by Lisa Cooke | Sep 3, 2015 | 01 What's New, Book Club, Cloud Backup, Digital Archives, Disaster Prevention, Genealogy Gems Podcast, Humor, Organization, Photographs, Preservation
Digitization tips for old home movies and photos. Online storage and computer backup tips. The Genealogy Gems Book Club interview with Pamela Smith Hill, the editor of the new Laura Ingalls Wilder biography, Pioneer Girl.
These are all highlights of the free Genealogy Gems Podcast episode 183, newly-published and available for your listening pleasure on our website, through iTunes and the Genealogy Gems app.
A special feature is an exclusive interview with digitization expert Kristin Harding from Larsen Digital. She is passionate about getting old photos and movies safely digitized and into storage we can access in the years to come!
As always, you’ll hear from fellow genealogy lovers who have written in with comments and questions. Diahan Southard returns from her summer break with a great new DNA story that settled an old scandal involving U.S. President William G. Harding.
So tune in and enjoy the free Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 183! Then why not share it with a friend who may like it, too? Thank you!
by Lisa Cooke | Oct 7, 2015 | 01 What's New, Book Club, Disaster Prevention, DNA, Genealogy Gems Podcast, Humor, Photographs
The FREE Genealogy Gems Podcast episode 184 has been published and is ready for your listening pleasure!
In this episode of the free Genealogy Gems podcast, you’ll hear about lots of fabulous and FREE online resources–including a way to harness the power of Ancestry.com for free.
You’ll also hear advice from two listeners, one on saving your genealogy from theft and another with a tip on digital preservation for photos. I share a genealogist’s poem that made me laugh. Resident DNA expert Diahan Southard joins us to respond to a common lament: when DNA doesn’t seem to be panning out for you.
In this episode we also announce our next Genealogy Gems Book Club, the last featured title of 2015. It’s a meaty new novel by a New York Times best-selling author who has also penned an Oprah Book Club Pick. Come check it out (or click here to read more about it)! Listen in iTunes, through our app (for iPhone/iPad or Android users), on our website and TuneIn (now available for Amazon Echo users).
The Genealogy Gems podcast is proud to continue its tradition as a FREE, listener-friendly show for all levels of family history researchers (beginners and beyond!). Thanks for sharing this post with your friends and genie buddies. You’re a GEM!
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 20, 2015 | 01 What's New, Ancestry, Cloud Backup, Disaster Prevention, Trees
THIS IS IT! Our #1 blog post of 2015. Not surprisingly, it’s about how to secure your data on Ancestry.com: your trees, photos, sources and even DNA! 
Earlier this year, rumors circulated that Ancestry was up for sale. Our post about that rumor included tips about how to back up everything you’ve put on Ancestry–trees, source citations, images and even DNA results. That post from our genealogy blog circulated among thousands and thousands of Facebook friends! It was definitely our most-read post of 2015, thanks to those of you who helped share its tips with your friends.
Here’s the bottom line from that post: if you don’t already have up-to-date copies of everything you’ve
put on Ancestry, download it now. From here on out, keep your master family tree not on Ancestry (or any other site) but on your own computer. If you do keep building your tree on Ancestry, download updated GEDCOM files regularly. That way, if Ancestry gets hacked, goes out of business or even dumps your data (it’s happened before), you’ve still got your tree.
In that same spirit, back up
your own computer systems. Many of you have taken our advice to hire Backblaze to do this for you. Backblaze runs in the background of all Genealogy Gems computers, instantly backing up to the cloud every new or revised file we create, 24/7. Including our master family trees, digital photos and genealogy document images! Lisa loves that their online backup security is second to none and costs just $5 a month. (Click here to learn more about Backblaze.)
Click here to see all Top 10 Genealogy Gems blog posts for 2015–and enter to win a great prize! The contest ends TODAY, so click now to enter!
by Diahan Southard | Sep 16, 2014 | 01 What's New, Ancestry, Trees
If you’re an Ancestry.com user, you’ve seen those “shaky leaves.” They are automated hints generated when Ancestry.com thinks a historical record or tree matches an individual on yours.
Are you getting the most out of your Ancestry.com shaky leaf hints? Check out this video on YouTube–then keep reading!
In a nutshell: look at all the hints. Then keep searching.
According to the Ancestry Insider blogger, hints are only provided for the top 10% of Ancestry records.
I asked our Genealogy Gems source at Ancestry.com about this. He did clarify that this means the most popular 10% of collections, which accounts for “a majority of the records.” But he also comments, “Hints are not meant to be an exhaustive method to flesh out all of the records for your ancestors. People should always search as well as use hints.”
After checking all the hints, I routinely find a LOT more by then searching records from an individual’s profile.
Search from the profile rather than the main search screen so some of the other data you’ve already found (like dates and relationships and locations) will be included automatically in the search parameters. I think searching from the individual profile also makes it faster to attach records to your person once you’ve found them.
Click here to hear how one woman used Ancestry.com hints to discover a tree for the biological mother who abandoned her when she was five. You’ll also learn her inspiring message about how moving past her mother on her family tree has helped her move on with her life.
by Lisa Cooke | May 16, 2013 | 01 What's New, Research Skills
UPDATE: THIS COLLECTION HAS BEEN EXPANDED AND IS NOW ALSO AVAILABLE ON ANCESTRY.COM.
About 4.6 million genealogical records from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are now available on Archives.com.
This project represents a unique collection for Archives.com, which partnered with the ELCA Archives to digitize and index about 1000 rolls of microfilmed records of affiliated church. According to the company, this collection represents records that have never been online before. It eliminates the major barriers we usually have in researching church records: not knowing which specific congregation an ancestor attended; not knowing where those records are now and not having easy access to them.
According to a company press release, “The records in these collections date from the mid-1800s through 1940 and include births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and burials. Details vary from church to church, but often include parents’ names, dates and places of the event, and other biographical details. Many of the churches were founded by immigrants from Norway, Sweden, and Germany and had immigrant families as their members.”
I was curious to see what I could find in the collection on my own family. You can imagine how happy I was to find this record (image below) of my grandmother, Alfreda Sporowski (image right) from Gillespie, Illinois:

Church record naming Alfreda Sporowski, from Archives.com’s collection of Evangelical Lutheran Church records.
I remember years ago writing a letter to the church and receiving a letter in reply with this information. Now I’m looking at the original document in just seconds from my home computer. We’ve come a long way!
Not a member at Archives.com? You can sign up here for a free 7-day trial membership.