probate birth certificates

RootsWeb: TXDALLAS-L [TXDALLAS] Birth Certificates: "There are delayed (or probate) birth certificates file by many people in the 1930s when there was a need for proof of birth to get a Social Security Card. It was not unusual for persons (especially women who were not employed outside the home) to get one at the time a spouse retired.

These records could be filed anywhere - not just in the county of birth. I would check the probate birth records in the county of birth as well as places persons lived in the 30s and early 40s, or even where they lived at the time of retirment. There are birth certificates for foreign born persons filed in local county courts."

new to me - "probate birth certificates" - Google Search

RootsMagic 4

RootsMagic Genealogy Software: "RootsMagic is the easiest to use family tree software available for Windows Vista, XP, 95, 98, ME, NT, and 2000, yet is also one of the most powerful."

RootsMagic | FamilySearch Certified Software: "As a FamilySearch Certified application, RootsMagic 4 bridges the gap between your personal family history data and the New FamilySearch internet site. RootsMagic 4 can seamlessly share your family tree with others through New FamilySearch as well as retrieve the information that you don't have. It also makes cleaning up and correcting information on New FamilySearch a breeze! RootsMagic 4 also allows you to do things not possible with the New FamilySearch website alone such as print charts and books, keep private information, and create Shareable CD's.
The Perfect Upgrade for PAF Users

Users of the PAF genealogy software will discover that their software is unable to directly work with New FamilySearch. RootsMagic 4 makes the transition painless by directly reading all of your information from PAF. And RootsMagic 4's friendly screens and menus allow even the most inexperienced computer novice to get up-and-running quickly."

1914 to 1918 casualties

BBC NEWS | UK | Piecing together the past: "

Detective work by a British historian has unearthed information that could enable thousands to piece together their family histories.

Historian Peter Barton explores the archives
Peter Barton was commissioned to carry out research into the identities of World War I casualties discovered in a mass grave at Fromelles in France.

He was given access to the basement of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva.
There, he was allowed to examine records that have lain virtually untouched since 1918.

He estimates that there could be 20 million sets of details, carefully entered on card indexes, or written into ledgers. . . . .
The fragile documents now being examined could provide the missing pieces of a jigsaw, and the Red Cross are already working to bring the archive into the computer age.

The organisation's head of press, Florian Westphal, admitted they had never faced a challenge quite like this: "First we have to make sure that we preserve the original records," he told me."Then, this autumn, we will begin the process of digitising the World War I section of the archive - we expect that phase of the project to cost around four million Swiss Francs."

The Red Cross say they'll need expert help from other countries, and will almost certainly ask for volunteers to join their own archivists. They aim to have the archive available on the web by 2014, a century after World War I began.But that's only the start; the careful record-keeping extended through World War II, and on to more recent conflicts.

I was shown the rows of metal shelves which contain millions more personal stories; more index cards neatly packed into boxes. Public access here would require significantly more effort, and more cash which is simply not available at this stage.

Back in the World War I archive, Peter Barton was leafing through page after page of handwritten names - all men who had died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme - lives ended far from home, but, thanks to the patience and care of Red Cross staff all those years ago, their stories may soon be told. "

London Family History Event

The Family History Event: "The Family History Event
Enquiries: 0844-478-0410 (all calls cost 5p per minute)

Date:
Sunday May 3rd 2009
May Bank Holiday Weekend


Location:
Exhibition Hall 2
Barbican Centre
Golden Lane
London
EC2Y 8DL
UK

Time:10.00am - 5.00pm"

GENEVA: The GENUKI calendar of GENealogical EVents and Activities

An online calendar of GENealogical EVents and Activities

This calendar is being run jointly on behalf of GENUKI and the Federation of Family History Societies. Event organisers are encouraged to check this calendar when picking a date to avoid clashes with other events in the same area. They are also encouraged to submit an entry for this calendar as soon as a date has been booked so that other organisers know about it and can try to avoid it.
Please note that this calendar depends on your Family History Society submitting its events as well as you reading it. If your society's events are not listed, please complain to them rather than to me. If the calendar does not link to any further details, please don't ask me for further information - because I don't have any.
At the end of this page you'll find some other groups' event lists and how to submit events to GENEVA.

The venue area codes are (mostly) the usual Chapman County Codes extended to the rest of the world as per the GRD usage. Where it seems more helpful, London postcode prefixes and other variants may be used.

making simple things complicated

from the blog Taking Genealogy to the Common Person
So what are the key concepts that should be supported by a genealogy program? With the help of some co-workers, I put together a concept map about genealogical research. A concept map is a simple, but powerful, way to capture and communicate knowledge about a topic. The map identifies nouns (concepts) and shows how they are related through verbs. Here is a PDF of the concept map. The video below is a guided tour through the concept map. I’d really appreciate your insight and feedback on the concept map.



basically genealogy is about making lists

and new lists from lists, and lists of lists like UK Census Collection - Ancestry.co.uk

Jewish names for girls

origin and meaning of some of the most common Jewish names for girls. - Google Search
eg
Hadassah is the Hebrew name of Esther, who saved the Jews in the Purim story from Haman's genocidal plot, as recorded in the biblical Book of Esther. Hadassah means "myrtle tree."
(variations: Hadas, Hadasa, Dassa, Dassi)

researching danish military records

Stavnsbåndet - Wikipedia, den frie encyklopædi: "Stavnsbåndet blev indført i 1733 efter ønske fra godsejere og militær. Det bandt mænd mellem 18 og 36 år til at blive boende på det gods eller herregård, hvor de var født. Der var dog mulighed for at købe fripas, så stavnsbåndet var i praksis næppe særligt bindende for de bedrestillede, d.v.s. bønderne og deres sønner.[1]

Det blev indført for at afhjælpe en alvorlig landbrugskrise i 1730'erne, som bl.a. skyldtes svigtende efterspørgsel fra Danmarks traditionelle eksportlande. Hertil kom afvandring af folk fra landet til byerne, hvilket yderligere medførte, at det kunne være svært at få befolket fæstegårdene. Endelig skulle militæret bruge folk til landmilitsen. Militærtjenesten påhvilede i praksis 'de mindre egnede' i landbruget, fordi det var godsejerens opgave at udtage mænd til landmilitsen.

Aldersgrænserne blev ændret i tre omgange. I 1735 til 14-36 år, i 1742 til 9-40 år og i 1764 til 4-40 år.

Stavnsbåndet blev omlagt som led i Landboreformerne af 20. juni 1788 med en overgangsperiode indtil 1800. I første omgang omfattede omlægningen kun dem, der var under 14 år. Dernæst dem der var over 36 år - og derefter dem, der havde tjent som soldat. Hovedpunktet i denne administrative reform var, at bindingen til godserne blev ændret til en binding til udskrivningsdistriktet. Enevælden var nu så udbygget, at staten i højere grad "kunne selv"; der var i mindre grad brug for godsejerne som det lokale administrative led."

Landmilitsen - Wikipedia, den frie encyklopædi: "I 1701 oprettedes der en landmilits af Frederik 4. Hver 20 tdr. hartkorn skulle stille en soldat, der hver søndag skulle møde op foran kirken for at træne i eksercits før gudstjenesten. Forordninger om pas, løn og skudsmål medførte en reel stavnsbinding af de værnepligtige. Soldaternes våben skulle opbevares i kirkens våbenhus, så de ikke blev misbrugt til ulovlig jagt. Fra 1733 indrulleredes alle bønder fra de var 18 til de blev 40 og senere til de blev 45. Det blev indført i deres fæstekontrakter, at hvis de gik fra gården, mens de var indrullerede, skulle de være soldat på fuld tid. Soldaterne blev kommanderet på tysk af lejede tyske officerer, og tjenesten, der varede op til 8 år, var meget forhadt."

1750-1800 STREJF DK and is part of an excellent timeline for danish history

and search the archives

Daisy: "Dansk Arkivalieinformationssystem Version 4.0"

useful keywords for archive series include:-

stambog
lægd

Vicipaedia

Vicipaedia: "Ave! Vicipaedia est opus commune, quo creetur encyclopaedia libera interretialis. Omnes ad contribuendum invitantur! Vicipaedia adhuc habet 26 770 commentationes."

Wolfram|Alpha search engine

Wolfram Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!: "he way humans normally communicate is through natural language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too.

Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.

But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.

All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do."
wolframalpha - Google Search

Smith and Frost

Family Ancestors - the story and trees of the Smith and Frost families and the ancestors who shaped us: "This is us - the Smith family. Actually, originally I'm a Frost, but I made an honest man of Chris in 1985, and in return he made me use his surname. I'm the one in the middle, name of Jean, christened Margaret Jean, but only the Inland Revenue calls me that, and the cute card sharp on the right is our daughter, Becky. She also has a name only the authorities call her, and that's Rebecca Anne. Chris is the wild frontier man and IR call him Christopher David.

This is the story of our family trees, and the people and places who shaped us and made us who we are."

Family Ancestors - the story and trees of the Smith and Frost families and the ancestors who shaped us: "The
British Isles c.1300
Yorkshire, Dorset, London, Monmouthshire, Somerset, Essex, Derbyshire, Buckinghamshire…. these are just a few of the counties our forbears have lived in. An adage of genealogy states that until the advent of railways, families stayed in one place - not ours they didn’t! Rich or poor, people moved around, going where work, circumstances or opportunities took them, and our living cousins are scattered around the old British Empire - New Zealand, United States and Australia. I’m sure we’ll unearth more destinations! Chris’ mum was born in South Africa - I bet we have cousins there too.These pages are a little, personal, archive of the places our ancestors inhabited."

Poor Law in England

www.workhouses.org.uk - The Workhouse Web Site: "From its beginnings in the fourteenth century, up to the inauguration of the National Health Service in 1948, the evolution of England's poor laws is the story of one of the most significant and far-reaching strands of the nation's social policy and administration. . . . . . "
http://www.workhouses.org.uk/index.html?poorlaws/poorlaws.shtml

Burns Monument Genealogy Centre Scotland

Burns Monument Centre : Welcome: "The Burns Monument Centre is a ground-breaking development in Scotland bringing together staff expertise, resources and first class facilities under one roof to create a new destination for family and local history researchers.

The custom built centre provides East Ayrshire with a unique facility for ancestral tourists, attracting visitors from across Scotland and from the very large ex-patriot Scots community around the world."

from my email:-

Just to let everyone know that the Burns Monument Genealogy Centre opens on
16 March.

This will also house the Registrars and the present building in John Dickie
Street will close at the end of this week.

As I understand it (not yet received any word from them) the Burial Records
will be going there as well but there is a complete listing of records
available on their site.

Irish genealogy

Irish genealogy - Search for your ancestor and hibernian roots and trace your family tree: "Place names and geographical divisions are very important for successful genealogy research in Ireland. Land in Ireland is divided into different jurisdictions, religious and political, in a way that can be complicated to understand. Provinces are divided into counties which are divided into civil parishes. Civil parishes, in turn, are made up of townlands, each of which is an area of land with a certain acreage and set of boundaries. Within the official townlands, there may be other smaller subdivisions such as field and farm names. Sometimes these smaller subdivisions are referred to as “sub-townland denominations” or “minor place names.” Villages and towns also fall geographically within one or more townlands. Cities often include more than one civil parish."

General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns, Parishes and Baronies of Ireland. Based on the Census of Ireland for the Year 1851.
1861.
Reprint, Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1984.

this handbook was used to help me by a librarian of the National Library of Ireland

Contact Us: "The main contact details for the National Library are listed"

Irish Ancestors/Placenames: "HELP EXAMPLES

IRISH PLACE NAMES


The single most important item of information for Irish family history research is a precise place of origin, and the most important tool in identifying Irish placenames is the 1851 General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns, parishes and Baronies of Ireland.

From here you can search the entire Index, together with street listings from Dublin, Cork and Belfast cities, more than 65,000 entries in all.

Remember you can search for a placename either in the whole of Ireland ('Simple') or confine it to a particular area ('Advanced').

You can also use wildcards:

* % (percent) represents any sequence of letters.
* _ (underscore) represents any individual letter."

SCETI—the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Images

Penn Gazette | Open Treasure

Down two flights in the Van Pelt building, the small staff of SCETI—the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image—is tooling away at just such wizardry. In a glass-enclosed office, an intern sits in a darkened corner before one of three scanning stations, patiently wading through Box 14 of the 41 cartons constituting the Keffer Collection of Sheet Music, some 2,500 scores—about half of them published in Philadelphia—of 19th-century American popular music. Using a high-end Hasselblad lens and a Phase One P45 39-megapixel digital camera mounted on a copy stand, he photographs each piece. About five seconds later, the RAW image appears on his Mac, opening in an editing program called Capture One Pro. Typically, this digital image will record at 600 dpi, at 100 percent of its size and with as little tech fiddling as possible.

“We may adjust white balance, but that’s about it,” says Chris Lippa, scanning supervisor for SCETI. “We try not to have a need to correct—we’re trying to keep as true to the page as we can get.” Digitizing—the proper term in this case, since scanned implies the use of a flatbed scanner, a machine that records images of a lower quality—serves two purposes, Lippa points out. “There’s the archival aspect, of course, where the material is forever preserved as is, and protected from further wear and tear,” he says. “And there’s the notion of increasing the materials’ accessibility by placing it online or, in some cases, on a CD. Archiving is necessary and practical, but for me, what’s really cool is looking through this stuff and knowing that it’s soon going to be out there for an unknown and, potentially huge, population.”

Lately, the pace of digitizing has been stepped up—with SCETI now working at a rate of 3,000 captures a month, says Lippa. Recent projects range all over the geographic and chronologic maps, from an Abraham Lincoln letter to an 11th-century Koran to “Fragments From France,” a portfolio of comics written and drawn by British World War I captain Bruce Bairnsfather.

Once Lippa and his team digitize a manuscript, SCETI web developer Dennis Mullen usually steps in, charged with moving the material onto the web. “This whole project got under way when [library overseer] Larry Schoenberg [C’53 WG’56] began exploring ways to share his private collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts,” Mullen recalls, “but it’s just taken off since then.”

SCETI—the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image - Google Search

disaster at the Cologne City Archives

Flickr: The Eingestürtzes Stadtarchiv Köln Pool


- from ARD news TV

Slideshow of images on Flickr

Cologne City Archive Disaster | MetaFilter:
"Cologne City Archive is a six-story building containing 26 kilometers of shelves, 65,000+ documents dating from 922 AD, 104,000 maps, 50,000 posters, 500,000 photographs and 780 estates and collections, including Irmgard Keun, Hans Mayer and Jacques Offenbach.

Considered a state of the art institution when built in 1971 and copied around the world, the building simply collapsed on Tuesday, destroying most everything.

When the building was constructed, a small nuclear-bomb proof chamber was included in the cellar to protect the most precious pieces. But in recent years, the chamber has been used only to store cleaning material."

Eingestürtzes Stadtarchiv Köln - Google Search

The WELL

The WELL - Online community is no oxymoron here. The WELL is known as the birthplace of the online community movement.: "The WELL, originally the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, provides a literate watering hole for some articulate and unpretentious thinkers."

genealogy - Yahoo! Search Results

Genea-Musings blog

Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Fun - True Confessions of a Genealogy Junkie: "It's almost Saturday Night here in the West. Let's have a little fun before we go to bed or wherever in the morning. We must be Genealogy Junkies, right (after all, many of you come back every Saturday Night!). How about a True Confessions time, genealogy style?"

: Answer these questions about your genealogy life - Randy Seaver'z of Chula Vista, California, United States are in parentheses:

1. When did you start genealogy research? (1988)

2. Why did you start doing research? (I love research, saw Roots series in rerun then read the book, the family was interested but nobody else would do it)

3. What was your first big success in research? (Finding that my Seaver family was descended from Peregrine White)

4. What is your biggest genealogy regret? (Did not interview my father before he passed away. Got his brother though!)

5. What are you best known for in the genealogy world? (Ranting on my Genea-Musings blog, I think. No books, no conference presentations, some local presentations).

6. What is your professional status in genealogy? (Not certified, or accredited, not pursuing either, don't take paying clients, do pro-bono work for friends and colleagues).

7. What is your biggest genealogy achievement? (blogging for almost three years at a 2.5 post per day clip? Filling up a database with over 2,000 ancestors and 23,000 people? I'm very numbers oriented!)

8. What is the most FUN you've had doing genealogy? (meeting genea-bloggers at Jamboree and SLC)

9. What is your favorite genealogy how-to book? (The Sleuth Book for Genealogists by Emily Anne Croom)

10. What notable genealogist would you like to meet someday? (Maureen Taylor)

There you are - talk about yourself for a change! Go forth and blog about your True Confessions of a Genealogy Junkie! Or write a comment to this or the original post at Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Fun - True Confessions of a Genealogy Junkie.

PAF Users Group blog

Utah Valley PAF Users Group - Press Releases: "UTAH VALLEY PAF USERS GROUP MEETING AND NEW LOCATION

The next regular, second-Saturday-of-the-month meeting of the Utah Valley PAF (Personal Ancestral File) Users Group will be on Saturday, 14 Mar 2009, from 9 am until noon IN THE EDGEWOOD/RIVERSIDE LDS CHAPEL, 3511 North 180 East, Provo, Utah. Note the Group has moved from their old location to this new LDS chapel which is behind the Jamestown shopping plaza on the east side of University Avenue in the Provo 'River Bottoms'. You get to it by going on 3700 North east from University Avenue and then south on 180 East. There is a map showing the new and old locations on our website given below. The main presentation will be by Marcy Brown on WELCOME TO ROOTS TELEVISION! Have you discovered all the terrific, free genealogical programming at Roots Television yet?"
. . . . .

Following the main presentation there will be several classes taught concerning technology and family history. As usual, there will be something for everyone at all levels of expertise. The classes currently scheduled for this meeting are the following:

(1) The Value of the Pedigree Resource File, by John Blake;

(2) The New Search at Ancestry.com, by Kendall Hulet;

(3) Beginning US Census Research, by Jerry Castillo;

(4) Q&A: Welcome to RootsTelevision.com, by Marcy Brown;

(5) Video of last month's main presentation: Avoiding Pitfalls in Your Research, by Jake Gehring;

(6) Legacy 7, by Joel Graham; and

(7) RootsMagic 4, by Sue Maxwell.

All meetings of the Users Group are open to the public whether members of the Group or not. The Users Group has the goal of helping individuals use technology to further their family history and there are usually 100-125 attending the monthly meetings on the second Saturdays.