NGS Day One (Wednesday the 9th)

Some folks sleep through the opening plenary session; today they missed the amazing story of the 1848 Cincinnati panoramic daguerreotype and the details of everyday life it captured -- now that it can be digitally and microscopically examined. Check it out.

Later on . . .

. . . Jeanne Bloom explained proof arguments. “If you want to break through a brick wall, write down what you know and it will reveal the holes in your argument." In an interesting analogy she also compared the elements of a proof argument to the loom, warp, and woof that go together to make up a tapestry.

. . . Marie Melchiori gave an always-helpful introduction and review of ways of accessing military medial records in the National Archives, followed by a series of examples that left us wanting to camp in the National Archives for a year or two. "You don't ever use one set of records as an end result, you use them as a stepping-stone to others." Thus the file of a US medical officer who later served for the Confederacy included a postwar request for amnesty, opening up a new record set for investigation.

. . . The annual writing contest of the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE, nevertheless frequently pronounced "Ifshwee") remains open until June 3. Visit ISFHWE for more information and to download the PDF informational package.

. . . I haven't heard and haven't asked about the conference attendance this year. But at the two booths where I'm volunteering, the Indiana Genealogical Society and the Association of Professional Genealogists both had successful days making new friends and acquiring new members too.

. . . in my continuing series of scheduling train wrecks, the Ancestry "VIP Reception" came at the same time as the Geneabloggers' meetup. I finally ended up at Ancestry, where I heard that they now have 10 billion records on line. Their $99 autosomal DNA program is coordinated with Ancestry trees, so the results may (for example) actually name your (alleged) fourth cousin. Their new semantic index for city directories is a major improvement over OCR in that the computers can now understand which words are names, which occupations, etc. Among newly added collections is a 1798 London land tax never microfilmed or digitized. They're emphasizing mobile devices more and more. Their 1940 census indexing reportedly continues to involve "select offshore vendors" who are indexing "almost every field."



Harold Henderson, "NGS Day One (Wednesday the 9th)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Words from IGS Conference Day

Several admonitions are echoing in my mind from the Indiana Genealogical Society's day-long conference in Fort Wayne; other attendees' mileage may vary.

More than half of the 111 attendees also attended the business meeting, where we heard that our 76 volunteers had helped index 100% of Indiana's portion of the 1940 census in less than a month, far ahead of all neighboring states.

* Speaker Michael Hall, deputy chief genealogical officer of FamilySearch: “Every one of you should be writing in the FamilySearch Wiki [page about your county] about your libraries and resources,” thus helping draw genealogical tourism.

* Speaker Debra Mieszala, who works in the genealogical part of the process of identifying and returning remains of US soldiers long lost in action: The military now uses all three kinds of DNA -- Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA, so relatives of missing soldiers may have new opportunities to provide reference samples. Of the 88,000 missing, 78,000 are from WWII.

* IGS president Michael Maben, who asked for volunteers for an advocacy committee and identified the State Archives (long relegated to an outdated warehouse) as a problem to be addressed: “We need to press our legislature to replace that facility."

* Mieszala again (part of an informative talk on finding the patent filings of inventive ancestors): The Great Lakes Regional Branch of NARA has a Facebook page, and we should "friend" it. Among the many great examples they post from their holdings, one is a patent infringement case.

Lots of good people and good laughs, all in a day's genealogy work . . . the April 2013 conference in Bloomington will feature Josh Taylor.


Harold Henderson, “Words from IGS Conference Day,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Volunteer for the 1940 census indexing!

What Kimberly Powell says about helping index the 1940 census.

I would add two things:

(1) Indiana has started indexing; I joined the FamilySearch indexing under the auspices of the Indiana Genealogical Society. Here's how to get started.

(2) Any kind of volunteering that exposes us to the original records will make us better researchers (almost without trying) because we will get better acquainted with the records and all their little quirks.

I've already encountered one enumerator in Allen County who wrote "Indiana" in the column for the city in which the family had lived in 1935! If the FamilySearch index allows us to search by city of residence in 1935, there will be some strange entries . . . hopefully the researchers will look into the original record and figure out what was going on.

Ohio Genealogy News Winter 2011

"Have You Researched Your Ancestor's Mental Health?" is the cover headline on the new OGS News, the class of the state-level newsletters. Among the contents:

Lisa Long (Ohio Historical Society reference archivist), "Mental Health Records: An Introduction for Researchers" and "Selected List of Patient Records in the Ohio History Center." Don't get your hopes up -- asylum and mental health records are "restricted" no matter how old, according to state law (insert your joke here about the lunatics running the asylum), but there are a variety of workarounds.

Deb Cyprych, "Return of Deaf and Dumb, Blind, Insane and Idiotic Persons in Ohio, 1856" -- a township-level partial census, many of the entries including parents' names.

Susan Zacharias, "Searching the Dead in Stark County: Coroner's Records Online."

Beverly R. Austin and Ronald L. Burdick, "Cleveland Public Library's Genealogy Resources."

Wally Huskonen, "Getting Ready to Research in the 1940 Census," including several tips for identifying enumeration districts as we await its indexing.