Last month we told you about provisions in a sweeping national security bill called
the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act that could threaten your access to
vital records. (Read the story at http://net.fwpublications.com/newsletters/Newsletter
Archive/Family_Tree_Magazine_E-Mail_Update/10_14_2004.htm.) The Wisconsin Historical Society is urging genealogists to e-mail their representatives before Nov.
19, the house judiciary committee's deadline to issue a report on the bill. See http://www.
rootsweb.com/~wsgs/records.htm for information.
To celebrate Family Tree Magazine's impending fifth anniversary, we asked you to send photos of yourselves with our premiere issue, dated January 2000. Three E-Mail Update readers won Family Tree Magazine subscriptions—this week, meet Lila
Davis! We'll introduce you to our other winners in future newsletters (please note you won't receive a Nov. 25 E-Mail Update due to the Thanksgiving holiday).
—Diane Haddad, Newsletter Editor
ftmnews-editor@fwpubs.com
P.S. Make sure you don't miss a single issue of your E-mail
Update! Add our address (familytree-newsletter@fwpubs.com)
to your email-address book—your software will recognize the Update as an e-mail you want to read.
Better Than Ever
The Ellis Island Web site (http://www.ellisisland.org), home to a free database of 22 million Ellis Island passenger records, has relaunched with a more efficient ancestor search.
When the database debuted in April 2001, researchers logged on to the tune of 10 million hits per day. The site's remained popular, though genealogists have noted problems catching variations of their ancestors' names. And some researchers have felt hamstrung
by the site's first name/last name/gender search: They could narrow results by characteristics such as ship name and port of origin, but couldn't search on those terms.
Ellis Island's new refined search—still in test phase—lets you frame your query around what you actually know about your relative, and effectively narrow or broaden your results. The search offers 11 data fields:
- first name (you can enter parts of a name)
- last name ("sounds like" and "alternate spellings" options help catch variations)
- gender
- marital status
- approximate year of birth
- year range (expands range for year of birth)
- approximate year of arrival
- year range (expands range for year of arrival)
- town or village of origin
- name of passenger ship
- ethnicity
Spelling variations are easier to find, but they won't disappear. Transcribers copied passenger names as they appeared on ships' lists. To preserve the integrity of those historical records, site administrators don't alter correctly transcribed names in
the database. But if you believe you've found a transcription error, you can notify Ellis Island staff via an e-mail link on the Passenger Record page.
The relaunched Ellis Island Web site also features other improvements, including streamlined navigation; the Genealogy Learning Center; the Ellis Island Society Links Network to connect site visitors with societies specializing in
their research areas; and new Ellis Island histories, old photos, famous passenger information and visitor information.
Health-History Turkey Talk
US Surgeon General Richard Carmona wants you to talk about your family's health history at this year's Thanksgiving get-together. Citing recent survey findings that only one-third of Americans have tried to record family medical information, Carmona has
declared this Thanksgiving the first annual National Family History Day.
Common health problems such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as well as rare conditions including hemophilia and cystic fibrosis, can run in families. Knowing illnesses your parents, grandparents and other relatives have experienced—information
that's available in records such as death certificates, obituaries and family letters—can help you reduce your health risks.
My Family Health Portrait, a simple computer program that's downloadable for free from http://www.hhs.gov/familyhistory/download.html, lets you enter family members' names and medical problems,
and then print a chart you can take to your doctor's office. The program runs on Windows 98 or higher. To get a blank health-history chart (shown here—click to enlarge), call (888) 878-3256, or download the chart as a PDF file from http://www.hhs.gov/familyhistory/order.html.
(To open the file, you'll need the free Adobe Reader, available at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html).
For more information on National Family History Day—the start of the surgeon general's Family History Initiative public health campaign—see http://www.hhs.gov/familyhistory. Chart shown with permission
from the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Maryland Courthouse Burns
Prince George's County, Md., lost its historic courthouse to a four-alarm fire last week, but the black smoke clouds have a silver lining: The building was empty for a renovation that was to be completed in January. No one was seriously injured in the
blaze, and historic records and paintings had been removed. Firefighters kept the flames from spreading to the adjacent modern facility, which houses the court system and records.
The old red-brick courthouse, called the Duvall Wing, was gutted, and most of its roof burned. County executive Jack Johnson called the historic building a "treasure to the county" and vowed to rebuild it. A courthouse has stood on the property since 1720;
the Duvall Wing was built in 1881.
Readers Review Family Tree Maker 2005
Almost 50 of you responded to our last E-Mail Update asking for your thoughts on Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2005, MyFamily.com's update to its popular genealogy software. Released in August, FTM 2005 is quite a change from previous versions and is arousing
mixed opinions from longtime users. (Please note that Family Tree Magazine and this E-mail Update are not affiliated with Family Tree Maker software.) For more information on FTM 2005, visit http://www.familytreemaker.com.
Here's what you said.
Nearly half of your reviews were positive. A sampling:
•"It's so much cleaner and very user-friendly."
• "It is great to be able to have eight children displayed on the family view page and to see three generations at a glance. It's good to ... know how many objects are in the scrapbook without opening it, [and] to see how many additional spouses
there are
for the husband and wife without opening the page listing all the spouses."
• "You have to get used to the navigation between generations. After you do, things smooth out."
• "I find the family page much easier to use, in that you can enter birth and death info for all the children in the family without having to go back and forth to each of their individual pages."
• "I have found it very easy to use and really enjoy the family display on the screen. It is easier to put information in."
• "The integration with Ancestry.com is an absolute dream. I have been working on my tree for years, and my first time using the Web search on one of my family names, [I] found lots of new information."
Eleven e-mailers were unhappy with aspects of FTM 2005. Some comments:
• "I use the Notes section all the time, and it has a limited amount of space."
• "I am trying to learn it, but even as a longtime genealogy program user, I find it extremely difficult."
• "Several of us have been unable to enter cause-of-death data without having the program freeze."
• "The one thing I miss the most is the lack of the burial location on the main page."
• "I paid $200 to be a gold member of Genealogy.com, since it interfaced with FTM. [MyFamily.com] switched the program's internal link to Ancestry.com without warning. Now when I click on Internet access features of FTM, it complains that I am
not a member
of Ancestry.com."
• "If the Web search could be altered so that you could revise the list of people being searched, and could then limit the search to one or two people, it might be more useful."
The rest of the respondents haven't tried the update for one reason or another:
• "I'm sitting tight! I don't want a whole new Family Tree Maker that I have to learn all over again. Updates, I'll take."
• "There are never discounted add-on versions, only full-install high-priced versions ... Discounts offered to longtime users are minimal, and changes to the software year after year aren't worth the hundreds of dollars I've dished out."
Count on County Histories
Having trouble tracking down those elusive ancestors? In this biweekly, Web-exclusive column, contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson points to new and helpful ways to do your computer-related genealogy research. This week, she writes about the genealogical
gems you can find in county histories.
Read more at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/ancestornews/current.html.
Hendrickson is a family historian, freelance writer and the author of the book Finding Your Roots Online, on sale now at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/store/display.asp?id=70583.
Browse the archive of her AncestorNews columns at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/ancestornews/previous.html.
Make Everyone Happy
This week's tip comes from reader Rosemarie Carr of Uvalde, TX:
"I had many photos of my mother's family. Fortunately, I knew the subjects' names. In order to preserve them for my four children, I had a negative and four prints made of each photograph. I put the copies into albums, with labels for each photo.
Every album has a master index of relatives, which notes their positions on the family tree, dates and relevant album page numbers.
"A fifth album—the master, from which new albums could be made—has the original photographs and the new negatives. Now with digital photos, scanners and CDs, making copies will be a simpler process."
Do you have a great idea for discovering, preserving or
celebrating family history? E-mail us your tip at
ftmnews-editor@fwpubs.com with "TIP OF THE WEEK"
in the subject line. If we publish it, you'll win a Free copy of Family Tree Magazine's 2005 Genealogy Guidebook, available Nov. 22 on newsstands and from http://www.familytreemagazine.com.
Overwhelmed by the number of family history-related Web sites popping up? FamilyTreeMagazine.com sorts through them all—whew!—to bring you only the very best. We recently recommended the following as Sites of the Week:
• National Gravesite Locator
http://www.cem.va.gov
Search more than 3 million veterans' cemetery records, courtesy of the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
• El Dia de los Muertos
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/dead
Learn about the history and traditions behind the Mexican holiday El Dia de los Muertos—the Day of the Dead.
• Delphos History
http://www.delphos-ohio.com/history/mainpage.htm
This site on the history of Delphos (Allen County), Ohio, has databases of cemetery records, war casualties and death records.
• Genealogy in Croatia
http://www.appleby.net/genealogy.html
Find hints and links for researching Croatian ancestors.
Surname Searching
Looking for family surnames on the Web? Here, Family Tree Magazine contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson offers advice for finding your family names in online databases.
Several free Web sites store millions of names, submitted by your fellow genealogists, in online pedigree databases. (Remember that nobody officially verifies these family trees, so use them as starting points.) If your search comes up empty, try variant
spellings. You never know how your surname might have been spelled (or misspelled), and some sites are better than others at catching variations.
• FamilySearch http://www.familysearch.org: FamilySearch boasts 957 million names in its databases. To use the site, click Search for Ancestors, then enter at least a surname.
• WorldConnect http://worldconnect.rootsweb.
com: At last count, the free database had 340 million names in more than 300,000 GEDCOM files. It's merged with Ancestry.com's Ancestry World Tree; you also can search it for free at www.ancestry.com/trees.
Search by entering your surname. If you get too many hits, use the advanced search box at the bottom of the results page to narrow the matches by date, place, parents or spouse.
• Ellis Island http://www.ellisisland.org: This site's database contains 22 million names of Ellis Island passengers lists from 1892 to 1924. To locate your ancestor, enter as much information as you
know into the basic search fields. Or you can perform a refined search on parts of a name and additional criteria from passenger lists (see the article above for more information).
For more surname-searching advice, see the Family Tree Magazine 2005 Genealogy Guidebook, a special issue available Nov. 22 on newsstands or online at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/mags.
A Long-Distance Call for Help
Expert photo historian Maureen A. Taylor helps readers analyze old family pictures in her Web-exclusive column Identifying Family Photographs. This week, she offers
advice for solving picture puzzles from abroad.
http://www.familytreemagazine.com/photos/current.htm.
If you have a family photo mystery for Taylor to solve, check out our Submission Guidelines at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/photos/photohelp.htm.
Lake Charles, La.
Emily Anne Croom
Nov. 20
Southwest Louisiana Genealogical Society
Topics:
- Timely Tools for Genealogists: Using Timelines
- You're Known by the Company You Keep: Cluster Genealogy, an Essential Tool in Research
Contact Pat Huffaker at phuffaker@xspedius.net.
Tomball, Texas
Emily Anne Croom
Nov. 27
Chaparral Genealogical Society
Topic:
- Territorial Papers of the United States
Visit http://www.chaparralgensoc.org.
Let Memories Scribed scribe your family legacy in a book or create a heritage scrapbook. For a full line of services, visit www.memoriesscribed.com.
Genealogy Hotel Rates
in Salt Lake-You will love the genealogy rates at the Holiday Inn-Downtown along with the free shuttles to & from the Family History Library. www.holiday-inn.com/slc-downtown
LIQUIDATION
SALE at Genealogical.com.
“Early Connecticut Probate Records” & 57 other books are 65% below retail price. http://www.genealogical.com/item_detail.asp?afid=&ID=3690
Smoky
Mountain Reunion Chalets - 1-8 BR's. Reunion packages, facilities and coordinator. 1-800-561-5691 www.yoursmokymountainreunion.com
UNIQUE SCANDINAVIAN HERITAGE
TOURS
Visit ancestral villages, parish churches, archives, connect with family. Fluent guides and genealogy experts included. www.scandgen.com
ALL GERMAN TRAVEL AGENCY
NONSTOP
TRAVEL specializes in Heritage Travel for individuals and groups. 20 years in business! ALL GERMAN STAFF. (800) 611-9851 or www.nonstoptravel.net
GenSmarts Automated Genealogy Research
- "the best genealogy add-on software " says Eastman's Newsletter. Only $24.95 at http://www.GenSmarts.com/ftmagDeals.asp
RootsMagic Genealogy Software - "An excellent choice for
any genealogist" says Family Tree Magazine. Get a free trial copy at http://www.RootsMagic.com
Save 50% on Photo Restoration through December
15
Your heirloom family photos can be restored to prime condition by Bellamax. Fix creases, missing corners, tears, fading, water spots, etc for only $19.99! Great holiday gifts!
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