Enjoy Free Access to NEHGS' Register Online

The following is an announcement from the New England Historic Genealogical Society:

NEHGS is pleased to offer free access to its New England Historical and Genealogical Register database on NewEnglandAncestors.org over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend! Normally only available to NEHGS members, the Register database will be accessible to everyone from Thursday, November 25 through Sunday, November 28, 2004. We encourage all NEHGS members to spread the word about this offering, and we hope that those of you who are not members find a veritable feast of ancestors in the Register database!

Published quarterly since 1847, The New England Historical and Genealogical Register is the flagship journal of American genealogy and the oldest journal in the field. The online database includes issues from 1847 to 1994.

The Register has featured articles on a wide variety of topics since its inception, including vital records, church records, tax records, land and probate records, cemetery transcriptions, obituaries, and historical essays. Authoritative compiled genealogies have been the centerpiece of the Register for more than 150 years. Thousands of New England families have been treated in the pages of the journal and many more are referenced in incidental ways throughout. The articles in the Register range from short pieces correcting errors in print or solving unusual problems to larger treatments that reveal family origins or present multiple generations of a family. 

Look for details on how to obtain free access to the Register in a special eNews bulletin to be sent out Wednesday, November 24. A link will also be available on that date on the home page of our website, www.NewEnglandAncestors.org.

Comments

[Bev Anderson]

Thank you!

If access to records (and not just an index of names like on ancestry.com) is available for free for a few days, this potentially may add to information I already have on two lines of New England ancestors. I had access to NEHGR books at a library in a large city with an entire section devoted to genealogy information years ago and found some information in those books on a couple of ancestors, but it would help to see if more info has been found, whether it is available online, or if the sources where I could order copies of documents are listed. I have specific names and dates and locations of birth/death, so an index of names only (as on an ancestry.com search) is useless.

As with anyone else on a limited income and a passion for genealogy going back more than 40 years, I like to know in advance what's available about specific ancestors and spend my resources wisely for things like books, and copies of documents from the locations where documents are stored. Web sites like the one for Martha Ballard's Diary are invaluable because .jpg images of the pages are available for a free download, as are the transcriptions, and the same goes for the Land Grant web site that has .gif and .tif images of deeds available for a free download - after one finds out if the name of a specific ancestor is even listed on a surname search, and one can look at the image to find out if the land description matches the plat map locations where one knows ancestors lived (especially valuable if the name is really common and there's a long list of people with the same names who had homesteads in the same or adjoining counties). Norway has a wealth of information online - for free - as does Denmark; Sweden hasn't caught up to Norway and Denmark yet for free information online (although it seems people can purchase CDs of info, which doesn't quite help if one only has vague data, but would recognize the valid data if it's there), but the one specific county where my Norwegian ancestors came from has information going back to the early 17th century online, and they keep adding more to the Digitalarkivet database almost weekly, it seems.

A select few counties in the Midwest are catching up with some of the east coast states by putting transcribed records from a century ago (more or less) online. I've been fortunate finding information within the last three years - in one case less than a month after it was put online, and a couple of weeks ago I found information only four days after it went online, and from there I can order copies of birth, marriage, and death records from those counties to add to my genealogy documents.

So, if the NEHGR database gets that specific, maybe I can add to the information I have on my colonial ancestors by adding more documents to what I already have.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Bev Anderson

[Sharon]

This sounded like a good idea. However, I was refused entry the few times I tried to search for my New England ancestors. I guess there really is no such thing as a free lunch - or URL.

[Dick Eastman]

What error message did you get?

Several thousand people have been able to access the Register Online in the past twenty-four hours. Whatever the reason you cannot acess it, I suspect we can find it easily.

[Beverly Stimer Walker]

I have been looking over your site and I can't find where you can look for surnames. I would like to know where Stimer's came from. I have also found it spelled Steimer. I have found them in PA back to 1790 in Philadelphia. Now I am at a dead end. Could you help me find where they might have come from?
Sincerely,
Beverly Walker
walker0369@msn.com

[Dick Eastman]

There is a big surnames section on NEHGS' web site at http://www.NewEnglandAncestors.org . It is in the Discussion Board section. Go to http://www.NewEnglandAncestors.org , click on RESEARCH, click on FORUMS, then look at all the SURNAME sections.

- Dick Eastman

[ZO PARSONS]

IT IS 2:30 p.m. SUNDAY, NOV. 28,2004 AND ALL I GET IS IT IS UNAVAILABLE. WHAT IN THE EWROLD IS WRONG? I WANTED TO SEE WHAT YOU HAD ON THE PARSONS & HOUSTON FAMILIES IN THE N.E. STATES.

[Dick Eastman]

I just checked and found that the NewEnglandAncestors.org site is up and running, complete with the free access to the Register. I was able to look at that database from my home without any difficulties. I am not sure why you are having problems.

I was in the office on Friday morning and found that more than 6,000 people had accessed the Register online in the first twenty-four hours it was available. According to the few e-mails we received in the webmaster's e-mail account, very few people had any difficulties with it, less than 0.5% of those people wrote to ask questions (that is less than a normal workday).

- Dick Eastman

[Suzanne Dodge]

It is Sunday evening, and I have tried the URL to gain access to the New England web site several times, and keep getting the error message: http 500 Internet explorer. (Page cannot be found). Am I too late? Suzanne

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

I was on earlier this weekend, for a quick look and thought I'd devote Sunday noght to my research. Unfortunately, all I get is a PAGE NOT FOUND error.

Looks like I should have done my research earlier.

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

This is the error I get right now (7:24 PM Central):

The page cannot be displayed
There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please try the following:

Open the www.newenglandancestors.org home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
Click the Refresh button, or try again later.

Click Search to look for information on the Internet.
You can also see a list of related sites.

HTTP 500 - Internal server error
Internet Explorer

[Bill Harding]

I was able to use the Register for more than an hour ealier this afternoon without any difficulties. It worked perfectly for me. I haven't had any errors at all.

[Dick Eastman]

This may sound like a broken record, but...

At 9:48 PM Eastern time I am able to access the site from home, using Charter Communications' broadband cable service. I have also checked the site six or eight times over the weekend and never saw a single error message.

The web server logs show several thousand people accessed the Register Online this weekend although the site is not swamped with this number of users. (It can handle a lot more than this load.)

Obviously, some other people are having problems accessing the site. Yet thousands of others and myself are getting in without difficulty. I do not know why there is a difference.

Make sure you go to http://www.NewEnglandAncestors.org and then look at the introductory information in the top left of the home page. Then click on the link shown there:

Start the search for your ancestors in the Register at http://surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=46883732209

Also make sure that you have your web browser's security set at something less than maximum security (that breaks a lot of web site connections and yet is the most-often reported problem at NEHGS' site). Also, if you use a personal firewall of some sort, please make sure you use the "trusted sites" list in your firewall to allow those URLs in. Personal firewalls often block cookies that are used by most web sites that require user log-ins.

[Jane Schapka]

FYI. On Saturday, Nov. 27, I was denied entry several times -- "Page not found." I didn't bother to complain, as I just figured the site was over-loaded by the free use for the weekend. Now that I read it can handle a large load, I thought you should know that there was a problem. I am a member and know how to access the information.

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

Well, I got back in, but now when I try to access any pages off of my search results page, I get an error.

Too bad, I was only able to see 7 out of 15 references. Nothing very good, mostly transcripts whose provenance is not listed, but they are from the 1840's.

Guess I'll give up.

[Steve Gauss]

I am a member of NEHGS and regular user of the web site. I have seen all of the problems mentioned as above over the holiday, including being locked out for most of Sunday. If the server really isn't overloaded, then there is some other problem. The Essex Mass. list serv has had numerous complaints of this type.

[Steve Gauss]

On the other hand, the searches of Mass VItal Records 1841-1910 has suddenly speeded up tremendously. It used to take forever and is now almost immediate.

[Dino (All DIno, All the Time)]

I'd like to thank the NEHGS for opening up its Register Database to public use over the weekend. I was a little frustrated at not being able to get in exactly when I wanted, but found that repeated attempts usually paid off.

Even though I didn't find any new info, it was still interesting.

[Ken]

Three comments on the free access:

1. No problem accessing the database on Thanksgiving Day via dialup.
2. The page images are MUCH clearer than in my copy of the CD version of the NEHGR. With the CD version, I have to make a copy of many of the pages and load them into Microsoft Word, which miraculously clears them up.
3. When I attempted to search on Charles Morse, I was provided with only 6 pages (60? persons, up to Charles H.). If this is a normal limitation on the website, it will make for a good bit of frustration for those who do not know the full name of the person they seek. Since I assume the society was trying to recruit new members, it would have been wise to make any temporary limitations very explicit.

[Dick Eastman]

Thank you for writing, Ken. I'll answer your questions in series:

1. Thank you for the positive feedback. I participated in a wrap-up meeting this morning at the Society, examining the results of the 4-day public access. Everyone was smiling in the meeting: thousands of people on the web site over the weekend (although not the busiest we have ever been), about 160 e-mails from people who had problems (less than 1% of the participants), about 50 e-mails of "thank yous" and kudos along with about triple the number of new members signed up that we would normally expect over a 4-day weekend. Of those who had problems, about half were under the impression that EVERYTHING on the site was supposed to be freely available, not just the Register. The most common complaint was frustration that the ONLY thing they could access was the Register. Obviously, we will have to craft the wording a bit differently in our next such announcement.

2. You are right: the images on the site are higher resolution than the CD version images. Actually, they started out as the same images but were compressed more for the CD version.

3. There is no such limitation, other than I think the web site stops listing names after it finds 1,000 occurrances. (I think it is 1,000, going from memory. I know it is a high number.) There were no temporary limitations this past weekend. In fact, it would cost us money to put in temporary limitations and I think we can find better ways to spend money. How many persons did you expect to find?

Thanks again for writing.

- Dick Eastman

[Phyllis]

Thank you NEHGS for the free time to search your Data Base. We arrived home Sunday afternoon so I had only a little time to look. Found an excellent well documented article (a full page!)about a Revolutionary War Ancestor of my husband's. Thanks again!

[Tom]

I accessed the site Wednesday, Friday, & Sunday evenings for an hour or two each time and had dozens of 500 errors. They accounted for probably less than 1% of the requests that I made, but that's still an error rate thousands of times higher than the vast majority of web sites and certainly unacceptable if NEHGS is paying for its Web services and/or IT staff.

Personally, I'm not going to send email to complain about a one time freebie offer and I bet many others have the same view, so I wouldn't count on email complaints as being representative of public perception of the service. As a previous poster mentioned, check the MASSSEX-L archives on Rootsweb for what people thought of the experiment.

[Tom]

p.s. Anyone know if the free version was dumbed down from the full version that members pay for? The free version didn't even have basic linkages between articles. To go back to a previous section of an article you had to edit the URL by hand and there was no way to go forward except to scan or think up a name that might have been indexed in the next section. Other things like the lack of a subject/place index, the missing post-1994 volumes, etc were obvious holes, but I'm wondering if these limitations don't exist in the member's version.

[Dick Eastman]

No, it was not "dumbed down." It would cost money for the extra programming hours required to "dumb it down." NEHGS has better uses for that money.

However, I have no idea why you had to "edit the URL by hand." I have never heard of that before.

- Dick Eastman

[Tom]

Re: editing URLs

Say you look up John Smith and then click to jump to vol. 9 pg 300. After backing up a few pages you come to "continued from pg 137." A well designed system might have both "previous in volume" and "previous in article" buttons or allow you to click a link to go directly there. An adequate system would allow you to type in the desired volume and page to jump to (without backing out three levels to the "Browse" menu which wasn't part of the free trial anyway). With the current system, the easiest way to get to the desired page is to go to the address bar and edit the URL.

Following a continuation forward is worse. Lacking a table of contents there is no direct way to know which future volume and page the article is continued on. I searched high and low on the Web (which is how I found this thread) and apparently no online Table of Contents exists for the Register.

There's lots more stuff like this. For example, try to read vol. 9 pg 198. You can't reach it (or any other page in the last few pages of a quarterly issue) without some trickery. I've got a page of notes on bugs and workarounds that I'll write up into a full blown review when I find time. I'll try to remember to post a link here when it's available.