Genealogy Reviews Online

Genealogy Snake Oil

I was enjoying a good program on History Channel International yesterday evening about underwater archaeology when a fascinating commercial came on.  I usually fast forward through commercials on my DVR, but I just couldn't take my eyes off of this one.  It was titled "Your Family Name" and had a fast talking man describing how, by calling a toll free number, you can have your name exhaustively researched and its history sent to you in a handsomely framed scroll or coat of arms.  The interesting part to me is the man alludes to exclusive databases containing all of your family history needs - after all he's the founder of the Historical Research Center.  The commercial also shows shots of old books in a library (I assume its the Historical Research Center) and even a woman thumbing through a book doing research I suppose.  It ends with happy families sitting around tables looking at the products they ordered learning an incredible amount about their names and family histories.  This is the coolest commercial ever.  I've seen many Ancestry.com commercials lately and they don't even come close to this one.

This commercial did seem familiar though.  It kind of looks like one of those late night things about super stain removers, wall hanging devices that can hold up to 50 pounds, and super tools having multiple applications.  I did a simple Google search on this guy's name and discovered the reason why everything looked so familiar.  Not only is he a family history expert, but he also developed the Ginsu Knife, the Rocket Chef food processor, and as his website says, "Chinese Woks to Power Tools and many more in between."

I expect everyone to add the Historical Research Center to their genealogy tool boxes (look, I've categorized this post as "genealogy resources."  After all, it sounds like they have incredible databases containing millions of names - I'm surprised Ancestry, FamilySearch, and Familylink haven't formed partnerships with this guy...if I could get a free Ginsu Knife collection by subscribing to Ancestry.com I would probably renew.  

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

World Digital Library

Early this morning I found an article in the Washington Post about a new effort by the United Nations to create the World Digital Library.  I Tweeted about it, but it seems the Washington Post changed the link and my original Tweet link doesn't work.  I was a little skeptical at first because of the United Nations connection, then I discovered it was really run by various world libraries headed up by the Library of Congress.  I have nothing against the UN in principle - I just think it's a generally ineffective organization.

The Washington Post article discusses the history of the effort, who's involved, etc., I just want to show you some cool things I found:

A history of Genghis Khan written in 1722. 

Apocalypse of Saint John printed in Germany in 1470 (in Latin)

Emigrant's Map and Guide for Routes to North America created in 1853 (in German)

Video of a New York Police Parade created in 1899.

This library is full of maps, photos, manuscripts and has potential as a very good historical resource.  The best part is it's free.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza - Italian Records Online

For a long time I've patiently waited for services like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and others to finally start putting useful Italian records online.  I just think it's so weird there are tons of Irish, English, German, Central and South American records online, but very few places where one can find enough Southern Italian records to make online research useful.  The few records Ancestry.com is offering are from Northern Italy where, compared to the South, relatively few immigrants originated - FamilySearch has zero Italian records.  I'm sure there is a very good reason for this, but I don't have a clue what it could be.

I guess I've looked in the wrong places.  This morning, in a round-about way, I discovered the Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza.  This is the Archives of Cosenza province, Calabria (basically the in-step of the Italian boot) and they have a searchable online database.  It just so happens both of my grandparents came from small towns in Cosenza so you can imagine my interest here. 

The opening page is a search form, but will not give you any results unless you register for the site.  I discovered this by searching for my surnames and some other common Italian names, but the results were always zero.  After registration the results started appearing. 

When you enter a name you get two lists.  The first is a list of people who are the subjects of the records, and a second list of other people mentioned in those records.  For example:  I entered my grandmother's maiden name "Rota" and this generated a list of 154 people, and the second list showed 21 other names mentioned in those records.

I was surpriseg at the types of records available.  I found birth, death, marriage, and what appears to be Army enlistment records.  Most of these are simply a transcription of enough of the document to create an index, but I did find actual images of a few documents recording the enlistment of a person.  There is also a nice bookmark feature where you can save a link to a particular record you want to come back to later.  The dates of the records appear to run from 1800 to 1900 and one of the best part of the site is you can toggle the transcriptions from Italian to English.  My understanding is that they are still adding records to their database.

The Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza is not a fancy site.  Sorry, but it has no social networking or family tree features that the subscription services are falling all over themselves to create as centerpieces of their sites.  It consists of just plain records...the kind real family historians love to dig into.

(The image above is the coat of arms of the Province of Cosenza)

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Voting With Their Mouse(s)

I have the feeling my readers (I mean my former readers) didn't take too kindly the views I expressed on genealogy resources.  My subscriber numbers went from hovering around 400 to 246 for today.  Hmmm...I think I see a trend here...I don't write anything for a month and my numbers of subscribers doesn't change (on an occasional day, they even go up).  I then write a post and the number drops by half...I thought my sarcasm was was fairly clear...or maybe, based on the comments I've seen on other blogs and in forums, genealogists just have no sense of humor.  Well, at least the 6 who commented on my post did, but the rest are voting with their Mouse(s) and unscribing. ( Or more likely it's another Google Feedburner problem) 

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Top 5 Absolutely Worst Genealogy Resources...Ever...I Mean These Are Horrible

Yawn...coming out of my cave as spring-time approaches...wait a minute, it's already here so I guess I over slept again.   As I'm waking up and rubbing my eyes, I have this incredible urge to list the Top 5 Worst Genealogy Resources - ever.  I don't know where this urge came from, but I've decided to just go with it because I know genealogists are relying on this blog to be an accurate genealogy resource.   

5.  Letters:  These are words strung together into sentences on paper (if you can believe this) written by people.  We all know how unreliable people are - especially those who have opinions different from our (my) own.  You would think this would be enough, but there's more.  Sometimes these letters are written in very poor handwriting and sometimes in an unintelligible foreign language.  It's ridiculous to call something a "resource" that takes a magnifying glass to determine if a letter is an "h" or a "k."   How can you trust anyone who doesn't use email or have a cool address like purplebunny@gmail.com.  Letters are so over-rated.

4.  Photos:  Photos are a big part of genealogy research and I've never understood why.  Come on now, do photos ever accurately portray people?  If you look at any old photo you'll see people who are stiff, appearing uncomfortable, and probably thinking "when is this going to be over?"  My kids act like that every time we try to get a family photo.  On the backs of many photos, people can write anything they want...even if it's not true...so you can never trust what's on the back.  I don't even think you can trust what's on the front.  I remember an item going around blogosphere awhile ago and the issue was whether or not the person depicted in the photo was alive or dead...huh?  Never trust a photo - front or back.

3.  Marriage records:  This should be obvious here...who would trust any record created under duress?  Now I have nothing against marriage, but most people are not in their right minds when they apply for a marriage license and some people aren't even there at all.  I'll use my own example here...the year was November 1990 and the US Army was preparing to go to war with Iraq (the first time).  We were sure I was going to be deployed soon so my wife (then my girl friend of course) went to the marriage license place in Annapolis, Maryland to get information in order to be ready to get married if I had to suddenly leave.  She returned saying she went ahead and applied for a license.  I said "huh?  But I wasn't there."  It turns out in Maryland only one person has to show up to apply for one...I didn't have to be there (still scratching my head over that one 20 years later).  When the license actually came in the mail I discovered I didn't have to sign anything to actually be married...only the minister had to sign the license at the wedding to make it official.  To this day I wonder if I'm really married since I didn't legally sign any contract.  This just goes to show you that marriage records are not the accurate resource they seem to be. 

Google is Taking Over the World

I don't know if many of you have noticed, but Google is quietly taking over the world.  As any genealogist will confirm, Google is a wonderful ancestor hunting tool - I mean there's a whole book written about using it for genealogy.  Even though it's a useful tool, I believe there are sinister plans at work here.

Look at this screen shot of my "My Account" page (I hope you can see it).  Now when I log in I can check to see if my Google Affiliate Network (formerly Performics) earnings have creeped passed zero; look at my Feedburner Stats and wonder what happened to the 400+ subscribers I had at one time; manage my genealogy Alerts; look at my favorite blogs using Google Reader; check out my microscopic Analytics; and read my Gmail (always empty).  There are many other things I could do through my Google account,  but I haven't begun using them yet.  Both Google Affiliate Network and Feedburner were separate independent services when I started using them, now they are integrated into the Google family of products.

On the surface this seems like a convenient (one stop) place to accomplish any number of tasks, but here's where it gets sinister.  They lure you in with all of these cool functions, but they don't tell you they are tracking every move you make on the Internet.  As long as you are logged into Google, they are collecting on you.  I forgot that many many months ago I allowed Google to collect my web searches.  Yesterday I re-discovered it and found right off the bat an embarrassing search I made recently...I heard on the radio about this woman and a 38kkk issue she had.  Well, I just had to see what that looked like so I searched for the term and it turns out Google saved the session for me and I was able to live it all over again.  Not only was this search saved, but every one I conducted (while logged in) since the service started in January 2007.  You can turn it off and delete your saved web history, but this is the internet...nothing is ever really deleted.  Google makes it sound like such a great thing, but does anyone really have a use for the web history service?

I believe we will eventually regret giving Google so much power, but until then I guess I'll keep using it...except for web history...I made sure it was turned off...I don't want to be reminded of my embarrassing searches.    

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Immigrant Ship - Stampalia

I was browsing the New York Times archives recently and stumbled across an article about the ship that delivered my grandmother to the port of Philidelphia in September 1913.  I knew that my grandmother came to the US on the ship Stampalia and also read about how the ship was sunk (Aug 17, 1916) during World War I, but the article I found was press reporting on the event only three days after the fact (Aug 20, 1916).  The article also provides additional details on the ship I hadn't seen before. 

I was so full of myself for finding this nugget, I kept looking for more and found another article( dated Aug 21, 1914) about the Stampalia.  It seems a US banker had a whacky adventure trying to get out of Italy shortly after the start of World War I, and he was able to finally get passage on the ship.  It's a good story, but I really like the description he gave of his accomodations (steerage) on the Stampalia.  It's a small part of the article, but it interests me because my grandmother was in steerage on that very ship about one year prior.

To me, this kind of discovery is more exciting than any other and also goes to show how important newspaper archives are to family history.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

FamilySearch Records

 

I saw the announcement about new collections added to FamilySearch and of course there weren't any Italian records (sorry for my continuous whining about this subject...that's just what I do).  I sat there depressed for a few minutes and then saw the feedback link and decided to ask them the question above.  I left a word out so I thought I'd add it here. 

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Northern New York Library Network - Looming Budget Cuts

The Northern New York Historical Newspaper database, on the Northern NY Library Network, is one of the best functioning resources of it's kind I've ever used.  Now I'm reading in their newsletter about massive state budget cuts which may impact this fantastic resource - I'm sure we are going to hear more news of this kind from around the country in the future.

While I was there, I did a little searching for my maternal 2nd great grandfather (Thomas Hartford) and discovered the coolest little snippet of news so often found in small town newspapers:

Thomas Hartford, an old gentleman of our little town, received a letter from his son in Colorado with $20 in money, his Christmas present.*

The sentence is talking about my g-g grandfather receiving a $20 Christmas present from my g-grandfather in Colorado.  I sure hope the budget cuts don't his the Northern NY Library Network too hard

* 1900, December 26.  News of the County, Grantville.  The Courier Freeman, Retrieved from http://news.nnyln.net/st-lawrence-county/.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Twitter and Facebook

 

     

 

I've been on Twitter since the beginning of last summer and started using Facebook when the genealogy world began the migration, but I'm still not sure what to think about them.  I wrote a post last July called "I'm on Facebook So Now What?" and the question still stands - What the heck should I be using these services for?

I do visit both every day and have to admit my voyeuristic tendencies probably keep me coming back.  Usually all I do on Facebook is look at the status updates ("tweets" on Twitter) and read about what people were doing at any particular time.  The strange part of it is I don't know any of the people who make these updates.  I've never exchanged so much as an email with the vast majority, but feel like I know them from these little one sentence snippets about what they are doing or thinking.  I actually feel a little guilty sometimesbecause it's like I'm eavesdropping on someone's private thoughts.  I know it's a situation where people have sent or accepted friendship requests, but with one or two exceptions, I really don't know any of the 76 people on my friends list.  So far I've mostly been an observer of everyone else - maybe I'm just one of those weird anti-social types who stays in the shadows...hmmm. 

I've never really used either for genealogy.  My blog feed goes into my profile and I've become a fan of a whole bunch of other genealogy blogs/groups/resources, but that's the extent of it.  I've seen a few conversations going on in the various groups and fan pages, but nothing like what I've seen in some of the genealogy forums and newsgroups out on the web.  I do enjoy seeing the photos people post while at various conferences and it was pretty cool seeing those posted of the recent blogger/communicator visit to The Generations Network.  I just wonder if anyone else gets any genealogy value from Facebook or Twitter besides the networking aspect.

From my observations, Facebook is mainly a place for socializing.  It does create an atmosphere of familiarity that in the past only came from real life interactions.  I imagine socializing on Facebook makes real life meetings less awkward - the folks at the TGN blogger meeting sure looked like old friends. 

Because I'm the weird anti-social type, and haven't participated in genealogy socializing either online or in real life, I wouldn't know about all this, but it sure is fun watching everyone else - come to think of it maybe this is what makes me a bit weird...      

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

New Additions at FamilySearch - as Usual No Italian Records

Many genealogy bloggers have recently written about new additions to the Family Search collection like at Renee's Genealogy Blog.  Everytime these announcemnts come out I quickly scan down the list looking for Italian records and everytime I'm disappointed.  I blogged about the lack of Italian records online last November and in that post I just couldn't figure out why...still can't.  FamilySearch has added Czech records, Hungarian records and records from Brazil, but nothing from Italy.

I have nothing against immigrants from the Czech Republic, Hungary, or Brazil, and am happy people can research their ancestors from these areas.  But Italian immigrants had a huge impact on this country in the 20th century and I wager the US would be a lot different today if Italy was prosperous in the early 1900s and the millions who left had stayed home.

I know my complaining won't help, but maybe whining on a regular basis will - my kids use this tactic and it appears to work occasionally.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Genea Christmas Gifts Everywhere

First the folks at Roots TV decided to give us commercial free viewing of their video collection, now Dick Eastman is giving us free access to his (+) Edition through Christmas day.  Now is the time to peek behind that (+) symbol on his free newsletter and see what you are missing.  At one time I did subscribe to the plus edition, but didn't renew when the subscription ran out.

I wonder who else is going to give us a Christmas present for free this year? 

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Genealogy During the Economic Meltdown

With General Motors and Ford running out of cash, banks collapsing, and other big companies reporting huge losses, families need to reassess their finances to make sure they don't go in the same  direction.  My wife and I were talking about our family spending habits the other day and both agreed we need to cut unnecessary spending in order to make sure we come out of the meltdown in good shape.  We looked at spending on food, entertainment, travel, kid activities the upcoming Christmas holidays, and did find some fat we should cut out of the budget.

While we didn't talk directly about my genealogy related spending habits (actually I manage to steer the conversation away from this topic), I thought it would be wise to at least consider (hypothetically of course) cuts in my genealogy spending.  Now I have to say I probably spend more than most on subscriptions, and I wouldn't be surprised if I've forgotten about some of them.  Here are the major genealogy sites where I pay for annual memberships:

Ancestry.com/$299.40
World Vital Records/$119.40
Footnote/$69.95
The Origins Network/$75.00
The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS)/$75.00
The Godfrey Memorial Library/$35.00

This comes to a surprising grand total of $673.35 to do my online genealogy tasks.  Add to this amount the cost of the Typepad blogging platform, multiple social security application requests a year, multiple requests per year for documents from the National Archives and the various State Archives and genealogy becomes a very expensive hobby.

Irish Genealogy Resource - "Information Wanted"

Here is another post generated from the search results of one of my readers.  I'm sure someone must have already written about this, but if they have, I've never seen it.  In March of 2005, the Boston Globe published a story about a new database coming online.  According to the article, the Catholic newspaper called The Boston Pilot published "want-ads" between between 1831-1921 focused on Irish immigrants looking for friends and family members.  These were actually a part of a regular "missing friends" column in the paper.  The Irish Studies department at Boston College gathered all of these missing friends ads from the paper, and established an "Information Wanted" database consisting of over 31000 names.

I did a little test run on the maiden name of my maternal second great grandmother Isabel Rafferty and came up with 18 hits.  Clicking on one of the results provides details on who placed the ad, the name of the missing person, fairly detailed information on where in Ireland they came from, and potentially a lot of other key data if it was known at the time the ad was placed.  I have no idea if any of these people are related to me, but I'm impressed with the information contained in the records.

This is a small database, but who knows...maybe someone will get lucky.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Find A Grave

      

Left, Thomas Hartford (1826-1911); Right, Isabel (Rafferty) Hartford (1824-1901)

Both are my great-great grandparents on the maternal side

Photos used with the permission of Find A Grave member Silentarcher99     

When I first started getting interested in genealogy (around 2003) I discovered Find A Grave, but had absolutely no luck at all, and never went back - at least to look for family members.  Occasionally I would check out the some of the famous graves, but would never again use the site as a genealogy resource since those first couple of times in 2003.

This morning, while playing around with the search function on World Vital Records, I came to a Find A Grave record (with headstone photo) for my second great grandfather.  Then I searched again (this time without going through WVR) for "Hartford" in New York, and discovered six family member records (the last six listed) with headstone photos taken by the Find A Grave member cited above.

I'm really amazed how Find A Grave has evolved since 2003.  The main page says it has "27 million grave records."  I looked for a couple other surnames of interest (Agazio, Zaring, Cone) and found results that weren't there in 2003 - in fact there were a couple of new leads I can follow.  I even found a few other grave records of ancestors and requested photos of the headstones.  Of course, I will now volunteer to take a few photos at graveyards near me as time permits. 

I'm sure most of you have used Find A Grave for years so this is probably old news, but since I've now rediscovered the site, I figured what the heck...might as well write about it.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Genealogy Surprises - Jennie W. Cone (1869-1934)

I've learned a couple of valuable lessons during the last month or so.  First, don't get discouraged about not finding people you're hunting for, and second, genealogy success will happen in the places you least expect.  Early in October, I wrote about the Dumb Luck involved in finding my paternal grandfather's immigration paperwork in (of all places) the Washington State Digital Archives.  Well, a similar kind of dumb luck struck me again.  I was checking out Family Search for recent updates and, like I said in my  "Dumb Luck" post, started entering in my surname list.  When I got to the "Cone" surname, I found the death certificate for one of my maternal great grandmothers Jennie Cone Zaring (1869-1934).  The exciting part of this find was I discovered she died in Ohio...I had no idea she ever lived there and never would have thought of looking in Ohio for a death certificate.

I knew when Jennie died and where she was buried (Colorado Springs, Colorado), but the big mystery for me was I had no idea where she died.  I assumed it was Colorado Springs, but couldn't find her death certificate in Colorado despite paying about $30 for a search.  I knew Jennie was in Colorado at least up to the mid 1920s because I have photos of her with my mother (born in 1920) who was five or six at the time.  I also found her in the 1930 census living with her daughter in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.  I looked for Jennie's death certificate here, but after paying another $30 or so, I found out there was no record. 

Finding her in Youngstown Ohio was quite a surprise.  According to the death certificate, Jennie died of a cerebral hemorrhage while living with her son Walter Zaring in Ohio.  She had 11 children and (wouldn't you know it) Walter was one of two I never research so I had no idea he lived in Ohio.  It's kind of sad, but it appears Jennie was being passed off from one child to another in her old age (her husband abandoned her in the early 1920s).

With all of the online databases being constantly updated it really pays to keep your surname list handy.  Every now and then just plug your list in to sites Family Search/Ancestry or whenever you find a new one.  Who knows, maybe you can have the same dumb luck I've had recently.      

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Dumb Luck - Again

So....I was surfing the Internet Monday evening and somehow I ended up on the Washington State Digital Archives page.  My brain is still a little fuzzy on how I got there, but when I saw the search box I started plugging in my surname list as I routinely do when I find sites like this.  I didn't get very far because after I entered "Agazio," I got a hit...and this is what caused my brain to get a little fuzzy.

I clicked on the one result under naturalization records, and I saw the name Antonio Agazio.  Hmmm...this was my grandfather's name.  Now before I clicked again I thought this couldn't be him.  Why would there be a naturalization record for my grandfather in Washington with a date of 1901 when I already have the petition for naturalization (1925) and declaration of intention (1922) he obtained in Colorado?  There have been so many false positives in my hunt for how this man came to the United States, but there was his name staring at me...so I took a breath and clicked.

As my luck sometimes seems to go in these matters, it was him.  Here's the record page and the actual declaration of intention my grandfather signed in 1908.  The exciting part about this find is the new information this document gives me.  I learned that he traveled from Italy to France; then to Liverpool, England; then to Quebec, Canada on a ship named "Lake Michigan."  Up to this point, I had no idea he was in France, England, or the name of the ship he sailed on to Canada.  I need to study the document closer and I will write more about what I find later.  I wonder why he went through the declaration of intention process twice?

The weird part of all of this is I wasn't really looking for him...it just kind of happened.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Federation of Genalogical Societies Conference

Here is yet another genealogy conference I can't attend.  The frustrating part about this one is I only live about 3.5-4 hours away from Philadelphia - getting there is easy, but getting the time to get there is another story.  Although I've never had any connection to a genealogy society, I was attracted to this one because of some of the presentations I saw scheduled.  While many appear centered on societies and the things they do, there are some practical presentations for those of us without society connections.  For example, here are a few of the presentations I would have loved to attend.  There's not a whole lot of info in the following links, but it was enough to tantalize me:

How to Find the Truth About a Family Story - Elizabeth Shown Mills

Finding a Woman's Maiden Name - Lisa Ilowite

Grandma's Shoebox:  All Her Treasures - Joan Kitchen Murry

Anatomy of a Pension File - Tony Burroughs

Grandpa Did What?!  Dealing with Family Skeletons and Stories - Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer

Playing Hide and Seek in the US Census - Steve Morse

There are many, many others, but these jumped out at me.  I also noticed another thing about the presenters of many of the sessions.  When I first looked at the program 3-4 months ago I didn't recognize the names of most of the people listed as presenters - this was pre-Facebook.  When I look at the program now, after the mad rush to Facebook, many of the names I now see look familiar...actually I can put a face to some of them.  I guess this is the good thing about Facebook - most are not anonymous anymore...except me of course.

Hopefully there will be other genealogy bloggers who will give us updates on how everything is going.

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Public Profiler - Mapping the World's Names - UPDATE

UPDATE to the UPDATE (2 Sep 2008):  I just checked the Public Profiler World Names site and it's now working!

I wrote a short little post about a cool new site having a lot of promise at about 8:45am on 30 Aug.  I was so excited because at the time, and to the best of my knowledge, I think I was the first genealogy blogger to write about this site - rarely am I the first at anything relating to genealogy.  Since I wrote the post, I've tried to use it every couple of hours and it hasn't worked...just my luck.  I either get a page saying the site is being updated, or an error message when I try to search for a name.  I think the owners of the site did not anticipate the amount of traffic they would bet after the BBC article.  I expected it would work after a day or so, but so far this is not the case.  One would think they would put some kind of explanation on their website about why the product isn't working.

Has anyone actually been able to successfully conduct a name search?

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online

Public Profiler - Mapping the World's Names

The BBC News has an article about a cool new tool where people can see how their surnames have dispersed across the world.  According to the article, "The Public Profiler site plots 10.8 million last names using data from electoral rolls and phone directories."  I wanted to try it out, but it appears the site was either being updated or was unavailable because of the traffic.  Rarely am I first genealogy blogger with this kind of news, and when I am, the site won't work...just my luck.  Maybe I'm not cut out for the breaking news thing.  So instead of saying what a great resource this thing is and tooting my own horn because I got it first, at this time, I can only say theoretically this is a great concept.  I've used country specific sites like this and they are very useful. 

Click here to subscribe to Genealogy Reviews Online