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June 23, 2005



Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs Your online genealogy pal Nancy Hendrickson is back after a break with an all-new AncestorNews, and she's looking forward to hearing your feedback. Plus you could win Maureen Taylor's new book, Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs—find out how in this week's Identifying Family Photographs.

Speaking of breaks and uncovering mysteries: A new season of PBS' "History Detectives" (one of my favorite shows) premieres Monday with three more cases of historical intrigue. Go to the show's Web site, and you'll see the detectives' techniques are the same ones you use to peek into your own past: analyzing photos, using archives, locating land records and more. Pick up some tips at http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives—and watch for a genealogy-focused episode Aug. 15.

—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.
   

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Take Our Quiz and Win
How closely do you read your Family Tree Magazine? Take our test and find out: Go grab your August 2005 issue and use it to answer the following five questions. The first three people to e-mail the correct answers to ftmnews-editor@fwpubs.com will each get a free copy of the Family Tree Sourcebook, a special issue of Family Tree Magazine coming to newsstands July 19.
  1. Which of the 101 Best Undiscovered Web Sites links you to records of 200,000 Pullman Car Works employees?
  2. If you're searching Ancestry.com's Castle Garden passenger lists but don't know the passenger's arrival year, what character should you type in place of unknown numbers in the year?
  3. What Congressional act allowed men to claim 160 acres in Kansas if they'd cultivate it for five years—contributing to a population leap in the Sunflower State?
  4. What do historical re-enactors call the process of removing traces of modern life from their re-enctment events?
  5. What does the acronym GEDCOM stand for?


Search Party
Stephen P. Morse—whose One-Step Web pages rank among Family Tree Magazine's 101 best sites for 2005—recently introduced RootsWeb Plus, a new search utility for RootsWeb's Social Security Death Index (SSDI). The SSDI is a database of nearly 75 million Americans whose deaths were reported to the Social Security Administration; almost all of them since 1962.

RootsWeb offers a free search of the SSDI at http://ssdi.rootsweb.com. Morse's utility, located at http://www.stevemorse.org/ssdi/ssdi.html, lets you search RootsWeb's database on several additional parameters to filter out false positives. You can search on:

  • as few as one character in the first and last name fields
  • a range of birth and death years
  • age at death
  • a last residence outside the United States
  • the day of the month your relative died
Morse advises patience if you're using several of the above options at once. "The way my software searches on birth and death ranges is to do repeated searches for each year in the range," he writes on his Web site. "Same for partial first and last names of fewer than three characters." The more date ranges and partial names you include in one search, the longer you'll wait for results.

You can use Morse's SSDI search page to scour SSDI data at other sites including Ancestry.com, Family Tree Legends, FamilySearch and NewEnglandAncestors.org. These sites support different search parameters, and may contain slightly different data depending on how often Webmasters add new information from the Social Security Administration. For more information, see Morse's FAQs at http://www.stevemorse.org/ssdi/faqi.htm.


Digitizing Irish Books
Trinity College Dublin is partnering up with new publisher Archive CD Books Ireland to digitize the college's old books, journals and historical directories. Trinity College, founded in 1592, has the largest library in Ireland. Since January, the project has made 25 historical directories available, with 150 more expected by 2006. You can check the progress and order directories on CD at http://www.eneclann.ie.


You Said It: Conference Feedback
In the last newsletter, we asked you to tell us why you did or didn't go to the National Genealogical Society conference this year. Read our post-conference report at http://net.fwpublications.com/newsletters/
NewsletterArchive/Family_Tree_Magazine_E-Mail_Update/
6_9_2005.htm

We heard from 23 of you who didn't make it to the conference, and six who did. Of those who stayed at home:

  • Eight said attendance didn't fit their budget or Nashville was too far away. "If you had no charge for viewing the vendors and a small fee for select programs, maybe I could afford to attend," wrote one reader. Editor's note: Exhibit hall admission is free at National Genealogical Society conferences. For more information, see http://www.ngsgenealogy.org.
  • Eight were too busy (several cited graduations).
  • Six didn't learn about the conference in time to make plans. "There was no advertising for it at all," said one reader who lives in Nashville.
  • One person didn't like the location. Another who regularly attends conferences said he'd already heard many of the scheduled classes.

Of the respondents who traveled to the NGS conference:

  • Three went for the program. "I read the announcement in International Society of Family History Writers and Editors list messages," an attendee wrote. "I checked out the program offerings and saw there were quite a few relating to [topics that] interest me."
  • Two cited the convenient location. "I met a cousin in Germany who told me his sister was living in Tennessee, so right away I made reservations and got a plane ticket," explained one researcher.
  • One says she does her best to go to all the major conferences.




Finding Your Roots Online Tricking Myself Into Using
Pre-1850 Censuses
I know I'm not the only genealogist who hates looking at pre-1850 censuses. These are the records that name only the heads of household, with everyone else counted not by name, but by age and/or sex. There's just something about those columns of dits and dashes that makes me go cross-eyed.

Continue reading at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/ancestornews/current.html.

In this biweekly, Web-exclusive column, contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson points to new ways to do computer-related genealogy research. Hendrickson is a family historian, writer and author of Finding Your Roots Online, on sale at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/store/display.asp?id=70583.

Read past AncestorNews columns at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/ancestornews/previous.html.


Be first to check out these new articles on our Web site:





Canon vs. Civil
Q. Our genealogy program's kinship report shows categories called Civil, which has Roman numerals, and Cannon, with Arabic numerals. What do cannon and civil mean?

A. Canon (correctly spelled with one n) and civil have to do with degrees of relationship between relatives—the terms stand for different methods to calculate the degrees.

Canon law records the number of steps back to two relatives' common ancestor. For example, your first cousin is two steps to the ancestor you two share (your grandparent)—so the canon number is 2.

Civil relationships give the total number of steps from one relative to the other. In the case of your first cousin, it's two steps from you to your grandparent and two more from your grandparent to your first cousin. That makes the civil relationship IV (as you've noted, it's customarily shown in Roman numerals).
—Diane Haddad

Diane Haddad is editor of the Family Tree Magazine E-Mail Update newsletter.

Read more Q&A with the experts at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/nowwhatonline/previous.html.


Identifying Family Photographs Help Identify This Photo and Win a Book
Expert photo historian Maureen A. Taylor helps readers analyze old family pictures in her Web-exclusive column Identifying Family Photographs. This week, she'll give her new book to a newsletter reader who can help ID this photo.

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.


Huntsville, Texas
Emily Anne Croom
June 25
Texas Genealogical and Family History Fair

  • Topic: You're Known by the Company You Keep: Cluster Genealogy, an Essential Tool in Research
For more information, contact the Walker County Genealogical Society at http://www.wcgen.com.


Lufkin, Texas
Emily Anne Croom
July 22-23
Angelina College Genealogy Conference
Topics:

  • The Old Dominion: Researching Virginia Ancestors
  • The Territorial Papers of the United States: the Southern States
  • Genealogy in the Urban South
  • Sifting Through the Ashes: Research in "Burned Counties"
For more information, go to http://www.angelina.edu/genealogy.htm.




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Sponsor This Newsletter
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August 2005 Issue

August 2005 Family Tree Magazine

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