Archive for September, 2010

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Hispanic Heritage Month begins on Sept. 15, the anniversary of the 1821 declaration of independence for the Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

September also is marks the independence days of Mexico (16th), Chile (18th) and Belize
(21st).

President Lyndon Johnson approved Hispanic Heritage Week in 1968. Twenty years later,
President Ronald Reagan expanded the observation to cover a 30-day period ending Oct.
15.

The month celebrates the long and important presence of people of Hispanic descent
in North America. The Spanish fortress of St. Augustine, Fla., founded in 1565, is
the first continuously inhabited European settlement in North America. The Spanish
explored the US Southwest in the 16th century and founded Santa Fe, NM, in 1610.

The website Our American History/La
Historia de Nuestra América relates the part the Spanish and Hispanic Americans
played in the American Revolution—a role I have to admit I’ve never learned much about.

You can research Hispanic roots with help from our Hispanic
Heritage Toolkit, which has articles including

• Spanish
  genealogy glossary
• Mexican
  research resources 
• tips
  for finding Mexican parish records
• Central
  and South American Archives

…and more.

In ShopFamilyTree.com, you can snap up our digital research guides to Mexican
roots and Spanish
and Portuguese roots.

If it’s language tips you need (maybe for reading records or visiting your ancestral
homeland), try our Everything Guides to learning
Spanish and learning Brazilian
Portuguese.

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BackUpMyTree, a free online
backup service for your genealogy files, launched today.

After you install BackupMyTree software, created by the team behind Pearl Street Software
and its Family Tree Legends genealogy program (purchased by MyHeritage in
2007), the software will automatically find family tree files on your computer. It
creates a remote, off-site backup you can restore if necessary, and maintains multiple
previous versions of your files.

You also can opt to manually upload files through your browser, rather than install
the BackupMyTree software.

The service is free. “In the future, we will offer a Pro version of our service for
a small yearly fee,” says creator Cliff Shaw. “This version will offer more features,
but we will always keep the free version the way it is.”

In addition, there’s no limit on the file size you can store—yet. “If we impose some
sort of limit in the future, it will be a very high limit, and we will let all our
users know,” Shaw says.

Note that photos and other media included in your tree aren’t yet backed up. According
to the site’s FAQ: “We plan on adding this in the near future. Family Tree Maker [genealogy
software] often stores photos inside the file, so these photos are backed up as a
function of being included in the file.”

BackupMyTree software works on Windows systems. The service supports the genealogy
applications Family Tree Maker, Personal
Ancestral File, RootsMagic 4, Legacy
Family Tree, Family Tree Legends, Family
Tree Builder, and GenoPro.

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Another Ancestry.com member story to share — this one’s about a photo with wonderful secrets:

“I had wondered what my grandmother looked like at a young age. This was my father’s mother, Mary Helisek Vinic, who died before I was born. The only picture I had of her was of her in an open casket in front of her home. I had some old family pictures but as usual with no names on them. My parents had already passed away so I had no help in knowing the relative’s names. All I knew was they were ‘family.’  I decided to enlarge quite a few of the pictures to put in a photo album.  One of them was just a wallet size photo. After enlarging it to 5″ x 7″ we noticed there were names above the people in the photo. To my joy and amazement I discovered the photo was of my grandmother Mary with my Aunt Marie (at the age of 4), my Uncle John (at the age of 3) and my Aunt Antoinette (at the age of 1+). The picture was taken in Bohemia just before my grandma came through Ellis Island. What a wonderful find and an “AHA” moment in ancestry finds.”

– Karen A. Vinic Markey

If you have a story you’d like to share, I definitely want to hear it. Send it to me at stories@ancestry.com.

Also, visit http://www.ancestry.com/immigration for more information about America’s immigrant roots. You’ll find oral histories, more details about immigration (like what it meant to travel in steerage – ugh) as well as immigration-related family stories from Ancestry.com members and ways to search for your own family’s passenger list and more at Ancestry.com.

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• Today (Sept. 10) marks the 20th anniversary of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum opening
  in 1990. More than 35 million people have visited the museum, which highlights the
  immigrant experience and the growth of America during the peak immigration years of
  1880 to 1924. You
  can read more about the museum on the Ellis Island website.

For help searching online for your Ellis Island ancestors, download our Ellis
Island Web Guide from ShopFamilyTree.com or use the book The
Family Tree Guide to Finding Your Ellis Island Ancestors (on sale for $12.99).

• Pay-per-view genealogy website ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk was
  officially relaunched with a new look and and new search features, including search
  results plotted on maps, to make it easier for you to find ancestors. The site offers
  records dating to the beginning of civil registration in Scotland in 1855, as well
  as parish records dating back as far as 1538.

• FamilySearch’s army of volunteer indexers have started work on the 1930 census,
  currently the most recent US census available to researchers. As with several other
  FamilySearch census indexes, volunteers will start with Ancestry.com indexes and create
  a second comparison index from scratch, then arbitrate discrepancies to reduce errors.
  FamilySearch also will extract additional fields of census data for improved searchability. You
  can read more about this project on the FamilySearch blog.

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If you’re among the more than 9 million Americans with Polish roots, Trace
Your Polish Roots: Strategies for Searching in the US and Poland will help
you find your Polish ancestors by debunking myths, explaining history and pointing
you to the most useful records. Ceil Wendt Jensen teaches the class, which includes
helpful information like this:

The first step to finding your Polish ancestors starts here in the United
States. The core records to look for are the US census and naturalization papers.
The census will pinpoint the date of arrival in the US for the family members and
state if the males had alien status or were naturalized. It will also offer the key
to finding the region the family hailed from: German Poland, Russian Poland or Austrian
Poland. Poland was not on the map for 123 years, so ethnic Poles carried papers stating
they were subjects of the governing countries.

Sign
up here! The next session starts Monday, Sept. 13.

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I’m a little biased this week in choosing the book that was my baby for most of the
spring and early summer.

The
Family Tree Sourcebook, now available for pre-order (and on sale at 34
percent off), is a reference book with all the information you need to trace your
roots across the United States:

• A summary of genealogy research in every state, with a historical overview, vital
  records information, tips on other major records to look for and places to begin,
  and maps showing county boundaries.

• Detailed county-level data telling you which county office to contact for court, probate,
  vital, and other types of records. Here’s an example:
  
  

• Names, addresses, phone numbers and websites for helpful libraries, archives, and
  genealogical and historical societies in each state.

• Bibliographies listing genealogical and historical books that will help you further
  your research in each state.

• Special sections on the best websites for state-based research, as well as broader-scope,
  national resources.
  

The book comes with a free 30-day trial of Family
Tree Magazine Plus, our members-only, online archive of expert genealogy articles
from past issues of Family Tree Magazine. (The book’s content also is searchable
online as part of a Plus membership.)

You
can pre-order The Family Tree Sourcebook now (and get the sale price) at ShopFamilyTree.com.

News from around the web.
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FamilySearch has announced a major upgrade of its FamilySearch
Beta site. Its usefulness has already outpaced FamilySearch’s familiar Pilot
Record Search site. New features, including the following, make the beta site
easier to use and nudge it closer to replacing FamilySearch.org:

• A new web address at beta.familysearch.org 
  (though fsbeta.familysearch.org still
  works).

• New records, including all those found at the Pilot
  Record Search site and more, for 450-plus collections.

• Alphabetized browsing (click All Collections on the FamilySearch
  Beta home page to access it) so you can quickly find the collections you’re looking
  for. In most cases, the collection title begins with the name of the state or country
  where the records were created.

• If you’re interested in only collections with record images, you can click All Collections,
  then check a box at the bottom left to see only titles of collection with images.

• You can type apostrophes into the search fields to find names such as O’Hara.

• You can filter your search results by collection category. 

• When viewing a record, you can click to see the previous or next record image in the
  collection.

• Census results now list all household members with their genders and ages.

• If you’re searching Trees (a link on the FamilySearch
  Beta home page), where the information from FamilySearch’s Ancestral File is,
  you can find people by event year—that is, the year of birth, death or marriage.

• For easier navigation and viewing of the site, you’ll find new labels in the header
  and footer, enhanced color contrast, and visited links that change colors once you’ve
  already clicked them.

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Britain marked the 70th anniversary yesterday of the Sept. 7, 1940, start of the Blitz—Nazi Germany’s WWII bombing campaign that lasted until May 10, 1941. It began with 76 consecutive nights of bombing in London and hit many towns and cities across England, eventually killing more than 43,000 civilians.

Color footage of London during the Blitz was recently discovered in the attic of a
London home. Alfred Coucher, the wartime mayor of Marylebone in west London and the
local chief air raid warden, shot the footage. You
can read more about the Blitz footage and see it on Telegraph.co.uk.

Read correspondent
Ernie Pyle’s description of nightime raid on London here.

Also check out the West End
at War website, which is adding the film, historical information, eyewitness accounts
and more to document the impact of the Blitz on the London borough of Westminster.
 

Related resources from Family Tree Magazine:

• English
  research toolkit (contains both free and Plus how-to
  articles)

• British
  Genealogy Guide digital download (available from ShopFamilyTree.com)

• Research
  in Foreign Records: How to Find Your Family Across the Pond Family Tree University
  course (the next session starts Sept. 13; save 25 percent on any Family
  Tree University course with coupon code FALL1025 ).

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I feel an odd connection to Ellis Island, a place I’ve never been to personally. But two of my grandparents and all but one set of my great-grandparents found themselves there at one time or another.

I discovered this fact last week when two passenger lists I’d been looking for finally found me, too. I’d like to credit the discoveries to my dedication and persistence, but mostly I finally lucked out and found the right wildcards for my search.

Now, between passenger lists, naturalization records and other document trails my family created after coming to America, I’m starting to piece together my own family’s stories of immigration. Like the one about the great-grandfather who declined to accept his American citizenship because he’d given up and returned to Italy (his naturalization records are a fantastic read). Or the story that I’m still trying to understand: why my great-grandparents left their three young children in Austria-Hungary/Yugoslavia/Slovenia for nine years during World War I, while they set up house in America. 

I’m also getting a better understanding of my family’s first moments in America through the newly released Ellis Island Oral History collection at Ancestry.com. Listening to the accounts of immigrant Lawrence Meinwald, who was about the same age as my great-uncle when he first saw the Statue of Liberty in 1920, and Lillian Galetta, who, at age four, experienced an emotional reunion with her father at Ellis Island, is helping me grasp what was going through the minds of my own family when they reached American soil. Approximately 1,700 stories from immigrants are featured in this free collection, and each one offers greater insight into what it was like and what drove families to become new residents in a new world. 

Immigration-related records provide some of the most revealing details available about an immigrant ancestor’s American experience as well as the life left back home. And we’ve collected the whole batch as well as tips for searching and understanding more at www.ancestry.com/immigration. Search for your own family’s journey to America or read and listen to the experiences of others. In addition to the oral histories, we’ve also added nearly 2 million new naturalization record indexes and additional Boston passenger and crew lists to the collection. Plus, through Labor Day, we’re opening our entire U.S. Immigration Collection to everyone – you can search all 170 million+ records with or without an Ancestry.com subscription.

Hopefully you, too, will find your family’s Ellis Island – or Galveston, Baltimore, Angel Island, Philadelphia, Castle Garden, or another port entirely – connection. Let me know when you do.

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Sometimes I get a story from an Ancestry.com member that’s just so wonderful I have to share it. The following, from Kathy Kennard, fits that description perfectly: 

“My great-grandfather, Hans Knutson, came from Norway and, according to family history, had a bit of a lisp. When he told the officials his name, they understood him to say Newton, rather than Knutson. That was the name that was written down. He liked it, according to a relative, so he decided to keep it, although it was never changed legally.

Most of my great-grandfather’s sisters kept the Knutson name; only one used the name ‘Newton’ like Hans. I, however, didn’t know this for many years, which made tracing this family a bit difficult.

One day, my mom made the remark that Hans had some relatives named Moe. She wasn’t sure how they were related but just had some recollection of that fact. So I did a little research and found the Moe family. It felt like a small and somewhat odd lead but I was willing to go anywhere it took me.

I found a Kari Moe who came from Norway at about the same time Hans had so I contacted someone from her family. The man that I spoke to was adamant that his grandmother, Kari, was not related. Her maiden name was Knutson, not Newton and he knew the Newton clan, as they were all neighbors, and they were just not related. ‘Surely someone would have mentioned it before now,’ was his response.

Several months later, this same man called me. His aunt had just passed away and it was his responsibility to clean out her house. In her Bible, he found some obituaries: one was the obituary of his grandmother. It listed each of his grandmother’s sisters and her brother, Hans Newton. He called me in excitement and to apologize. He also wanted to let me know that on the wall was a picture of Hans Newton with each of his sisters, and he was happy to make a copy for me.

I now have a picture of my great-grandfather and the history of the Moe family, which I would have never had if I hadn’t followed that one lead through Ancestry.com.”

Thanks Kathy. And if anyone else has a story to share, send it to stories@ancestry.com.

By the way, if you want to learn tricks, tips and how-tos for success with immigration records, do what I did: take all the hands-on advice you can get from Ancestry Weekly Discovery editor, Juliana Szucs Smith. Attend her FREE online class, Coming to America: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors, tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern. You can register for the live class or watch it at a later date in our archive (live classes hit the archive about a day after broadcast) at http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Webinars.aspx.