New Records Include Irish Genealogical Abstracts

Explore new Irish Genealogical Abstracts that have become available this week. They are a great alternative to records destroyed in the 1922 Dublin fire! Also new are church and burial records for England, poorhouse records for Scotland, German military recruitment, documents, and colonial letters for Australia. Finally, a variety of exciting collections are now online for the U.S. for Massachusetts, New Mexico, Georgia, and more!

Irish Genealogical Abstracts

Irish Genealogical Abstracts

New this week at Findmypast are several genealogical abstract collections! First is the Thrift Irish Genealogical Abstracts, created by renowned Irish genealogist Gertrude Thrift. This collection features copies of wills, bill books, parish registers, commission books, and freeman lists, as well as detailed family trees and pedigree charts. Records in this collection date as far back as the 16th century and up to the early 20th century.

Next is the Crossle Irish Genealogical Abstracts collection. Explore the various notebooks of 19th-century genealogists Dr. Francis Crossle and Philip Crossle to reveal a wealth of Irish genealogical resources including copies of records destroyed in the fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922.

Finally, the Betham Irish Genealogical Abstracts features abstracts and genealogical sketches created by herald Sir William Betham, the Ulster King of Arms. The notebooks are an excellent substitute for missing records and include abstracts of wills, reconstructed family trees, and detailed pedigrees.

Also new for Irish genealogy this week is the Cork, Pobble O’Keefe Census 1830-1852. Search these records to discover who your ancestor was living with as well as their occupation, birth year and marital status.

Findmypast is the leader in genealogical records for Ireland, the UK, and now including U.S. and Canada. Get a two-week free trial of their premium subscription and explore millions of Irish record and more!  Click here to subscribe now.

England Parish Records

Extracted Church of England Parish Records, 1538-1837 for Nottingham, England are now available online at Ancestry.com. The records include baptisms/christenings, burials, marriages, tombstone inscriptions, obituaries, tax lists, wills, and other miscellaneous types of records.

Over 75,000 records have been added to Findmypast’s collection of Yorkshire Burials, covering Anglican parishes and municipal cemeteries. Find your ancestor’s name, age at death and burial place, with more than 4 million records covering over 400 years.

Scottish Poorhouse Records

New for Scotland are Kirkcaldy, Fife, Poorhouse Records, 1888-1912. This collection includes records for those who received help from the Abden Home Poor Law Institution, originally named the Kirkcaldy Combination Poorhouse.

German Military Records

Stadtarchiv German Military RecordsHalle(Saale), Military Recruitment Lists, 1828-1888 are now online at Ancestry.com.

From the collection description: “These recruitment lists are arranged in chronological-alphabetical order and contain detailed information about male military personnel in the city. Typically records for young men begin at age 20. Therefore this collection includes age groupings for men born beginning in 1808 up to and including 1868.”

Australia – New South Wales

At Ancestry.com, you can now explore the New South Wales, Colonial Secretary’s Letters, 1826-1856 collection. If you had ancestors living there during that time period, you can find a wealth of information in this collection, including petitions by convicts for sentence mitigation, marriage permission requests, character memorials for potential settlers, land grant or lease applications, official visit reports, information about court cases, and lists of assigned servants.

United States – Maps & More

Confederate Maps. The Cartographic Branch of the National Archives has announced the digitization of over 100 Confederate maps from Record Group (RG) 109.  All are now available to view or download through their online catalog. “These maps can include rough sketches created quickly before or during a battle, but can also include maps that were drawn to accompany official reports or even post-war publications. Many are highly detailed and colorized.”

Massachusetts. At AmericanAncestors.org (the website of the New England Historic Genealogical Society), 12 new volumes have been added to the parish of Immaculate Conception in Salem to Massachusetts collection, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Records, 1789-1900. This update consists of 23,972 records and roughly 90,300 names.

New Mexico. Bernalillo County, New Mexico, Marriage Index, 1888-2017 are now available online at Ancestry.com. The original records come from Bernalillo County Record’s Office, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Georgia. From a recent press release: The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is celebrating its 1 millionth digitized historic newspaper page. The premier issue of the Georgia Gazette, Georgia’s first newspaper, published from 1763-1776 in Savannah, will become the 1 millionth page of historic newspapers to be made freely available online through the Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN).

Colorado. Also celebrating a 1 million milestone is the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC), from the Colorado Virtual Library. The millionth page came from the Montrose Daily Press, Volume XII, Number 247, April 21, 1921, which is part of a digitization project supported by Montrose Regional Library District.

Disclosure: This post 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 the free Genealogy Gems podcast and blog!

Episode 195

The Genealogy Gems Podcast
Episode 195
with Lisa Louise Cooke

In this episode, I’m celebrating the 100th episode of another podcast I host: the Family Tree Magazine podcast. So I’ll flashback to one of my favorite interviews from that show, an inspiring get-in-shape conversation for your research skills: how you can strengthen your research muscles and tone those technology skills to find and share your family history.

Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 195

Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 195

Listen now – click the player below

More episode highlights:

  • News on Chronicling America and Scotland’s People;
  • Comments from guest expert Lisa Alzo on millions of Czech records that have recently come online;
  • A YouTube-for-genealogy success story from a woman I met at a conference;
  • An excerpt from the Genealogy Gems Book Club interview with Chris Cleave, author of Everyone Brave is Forgiven;
  • Diahan Southard shares a DNA gem: the free website GEDmatch, which you might be ready for if you’ve done some DNA testing.

 

NEWS: GENEALOGY WEBSITE UPDATES

NEW RECORDS ONLINE: FREE CZECH RECORDS AT FAMILYSEARCH.ORG

On browse-only records:

Though not fully indexed, the new Czech browse-only records number over 4 million. Click here learn how to use browse-only collections on FamilySearch.org.

 

 

 

 

Lisa Alzo, Eastern European genealogy expert and author of the new book The Family Tree Polish, Czech and Slovak Genealogy Guide comments on the significance of these records coming online:

“These records are a real boon for Czech researchers because at one time the only to get records such as these was to write to an archive and taking a chance on getting a response or spending a lot of money to hire someone to find the records or to travel there yourself to do research in the archives.

The church records contain Images and some indexes of baptisms/births, marriages, and deaths that occurred in the Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and Reformed Church parishes, as well as entries in those registers for Jews.

Land transactions containing significant genealogical detail for a time period that predates parish registers. The collection includes records from regional archives in Opava and Tebo and from the district archive in Trutnov.

School registers contain the full name for a child, birth date, place of birth, country, religion and father’s full name, and place of residence.

While researchers should keep in mind that not everything is yet online, and FamilySearch will likely add to its collection,  having these records from FS is an amazing resource for anyone whose ancestors may have come from these areas. And hopefully, there are more records to come!”

GENEALOGY GEMS NEWS

Celebrating 2 million downloads of the Genealogy Gems podcast and GenealogyGems.com named as one of Family Tree Magazine’s 101 Best Websites for 2016

Story of My Life by Sunny Morton, life story-writing journal available as a print workbook and as a writeable pdf e-book

Genealogy Gems app users:  For those of you who listen to this show through the Genealogy Gems app, your bonus handout is a PDF document with step-by-step instructions and helpful screenshots for Google image search on mobile devices. The Genealogy Gems app is FREE in Google Play and is only $2.99 for Windows, iPhone and iPad users

 

Lisa Louise Cooke uses and recommends RootsMagic family history software. From within RootsMagic, you can search historical records on FamilySearch.org, Findmypast.com and MyHeritage.com. In the works: RootsMagic will be fully integrated with Ancestry.com, too: you’ll be able to sync your RootsMagic trees with your Ancestry.com trees and search records on the site.

 

Keep your family history research, photos, tree software files, videos and all other computer files safely backed up with Backblaze, the official cloud-based computer backup system for Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems. Learn more at http://www.backblaze.com/Lisa.

Review your search results especially those that pop up in the Images category.

 

MAILBOX: Robin’s YouTube Success Story

YouTube video with Robyn’s father: Cleves, Ohio: Edgewater Sports Park

The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox, 2nd edition has an entire chapter on using YouTube to find family history in historical videos

YouTube for Family History: Finding Documentaries about Your Family

 

MAILBOX: FEEDBACK ON THE PODCASTS


Free, step-by-step podcast for beginners and a “refresher” course: Family History: Genealogy Made Easy

Genealogy Gems Premium podcast

 

SHAPING UP WITH SUNNY MORTON

Family Tree Magazine Podcast celebrates 100th episode

 

Sunny Morton has get-in-shape advice for us from strengthening research skills to toning tech muscles–from the article “Shaping Up” featured in the March 2010 issue of Family Tree Magazine.

More resources for genealogy education:

GENEALOGY GEMS BOOK CLUB: Everyone Brave is Forgiven, the best-selling novel by British author Chris Cleave. A love story set in World War II London and Malta. This story is intense, eye-opening and full of insights into the human experience of living and loving in a war zone?and afterward. Everyone Brave is Forgiven is inspired by love letters exchanged between the author’s grandparents during World War II.

Video: Chris Cleave on the U.S troops coming to Europe in World War II

Click here for more Genealogy Gems Book Club titles


MyHeritage.com is the place to make connections with relatives overseas, particularly with those who may still live in your ancestral homeland. Click here to see what MyHeritage can do for you: it’s free to get started.
 
GEDMATCH WITH DIAHAN SOUTHARD, YOUR DNA GUIDE

The genetic genealogy community has a crush. A big one.  Everyone is talking about it. “It has such great features.” says one. “It has a chromosome browser!” exclaims another. “It’s FREE!” they all shout. What are they talking about? GEDmatch. GEDmatch is a mostly free online tool where anyone with autosomal DNA test results from 23andMe, FTDNA, and AncestryDNA can meet and share information. All you need to do is download your data from your testing company and upload it into your newly created GEDmatch account.GEDmatch is set up just like your testing company in that it provides two kinds of reports: ethnicity results, and a match list. Remember that ethnicity results, meaning those pie charts that report you are 15% Italian and 32% Irish, are based on two factors: a reference population and fancy math. GEDmatch has gathered data from multiple academic sources to provide you with several different iterations of ethnicity reports. This is like getting a second (and third and fourth, etc) opinion on a science that is still emerging. It is a fun exercise, but will likely not impact your genealogy research very much. The more important match list does allow you to see genetic cousins who have tested at other companies. Of course, only those who have downloaded their results and entered them into GEDmatch will show up on your list. This means GEDmatch has the potential to expand your pool of genetic cousins, increasing your chances of finding someone to help you track down that missing ancestor. Many also flock to GEDmatch because they were tested at AncestryDNA and thus do not have access to a chromosome browser. A chromosome browser allows you to visualize the physical locations that you share with someone else. Some find this to be a helpful tool when analyzing their DNA matches (though in my opinion, it is not essential).GEDmatch also has some great genealogy features that let you analyze your pedigree against someone else’s, as well as the ability to search all the pedigree charts in their system so you can look specifically for a descendant of a particular relative.However, even with all of these great features, GEDmatch is still yet another website you have to navigate, and with that will be a learning curve, and certainly some frustration. So, is it worth it? If you are fairly comfortable with the website where you were tested, and you are feeling both curious and patient, I say go for it.It’s too much to try to tell you right this minute how to download your data from your testing site and upload it to GEDmatch. BUT you’re in luck, I’ve put step-by-step instructions for getting started in a FREE tutorial on my website at www.yourDNAguide.com/transferring

Genealogy Gems Podcast turns 200: Tell me what you think?
As we count down to the 200th episode of the free Genealogy Gems Podcast, what have been YOUR favorite things about the podcast? Any particular topics, interviews or segments of the show? What keeps you coming back? What would you like to hear more of? Email me at genealogygemspodcast@gmail.com, or leave a voicemail at (925) 272-4021, or send mail to: P.O. Box 531, Rhome, TX 76078.

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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!

How to Start a Genealogy Blog: FREE 5-Part Podcast Series

how to start a genealogy blogHave you thought about starting a blog to share your family history research, but just haven’t done it yet?

  • It’s a free, no fuss-way to publish your family history as you write it, one little piece at a time.
  • It shares your family stories with loved ones who are interested enough to read your short snippets.
  • It’s “out there” on the internet for long-lost relatives to find and connect with you.

Family History Genealogy Made Easy PodcastWell, Lisa has just republished a FREE 5-part podcast series on how to start a genealogy blog! It’s from her original Family History Podcast, a step-by-step how-to series for genealogists. I’ve just finishing remastering the last of the how-to-blog episodes, and I’ll tell you, they are inspiring!

In fact, after one of the episodes originally aired, listener Will Haskell contacted Lisa and said he thought he’d start a blog. I was curious–did he ever do it? He DID! I found Will’s Genealogy Blog here and started reading. He’s posted all kinds of great information about his family history. He hasn’t posted much recently, so I contacted him. What he said was really interesting:

“Lisa definitely was the instigator in starting the blog. I have not been keeping up with the blog in the past couple years. Being a business owner has cut in to the family history research and blogging quite a bit. I am still amazed at how many people visit my blog even without regular updates. I have been able to reconnect with several relatives through the blog.”

So that’s another great aspect of blogging: it’s not a forever commitment, and it often continues to reward you even when you’re not actively blogging! Check out the blog series here:

Episode 38: How to Start a Genealogy Blog, Part 1. The Footnote Maven, author of two popular blogs, joins us to talk about the process of starting a genealogy blog. She gives great tips for thinking up your own approach, finding a unique niche, commenting on other people’s blogs and more. This is a fascinating inside look into the geneablogging community, whether you’re interested in starting your own or not!

Episode 39: How to Start a Genealogy Blog,  Part 2. This week we continue to explore of family history blogging. In this episode I interview TWO more successful genealogy bloggers, Denise Levenick (author of The Family Curator and alter ego of “Miss Penny Dreadful” on the Shades of the Departed blog) and  Schelly Tallalay Dardashti (author of the Tracing the Tribe blog).

Episode 40: How to Start a Genealogy Blog, Part 3: Step by Step. In this episode, learn step-by-step how to create your own free family history blog on Blogger.com. Learn tricks for designing a simple, useful blog and how NOT to overdo it!

Episode 41: How to Start a Genealogy Blog, Part 4: Blog readingsGet inspired by two seasoned bloggers who each read a great post for you. And hear a special announcement about an exciting project I’ve been working on.

Episode 42: How to Start a Genealogy Blog, Part 5. In this final episode, learn a few more gadgets for formatting your blog and making it easy for others to subscribe. Learn tips for writing that first post and using keywords that will help others researching your family to find you.

Irish Catholic Parish Registers from National Library of Ireland

Writer James Joyce's baptismal certificate; click to link to Wikipedia image.

Writer James Joyce’s baptismal certificate; click to link to Wikipedia image.

As of today, the National Library of Ireland expects to launch a free, digitized collection of ALL its Catholic parish registers on its website (this link takes you to the English version; it’s also available in Irish). Nearly 400,000 digital images of microfilmed parish records comprise this collection.

According to a press release, “The parish register records are considered the single most important source of information on Irish family history prior to the 1901 Census.  Dating from the 1740s to the 1880s, they cover 1,091 parishes throughout the island of Ireland, and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records….Their digitisation means that, for the first time, anyone who likes will be able to access these registers without having to travel to Dublin.”

Catholic parish registers are a vital genealogical resource. In addition to the names of those baptized or married, they usually include those event dates, names of parents of baptized children, godparents and witnesses (who may also be relatives).

NOTE: This is a browsable-only collection. There are currently no plans to index or transcribe the records. However, the press release included a great suggestion for accessing indexes: look to local family history centers for that parish or neighborhood. “The buy diet medication online nationwide network of local family history centres holds indexes and transcripts of parish registers for their local areas,” it says.

Roots Ireland county genealogical centresThose unfamiliar with Ireland research may assume this means local FamilySearch Family History Centers, but a map shows only a few of these in Ireland. I would start first with the network of county genealogy centers, accessible online at Roots Ireland. According to that site, “The county genealogy centres are based in local communities, working with volunteers, local historical societies, local clergy, local authorities, county libraries and government agencies to build a database of genealogical records for their county. By using this website you are supporting that work and the communities from which your ancestors originated.” Several counties actually already have online records you can access through the Roots Ireland link above. Ancestry also has several databases of Irish Catholic parish registers.

For more tips on researching your Irish relatives, listen to the FREE Family History Made Easy podcast episode 21, in which we interviewed Irish expert Judith Wight.  You’ll hear her tips on finding Church of Ireland records, civil registrations, estate records and how history helps us understand gaps in the records.

Thank you for sharing this post with those who will LOVE to know about these Irish genealogy resources!

 

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