Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Sourcing Made Easy

I hear so many people say, “I would put in sources but it takes to long”. Here are a few tricks I use to make it easy.

My first choice would be Notepad found in your Accessories section in your Start/Programs menu. It is small, can be resized & moved around in front of your browser or other programs.

Coping a section of a website: All you do is copy/paste into notepad the URL, title of the page, then copy/paste the section of the page you want. The Title & URL is your source & the text you put in your Source or Detail/Citation text area.
Example:
mydomain.com/genealogy
John Doe’s Genealogy
John Doe came to this county in 1904…

Document Images: Just move Notepad to where you read what you want so you can read the image & type in Notepad at the same time. Type where it came from, page number or any pertinent info, and then start typing what you want. The Title & URL is your source & the text you put in your Source or Detail/Citation text area. A census will usually take me just a few minutes, but I think my ancestors are worth the extra time.
Example:
1860 census Iowa, Warren, Liberty Twp, p878 sheet 214, enumerated 24 July 1860
Benj Byerly, 53, Minister "German Baptist", VA
Delilah ", 43, VA
William H ", 21, TN, Teacher com s (probably teacher in common school)
Sarah C ", 17, TN, school within the year
Susan E ", 15, TN, school within the year
John A ", 12, TN, school within the year
Mayt(?) J ", 10, OH, school within the year
Martha E ", 7, OH, school within the year
Samuel M ", 4, OH

Most genealogy programs have a copy/paste option when entering sources. So you can copy 1 source & paste it onto everyone that appears on that document. Looking at the above census, you can make 1 source & paste it on 9 people.

Second choice if you want formatted text, use “Split Screen”. This is by loading your Browser or Image Viewer & Word Processor at the same time, click the program you want on top, then you “Right Click” your “Tool Bar” & chose “Tile Windows Horizontally”. Low Resolution monitors might give you some problems so give it a try. One disadvantage of Tiling is it will Tile every program you are running. An option to Tiling is using a program called “Transcript” http://home.wanadoo.nl/jgboerema/en/Freeware.htm it is free for private non-commercial use, but it only supports JPG, JPEG, BMP & GIF images.

One good thing that comes from keeping sources, if you learn more about your family possibly that page has more info that you missed and you can go back to that website or document & see if there is more there.

Note: Just remember to take into account copywrites, when publishing to the web or other printed material. Stuff in the public domain is safe to reproduce.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Stephen P. Morse's Search Engines

Alan from one of the lists I’m on turned me on to a Ellis Island search engine www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB/ellis.html that is easier to use than the official website www.ellisisland.org/. So I went and explored the developer’s website www.stevemorse.org/ & found several other good links. The pay links are clearly marked with a “$”, and most of them send you to ancestery.com but there are a few others. There are so many I had to condense what I found.

  • Ellis Island Search Forms and Ship Arrivals (1892-1924), Some pay sites.
  • Castle Garden (and earlier) Search Forms and Ship Arrivals (1820-1891), Some pay sites.
  • Other Ports of Immigration: Baltimore Passengers (1820-1948), Boston Passengers (1820-1943), Galveston Passengers (1844-1954), Philadelphia Passengers (1800-1945), San Francisco Passengers (1893-1953). Some pay sites.
  • US Census and Soundex (1790-1940): Some pay sites but many interesting searches like ED finder, street finder, street name changes & more.
  • Canadian and British Census: 1901 census for Canadian & British are free the others are pay sites.
  • New York Census: Obtaining AD/ED for the 1905/15/25 NY State Census & Brooklyn 1925 Name Index: Searching the Brooklyn 1925 Census.
  • Births, Deaths, and other Vital Records: Several interesting search engines.
  • Calendar, Sunrise/Sunset, Maps.
  • Dealing with Characters in Foreign Alphabets: Converting Hebrew, Russian, Greek, English & a few other goodies.
  • Holocaust and Eastern Europe.
  • Creating your own Search Forms, Search Engines, and Databases

And more!!!!

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

New Genealogy Resource For Us

I have found a library in AZ that has a free online library card that will give us access to Heritage Quest & another online database I like called Newsbank, great for US obituaries from 2-10 years old (some go back farther).

If you are interested, maybe we can make a class to sign up & learn how to use these databases.