Posted This Week:

• Marriages and Deaths from the Maryland Gazette, 1727-1839 
• Index to Marriages and Deaths in the Baltimore Sun 1837-1850 
• Index to Marriages and Deaths in the Baltimore Sun 1851-1860 
• List of Freemen of Massachusetts, 1630-1691
• Henderson’s Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) Directory, 1920 
• View a list of all new and updated databases 
• Learn more about what’s new at Ancestry.com  
• Search the Ancestry.com Card Catalog

Coming Soon:

• U.S. Passport Applications, 1787-1925 
• Historic U.S. & Canada Atlases, 1591-2000 
• Major U.S. & Canada Newspaper Update 
• North Dakota State Census, 1915 & 1925 
• Oklahoma Territorial Census, 1890 & 1907 
• Southern Claims Commission Records 
• Stars and Stripes, Pacific Theater, 1942-1964

In honor of Family History Month, your challenge is to answer five questions from each Weekly Planner topic–or make up five of your own. This week’s topic is home. Here are some questions to get you started:

• What was your room like when you were growing up? Did you share it or did you have your own room? What did it look like?
• Did you have a backyard? A garden? Did you grow fruits and/or vegetables? 
• Did you have a secret hiding place?
• What household chores were your responsibilities?
• In what room did your family gather most? Was it in the living room or around the kitchen table? What did you do there? Sing? Talk about the day? Watch T.V.? Tell stories?

Feel free to share your memories in the Comments section of this blog below; or, if you have a blog, post a link to your responses. Your memory may help spark the memories of other readers who had similar experiences. For more interesting questions, see TheRememberingSite.org.

Previous challenges:

• School Memories 
• Fun and Games

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Unfortunately, I have to start this week by apologizing to those of you who did not receive last week’s newsletter. There was a problem with the mailing list. If you still haven’t seen it, it is available online in the Ancestry Library.  If you still haven’t received a newsletter via email, and are reading this online, please check your account preferences to make sure you’re still on our mailing list. (To do this, log in to Ancestry.com using your membership or free registered user I.D. and password, and click on My Account. In the top right box, select Update your newsletter and marketing email preferences, then make sure the box for Weekly Journal is checked. If not, check it and scroll down to Update Preferences.) I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.

One last little piece of housekeeping. I’ve included some samples here on the blog from a book I created from one of my trees. It’s in the experimental stages, but I’m including a variety of examples of what you can do, and so you can see some of the tools and icons I am describing. I realize the images aren’t optimum size for reading, but if you click on the images it will enlarge them a bit. Now, let’s get started!

In last week’s column, I discussed how I have been working on tidying up my online tree at Ancestry, attaching records and photographs. This week we’re going to take a look at what we can do with the new Ancestry Press tool that was launched this week, using all those images that we loaded to our tree.

Getting Started
Beginning your book is easy. Go to the new Publish tab at Ancestry and click on the orange Get Started button. (You’ll want to disable any pop-up blockers you have enabled.) Next you can choose to either create a new book using templates, or to create one from scratch. Let’s walk through the steps of creating a new book using the templates. This will bring in all the records and images you’ve attached to your tree.

On the next screen, you’ll see a list of the trees you have posted at Ancestry. Select the tree you want, then the format of the pedigree chart, and finally the starting person for your book. Then click Continue. Ancestry will gather all the information from your tree and create pages based on what you have attached. When it finishes loading you’ll find pedigree charts, family group sheets, timelines, and pages for the records you have loaded. You can also create blank pages.

Let the Fun Begin
With your tree loaded, now the fun part begins–customizing your book. You’ll notice on the left side of the first page there is a menu bar with three buttons. The bottom button will be opened at first and through this button you can choose to view records and photos that you attached to anyone in that tree. It will default to your start person, but you can change views by typing in the name of someone else in the tree.

The button above it contains Embellishments that you can use in your book, and above that you’ll find Photos. Click on any button to open that selection, and then you can just click and drag whatever image or text you’ve selected to the page you’re working on. Continue reading →

The long-awaited official release of Elizabeth Shown Mills’s new book, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, published by Genealogical Publishing Co., occurred at the Federation of Genealogical Societies’ 2008 Conference in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in August. And what a great book it is! It doesn’t replace her previous book, Evidence! which remains an excellent reference for a large number of source materials. Nor does it replace the laminated QuickSheet: Citing Online Historical Resources Evidence! Style, published in 2005. Instead, it takes source citations to the most current of levels and includes a wonderful collection of source materials and definitive citation examples.

The book boasts more than 1,000 examples, weighs in at 2 lbs. 4 oz., is 885 pages long (including the indexes), and retails for $49.95. While not intended to be read cover to cover, I will tell you that, as a genealogist concerned with performing and documenting research in a scholarly way, this is a must-have book for your personal reference library. Don’t skip the foreword, which is a short and concise statement of why we should all be interested in citations. Continue reading →

We used to have a saying when I first worked for a newspaper, an alternative weekly in Pasadena, California. “We are not the newspaper of record,” we’d say. There was a daily paper in town that carried that responsibility. This freed us up to write more quirky and colorful stories.

You are not the newspaper of record, either. Remember that. It is not your duty to recreate World War II on the page, or sum up the Great Depression.  What your readers want to know, the story only you can tell, is what you felt in those days, what you saw, and how you were affected.

Are you particularly careful with your money because of your family’s experiences in the 1929 stock market crash? Do your children or your children’s children agree with you about the value of a dollar? Do they buy designer clothes when you think store brand would do? Do you have military clothing stashed away?  Is it your father’s, your brother’s, your sister’s, or your own? When you get together to tell war stories, what stories do you tell?

Do not feel that you must recount the history of the world. If you put down your own experiences, you are adding your individual voice to humanity’s ambitious goal of getting the story told.

Get more tips on preserving your memories on The RememberingSite.org

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