BillionGraves for Genealogy: YouTube Video Interview

Using BillionGraves for genealogy research has never been easier. 

BillionGraves aims to document and preserve the world’s cemeteries. They provide a platform for volunteers around the world (and their smartphones!) to capture headstone images and their GPS locations. The images are transcribed and the index is searchable on the BillionGraves website and other leading genealogy sites.

Learn more on using BillionGraves for genealogy, what it offers now and its hopes for the future in this video interview by Lisa Louise Cooke with Hudson Gunn. Then keep reading below to learn a few more tips from us here at Genealogy Gems on using Billiongraves for genealogy.

Ready to learn more about using BillionGraves for genealogy?

We’ve blogged about it before:

Click here to learn how to request a cemetery headstone image from a BillionGraves volunteer.

Click here to read about how BillionGraves is now accepting source documentation uploads for tombstone records.

Click here to read my experience (together with my young son) in taking photos for BillionGraves.

 

 

Where You Can Find Over a Million British Church Records that are Now Indexed!

Over a million Church of England records from the county of Norfolk are among materials now indexed at FamilySearch.org.

Happisburgh church

Happisburgh church of St. Mary’s, Norfolk. Image by Martin at Flickr Creative Commons.

The collection includes bishops’ registers of baptisms, marriages and burials from the mid-1600s to the mid-1900s.

  • Baptismal records may include the child’s name, date and place of baptism, parents’ names and residence, legitimacy status of the child, father’s occupation and minister’s name.
  • Marriage records may include the names, ages, marital status and residence of bride and groom; date and place of marriage; fathers of the bride and groom and information on whether banns were published.
  • Burial records may include the name, age, and residence of the deceased and the date and parish of burial.

The Church of England was a state-sponsored church. This helps genealogists because it means that most everyone who lived there (until the mid-1800s or so) is likely to show up in Church of England records. So if you had English ancestors who lived in Norfolk, take a look. These images have been online since 2010, but the new index makes them a lot easier to search!

FamilySearch and Ancestry: Billion Record Deal

Ancestry.com and FamilySearch International, the two largest online providers of genealogy data,  just announced an agreement that’s expected to put a billion more historical records from around the world within reach online.

1 Billion Records FamilySearch and Ancestry

FamilySearch and Ancestry: Billion Record Deal

A billion is a LOT of records. If you wanted to count to a billion, it would take you 95 years.

According to an Ancestry.com press release, the organizations will partner “with the archive community over the next five years to digitize, index and publish these records from the FamilySearch vault.”

“The access to the global collection of records marks a major investment in international content as Ancestry.com continues to invest in expanding family history interest in its current markets and worldwide,” continues the release. “Ancestry.com expects to invest more than $60 million over the next five years in the project alongside thousands of hours of volunteer efforts facilitated by FamilySearch.”

This kind of collaboration (rather than competition) between these two enormous organizations will likely mean fabulous fruits for the genealogist. I love that the emphasis is on worldwide records, too. Though people in certain international markets may be the ones using their records, the ancestors of those folks have come from all parts of the world. As always, stay tuned to Genealogy Gems to hear news like this and for updates as these records start becoming available.

Collection of Historical U.S. City Directories Released by MyHeritage

Here’s news we love to hear:  the publication of a huge collection of historical U.S. city directories that has been two years in the making!

City Directories at MyHeritage

City Directories at MyHeritage

MyHeritage Announces US City Directories Collection

TEL AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah —

MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, announced today the publication of a huge collection of historical U.S. city directories that has been two years in the making.

The collection was produced by MyHeritage from 25,000 public U.S. city directories published between 1860 and 1960. It comprises 545 million aggregated records that have been automatically consolidated from 1.3 billion records. This addition grows the total size of MyHeritage’s historical record database to 11.9 billion records. 

MyHeritage teams applied innovative technologies to produce this collection and make it as useful and easy-to-use as possible.

Machine-Learning and OCR Technology 

The city directories in this collection were published by cities and towns all over the U.S., and each directory is formatted differently. To overcome the formatting differences and unify the structures, MyHeritage corrected errors in the Optical Character Recognition of the scanned directory pages, and then employed several advanced technologies, including Record Extraction, Name Entity Recognition, and Conditional Random Fields to parse the data. By training a machine learning model how to parse raw free-text records into names, occupations, and addresses, the company produced a searchable, structured index of valuable historical information.

As an important resource for family history research, city directories can provide fascinating new discoveries for anyone exploring their family history in mid-19th to mid-20th century America. The records contain valuable insights on everyday American life spanning the time period from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.

Cities in the United States have been producing and distributing directories since the 1700s, providing an up-to-date resource to help residents find and contact local individuals and businesses.

What You Can Find in City Directories

The city directories provide a wealth of information regarding family life during those years, listing names, residences, occupations, and relationships between individuals.

Thanks to their exceptional level of detail, city directories can also provide a viable alternative to U.S. census records during non-census years, and can fill in the gaps in situations where census records were lost or destroyed. In 1921, a fire at the U.S. Department of Commerce destroyed most of the records from the 1890 census. Despite the loss of the records in the fire, much of the data can be reconstructed using the 1890 city directories on MyHeritage, which consist of directory books from 344 cities across the country, including 88 of the 100 most populated cities during that year.

Example: Thome Edison in US City Directories at MyHeritage

Example: Thome Edison in US City Directories at MyHeritage

“We are harnessing new technologies to make family history research more accessible than ever before,” said Tal Erlichman, Director of Product Management at MyHeritage. “The use of machine learning to process the city directory records highlights the major strides MyHeritage is making in digitizing global historical records.”

MyHeritage automatically consolidated multiple entries for the same individual into one robust record that includes data from all the years an individual lived at the same address. This makes it easy to track changing life circumstances over the years. Users may be able to see more easily when their ancestors changed professions or got married, divorced, or were widowed — and MyHeritage automatically inferred approximate dates for such life events. Inferred dates contribute to improved matching between family trees and historical records on MyHeritage.

MyHeritage is currently indexing thousands of additional U.S. city directories that will be added to the collection in the coming months. This addition will include directories dating back to the late 18th century, as well as a large and unique set of directories from the late 20th century. 

The online collection of U.S. city directories is now available on SuperSearch™, MyHeritage’s search engine for historical records. Searching the collection is free. A subscription is required to view the full records and to access Record Matches.

How to Search the Collection

Click here to go to MyHeritageUnder Research in the menu click Collection Catalog and then click Directories in the side menu.

City Directories at MyHeritage

City Directories at MyHeritage

Searching the U.S. City Directories is free, but a subscription is required to view the records.

Users with a Data or Complete subscription can view the full records including the high-resolution scans of the original directories, confirm Record Matches, extract information from the record straight to their family trees, and view Related Records for the person appearing in a historical record they are currently viewing.

Click here to go to MyHeritage.

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