Arizona Genealogy Birth and Death Certificates

Arizona has Birth (1887-1930) and Death (1878-1955) certificates online at http://genealogy.az.gov/. The nice thing is you can view the actual images online. You have the option to include Father & Mother's name in the search, good for birth certificates or narrowing down death certificates. And to limit the search by county & year range, helpful if you know the county but not the exact year.

County Boundaries

If you need to find a county boundary for a state & can’t justify spending the money for a book or a program, HeritageQuest has made it easier. They have put maps online from “Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Censuses”, 1790-1920, By Wiliam Thorndale and William Dollarhide.

On HeritageQuest, click browse in the census area. Pick a year & a state, and then click “View State Map”. You will be able to view that year’s county boundaries (black lines) & currant boundaries (white lines). Just plot the current location & compare it to the one for that year.

To find out if HeritageQuest is offered from your local library website or one in your state please visit http://www.eogen.com/HeritageQuestOnline .

Genealogy Training Cource

With Carol Brown
9:30 am- 11:30 noon Tuesday’s & Thursday’s
January 9, 2007 - February 8, 2007
(Except as noted)

Sign-up at the library

Everyone Welcome

At the Bouse Library, 44031 Plomosa Road
Cost is $5.00 per class

Each week Carol teaches two different aspects of genealogical research followed by an open discussion session. All class are approximately 2 hours in length. You do not have to attend every session. You can choose the topics you wish to attend.

• January 9 - Class 1 - Beginning Genealogy, Record Organization and Source Citation
• January 10 - Class 2 - Computers and Genealogy on the Internet
• January 16 - Class 3 - Census and Social Security Records
• January 18 - Class 4 - Researching in Libraries and Court Houses
• January 23 - Class 5 - Immigration and Migration Patterns
• January 25 - Class 6 - Genealogical Societies and Magazines
• January 30 - Class 7 - Over Coming Dead Ends
• February 1 - Class 8 - Preponderance of Evidence
• February 6 - Class 9 - Researching in Military Records
• February 8 - Class 10 - Sharing Your Family History

Free Medical Dictionary

Trying to read some of these Death Certificates I just couldn’t make out the cause of death. I found this medical dictionary very useful http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/. One of the causes of deaths I was able to make out the first letter & the end of the word. I was able to limit my search to “Ends With” then look for a word that started with the letters, and was able to find the word I wanted. These are some of options to limit your search, "Word/Article", "Starts with", "Ends with", and "Text".

The Free Dictionary website http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ has more than just medical definitions: Dictionary/thesaurus, Computing dictionary, Medical dictionary, Legal dictionary, Financial dictionary, Acronyms, Idioms, Columbia encyclopedia, and Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Utah State Archives

The Utah State Archives http://historyresearch.utah.gov/indexes have many good free indexes online, birth, death, court, government, etc… They only have what the counties have given them & not all their holdings are index, but this is a good place to look for people that have lived in Utah.

I just noticed in the 1904-1954 Vital Records & Statistics section, they are starting to put the actual death certificate images online.

One thing I don’t like, I don’t see a way to search just one database. But the search engine they do have is easy to use. All you need to do is enter “Surname” or “Surname, given name” or what I like is “Surname, first letter of given name”.

The Utah Geographic Place Names

I discovered this site looking for a place in Utah. It had a locations on it none of my other programs had http://history.utah.gov/FindAids/B01018/b1018.html .

The Utah Geographic Place Names Committee Records, ca. 1970s A Register of the Collection at the Utah State Historical Society

Genealogy Classes At The Bouse Library

Put on by professional genealogist Carol Brown .

Classes start at 9:30 AM, cost $5 per class for expenses. Located at the old Bouse Elementary School, 44031 Plomosa Road (look for the flag pole), in the building just east of the library.

• Dec 12- Preponderance of Evidence (using DNA to prove or disprove a point)
• Dec 14 - Military Records
• Dec 18 - Publishing Your Family Records (there is some question whether the people who are in the class will want to have class that week).
  

Starting on Jan 9 we will restart the classes

• Jan 9 - Beginning Genealogy
• Jan 10 - Genealogy on the Internet
• Jan 16 - We will start back to every Tuesday and Thursday for the next 8 classes.

Check the calendar for updates

Lake Havasu Genealogical Soc. Special Events

This sounds like a good seminar if you can make it up to Lake Havasu on January 27th.

Special Events: "2007 13th Annual Genealogy Seminar will be held Saturday, January 27, 2007 at the Mountain View Mobile Home Park Clubhouse. Time: 8:00 AM registration 9:00 AM sessions to 4:00PM. Lunch break with salad luncheon included with registration fee of $30.00. Featured speaker will again be Shirley Gage Hodges from Albion, MI and Apache Junction, AZ.

Topic’s :
Immigration, The Journey to America
Newspapers, A Pot of Gold
Tracing your Ancestor through Military Records
Church Records, The Ties that Bind"

Simple OCR

If you are a slow typer like me & want to put text from a document into your genealogy you might want to think about an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. The commercial versions can be pricy for people on a limited income. All I have found so far for free programs that works with Windows is SimpleOCR http://www.simpleocr.com/ .

One thing I DON’T like about this program is there no way to select a text area you want, just select to ignore an area. But you can choose that area you want when scanning the document, which is probably easier. “Selecting picture region” doesn’t give very good results, so if you need to include a picture scan it separately & insert it into your document later. When converting the image into text it does show the original image very well, I do like that. It does support TIFF, BMP & JPG if you already have the document as an image file.

If you can afford a good OCR program I do recommend that, if you want free this is the best I have found so far.

Note: Good news Google has released Tesseract OCR into Open Source. I don’t see anyway to run it in windows yet, let’s hope soon. More info here http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/announcing-tesseract-ocr.html

Looking For Cemetery Volunteers

I am looking for some people that are willing to go out and transcribe & photograph headstones. I know the Quartzsite Cemetery needs to be checked for errors, and Brenda needs to be photographed. Then we can upload the information to the free genealogy websites for La Paz Co.

I have a digital camera that will hold around 250 pictures with 2 batteries, but the battery only do about 40 pictures each. So if we can get a few people with cameras & paper & pencils I think this could really help others.

Please contact me via this page http://www.blogger.com/profile/20597318 if you are interested.

Google Book Search

On Google Book Search http://books.google.com there are a lot of books here that are copyright free which are nice for research. Just enter your keywords and your results will be “Full View”, “Limited Preview”, “Snippet View”, or “No Preview Available”. But you do have the option to limit your search as “Full Page” only, which will get you mostly the copyright free books. Another nice feature is your keywords are highlighted so they can be easily found. “Advanced Search” will give you a chance to search by Title, Author, Publisher, Publication Date, and even search by ISBN (barcode).

Options when you found a book:

• Browse: Will let you look at the book page by page.
• Search within the book: Will let you search for more keywords within the book.
• Buy the book: Doesn’t guarantee that the book will be there but might help.
• Find reviews: Doesn’t pop up much on the copyright free books, but might help if you plan on buying the book.
• Find it in a library: Will tell you if a library has it, and you might be able to use the interlibrary loan to get it from your local library.
• Learn about the publisher: Will get you to the publisher’s website.

For more information on Google Book Search can be found at http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html.

Collaborating Research

Collaborating with a cousin was the way I learned most about research & is one of the quickest way to get things done. Google has made this easier for you with Documents, Spreadsheets http://docs.google.com/ & new to Google Labs “Note Book” http://www.google.com/notebook/. Everyone must have a Google account, but signing up is free.

Documents: I don’t see a lot of good unless several people are writing a family history together. But it does have nice features, export as HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice & PDF. You can Insert Images, Links, Comments, Bookmark, Separator or Special Character. View what revisions have been made. Choose who can views or who can make changes. Publish to the web (a unique URL on Google) or to your Blog. It has some of the same features you will find in a Word Processors, but personally find it a little bit limiting. It will solve the problems of people using different Word Processors.

Spreadsheets: I don’t use spreadsheets very often so I’m no expert. But if you are transcribing something like a cemetery, indexing or anything you might need the use of a spreadsheet, this can be very useful. Each of you can take a portion of what you are doing and work on the same project together.

Note Book: I really like this one, forget about bookmarks you can a select section of a page & come back to look at it later (images are also saved). It requires a little plugin on your browser, but after that is installed all you do is highlight the portion of the page you want, right click and select “Note This” or click the new little notebook icon on the right side of your browser & select “Add Note”. It won’t do PDF files on the web, but it does let you type or copy/paste the text & have a link to that file. I did find a problem with long pages, seams to have some problems with pages that would be much over 2 pages in my Word Processors, and Netscape browser doesn’t seam to be supported.

Genealogy Classes At The Bouse Library

Put on by professional genealogist Carol Brown

Cost $5 per class for expenses. Located at the old Bouse Elementary School, 44031 Plomosa Road (look for the flag pole), in the building just east of the library.

Classes scheduled so far:

• Class 2 - Friday - Nov. 3, 2006 - 9:30 am- Class 2 - Computers and Genealogy on the Internet
• Class 3 - Thursday - Nov. 9, 2006 - 9:30 am - Class 3 - Census and Social Security Records
• Class 4 - Tuesday - Nov. 28, 2006 - 1:30 pm - Class 4 - Researching in Libraries and Courthouses
• Class 5 - Thursday - Nov. 30, 2006 - 9:30 am - Class 5 - Immigration, Emigration & Migration
  

Not scheduled yet:

• Class 6 - Genealogy Societies, Magazines and CD-ROM's
• Class 7 - Overcoming Dead Ends
• Class 8 - Preponderance of Evidence & DNA
• Class 9 - Military Records - Service, Pension & Bounty-Land
• Class 10 - Publishing You Family History

Check the calendar for updates

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.

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!!!!

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.

Questions And Ancestors

Questions And Ancestors is back on TV even though it might be in reruns. After not seeing it all summer I noticed it is back on BYU TV (on many cable & satellite systems). Right now it is on Tuesday at 6:30 PM & will probably on Thursdays like last year, but after the time change in Utah it will be an hour different. It is a great little program giving you help with research for your genealogy. You can listen to some of the past episodes at http://byub.org/questionsandancestors/episodes.asp but believe you me that is only part of them.

Also I have been listening to it on the Internet on BYU Radio http://www.byuradio.org/streaming/ Saturday & Sundays at 10 AM all summer. The schedule is at http://www.byuradio.org/schedule/. Use the “View Entire Day's Listings” to find what will on upcoming episodes. Remember we are an hour earlier until October 29th.

Massachusetts Archives Searchable Collections

Massachusetts Archives website has 3 nice searchable databases.

Massachusetts Archives Collection Database (1629-1799)
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/arc/arcsrch/RevolutionarySearchContects.html
No actual documents, but a good index.

Passenger Manifest (1848-1891)
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/arc/arcsrch/PassengerManifestSearchContents.html
If listed it contains: Name, Title, Age, Gender, Birth City, State, Country, Germany, Destination City, State, Country, In USA, Occupation, Citizen, Condition, Arrive With, Residence, Date, Port, Ship Name, List Number, Comment.

Vital Records (1841-1910)
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/arc/arcsrch/VitalRecordsSearchContents.html
Right now only has a death index. The information you will get is Last Name, First Name, Town, Years, Volume, Page & Type.

New Genealogy Resource In Quartzsite

The Family History Center in Quartzsite has gone broadband. Instead of 6 computers sharing a 56k modem, they now have Satellite Internet. Along with that they have 2 computers with Ancestry.com. Something new GenSmarts is on most of the computers, it will analyze your genealogy file & make recommendations where to look for sources & take you there if it's online.

Right now they are open Monday & Wednesday 9-12 AM, but this winter they are talking about being open Monday Wednesday & Friday 9-12 AM & Tuesday & Thursday 6-8 PM.

The address is:
455 S Riggles Rd
Quartzsite, Arizona

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