Online Vital Records

Looking for online vital records? If your your answer is no, shame on you. If it is yes, I have another question for you. Have you looked at Genealogy Roots Blog lately? If not it will be in your interest to do so. There have been several updates lately. I hope some of them are for an area in which you are searching.

Cleveland Public Cemetery Records Online

Those of you who have ancestors who may have died in Cleveland will want to check the new database created by the East Cuyahoga County Genealogical Society, As reported by Dick Eastman in a recent issue of his newsletter, the database contains almost 359,000 records from the publically owned cemeteries in Cleveland. More than half that total come from just 2 cemeteries—Highland Park and Woodland. The dates covered vary. Some are from as early as 1813 (Alger); and others (Woodland) extend up to 2001. Dick says, “The online records typically include not only when and where the deceased died, but also how the person died, how old they were when they died, where they lived, who the undertaker was, and the date they were buried.” Cemetery plot maps are included and will be valuable if you find an ancestor and wish to visit their burial site.

If you use the All Cemeteries Cumulative Index, you may want to use your browser's "Find" command to quickly locate names of interest after you have opened the appropriate image.

UK Research Sites

What sites do the genealogy experts in the UK use? 
The instructors at Pharos have been keeping track of where they spend their research time online. Their results serve as a great guide for where the rest of us should be searching our UK ancestors. The general resources are listed at the end---after the country specific sites for England, Scotland, Wales & Ireland. Happy searching and Happy Holidays!

French Family History Records Free This Weekend

Dick Eastman passed along an announcement that may be useful to many of you in his Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter. The item is titled "Millions of French Family History Records Free This All Saints Day Weekend on Ancestry.ca." For details follow the link above to Dick's post from last night.

Maps of Missouri

The University of Missouri Libraries are developing a great resource for genealogists and other researchers. Among other images in its Digital Library are great collections of maps. I will mention only two of these in this post.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Company published detailed maps of cities and towns to enable insurance companies to assess risk. These are great for finding buildings during the last half of the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century. If your Missouri ancestors lived in one of the almost 400 towns covered by this series, you may be able to find them in one or more of these maps.

If on the other hand, your ancestor lived on a farm, you will want to check out the Plat Book collection that covers almost all the entire state of Missouri.These were published in 1930 so the locations shown were ownership of land prior to that time.

These are just two collections contained in this impressive Digital Library. You also will want to explore the other treasures that can be found here.

The Huntington's Early California Population Project

Thank you to Martha Graham for her tip about this site:

"The Early California Population Project (ECPP) provides public access to all the information contained in California's historic mission registers, records that are of unique and vital importance to the study of California, the American Southwest, and colonial America.

Within the baptism, marriage, and burial records of each of the California missions sits an extraordinary wealth of unique information on the Indians, soldiers, and settlers of Alta California from 1769 - 1850."


While the site is very data rich if you are researching early California ancestors, it is difficult to navigate. The site is free but does require registration. This cooperative project is made possible through major grants from:

The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation

Additional support was provided by:

The Dan Murphy Foundation

Giles W. & Elise G. Mead Foundation

USC / Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute 

Family Bible Index

To many, Family Bibles are considered the Holy Grail of genealogy research. For those few lucky researchers who are able to find one, these can be a very thrilling and useful discovery. 


"Index to Early Bible Records" currently lists over 6,000 Bibles that have been placed online from a variety of locations or are available from the Family History Library or the DAR Library.

Bible records are not always the "Gospel" truth when it comes to family information. It must be evaluated with the same scrutiny as any other source of information. The first thing to check is the copyright date of the Bible. If it is later than some of the information included in it, then even a "Bible record" is NOT a primary source. Those events were not recorded at the time or near the time of the events it lists. It is a good sign if the entries appear to have been made with different pens. That is one indication that events were recorded at different times--hopefully as each event occurred. With those caveats in mind, explore this Index, and good luck in finding one for your family.

Minnesota Marriage Index

A new Minnesota Official Marriage System (MOMS) is now making good headway. Although it is described as a work in progress, it seems to be well on its way to completion. It is intended to be a state wide index that is the front end for online ordering of the marriage certificates. The index seems to be flexible and in itself contains much genealogical information.  My own quick exploration was limited to Hennepin and Nicollet Counties. Based on the several searches I conducted it appears the coverage extends forward in time until it overlaps with the Minnesota Marriage Collection, 1958-2001 already online at Ancestry.com. I also found some records from the last quarter of the 19th Century. A more compete description of the project has been prepared by Park Books and can be found at "Minnesota Marriages Records". 

New Irish Records Now Online

County records are coming online in Ireland every two or three months. County Limerick is the most recent to join this effort. Today the Irish Family History Foundation's Online Research Service (ORS) announced "the availability of an additional 100,000 birth, death, marriage and census records from Limerick Genealogy covering the parishes and districts of County Limerick."

Thus County Limerick joins most of the rest of Ireland in this project. In order to see if the county in which you have an interest has provided online access to its records, check out the interactive map. These records are made available on a pay as you go system where you can pay with your credit card to be able to download records. You can search for free but a nominal amount will be deducted from your deposit if you view the actual record and download it. It is similar to contacting a vital records office here and paying a small fee to get a copy of the record except the entire transaction is online.

Revolutionary War Pensions Addendum

In yesterday's post I neglected to mention HeritageQuest--an online database which is available in about 7,000 public libraries across the US. HeritageQuest has a section on the Revolutionary War which includes pension records. Its search engine is much simpler to use than the one at Footnote. Sometimes that is an advantage and sometimes it is not.

A big advantage for using HeritageQuest is that most public libraries that subscribe allow their registered patrons to search it from home by entering the bar code found on your library card. To check this out, go to the web page for your local library. Select databases and then HeritageQuest. Enter your bar code number from your library card when you are asked for an ID.

Revolutionary War Pensions

You might think Revolutionary War pensions were started in the late 18th Century. However, in general that was not the case. Some states did initiate payments then to disabled veterans and occasionally to others. For information about those, the documentation would be found mainly at the archives of the individual state. However, the majority of pensions were not awarded until the early 19th Century. It was only then the the federal government got involved.

The first major pension act for the assistance of veterans, their widows and some other dependents was not enacted until 1818. So many pensions were approved that Congress had to appropriate additional funds. However, many applications were at least initially denied. As a genealogist, you should hope that the application of your ancestor was one of the latter. Applications that were immediately approved generated very little paperwork. Denied applications, on the other hand, sometimes resulted in voluminous files of correspondence back and forth which is often rich with genealogical information. Some of these applications disputes extended well into the middle of the 19th Century before they were resolved.

These pension applications files are housed at the National Archives. The easiest way to access them is through Footnote.com. Footnote is a pay site. If you are not going to use it frequently, you may wish to look for a nearby library which subscribes. Most local Family History Centers of the LDS Church hold such subscriptions for their patrons as do some public libraries. Check with you local library or family history center for information.

According to a newspaper article published in the Star of Christchurch, NZ in 1902, there were still three widows receiving pensions based on the service of their spouses during the Revolutionary War.

Among the jewels I have found in Revolutionary War pension files is the only official confirmation I have been able to find of the parentage of my 3rd great-grandfather, Peter Dowell, who was born in 1788. His mother initiated a request for a widow's pension in her old age. It was denied several times but Mary persisted until her death in 1853. A few weeks after her death a notice came that the pension had been approved. Then the amount approved for her had to be paid to her surviving children which were listed as Peter and his sister Elizabeth (Dowell) Johnson wife of Ambrose Johnson.

Take a look at the beta FamilySearch Catalog

Take a look at the beta FamilySearch Catalog. FamilySearch is beta testing a new portal catalog and is looking for your feedback. Take a look at this now while you can participate in shaping this important tool into something that can be useful to you and others in the future. It certainly has a cleaner look than the previous version. Share your thoughts about it in the comments box below AND with the development team through the above link.

Enjoy!

4th of July @ the US National Archives

What could be more appropriate than a visit to the United States Nation Archives on the 4th of July? This is the second in my discussion of genealogy research sites in our nation's capitol. The Archives contain an incomprehensible amount of documents that are byproducts of the work of various offices of our federal government.

It was only a little over a decade ago when one had to visit the National Archives, one of it's regional branches or a large and specialized genealogy library to be able to review census records. How times have changed. Today we have come to expect to be able to review census records in more than 2,000 libraries who subscribe to Ancestry Library Edition or even from the comforts of home if one is fortunate enough to have a personal subscription to Ancestry. In addition, Footnote.com is in the process of opening a wealth of other documents to armchair researchers. One thing for researchers to remember is that documents created by the federal government are not protected by copyright as they are considered to be in the public domain.

I will not pretend to describe all the resources available at the National Archives. I would suggest that your exploration begin but not be restricted to the page on Resources for Genealogists and Family Historians. Also visit Inside the Vaults - The Declaration of Independence to see a short video about the document which celebrates its 234th birthday today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE!

Washington, DC Researching--Library of Congress

I'm in Washington, DC where I am attending the American Library Association (ALA) as a member of the Association's Genealogy Committee. I will chair that committee for the coming year. Unfortunately my participation in the conference is cutting into my research time because Washington is one of my favorite research sites. The top three sites for genealogists here are:
1. The Library of Congress (LC)
2. The National Archives (NARA)
3. The Library of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)

I'm on my way to another ALA meeting so I'll just introduce LC briefly in this post. Two of these organizations are libraries and therefore collect a wide array of materials of interest to genealogist. LC may be the largest library in the world and contains all kinds of materials on any topic you can imagine and in any format you can think of. The purpose of LC is to provide members of Congress and their staff with all the information they might need to know on any topic. Sometimes a way to get information from LC is to send a research question to your member of Congress and hope that the member's staff will forward your inquiry to a subject specialist in the Congressional Reference Service of LC.

I would recommend that you check LC's website even if you think you are somewhat familiar with LC. Something new is always being added. Lots of digital content of interest to genealogists is available online through the American Memory project. More is being added daily.

Of course LC is is a library and you will want to do search the LC Catalogs. This process may not be as user friendly as you would like but your results should be worth your effort. The on screen directions should help you navigate.

Visiting LC in person can be very rewarding but it is intimidating to a first time researcher. LC is an entire complex of three buildings--each of which is a square block in size. The buildings are connected by underground tunnels. Security is high as it is in most buildings in Washington. You may have to go through a metal detector and have your bags searched to enter but you won't have to take to take off your shoes as you do at the airport. You will have to register and get a picture ID that will serve as your library card. You also will have to register your laptop and camera and "un-register" them as you leave. This is partly for the security of your toys to make sure the person who tries to remove them from the building is the one who brought them in. There are always interesting displays for tour groups. You will probably want to go to the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room which has a very helpful website. LC is a closed stack library which means you have to fill out call slips and request the materials you want. It can take up to an hour for the materials to be retrieved for you. The reading room has a small but interesting collection of back runs of genealogy journals you can peruse as you wait for your materials to arrive. You can even go to one of the staff cafeterias to refuel your body without leaving the premises. I would be happy to try to answer any questions if you post them as a comment through the link immediately below.