Archive for July, 2011

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

If you haven’t visited FamilyTreeMaker.com recently, it’s time to take another look. Recently, Family Tree Maker launched its newly redesigned website with simplified navigation and more features to help you find answers to your questions.

Here are a few highlights:

• A tour of the software shows some of the key features and tools available in Family Tree Maker.
• A “tips and tricks” section helps users of all levels be more productive.
• An updated FAQ answers questions about sharing files, upgrading the software, and more.
• A learning center gives you quick access to webinars, message boards, and tutorials.

We’re excited about the new changes and hope you’ll find the new site easier to use and filled with useful resources.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

• Subscription genealogy site Archives.com has
  added 17 million new US vital and military records. Vital records come from Texas,
  Colorado and South Carolina; and the military records provide information about individuals
  who served in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and National Guard during the
  Vietnam War and Gulf War eras. Click
  here to see more details on the Archives.com additions. 

• FamilySearch has updated 55 of its online
  record collections, for a total of 25 million new images of records from 16 countries.
  Many of the collections haven’t yet been indexed, so you’ll need to click through
  to the individual database and browse by place, year or however the records are organized. Click
  here to see a list of the record additions and link to the updated collections. 

• Deceased Online, a pay-per-view
  site for burial and cremation records in the UK, is adding millions of records from
  Scotland. You
  can check out participating cemeteries and crematoria here. 

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

Today we’re super excited to announce the winners of the Family
Reunion contest held in June. 

And the grand prize winner is … Patricia Skubis! Her long-lost Danish relative
Tage will travel to the United States so they can meet in person for the first time.
Patricia also will receive a year-long VIP
membership to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-Plus subscription
with MyHeritage.com.

Patricia belongs to a Danish family that immigrated to the United States in 1888.
Another branch had headed for Australia in 1873. Skubis made contact 27 years ago
with Alison Rogers from the Australian branch, but they were unable to find a connection.
Here’s Patricia’s account of how it finally happened (look for more details in an
upcoming issue of Family Tree Magazine):

In March of 2011, a family in Denmark researching the Thygesen name posted information
on MyHeritage and I received a Smart Match notice. I wasn’t sure we had a match. The
parents’ names were the same but the children did not match. So I asked the submitter
for more information. With the additional information I thought we did indeed have
a match.

I went online to the Danish Church Records [on the
Danish archives’ website] and found Tyge Jørgensen’s children between Neils Madsen
Thygesen, born in 1794, and my great-great-grandfather Martin, born in 1805. What
a great surprise I received when I found that the next son after Neils was Peder Andersen
Thygesen, the great-great-grandfather of Alison Rogers.

Tage and I are fourth cousins once removed. Our great-great-grandfathers, along with
Alison’s, were brothers.

Each of our two runners-up will receive a digital
subscription to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-plus subscription
on MyHeritage.com. They are:

• Linda Mehlinger, whose mystery started with her Louisiana-born great-grandmother’s
  photo of a lady and five schoolgirls in a rickshaw being pulled by a Zulu warrior.
  Through research including searching the 1910 census on Ancestry.com and contacting
  other genealogists via a mailing list, she discovered a cousin in South Africa who
  had pictures of the same people.

• Pam Ingermanson, whose Norwegian ancestors settled in Idaho. After hours upon
  hours of research, she connected with a cousin who descended from a brother who ended
  up in Ohio. The branches of the family had lost touch over the years.

You can read the winners’ full stories, as well as those of other entrants, in their
comments on the MyHeritage.com
Blog. 

Thank you to everyone who entered this contest. Both our team at Family Tree Magazine and
our contest partners MyHeritage.com were touched by your stories of reconnecting with
family, and we’re impressed by your diligent research. You’re truly an inspiration
to your fellow family historians!

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

We salute you, stiff-elbowed scroller of microfilm. Mosquito-bitten searcher of headstones.
Sneezing file-flipper in dusty courthouse archives. 

Hats off to you who squeeze all your genealogy into just a few hours on the weekend,
quick half-hour intervals during lunch, or late nights on the computer after the kids
are in bed.

The Weekend
Genealogist Value Pack—available during July at an extra-deep 63 percent discount—will
help you make the most of your limited research time. This value pack contains: 

• Online Genealogy Crash Course DVD: Lessons to help you master finding ancestral
  records online and using Ancestry.com.

• Discover Your Roots Winter 2011 digital issue: Our 132-page guide to
  getting started in genealogy, with articles on finding your ancestors in a weekend
  genealogy blitz, avoiding common myths, visiting the courthouse and more.

• Discover Your Family Tree FTU Independent Study Course: This course download
  is designed to help you start your family tree research without feeling overwhelmed.

• 60 Minute Genealogy Jobs download: You can do these 14 family history projects
  in an hour or less, making them perfect for lunch hour.

Click
here to find out more about the Weekend Genealogist Value Pack.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

We wrote
last week that genealogy search engine Mocavo.com added GEDCOM
uploading (via a Facebook app) to its offerings.

Mocavo.com has announced it’ll give away an iPad 2 on July 15 to someone who’s uploaded
a tree. In response to a comment on the Mocavo.com
Facebook page, webmasters also said they’re working on a non-Facebook upload method,
and hope to have it in place before the end of the entry period.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

We are experiencing some temporary site problems with our search functionality. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. Our development and web operations teams are working on the problem and we will have it resolved as quickly as possible.  Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE AS OF JUNE, 30, 2011 AT 5:00 PM MT/7:00 PM ET/12:00 AM BST

We are pleased to inform everyone that we have restored the majority of the search functionality.  Our teams are continuing to work toward ensuring that you’ll be able to use the site’s search functionality without any issues. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused and truly appreciate your patience through this situation.

UPDATE AS OF JUNE, 30, 2011 AT 5:25 PM MT/7:25 PM ET/12:25 AM BST

The temporary site problem we experienced earlier has now been resolved.  Your patience was truly appreciated as we worked through this issue. Thank you and happy searching!

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

• If you have an iPad or iPhone, here’s a more educational way than Angry Birds to pass
  the time, especially on the Fourth of July: MultiEducator’s History
  on the Go apps  use images, contemporary accounts, multimedia presentations
  and documents to help you learn about the American Revolution, Civil War, Constitution
  and Federalist Papers, and more. They’re available for about $5 through the Apple
  iTunes store (the Constitution app is free).

• Genealogy search engine Mocavo.com,
  one of Family Tree Magazine’s 101
  Best Websites for 2011, has added new features. You can now upload
  your family tree GEDCOM to Mocavo (via Facebook),
  and within a few weeks, you’ll begin receiving e-mailed search results for your ancestors.
  (See
  how the upload process works on Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings blog.)

  You also can opt to have your tree included in the Mocavo.com search engine. (The
  site will automatically exclude living people.)

• The Civil War Trust, a battlefield preservation organization, has announced Campaign
  150: Our Time, Our Legacy, a campaign to raise $40 million for the permanent protection
  of 20,000 acres of battlefield land over the next five years. An average of 30 acres
  of battlefield land are lost each day, according to Battle
  Cry of Freedom author James McPherson.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

If you have a Revolutionary War-era Patriot ancestor, applications for the Sons of
the American Revolution (SAR) lineage
society are a great research resource.

These applications are worth a search even if you don’t know of a Patriot in your
family tree, because they name other ancestors who link SAR applicants to Patriots.
You may find an ancestor or collateral relative among one of those names.

Through July 4, you can search SAR applications dating from 1889 to 1970 free on Ancestry.com.
(After you hit Search, you’ll be prompted to set up a free account to view your results.)
The collection includes 145,000 applications.

Click
here to start your search (then
select the Free Access Weekend logo on the right).

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

Let’s play the word association game. I’ll start:

Virginia genealogy.

“Burned courthouses,” you say? “Early, hard-to-trace immigrants”?

Our Virginia
Genealogy Crash Course webinar will show you how to get past research brick walls
such as

• courthouses (and their records) destroyed during the Civil War and in fires and floods
  at other times

• hard-to-research Colonial-era immigrants
  

• potentially confusing land records due to the carving up of Virginia’s enormous original
  territory into other states, a maze of courts, and many cities that are independent
  of their surrounding counties 

You’ll also learn about Virginia records including headrights and vital records, and
the best websites for Virginia research (including the Library
of Virginia, whose Virginia
Memory site has digitized newspapers, military records and other genealogical
resources).

The Virginia
Genealogy Crash Course webinar, presented by Family Tree Magazine contributing
editor David A. Fryxell, takes place Wednesday, July 27, at 7 pm Eastern time (6 pm
Central, 5 pm Mountain, 4 pm Pacific).

Attendees will receive a link to view the session again as many times as they like,
a PDF of the presentation slides, and Family Tree Magazine’s Virginia State
Research Guide.

Click
here to find out more about the Virginia Genealogy Crash Course webinar—and take advantage
of the 20 percent off early bird registration special.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

I read about the How
to Access the 1940 Census in One Step quiz  on Dick
Eastman’s blog this morning. 

The quiz, by One-Step Tools webmaster Steve
Morse and friends, is designed to guide you through the site’s tools that help
you determine your ancestor’s 1940 census enumeration
district (ED). This is important because, when the 1940 census comes out April
2, 2012, you won’t be able to search by name. Instead, you’ll need to find the records
for the ED where your ancestor lived and view pages until you find him or her.

(If you don’t mind waiting an as-yet-unknown length of time for a searchable name
index to be created, probably by FamilySearch and/or
a commercial entity such as Ancestry.com,
you may not need to worry about the ED. I say “may not” because if your ancestor gets
mis-indexed or the census-taker recorded his name in an unexpected way, you still
might need to browse the records.)

Anyway, I tried the quiz for a spin and did indeed find the 1940 ED I needed. Here’s
how it worked for me:

Question: Do you know where your family lived on April 1, 1940, the official
1940 census day?

Answer: I chose yes. This was my hint to check the address in my ancestor’s
1942 declaration of intention to naturalize:

Question: Did the family move between 1930 and 1940?

Answer: Yes.

Question: You know where your family was in 1940. Were they:

• in a rural area or a small urban community (under about 5,000)?
• in an urban area of 5,000 or more?
  
• in an institution (hospital, jail, orphanage, etc)?
  
• outside the US proper but under US jurisdiction? 

Answer: They lived in Cleveland, Ohio, an urban area of 5,000 or more.

Question: Check to see if the city is on the One Step 1940 Large City ED Finder
Tool. Go to this tool, choose the state or possession, and look in the city dropdown
box. Do you see your city listed there?

Answer: I clicked the link to the 1040
ED Finder, chose Ohio from the state dropdown menu, and yes, Cleveland was in
the city menu. 

Question: OK, now to use the above One Step tool, choose the state and city
and then enter the street and cross streets for the house at which your family lived.

Answer: I went back to the 1940 ED Finder, which looked like this:

I chose my ancestors’ street, Franklin Blvd, and was directed to choose a cross street.

Um, cross street? Luckily, at the bottom of the page you can enter a house number
and generate a Google, Yahoo! or MapQuest map of the location, like this one:

I chose 47th W. as the cross street and was rewarded with:

The “View microfilm ” link gives you a message that the 1940 census images are not
available. Looks like Morse is planning to link the ED numbers to the record images
when they’re released on NARA’s website ext year.

I tried other quiz answers, too: 

• Basically, if you don’t know where your ancestors lived in 1940, you’ll get suggestions
  for records to check.
  

• If you know where they lived in 1940 and they hadn’t moved since 1930, you’ll be directed
  to the site’s 1930-to-1940
  ED Conversion tool (EDs changed from census to census).
  

• If your ancestors lived in a small-ish town or rural area, the area may not yet be
  covered in the One Step 1940 ED Finder, in which case you’re directed to National
  Archives’ ED maps (not yet online). Those will be easier to use if you know the
  street address. 

• If you don’t know the address in the small-ish town or rural area, you can use the One
  Step ED Definition Tool to choose a state and county, then search on a community
  name. If the name is in the definitions, you’ll get back a list of possible EDs where
  you can start your census search. 

Now, the trick is not losing the sticky note I wrote the ED on.

You can read all about the 1940 census in the May
2010 Family Tree Magazine‘s Complete Census Guide. Family
Tree Magazine Plus members can read
the 1940 census article here.