I was just checking out the Ancestry World Archives Project and thought this would be a good time to post an update on the status. There are currently more than 7,900 participants in the project and close to 4 million records have been keyed! The top indexer alone has indexed more than 70,000 records.  We should begin seeing collections posted to Ancestry.com in the near future.

Here are some of the collections that are being indexed right now:

• Nebraska State Census, 1885
• New England Naturalization Indexes
• New York Naturalization Indexes
• New York City Naturalization Indexes
• Southern California Naturalization Indexes
• England and Wales, Criminal Registers, 1805-1892
• England Newspaper Index Cards (Andrews Collection)
• Cartes postales historiques (France-Historic Postcards)

Click here if you’d like to learn more about the World Archives Project or if you’d like to join the community of keyers.   

You can also view the free webinar that was held on the World Archives Project in the Learning Center webinar archive. There is also a new article on Reading Old Handwriting in the Help section of Ancestry.com, that is useful both in keying for the World Archive Project and in reading the handwriting we’re faced with in our research.

After Maureen’s directory of articles ran in the 3 November 2008 Ancestry Weekly Journal (click here if you missed it), I received the following message from StoryCorps, a non-profit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. What a great way to kick off the holiday season!

I’m writing from StoryCorps to let you know we saw Maureen Taylor’s blog post from February 17, referenced again on November 2, mentioning StoryCorps as an inspiration for recording ancestry in audio format. It’s such a great connection: preserving family ancestry and the simple act of listening to each other.

I wanted to write to let you know about a new initiative we’re launching this year that might also appeal to your readers. StoryCorps is asking the whole country to set aside one hour on Friday, November 28th, the day after Thanksgiving, to record a conversation with a friend or loved one. We’re declaring this day the National Day of Listening. We just launched a website (www.nationaldayoflistening.org) with more information and tips for a Do-it-Yourself style interview as well as a video walking through an interview. Since so many Americans aren’t able to make it to a StoryCorps recording booth, we’re making it easier for everyone to share this experience in their own homes.

Again, thank you for writing about StoryCorps on your blog. Please share the idea of National Day of Listening and these Do-it-Yourself tools with your readers, family, and friends, helping us make the experience of listening as an act of love even more accessible.

Thank you again,

Kathleen McCarthy
Marketing and Communications
StoryCorps
www.storycorps.net/

Join StoryCorps in the National Day of Listening
November 28, 2008
http://www.nationaldayoflistening.org

Hundreds of thousands of historic records will be freely available online

Salt Lake City, Utah—Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and the National Association of Government Archive and Records Administrators (NAGARA) announced on July 24, 2008, that Judge Bill Spicer and the Probate Division of the Summit County Common Pleas Court in Akron, Ohio, were awarded a 2008 grant for the digitization of Summit County marriage, birth, and death records. The court’s grant was one of only two awarded in 2008. This significant grant will make it possible for Summit County to digitally preserve and provide free online access to select historical documents.

The project targets 1840 to 1980 marriage records for over 550,000 individuals, birth records prior to 1908 for over 46,000 individuals, and death records prior to 1908 for over 22,000 individuals. A free, searchable name index linked to the digital images of the original records will be available to the public through the probate court’s Web site www.summitohioprobate.com and the grant partners’ sites.  

“As a result of the grant, our Website, which was chosen as one of the 10 best in the country by the National College of Probate Judges, will now have the added distinction of being a model for the state and country for accessing historical court records,” said Judge Spicer. “Not only will it improve access, but by reducing the need to see the often-fragile originals, it will make the court’s job of preserving hundreds of thousands of original records easier. The project is a far-sighted and important effort in preserving local history. On behalf of the court and the citizens of Summit County, I thank the project sponsors for selecting Summit County Probate Court as its 2008 grant recipient.”

This is the first year that this national grant was offered. It is sponsored by Ancestry.com and FamilySearch and administered by NAGARA. Under the grant, FamilySearch will digitize the original documents on-site in the Summit County courthouse by the end of 2008, and Ancestry.com will create an electronic index linked to the images. The entire project is scheduled for completion in 2009. The commercial value of the grant is estimated to be $150,000.00.  (more…)

I was watching our local news and found a story that I thought all family historians would appreciate. Volunteers are identifying the unmarked graves of Chicago police officers who have been killed in the line of duty. A local monument company is donating gravestones to mark their resting places. It’s on a segment of the news called, “Someone You Should Know.” I have to agree. What a wonderful and worthwhile project.

You can read more or view the segment on the ABC7 News website.

Was just reading some of my blog feeds on iGoogle and noticed a post by our friend Megan Smolenyak. It’s now been two years since she and her partner Marcy Brown launched Roots Television and what they’ve accomplished is truly amazing! In their first year, they won four Telly Awards and there are now hundreds of videos available on twenty-four channels that can be viewed on the website, including George Morgan and Drew Smith’s Down Under Florida series on the Dearly Departed Channel, DNA Stories, and a series of interviews by Dick Eastman on the Conferences Channel.

If you haven’t had a chance to explore Roots Television, I highly recommend you check it out. The shows provide helpful information through some great stories! Roots Television is online at www.rootstelevision.com.

Congratulations to Megan and Marcy and all the folks behind the scenes at Roots Television!

This week I was checking out the Canadian Passenger Arrival Records that were recently posted on Ancestry.ca in search of some connections to my Hungarian ancestors. As I was looking for information regarding locations, I happened across the newly updated website of the Federation of Eastern European Family History Societies (FEEFHS). If you have ancestors from Eastern Europe, this fantastic website is a must-see.

FEEFHS has had an outstanding presence on the Internet for more than ten years. (I’m not sure of the exact date, but I know they already had a pretty extensive presence when I was compiling the first edition of the Ancestry Family Historian’s Address Book back in 1997.) At any rate, I love this newly revised website.

The FEEFHS Map Room alone is worth the visit, but the new layout makes it easier than ever to find the many resources available, by country, region, or religion/ethinicity. You can check it out yourself at www.feefhs.org.