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April 11, 2007
In the December 2006 Family Tree Magazine, we invited webmasters of family history sites to enter our Best Family Web Site Contest. We chose five finalists, then let you decide
the winners through online voting. The top site wins a software package from RootsMagic (http://www.rootsmagic.com) and GenSmarts (http://www.gensmarts.com); all three are honored
as Sites of the Week on our home page. The winners:
In other news, if you're planning on trekking to the Ohio Genealogical Society Conference
in Columbus this weekend, stop by the exhibit hall for a chat with your friendly neighborhood Family Tree Magazine editors.
—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 e-mail-address book—your software will recognize the Update as an
e-mail you want to read.
Allen County Library Partners With WeRelate.org
A new partnership has the much-revered genealogy department at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind., (http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/genealogy)
helping with the Web site WeRelate.org (http://werelate.org). Dallan and Solveig Quass of the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy launched the free social networking wiki last year.
Anyone can post and edit content on
a wiki. WeRelate has pages for more than 430,000 places, 115,000 names and 1.3 million research resources (including listings from the Family History Library online catalog). The Allen County library will provide administrative support; the foundation will
continue developing features such as these, which were recently added: - user-uploaded GEDCOMs and digitized images, plus the ability to annotate images
-
Family Tree Explorer, a Web-based application for building a family tree
- automatically generated pedigree maps showing the migrations of people on an ancestor chart
Oh, Canadian Genealogy
Two online developments have researchers from the Maple Leaf country jumping up and down: Now you can check
the subscription Web site Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com)
for immigrant ancestors who landed in Canada before continuing to the United States. The site's immigration databases now include record images bearing more than 4 million
names of people who crossed the U.S.-Canadian border between 1895 and 1956.
Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics (https://www.novascotiagenealogy.com),
a new site form the provincial archives, lets you search and view (using the free Viewpoint media player) vital records including births from 1864 to 1877, marriages from 1864
to 1930 and deaths from 1864 to 1877 and 1908 to 1955. Click Add to Cart to order electronic files or paper copies of the records.
WorldVitalRecords.com Adds NARA Databases
The subscription database site WorldVitalRecords.com (http://www.worldvitalrecords.com)
has added several databases from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA, http://archives.gov) including WWII Army Enlistments, Army casualties (1961 to 1981) and Korean War
Casualties (1950 to 1953). You need a subscription ($49.95 per year) to access these record transcriptions on WorldVitalRecords, but you can search them free
through NARA's Access to Archival Databases at http://aad.archives.gov/aad. It's not the most intuitive databsae to search, but NARA has vastly improved the interface over the past year. Just type a first and
last name into the Search AAD field or, to search individual databases, click Genealogy/Personal History, then click the Search button by the title you want.
Ellis Island Gets Busy
This month marks the 100th anniversary of Ellis Island's
busiest day, April 17, 1907, when immigration officials processed 11,747 arrivals—more than twice the number of passengers entering the
port on a typical day.
The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation will celebrate the centennial with its annual Ellis Island Family Heritage Awards ceremony honoring three Americans with roots on the island: Duke University basketball coach
Mike Krzyzewski, AARP director Bill Novelli and Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack. Filippino-American fashion entrepreneur
Josie Natori will receive the Peopling of America Award, which goes to an American with roots in another time period or different port.
In all, 1,285,349 immigrants entered the United States in 1907, most from Southern and Eastern Europe. Ellis Island
processed nearly 80 percent of those arrivals. You can search for Ellis Island passengers between 1892 and 1924 at http://www.ellisisland.org.
What's in it for you?
You could go crazy chasing after ancestors who spelled their names 10 different ways and seem to pick up and move just as the census taker closed in. So this week we want to know: Why do you do genealogy,
anyway—to leave a legacy? Stay out of trouble? Tell us in the Introductions Forum.
http://www.familytreemagazine.com/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=293&posts=1#M653
Mr.
and Mrs. Smith
always april is researching her Smith family in Kansas, with little information to start. Post your common-name search strategies on the Forum.
http://www.familytreemagazine.com/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=295&posts=2&start=1
Tip of the Week: Prowling for Resources
This tip comes from the May 2007 Family Tree Magazine, available
now on newsstands and at FamilyTreeMagazine.com:
Can't find a
local history book about your ancestor's town? Search WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org), an online catalog of a billion books, maps, articles and documents in 10,000 repositories. If an item isn't at your library, you can request it through interlibrary loan or buy it using a handy Amazon.com link.
Do you have a great idea for discovering, preserving or celebrating family history? Post your tip to our Submit Your Tips Forum and if we publish it in teh newsletter, you'll win a free genealogy book. You must register with the Forum to post.
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:
- Free on Ancestry
- http://www.freeonancestry.com
- Why didn't someone think of this before? This site lists all the free databases on Ancestry.com by region and record group—just click to go to the search page on
Ancestry.com.
- Africans in America
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
- This companion Web site to the PBS show takes you on a journey through slavery in America
Ladies First
A caption on the back of Helen Armstrong's photo reads "Ally, Rose, Mar." Armstrong thinks "Mar" is her great-grandmother Margaret (seated), but she has no idea who the others are.
Expert photo historian Maureen
A. Taylor is on the case at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/photos/
current.htm.
Taylor is the author of Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photographs, available at http://www.fwbookstore.com/product/1217/168.
If you have a family photo mystery for Taylor to solve, check out our Submission Guidelines at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/photos/photohelp.htm.
Columbus, Ohio
April 12-14
Ohio Genealogical Society Conference
For more information, go to http://www.ogs.org/2007conf.php.
Find other
genealogy and living history seminars—and publicize your group's events—in our online calendar. You must be registered with the FamilyTreeMagazine.com Forum to post.
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http://www.genealogical.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&item_number=3505
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