The Deep Internet - Learn how to make use of Database Searches

Genealogy Research in the Deep Internet

Join me in Omaha on July 18 when I show you how to find hidden treasures online in the "Deep Internet." Did you know that at least 80 per cent of genealogy information online cannot be found using a standard search engine such as Google? Are you missing out on 80 per cent of information you can find out about your family online?

If you've been frustrated with the results of your searches on Ancestry, find out how you can improve the way you search by using some adjustments to the way you think about search strategies!

This presentation is Free and open to the public. But you need to preregister here:

http://omahalibrary.evanced.info/signup/EventDetails.aspx?EventId=41274&lib

July 18, 2015

2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

W. Dale Clark Library

215 S. 15th St

Omaha, Nebraska

Why I Love Newspapers.com

I subscribe to three paid newspaper subscription sites: NewspaperArchive.com, Genealogybank and Newspapers.com. As a journalism major in college, I had always been something of a news junkie until recent years when all of the "bad news" in the media made me cancel my newspaper subscriptions and stop watching TV news. You know the saying, "If it bleeds it leads." But I still feel as though printer's ink runs in my veins and I absolutely love Love LOVE old newspapers for my genealogy research.

The team from Newspapers.com at the recent conference
 of the National Genealogical Society in St. Charles, MO.
I HAD to stop at their booth to tell them how much I LOVE the site!

Comparing the Big Three

Over the past thirty or so years of genealogy research, I've had on-again off-again periods of being active. In one of my off-again periods, I subscribed to NewspaperArchive and I was searching non-genealogy topics. It became a valuable resource for me once I returned to family history research. That is, until they discontinued carrying images from some of my favorite newspapers because of the end of some licensing contracts. Even with their increase in fees (close to $200/year now, billed every six months), I've maintained my subscription because I continue to find articles about long lost relatives within their pages. Compared to the other sites, I believe their pricing is too high, but I've found enough information there to justify the expense.

GenealogyBank is also a favorite newspaper subscription site and it also includes more contemporary obituaries which has moved my research forward considerably by examining the lists of survivors. The annual cost for new subscribers is about $70. Monthly subscriptions are available. You can also get a 30-day trial for under $10.

Whenever anyone asks about which paid site is the best, my answer is always "Whichever one has the most newspapers in the area where your ancestors lived." That being said, I maintain my paid subscriptions to all three sites and will continue to do so as long as I can afford to.

The annual subscription to Newspapers.com is $79.95, but with my subscription to Fold3, I get it for $39.95. I call that a bargain! Monthly subscriptions are available for $7.95.

Why I Love Newspapers.com the Most

That brings me around to Newspapers.com, an Ancestry company, which has become my newspaper subscription site of choice. Of the three big players in paid subscription sites, I find Newspapers.com the easiest to navigate and search. I can search by my ancestor's name or keywords. I can also search within specific newspapers. I have to say that it was a little weird when I found articles about myself or that I had written in those pages! But it was amazing when I discovered several Letters to the Editor written by my grandfather, William Kelly (writing as W. L. Kelly). It was so nice to know where I inherited my spunk and tongue-in-cheek delivery style.

Newspapers.com makes it very easy to clip an article. You have the option of keeping your clippings private (which I do most of the time) or make them public. If you want to share the clipping using social media, you need to make the clipping public.

As of this morning, the site has more than 102 million page images available to search!

Let me take you through a few screen clippings to show you the ease of using Newspapers.com.

This is a screen shot of some of my clippings on Newspapers.com

As you are saving your clippings, make sure you click on "Edit" and add a description of the clipping, using your ancestor's name and keywords. Think of this as writing a headline for the article. Otherwise, you will not be able to search for clippings about a specific ancestor. Yes, I learned this one the hard way, and I'm still back-tracking, adding those names and keywords to my clippings.

See how easy it is to save to Ancestry!

You just select which tree and person
to whom you are saving the clipping!

Share With Others!

This may be one of my favorite perks of the site. It makes it very easy to share the clipping with other researchers. I'm a relatively new fan of Pinterest, even though I've had an account since it first came on the scene. I have a Pinterest board, Ancestor News, where I can share clippings with other researchers. I also set up a Facebook group for other Pecht family researchers and I can share clippings with those cousins. Just remember, the clipping must be made Public if you want to share it.

It is still up to you to explore each of the paid sites and determine which has the most bang for your buck for the geographic areas where your people lived.

Screen captures are from Newspapers.com and are used here for educational purposes. No violation of copyright of the images is intended.

My New Web Site

This morning, I am launching my new web site: SusanPetersen.net.

The site will be home-base for my genealogy activities, including my speaking engagements (more to come, I hope!), a genealogy toolbox (my most-used online resources), links to my blogs and copies of my free eBooks (more of those to come as well!).

My site is in its infancy as I continue to tweak things. The site is hosted on Weebly.com. I've created many web sites over the years and this is, by far, the easiest to do! Everything is drag and drop and you don't need to know any coding! I highly recommend the site if you want a web presence for your genealogy hobby.

I'm off to Omaha this morning for the Greater Omaha Genealogical Society spring conference. I'll try to tweet or post some messages on Facebook throughout the day.

What You Can Do With 20 Minutes

Quite often, I'll find myself up early in the morning - after a quick check of blog posts in my reader and Facebook messages from my fellow genealogists, I'm faced with a few uncommitted minutes before I need to get ready for work. This is when I will turn to my family tree on Ancestry.com and select one of those leaves that tells me I have a hint or two about someone in my tree.

That's what happened yesterday morning as I checked the information on the siblings of my great grandmother. I didn't have much information on one of her brothers whose last entry was the 1930 census in Sheridan, Wyoming. I turned to Google, typed in his name and "Sheridan Wyoming." Among the first hits was a reference to his burial at the Sheridan Municipal Cemetery. There were several other people buried there with the same surname.

Next step: FindAGrave.com. There were listings for him and his wife. I clicked. There was a photo of their tombstone, with the years of their births and deaths. There was one other name on the stone - that of their son. And there was room for a fourth name, not yet added.

I entered this information on Ancestry. I returned to Google and entered the name of the son. These search results told me that his wife just died in April of this year at the age of 90. There were several references to online obituaries for this relative who Ancestry informed me is the wife of my first cousin, twice removed. I clicked. There was her beautiful, smiling face, from her younger years, on the screen.

Her obituary told me where she lived when she died, when and where she was born, the names of her parents, the high school and college she attended (and the years), the date she married her husband, the names of her children and grandchildren, names of her brother and sister, where she attended church, a story of how she helped her husband through five battles with cancer, and her 45 year career in nursing.

Her obituary states that she enjoyed her achievements and worked hard with her husband to create a complete, balanced and very happy life for her family.

Her name is the one waiting to be placed on the tombstone that is pictured on FindAGrave.

That's what I was able to learn in just under 20 minutes yesterday morning. Twenty minutes gave me three generations of a family I knew nothing about when I started.

Note: because this woman's death is so recent, I have opted not to list any names here out of respect for the privacy of her and her immediate family. To write such a wonderful obituary, it strikes me that there is a lot of love and respect there and it sounds like she was a much loved and respected woman.

Connecting the Dots via "Snoop Sites"

There are many web sites where you can do background searches on people for a fee. You can often obtain information such as age, date of birth, address, former residences, and names of relatives. The information on these sites is culled from public records.

There have been times when the information on these sites has given me the clues that I need to fill in some blanks, confirm information from my inferences and figure out what happened to more contemporary relatives.

And guess what? Much of the time, you can pick up some clues without even paying to get the full records search results.

One site that I turn to when I get stuck on more contemporary people is Intellius.com. Since this site has information about living people, I don't want to use any screen captures for illustration purposes. You can try it out on some of your own missing kin - or on yourself, just to see how it works.

What has been most helpful to me in using sites like Intellius is that a basic search will provide results that include the most recent cities the individual has lived in, generally in chronological order with the most recent listed first. There is an estimate of the person's age. And what is very handy is that a list of names of possible relatives shows up on the search result page. This is a way that I've been able to determine married names of females and from that, take my people sleuthing a bit further. Sometimes, this information is used as confirmation that I have identified the correct family and the area where they are located. Sometimes those additional family member's names can be used to help you narrow down some online searches for obituaries of the person's parents or great grandparents. It has worked for me.

Intellius also still has deceased individuals in its databases. So you might find people who show up in your search result and it shows they are 111 years old. Again, that is just providing you with a clue to the person's year of birth and names of potential family members.

Once you try this out, or do a sample search on yourself, it might creep you out. I acknowledge that. I was creeped out at first. But I'm a researcher, not a stalker. I've not used the information obtained on these snoop sites to contact anyone directly. There was only one time when I paid to get information from one of these sites so that I could verify a date of birth and the address of a living relative. I've been holding on to that information for about eight or nine years now and have yet to make direct contact.

It's just another tool that may be useful in your genealogy quest. You never know - it might turn up that long lost cousin who has all of those photographs of your ancestors that you've never seen before.

Please feel free to comment about your experiences with these snoop sites in the comments section below.

Nebraska State Government Resources for Genealogists

Today's Tip will focus on genealogy resources available on the State of Nebraska's official government web sites. While many of the government pages merely provide links to other online resources, there are a few gems to be found along the way. If your genealogy has any Nebraska ties, I hope you'll find a couple resources you may not have seen before.

A couple years ago, the State of Nebraska revamped its online presence to this dynamic Nebraska.gov site that was intended to serve as a portal to all state government services in one location. Personally, I find it cumbersome and much too difficult to find what I'm looking for most of the time. If I need to find something quickly, I've learned to go to Google to search within this site. To save you some time and frustration, here are some of the pages of interest to genealogists doing research in Nebraska.

A starting point is a list of links of Genealogy resources:

http://nebraskaccess.ne.gov/genealogy.asp - the links are the usual fare for genealogy researchers and most are general information, not specific to Nebraska (Ancestry, Cyndi's List, FindAGrave . . .)

The State of Nebraska offers free access to Heritage Quest if you are a resident of the state. Your Nebraska driver's license number will get you into this database. Access to eLibrary is also available with a password you can obtain through your Nebraska public library.

Privacy issues have limited access to some records for genealogists. The basic procedures for obtaining records is on the Health and Human Services web site. The state rules and regulations for release of records for genealogical purposes is in Chapter 3 of Nebraska Administrative Code 174. You have better access to records if you are a certified historian or a an enrolled student of history working on a specific project or an employed member of the news media.

Information about where to obtain birth, marriage, death and divorce certificates is on this page, although it is primarily a list of links to external sites.

The State Library Commission hosts a blog which announces different libraries in Nebraska as each attains an online presence. You can subscribe to this blog in your RSS reader to receive updates. Here are a couple examples of the libraries on the site:

• Alliance Public Library
• Superior Public Library

This page has links to libraries in Nebraska, links to their social networking sites, and indicates if they have WiFi access or a catalog online. This is a good starting point for your local research.

Nebraska Memories is another government web site operated by the Nebraska Library Commission. Subtitled "Making Nebraska's Past Unforgettable" you can browse or search a variety of digital images on such categories as portraits, sports, music scores, animals, maps, government, education, business, disasters and more. I can easily get lost on this site for quite a while.

If your research leads to a famous Nebraskan, there are several links on this page. I have to toot my own horn a little bit since the page links to my NebraskaOnFilm.com web site (another of my passions in addition to genealogy).

The Nebraska State Historical Society provides a wealth of information and resources online. Since I've already written a blog post about their resources, I'll direct you to that post rather than repeat it here. But here is a link to the Society's page about doing genealogy research.

If you are researching property in Nebraska, here's a nice 60 page guidebook with a lot of great tips. A link in this book took me to an interesting map labeled "Ghost Towns of Cass County" as well as a 1908 map of Lancaster county. Even if you don't have a Nebraska connection, this publication also serves as a good resource on land and property research. This publication may just be the best "Easter egg" that I discovered while surfing sites to include in this post. It's a pdf file that you can download.

You can search court cases, but you need to get a User ID and password. Presently, the fee is $15 per search.

The Secretary of State's office has some information that may be of value to researchers, although this information may be more recent in nature. One of the databases is on registered voters, which I've used a time or two.

The Unclaimed Property division of the State Treasurer's department might yield results on missing relatives. This is a searchable database of money sitting around in bank accounts or safe deposit boxes. Whoa, Nellie! I just found a listing for less than $300 for one of my Dad's aunts who died in 1982. I told you that you might find something here!

I hope these links provide Nebraska researchers with a few resources they may not have seen before. If you come across other gems or links on any State of Nebraska government web site, please share them in the comments section below.

Follow Friday: Ancestry.com releases 60 million yearbook images

Today's news release from Ancestry.com announced the release of more than 60 million school yearbook images available on the site. I rushed right in to Ancestry's card catalog and immediately bookmarked the yearbook search page. I began going through the browse feature, one step at a time > Nebraska > Lincoln > Lincoln Northeast.


Oh my goodness! Was it true? Yes, the 1968 edition of The Rocket was right there before my eyes. Not that I needed any reminders of the page images before me on Ancestry. I was on the staff of The Rocket and between September 1967 until May of 1968, I lived and breathed The Rocket yearbook. I was intent on a career in writing and journalism, but rather than apply to be on the staff of The Northeastern, I applied to be on the yearbook staff instead. Why? Because I figured that a yearbook would last through time, unlike the newspapers that would likely be thrown away. After finding the entire 1968 Rocket available online, I'm beginning to question the decision I made as a 17 year old! Who in their right mind really wants their high school yearbook photos available for the world to see?


Well, I am still a writer and still consider myself a journalist even though I didn't follow my original dream of going into newspaper reporting or broadcasting. And as a genealogist, I have to accept the facts, warts and all. And that is why I've decided to share some of those hideous photographs from The Rocket with my blog readers and to set the record straight about some of the images. And having reached another birthday milestone that ends in a Zero yesterday, there's just not anything that embarrasses me anymoe.

Here's my senior photo as it appeared in the yearbook. I hated it then and I hate it now. Dig those vintage cats-eye glasses!

The Back Story: I had a really nice senior photo that was much better. In 1968, we still lived by rules, dress codes and there were strict requirements on the attire that we wore in our yearbook photographs. Girls had to wear black/dark sweaters and a plain necklace. Can you believe it! The guys had to wear jackets and ties. One fellow turned in his photo wearing a plaid jacket. I thought our yearbook advisor, Mrs. Marlys Hughes (whom I loved dearly) would go through the roof. Rather than having the photo taken over, she pulled out her equivalent of what would be today's black Sharpie and marked up his jacket. Another girl didn't wear the required necklace, so Mrs. Hughes painted one on with white-out. Did ya think no one would notice these touch-ups? A friend and I got caught in this game as the studio where we had our photos taken used a backdrop that was too dark for the yearbook photos. We had to have our photos retaken with the correct backdrop. No choices to select from this time around - we got one and only one pose. I had just finished being in the school play, during which we were instructed to NOT cut our hair so it would fit with the vintage roles were were playing. I hated how long and stringy my hair had become that I immediately had it cut very short. It was just beginning to grow back in when I had this photo taken. I hated it then and I hate it now because the rules all seem so silly.

Here's a photograph that was taken for the section on the guidance counselors and home room.


The Back Story: The photographer needed six students to pose with Mr. Crosier, so the six of us shown jumped at the chance. Read the caption: "Tardy students" and "guilty persons" Ack! I had never been tardy for anything in my entire life, and right there in the yearbook, for all to see, I am labeled as tardy and guilty. Well, that look on my face makes me look guilty! It's called ACTING!

That brings me around to my short-lived acting career.


The Back Story: Here I am in the cast of Ruth and Augustus Goetz's The Heiress, which we produced in the fall of 1967. I suppose I thought I was going to get into method acting and immediately went to the original source material, Henry James' Washington Square. To learn that my character, Maria, the maid, wasn't even in the original work was more than a little disappointing. The only reason I tried out for that particular part was because it had the fewest lines to memorize. I always had visions of going into musical theater, as I knew all of the songs from West Side Story, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Bye Bye Birdie - you name it. There was one small problem - I could not carry a tune if my life depended on it. That seemed so unfair because I knew all the lyrics! The director of the play was Mr. Jim Putnam, who was my drama teacher and I really liked him a lot. Our paths crossed again ten to 15 years ago. We got reacquainted and one day I told him that he had been one of the best teachers I'd ever had. He was rather shocked and told me that when I knew him, it was his first year of teaching! He retired last year after a long career in education. I didn't do any more acting, but still feel that the speech and drama classes provided a good solid foundation for the training and public speaking that I do today.

International Club - This was a group interested in learning about other countries and languages. I'm in the front row wearing the sweater with the diamond design.

The Back Story: A lot of us joined just so we could have another activity listed next to our senior picture in the yearbook!

Here I am (sitting) as one of the activities editors of The Rocket.

The Back Story: That's the long stringy hairdo I mentioned earlier that I could hardly wait to get cut as soon as The Heiress was over. Working on The Rocket was undoubtedly the best part of my senior year in high school. It was a project I was totally passionate about. It gave me some experience in writing, layout, printing, production of a real book - skills that transferred to my study of journalism at the University of Nebraska and skills that remain with me today. The technology has changed, but the basics were all right there all those years ago.


From Sue to Susan, The Back Story: I was never too keen on the shortened version of my name. I had always been Susan until junior high school when one of my teachers took it upon herself to begin calling me Sue. Not knowing that I could object, it stayed with me for way too many years. At least over the past 25 years, I think I've managed to get across the message that I prefer to be called Susan, although a few very old friends still know me as Sue.


Maybe this blog post is a little over indulgent, but how many times do you find yourself in a database on Ancestry.com? And besides, I wanted some of my new genealogy friends to see that I really used to be thin! LOL.


So - take a look at the new additions to the yearbook database on Ancestry.com. I'm looking forward to reading what other bloggers find buried in that treasure!

Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems Podcast 95

Lisa Louise Cooke mentioned LongLostRelatives.net blog on her recent Genealogy Gems Podcast 95. She referred to an earlier post on this blog where I wrote about her podcast being my walking companion. That post was in response to one of the 52 Days to Better Genealogy challenge.

Thanks, Lisa! I appreciate the tip of the hat!

Have you visited Footnote.com lately?

Footnote.com is one of those web sites that has taken me some time to get used to. But the more I use it, the more I value it as a site than can aid my genealogy research.

Footnote is working diligently to scan and make available millions of documents from the National Archives. These are all public records. The membership fee charged by Footnote.com goes toward the cost of scanning the documents and making them available in digital format. At this writing, the site hosts nearly 68 million images.

Already, Footnote is providing one of the most extensive collections of records from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

Here are just a few of the collections available on Footnote.com:

• The entire collection of Matthew Brady's Civil War photographs (more than 6,000 images)
• Civil War pension index
• FBI case files
• Passport applications
• City directories
• Newspapers
• Texas death certificates
• US Census records - 1860 and 1930 are complete, other years are being added
• Civil War maps
• Records of the Continental Congress
• The court martial of George Custer
• Homestead records from the Broken Bow, Nebraska land office

I can't even begin to list all of the different types of record collections available on the site - you need to take some time to browse around in your field of interest.

The site can be searched by using keywords or you can browse titles through a hierarchical structure. It is very simple to print or download documents to your computer.

An ever growing feature of Footnote is the ability of users to contribute their own content by uploading images and creating pages. If you find your ancestor in a census record, it's simple to upload a photograph of that person that is then connected to the record. You can also create Footnote pages for a person, place, event, organization or topic. I've started creating Footnote pages on my grandparents and great-grandparents. This allows me to add photographs, facts such as birth, death, marriage, military service, etc. When you find other documents on Footnote that are about your ancestor, you can connect them to your Footnote page. You also have the option of allowing other users to contribute information to the page or not.

You can also annotate documents, whether they are provided by Footnote, another user or yourself. I recently uploaded a copy of the marriage certificate of my great-grandparents. I annotated all of the names and locations that appeared on the document. This makes those annotations available immediately in the search results.

Learn more about Footnote.com:

• The best place to get started is on the Getting the most out of Footnote page.
• Press release from the National Archives about its relationship with Footnote.com
• Titles that are coming soon
• The Footnote blog
• Footnote on Facebook
• Footnote on Twitter

Footnote.com is a subscription web site, although many of its collections available at no charge. The annual loyalty pricing fee is $59.95 (regular price is $79.95). When you figure that is less than $5/month, it's quite a bargain in the field of subscription sites. You can try it out with a seven-day free trial.

My "member card" below shows a summary of the items I've contributed to Footnote.

www.footnote.com

Disclaimer: I am not a member of the Footnote.com affiliate network and I did not receive any compensation for this review. Opinions expressed are my own.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #32 - RSS Feeds

If you read a lot of genealogy blogs, it can be very time consuming to visit each one individually to see if any new items have been added. The best way to read all of your favorite blogs in one place is by using an RSS reader. What is RSS? RSS stands for "really simple syndication" and that's exactly what it is.

My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader. Earlier this summer, I wrote about my use of Google Reader for genealogy. Rather than repeat information from that post, I've decided to share some additional add-on tools that make RSS even easier.

My web browser of choice these days is Google Chrome because of its speed in loading pages. When I come across a blog that I want to subscribe to, I open Google Reader, click on the "Add a Subscription" button and paste in the web address of the blog. Presto. It's there.

RSS extenstion tool for browsers

I admit to being impatient when it comes to web browsing. I wanted something on my Chrome toolbar where I could immediately add a blog to my reader on the spot. I searched for "Add RSS Feed" and discovered this handy RSS extension tool. A quick installation and it's ready to go. This tool will identify any page that provides an RSS feed. The RSS feed logo appears right in the address bar of your browser. Want to subscribe? Just click on the logo and it's done. Anything that saves time and clicks gets points from me.

Share tool bar in Google Reader

I'm really not sure what this feature in Google Reader is called, but it has become my other new best friend. This is at the bottom of every blog post that appears in Google Reader.

Once you've read a blog post, it seems to disappear from your Google Reader. I love this tool bar because it's an easy way for me to be able to retrieve favorite posts to read again later. "Add tags" is an especially nice feature. You can categorize posts and then create a special feed to embed on your blog or web site to be able to share some of your favorites with friends or blog readers.

How can you apply this to your blogging? Since I now have two blogs, I've added the embedded html code to add the "tagged" items from my Google Reader into my blog. This way, I can (hopefully) generate interest in my Nothing But Tombstones blog by displaying a feed on my LongLostRelatives.net blog and vice-versa.

The toolbar also lets you share by email, star an item, keep it unread, and more. Try out each feature and decide which ones work for you.

Have the freedom to experiment and try all of the features of Google Reader. If you have some suggestions to add, please add a comment below.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy is a series of weekly prompts that are a bit more challenging and are geared towards those new to the field of genealogy and family history as well as those who want to brush up on some skills which might be a bit rusty.

Midwest Family History Expo - Session Highlights - Day 1

Now that I've covered the social aspects of the Midwest Family History Expo in Kansas City, it's time to get down to the business of providing a few highlights from the sessions I attended.

The FHE folks compiled a wonderful syllabus (can you say 360 pages?) for the event. What's nice about this is that the web sites and resources the speakers referred to in their presentations are already in the book for later reference. I was able to use my net book computer for taking notes in many of the sessions, so as a speaker talked about a web site, I could access it and add it to my bookmarks right on the spot. I just scrolled through those bookmarks and I have a LOT of sites to visit and search. And that doesn't even come close to everything in the syllabus.

Day 1 - Friday


Sources and Citations: Just Do It
Carol Cooke Darrow, CG
http://www.unravelingyourpast.net/

Carol emphasized the importance of identifying your sources and compared primary information and secondary information. One of the books she talked about was Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian by Elizabeth Mills, a book I have in my personal library. It was also interesting to learn ways to document online sources.

Mapping Madness
Ron Arons, Author
http://www.ronarons.com/

Ron is a very entertaining presenter - I loved his sense of humor! He compared the differences between Google maps and Microsoft's maps (Bing).

One of the online tools he discussed was MapCruncher by Microsoft. This allows you to layer maps to emphasize or make comparisons in an area you want to show. For example, a historical map can be layered on top of a contemporary map for a comparison of then and now. Here are some examples of what this tool can do.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Footnote.com
Justin Schroepfer
http://www.footnote.com

One thing I learned from this session is that genealogists are forgiving people. It's a little tough to do a live presentation about an internet web site when the wireless connection isn't working. But Justin was a real pro and continued to inform and entertain the audience about his product until web connectivity was restored. As a presenter myself, I know how frustrating it can be when the technology doesn't cooperate. Justin - and the audience - handled it all very well.

That said . . . I chose this session because I've been a Footnote subscriber for more than a year and have found their search and navigation a bit cumbersome. And I am far from being a web novice. One thing Justin did was to give me a better feel for the type and breadth - and volume - of information that is on the site. The information that I'm looking for most likely is there; I just need to look deeper and refine my search methodology so I can find it.

He shared information about setting up pages about our ancestors. I'd done a few pages in the past. When I came across information on deceased relatives, I added some photographs. Most of my online genealogy activity is on Ancestry, but I can see the value of adding pages to Footnote, just to throw the net out over a wider area.

Colonial Immigration Genealogy
Beth Foulk
http://bethfoulk.wordpress.com/


You know what it's like when you buy a new car, then suddenly it seems like all you see on the streets is that make of car? I'm beginning to feel that way as new (new to me, anyway) sources of genealogy resources keep showing up again and again.

One of the resources Beth mentioned is one that entered my life in the last week. That is the vast amount of information on colonial immigrants available at the New England Historic Genealogical Society library. This source is definitely becoming one of my new best friends. Another recommended web site waiting for me to explore is http://www.greatmigration.org/

Combining Historical Research with Your Genealogy
Gena Philibert Ortega
http://yourfamilyhistoryresearch.com/

Gena's session was a great way to end the day! She is an enthusiastic and engaging presenter. And she overcame the adversity of a very loud air conditioning system in the meeting room to share a wealth of information with eager learners. Her book, Cemeteries of the Eastern Sierra (Images of America) is one I definitely want to read.

Gena focused on techniques to help us fill in the spaces between those major life events by studying the history of the times our ancestors lived in and understanding how history effected their lives. One of the books she recommended was Hidden Sources (much of which is available on Google Books).



My summary of Saturday's sessions will be in a separate post.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge #28 - Patents and Trademarks

Do you have Patience for Patents?

This week's challenge in 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy is to spend some time with patents and trademarks. The two sites recommended for use were the U.S. Patent and Trademark office and Google Patent Search.

I had little patience for the U.S. Patent Office web site. There were just too many links to wade through, so I returned to my good friend Google and tried its patent search for the first time. I typed in a couple family names with no results, then remembered that the brother-in-law of my great-grandmother was an inventor. I typed in the surname "Garrigus" and got a result that I will gladly add to my genealogy research.

Clarence Garrigus was, indeed, an inventor. Earlier this year, I learned that he had developed the Universal Breadmixer in 1903. He and his wife, Agnes Welch Garrigus, used their kitchen as a laboratory to develop the product. His obituary stated that during the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904, Garrigus passed out samples of bread made with the mixer from his wife's recipe.

A quick search and there on the computer screen in front of me was the drawing for Clarence's Dough Mixer, No. 736,956 patented August 25, 1903.

I found several more of Clarence Garrigus' patents. Another one that interested me was his Vibration Eliminator for Phonograph Turntables in 1929.

That patent application begins "The invention relates to sound translating apparatus as utilized in the recording and reproduction of sound, more especially a turntable for supporting and rotating a suitable disk record or blank and to which table rotational movement is communicated through an intermediate shaft from a suitable driving member, as a spring or electric motor."

That makes me wonder what Clarence would have thought about CDs and mp3s!

Follow Friday: Review of 5 of Family Tree Magazine's Best FREE web sites

 I love doing my genealogy research on line. I love reading about genealogy online. But I also look forward with anticipation to my print copy of Family Tree Magazine in the mail each month. And this month's issue has some real treasures. And where do the treasures lead me? Online, of course!

Family Tree Magazine published its list of 101 Best FREE Genealogy Web sites. Yep, browse and search to your heart's content and don't shell out a penny. Many are ones you already know about, but there are still some I haven't seen before.


I decided to select five of the sites I'd never visited before to see what they have to offer.


Being a newspaper junkie, the first site I visited was NewspaperAbstracts.com. It is organized differently than I would expect. A search on abstracts from Lancaster county, Nebraska yielded 11 hits, none of which were from Nebraska newspapers. The subjects of the articles refer to Nebraska place names or people from Nebraska. In that regard, the organization of the site allows one to think outside the box and not restrict oneself to newspapers of a specific locale. The site has a search feature, but a surname search gives results that only list the newspaper name. I had better luck using a standard Google site search string "kelly site: http//www.newspaperabstracts.com." Seeing the results in Google allowed me to see summaries of the article. The site has a yahoo discussion group where you can sign up for their e-newsletter. Overall rating: C.

Next up was the New York Public Library digital collection. The site states that it is partnering with Google to have a portion of its pre-1923 books scanned for Google books. I found that some manuscripts that relate to some of my Bellinger line from the Mohawk Valley are in the collection, but I could not review a digital copy. Now, once you visit the Digital Library, you will find much more interesting and accessible fare. In the History and Geography section, I found some of George Catlin's beautiful images of Native Americans. I found a collection of cabinet card photographs. Once I found the collection of old sheet music, I knew that I would have to make a return trip to this web site!

The site also includes a collection of Ellis Island photographs, postcards, cartoons. I know that my return trip to this site will undoubtedly last an hour or two. Overall rating: A+.


I collect cookbooks. I don't actually use them, I just read them. So my next site was Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project. There are cookbooks featuring French cuisine, Creole cooking; another called The Frugal Housewife (some things never change), a manual for Army cooks, and a White House cookbook from 1897. It's a very interesting site which I hope to return to - even though I'm not quite sure how it made a list of the top 101 genealogy sites. The Library of Congress has chosen to include this site in its collection. Interest Rating: A; Genealogy Rating: D; Overall Rating for Genealogists: C+.

Next stop was a techie product site called Evernote.com. This allows you to make notes, do screen captures, and organize various bits and pieces of information and store it all on the web. Rather than tell you any more about this site, I'll let you watch this video:



As I'm already sold on Microsoft OneNote and use it almost daily, I'm probably not going to switch, but for those looking for a free product that does something similar, this might meet your needs. Overall use for a genealogist: B+

My last stop on the tour was the Danish Demographic Database. I wondered if I could find anything on my Danish ancestors. WOW! Within seconds of initiating a search on Danish immigrants, I discovered this record on my great grandfather, Jens Petersen, then using the surname Jeremiasen. He was from Terndrup, Denmark, and with his parents and siblings, on their way to Waterloo, Iowa. His parents and siblings also showed up in the search results. Jens' father's occupation was Arbejder, which I guess means he was a laborer. Jens' occupation was a Barn? Say what? Thanks to my friend, Google Translate, I discovered that is Danish for Child. Whew!

One more search while I'm on this site - let's see what the Census search comes up with. I entered great-great grandfather's name, Peder Jeremiasen:

It just doesn't get any better than this! There's my family! My great-great grandparents: Peder and Else. The Larsen surname is new information. Other family members had given me her last name as Polsdatter. And here, the children have the surname Pedersen, as with Danish naming tradition. They did change the spelling to Petersen once settled in the U.S. "Hans Hustru" by Else's name is translated as "His Wife." Peder's occupation of husfader jordbruger og pottemager translates as "The father a farmer and potter." And from this record, I now have birthplaces for these members of the family.

Was it sheer luck or divine intervention that I saved this web site until last? Based on ease of use and my personal discoveries, I've got to give this one an Overall Rating of A++ !

iGoogle for Genealogy

Recently I wrote about the Joy of Blogging and using Google Reader. Another Google tool that may be of interest to genealogists is iGoogle. iGoogle allows you to customize your Google home pages based on your interests. Depending upon how you customize iGoogle, you can catch up on the news, see the latest posts from your favorite blogs, check out the weather and even do some quick family history searches - all from one page!


To begin customizing your page(s), visit http://www.google.com/ig. From there, you can begin setting up your customized pages, colors, themes, and most importantly, your personalized content. Below is a screen capture of one of my pages. You can click on the image to see a larger view.

Where does all of this content come from? In the lower right portion of the header, you'll see "Add Stuff." Click on that. You next see a screen that shows all the different gadgets you can add to your page. In the search box, type "Genealogy."

There you will see a variety of genealogy related topics and gadgets to add to your page. The RSS feeds from some bloggers we're all familiar with are among your options. You want it on your page? Just click on the "Add It Now" button.

As you add gadgets, you'll be prompted to see similar items, such as you see on this screen:

Something I enjoy about using iGoogle, is that I can have a condensed version of Google Reader as one of my gadgets. That's more like viewing the crawler across the bottom of a television news channel for quick headlines. I can click on the article to read it, or just see all of the articles that await me in Google Reader. Among the gadgets you can add are searches on Ancestry.com and USGenWeb. Sirius Genealogy offers a couple different age/date calculators.

Now a tip for my fellow bloggers. How would you like to make your blog content available for other people to add to their pages on iGoogle? That is very simple! Visit this page for Publishers and by following the simple directions, in less than a minute you have the html code to add to your blog. Your readers can click on the "Add to Google" button and have the option of adding your feed to iGoogle or to Google Reader. Google states that one in five Google homepage views goes to iGoogle. So would you like to have your blog show up every time one of your readers opens her or his iGoogle home page? It's an excellent option to help drive traffic to your blog.

My recommendation is Just Do It! Get into iGoogle and look around. Change your theme, create pages for different interests. Start adding Genealogy Gadgets and content. Try things out. Have fun with it. Once you've tried it out, come back and leave a comment below. Let us know what other genealogy related gadgets you found to add  to your iGoogle! I'm eager to hear about your discoveries!

Success Story! Dr William D Kelly Obituary

Never underestimate the power of the Internet and the generosity of fellow genealogists.

On January 10, 2010, I posted a request for an obituary of Dr. William D. Kelly of St. Paul, Minnesota. In addition to posting on this blog, I also posted a query on a message board on Ancestry.com. Thanks to the Minnesota death index search of the Minnesota State Historical Society I had narrowed down my search to two William Kellys in Ramsey county. One died in 1940 and the other died in 1943.

Not long ago, I received a special surprise in my email. A generous volunteer sent me not only a copy of the obituary from the newspaper, but also a copy of William's death certificate. Thanks to both, I now know that he is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Before I received this information, I continued my search for Dr. Kelly's obituary. A Google books search resulted in a reference in the journal of the Minnesota Medical Association, Minnesota Medicine. Unfortunately, it was only a limited preview and the entire obituary was not available online. I found the website for the Minnesota Medical Association and sent an email to the contact listed. He referred my request to the editor of the publication, who immediately responded with a scanned copy of the page from the journal. It had helped that the Google book search indicated exactly the volume and page number I was looking for so I could provide that with my request. As Dr. Kelly's brother was also a physician in St. Paul, I obtained a copy of his obituary from Minnesota Medicine in the same manner. Kudos to the Minnesota Medical Association for their willingness to help and their prompt response on both occasions!

And, of course, my thanks to the gracious volunteer who took the time to lookup the newspaper obituary and the copy of the death certificate.

Thanks to people like this, our work as family historians is a little easier.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge # 27 - The Inventors of Greenwood, Nebraska

This week's challenge in "52 weeks to Better Genealogy" was to try our skills using Google Scholar. I was aware of this search tool but had not yet used it. When my search turned up titles such as "Reaction of Benzocyclobutnoxides With Nitrates: Synthesis of Hypecumine and Other 3-Substituted Isoquinolines" I wasn't sure if I was up to this challenge!

A few surname searches didn't turn up any of my ancestors, so I thought I'd try searching on Greenwood, Nebraska, the little village northeast of Lincoln where many of my ancestors settled.

To my surprise, I discovered that Greenwood had spawned some inventors. 

On May 1, 1883, Walter Trumbull received a patent for his improvement to windmills.

On June 11, 1889, William Carr received a patent on his ironing table.

On June 4, 1901, John Stradley of Greenwood received a patent for his corn sheller.

On June 11, 1907, W. Dean received a patent on his dropping device - which is a system for planting corn at regular intervals.

And on December 27, 1910, Sterling McDonald received a patent on his cuspidor. I don't know if that one ever took off because 40 years later, my grandfather Bill Kelly was still using a Hills Brothers coffee can for his spitoon!

While I doubt if I make as much use of Google Scholar as I do of Google Books, it's nice to know that it's there if I need to know about the taphonomy and population dynamics of an early Pliocene vertebrate fauna.

Genealogy 101 - Fueling Your Passion with Podcasts

Last week, I wrote about ideas for creating your own genealogy conference right at home. I'd like to expand on that theme with some suggestions for the auditory learners.


Make iTunes your friend. This free software is available from Apple, and no doubt any iPod users already know about this. What I love about iTunes is the ability to subscribe to podcasts. These are informational and educational "radio shows" that can be downloaded (usually free) into your iTunes library. You can listen on your computer or transfer them to your portable device, mp3 players, etc. It seems like I spend a lot of time in my car, so rather than listen to the sports and weather reports on my radio, I can turn my car into a temple of learning!


Here are some genealogy podcasts to get you started:

• Family Tree magazine podcast
• Genealogy Gems podcast
• Family History Expos podcast
• Genealogy Guys podcast

These are just a few of the genealogy podcasts that are available. To find more, visit the iTunes store (located in the iTunes software) and enter "genealogy" as your search term. You can then narrow the search down to "podcasts" and find those podcasts of interest to you. Right now, I have more than four days (24/7) of genealogy podcasts downloaded for future listening. I can listen to one of the shows while at my computer, or I can download several episodes to my mp3 player to listen to in the car or while walking.

My next recommendation is a commercial site, Audible.com, which is now an Amazon.com company. I've subscribed to this service for several years. It seems like I don't have that much time to sit down and read a real book anymore, so I've opted for the audio version instead. Over the past month, I've spent a lot of time traveling and have "read" five audio books. Audible has a huge selection of history books, as well as any other topic that might interest you. As with iTunes, Audible has a free software download so you can listen to your books from a computer file, transfer the books to your portable device or even listen to live streaming of the books from your online library at Audible.

Now for an even better option - a FREE resource for downloadable audio books is your local library. For example, the Lincoln, Nebraska city libraries offers a huge variety of audiobooks available for download to your mp3 player. You can reserve the audio book, just as with a real book, and when your turn comes, you can check it out for download or listen to it on your computer during the checkout period. As with iTunes and Audible, there is software you need to download to be able to listen to your books. To find out if your library offers this service, check out the Overdrive.com web site.

If you just can't get enough of your genealogy and history fix, add audio to your day. It's especially great for those long waits at doctor's offices!

If you have a favorite genealogy podcast or audio resource to share, please leave a comment below.