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Hidden History and Reference Guides | |
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101 Best Undiscovered Web Sites 2005 | |
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August 2005 issue | |
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Hidden History and Reference Guides
About Names American Cultural History Applied Language An Atlas of the German Empire Conservation Online Early American History Encyclopedia of Genealogy ePodunk.com Film Forever Gazetteer of British Place Names Map History New York Times Articles Archive Find news and reviews on more great Web sites in the August 2005 Family Tree Magazine.
Paid Content
www.aboutnames.ch
Learn all about the 2,000 most common American given names, along with 1,000 of their European counterparts. Names are grouped by common origin and meaning, allowing you to see at a single glance the 30 variants of Maria, for example.
kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/19thcentury.html or kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decades.html
Place your ancestors in historical context with these lively guides to the 19th and 20th centuries—you'll find everything from basic facts and statistics to fads and fashions to education and technology. Profiles of each decade include suggested books for further reading.
www.appliedlanguage.com/free_translation.shtml
Stumped by that foreign phrase or Web site? This free online resource translates up to 150 words or any Web page between English and 10 different languages (even Chinese). You'll find world maps and online foreign-language dictionaries here, too.
www.library.wisc.edu/etext/ravenstein
Though Ludwig Ravenstein's 1883 atlas resides in the collection of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, its online incarnation will be of most interest to genealogists with central European roots. Its large-scale, thorough gazetteer of place names and mapping of church locations make the atlas invaluable to families with origins in any part of the German empire from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Maps also cover bordering portions of present-day Austria, Belgium, the Czech and Slovak republics, Denmark, France, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia and Switzerland.
palimpsest.stanford.edu
Though aimed at professional conservators, this site can help even amateurs learn about family heirloom preservation, copyright and intellectual property issues, digital imaging and solutions to problems ranging from mold to bugs. Start with the Conservation/Preservation Information for the General Public link.
www.1st-hand-history.org
This lively collection of written accounts from the 1700s and 1800s warns, "This is probably not the same history that you learned in school." Clicking through these documents is like interviewing your early American ancestors-listening to real people, not the famous folks who made the history books-express their thoughts, feelings and ambitions. As the site's introduction puts it, "Here is the real pioneer spirit at its best and worst."
www.eogen.com
Get answers to your genealogy reference and how-to questions at this free, user-contributed "encyclopedia," the brainchild of genealogy computer guru Dick Eastman.
www.epodunk.com/genealogy
Find those obscure and obsolete ancestral towns with this searchable guide to 45,000 cities, villages, towns and townships across America. Search on a place name, and you'll find the name of the county, the county seat and links to various genealogical resources.
www.filmforever.org
Save those old home movies for future generations with an assist from this in-depth guide aimed at preserving home films, not just Hollywood productions. (You might want to let that scene of you as a baby in the bathtub fade away, though.)
www.gazetteer.co.uk
Find your British ancestral home with this exhaustive place-name index. Its 50,000-plus entries cover commonly accepted alternative spellings, as well as Welsh and Gaelic versions.
www.maphistory.info/sum.html
Besides an introduction to the history of cartography, this site serves up thousands of links to old-map sites—including hundreds with digitized images—to help you trace your ancestors' whereabouts.
pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nytimes/advancedsearch.html
Search the nation's newspaper of record from Sept. 1851 to Dec. 1995—more than 15 million articles in all, part of the ProQuest Archiver service. Searching is free; if you get a hit on a newsworthy ancestor, a single article in PDF format costs $2.95. (Note that you can tap the same content with a membership to the Godfrey Memorial Library—see Document Discoveries.)
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