Reaching Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/