites and naps)!

US, British Commonwealth & German Veterans Gravesites

2008-11-25T07:13:00.001-05:00

I am a little late for Veteran’s Day but it is never too late to remember your ancestors who fought in the various wars including WW I and WW II. This article will focus on some online databases which can be used to search for veterans from the British Commonwealth, United States and Germany who died during these wars.

I received the idea to write this article concerning war veterans from a friend of mine at work. He has been searching off and on without much luck, for his grandfather and other relatives who fought for the British Army during World War II. He asked me if I knew of any sites where he could find information on these veterans and frankly, I didn’t know of any right off hand. I had been able to find my relatives who died during WW I and WW II online a few years ago. Many of them happened to be Germans who had mostly died in France during the wars and their cemeteries had been indexed. This made some interesting reading even though none of it was written in English. I had also been able to find records for many of my ancestors from the United States who had fought in these wars. But I hadn’t tried to find any British records even though most of my wife’s ancestors are of British descent.

Well, a little research later and I am able to say that I have found an excellent website that contains details about the veterans from the British Commonwealth nations including Britain, Canada, Australia and others, who died during these wars. The site is managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and can be found at http://www.cwgc.org/. This site contains the records of over 1.7 million men and women who died during these wars and the 23,000 cemeteries they are buried in. The search screen is very intuitive and the results include name, rank, serial number, date of death, age, regiment, nationality, and cemetery. A detailed view is also available which may include names of family members and a description of the memorials that commemorate these brave men and women. You can also see lists of the veterans buried in each cemetery if you are interested. There are also histories of some battles, videos commemorating some of these veterans and educational materials on this site. Many of these materials can be used as educational materials to explain what life was like during those times.

There are many databases on the internet that provide information on US veterans. Most of you have probably heard of the Draft Registration Card indexes at Ancestry.com and KindredKonnections.com. But another site that I have used is the Nationwide Grave Locator run by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. This site is located at http://gravelocator.cem.va.gov/. The search screen is also very easy to use and it provides the details of veterans who have died since 1997. You can find the branch of service, dates of birth and death, and the location of the cemetery where the individual is buried.

While I am at it I might as well talk about the website that I used to discover my German war veterans also. This site is the Deutsche Gräbersuche Online and can be found at http://www.volksbund.de/graebersuche. The site includes records from 4.4 million veterans who died during the war. One thing to remember when using this site is that it is written completely in German. If you can’t read German, I suggest that you use one of the online services such as Google’s translator at http://translate.google.com/ to find your way around the site. This site asks you for your name and some other basic information before it allows you to search their records but all of the results are presented to you at no cost.

Have fun digging up your veterans!

National Day of Listening - November 28

2008-11-24T09:11:00.003-05:00

November is an important month of holidays where we look back on our history and heritage. These holidays include Veterans Day and Thanksgiving. Veterans Day is the day we honor our veterans and the sacrifices they went through to make our freedom possible and we all know about Thanksgiving. That day of thanks and gluttony we all celebrate by worshiping the large bird, watching football and then taking a nap. Well, StoryCorps, an independent non-profit organization, with the help of National Public Radio, has declared November 28, 2008, the first annual National Day of Listening. They are asking us to take one hour of your day and record a conversation with someone important to your life. This could be a relative, friend, teacher or someone from your neighborhood. You can read more about the National Day of Listening by going to their website at http://www.nationaldayoflistening.org/. While visiting the site you can download a do-it-yourself guide, use their question generator to create a customized set of questions, and listen to interviews that are being shared by others taking part in this day. NPR will be airing some of these stories during their broadcasts all week long. So remember, take this time when you have family together to learn more about them and by doing so, learn more about yourself. Have fun!

Newspapers from Oceania (Australia & New Zealand)

2008-11-23T08:12:00.005-05:00

We have been having fun looking at old newspapers online lately. Newspapers are a good source for information as you research your genealogy. They can provide hints about important events during the person's lifetime, and details on mariages, births, deaths, etc. Everyone probably realizes that the US newspapers can be found in several subscription places such as Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank.com. But where would you go if, for some reason, your ancestors happened to immigrate to Australia or New Zealand? Several of my wife's lines, the Bielefeld, LeBoeuf and Vickery sides, happened to settle in Australia and travel to New Zealand during the latter part of the 19th century. The sites I have listed below are all free to use and do not require a subscription.

PapersPast is a product of the National Library of New Zealand. It can be found on the web at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/. PapersPast contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1920 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand. The site is very user friendly and allows you to perform searches by key words, date, region or publication title. One of the things I love about this site is that the pages have been converted to OCR so you can copy the text as the computer interpreted it, directly into your text editing program or genealogy software. Of course the computer is never 100% correct in its interpretation so you will have to compare the OCR against the digital image.

If you have Maori ancestry you can view the Maori newspaper collection at http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/. Look toward the bottom of the page to find the link to Nuipepa: Maori Newspapers. This site is written in Maori but does have English translations of the site however, the newspapers are all in the Maori language. It covers the Maori newspapers published during the period of 1842 to 1932

Australian Newspapers Online is a product of the National Library of Australia. This site is currently in beta and can be found at http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/. This site has digitised images of various newspapers from all regions of Australia during the period of 1803 to 1954. As in PapersPast, the Australian Newspapers Online compares the OCR text alongside the digitised image however this site has some very cool options that I had not seen before on other sites. First of all, you can correct the OCR text online for others to read. That means that any corrections you find will be permanently included in the online record. Additional options include the tagging of images and the ability to leave comments concerning the article.

These are all very user friendly sites and give us an idea of how online newspaper archives should perform. I know that Australia and New Zealand aren't always the hottest locations for genealogical research, but for those of us who have links to the land down under, these are great sites.

G'day mates!

Ward Service Project

2008-11-22T20:11:00.005-05:00

I know this is not genealogy related but I just wanted to post a story about a service project that our ward took part in. We have gotten quite a bit of press concerning this both locally and in the Church News. I was one of the coordinators of the project. We managed to have over 100 people come out and we did an incredible amount of work including landscaping, clearing trails and constructing a 30' bridge. In total we completed about 600 hours of service in this one project. Stories have been posted at the following sites:

http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/55645/Service-goal-met.html
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/111508/ner_355724970.shtml

You can see pictures of the project here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/milesmeyer

Family Reunion Ideas on a Budget

2008-11-22T11:25:00.007-05:00

Have you ever been responsible for organizing the family reunion. If you have, I am sure that you found out pretty quickly that these can be expensive endeavors. Here are some tips to help keep costs down.

We just had my wife's family reunion last month. This is a rotating event where one family has the responsibility each year to coordinate it and then it moves to another family for the next year. Right before the family reunions my wife and I usually cram a years worth of genealogy research into a few weeks. Two years ago I printed family books to pass out (I paid $10 for three 100 page books - had store discounts for printing). Last year we scanned all of the family photo albums and passed out cd's with the pictures to everyone (cost of cd's 5¢ each). This year my wife compiled a family tree that, when printed, stretched over 30 feet long (cost for printing $0 - we know a local blue printing company). Each year we bring along our laptop computer and set it up for the family to see their genealogy in PAF and so they can edit it with new information. This helps us keep up on the many changes that have occurred over the year.

Next year it is our turn to host the reunion so what do we have planned? We plan on taking a sampling of our famous and not so famous ancestors, print their pictures on our home printers, place them in frames and display them on the tables at the reunion. To save money, search for frames during sales at home craft stores such as Michaels, Hobby Lobby or Garden Ridge. Sometimes you can find the frames for under $2 each during these sales. Printing 8x10 photos at home could cost less than $1 per page depending on the printer you have. At the end of the reunion the family can take some of these with them to use in their own home.

Where will you have your reunion? There are many places that can be selected to have reunions. We usually try to keep the events affordable and have a limit of about $2,000 each year. Our reunions are attended by 50-75 people so that is about $30 per person. That includes the facility rental and food. Past reunions have been at Fraternal Order of Police facilities, subdivision club houses and a local zoo. Generally the use of your local club house is fairly cheap and may already be included in your home owners dues. The rental of the zoo facilities may be more expensive. I like to have events at local parks. We have a nice city park in our area. This park has a community center with kitchen, swimming pool, play ground, 9-hole golf course, soccer fields, tennis courts, fishing pier, boat dock and several miles of trails. How much do you think this would cost? Well, it is $50 for clean-up and $25 per hour. There is a minimum of 3 hours rental so that is $125. We will probably go for 6 hours for a total of $200 with all of the activities included (except greens fees for the golfers). Now all we have to do is work on the southern fried catering or maybe it will be pot-luck.

My First Blog

2008-11-21T17:55:00.002-05:00

Hi there everyone. I have decided to catch up with the times and start my own genealogy blog. I am turning 40 soon (next week) and have a reputation for my expertise in technology but I have not been utilizing all of the resources that are currently available. Just a few months ago I set up my Facebook profile and now I have almost 60 people in my friends list, many of them well known genealogy bloggers. A few weeks ago I added a profile to LinkedIn. And now I will be starting my blogging life. We all know how hard it is to keep a journal, so we will see how this goes.

I have been using the internet for a long time, have developed many web pages, have taught classes on how to use the web for research and some of my materials are being used in various places across the world. I am glad that I have been of help to others doing their research. I greatly appreciate all of the other genealogy bloggers out there for their help and inspiration, including:

Dear Myrtle (http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/)

Renee Zamora at Renee's Genealogy Blog (http://rzamor1.blogspot.com/)

Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter (http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/)

Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider (http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/insider/)

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings (http://www.geneamusings.com)

Randy Ragan at Treasure Maps Genealogy (http://amberskyline.com/treasuremaps/)

Ancestry Insider (http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/)

and many others.

Now that I have mentioned some of the blogs that I use frequently, I hope that what I post will be fresh and not just a rehash of what you can find on the other blogs. This blog will contain results of my family's research as well as any discoveries I make that are useful to the genealogy world as a whole.

If you want to see examples of what I have written in the past please check out my Family History web site at http://milesmeyer.googlepages.com. I have copies of my newsletters, lesson plans and many other things located there. Please feel free to use these as you like, just make sure to give me credit somewhere for all the work.