Thursday, January 25, 2018

JSTOR: the Great Online Genealogy Resource that Few Genealogists Know About

JSTOR: the Great Online Genealogy Resource that Few Genealogists Know About

Genealogy information can be found in many places. Most genealogists know about and use the various online sites that have census records, vital records, pension application files, and user-contributed family trees online. These are great resources but they are not the only ones available to us. For instance, have you used JSTOR?
JSTOR is an online library of hundreds of years of academic research and presently contains more than 1,900 journal titles in more than 50 disciplines. The web site started in 1995 as a site containing back issues of academic journals. Since then, JSTOR has grown to include books and primary sources, and current issues of journals.
A quick search for “genealogy” on the JSTOR web site produced 105,889 “hits” to that word.
As always, I searched for some of the surnames in my own family tree. Here is one that I found that can serve as a typical example of the information found on JSTOR:

JOURNAL ARTICLE
Eastman’s Maternal Ancestry: Letter from Charles Alexander Eastman to H. M. Hitchcock, September 8, 1927
A. LAVONNE BROWN RUOFF
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2, Vol. 17, No. 2, Honoring A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff (SUMMER 2005), pp. 10-17
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20737262
Page Count: 8
JSTOR provides full-text searches of more than 1,900 journals and more than a few of those are journals published by some of the most respected historical societies of our time. Most of the journals are published online on JSTOR about 3 to 5 years after publication in print. However, if a journal’s publishers agree, journals may be published even earlier.
Journals available in JSTOR typically do not contain lists of individual residents of an area. However, they are very useful for:
  • Researching historical figures, places, and events
  • Finding state- and region-specific information and history
  • Learning about immigration patterns, political movements, and social issues of the day
  • Some of the available online journals include:
The Arkansas Historical Quarterly published by the Arkansas Historical Association
  • Massachusetts Historical Review
  • Michigan Historical Review
  • Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
  • Wisconsin Magazine of History
  • Tennessee Historical Quarterly
The above is an abbreviated list; there are many more.
JSTOR is a subscription web site although it is possible to read up to three articles at no charge. Plans start at $9.99 per month or $99 per year if paid one year in advance. However, many libraries have subscriptions to JSTOR so it is possible to gain free access by visiting a local library in person or, in some cases, accessing JSTOR remotely by first logging onto your library’s web site and using its “gateway” to JSTOR. More than 7,000 academic institutions, public libraries, research institutions, museums, and schools in more than 150 countries have access.
JSTOR is available at: http://www.jstor.org.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

How DNA Testing Botched My Family's Heritage, and Probably Yours, Too

  How DNA Testing Botched My Family's Heritage, and Probably Yours, Too

 by Kristen V. Brown
Senior Writer, Gizmodo. 


Go to this website to see the complete, exact article for illustrations AND the comments which are quite valuable.  
https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-botched-my-familys-heritage-and-probab-1820932637



"My grandfather was caramel-skinned with black eyes and thick, dark hair, and until he discovered that he was adopted, he had no reason to suspect that he was not the son of two poor Mexicans as he’d always been told. When he found his adoption papers, according to family lore, he pestered the nuns at the Dallas orphanage where he had lived as an infant for the name of his birth mother. Name in hand, at 10 years old, he hopped a bus to Pennsylvania, met his birth mother, and found out that he was actually Syrian.
At least that’s what we thought until my Aunt Cat mailed a tube of her spit in to AncestryDNA.
Genetic testing suggested that my aunt’s genetic makeup was only a tiny bit Middle Eastern—16 percent, not the 50 percent you might expect if your father was a full-blooded Syrian, as my grandfather believed himself to be. The rest of her Ancestry breakdown provided some explanation, but mostly more confusion. While we typically think of the Caucasus as countries on the Black and Caspian seas like Turkey and Armenia, Ancestry’s test also said it includes Syria. According to Ancestry, the Caucasus accounted for another 15 percent of my Aunt Cat’s DNA. What about the other 20 percent? One line-item stood out as something my aunt hadn’t expected, based on what she knew about either of her parents: She was 30 percent Italian-Greek. My mother’s test revealed similar results.
This caused a minor family scandal. My grandfather’s mother was born in Pennsylvania, but she had lived in an insular Syrian community that never really assimilated. She became pregnant as a teen by her father’s best friend. The assumption had always been that he was Syrian, too. If we weren’t who we thought we were, well, then, who were we?
“I guess we never knew the name of Dad’s father,” my aunt told me, bemused. Suddenly it seemed as though all along we had been missing a gigantic puzzle piece of information about our family tree. At least, my aunt quipped, this was a solid explanation for why she loved pasta.
It’s right there in the fine print of any consumer DNA test, if you bother to read it: DNA testing can come with identity-disrupting surprises, be it an unexpected relative, genetic condition, or, in our case, heritage. But something about this particular surprise didn’t feel quite right."
My Aunt Cat is our family’s amateur genealogist, and she has logged hundreds of hours both on Ancestry.com and in my grandmother’s attic, piecing together the story of our family tree. She’s found countless third, fourth, and fifth cousins with ties to Syria, but no one from either Italy or Greece. In her twenties, she even visited my grandfather’s biological mother and aunt. She recalled them passing around a hookah, yelling in Arabic, and expressing repulsion at the American-style cold cut platter served at a community function. Given how segregated the family was, it seemed like a stretch, she told me, to imagine that anyone had ever had so much as a friendly conversation with an Italian.
I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.
My AncestryDNA test revealed that I, too, had geographic roots in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Southern Europe, along with the expected big dose of Scandinavian from my very Norwegian father. Weirdly, though, my percentages of Middle Eastern and Caucasus were almost as high as my mom and aunt’s, though you would expect them to be closer to half.
It got more confusing from there. My test through National Geographic (which partners with the DNA sequencing company Helix for its test) gave me even more links to the Middle East, with 16 percent of my DNA from Asia Minor, 6 percent from the Persian Gulf and 9 percent something called “Jewish Diaspora.” Unlike AncestryDNA, National Geographic’s test assigns your heritage to broad regions instead of modern nation-states. But I could infer that, according to National Geographic, I was less Scandinavian based on my percentage of Northwestern European. I was also more Southern European and, for fun, now had a good chunk of Eastern European thrown in there, too.
23andMe’s ancestry results were the most confounding of all. It found that I was only 3 percent Scandanavian, a number that, based on my recent family history, I know is flatly wrong. It also found I was only 5.5 percent Middle Eastern and a whopping 62.6 percent Northwestern European. And no Eastern European at all.
 I also uploaded my 23andMe data to GenCove, a small ancestry-test startup founded by scientists. Based on the exact same data that 23andMe had crunched, GenCove reported that 8 percent of my DNA was from the Indian subcontinent. 23andMe had found I had no South Asian DNA at all.
Four tests, four very different answers about where my DNA comes from—including some results that contradicted family history I felt confident was fact. What gives?
There are a few different factors at play here.
Genetics is inherently a comparative science: Data about your genes is determined by comparing them to the genes of other people.
As Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist and author of the excellent book “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived,” explained to me, we’ve got a fundamental misunderstanding of what an ancestry DNA test even does.
“They’re not telling you where your DNA comes from in the past,” he told me, “They’re telling you where on Earth your DNA is from today.”
Ancestry, for example, had determined that my Aunt Cat was 30 percent Italian by comparing her genes to other people in its database of more than six million people, and finding presumably that her genes had a lot of things in common with the present-day people of Italy.
Heritage DNA tests are more accurate for some groups of people than others, depending how many people with similar DNA to yours have already taken their test. Ancestry and 23andMe have actually both published papers about how their statistical modeling works.
As Ancestry puts it: “When considering AncestryDNA estimates of genetic ethnicity it is important to remember that our estimates are, in fact, estimates. The estimates are variable and depend on the method applied, the reference panel used, and the other customer samples included during estimation.”
That the data sets are primarily made up of paying customers also skews demographics. If there’s only a small number of Middle Eastern DNA samples that your DNA has been matched against, it’s less likely you’ll get a strong Middle Eastern match.
“Different companies have different reference data sets and different algorithms, hence the variance in results,” a spokesman from 23andMe told me. “Middle Eastern reference populations are not as well represented as European, an industry-wide challenge.”
As a person of Syrian descent, the British genealogist Debbie Kennett told me, my test was simply not going to be as accurate as fellow Americans whose relatives skew more European. “The tests are mainly geared for an American audience, and they tend to not have a lot of Middle Eastern ancestry,” she said.
Likewise, Kennett said, because relatively few English people have taken tests from American companies like Ancestry or 23andMe, residents of the U.K. are likely to find less useful results.
“A lot of English people come up with a low percentage of British. My dad was only 8 percent British and most of his ancestors as far back as I can trace came back from Great Britain,” she told me. “People in America come up with much higher percentage of British, often.”
Another anecdote that stuck with me came from my friend Alexis Madrigal. Initially, he said, his Mexican family came up as Arab North African, which was surprising. As 23andMe refined its test and its data set grew, it also refined the results: Now, he was descended from Jewish people from Southern Europe. The number of Madrigals in central Spain had long led the family to suspect that their migratory path to Mexico had at some point passed through this region. As more people took the test, the picture of where his family was “from” changed. The Canadian bioethicist Timothy Caulfield shared a similar story. At first a DNA test revealed he was entirely Irish, but as the data set changed, he gradually became less Irish.
When we talk about “ancestry,” we also don’t always mean the same thing. Ancestry just implies people you’re descended from. But when? In America, we often mean whenever our relatives came to the U.S. On my dad’s side, I expected to see a lot of Scandinavian, because just a few generations ago my great grandparents came from Norway to North Dakota. On my mom’s side, my grandmother has a relative that came to America on the Mayflower. Both are what come to mind when I think of my “ancestors,” but they are separated by several generations and hundreds of years in time. Rutherford pointed out that if we went 5oo years back, my ancestors were probably from all over Europe.
“You and I are probably fifth cousins,” he said.
Where your ancestors are from depends on what period in time you’re talking about. Why don’t I instead say I’m 50 percent North Dakotan and 50 percent Texan?
Tests also differ from one another because they’re simply looking at different things. The results of ancestry tests aren’t based on a reading of your whole genome. The vast majority of every human’s DNA is identical to any other human’s. Ancestry tests look at SNPs, the places on your genome where an individual letter tends to differ between people and give us insight into characteristics like disease, ancestry, and physical appearance. When an SNP occurs within a gene, then, in science-speak, that gene has more than one allele, or alternate forms of a gene that exist in the exact same place on a chromosome. To make matters more confusing, some tests look at mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA, while others don’t. 

The CEO of GenCove, the company where I had uploaded my 23andMe data to get drastically different results, told me that even though he expects a fair amount of variability between algorithms, even he was surprised at how differently his company and 23andMe had interpreted my DNA data. He asked me to also upload my Ancestry data, and ran both data sets again after GenCove’s algorithm had been updated. The results were all over the map.
“To be honest I’m a little confused about what’s going on,” CEO Joseph Pickrell told me.
Each testing company is looking at different alleles from different parts of the genome, and using different algorithms to crunch that data. (You can see a list of how company tests differ here.) It’s worth mentioning that genetics is also probabilistic: just because you have the gene, doesn’t mean you have the trait.
“One British company identified an allele in me that gave me ginger hair, and 23andMe didn’t,” said Rutherford. “That’s a simple case where they just used different alleles. That’s relatively simple to explain.”
And sometimes, the algorithms might just get it wrong. Rutherford told me his 23andMe test came back with a tiny amount of Native American DNA. The finding actually linked up with one anecdote from his family lore, about a relative of his father’s that was a Native American tribesman and horse jumper in a British traveling circus.
“As a geneticist, I am absolutely convinced that they’re not related,” he told me. “It’s just statistical noise that happens to coincide with this cool story.” Statistically, it’s unlikely that such tiny amount of Native American DNA would have been enough to show up on Rutherford’s test.
A big problem is that many of us have a basic misunderstanding of what exactly we’re reading when Ancestry or 23andMe or National Geographic sends us colorful infographics about how British or Irish or Scandinavian we are. It’s not that the science is bad. It’s that it’s inherently imperfect, an estimation based on how much our DNA matches up with people in other places around the world, in a world where people have been mixing and matching and getting it on since the beginning of human history.
“You’re creating different algorithms and you’re using different data sets as your reference points, so it makes sense that you’re going to get some different responses,” the Harvard geneticist Robert Green explained to me, as I tried to make sense of my own DNA data. “It’s not that one’s wrong and one’s right. It’s that there isn’t an agreed-upon approach to pick the right number of markers and combine them mathematically. Everyone is sort of just making it up as they go along.”

At the continental level, said Kennett, ancestry testing is useful. It can tell you pretty reliably whether you are African or Asian or European. It can also reliably identify close familial relatives, as distant as third or fourth cousins. Otherwise, Kennett said, “take it with a large pinch of salt.”
Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story said that, taken with the right mindset, ancestry DNA testing can be fun. As more people take DNA tests and company data sets grow, the results from those tests will also become more detailed and accurate. Anecdotally, I saw this in my own results. Ancestry has the biggest DNA database, and its interpretation of my DNA was also most in-line with what I expected.

“The more people that take tests, the better the experience for all of us,” an Ancestry spokesman told me. “Your DNA does not change, our science does.”
But consumer genetic testing companies have also fueled the misunderstanding of their products, suggesting that those colorful results reveal something profound about what makes you, you.
Take this AncestryDNA ad about Kyle Merker, who, the ads explains, grew up German, wearing a lederhosen and performing traditional German dances. Then an AncestryDNA test revealed he was actually Scottish and Irish. He bought a kilt.

Ancestry.com is suggesting—quite heavy-handedly—that your DNA can define your identity. A few changes to those As, Gs, Ts, and Cs, and all of the sudden you’re river dancing.
“Your culture is not your genes,” said Caulfield. “But the message these companies send is somehow where your genes are from matters. That’s not necessarily constructive. The role of genes in who we are is very complex. If anything, as genetic research moves forward we’re learning that it’s even more complex than we thought.”
In truth, your specific ancestors actually have relatively little impact on your DNA. Some 99.99 percent of your DNA is identical to every other human’s. We’re mostly just all the same. But instead of embracing our genetic similarities, we cling to those differences as symbols of what makes us unique. Consumer DNA testing tends to reinforce that—even though the difference that one test reveals might not even exist in another.
“These companies are asking people to pay for something that is at best trivial and at worst astrology,” said Rutherford. “The biggest lesson we can teach people is that DNA is probabilistic and not deterministic.”
Your DNA is only part of what determines who you are, even if the analysis of it is correct. Plenty of people love pasta, with or without Italian DNA.
If the messaging of consumer DNA companies more accurately reflected the science, though, it might be a lot less compelling: Spit in a tube and find out where on the planet it’s statistically probable that you share ancestry with today.
Learning he was Syrian did not seem to impact my grandfather’s identity as a Mexican man. And how could it? His life story was the story of so many children of immigrants. His father, Manuel, had swum the Rio Grande from Mexico to America in hopes of a better future. He worked as a waiter, and my great-grandmother as a seamstress. At age 10, my grandfather was sent to work at a Coca-Cola bottling plant to help the family make ends meet. He lost a finger. Eventually, he met my blonde-haired, blue-eyed grandmother and moved to California, hoping to raise their children somewhere it would matter less that one of their parents spoke Spanish as a first language.
But me, I don’t even look the part. I’m fair with blue eyes. As a kid, I remember wincing when my friend’s mom made xenophobic comments directed at Mexicans, never suspecting her daughter’s fair friend had some Mexican ties, even if they were not by blood but by heart. As an adult, I learned Arabic and perfected my tamale-making, all in search of some sort of an identity fit. When my grandfather was dying, I struggled with the relationship between DNA and cultural identity. I wondered what would become of my Mexican heritage, once my last living link to it was gone.
In the end, I finally found the same wisdom my grandfather never seemed to question. Sometimes your heritage doesn’t have anything at all to do with your genetics—and I didn’t even have to spit in a test tube to figure it out."

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Why Was the Information Removed from Online? Comment on Wayback Machine

Why Was the Information Removed from Online?

NOTE: This is a slightly updated version of an article I published about a year ago. A newsletter reader sent a message to me recently expressing dissatisfaction with records that once were available online but recently have disappeared. I am offering this republished article as an explanation about why we should not be surprised when that happens. I believe that every genealogist should understand why this happens so this article bears repeating every year or two. Please feel free to republish this article in newsletters, message boards, or forward it in email messages as you see fit.
I will also offer a suggestion as to making sure you keep your own copies of online records that are valuable to you.
A newsletter reader sent an email message to me recently expressing dissatisfaction that a set of images of vital records has been removed from one of the very popular genealogy sites. Indeed, removal of any online records of genealogical value is sad, but not unusual. Changes such as these are quite common on FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Ancestry.com, Fold3, FindMyPast, and many other genealogy sites that provide digital images of old records online. Removal of datasets has occurred dozens of times in the past, and I suspect such things will continue to happen in the future. I thought I would write a brief explanation.


In almost all cases, information of genealogical value obtained from government agencies, religious groups, museums, genealogy societies, and other organizations is provided under contractual agreements. The contracts specify what information is to provided, how it is to be made available, and what price the web site has to pay to the provider for the records. All contracts also have a defined expiration date, typically 2 years or 3 years or perhaps 5 years after the contract is signed.

When a contract nears expiration, the two parties usually attempt to renegotiate the contract. Sometimes renewal is automatic, but more often it is not. Maybe the information provider (the government agency, religious group, museum, genealogy society, and other organization) decides they want more money, or maybe they decide they no longer want to supply the data to the online genealogy service. For instance, in the time the information has been available online, the information provider may have learned just how valuable the information really is. The information provider may decide to ask for more money or may even refuse to provide the information any more since the provider may have a NEW plan to create their own web site and offer the same information online on their own, new web site for a fee.
Sure, that stinks for those of us who would like to have the information everywhere; but, it makes sense to most everyone else. I am sure the budget officer at most any state or local government archive thinks it makes sense.

Every contract renegotiation is different, but it is not unusual to agree to disagree. The contract ends, and the web site provider legally MUST remove the information from their web site. The same thing frequently happens to all the other online sites that provide old records online.

Moral of this story: If you find a record online that is valuable to you, SAVE IT NOW! Save it to your hard drive and make a backup copy someplace else as well. If there is no option to save, make a screen shot and save it on your hard drive or some other place where it will last for many years. Just because you can see the record online today does not mean that it will be available tomorrow.

COMMENTS

if you can’t download Dick, you gotta love screenshots or saving the page to a pdf ! Like
 
Recently, the link I used in my research of the Ryder family, freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~rclarke/page1/ryder.htm, no longer pointed to the same Ryder branch. I entered the url in the archive.org “Wayback Machine” and was pleased to find several dates where archive.org had saved the information. I was back in business. Basically, if you have a url that no longer works, try out the “Wayback Machine”. It has over 300 billion web pages saved there.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Hurricanes and Your Genealogy Data

Hurricanes and Your Genealogy Data

The recent Hurricane Harvey, the present Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Jose presently in tropical waters that might head northward all bring to mind questions, such as “How do I protect my personal belongings and information?”

I cannot speak to protecting belongings. However, I have written many times about preserving personal genealogy information that perhaps you spent years accumulating. The same procedures will also protect your family documents, insurance policies, photographs, and much more of the paper we all accumulate.
Many of the people who live through hurricanes will lose all paper documentation of their existence. Some cannot even not prove they ever lived. This is where going paperless can help.


My suggestion is to make digital copies of ALL PAPER WORTH SAVING, not just genealogy information, but also deeds or mortgage papers, bank and money information, birth certificates, passports, discharge papers, graduation and school records, medical records (especially if there is a chronic health problem), family pictures, and more. The list goes on and on. Scan each document and save each digital image to multiple locations.

For instance, you might save the copy on a thumb drive and on an external hard drive. That protects data lost from your computer but does not provide safety when your entire house is damaged or destroyed. In the case of flood waters, a burst water pipe, fires, or even the destruction of an entire house, the only protection of data is: multiple copies stored in multiple distant locations.

You can save the data to a thumb drive stored in a desk drawer at work, saved to a hard drive or a thumb drive at a relative’s distant house, or to a secure cloud-based file storage service. The choice is yours to make. However, I strongly suggest you keep multiple copies both at home and in other locations many miles away.

Thursday, August 10, 2017

ROOTSTECH 2017 FREE Session Links Available Online

 NOTE: This is for online streaming only--no downloads are available.
For original site (Thomas MacEntee Blog) go to: http://www.geneabloggers.com/rootstech-2017-session-videos-now-available/
 
If you were not able to attend the amazing RootsTech 2017 Conference  OR perhaps you were there, but missed a session, now you can view the recorded sessions from the comfort of your home. Thanks to FamilySearch and RootsTech for making these education videos available!
Wednesday, February 8, 2017 Sessions – click here!
  • Full Session: Innovator Summit General Session 2017
  • Liz Wiseman: Innovator Summit General Session 2017
  • Steve Rockwood: Innovator Summit General Session 2017
  • Ben Bennett; Craig Bott, Grow Utah; Heather Holmes, TapGenes; Nick Jones, JRNL, Inc; Robert Kehrer, FamilySearch: Industry Trends and Outlook
  • Cydni Tetro: Innovation: Best Practices and Applications
  • Showdown Semi-Finalists: Innovator Showdown Semi-Final
  • Alison Taylor, Pictures and Stories: Metadata—Writing on the Back of a Digital Photo
  • Tamra Stansfield: Family at the Center: Making the FHC a Sacred Place
  • Allison Kimball; Crystal Farish; Risa Baker; Rhonna Farrer: Grandma’s Syrup: Fortifying Your Home with Family History
Thursday, February 9, 2017 Sessions – click here!
  • Drew and Jonathan Scott: RootsTech General Session 2017
  • Steve Rockwood: RootsTech General Session 2017
  • MyHeritage: RootsTech General Session Sponsor 2017
  • Kelli Bergheimer: Getting Started in Genealogy
  • Diahan Southard, Your DNA Guide: DNA: The Glue that Holds Families Together
  • Dana Drutman: DNA Matching on MyHeritage
  • Bryan Austad: Building Powerful Youth Consultants
  • Lara Diamond: Jewish Genealogy: Where to Look and What’s Available
  • Angie Bush: My Ancestors are in MY DNA!
  • Crystal Farish; Rhonna Farrer: Family History Is Anything but Boring
Friday, February 10, 2017 Sessions – click here!
  • Kenyatta Berry; Sherri Camp; Melvin Collier: RootsTech General Session 2017: African Heritage Presentations
  • Findmypast: RootsTech General Session Sponsor 2017
  • Brian Braithwaite; Linda Gulbrandsen; Ryan Koelliker; Stephen Shumway: FamilySearch and Partners: Using All the Resources to Find Your Ancestors
  • Jason Hewlett and Finalists: Innovator Showdown Finals 2017
  • Judy G. Russell: Mothers, Daughters, Wives: Tracing Female Lines
  • Mary Kircher Roddy: Censational Census Strategies
  • Amy Harris: Next Steps in British Research
  • Rod DeGiulio: Understanding Your Family History Calling
  • Sunny Morton: Big 4: Comparing Ancestry, findmypast, FamilySearch and MyHeritage
  • Rorey Cathcart; D. Joshua Taylor; Rich Venezia: You Found it Where? Unusual Records
  • Diane Loosle: Begin at the Beginning 2017: Helping Others Love Family History
  • Jen Baldwin: Cross the Atlantic with Religious Records
  • Anna Graff; Jennifer Hadley; Katie Smith; Andrew Thomas; Tyler Thorsted: How to Preserve Your Family Heirlooms
Saturday, February 11, 2017 Sessions – click here!
  • Buddy Valastro: RootsTech General Session 2017
  • CeCe Moore: RootsTech General Session 2017
  • Ancestry: RootsTech General Session Sponsor 2017
  • Steve Reed, JRNL, Inc.: Journaling Principles that Work
  • Crista Cowan, Ancestry: Don’t Just Be a Searcher, Be a Researcher
  • Katherine R. Willson: Creating Google Alerts for Your Genealogy
  • Dallin Lowder; Julia Carlson: Youth + Consultants = Awesome
  • Anne Metcalf; Gregg Richardson: Getting Started with Finding Your Ancestors
Also, the RootsTech 2016 Video Archive is still available online – click here!
©2017, copyright Thomas MacEntee. All rights reserved.

Monday, August 7, 2017

FT Magazine 101 Best Websites of 2017

Best FREE Genealogy Websites of 2017: The Big Sites

8/3/2017
On these genealogy websites, you can search databases of ancestor names and digitized records—and it's all free.


Access Genealogy 

This grab-bag of free genealogy records keeps growing. Click the Databases tab to search data from Southern states, military records, small-town newspapers and the Guion Miller Roll index to Cherokee tribal members. The latter supplements what was already a must-bookmark site if you have Native American roots.

Allen County Public Library 

Though based in Indiana, this library’s online reach extends much further—reflecting its status as the nation’s second-richest genealogy library. Special collections focus on Native American, African American, military and family Bible records.

FamilySearch 

More than 2,200 online collections (and growing) make this the internet’s largest home to free genealogy data, with recent updates spotlighting Italy, South America and US vital records. You can share and record your finds in family trees and a “Memories Gallery,” and get research help from the wiki.

HeritageQuest Online 

Free to your home computer courtesy of your library card via participating institutions, HeritageQuest is now “powered by” (but not owned by) Ancestry.com. This partnership has dramatically expanded its half-dozen collections to a sort of “Ancestry.com lite,” including the complete US census, military and immigration records, and city directories. Click Search and scroll all the way to the bottom to unlock more US records as well as selected foreign databases.

Library of Congress 

Though not specifically focused on genealogy, the nation’s library has plenty to offer online, including the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, the American Memory collection and its own comprehensive catalog.

National Archives and Records Administration 

Read all about the genealogical treasures stored at the National Archives, order military and other records, and browse historical maps and photos. Access to Archival Databases serves up files ranging from WWII enlistments to passenger lists for millions of German, Irish, Russian and Italian immigrants.

Olive Tree Genealogy  

Since its launch in 1996, this modest website has grown into a useful collection of how-to help and databases. It’s strongest on passenger records, heritage groups such as Palatines and American Indians, and less-familiar records, such as those for residents of orphans and almshouses.

RootsWeb 

This venerable free site still serves up how-to articles, databases of surnames and US locations, mailing lists, pedigree files and much more—making it an oldie but a goodie.

USGenWeb 

This volunteer site recently celebrated its 20th birthday with a mobile-friendly update. Its state and county pages and special projects remain as vibrant as ever. Just found an ancestor who lived in, say, Stone County, Ark.? There’s a page for that, as for almost every other place your family may have landed.

See the rest of our 101 Best Websites for Genealogy in 2017:

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Pass It Down Reinvents the Greeting Card to Help Capture Family Memories

Pass It Down Reinvents the Greeting Card to Help Capture Family Memories

I haven’t had this in my hands yet but it certainly looks interesting. Here is the announcement from Pass It Down:
greetingStory™ makes it simple and fun to capture family stories one greeting card at a time.


Chattanooga, Tenn. (July 18, 2017) – Pass It Down, an award-winning storytelling platform that makes it easy to digitally record and preserve family memories, announced today the launch of its first physical product, greetingStory™. greetingStory™ reinvents the greeting card, making it easy to capture family memories and handwriting, reconnect with loved ones and preserve family stories.


“Our goal at Pass It Down is to create innovative and affordable ways for every family to capture their treasured memories,” said Pass It Down CEO and Founder Chris Cummings. “Today’s technology allows us to simplify everything we do, and we think capturing and sharing family memories should be no different. With the launch of greetingStory™, families have an effortless, interactive and effective way to capture each of their special memories, one question at a time.”
greetingStory™ is great in its simplicity. Each greetingStory™ card features a question on the cover, with included tips and instructions from top biographers to help guide loved ones in sharing their memories. The cards feature two prominent spaces to share memories and to capture loved one’s handwriting. Every card includes a QR code on the back, allowing the user to upload a loved one’s story into the Pass It Down platform. The platform can also host additional video, audio, text and photos, completing the story. A complete story can be shared with the entire family, serving as a permanent, digital memory book for everyone.
Families can choose between two options for greetingStory cards. Worldwide, Pass It Down offers greetingStory™ Memory Boxes that include 12, 24 or 48 cards and envelopes. In the US, Pass It Down offers a subscription model where you can send a family member one, two or four cards per month. Each card includes a pre-paid return envelope to send the card back to the customer.
“Imagine being able to send your mom or dad 24 cards a year, in a personalized envelope, asking about their life and their legacy. We automate the process for families, and our pre-paid return envelopes ensure that it is extremely simple for your relative to get the cards back to you” said Cummings.
For more information about greetingStory, please visit www.passitdown.com or connect with Pass It Down on Twitter (@passitdown).

Family Buys Hilarious Birthday Card for Grandpa, Finds Out it has an Old Family Photo

Family Buys Hilarious Birthday Card for Grandpa, Finds Out it has an Old Family Photo

Family photos are where you find them!
A 12-year-old in Kansas recently found a hilarious card to give to her grandfather for his 74th birthday. The card had a very old-fashioned family photo on the front, with everyone looking very stern and serious. On top it said, “It’s your birthday!” Her mother also laughed when she saw the card. Then she stopped laughing when she looked closer.

A man in the photo looked a lot like her grandfather and of her great-grandmother. The family gave the card to the 74-year-old man celebrating his birthday. He got all excited as he realized the picture was of his father, his grandmother, and of a number of his other relatives! It was a photo he had never seen before.

In fact, the family eventually was able to locate the original photo the card was made from. The family identified almost everyone in the photo that was taken in 1906 at a wedding.
You can read the details in an article in the Epoch Times web site at: http://bit.ly/2taHCeC.
My thanks to newsletter reader Karen Parker for telling me about this story.

Huge Genealogical Database of Ukrainians Born in 1650–1920 is Now Online

Huge Genealogical Database of Ukrainians Born in 1650–1920 is Now Online

According to EuroMaiden Press at http://bit.ly/2tbqm9k:
A huge database of people born in the territory of contemporary Ukraine between 1650 and 1920 became available online this week. Its opening crowned the four-year efforts of activists to digitize, systematize, and assemble countless entries from historical documents—but is not the final point of the project.

The database includes 2.56 mn people and is expected to reach 4 to 5 mn in 2019. The access to its contents is and will remain free of charge. The sources of data are manifold: birth registers, fiscal and parish censuses, lists of nobility, voters, the military, and victims of repressions, address directories, and other documents produced under the Tsardom of Muscovy, Russian and Habsburg Empires, Poland and the Soviet Union. A Roman-letter version of the data index is reportedly to be enabled in the coming months.

All the users who register profiles on the project’s website pra.in.ua can construct their own family trees. Nearly 18 thousand trees have been created in the first couple of days following the official inauguration of the site.
You can read the full article at: http://bit.ly/2tbqm9k.
I normally look at web sites and make a quick evaluation before I write about them. However, the web site at https://pra.in.ua/ is in Ukrainian, not one of my languages. I will simply mention the site and leave it to you, the reader, to decide how useful it is for you. I assume you can read Ukrainian.
I did attempt to use Google Translate but the results were mixed. For instance, I wondered if there is a fee to use this site. Google translates reports, “To support the project financially. We have access to the database free of charge, but to base the project developed and increased resources are needed.”
O)n a different web page, Google Translate provided the following words: “Access to the database is free. All costs of creating the portal, its administration, technical support, development, work with documents and content indexing database implemented entirely by donations from outside users.”
The Ukrainian births database is available at: https://pra.in.ua.
The article in the EuroMaiden Press reports, “A Roman-letter version of the data index is reportedly to be enabled in the coming months.”

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

FamilySearch to Discontinue Microfilm Distribution

FamilySearch to Discontinue its Microfilm Distribution Services

This announcement shouldn’t surprise any genealogists. The end of microfilm has been predicted for years. Microfilm and microfiche has become harder and harder to purchase. Most of the manufacturers have stopped producing microfilm and microfiche so the companies and non-profits that release information on film have been forced to abandon the media.
Over 1.5 million microfilms (ca. 1.5 billion images) have been digitized by FamilySearch, including the most requested collections based on microfilm loan records worldwide. In addition, many records that FamilySearch has not yet published can be found online on partner or free archive websites. FamilySearch plans to finish microfilm digitization by 2020.
The following is an extract from the announcement from FamilySearch:
On September 1, 2017, FamilySearch will discontinue its microfilm distribution services. (The last day to order microfilm will be on August 31, 2017.)
The change is the result of significant progress made in FamilySearch’s microfilm digitization efforts and the obsolescence of microfilm technology.

  • Online access to digital images of records allows FamilySearch to reach many more people, faster and more efficiently.
  • FamilySearch is a global leader in historic records preservation and access, with billions of the world’s genealogical records in its collections.
  • Over 1.5 million microfilms (ca. 1.5 billion images) have been digitized by FamilySearch, including the most requested collections based on microfilm loan records worldwide.
  • The remaining microfilms should be digitized by the end of 2020, and all new records from its ongoing global efforts are already using digital camera equipment.
  • Family history centers will continue to provide access to relevant technology, premium subscription services, and digital records, including restricted content not available at home.
You can read the full announcement at: http://bit.ly/2sGGePz.
Frequently Asked Questions about the change may be found at: http://bit.ly/2s6OvO6.