Member of ISOGG
Archive for October, 2011
News from around the web.
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The Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness website, which we’ve recommended in many
a Family Tree Magazine article,
is offline due to the owner’s computer and health issues and will be for “some time,”
according to a
report on Dick Eastman’s blog. Read a similar
report on the Vermont Genealogy blog.
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Arphax Publishing has announced its HistoryGeo
online service, which we
blogged about last month, is now available for Charter Members to join. The service
gives you online access to land-ownership and other maps—for starters, all maps in
Arphax’s Family Maps and Texas Land Survey Maps series. Enhancements to the Viewer
and additions to the Map Library are in the works. Here’s
a YouTube video that explains how the service works.
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If you’re visiting the National
Archives in Washington, DC, you can use your phone to play a mobile history game,
earn points and possibly win rewards. Go to the Scvngr
gaming site to download the free iPhone or Android app (or text CIVWAR to
728647), then complete challenges within four blocks of the National Archives D.C.
headquarters. Examples include locating Civil War photographer Mathew Brady’s studio
and finding Red Cross founder Clara Barton’s office. So far, you can redeem points
for a discount in the National Archives Shop.
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Randy Majors announced enhancements to his Historical
US County Boundary Maps site, for helping you figure out which county had
jurisdiction of the places where your ancestors lived. For example, type a place and
a year, click Go, and be zoomed to that place with an information panel above the
map. See
what else is new here.
News from around the web.
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Do you have an Irish ancestor who served time? You might have one who served time
and you don’t know about it, given that FindMyPast.ie’s
new Irish Prison Registers 1790-1920 database contains 3.5 million entries at
a time when Ireland’s population averaged 4.08 million.
The prison registers, which came the National
Archives of Ireland, cover bridewells (places of detention), county prisons, sanatoriums
for alcoholics and other institutions. Most records give the prisoner’s name, address,
place of birth, occupation, religion, education, age, physical description, name and
address of next of kin, crime, sentence, and incarceration start and ending dates.
Drunkenness accounted for more than 30 percent of crimes reported and more than 25
percent of incarcerations. Other common offenses in the registers are theft (16 percent),
assault (12 percent), vagrancy (8 percent) and rioting (4 percent).
You can access the records with a FindMyPast.ie subscription
or with PayAsYouGo credits.
For help finding Irish ancestors in court and other records, check out Family Tree
University’s Irish
Research 101 and 102 courses,
as well as our $4 Irish
Heritage Research Guide from ShopFamilyTree.com.
News from around the web.
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Family Tree Magazine and Family Tree University are celebrating Family History
Month by giving away great genealogy supplies all month long!
Each day at 4 pm ET (3 CT, 2 MT, 1 PT), we’ll announce the winner of that day’s giveaway.
Plus, each daily prize will be on sale for a fantastic price.
Congratulations to the winner of today’s giveaway, the Family Tree Sourcebook:
Your Essential Directory of American County and Town Sources. The winner is Kathleen
Nitsch.
The Sourcebook is the most comprehensive, easy-to-use guide for researching
your family history.
Today’s deal is: Get
the Family Tree Sourcebook for just $15. The price is good until midnight
ET today, Oct. 20. Click
here to get the deal!
The daily giveaway for tomorrow, Oct. 21, is a one-year membership to the Genealogical
Society of Pennsylvania, a fabulous resource for anyone whose ancestors spent
time in the state (check it out here).
Click here to sign
up for the deal on our Daily Deal & Giveaway page. (Even if you signed up
for a previous giveaway, sign up again to get in the running for this one.)
Then just come back here tomorrow at 4 pm ET to see if you’ve won (and check out the
Thursday deal). Good luck!
News from around the web.
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Family Tree Magazine and Family Tree University are celebrating Family History
Month by giving away great genealogy supplies all month long!
Each day at 4 pm ET (3 CT, 2 MT, 1 PT), we’ll announce the winner of that day’s giveaway.
Plus, each daily prize will be on sale for a fantastic price.
Congratulations to the winner of today’s giveaway, our Virtual Conference video class
on mining the free Internet Archive website for genealogy answers: The winner is Catherine
Lord.
In this 30-minute video called “Reaching Into the Internet Archive,” Thomas MacEntee
of GeneaBloggers shows you how to tap into
digitized historical books and other ancestral artifacts at this free website dedicated
to “universal access to all knowledge.
Today’s deal is: Get
the Reaching Into the Internet Archive video class for just $15!
The price is good until midnight ET today, Oct. 19. Click
here to get the deal!
The daily giveaway for tomorrow, Oct. 20, is the Family Tree Sourcebook—the most comprehensive,
easy-to-use guide for researching your family history. Click
here to sign up now on our Daily Deal & Giveaway page. (Even if you signed
up for a previous giveaway, sign up again to get in the running for this one.)
Then just come back here tomorrow at 4 pm ET to see if you’ve won (and check out the
Thursday deal). Good luck!
News from around the web.
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Everyone has a story to tell, but recording those stories for future generations can
be a daunting task. What should you share? How much should you write? How can you
clear the fog from memories made long ago?
Sunny Jane Morton, author of My
Life & Times: A Guided Journal For Collecting Your Stories, answered these
and more questions in last week’s free webinar Start
Writing Your Life Stories.
One idea that struck me right at the beginning is to imagine that a biography has
been written about your life. When you look at the book jacket, what does it say?
What main theme of your life, setting and colorful characters does it mention. “In
the broadest sense, that book jacket is your story,” Morton says. “Everyday life is
found in the chapters inside.”
News from around the web.
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Family Tree Magazine and Family Tree University are celebrating Family History
Month by giving away great genealogy supplies all month long!
Each day at 4 pm ET (3 pm Central, 3 pm MT, 1 pm Pacific), we’ll announce the winner
of that day’s giveaway. Plus, each daily prize will be on sale for a fantastic price.
Congratulations to the winner of today’s giveaway, our Amateur Photo Restoration Virtual
Conference video class: The lucky person is Paul Bing.
He’ll learn how to digitally repair worn, torn or moldy photos—no photo editing experience
required, just the free online tools and easy techniques demoed in this 30-minute
video.
And the deal is: Get
the Amatuer Photo Restoration video class for just $15.
I love the idea of using the instructions in the video to digitally restore a photo,
then printing and framing it, and giving it as a gift.
The price is good until midnight ET today, Oct. 18. Click
here to get the deal!
The daily giveaway for tomorrow, Oct. 17, is our Internet Archive Virtual Conference
video class, with Thomas MacEntee’s secrets to tapping into digitized historical books
and other ancestral artifacts at the free Internet Archive website. Click
here to sign up now on our Daily Deal & Giveaway page. (Note: Even if you
signed up for a previous giveaway, sign up again to put yourself in the running for
this one.)
Then just come back here tomorrow at 4 pm ET to see if you’ve won (and check out the
Thursday deal). Good luck!
News from around the web.
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This Friday’s free GeneaBloggers
Radio show is all about death—records, that is—and host Thomas MacEntee will interview
Diana Crisman Smith, instructor of the Family
Tree University Death Records 101 course. You’ll also hear from Susan Soper, an
author and journalist who has created ObitKit, a
workbook for writing your own or someone else’s obituary.
This ominously titled GeneaBloggers Radio show, “The Final Chapter—Obituaries, Death
Records and Genealogy” is Friday, Oct. 21 at 9 p.m. ET, 8 CT, 7 MT and 6 PT (for regular
listeners, that’s a new time). Go
to the GeneaBloggers Radio website to listen.
News from around the web.
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Do the Halloween pumpkin patches and candy sales have you in the mood for ghost-hunting
in a cemetery? You’re in luck: ‘Tis the season for old cemetery tours.
These events offer the chance to take in interesting local history, nice scenery and
slight spookery. You can find tours by day or night, for free or a fee (they often
serve as fundraisers for historical societies).
A Google search or visiting the website of a local historic cemetery or historical
society will help you find tours near you. Here are some tours around the country
that my searches turned up:
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In Mississippi, there’ll be free tours at the Old Biloxi Cemetery (Oct.
25), Krebs Cemetery in Pascagoula (Oct. 27) and Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay
St. Louis (Halloween night). Read
more in the SunHerald.com online news article.
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Watch out for headless horsemen during Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery daytime and nighttime tours in Sleepy Hollow, NY, taking
place weekends in October. Fees vary; reservations are required.
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Oct. 29, the Historical Society of Long Beach (Calif.) holds a nonscary tour
of Long Beach Municipal Cemetery and Sunnyside Cemetery, featuring actors in period
garb delivering graveside presentations (based on sources such as obituaries, newspaper
articles and oral histories) about the person who lies at rest. General admission
costs $18, with specials for society members and students younger than age 18.
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Riverside Cemetery (which has an online burial database), established in 1887 in Macon,
Ga., holds its Spirits
in October series Oct. 20-22 and 27-29, with cemetery tours and more. Advance
tickets are required; admission costs $10 to $20.
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Capturing the Spirit
of Oakland at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta features nighttime tours with
historical accounts from cemetery “residents” and candlelit mausoleums. Tickets must
be purchased in advance; admission ranges from $10 to $17.50.
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Elmwood Cemetery in Kansas City, Mo., has a free Halloween
Tour Oct. 30.
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Historic All Hallows Eve cemetery tours with
costumed interpreters are happening on Halloween evening at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg,
Va. Adults: $7; children 12 and younger, $5.
News from around the web.
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Family Tree Magazine and Family Tree University are celebrating Family History
Month in October by giving away great genealogy supplies all month long!
Here’s how it works: Each day at 4 pm EST, 3 pm CST, 3 pm MST and 1 pm PST, we’ll
announce the winner of that day’s giveaway and reveal the next day’s giveaway.
Each daily prize also will be on sale at ShopFamilyTree.com for that day only—so if
you don’t get the giveaway, you can still snatch up a fantastic deal on tools to advance
your research!
The winner of today’s giveaway, a Research Remedies CD, is Ernestine
DuBois.
Want to buy the Research Remedies CD? The special price is good until midnight
EST today, October 22nd. Click
here to buy now.
The daily giveaway for tomorrow, October 23rd, is a free Family Tree VIP Membership,
plus a free Family Tree Magazine’s Web Guides CD! (Tomorrow’s special is a
free Family Tree Magazine’s Web Guide CD when joining the VIP Program!) Click
here to sign up now on our Daily Deal & Giveaway page. (Note: Even if you
signed up for a previous giveaway, sign up again to put yourself in the running for
this one.)
Then just come back here tomorrow at 4 pm EST to see if you’ve won. Good luck!
Surname Forum Activity
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My great grandmother was Mary Eugenia Manley who married William R. Sapp. They married in Glynn County (Brunswick), Georgia. He was from Appling County but I have not found any information of where she was from.
Can you help?!
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