by Lisa Cooke | Feb 24, 2017 | 01 What's New, Records & databases |
Find your Abuela (the Spanish word for Grandma) in a wide variety of Catholic Church records for Mexican genealogy at FamilySearch. Also in new and updated genealogical records, collections from Norfolk, England; Victoria, Australia; and Quebec, Canada.
Mexico – Church Records
Abuela Francisca Ramos. Photo used with permission from the family.
FamilySearch has updated and added thousands of new Catholic church records in their Mexican genealogy databases. These church records cover many areas of Mexico, but in particular, the Hidalgo, Puebla, Jalisco, and Guanajuato databases have all reached over 1 million records. The years covered will vary, but the earliest records are from the 1500s and as recent as the 1970s.
These Catholic church records include baptismal records, marriage records, deaths, and other miscellaneous records that may contain valuable genealogical data for your ancestors. Check out the following databases for Mexican genealogy below:
England – Norfolk – Church Records
Several collections for Norfolk, England have been updated at Findmypast this week. Among them are first,
Norfolk Bishop’s Transcripts Baptisms 1685-1941. Norfolk Bishop’s transcripts for baptisms contain over 647,000 records. Each entry includes an image of the original document and a transcript of the vital details. The amount of information found in the transcript will depend on the age and condition of the original document. Most will include a name, baptism year, baptism place, and the names of parent’s. Images may reveal additional information such as your ancestor’s birth date, father’s occupation, and the name of the officiating minister.
The second database is titled, Norfolk Bishop’s Transcripts Marriages 1685-1941 and contains over 157,000 records. Each record includes a transcript and may include the birth year, date of marriage, place of marriage, and the name of their spouse as well as an image of the original document.
Thirdly, the Norfolk Bishop’s Transcripts Burials 1685-1941 collection will allow you to search over 434,000 Bishop’s transcripts of Norfolk burials to discover your ancestor’s final resting place. Transcripts will also reveal when they died and their age at death. Images of original documents may reveal additional information such as the name of the minister who performed the ceremony, your ancestor’s date of death and, occasionally, their cause of death.
Finally, the Norfolk Electoral Registers 1832-1915 containing over 4.5 million records may be just want you are looking for. Electoral registers were first created in 1832. Every year, a new electoral register was created to list the name of every individual eligible to vote. Voting was closely linked to the possession of property; therefore, the registers described the type of property owned or rented by the individual.
Electoral registers are an invaluable resource to trace your ancestors between the census years. Each entry in the Norfolk Electoral Registers 1832-1915 will include an image of the original register and a transcript of the facts listed. Transcripts will list your ancestor’s name, the place they registered, the district and the year they were registered. Images will provide additional information such as you’re their address and the type of property they owned or rented.
Australia – Victoria – Birth Records
Also at Findmypast, over 104,000 records have been added to the Victoria Births collection. These civil registration records may reveal your ancestors birth place, birth year, parent’s names and registration number. The entire collection now contains over 1.9 million records spanning the years 1837 t0 1917.
England & Scotland – Newspapers
Over 1.6 million articles and 13 brand new titles have been added to Findmypast’s collection of historic British Newspapers. The new additions cover the North West and South East of England, a number of Scottish counties, Nottinghamshire, and Bournemouth. The new Scottish titles include the Haddingtonshire Courier, Linlithgowshire Gazette, Ross-shire Journal, Rothesay Chronicle, Kinross-shire Advertiser, Peeblesshire Advertiser, and the Scottish Referee.
Canada – Quebec – Various Record Collections
The Drouin Institute has been in the genealogy business for over a hundred years. The Drouin Collection, which is available on Ancestry as well as on
GenealogyQuebec.com, was microfilmed in the 1940s and digitized in the 2000s by the Institute. The Drouin Collection contains the civil copy of all
parish registers (baptism, marriage, and burial records) from Quebec from 1621 to the 1940s. It is just one of many of the collections you will find from the Drouin Institute.
In total,
GenealogyQuebec.com offers many databases to research and reaches near 43 million images and files.
To access the Drouin Institute record collections, you will need to visit GenealogyQuebec.com. It is subscription based website. Subscription information can be viewed here.
LAFRANCE
The LAFRANCE is the most popular and comprehensive tool available at GenealogyQuebec.com. It is a very detailed, high quality index of the Drouin Collection, and also provides the original document. Here is an example of what the LAFRANCE looks like from our users’ perspective:
Currently, the LAFRANCE covers the entirety of the 1621 – 1849 period for Catholic baptisms and burials, as well as, the 1621-1916 period for Catholic marriages. In addition, the LAFRANCE covers the 1760 – 1849 period for Protestant marriages.
The LAFRANCE’s index is particularly valuable and appreciated by English speakers, as it negates the need to read and understand French in order to obtain all the relevant information from a record.
WWI Holdings
The Library of Congress has launched a comprehensive portal to its extensive WWI holdings. This one-stop portal is designed to help you search WWI subject material with ease. Search things like propaganda posters, letters, diaries, newspapers, and more. It is a wonderful site for not only the genealogist, but the avid historian as well.
More on Mexican Genealogy
The Mexican Genealogy Guide by David A. Fryxell from Family Tree Magazine will help you discover the bounty of records in Mexico. This digital download will help you understand naming practices, pinpoint ancestral whereabouts, and how to best navigate church records there.
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!
by Lisa Cooke | Jun 25, 2016 | 01 What's New, Evernote |
The Evernote for Windows upgrade has received a major face-lift. It is getting some great reviews online. Here’s what to love about it.
If you’re a Windows user and you’re still not using Evernote to organize your genealogy and the rest of your life, perhaps it’s time to take a look and see if it’s right for you and your research.
If you’re already a user, a new Evernote for Windows upgrade will make your experience all the better.
Evernote for Windows Upgrade New Look and Functionality
The Evernote blog explained that their goal “is to provide an experience that feels natural and familiar for Windows users. Our latest version is designed for all types of Evernote Windows users in mind, whether you have just a handful of notes or thousands of them.” They continue to say, “We began by paring down the left sidebar for a more streamlined workflow, so you can find and manage your content even faster.”
Here’s a run-down of the improvements they’re touting:
- A new higher-resolution display looks crisp and clean, even on high-resolution screens.
- The left sidebar is pared down for a more streamlined workflow. This makes it easier to find and manage content. For example, you can select Notebooks to pull up all notes in the Note list, and expand the Notebooks section to see all the notebook stacks and notebooks. You can drag and drop notebooks between stacks. The trash is now its own section.
- A new quick navigation feature lets you hover over the Notebooks section and jump quickly to a specific notebook or create a new one. This also works for tags.
- The search is smarter and more powerful, even for those with complex tags and tons of notes. It also feels more like web browser searching. You can widen or narrow your search to specific notebooks. The search system will rummage through your Evernote Trash now, too.
Image by Evernote.
- There’s a new color-coding system to let you mark important notes. So far, this is pretty popular with dedicated Evernote users.
- And finally, if you use Evernote Business, you’ll find a new separation between business and personal content.
It’s worth noting that the upgrade takes a while to complete and while it’s happening, you won’t be able to use Evernote. And at least for now, the saved searches of previous versions have disappeared. Evernote says that’s temporary.
What others are saying
TechTimes says the new Evernote for Windows has “a slew of improvements bound to enhance the overall experience.” Engadget.com calls the upgrade “a streamlined, cleaner approach with refinements addressing the sidebar’s design and functionality.”
How to get organized with Evernote!
Click here to learn about how to get started with Evernote, and more about using Evernote to organize your genealogy life.
What do you think about the new upgrade? Feel free to share your experience in the comments section below.
by Lisa Cooke | May 21, 2015 | 01 What's New, DNA, images, Trees
While attending the NGS conference in beautiful St. Charles recently–during a rare calm moment at the Genealogy Gems booth–I slipped over to the Family Tree DNA booth to talk to Taylor Trusty, the FTDNA product manager. There’s been a question on my mind about Family Tree DNA privacy since my last post about them: why are we seeing “private trees” when we use the new global GEDCOM search?
He explained that one of the main reasons is due to the fact that FTDNA has a game plan, and they want to make sure that their privacy settings are going to be able to accommodate these upcoming integrations. So, they have erred on the conservative side. Because the consent form that you signed when you were tested indicated that you would be showing your information to your “matches,” FTDNA is hesitant to show your information to your non-matches, like what happens in the global search. So your name will not show up attached to your pedigree chart in the global search (even to your matches!) unless you change your privacy settings.
If you want to change this, click your name in the upper right corner, then click Account Settings, Click on the Genealogy tab and change “Deceased people born in the last 100 years” to Public. Taylor is promising that an email will go out at the end of June encouraging everyone to do just this.
For more help using FTDNA, check out my quick guide, Understanding Family Tree DNA, available on its own or as part of my DNA super bundle (click on the image to the left to read about the bundle). This inexpensive laminated guide will help you save time and frustration while helping you get the most out of your investment in DNA for genealogy.
As always, if you’re ready for a personal consultation with me, you can reach me through my website, YourDNAGuide.com. I help people decide what testing is right for their family history questions–and I help them make the most of their results.
by Lisa Cooke | Jul 9, 2016 | 01 What's New, Records & databases, Research Skills |
Records that have been created recently are difficult to find and access. Some privacy laws protect, and hinder, our being able to find more recent birth, marriage, and death records we need. Here are some tips for finding these and other genealogy records not yet online.
Recently, Tom in Olympia, Washington wrote us with a question about how to find recent genealogy records that are not online yet.
“My wife’s mother was adopted in 1925. We have found her biological mother’s name and through Ancestry.com, I’ve found several bits of information about her from census records. She also was a crew member on three steamships in the 1930s. On two of the ship manifests, her U.S. passport numbers are listed. Do you know any search options for finding information from passports in the 1930s?”
Maybe you have had a similar question. We hope our answer helps everyone more easily find genealogical records that are not online yet.
Obtaining Recent Passport Application Records
Tom will be interested in obtaining a passport application record which may hold more information about his targeted ancestor. As Tom already discovered, U.S. passport records are online at Ancestry and FamilySearch, but only those records prior to 1925.
My original hope was that the National Archives Records Administration would have had the passport application records for the 1930s. I googled passport applications National Archives, and the first search result took me to an excellent article. I learned the U.S. State Department has passport applications on microfilm between the years and dates of 1795 to 1905 and January 2, 1906 – March 31, 1925. Sadly, these were not the years Tom was looking for.
To find information about passport applications in the 1930s, I needed to go another route. I opened a new window and googled U.S. State Department passport applications request copy. The first search result took me right to the page I needed. The Passport Services maintain the U.S. passport records from 1925 to the present. These records are protected by the Privacy Act of 1974.
Passport records in this time frame for a third-party person are processed under the Freedom of Information Act. These records need to ordered by mail. Tom can make a request in writing and send that request to:
U.S. Department of State
Office of Law Enforcement Liaison
FOIA Officer
44132 Mercure Cir
P.O. Box 1227
Sterling, VA 20166
I suggested he mention his desire for the information is for genealogical purposes and what his relationship is to the person in question.
Using the Same Strategy for Other Recent Genealogy Records
Remember, this same kind of strategy applies to other genealogical records you might be looking for that were created recently. You can use Google searches and follow-up phone to find out where more recent records are and the access policies.
As an example, a recent Indiana marriage license index can be searched and viewed online for free at the Public Access records website for the state. I found this little goody by googling Indiana marriage records.
All of us at Genealogy Gems adore having the opportunity to find and share solutions like this one for overcoming the problem of locating recent genealogy records that aren’t online. If you haven’t done so already, sign-up for our weekly newsletter for more tips and tricks. Oh, and write to us anytime with your genealogy questions! We love to hear from you!
More Gems on Recent Genealogy Records
Other recent genealogy records in the U.S. are also available via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Click here to read about them! They include post-World War II draft registrations, immigration and naturalization documents and Social Security applications (SS-5).
