Archive for February, 2013

News from around the web.
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Two indispensable genealogy resources are joining forces, resulting in a win for genealogists wanting to access offline family history materials.

FamilySearch and OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center) have reached an agreement
to list the holdings of the FamilySearch
genealogy catalog in WorldCat, the OCLC’s online
search portal to

catalogs from 74,000 repositories in more than 70 countries.

Under this partnership, OCLC will incorporate data from FamilySearch’s catalog into
WorldCat, and FamilySearch will use OCLC cataloging services to continue to catalog
its collections in WorldCat. FamilySearch will also incorporate WorldCat results into
search results returned by FamilySearch genealogy services.

Once they’re combined, instead of searching WorldCat for family and local histories
and other sources, then searching FamilySearch for genealogy records, you’ll be able
to run a search at either site for results from both.

That’ll also make it easier to see when a library near you holds copies of FamilySearch
genealogy resources—including printed books, which FamilySearch doesn’t circulate
to its local FamilySearch Centers.

On WorldCat, you can set up a profile to create your own bibliographies, review materials,
and more. WorldCat also has a Facebook app so you can search from within Facebook.

Get the most out of WorldCat by downloading
our WorldCat search tutorial for genealogists from ShopFamilyTree.com for $1.99.

Once you find materials you want to borrow from the FamilySearch Family
History Library, you’ll need to plan a visit to a FamilySearch Center. Click
here for our tips on doing genealogy research at FamilySearch Centers.

Read
more about the FamilySearch/OCLC partnership in the organizations’ press release.

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Your great-great-grandfather’s military pension records could have
the answers you want about his Civil War service and the widow he
left behind … if only you could find the records.

Or maybe your military genealogy brick wall is one of these:

• the 1973 fire
  at the National Personnel Records Center, which destroyed most records for Army
  personnel discharged from 1912 to 1960, and air force personnel discharged from 1947
  to 1964
• privacy restrictions for post-WWI soldiers
• service in a lesser-known war, without widely available or publicized records
• service during peacetime, rather than a specific war
• several similarly named soldiers, any one of which could be your relative (at $80
  a pop, you won’t be ordering that pension unless you know it belongs to your
  guy)
• a POW
• a female ancestor in the Army Nurse Corps, Cadet Nurse Corps, Women Airforce Service
  Pilots or other unit
• … or you just don’t know what records are available with regard to your ancestor’s
  military service, or how to get them

Our next webinar, Expert
Tricks for Beating Your Military Brick Walls, may be for you. David
Allen Lambert, a military research expert and chief genealogist at the New
England Historic Genealogical Society, will show you the best strategies for solving
difficult military records research problems—and he’ll tackle real-life brick walls
of webinar participants.

You can either submit your military brick-wall questions when you register or during
the live Q&A session. Here are the details:

• Date: Wednesday, Feb. 20
• Starting time: 7pm EST (that’s 6pm CST, 5pm MST and 4pm PST)
• Duration: 1 hour
• Registration: $49.99 (but save $10 if you register before Feb. 13)
• Includes: participation in the live event, the ability to watch the webinar
  again as many times as you like, a PDF of the presentation slides and our

  “Brick Wall Busters: Proving Military Service” handout.
  >

Click here to learn more about the Expert
Tricks for Beating Your Military Brick Walls webinar!

News from around the web.
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Fold3 is providing free access to its Black
History Collection of historical and genealogical records for the month of February—Black
History Month in the United States. 

Those records document slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the World Wars and
the Civil Rights Movement. Here’s a sampling of the record sets in the collection

• Court Slave Records for Washington, DC
• South Carolina Estate Inventories and Bills of Sale, 1732–1872
• US Colored Troops Civil War service records
• Southern Claims Commission records
• The Atlanta Constitution newspaper
• WWII “Old Man’s Draft” Registration Cards

Some of the record sets, such as the Southern Claims Commission records (Southerners’
reimbursement claims for property Union troops seized during the Civil War) and WWII
draft cards, also will cover non-African-Americans.

Visit the Fold3.com Black History Collection
home page to see samples of the records and links leading to more information
about each collection.

You’ll need to set up a free registration to access the collections. On the Black
History Collection home page, click on the link in the blue box to get started.

If you’re tracing black ancestors, you’ll find tips and advice in guides at ShopFamilyTree.com,
including:

• A
  Genealogists Guide to Discovering Your African-American Ancestors by Franklin
  Carter Smith and Emily Anne Croom
• Finding
  African-American Ancestors in Newspapers Family Tree University Independent Study
  course
• African-American
  Genealogy Value Pack (combines several of our ancestors research helps for black
  ancestors)

Click
here to see all the African-American genealogy research helps at ShopFamilyTree.com.

News from around the web.
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So I finally got my hands on a copy of the
divorce case for my my third-great-grandparents, Thomas and Mary Frost (more later about how I got it). As I hoped, it has
her maiden name!

There’s just one problem—I can’t read it, exactly:

Alanis Morrisette would call this situation ironic.

I searched Ancestry.com for Mary Wol*am (the wildcard
* can stand in for more than one letter). Some of the possibilities are Wollam, Wolam,
Wolham, Woldham, Woltam and Wolfram.

I even found an 1850 census record for a Wollam family living in Ohio with a Mary
of the right age, born about 1840. But this family has no Matilda, one of Mary’s sisters,
who gives her name but not her age in a deposition for the divorce case. The same
family (I think) in later censuses doesn’t have a Matilda, either, and is no longer
in Ohio. (My third-great-grandparents married in Cincinnati in 1865.)

I can’t find a family in the census that fits Wolham, my first thought when I read
the name. And no luck yet in my search for a Wol-something-am (or a Frost) marriage
record.

I’ve looked through the rest of the 103-page file for another maiden-name mention
and can’t find one, though the writing is really hard to make out in places. I need
to spend some quality time with the document.

Are you searching for a female ancestor’s maiden name? Check out our new Family Tree
University course Finding
Female Ancestors (I’m planning to!), which starts this week—it’s open for registration
through Friday. You’ll get help developing a research strategy for female ancestors,
teasing out maiden names and more.

Here’s
the link to learn more about the Finding Female Ancestors course.