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November 2009 Blog Posts (82)

New collections in Record Search go into Wiki FamilySearch -- sort of

Record Search added a new collection of Massachusetts Marriage Records from 1842 to 1915. The collection is presently (November 15, 2009) only 19% complete. The collection includes the name index and images of Massachusetts statewide marriage registers. The marriage registers are in numbered volumes arranged by year then by individual town. Currently only marriages for the years 1906-1915 are available.
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Added by James Tanner on November 15, 2009 at 6:53pm — No Comments

A part of my pathway

Good Morning, My name is Kerry Bailey. I was born and raised on the southwest side of Chicago, IL, USA some 58 yrs ago. I have been a widow for 17 yrs. I have two daughters who were 5 and 9 when my husband died unexpectedly in 1992 while he was away on business. This was not my first loss. I had one other daughter, Cassandra Jewell, who we lost in 1984 at three and half months old following open heart surgery due to congestive heart failure. My two daughters and one 3 year old grandson now live… Continue

Added by Kerry Bailey on November 15, 2009 at 1:51pm — No Comments

New FamilySearch -- the end is in sight Members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Temple District will have their first official access to the New FamilySearch p…

New FamilySearch -- the end is in sight

Members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Temple District will have their first official access to the New FamilySearch program on November 16, 2009. Thirty Stakes will gain access on that date leaving approximately 38 remaining Stakes for a future date. This may well end one of the longest, if not the longest, software introductions in the history of computers. It has been over two years since the first Stake… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 13, 2009 at 6:00pm — No Comments

SteveMorse.org and an immigration mystery solved

I've been working with the passenger lists and ship manifests from the Ellis Island website (www.ellisisland.org) and, like many people, became just a bit frustrated with some of the inabilities of the search engine to find and sort the search results. Particularly, I wanted to find all of the people that came from a very small, mountain town in Hungary between the years of 1900-1920. It appears that most of the young adult men were… Continue

Added by tami osmer glatz on November 12, 2009 at 5:25pm — No Comments

Personal Ancestral File -- only mostly dead

I recently had a discussion with a patron at the Mesa Regional Family History Center who was trying to learn more about genealogy to help others with their research. She indicated that she was sort of serving by default as the Ward Family History Consultant in her LDS Ward. During the discussion she mentioned that a member of her Ward was teaching classes and insisting that everyone had to use Personal Ancestral File. Apparently, as I have mentioned in the past, some people think their is a… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 12, 2009 at 8:52am — No Comments

DISTURBING THE DEAD – PART II

I believe that the solution to my riddle is that there was a generation left out of the oral history told by my great grandmother.

I have looked at an 1805 marriage in Stretham, Surrey between James Wicks and Mary Chitty but repeatedly discarded it because of my great grandmother’s story and the certainty that Mary must have been a Russell. Finally – and mostly because of a lack of other possibilities – I decided to research this marriage and search for the Chitty… Continue

Added by Fred Close on November 11, 2009 at 11:10pm — No Comments

Josiah Rucks-Rev War Patriot

My GGG Grandfather Josiah Rucks, born in Chesterfield Co., VA in 1759 and died and buried in Smith Co., TN in 1836, fought with two of his brothers in the American Revolutionary War. He was given title to land in Smith Co., TN where he settled and formed a Baptist Church at Knob Springs. He is buried on what was his estate at Smith Co., TN. His headstone reads "A Rev War Soldier". At one time the DAR accepted this as proof of his service, but this is no longer true. I have been trying to find… Continue

Added by Beverly Simpson on November 11, 2009 at 3:00pm — No Comments

How to find your American Veteran Ancestors

Abijah Franklin Hitchings, Civil War, Co. I, 8th Reg. Mass. Vol. Inf.

Veterans Day 2009

The further your family tree goes back in time, the more chances you have of finding an ancestor, sibling, or distant cousin who served as a soldier or sailor. My first advice is to continue collecting oral histories, and asking all your older relatives about anyone they might have known who served in the military. Use those oral… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 11, 2009 at 10:30am — No Comments

Can somebody tell me hwo i can read chortsbook and list tell people,Hope you unerstod me.Living in Norway,

Added by Jan Eskild Jensen on November 11, 2009 at 7:40am — No Comments

Veterans Week (Nov 5th to Nov 11th)

The theme of Veteran’s Week this year is “How Will You Remember”.

The Library and Archives Canada has put on their website "Welcome to Canada at War: a Guide to Library and Archives Canada Recalling the Canadian War Experience".

For information on the role that the Canadian military played during the Second World War, please go to the virtual exhibit called Faces of War at a… Continue

Added by William Bruce Hillman on November 9, 2009 at 1:59pm — No Comments

Legacy Genealogy Cruise 2010 - Australia/New Zealand - Nov 8-21

The 7th annual Legacy Genealogy Cruise, held November 8-21, 2010, starts and ends in Sydney, Australia and visits the following New Zealand ports: Fjordland National Park, Dunedin (Port Chalmers), Christchurch (Lyttelton), Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, and Bay of Islands. We will sail on Princess Cruises Sun Princess ship.

Click here… Continue

Added by Geoff Rasmussen on November 9, 2009 at 10:44am — No Comments

Entire U.S. Census goes Interactive with Footnote

October 29th, 2009 | Written by Tyler

Today Footnote.com announced it will digitize and create a searchable database for all publicly available U.S. Federal Censuses, ranging from the first U.S. Census taken in 1790 to the most current public census from 1930. Through its partnership with the National Archives, Footnote.com will add more than 9.5 million images featuring over half a billion names to its extensive online record collection.

With over 60 million historical… Continue

Added by Stefani Twyford on November 9, 2009 at 10:06am — 2 Comments

Video Biography Project In Mississippi

From February 2, 2009

This past weekend Isabelle and I flew to Northern Mississippi to work with a new client on creating a tribute video biography. It was a really fun, albeit short trip but we managed to cram a lot into two days.

We flew a commercial airline from Houston to Jackson Mississippi on Saturday where our client picked us up in his private plane and flew us another half hour to a smaller airport in the Northern part of the state. Isabelle was a bit nervous… Continue

Added by Stefani Twyford on November 9, 2009 at 8:40am — No Comments

Take a look at books

Having spent a goodly portion of my life in libraries, both as a patron and a library employee, I am aware that there are a lot of things about seeing books on shelves and having them to read that are lost when the books are digitized. The greatest loss is the synergy of having books grouped together. No catalog or index can give you the perspective of reading the shelves, that is, looking at each book in turn about a particular subject. Whatever the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System of… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 9, 2009 at 8:34am — No Comments

The Ballad of Cassandra Southwick

“Ballad of Cassandra Southwick”

For Bill West's Great American Local Poem Genealogy Challenge

There are lots of interesting characters in New England, like Cassandra, and many have had their stories made into poems. Longfellow tangled the story of another ancestor, Myles Standish, in his famous courtship poem, and the story of Paul Revere was one of his most famous, and most inaccurate, poems. In this poem, John Greenleaf Whittier got… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 9, 2009 at 8:00am — No Comments

FamilyInsight and Windows 7 on an iMac

FamilyInsight is a highly useful add-on tool for Personal Ancestral File (PAF) users who want to do many of the things that PAF won't do, particularly with New FamilySearch. The features of the program give PAF real utility, but unfortunately you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. (Actually, you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but the question is, who would want to?). PAF is not going to be supported in the future by FamilySearch and as time goes on and more and more… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 8, 2009 at 6:20pm — No Comments

How do I do genealogy?

When I was young and had time to do things other than genealogy, I used to practice archery from time to time. I would set up various targets to shoot at in the yard, which was big enough to use for the activity. Inevitably, I would shoot all of my arrows and miss the target at least a couple of times. In targets, think cardboard box, not the nice straw kind with big circles. Anyway, there were a couple things I did know when I started to search for my lost arrows. First, the arrow could only… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 7, 2009 at 6:46pm — 1 Comment

MY CREOLE ANCESTORS OF SOUTHEASTERN LOUISIANA

I have been meticulously going through my creole ancestral line from southeastern Louisiana, but the hardest feat of all is that my creole ancestors had kept an immense amount of secrets for which have hugely deterred their future descendants from growing the family tree. The most effective genealogical site of all has been ancestry.com for which I have gotten a wealth of information by searching through the U.S. Federal Census recently. It was definitely a wonderful ancestral site to connect… Continue

Added by Brittiney G. Riggins on November 7, 2009 at 5:12pm — No Comments

Surnames, My my we have some Surnames

Surnames are interesting they tend to litterally drive us to hunt in weird places and do strange things.

Surnames are very early in origin in some forms, late in origin in other forms. Whether your native or non,

surnames have been used around and around. Son of Peter son of David son of William, become, Peterson

Davidson, and Williamson, now if your Russian it still works. OV and OFF are the derrivatives but today I can not

remember which work for… Continue

Added by Susi (Susan C Jones) Pentico on November 7, 2009 at 2:20pm — No Comments

Researching Dead or Alive

Eliza Early Swain", Hutchinson;s Danville Virginia, Greene Georgia, Philadelphia,, PA

have had no success in finding Eliza Early ggrandmother searching since 1998???

Added by shelby on November 7, 2009 at 6:30am — No Comments