German Genealogy Research - The Basics

Wow, it's a new year - 2017 - and time to get back to business. I have been thinking about how to include a research plan for German genealogy as one of my blogs. Of course, everyday I have a different idea on how to organize it and each day I forget what that plan was. So now I decided to just start writing, my typical solution to everything, and see how it turns out. This was inspired by a discussion I was involved in on the German Genealogy group on Facebook. I plan on doing a multi-part blog post stepping you through the resources that I know about for German genealogy and how they can be of help. So, let's get the year off to a start.

Over the last couple years, I presented two talks on German genealogy at various venues. One dealt with German immigration and the other was about German research in general. This series of posts will be based on those talks and the resources I discussed as well as a lot of other sources that are available. There is some duplication in these presentations but they were given for different audiences. If you are interested in seeing the actual presentations you can find them here:

• German Genealogy - A Discussion About German Resources - https://1drv.ms/p/s!Am0w7RkB299GlGUrfB5Lee-fEFnz
• German Immigration Resources - https://1drv.ms/p/s!Am0w7RkB299GlHIcU80Co5huowP5 
• Handout for German Genealogy - https://1drv.ms/w/s!Am0w7RkB299Gl2LeVBqHbFOXeJaz 

The first thing I suggest to researchers is that they learn the basics of the native language, especially those words that are important for genealogy research. You need to know if you are looking at a birth record or a death record. You need to learn to read the dates. You also need to be able to tell the difference between locations and people's names. I had a person come into the Family History Center the other night who told me she had mistakenly thought the town name was a person's name for quite a while. This led her on a wild goose chase looking for records on a person who didn't exist.

So, what words should you know? First, start with some of the basics like:

• Born - Geboren which is often abbreviated as Geb. This could also be used to indicate the maiden name of a wife.
• Baptism - Taufen
• Confirmation - Konfirmationen
• Died - Gestorben - often abbreviated as Gest. This may be indicated by a cross (+).
• Wedding - Trauungen - This may also be indicated by interlinked circles.
• Funeral - Beerdigungen
• Protestant - Evangelische
• Catholic - Katholisch

With those words under your belt you now will be able to determine the type of record you are looking at, and if it is a church record, what religion it is.

The next set of words that are important are the numbers. Many records write out the dates long hand and since we are used to looking for numbers we may miss them when they are spelled out. You should start with the basics (1-12). The teens (13-19) are usually built off of the base numbers and then adding ten. For example 3 is drei, 10 is zehn, and 13 is dreizehn. When you get into the 20s-90s the numbers are based on the base number drei (3) with zig added to the end. So, 30 is dreizig, 40 is vierzig, etc. Numbers like 31 become 1 (eins) + (und) 30 (dreizig) or einunddreizig. Hundred is hundert and thousand is tausend.

You should also be able to recognize the days and months along with the words for year, month and day.  Year is Jahr, month is Monat, and day is Tag. Often, a person's age is given as 45 Jahr, 3 Monat, 14 Tag meaning 45 years, 3 months and 14 days. The days of the week are Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, and  Sonntag. While the months are Januar, Februar, Marz, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Oktober, November, and Dezember. I do think the months are the easiest part of the language. 

Now that you know a few words you need to learn to read the writing. German has several fonts and writing styles or scripts, all of which may make it difficult to read various records. My suggestion is to learn the various writing sytles or schrift. FamilySearch has a great German handwriting tutorial in their wiki (https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Germany_Handwriting). From there you can find examples of script, online lessons, and other advice for reading your documents. There are also several websites that you can type a word into and it will be shown in various scripts. Two of these sights are http://www.suetterlinschrift.de/Englisch/Sutterlin.htm and http://altdeutsche-schrift.de/adsschreiben.php#schrifftfeld. 

Now that you are able to read the script you will still need translations. Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/) is a great place to start. Even if you can't figure out all the letters, Google Translate will provide suggestions of possible words to insert into the text to translate. Another great site for translating your records is the Genealogy Translations group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/genealogytranslation/). The volunteers on the Genealogy Translations group are wonderful and are able to translate almost any language and document type. As a final resort, you could always get your own translator. I have a guy in Germany named Fritz who does a lot of my translating. We met on social media and he uses the opportunity to brush up on his English while translating my German records.

I hope this basic introduction to German research techniques has been helpful. I foresee several more posts in this series including using social media, immigration resources, using FamilySearch, and possibly even more since this is such a large topic. Also. please see my previous post on German census records at http://milesgenealogy.blogspot.com/2016/09/german-censuses-where-do-i-find-them.html. Good luck and best wishes for 2017!

Ancestral Quest Releases Major Upgrade ver. 15

Ancestral Quest (AQ) has been my go to genealogy software for many years. Their software originated from PAF and has always maintained a close connection to FamilySearch. Their latest update provides more great enhancements.

TreeTips: AQ has always been able to search other genealogy websites for hints. Previous versions have even allowed you to write your own code to search your favorite websites. But now it searches as you view your ancestor's name and tells you when hints have been found for MyHeritage, FamilySearch and FindMyPast. That's a potential 10 billion records! Each of their icons show up next to your ancestor's name indicating new hints have been found.

TreeTips Provides Helpful Hints

Memories Manager: FamilySearch has a gallery where people can upload their memories (photos, documents, audio clips, etc.) for their ancestors. AQ has a scrapbook where you can link your records to your ancestors. Now, with Memories Manager, you can sync these records between your FamilySearch account and AQ. You can even download and link records that others have uploaded. You are able to see the records from FamilySearch and AQ side-by-side and sync those files between the two.

Memories Manager

Enhanced Child View and Pedigree View: This new upgrade allows you to see even more information in the standard views. The Child View provides symbols to the left of the names that indicate if the person was married, had children, or doesn't have any information. The Pedigree View now provides up to 7 generations on the same screen. Previously the default view was 5 generations.

Enhanced Child View

Enganced Pedigree View - 6 Generations Shown

The enhancements provided in AQ15 make your research quicker by finding more hints and making syncing between FamilySearch and your files easier. For more information visit AQ's website and read more about the updates.

Making Family History Fun for the Kids

Fun? When was the last time you heard someone say family history was fun? If you have worked with some people beginning their research you might have heard them exclaim how much fun it was when they found a new record. But generally, people who aren't doing family history consider it a boring task, best left to the retired members of the family and definitely not for the children. What if I could tell you some ways to make family history research fun for your children? Would you try them? I hope so.

With the holidays upon us, there are many opportunities for family gatherings. These are the perfect setting to add family history to the discussion. Many of us are planning on travelling and need activities for the children to do during the long trips.

One activity you can prepare are word search puzzles. There are many online sites that help you develop your own word search puzzles. Discovery Education has a great word search generator. You can enter in words or names of your ancestors and it creates a puzzle. Below, you can see a puzzle I created using some general words that we run across during our research but you can use any variety of words to make it interesting for you and your children.

Word Search Puzzle from Discovery Education

Did you ever play Car Bingo when you were a kid? If you did, you probably remember finding license plates or road signs with the words or numbers you were searching for to fill in your Bingo card. Now, you can create your own Bingo cards with information about your family history by visiting the BingoBaker or the TeachingStuff website. Just fill in the squares with information that your children may find as you travel and connect it to your family history. In the example below I have included a few dates, places and names that they may find on license plates, signs, or other things they will see.

Example of Bingo Cards from TeachingStuff website

Do you have a bunch of family photos sitting around? Maybe you can create a matching game or jigsaw puzzle from copies of the pictures (don't use the originals). For the matching game you can make duplicate copies of the photos and attach them to card stock paper to make them sturdier. Shuffle the pictures and place them face down and have your child pick the matches. You can make it more difficult by using two different pictures of the same person as the marching cards. As your child picks up a card and turns it face up you can tell them who it is and maybe a short story to help them recognize the photo. Jigsaw puzzles are easy to make. All you have to do is enlarge a copy of a photo and glue it to a hard backing then cut it into interlocking pieces. If you want to get elaborate with this, you can attach the photo to a thin piece of wood and use a jigsaw blade to cut pieces.

How about 20 questions? As your child becomes familiar with their ancestors you can start playing 20 questions. One person thinks of an ancestor and the other asks yes or no questions to try to figure out who it is.

In today's world, kids are used to video games and the electronic world. It could be interesting to show them games that you played as a child, or games that their grandparents played. Get them outside after the meals and play freeze tag, follow the leader, or hide and seek. If the weather isn't suitable you can stay inside and play jacks, checkers, or hot and cold. I am sure you have your favorite games from your childhood that you can teach to the kids.

There are so many ways to work family history into your children's activities. Take the opportunity to learn more about your family history and pass it along to your children in a way that they will enjoy.

It's All Online, Why Should I Visit the Family History Center?

Good morning all. I decided to take some time off from work to catch up on my writing. It is a beautiful crisp 68 degrees this December morning (I love south Florida) and as we get into the holiday season the number of visitors to our Family History Center (FHC) is begining to drop off. As the Vero Beach Stake Family History Center Director, I have been working on ways to increase the use of our FHC and when I woke up this morning it hit me, I haven't written about the Center. I maintain a Facebook page for the Center, but how else should I be reaching out to prospective patrons?

I do hear from many people that there is so much information online that they don't feel the need to come to the FHC. As long as they are working on family history somewhere, I am happy, but they are missing out on the excellent resources that the FHC has available. So why should they visit the FHC? Here are just a couple reasons to visit your local FHC.

1) Expert Assistance: Our Center has 7 consultants available during the week. We are open to the public most Mondays and Fridays 10:00 am - 2:00 pm and Wednesdays 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm. We are also open for LDS members on Sundays during Sunday School hour. There are always at least two consultants available on Monday and Friday and on Wednesday and Sunday we have 5 or more consultants available to give personal assistance.

2) Equipment: We have 7 computers in the FHC and one printer/scanner. We also have several film and fiche readers. The printer/scanner can scan your family photos directly to your Gallery in FamilySearch.

3) The FHC Portal: The FHC Portal is a collection of sites which you can access free from the Family History Center. This collection includes:

• 19th Century British Library Digital Newspaper Archive
• The American Civil War Research Database
• American Ancestors
• Ancestry
• Findmypast
• Fold3
• Geneanet
• Kinpoint
• MyHeritage
• Newspaper Archive
• Paper Trail
• ProQuest Obituary Collection
• Puzzilla
• and ArkivDigital Online

4) Trained Staff: We have been working to make sure all our FHC Consultants are properly trained. Through regular in person and online training, we are building a set of expertise that can provide you the help you need to find those elusive ancestors.

5) Record Access From Salt Lake: You can order microfilms and other records from the Salt Lake Family History Library and have them sent to your local FHC where you can take your time looking through them. It's much cheaper than flying out there for a record but maybe not as much fun.

6) Our secret weapon: Ok, if you come in on Wednesday you get me. Yeah, I know, now the doors will be busting down on Wednesday evenings.

7) Special Events: We are working on providing special events so the patrons get to know us better. Our first event of 2017 will be the Indian River Genealogy Conference. This is a free event scheduled for Saturday, March 18 (8:00 am - 4:00 pm). You can visit the Facebook site for more information on this conference. We are also planning for an open house and other events during the year.

8) In Home Assistance: For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we can provide in-home assistance on your family history. All you have to do is contact one of our Consultants and set up a time. We will take the opportunity to get to know you better, figure out your research interests, and develop a research plan for you to achieve your research goals.

We welcome all visitors from beginners to experienced researchers. We are called to serve the members of our Church as well as the people in our communities. Our Center is located at 3980 12th Street, Vero Beach, Florida and our phone number is 772-770-2361. Come visit us and learn more about your family's history.

So, how do you find your local Family History Center? One way is to go to FamilySearch.org and click on the [Get Help] link. From there select [Contact Us] and enter your zip code. This will provide a map to your local Family History Center. Once you locate your FHC give them a call and let them know you are coming to visit them, I'm sure they will be glad to hear from you.

Death Records - Digging Up Your Ancestors

Good morning all, hope you are having a great weekend. Earlier this week I was invited to speak on death records at our German Genealogy Interest Group. The speaker following me gave a short presentation on the Genealogy Proof Standard (GPS). I figured I would write about my talk and add some of the resources that can help you fulfill the GPS this morning. This blog post will be a little longer than many of my others but it is packed with a great deal of information that I hope is helpful to you in your research.

We all use death records in our family history research. They are a great source of data but not all death records are created equal. One of my favorite sources for death information are the cemetery databases. Many of these databases are crowd source projects where people can contribute information, photographs, documents, etc. to build the information about a person or cemetery. The most popular cemetery database is Find A Grave. Find A Grave was founded in 1995 and currently has over 154 million burial records from around the world. This site is now owned by Ancestry and its records are searchable from Ancestry and FamilySearch. One thing I really like about Find A Grave is that many families are now being linked together on a page. The links allow you to search for other family members quickly and compile your list of names and dates. Also, I like the ability to search for family names in a specific cemetery, county, or state.

Another of the larger online cemetery databases is Billion Graves. Billion Graves is based around a smartphone app which allows you to take pictures, tag them with gps coordinates, and upload them to the cloud. Every record on Billion Graves has a geo-referenced picture of the headstone. Of course the location of the headstone is only approximate and depends on the quality of the satellite data at the time and the phone's gps system, but it does give you a good approximation of the location if you are visiting the cemetery. I like this app because it allows you to take around 200 pictures in an hour and, once they are transcribed, gives researchers a great deal of information. Billion Graves data is searchable on FamilySearch and many of the burial records are linked directly to the person on FamilySearch.

An older site, Interment.net, contains lists of cemeteries and names. This site was founded in 1997 and has about 6 million records. It is affiliated with GenealogyBank. The site can be useful but has significantly fewer records (only about 6 million) than either Billion Graves or Find A Grave. Also, there are no pictures on this site. Additionally, there is no search capability for individuals, all data are delivered as lists for a specific cemetery. The search functions on this site are for either GenealogyBank records or Google search results, not for the cemetery index itself.

Beyond these larger databases there are several smaller ones that could provide great results. For your ancestors who served in the military, the Department of Veterans Affairs has the Gravelocator database. I have found records from the Civil War, Indian Wars, World War I and II, Vietnam, Korea, etc., on this site. The database includes individuals located in national cemeteries as well as those who had military funerals or markers.

One of the original online genealogy databases, US GenWeb, also has a cemetery database called their Tombstone Project. This is a text list of of individuals buried in a cemetery. You can search for the cemeteries by location and go down the list of burials until you find your person.

One more cemetery site is found on AccessGenealogy. AccessGenealogy was founded in about 2000 and provides a database of cemetery web sites. It does not hold any information itself, but gives you a list of websites that have the information on your specific cemetery.

Now that you have used the various cemetery databases to locate your ancestor, you should have some information on his burial location, dates for death and birth, and possibly some additional family members. Now you can move on to the next set of records, the death records. The death certificates can provide a wealth of information including birth, death and burial dates and places, names of parents and their birth place, other relatives (spouse, children, witnesses), cause of death, duration of illness, and many more pieces of data which are essential to your research.

FamilySearch and Ancestry have great collections of death records available. However, actual death certificates may only be available for a short period of time for each state. For example, Ohio only has death certificates available online for the period between 1908 and 1953. After 1953 you have to rely on other records such as the Social Security Death Index or death certificate indexes. Prior to 1908 you might need to rely on individual county death rolls. Each state has a different set of years where data is available so I recommend looking at the FamilySearch Wiki to see what is available and where to find it. FamilySearch and Ancestry also have indexed records that provide the basic information from the original records. Additionally, Ancestry has a great collection of Probate Records. Many states also have online access to their death certificates. You might try looking at the state's Memory Project or Archives, or even their individual state vital records site. It might be difficult to find these additional site so I will give you another site which could help you in this search, DeathIndexes.com. This site is a compilation of links to national, state and regional databases which have death records. One little tidbit of information about death certificates: Have you ever noticed the numbers in the cause of death area of the certificate? Those numbers are the International Cause of Death (ICD) code. The ICD codes have been in use since the early 1900s and may provide additional information about the cause of death. If you want to find out what your specific code means, I suggest you take a look at Wolfbane's database of codes. Make sure you look at the specific range of dates that your record is in because the codes do change periodically.

Now that you have specific dates for the death and the location of death, the next death record I try to find are the obituaries. The obituaries are found in the local newspapers. Remember to search the newspapers from the location of the event, the location where the person lived at the time of death, and the location where they were born. You may want to search the larger regional newspapers for mentions of the death also. I like to check multiple newspapers since you could find additional information in each newspaper. So, where do you look for newspaper articles?

One great database is the Library of Congress' Chronicling America Historic Newspaper Collection. This site has a collection of newspapers from across the country between 1789 and 1922. Another site that I use often is Genealogy Bank's Obituary Collection. This is searchable to Genealogy Bank subscribers but is also available for free from the FamilySearch website. If you cant't find your local newspaper on these sites, I suggest looking at Wikipedia. This link to Wikipedia has a list of online newspaper archives from around the world. Some of the papers are free while other have subscription fees. There are also several sites that compile lists of obituaries, some are for specific regions such as Elmer Spear's Genealogy Corner (Ohio and Southeast Georgia/Florida) and the Rutherford B. Hayes Library (Ohio). If you want to find obituary records for your region, I suggest looking at GenealogyBuff Obituary Collection. This is a site which compiles links to websites that have obituary collections. For more recent obituaries I suggest looking at the Tributes and Legacy websites. Both of these sites collect obituaries from funeral homes around the country. Sysoon also has a collection of death records. Sysoon is a wiki which starts out from death records compiled by the Social Security Death Index and then allows users to add additional information to fill out the data. One last tip, if you visit Cyndi's List she has a set of obituary and death collections that are very useful.

I hope that these resources provide you hours of research fun and result in new discoveries for your family. Have a good weekend.

Using BLM Land Patent Maps for Family History

Hello everyone. Fall is finally in the air. The temperatures here in Florida are falling into the low 60s at night and the pool is too cold to swim in. With the cooler temperature the grass grows more slowly and I hope to have a little more time to work on my family history and on blogging. One of the things I have been working on lately is using more mapping tools to help people locate ancestors. I have occasionally written about maps in my previous blogs but I wanted to discuss something that happened last week in our Family History Center.

One of our family history consultants was searching for an ancestor in the panhandle region of Florida. She has had a hard time finding anything on this person. Previously, we had found his land grant on the BLM Government Land Office Records database. This database includes more than five million land title records beginning as early as 1820 as well as many land surveys and field notes going back to 1810. We searched for her ancestor, Willie Kite Vickers and found that he had a land grant in Section 23, Township 1S, Range 12W in Bay County, Florida. His parcel included the southwest quarter of Section 23, approximately 160 acres.

GLO Records Results for Willie Kite Vickers

After seeing the results we looked at the original Land Patent image.

Land Patent Record for Willie Kite Vickers

From the land patent we learned that Willie received the patent on 28 March 1906 and we could see a full description of the land he received.

The next tab, Related Documents, leads to some further information including the plat image and surveys.

Survey Information for Township 1S, Range 12W in Bay County, Florida

We were able to copy the map provided by downloading it as either pdf, jp2 or sid formats. Most everyone has Adobe or another program which opens pdf files. JP2 files are jpeg2000, while SID is the MrSID format and not all graphics software can open those file formats. For most people I would suggest sticking to the pdf format. After I downloaded the image I opened it in my graphics software so I could draw out the property boundaries of his land. I use a free program called paint.net which is available online.

Willie Vickers Land Grant - cross hatched area

Then we searched the Related Documents tab to see who else received land patents in this same area. As we search through the 3 pages of other records she saw a last name that was familiar. It was the name for James V Sewell.

Related Documents - Other land owners in this area

Looking at James' land patent we discovered that he had land in Section 22. His land is listed as the NE1/4 of the NW1/4 and NW1/4 of the NE1/4 of Section 22.

James Sewell's land patent (Cross hatched Section 22) and Willie Vickers land patent (Section 23)

When we map the lands received by Mr. Sewell along with that of Willie Vickers, we see that they were neighbors. This discovery has led to some further investigation which is still ongoing. Hopefully we will break through this brick wall with the discoveries coming from this mapping exercise.

I encourage each of you to look into the possibilities of using maps in your research. They are a great tool and provide spatial information that the usual paper records may not.

Good luck, and keep researching.

French Archives

Good morning folks. I decided to take a vacation day today to catch up on some things around the house. Last week we were struck by Hurricane Matthew, a category 4 hurricane. We lucked out and the hurricane stayed just offshore as it made its way up the Florida coast. Our damage was minimal but that put me about a week behind on the typical housework items like mowing the yard. So, as I am waiting for sunrise I decided to write another short blog post.

Yesterday I attended our monthly German Genealogy Interest Group meeting. This was the first meeting of our year. We start in October and have meetings through May while the snowbirds are here and then take off the summer months. One of the members began asking about archives. As you may remember, I started a series of posts on archives in Germany, France and the Netherlands a little while ago. She was interested in the archives for the Alsace region. After her question I decided to provide more information on the French archives that I have been able to find.

In 1791, after the French Revolution, France was divided into departments which are the local divisions of government. Today, there are 96 departments in France and 5 overseas departments. Each of the departments is distinguished by a two digit number as shown in the map below. These departments have their own archives, and many have smaller local archives. Many of these archives are online.

Departments of France

These archives have important collections of records for your genealogy research. I have been able to use several of them for research that I have done for others. You can see my previous posts concerning the Paris, Haut Rhin, Bas Rhin and Moselle archives. My goal this morning is to provide you with a link to a comprehensive list of the French archives that I have been able to find online so you can further your French research.

The national archive for France can be found at http://www.archivesdefrance.culture.gouv.fr/. Once you arrive at the National Archive you can find a list of the departments. Each department lists their main webpage, contact information including e-mail, hours of operation, and any regional or local archives within the department boundaries. You can find the department archives list at http://www.archivesdefrance.culture.gouv.fr/annuaire-services/departement/. The archives also have a specific set of pages for genealogy research - http://www.culture.fr/Genealogie. In case you can't read the French pages, there is an English translation of the pages available by clicking in the upper right corner of the pages for the English link.

If you want to learn more about the departments and other political regions of France this link is a great resource (http://www.map-france.com/departments/).

Hope you have luck and let me know if you find any discoveries in these archives.