Archive for February, 2011

Surname Forum Activity
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The Free BMD index site shows:
1. the marriage of Alfred Edward Brown and Emma Manley registered in Wandsworth Registration District in the Jan-March quarter of 1898 in Volume 1d, Page 829.
2. the birth of Emma Manley registered in Uxbridge in the Sept-Dec quarter of 1874 who might be your Emmeline (Manley) Brown.
[NOTE: I am not related to this Manley family.]
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Rosie O’Donnell has always known she was Irish – but why did her family leave their homeland and how did they land in North America? Those are just two questions Rosie sets out to answer on tonight’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? From their 20th-century home in New Jersey to her ancestors’ former life in Ireland, Rosie discovers the hardships they faced, experiences the lives they led, and learns how blessed she is today, thanks to her ancestors. The show, sponsored by Ancestry.com, airs tonight on NBC at 8/7c.

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Tonight at 8:00 pm (EST) the experts at Family Tree Maker are giving a free webinar focused on printing and sharing your family history. You’ll learn how to:

• Design and print charts
• Run  reports
• Utilize the print functions available on each workspace
• Create individual and family slide shows

If you haven’t already registered, it’s not too late. Sign up now!

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Folks log on to Ancestry.com to locate lost siblings, scare out family skeletons, and, of course, find ancestors, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using the site to establish the provenance of a piece of pottery.

April Hynes’s grandfather Robert Strang unearthed this fantastic face jug in Philadelphia in 1950. It’s not only a beauty; it’s a rare artifact from African-American history.

Last August, PBS’s History Detectives revealed that the jug had been crafted by slaves who worked in potteries in a small town in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Archeologist Mark Newell unearthed the actual site of a secret kiln slaves used to make these vessels in their spare time and even found shards of broken face jugs that matched April’s.

One mystery solved. But another remained: how did this piece of grinning earthenware manage to migrate 700 miles north to Philadelphia?

With the help of an aunt who remembered the location and a few old maps, April quickly located the tract where the jug had been found and its owner: Stockton LeRoy Wingate. Mr. Wingate lived in Lower Merion, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, in 1930, and according to the 1930 U.S. Census, two African-Americans lived with him at the time: Lewis Gardner, who worked as his chauffer, and Lewis’s wife, the family cook. Both were born in South Carolina.

April used World War I and WW II draft cards databases on Ancestry.com to confirm that Lewis Gardner was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina—where the face jugs were originally made.

While working Lewis’s family tree back to mid-nineteenth-century Edgefield via census and military records, April found that the family name had been shortened to Gardner from Gardenhire. With this fact in tow, April made a visit to Edgefield, where she turned up numerous records that confirmed that Lewis’s parents and grandparents were slaves belonging to the owner of a pottery works.  A pretty good bet for how Lewis may have come by the jug, and a nice bit of genealogical detective work.

If April’s story has inspired you to do some digging into your own past, you’ll find our African-American collections here. Who knows what you might turn up?

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Ancestry.com has improved its 1910 US census collection to include clearer images, alternate names and mother’s and father’s birthplace search fields. The best part? You
can search the collection for free through Feb. 21.

ProGenealogists released its annual list of the 50 most popular genealogy websites.
Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, FindAGrave.com, FamilySearch.org and Genealogy.com round
out the top five sites. FamilyTreeMagazine.com even
made the list. See
all the sites here.

Think your ancestors greeted each other with a friendly hello? Think again. The first
documented usage of “hello” is in 1827, and it was used attract attention or express
surprise. It wasn’t until after the telephone came into regular use that “hello” was
a common greeting. Read
the entire history of the word here.

The New York Times is celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War by
posting collaborative blogs in a section called Disunion.
The blogs utilizes contemporary accounts and historical assessments to chronicle the
Civil War as it unfolded 150 years ago. Stay
up-to-date on the posts by liking Disunion on Facebook.

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has been jokingly lobbying for an invite to the royal
nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton with no success. But, much to Degeneres’
surprise, she is actually related to Middleton –
the two are 15th cousins. Because of the connection, DeGerenes is now awaiting her
save the date.

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Discover Your Roots, a 132-page guide to getting started in genealogy from Family
Tree Magazine, is the perfect introduction to researching your family history. 

We’ve jam-packed Discover Your Roots with tips, tricks and how-to guides. Here’s
a sampling of my favorites:

• Embark on your maiden voyage with our guide to researching female ancestors.
• Navigate death certificates, delayed birth certificates, Social Security applications
  and WWI draft registration cards with the help of the Document Detective.
• Become a census sleuth with charts and clues for each US enumeration.
• Boost your online genealogy with our 101 best free websites roundup, proving some
  of the best things in life really are free.
• Keep track of all your new-found family history with our genealogy worksheet starter
  kit and a decorative fold-out family tree chart.

Look for Discover You Roots on newsstands, or pick
up a copy at ShopFamilyTree.com.

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With all the anticipation of the first ever
RootsTech conference, it’s hard to believe it’s already come and gone. Here
are some highlights from this year’s conference that I hope inspire you to attend
next year. (Block out February 2-4, 2012 on your calendar!)

 

Microfilm Distribution: As
a member of the media, I had the rare opportunity to see how hundreds of thousands
of microfilm rolls make their way around the world each year.  The
Family History Library distribution center is the size of 19 football fields and stores
725,000 film copies, each copy averaging 100 feet in length.  Films
are stored in huge automated shelving systems holding trays of film that are tracked
and accessed by computer. Even though there is a goal to digitize
all microfilms held by the FHL, there will always be a need for microfilm distribution
because of copyright restrictions. 

 

Inside the microfilm distribution center
at the Family History Library.

 

Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner: One
of the winners at this year’s conference was the Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner. Many
a happy genealogist clutched their new portable workhorse, and those that didn’t already
have one were muttering quietly that they really needed one. Having
acquired a Flip-Pal scanner myself not long ago, I can say that the buzz was warranted.
Look for the Family Tree Magazine review of the Flip-Pal scanner in our May
issue, on newsstands March 8.

 

The Media Center:  I
felt a bit like Maxwell Smart in the Cone of Silence from “Get Smart,” as I conducted
interviews in the glass cubicles at the center of the exhibit hall. The
cubicles weren’t sound proof, but they provided a convenient place to record audio
and video while still capturing the ambiance of the place.  One
of my first interviews was with Patricia Van Skaik of the Cincinnati Public Library,
who won the Most Distinguished Presenter award for her Saturday presentations. The
media center was a stroke of genius on the part of the organizers. It
gave podcasters and bloggers the room and tools we needed to get the word out.

 

 

Lisa interviewing Patricia
Van Skaik in the media center.

Interviews: Curt
Witcher, manager of the genealogy deptartment at the Allen County Public Library in
Fort Wayne, Ind., also sat down with me for an in depth interview. He sees technology
converging with genealogy, and his keynote address was quite
a hit from sounds of between-session banter. Watch
our conversation below:

 

You can see more from RootsTech at the Genealogy
Gems YouTube channel. Click subscribe while there and you
can receive email notification as they are posted.

 

Virtual Presentations Roundtable: I
wrapped up the whirlwind three-day conference as a panelist in the Virtual Presentations
Roundtable. Thomas MacEntee pulled together a panel of experienced webinar presenters,
including editor of Family Tree Magazine Allison
Stacy, Photo
Detective Maureen Taylor, DearMYRTLE,
Geoff Rasmussen and Marian Pierre-Louis.  Not only did
we provide tips on how societies can hold their own virtual presentations, but the
session itself was a virtual webinar.  And to top it off,
the RootsTech folks streamed the session live on the RootsTech website!

 

RootsTech made a bold leap onto the conference
scene, and from every indication, it’s here to stay.

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This week’s tech tips blog entry is straight from the RootsTech
2011 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. FamilySearch CEO
Jay Verkler and his organizational team brought to life a conference vision that was
just a gleam in their eyes 7 months ago. As attendees flooded into the exhibit hall
Friday, they were met with towering scaffolding structures framing the various booths,
banks of computers and brainstorming areas. It was their first glimpse of the Verkler
vision, and it was stunning.

With this being the first run of a new conference, which Verkler refers to as an “experiment,”
there are bound to be glitches: delays in information and communication, challenges
in addressing such a diverse audience, and Mac users stymied by a PC-oriented facility.
But none of these glitches sytmied the core purpose of the conference: Connecting
technologists with genealogists. In this area, RootsTech is smooth sailing.

Verkler and his team are striving to find answers to a set of genealogy technology
challenges they believe the community is facing. Through classes, exhibits, “unconferencing”
brainstorming sessions and a Microsoft-sponsored playground complete with Wii and
pool tables, they hope to find answers.

Did genealogists’ find answers to their research challenges at RootsTech 2011? That
remains to be seen. But here is a tech tip from conference session Cool Tools to Enhance
Your Online Research by Tami Glatz: Windows Snipping tool.

Want save a snippet of a website? Perhaps an image or a paragraph of text? If you’re
a PC user with Vista or Windows 7, you have a free tool that allows you to capture
a portion of your computer screen. Here’s how you do it:

1. Navigate to a website where you want to save a portion of a page.
2. Under the Start menu click All Programs.
3. Click on the Accessories file folder.
4. Select Snipping Tool.
5. The tool pops up in a small window on your screen.
6. Drag the cursor around the area you want to save.
7. Click the Save icon in the window, name the image and save it to your hard drive.

It’s as simple as that. No need to jotting down notes on sticky notes or printing
out entire web pages for future reference. Now you can snip and save it with the Snipping
Tool. Want to see the Snipping Tool in action and learn more about its capabilities? Watch
the video tutorial here.

And stay tuned to the Genealogy Gems
YouTube channel for videos from the RootsTech 2011. Watch my first one below:

—Lisa Louise Cooke

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Pam Slaton is living her dream. She tracked down her birth parents, volunteered her sleuthing skills to other adoptees, became a professional investigative genealogist and landed a reality show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, sharing her story.

Her journey into family history got off to a rocky start with the search for her birth
mother. She hired an investigator to help her; after she located her mother, Slaton
was quickly rejected and absolutely devastated. “I never dreamed my birth mother didn’t
want to know me,” Slaton said.

She then set out to find her father. The only information she had was that he was
a 6-foot-5-inch Italian mortician living in the Bronx. She later found him, using
the little information she had as a jumping off point.

Because of her success, Slaton suggests gathering all the facts you can find before
doing any research, even if you think they aren’t relevant. Any details could end
up being important information. Do a Google search with the information you have,
and see where that leads you. “Peel back one layer, then the next, then the next,
like an onion,” Slaton said.

But don’t let the facts you have limit you. “Sometimes the more information you put
into a search engine, the less you get back,” Slaton said. Names can change or be
misspelled, handwritten records are hard to read and and maybe indexed incorrectly,
or information you think is right could be wrong. Try removing some information and
using a wild card search to yield more results.

While researching for her clients, Slaton utilizes military, census and other records
to find birth families. She often uses the information found in those records to trace
the ancestral lines forward to locate other living relatives.

If a client is trying to locate a living relative or birth parent, Slaton advises
them to make sure you are emotionally ready. The reunion could be a very joyful or
upsetting experience for everyone.

She also tells her clients to be respectful and confidential. Don’t call everyone
with in the phone book the same name as a birth parent.

And it is this sort of knowledge and compassion that leads clients to Slaton. “When
I speak to clients, they know I totally get it,” she said. “It makes me feel good
that I’m that support to them.”

“Searching
For …” starring Pam Slaton premieres tonight at 9 p.m., on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

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We’re celebrating the return of NBC’s “Who
Do You Think You Are?” with a giveaway. While celebrities explore their genealogy
on the show, we want to give you the opportunity to explore your own genealogical
history with our Discover
Who You Are Sweepstakes!

Each week in February we will announce a lucky winner on our Facebook
fan page and the Genealogy Insider blog. Our second winner:

So what’s the prize? Four lucky winners will get Discover
Your Roots Kits, which include a bookazine for genealogy beginners, a Family Tree
University course, a subscription to Family Tree Magazine, our State Research
Guides CD and the Family Tree Pocket Reference eBook—a $205 value!

You can enter each week in February, by doing one or both of the following things:

1. Comment here on the blog during “WDYTYA.” You could write about a technique or resource
   you learned about from the show, or (if you missed the show) something you’re looking
   forward to learning about your own genealogy.
2. “Like” Family
   Tree Magazine on Facebook, and comment on or “like” our statuses about “WDYTYA.”

We’ll pick a winner each Monday and post their name here and on Facebook. 

This contest will run until Feb. 27, 2011. Official
rules can be found here.