Archive for November, 2010

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New in our online store this week is the Family
Tree Magazine 2010 CD, featuring PDF versions of all eight issues we published
this year.

Get your hands on one of these and you can…

• keyword-search the issues to find expert guidance on the family history records,
  resources and topics you need

• print any articles you want for quick reference

• tuck a year’s worth of how-to genealogy advice into your research tote for library
  trips

• slip your slim CD case into a mere 1/4 inch of bookshelf space

Among the articles you’ll find in these eight issues: 

• Wide Open Spaces (November): 10 ideas for cutting clutter and getting your
  genealogy stuff under control

• Census Extravaganza (May): A special section of articles on information censuses
  collected over the years, getting ready for the release of the 1940 census in 2012,
  and finding census records from your ancestors’ homeland

• Undercover Genealogy (July): 10 investigative strategies for locating living
  relatives

• Go-Go-Gadgets (March): Seven essential technology tools every genealogist needs,
  and what features to look for in each

• Soul Searching (August): Finding your US ancestors in church records

• Fancy Free (September): Our list of the 101 best free websites for researching
  your ancestors

• Heads of State (December): 75 great state websites for finding family across
  the country

• Heritage research guides for Scots-Irish, Baltic, Finnish, Italian, Puerto
  Rican and Dutch roots, as well as tips for crossing the pond to your European forbears

Click
here to get the Family Tree Magazine 2010 CD from ShopFamilyTree.com. (Remember, Family
Tree VIPs get 10 percent off.)

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Sometime tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 18), you’ll start to notice new options for the
date fields on subscription site Ancestry.com’s
search form.

The coming changes will add an “Add an Event” link to the current birth and death
date fields in the search form. Click that link, and you can use a pulldown menu select
a type of event—marriage, military service, “lived in,” arrival or departure (the
last two are in reference to immigration)—and then enter the year the event occurred.

In search forms for collections in which exact dates are indexed, including vital
records databases and the Social Security death index, you’ll be able to enter a day,
month and year for birth, marriage and/or death. Some forms also will get an “any
event” date field you can use to type in the year of any life event that might be
included in a record.

You
can get more details and see what the updated search forms will look like on Ancestry.com’s
blog.

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A little while back, we started
our search for a newbie genealogist to blog for six months about his or her family
research experiences and resources. 

We were thoroughly impressed by all the entries we received, and wish we could pick
all of them! The Family Tree Firsts blogger we selected is Nancy Shively of
Skiatook, Okla. A genealogist of six months—since she discovered her mom had a brother
who died in infancy—she’ll be researching mostly in Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennesse,
Indiana and Canada.

Nancy reports she’s excited to get started blogging, and adds “I am interested in
my female ancestors but also in the military experiences of the men in my family tree.
I love walking through old cemeteries. I want to know how my family fit in with larger
events and trends in history.”

You
can read Nancy’s first blog entry on FamilyTreeUniversity.com. 

Update: And Nancy’s
the 1,400th blogger at Geneabloggers! Sweet!

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The genealogy tv show “Who Do You Think You Are?” returns to NBC for its second season Friday, Jan. 21 at 8 pm (7 central), according
to the NBC website. It’ll help fill open slots during a mid-season shakeup that’ll
rearrange the schedule and cancel a few shows. 

No details on which celebrities will trace their roots on air in season 2, but you
can see Family Tree Magazine readers’ suggestions on our Forum.

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Genealogy blogs are a great way to find out about new resources, get reviews of websites
and software, pick up research tips, and share in others’ family history searches.
If you’re the blogger doing the sharing, you’ve probably met some wonderful genealogy
folks (and possibly cousins) through your blog.

The May 2010 Family Tree Magazine celebrated this phenomenon with the Family
Tree 40, forty genealogy blogs that you all nominated and voted on as the best genealogy
blogs. (You
can see the 2010 Family Tree 40 list in our free online article.) 

Genealogy blogs are going strong with new ones popping up every day, so we’re doing
it again in 2011! You
can nominate your favorite genealogy blogs using our online form now through Tuesday,
Nov. 30.

When you nominate a blog, you’ll give us the title and URL, optionally tell us why
you’re nominating it, and put it into one of these eight categories (a few have changed
from last year’s Family Tree 40):

• Local/regional history and genealogy: blogs focusing on research in a specific
  county, state or region. Most library and archive blogs, as well as many local historical
  and genealogical society blogs, would go here.

• Heritage groups: Blogs focusing on the family history of a specific ethnic,
  religious or national background (such as African-American, Jewish, Polish, etc.)

• Research advice and how-to: Blogs that primarily explain how to research, analyze
  photos or perform various family history tasks. The blogger offers tips, strategies
  and examples; explains genealogical concepts; and writes about how to use new resources.

• Cemeteries: These blogs feature content primarily about cemetery research and
  visiting cemeteries. Many feature tombstone photos and transcriptions, with information
  about those interred.

• “My Family History”: Blogs about the blogger’s own roots, including accounts
  of personal research, their own family photos and heirlooms, stories, recipes, etc.

• “Everything” blogs: Blogs that cover it all—genealogy news, research advice,
  opinions, local history, family stories, etc.—go here.

• New blogs: Was the blog you’re nominating launched during the past year? Categorize
  it here, even if it would also fit into another category.

• Technology: Blogs focusing on genealogy websites, software, DNA testing or
  other aspects of technology as it relates to genealogy.

Thanks to our Family Tree 40 panelists—Genealogy
Gems blogger Lisa Louise Cooke, Genea-Musings blogger
Randy Seaver, Myrt of the DearMyrtle blog and
Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers—for
lending their expertise in formulating the blog categories and qualifications.

Family Tree Magazine editors and Family Tree 40 panelists will winnow out any
blogs that aren’t qualified (see below) and, if necessary depending how many blogs
are nominated, narrow the list of nominees based on the quality of the blogs’ content.

From Dec. 13 to 20, you all will vote on those finalists for the final Family Tree
40 blogs. The Family Tree 40 blogs, featuring five winners per category, will be revealed
in the July 2011 Family Tree Magazine.

Qualifying blogs must:

• be primarily about genealogy.
  
• have original content (aggregators featuring posts from other blogs will be disqualified).
  
• belong to a private individual or individuals, not to a business (a change from last
  year’s Family Tree 40). They may not exist primarily to market products.
  
• be active, having at least four posts per month for the past three months (or, for
  blogs newer than three months, four posts per month since the blog has been in existence).
  
• contain or link to information about the blogger(s), such as an “About Me” page.
  
• not be hosted by a Family Tree 40 panelist or by Family Tree Magazine.

Look for reminders and updates on
Facebook; on Twitter (we’ll
use hashtag #FT40), in the Family Tree
Magazine free, weekly e-mail newsletter, and, of course, here on the Genealogy
Insider blog.

Nominate a Family Tree 40 blog here. 

Genealogy bloggers, feel free to add this badge to your blog to encourage voting!
You can link it to the
nomination form:

Surname Forum Activity
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An update for Family Tree Maker 2011 is now available. It contains a number of user requested improvements and fixes of reported issues. Some examples are:

• Improved performance throughout the program
• Improved performance of Web Merge
• Right-click functionality in Web Search has been re-enabled
• The option to enable or disable enhanced image download (from Ancestry.com) has been added
• Media merge issues during Web Merge (from Ancestry.com) have been fixed
• The inability to modify references notes in the Source workspace has been fixed

A detailed list of all the enhancements and bug fixes in the update is available. For instructions on installing the update for Family Tree Maker 2011 access the Program Updates page; to download the update, click here.

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I never met Gene S. Jacobsen (who is listed as Jacobson in the World War II Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941–1945, database, a misspelling I’m sure happened often). But Jacobsen was the man who made the Bataan Death March real to me, as well as the horrific conditions that waited for the men who survived it: the death ships, the POW camps, the mines. Jacobsen was one of only 65 from his squadron of 207 to make it back, and reading a draft of the account he wrote years later made me wonder how any of them survived. But there they are in the records: Lloyd Huth, Joseph Barna, Nelson Quast, and several dozen more.

Gene Jacobsen and the men of the 20^th Pursuit Squadron are just some of the stories you can find amongst the new databases we’ve released in time for Veterans Day. There are plenty more. We’ve added application papers for West Point, 1805-1866, to the U.S. Military and Naval Academy Registers, 1805-1908, collection.  They include a file on Abner Doubleday, a career soldier who returned the first shot from Fort Sumpter, where he was second in command, to begin Union action in the Civil War. He also had good handwriting.

By the way, West Point is where Doubleday was toiling away as a cadet during 1839, the year he supposedly invented baseball back in Cooperstown.

West Point provided scores of officers on both sides of the Civil War, which divided classmates as well as a nation. George Pickett’s West Point file includes a reference to his resigning his commission to serve with the Confederate Army.

If you have Pennsylvania ancestors who fought for the country, you’ll want to take a look at the Pennsylvania Veterans Burial Cards, 1777-1999, database. County veterans affairs offices started creating these cards back in 1929, but their work stretches all the way back to the French and Indian War. The database includes a record for Lucille E. Desmarais, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2/16/43 through 9/22/45. Which has me wondering if this is the former Lucille E. McClarren of Nemacolin, PA, the first enlisted female Marine in WWII. (I’m just working on a hunch and a handful of similar dates and locales right now, if anybody knows the answer.)

And those are just the U.S. collections. We’ve also brought online almost 2 centuries worth of British military medal records:

• UK, Military Campaign Medal and Award Rolls, 1793–1949
• UK, Naval Medal and Award Rolls, 1793–1972
• UK, Citations of the Distinguished Conduct Medal, 1914–1920

And there are new First World War grave and burial registers for Canadian soldiers as well. You can find an introduction to some of the military collections at Ancestry.com here.

So take a minute this Veterans Day and get to know a veteran. I never met Gene Jacobsen, but I’ll never forget his story. There’s a saying that begins, “Old soldiers never die…” By taking time to remember them this Veterans Day, they won’t just fade away, either.

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We want to let you know that the Ancestry.com Blog will be down for about 4 hours for scheduled maintenance tonight (Tuesday, Nov. 9) through early Wednesday morning beginning at 9:00 PM Mountain Time (that’s 11:00  PM ET or 3:00 AM GMT). Additionally, the Ancestry.com Rootsweb Community will undergo scheduled maintenance for 12 hours starting at 9:00 PM Mountain Time on Tuesday, November 9.

During these times, the Ancestry.com Blog and the Ancestry.com Rootsweb Community will not be available.

Thank you for your patience as we improve our infrastructure.

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Visit Ancestry.com at the Atlanta Family History Expo this weekend. Stop by the exhibit hall for hands-on advice and attend an Ancestry.com class like Getting the Most from Family Tree Maker. Want to dive further into your research at Ancestry.com? Attend Getting the Most from Your Ancestry.com Subscription and Best Strategies for Searching Ancestry.com, or discover topic-specific solutions in Finding Your African American Ancestors on Ancestry.com.

The two-day event kicks off with the Friday morning keynote address delivered by Ancestry.com Executive Vice President and Head of Global Marketing, Josh Hanna, who’ll discuss Digital Expectations: Preserving Yesterday’s Records for Tomorrow’s Researchers.

The Atlanta Family History Expo runs Friday, November 12 through Saturday, November 13 at the Gwinnett Center in Duluth, Georgia. Learn more and register at http://fhexpos.com/expos.