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Live Streaming Announced for MyHeritage LIVE!

Live Streaming Announced for MyHeritage LIVE!

MyHeritage is hosting MyHeritage Live! on November 2-4, 2018 in Oslo Norway. This first-ever user conference will feature keynote talks from Founder and CEO Gilad Japhet, and presentations from industry experts including Lisa Louise Cooke. If you aren’t able to make the trek to Norway, you’re still in luck! It has just been announced that live streaming will be available. 

The first-ever MyHeritage LIVE user conference is taking place November 2-4 in Oslo, Norway. This unique experience will bring together MyHeritage staff and internationally renowned genealogists while offering attendees the opportunity to expand their knowledge, ask questions, and give feedback. Lisa Louise Cooke is excited to be a speaker at this conference, where she will be teaching how to use MyHeritage SuperSearchTM to find your family history in newspapers.

MyHeritage has also announced that live streaming will be available on the MyHeritage LIVE conference website! This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from wonderful speakers and dig deep into the tools and resources that MyHeritage has to offer.

Tune in at 9 AM Oslo time on Saturday, November 3 for live streaming. If you need help calculating the time difference to your local time zone, you can use www.thetimezoneconverter.com. Make sure to visit the conference website to see the full schedule and tune in at the time of the lecture to watch the live stream. Both the genealogy and the DNA track classes will be streamed, and all sessions will be in English.

Whether you are attending in person or tuning in through live streaming, don’t forget to post and share all your experiences using the conference hashtag: #MHLIVE2018. See you in Oslo!

#MHLIVE2018

 

 

Lacey Cooke

Lacey Cooke

Lacey has been working with Genealogy Gems since the company’s inception in 2007. Now, as the full-time manager of Genealogy Gems, she creates the free weekly newsletter, writes blogs, coordinates live events, and collaborates on new product development. No stranger to working with dead people, Lacey holds a degree in Forensic Anthropology, and is passionate about criminal justice and investigative techniques. She is the proud dog mom of Renly the corgi.

Favorite Resources for Finding Colonial Ancestors Online

Favorite Resources for Finding Colonial Ancestors Online

Colonial ancestors pose a unique challenge to the genealogist in that they often appear in many online family trees, but those trees frequently lack sufficient documentation. Eliminating the purely speculative and identifying verified relationships and accurate data is the goal. Here are three of our favorite online resources for finding colonial ancestors.

Thanks to Bob Call and the experts at Legacy Tree Genealogists for this guest post!

1. AmericanAncestors.org

The fantastic subscription-based website, AmericanAncestors.org, is the creation of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. NEHGS was founded in 1845 and is the oldest genealogical society in the United States. As such, they have had nearly two centuries to gather and preserve materials pertinent to family history. According to their “about” page, AmericanAncestors.org presents “more than 1.4 billion records spanning twenty-two countries” and is “one of the most extensive online collections of early American genealogical records.”

Of the 435 databases hosted on AmericanAncestors.org, 286 are focused on pre-1800 records. These databases include vital records, censuses, migration, bible, cemetery, tax, voter, property, probate, court, and military records as well as family histories, local histories, biographies, reference material, and periodicals. Searching these records is easy with the “Search All Databases” page, which allows the user to add a variety of search terms—names, years, record types, locations, keywords, and additional family members. With so many record types available to the genealogist, the databases at AmericanAncestors.org are a must for colonial family history research.

Besides research databases, AmericanAncestors.org offers access to a number of other helpful services. Two of these services are the Digital Collections and the Library Catalog both of which are portals to the extensive collections housed at the NEHGS library in Boston, Massachusetts. When searching the Digital Collections webpage the family historian will find personal family papers such as photographs, diaries, and letters as well as records created by non-family entities like organization and business records and newspapers. The Digital Collections section of the website also has a focus on the history of the Jewish community in the Boston area and offers material helpful to both the historian and genealogist.

The Library Catalog gives the family historian the ability to begin their research of NEHGS’s extensive collections at home. Of course, a catalog is different than a database in that a catalog lists the titles of the library’s holdings and not every name mentioned within each item. However, if planning a trip to NEHGS to conduct research, it would be wise to have a starting point for your research—that way you can hit the ground running and make the most of your time at the library itself. Use the catalog by searching family surnames and ancestral residences to find books, manuscripts, or photographs that may be beneficial to your research.

2. Digitized Books

Our experience reveals that many online trees presenting colonial American ancestries are based upon genealogies published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (although the online trees themselves frequently do not cite the published genealogies). Genealogies published in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century are not always accurate and rarely included extensive citations supporting each statement of fact as contemporary genealogies should, but they can still be helpful. These genealogies occasionally referenced original sources (such as wills or deeds) or made blanket statements about what type of records were used (like family correspondence or county records).

Additionally, the printed genealogies provide a clearer picture of what previous generations believed about their genealogy before the advent of the internet, which escalated confused and inaccurate pedigrees because of the ease of data sharing and a general lack of quality control. Thus, published genealogies can provide important clues about colonial American families. Accessing these published genealogies was much more difficult just a few years ago, but thanks to websites like Archive.org and Google Books many can be viewed right at home. These organizations have taken the time to digitize genealogies which are now in the public domain due to copyright laws.

3. The FamilySearch Catalog

One underutilized resource on FamilySearch.org is the FamilySearch Catalog (formerly known as the Family History Library Catalog). This tool inventories all of the holdings at the massive Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. A majority of the holdings at the Family History Library are on microfilm, which FamilySearch plans to digitize by 2020. While some of these digitized microfilms have been organized into databases available through FamilySearch’s “Historical Records” portion of the website, many are only found listed as microfilm in the FamilySearch Catalog. In other words, there may be a collection of digitized microfilms that can only be viewed online by clicking on the link in the FamilySearch Catalog and will not be found in a “Historical Records” database.

So what does this mean for researching colonial American ancestors? There are two record types in particular where the FamilySearch Catalog becomes exceptionally beneficial to colonial research—property and probate records. These record types are useful because they can prove, through both direct and indirect evidence, family relationships in times or places where other documents (like vital records and census) are lacking. However, because property and probate records are difficult to index there are fewer databases in FamilySearch’s “Historical Records” which focus on them. This is where the FamilySearch Catalog comes in; many microfilms of probate and property records have been digitized and are accessed in the catalog. These high-quality digital images—often of better quality than the microfilm itself—can be clicked through in search of an ancestor’s property or probate records.

Here’s an extra tip: Some of the probate records that have been digitized in the FamilySearch Catalog can only be viewed at the Family History Library or a Family History Center—due to agreements the Family History Library has with the original agencies, the images are locked and cannot be accessed at home. If you can’t make it to your local Family History Center, one workaround is checking Ancestry.com to see if that database has the probate records in question. Ancestry’s probate databases include a searchable index, but these indexes are very incomplete and it is best to browse through the images.

Using these resources and many others, our team at Legacy Tree Genealogists has assisted many with their Colonial American research problems and would be glad to assist in discovering your Colonial ancestors as well.

Bob Call is a researcher for Legacy Tree Genealogists, a worldwide genealogy research firm with extensive expertise in breaking through genealogy brick walls. Whether you’ve got colonial ancestors or ancestors all over the world, you can get expert research help and access to records otherwise unavailable when you partner with Legacy Tree Genealogists. Visit their website to learn more and get a free consultation!

Exclusive Offer for Genealogy Gems readers: Receive $100 off a 20-hour research project using code GGP100!

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

New Genealogical Records Online Featuring England & Wales

New Genealogical Records Online Featuring England & Wales

If you have ancestors from England and Wales, you’ll love these new online records collections! Electoral Registers, wills, and probate records are now available to explore. Also new are civil marriage records for South Africa and US records including WWI statement of service cards for Georgia and an Ohio death index. 

Featured: England and Wales

Two new collections and updates are available online for England and Wales family history hunters.

First up is the UK records giant Findmypast with their massive update of indexed records for England & Wales Electoral Registers 1920-1932. The collection is now comprised of 107 million records, and this recent update means “that the collection now contains a complete run of all surviving records for all parliamentary boroughs from A to L (the first being the PB of Accrington and the last being the PC of Nottinghamshire, Rushcliffe Division). This new and improved collection now contains over 107 million records that will enable you to bridge the vital gap left by the destruction of the 1931 census of England & Wales.”

 

Next, head over to MyHeritage for their new collection of England & Wales Index of Wills & Probates 1853-1943. This wonderful database may include a small number of records for individuals around the world, due to the expanse of the British Empire. According to the site, “Information recorded in a probate index includes: name of the deceased, date of death, place of residence, place of death, size of the estate, occupation, as well as the names and relationships of any benefactors. These grants of probate and letters of administration can serve as a practical substitute for missing vital records, such as death certificates, for relatively wealthy individuals.”

South African Records at FamilySearch

In the latest episode of the free Genealogy Gems Podcast #222, a young fan named Coral wrote in to tell us about the amazing discovery she made on the free ‘genealogy giant’ website FamilySearch. We love how they’re able to provide millions of records at no cost, and they are also home to rare and diverse records from around the world. (Take a listen to the free epsidoe and get inspired to make your own discoveries at FamilySearch!)

FamilySearch recently added a new collection for South Africa, Transvaal, Civil Marriages, 1870-1930. This wonderful addition comes from The National Archives and Records Service of South Africa, Pretoria. According to the collection, “Marriage certificates include names, ages, birthplace, whether banns were read, residence, and source of consent. Records are not filed entirely in alphabetical order. Names of cities may be interfiled with those of districts or neighboring towns.”

U.S. Records – Georgia & Ohio

Another new addition to FamilySearch’s free database is a collection of Georgia, World War I, Statement of Service Cards, 1920-1929. In these records you’ll find Georgians who served in the Army and Navy during the first world war. There are over 100,000 indexed records. Millions of records like these were destroyed in a fire in 1973, making these very valuable to anyone searching for their Georgian military ancestors. For more tips on finding military records post-fire, check out this recent article by military expert Michael Strauss.

Finally, we head back over to MyHeritage, where they have a new set of death records from the Ohio Death Index, 1913-1944, 1954-1963. This collection of over 3 million records “contains Ohio Department of Health Death Certificates from 1913-1944 and 1954-1963, Stillborn Death Certificates from 1913-1935 and 1942-1953, and Columbus Board of Health Death Certificates from 1904-1908. These contain the name of the deceased, death date, death county, and certificate number.”

The Free Genealogy Gems Podcast

We feature lots of new records and database on the free Genealogy Gems Podcast, including ones submitted by YOU, the fans! Episode #222 is dedicated to our listeners and features many of your wonderful submissions and tips. Listen now on the Genealogy Gems App, any of your favorite podcast apps, or on our website. It’s totally free and totally fun!

Lacey Cooke

Lacey Cooke

Lacey has been working with Genealogy Gems since the company’s inception in 2007. Now, as the full-time manager of Genealogy Gems, she creates the free weekly newsletter, writes blogs, coordinates live events, and collaborates on new product development. No stranger to working with dead people, Lacey holds a degree in Forensic Anthropology, and is passionate about criminal justice and investigative techniques. She is the proud dog mom of Renly the corgi.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

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