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Richard Michael Doherty and Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens are once again sponsoring genealogy research trips to Ireland. I have heard that participants on previous trips have enjoyed the experience so I suspect this year's trips will be equally popular. Here is the announcement written by Richard Michael Doherty and Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens:
Genealogy Research Trips to Ireland
Plymouth, Michigan, 11 January 2007-Imagine researching your Irish ancestors on their own turf. Imagine finding solutions to your pesky research dilemmas. Imagine sharing your successes with fellow researchers over a pint in an Irish pub.
There's a new player on the genealogy field, and their launch this week announced a partnership with the foremost resource in the United States. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration announced a major new initiative to scan millions of historical documents and to make them available online. The documents will appeal to many different interests: genealogists, historians, re-enactors, railroad enthusiasts, aviation historians, and many, many others. Approximately 4.5 million pages are available at launch, and millions more historical documents will be digitized and placed online each year.
The project is being launched in a partnership with a commercial firm called Footnote, Inc. The company's new web site went "live" at noon Eastern Time on Wednesday, January 10. I have spent some time using Footnote's new service and thought I would describe my experiences.
Footnote, Inc. and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration have announced a new partnership that will place millions of historical documents online. These documents have not been available online previously and many of them have never been microfilmed. Most of these documents were previously available only by traveling to the National Archives and examining the documents in person.
The new announcement describes a service that will make high-quality images available on any computer with an Internet connection. The potential here is huge for genealogists, historians, re-enactors, students, teachers, railroad history buffs, and many more people.
The following announcement is a joint press release written by Footnote, Inc. and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration:
I have written several times about the need for making backup files. Probably the safest method of making backing files is to use one of the online file storage services. Not only do these services provide backup copies, they also store them off-site. Off-site storage can be a critical factor when it comes to storing your most important information. Just ask anyone who lost a home in Hurricane Katrina, in one of the western forest fires, or in a tornado. Everyone should have their genealogy data as well as their old family photographs, checkbook data, income tax information, email messages, and many other items stored in a distant digital repository for safekeeping.
Wouldn't it be nice to scan text from genealogy books or papers directly into your computer? The next time you visit a library, a courthouse, or a genealogy society, you might want to scan your new findings directly instead of making photocopies or manually transcribing everything. In the case of handwritten documents, a scanned image of the original document could help to create the best source citation of all.
It may not be practical to carry a standard flatbed computer scanner on your next trip. The scanners that you purchase at local computer stores also may not be suitable for scanning information found in bound volumes, especially those oversized ledger books that we deal with so often in genealogy research. The C-Pen may be the solution you are looking for.
The following announcement was written by the U.S. National Genealogical Society:
Richard (Dick) Cheatham, a descendant of John Rolfe and Pocahantas, will provide a "Welcome to the Virginia Colony" to attendees at the National Genealogical Society banquet at the NGS Conference in the States & Family History Fair on Friday 18th May 2007 at the Richmond Marriott Hotel.
The following announcement was written by The Generations Network:
New Collection Opens the Door for Largest Ethnic Group in the U.S. to Discover Their Family Stories Online; Fifteen Percent of Americans Claim German Descent
PROVO, Utah, Jan. 9 -- Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history resource, today announced the addition of more than six million names from German port and census records to its historical records collection, making Ancestry.com the central online source for German family history. The German records launched simultaneously on Ancestry.de, Ancestry.com's first foreign-language, international sister-site.
Would you like to put your genealogy information online? Or perhaps you are interested in placing the extracted taxpayers' records from the nineteenth century onto your genealogy society's web site? Maybe your genealogy society doesn't yet have a web site but would like to? You now have a web site that can help.
Genealogy societies, companies, and individuals often have reasons to create web sites with protected content. In many cases, material may need to be available only to society members or to those who have paid for access to restricted material. Selling information online is an excellent method of providing online "books" or transcriptions of genealogy-related information, such as family genealogy books, tax lists, local census information, and more. Genealogy societies have long sold such books in printed form; now it is easy to do the same online. Buyers can purchase electronic copies of the material and receive instant access.
Luckily, all of this can be done without much difficulty, using today's technology.
The following announcement was written by the U.S. National Genealogical Society:
For more than twenty years, the National Genealogical Society has administered a program to honor our predecessors who made significant contributions to the field of American genealogy. We invite societies to submit a nomination of someone who meets the criteria set for this competition. For a list of those honored since 1986, go to the NGS Web site at www.ngsgenealogy.org/comhallmembers.cfm. To learn more about each honoree click on the names.
I recently moved this newsletter's web site to a dedicated server on a new hosting service. I decided to take advantage of all the turmoil to also make several upgrades that I had been thinking about. One of them is for the web version of the Plus Edition articles. I turned off the Plus Edition newsletter pages during the move, but I am now happy to report that the pages are again available online. Best of all, the Plus Edition articles are published on a much more powerful publishing platform that will allow for the introduction of many new capabilities.
Plus Edition subscribers may read the Plus Edition articles at any time by going to the newsletter's web site at http://www.eogn.com and clicking on "Read the Plus Edition Newsletter (user name and password required)." If you want to go right to the login screen instead of the main newsletter page, you can set a bookmark at http://www.eogn.com/blogplus. Either method will take you to the latest Plus Edition articles.
NOTE: This article has nothing to do with genealogy. I recently found some new technology that can save a lot of money on long-distance phone calls. I thought I would pass the information on to interested Plus Edition subscribers. If you are looking for genealogy-related articles, I suggest that you skip this one.
Who is that mysterious, elegant man? And why is he sitting on a dead horse?
Such are the questions sparked by a black-and-white photograph taken in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, between 1876 and 1884 that has led to nationwide curiosity, speculation and jokes. The picture is spreading on the Internet and is spawning many questions.
Nearly a month ago, I republished a brief announcement from Garrick Webster, Editor of Your Family Tree, a British genealogy publication. Garrick wrote that "Effective next month you'll be able to request information from 1911 [U.K.] Census records for a fee, and they're going to start putting the 1911 Census online three years early in 2009 (though not in its entirety)." The article can be found at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2006/12/1911_uk_census_.html.
The following announcement was written by the Indiana Historical Society:
Members of the community interested in learning how to take care of their original family documents at an upcoming preservation workshop presented by the Indiana Historical Society. “How to Preserve Original Family Documents” will be offered twice on Friday, Feb. 2, with sessions available at times of 9 a.m.-Noon and 1-4 p.m. The workshops will take place at the Indiana History Center, located at 450 W. Ohio St. in downtown Indianapolis.
The following is an announcement from the Germans from Russia Heritage Society:
The Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) is sponsoring a "Youth Essay Contest" for students. The purpose of this contest is to encourage students to learn about the history of the German Russian ethnic group. This year's theme is: "Germany/Russia/Americas… Giant Steppes toward Freedom".
Brigham Young University holds a great conference every year that focuses on the use of computers to aid in genealogy research. This year's even promises to be even bigger than last year's event. Here is the announcement of this year's conference:
The tenth annual Computerized Genealogy Conference at Brigham Young University has been scheduled for Friday and Saturday March 16 and 17, 2007. This conference is designed to be a how-to guide for everyone-beginning, intermediate, and advanced researchers. The focus of the conference is to help everyone learn how new computer programs and advancements in existing programs can help them be more effective in genealogy and family history work.
I had one of those "déjà vu" experiences this week. In this case, there was no impression of place. Instead, it was an impression of time. I felt that I was now living in a time that I had "experienced" some years ago.
Pam spent part of New Year's Eve organizing our collection of old genealogy magazines. She pulled out a copy of Ancestry Magazine that was exactly four years old: the December 2002 edition. She handed it to me and my eyes widened when I looked at the lead article: "What's In the Future for Genealogy?" Here was a four-year-old magazine article predicting what the future of genealogy would be like within the next few years. It is creepy that she stumbled over such an article on New Year's Eve, the one time of the year that many of us pause to reflect on the past and contemplate our future.
Now here's the strangest part: I wrote the article.
How accurate were my predictions? Did I score a hit or a miss? My hands trembled as I opened the magazine.
Ancestry.com now has the Hamburg Passenger Lists available online. These are lists of millions of emigrants from what is now Germany and a number of surrounding countries. These people left their homelands to go to North America and elsewhere.
The Ancestry.com collection now contains almost 200,000 images of original records. This is high-quality genealogy information: you can stay at home and view images of original records on your computer. The company plans to continue indexing the records until all of the original 5 million names are online.
Richard Michael Doherty and Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens are once again sponsoring genealogy research trips to Ireland. I have heard that participants on previous trips have enjoyed the experience so I suspect this year's trips will be equally popular. Here is the announcement written by Richard Michael Doherty and Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens:
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