African American History Month

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.