Just received the following press release regarding an upcoming media event:

WHAT:  To celebrate Memorial Day and honor all who have served our country, Ancestry.com - the world’s largest online resource for family history - is teaming up with the National Archives and Records Administration - the nation’s record keeper - to kick off a new agreement that makes millions of historical records more easily available to the public.

WHO:  Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Tim Sullivan, CEO, Ancestry.com

WHEN:  10 A.M., Tuesday, May 20, 2008

WHERE:  Washington Room, National Archives Building
Constitution Avenue between 7th and 9th Streets NW, Washington, DC
(Press should use the Special Events entrance at Constitution and 7th St. NW)

MEDIA OPPS:  Visuals of historical records including a passenger list of the US Army Transport USS Grant arriving at the San Francisco port in November 1929, the military service record for William James, a Washington, D.C. native who enlisted in the Union Army’s 1st Colored Infantry in 1863, and the death record of Judy Garland.

One-on-one interviews with Professor Allen Weinstein and Tim Sullivan, CEO, Ancestry.com, to learn more about the agreement and how Ancestry.com and the National Archives are working to preserve America’s heritage and provide access to important historical documents to Americans.

Background:  For more than a decade, Ancestry.com and the National Archives have collaborated to make important historical records available to the public, demonstrating their commitment to preserving America’s heritage. Ancestry.com currently has the largest online collection of digitized and indexed National Archives content, including passenger lists from 1820-1960, and WWI and WWII draft registration cards. This new agreement provides critical access to these important historical records at a faster rate than ever before due to the placement of Ancestry.com technicians and scanning machines at the National Archives to continually digitize content for online access.

For more information about Ancestry.com and its offer of free public access to its U.S. Military Collection, click here.

For more information on the new agreement between Ancestry.com and NARA, click here.

Media Contacts:

National Archives Public Affairs staff at: (202) 357-5300.

Ancestry.com, Sara Black at: (213) 996-3812; sblack@painepr.com.

To mark the first day of the 2008 National Genealogical Society Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, Tim Sullivan, has published a letter to the genealogy community. He highlights several recently released content collections and product enhancements on Ancestry.com, and gives insights into some exciting new projects on the horizon. Tim is the CEO of The Generations Network (parent company of Ancestry.com) and his letter has been posted on the TGN media site.

Click here to get a look at some of the major collections and updates you’ll be seeing at Ancestry.com.
 

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 

Posted This Week

• Social Security Death Index (SSDI)-Updated through March 2008 
• Headstones Provided for Deceased Union Civil War Veterans, 1879-1903 (More than 170,000 names added) 
• U.S. Public Records Index (Nearly 20 million names added) 
• View a list of all new and updated databases 
• Learn more about what’s new at Ancestry.com 
• Search the Ancestry.com Card Catalog

Often our brick walls stem from not fully understanding the conditions in which our ancestors lived and the events that shaped their lives. Reading social histories, biographies, and other historical books–even well researched historical fiction–can sometimes help you over those walls. Check your local library, WorldCat, local bookstores, and online bookstores like the Ancestry Store for publications that will offer you some insight into the lives and times of your brick wall ancestors. Then find a nice spot to curl up for some great summer reading!

Some of the best evidence of our ancestors’ vital dates and locations can be found in church records. This is especially true of the time periods before state, county, and local governments began complying with legislation to issue birth and death certificates. These records are also essential in cases in which government-produced records have been lost or destroyed.

One of the challenges of researching church records is that sometimes the churches have disappeared. For whatever reason, the church to which you thought your ancestral family belonged just cannot be found. Let’s discuss some possible reasons for “lost” churches and strategies to help you locate them and their records.

What Happened to the Church?
There are many reasons why you might not be able to find a church. First and foremost, be certain you are researching in the right place and are using the correct name and denomination. In Rockingham County, North Carolina, there are two Chapel Hill Churches (unrelated to the town of Chapel Hill in another county), three Mount Herman Churches, and two New Hope Churches, among others. Churches with the same name can also be different denominations, as I found when I located a Baptist church and a Methodist in the same county, both known by the name of Bushy Creek Church. (You might need to research both if you aren’t sure of your ancestors’ religious affiliation.)

The church may have changed its name, merged with another church, or split into multiple congregations. In some situations, the church may have dissolved entirely. Worse yet, the church may have been destroyed by some natural disaster and simply was not rebuilt. In these cases, you may need to trace the “genealogy” of the churches themselves. (more…)

My family–my former husband, our daughter, and myself–moved from our home town, Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles, California almost thirty years ago.  We came home for two weeks that first summer, and my dad gave me his old camera because he had gotten a new one.  I experimented with this somewhat complicated camera and, in doing so, decided that my vacation pictures would have a theme. I didn’t realize I was recording history; I was just taking individual photographs of all my friends and family standing beside their cars.

I ran across these pictures the other day, stuck in a small, ribboned album which proved to be a treasure trove of time and transportation.  My mother by her wood-sided station wagon; my artist friend Terry– now my librarian–leans on the back of his green VW Bug. 

My Great Aunts, Violet and Rosina, having driven over together, wear summer white. (They are gone now, as is my father.) My friend Lynn, with a bumper-sticker on her car touting the Columbus Zoo. We just had dinner together last night!

Everyone is younger, but everyone is there, outside smiling on a Columbus summer day. The twins, Amy and Barbara, and the maroon Chevrolet. My father, proud and strong and tan with his Chrysler Le Baron.  The hose is out and he’s wearing his bathing suit.  He was washing his car.
 
The vibrancy of life is there.  As James Taylor would say, “sunny days we thought would never end.”  The makes and models of the cars mark the moment.  The friends and family mark the life.

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D.G. Fulford is the bestselling author of the classic To Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come, which she wrote with her brother, Bob Greene; Designated Daughter: The Bonus Years with Mom, written with her mother, Phyllis Greene, and her latest, Things I’d Love You to Know: A Journal for Mothers and Daughters. She is also cofounder of therememberingsite.org that helps people tell their life story.

from George G. Morgan 
 
Having your Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA tested is a first step towards using a new toolkit in your genealogical research. It’s something new, just as using the Internet was twelve to fifteen years ago. Don’t be overwhelmed.

Dr. Blaine Bettinger, also known as the “Genetic Genealogist,” is there to help you learn how to use your test results and apply them to your research. His blog helps translate a scientific topic into understandable terminology for “the rest of us.” He also has produced a 28-page book PDF file titled “I Have the Results of My Genetic Genealogy Test, Now What?” that helps those of us who are just beginning our genetic quest understand it all. The file is available at the Genetic Genealogist blog. His explanation is one of the best and most understandable for the layman. You will want to add this to your reading list if you are exploring your genetic genealogical connections.

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Prison Records
I heard stories about my great-great-grandfather making moonshine so strong it burned blue. He was a rough man, but also a hard worker. After learning that he and his wife got a divorce around 1936, I checked with the Minnesota Historical Society for the divorce case file. The case had approximate dates for a prison sentence and location. 

The Minnesota Historical Society helped out again. This time they had found his prison case file–approximately fifty pages, all for twenty cents a page and the cost of shipping. What a goldmine of information for less than fifteen dollars. It included information on his prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas, for the “manufacturing and sale of liquor” in 1930, a complete physical exam, a list of letters received and written, a list of family members (including wife, children, and siblings). Oh, and his picture. 

Prison case files can be priceless. Have a shady character in your family? Maybe they made moonshine and bootlegged during Prohibition days too.

I love family history–even the not so pretty stuff.

Mindy McLane
Rexburg, Idaho (more…)

The year was 1885 and the flow of settlers to western Canada increased greatly with the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

And in Canada’s North-West Territories there were rumblings of a rebellion. In what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta, three groups had grievances with the Canadian government in Ottawa. The Metis, descendants of fur traders and indigenous peoples, were concerned about legal claim to their land; white settlers were waiting for official property titles necessary to secure loans and felt their interests weren’t represented; and the starving First Nations peoples who had been promised farming equipment and aid were angry that treaties weren’t being observed.

The rebellion, which would only last for two months, was led by Louis Riel, a Metis who had fought for the rights of Manitoba residents during the Red River uprising in 1869-70. He formed a provisional government and armed forces. These forces clashed with government troops at Duck Lake and although the Metis claimed this first victory, the rebellion was subdued by the end of May, and Louis Riel was arrested and hung for treason. 

In the United States, anti-Chinese sentiment was on the rise following the California gold rush, which had brought more than 100,000 Chinese to American shores. In September of 1885, violence erupted. In a Union Pacific Coal Mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming, there was a dispute over who had the right to work in a particularly rich area of the mine. Paid by the ton, white workers rioted, burning the Chinese quarter of town, and killing twenty-eight Chinese miners. The perpetrators were never prosecuted and Army troops had to be called in to protect those Chinese who wished to return to their homes.

In Chicago, Sarah E. Goode, a former slave, became the first African American woman to be awarded a patent from the U.S. government for her design of a “cabinet bed.” Her invention could be used as a cabinet by day, but opened into a bed for sleeping.

In June of 1885 the U.S. received a package–actually two hundred and fourteen packages. In them was the Statue of Liberty, waiting to be assembled on Bedloe’s Island. The statue would be unveiled in late October of 1886.

Great strides were made in the field of medicine in 1885, when Louis Pasteur successfully treated Joseph Meister for rabies with his new vaccine.

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