Archive for May, 2011

News from around the web.
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• A new website called Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names will
  launch in September. The site will contain free, searchable information about enslaved
  Virginians named in manuscripts at the Virginia Historical Society. Read
  more about the project here. 

• FindMyPast.co.uk has completed
  its two-year project to make the English and Welsh birth, marriage and death records on
  its site easier to use. This final installment of the project makes more than 85 million
  death records searchable at once, with as little as a surname. The site’s death records
  include England & Wales deaths, 1837-2006; British nationals who died overseas,
  1818-2005; British nationals armed forces deaths, 1796-2005; and British nationals
  who died at sea, 1854-1890.

• The
  Holisso Center, a research facility for Chickasaw Nation history, will
  open May 28 at the Chickasaw
  Nation Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla. The Holisso Center also has technology
  to repair and preserve damaged historical materials.
  

• The latest celebrities found to be relatives: Lady
  Gaga and Madonna, who share roots in Quebec (if you have French-Canadian roots,
  you’re probably also related to both women),  and Johnny
  Depp and Queen Elizabeth. Also, genealogists from Irish historical research company
  Eneclann have identified President
  Obama’s closest living Irish relatives in Ballygurteen, Co. Tipperary. 

News from around the web.
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Got some Google news for you  today: First, Google has announced it’s stopping
its quest
to digitize old newspapers and post them online in the Google
News Archive—to the disappointment of genealogists searching the archive for their
ancestors’ names. Also, small newspapers lose the Google option for preserving old
issues.

Google will continue to support the existing News Archive, so you can still search
it. But it won’t add any search enhancements.

This
article from the Boston Phoenix has more on what Google’s doing instead. 

See other
sites where you can search online newspapers in this free FamilyTreeMagazine.com article,
and look for even more help using online newspaper databases in our November 2011
issue. (We’ve
also got a Family Tree University course on newspaper research.) 

In other (happier) Google news, now you can get definitions for words in Google
Books right then and there. Just select the word and a little pop-up menu gives
you options to define it, translate it, or search for it in the book, Google or Wikipedia. You
have to be in “Flowing Text” mode for this to work; click here for more details. 

News from around the web.
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We’re thrilled to announce the winners of our “How
I got interested in genealogy” contest with world family tree site Geni. 

The winner of the grand prize—a two-year Geni Pro account and a year of Famliy
Tree Magazine—is Sadie Morgan of Rossville, Ga.

The second-prize winners, who’ll receive the Family Tree Magazine “Beginners
Guide to Genealogy” digital download and a three-month Geni Pro Account, are:

• Kim Cotton
• Lori Pilla
• Laura Ramsay

We’re contacting the winners to deliver your prizes. Congratulations to them, and
thank you to everyone who entered. We enjoyed reading about how you got into genealogy!
(You can see the entries on the Facebook pages for Family
Tree Magazine and Geni.)

News from around the web.
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(What can I say, I guess I’m in a bit of a melodramatic mood this morning!) Next Monday,
May 23, begins a new session of Family
Tree University and a new opportunity to find out what you need to know in order
to bust through that big bad brick wall.

Courses run for four weeks with one lesson per week. That’s except for Lisa Louise
Cooke’s Google Master Class, which combines three courses over eight weeks; and Discover
Your Family Tree, a two-week course especially for beginners.

Click each link for more about the class, including a syllabus, student feedback,
and even preview videos for some. You can save 20 percent on registration by using
offer code FTU0511.

• NEW: Computer
  Boot Camp for Genealogists, taught by Nancy Hendrickson
  

• Cemetery
  Research 101, taught by Midge Frazel 

• Creating
  a Family History Book, taught by Nancy Hendrickson  

• Discover
  Your Family Tree, taught by Grace Dobush 

• Discovering
  Your Czech and Slovak Roots, taught by Lisa A. Alzo 

• Finding
  Ancestors in the US Census, taught by Diana Smith 

• German
  Genealogy 201, taught by James M. Beidler 

• Google
  Master Class, taught by Lisa Louise Cooke 

• Land
  Records 101, taught by Diana Crisman Smith 

• Organize
  Your Genealogy, taught by Nancy Hendrickson 

• Source
  Documentation 101, taught by Charlotte Bocage 

• Trace
  Your Polish Roots, taught by Ceil Wendt Jensen 

• US
  Military Records, taught by Diana Crisman Smith 

News from around the web.
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Welcome back to all the genealogists experiencing conference hangover this Monday
morning! (The National Genealogical
Society annual conference wrapped up over the weekend in Charleston, SC.)

We can’t wait for our own Allison Stacy to stagger skip back into
the office to share all the conference happenings!

In the mean time, here’s a photo from our booth in the exhibit hall:

On the left is Jennifer Woods from the Climbing
My Family Tree blog, then Allison, and that’s Cheryl Cayemberg from the Have
You Seen My Roots? blog on the right, with Jennifer’s daughter Ellie.

Both bloggers were voted to the 2011 Family
Tree 40 in the New Blogs category. Check out their reports from the conference
and Jennifer’s stunning photographs. (And
check out Ellie’s NGS video report here.) Thanks to Jennifer for sending this
photo, as well.

Scroll down to see our posts with NGS conference news. Did you go? How was it? Have
you recovered from the travel, walking, talking, sightseeing and most of all, brain
overload?

Surname Forum Activity
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Hey folks. Does anyone know where i can view/purchase a copy of his Will? thanks, John.
Go to Source

Surname Forum Activity
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The Scranton Tribune
Scranton, PA 14 Oct 1901
Mrs. John Manley
Mrs. John Manley, 60 years of age, died yesterday at the family residence, 540 Beech Street, after a tedious illness. The deceased lady had lived on the South Side many years, was well known and highly esteemed. She is survived by a grown-up family. Notice of the funeral will be published after.

The Scranton Tribune
Scranton, PA 17 Oct 1901
Funeral of the Late Mrs. Mary Manley
The remains of Mrs. Mary Manley, who died on Sunday, were laid at rest yesterday morning after impressive services in St. John’s church on Fig Street. Hundreds of neighbors and sorrowing relatives of the deceased gathered at the family residence on Beech Street an hour before the time set for the services and viewed the remains.
At 9 o’clock, the casket was closed by the undertaker Cusick and the long line of sorrowing mourners wended their way to the church. Rev. E. J. Melley celebrated a requiem mass and afterwards paid a high tribute to the goodness and high moral character of the deceased. Interment was afterwards made in St. Mary’s cemetery, Dunmore. The pallbearers were Patrick Nealis, Patrick McNamara, Patrick Rogan, Patrick Coggins, John McNamara, and Stephen Reap.
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News from around the web.
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Last October we launched Ancestry Labs to test a few new ideas, and we’d like to thank all those members who contributed a lot of great feedback and discussion around these.  Today we’re excited to announce the introduction of one of the ideas, Web Search, into the main Ancestry.com search.

Why are we launching Web Search?

We’ve heard from many members that although Ancestry.com has the broadest collections of historical records available, it certainly isn’t completely comprehensive. Every day, digital records are being published on sites across the web, many of which are free to access.

These sites can be a great resource in helping break through brick walls, however, it can be hard to know where to find sites that are relevant to your ancestors, and it also takes time to work out the best way to search them once you do manage to track them down.

To help solve this, we are launching a new feature that searches select websites and brings back any matching results we find, along with a link to the site to enable you to go straight to the original record. Where relevant, we will include these results into your main search results. We will also list each collection we have within our card catalog, which will allow you to search those collections directly from within Ancestry.com.

Principles we will follow

As we’ve been developing Web Search, we’ve spoken with many members within the genealogical community to try to make sure we approach this in the right way. We recognize that this content is really important to every single site owner, and we believe it’s important we respect the wishes of these owners regarding links to their content.

From these discussions, we have developed some principles on how this service will work:

• Free access to Web Records – Users do not have to subscribe or register with Ancestry.com to view these records.
• We will always strive to follow web standards for web crawling permissions.  For example, some websites have a robots.txt file that instructs search engines (like Google) to not crawl the site, or to only crawl certain areas.
• Proper attribution of Web Records to content publishers – we will link prominently to the original site within the search experience.
• We have in place processes to remove content from the index if a website owner requests us to do that and we will publish how to contact our team to do this.  Website owners can also contact us to ask questions or to request their site be indexed – see this page to learn how to contact us: http://www.ancestry.com/websearch.
• Ancestry.com users will be able to save key information to their trees but it will list the website as the source and will have an easy way to link back to the original site.

How does it work?

When you do a search on Ancestry.com, if we find a relevant match in a record on a site we have indexed, we will include that match in your search results.

You can view the essential information in the search results list, click on a link to visit the website, or click on the information to view a little more and save it to your tree.  You don’t have to subscribe or even have a guest account with Ancestry.com to find and view this information or to get to the source website.  Of course, if you want to save it to your online tree, you will need to login or create a free account so we know where to save the information.

To designate which of these records are from Ancestry.com and which are found via web search, we are prefacing the source information with “Web:” and then the name of the collection.  For example: “Web: Rootsweb Obituary Index”. There is also an icon next to the name indicating this is a web record.

You will also see a link under the title that will go straight to the website.  If you are using new search, you will also find a special icon next to the title.

When you click on the name of the collection, you will get to this page:

This page only contains the essential information needed to find the information and to make sure it is the person for whom you are searching.

In the same way you should always check the image when you look at an index, make sure you go to the web site to see what other information is there.  You will usually find additional information – reference and publication information, grave site locations, ways to order the original record, notes, and sometimes even images.

Going to the original website

The first time you click on a link to go to an external website, you will see a message that looks like this:

We want to make sure users know a few things about this experience.  First of all, the content is not on Ancestry.com and the site will open in a new tab, or a new window (depending on your browser.)  Secondly, when you get to the website, you may have to search for the record.  Some sites have static URLs so we can help you get straight to the record.   Other sites dynamically generate the page for the record so you have to search when you get there.

If you don’t want to see this message in the future, just check the box in the lower right hand portion of the screen “Don’t show this message again.”

Can I search just one collection of web records?

Yes, you can do this.  There are a few ways to search just one set of records from a website.

If you are looking at a single record on Ancestry.com, just click the title of the collection and it will take you to a search page for that collection.

This will take you to a search page that will look something like this:

You can also find the individual search forms by going to the card catalog and searching on the name of the collection.  If you don’t know, just search on the word “web” in the title since we will include the word “web” to denote they come from an external source and not from Ancestry.com.

How fast will we grow the Web Search service?

We plan to add sites to our index gradually so we can learn about how useful they are to users. Today, we are launching Web Search with select websites but expect to add many more websites to help our users find more information about their ancestors.

Go try it out

The best way to understand this is to try it out.  Since we are starting out small, you may not see these results in your search results for your ancestors, yet.  (If you do, please let us know if it was helpful.)

You can see it in action by doing a search for Louise M Chrisman, died in Indiana, USA or click here to see the search results.

In the example above, the first result is for Louise in “Web: Allen County, Indiana Deaths 1870-1920.”

We would like your feedback

We hope this answers many of your questions.  We have appreciated all of the feedback we have gotten so far and look forward to continuing to learn from our users, from web publishers, and from others in the community.

We have a page with general information on this service at www.ancestry.com/websearch.  On this page, you will find a summary of some of this information as well as ways to contact us.

If you own a website or publish content, we have a special message board where you can ask questions and share your suggestions with us at http://boards.ancestry.com/content-publishers-feedback/mb.ashx.

If you publish family history records on the web, you can ask your site to be searched, or request your site not be searched, by emailing us at websearch@ancestry.com.

We also invite any of our users to share their thoughts and suggestions with us at the same email address – websearch@ancestry.com.

Happy Searching!

News from around the web.
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Here’s a quick look at some of the news bits coming out of the National
Genealogical Society (NGS) 2011 Family History Conference, which ends tomorrow
in Charleston, SC. 

• We’re hearing there’s great attendance at this year’s conference, and that the first
  two days in the exhibit hall were crowded.
  

• The 2012 NGS conference is May 9-12 in Cincinnati (also the hometown of Family
  Tree Magazine) and the 2013 conference will be in Las Vegas.

• FamilySearch has set an annual
  goal to add 200 million record images to its free online records search. Its 2012 RootsTech
  conference will be Feb. 2-4 in Salt Lake City.

• Archivist of the United States David Ferrerio, speaking at the NGS opening session,
  said that the National Archives and Records
  Administration (NARA) is digitizing the 1940 census in-house and it’ll be available—but
  not yet indexed by name—on on NARA’s website April 2, 2012. It won’t be on any commercial
  websites on that date.

• Ancestry.com will
  begin indexing the census records as soon as they’re available and will post the indexed
  records online later in the year, the company announced at a conference reception.
  

Dick
Eastman has posted his copious notes from the reception. Some things that caught
my eye: the new genealogy
Web Search, US Navy Ship Muster Rolls 1939-1949 (coming on Memorial Day), more
US birth and death records, a faster record image viewer, a new Android app, and the
ability to download data from your Ancestry tree to version 2012 Family Tree Maker
software.

• See this
  GeneaBloggers post for the latest NGS-related tweets and blog posts.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
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Web Search, one of the concepts from Ancestry.com’s Ancestry
Labs site, is becoming part of the main Ancestry.com search. (Here’s
our original post, from last fall, about Ancestry Labs and Web Search.) 

For Web Search, Ancestry.com will index other genealogy web sites. When you do a search
on Ancestry.com, if there’s a relevant match in a record on a site that’s been indexed,
that match will be included in your search results along with the historical records
on Ancestry.com. Web Search will be a free service.

Here’s what a Web Search result looks like (image, arrows and callouts are Ancestry.com’s).

So you can tell which records in your search results are from Ancestry.com and which
are from another site, you’ll see an icon and the word “Web” in front of the name
of the collection.

The Web Search results include the essential information from the other site (theoretically,
enough to help you decide whether the record refers to your ancestor) and a link to
visit the website.

“In the same way you should always check the image when you look at an index, make
sure you go to the web site to see what other information is there,” advises Ancestry.com
in its
announcement. “You will usually find additional information.”

You also can click to save the information to your tree.

You don’t have to subscribe or have a guest account with Ancestry.com to use Web Search
or get to the source website. But if you want to save the web record to your online
tree, you’ll of course need at least a guest account. 

Webmasters who don’t want their genealogy websites indexed in Web Records will be
able to contact Ancestry.com and opt out.

See more details and a Q&A on Ancestry.com’s
Web Search info page. 

Many genealogists see Web Search as Ancestry.com’s shot at a do-over of its Internet
Biographical Collection, which was pulled down shortly after its introduction in August
2007 amid negative feedback over copyright and other concerns. More
on that in this post.