by Lisa Cooke | Sep 22, 2019 | 01 What's New |
Filae’s French collection opens the door for non-French-speaking people to discover their family stories online.
40 million people in the world (excluding France) claim French descent. Here’s the latest press release from Filae:
Paris, France – September, 18, 2019 – Filae.com, the world’s largest online resource for accessing French official records, today announced the launch of its first foreign language international sister-site: https://en.filae.com
With more than 40 million people in the world claiming French heritage, the launch of an English language version of Filae.com gives all of them an unprecedented and exclusive access to more than 150 million images of French Census and Vital records (birth, marriage, death) which have been indexed by Filae.com.
As Elvis Presley, Alec Baldwin, Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Kurt Cobain, Warren Buffett, and many other celebrities, 4% of the US population, 17% of Argentinians and 14% of Canadians have French roots!
“The launch of Filae.com is just the beginning of a more global strategy whose aim is to facilitate access to the largest resource of French records and to help people with French descent tracing back their ancestry whatever their language is and wherever they live! We are thrilled to share information we digitized and indexed with family history fans all over the world.” said Toussaint Roze, CEO and founder of Filae.com.
Starting as early as 1500, Filae’s French historical collection features records such as:
- Parish registers,
- Civil records,
- Census and vital records,
- Passenger lists,
- Military records (Napoleonic wars, WWI, WWII),
- Indexes provided by French societies,
- Directories
- and many other historical records (French revolution, etc.)
Filae.com also provides its users with easy-to-use tools to build their own trees or import their gedcom files, upload photos and documents and share them with other members.
Here’s a look at the Filae website:
About Filae.com
Launched in December 2016, Filae.com is the first and largest resource for French digitized and indexed records online.
The service was created by Toussaint Roze, a French serial- entrepreneur dedicated to genealogy who previously created successful online services like notrefamille.com, genealogie.com and gedlink.
Filae.com hosts and indexes more than 150 million digitisations of French original records for the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries.
by Lisa Cooke | Aug 15, 2013 | 01 What's New, Newspaper
Have you already searched for your relatives’ names at Chronicling America, the the Library of Congress’ web collection of digitized American newspapers? Well, search again!
Recently the the Library of Congress added more than 600,000 historic newspaper pages to its enormous collection. According to a press release, these pages include “first-time contributions from Iowa, Michigan, and West Virginia. Other new additions include content from Hawaii, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.” The site now has over 6.6 million searchable newspaper pages from over 1100 newspaper titles, published in 30 states and Washington, D.C. between 1836 and 1922.
What are the chances your family will appear on one of those pages? Pretty good, actually. Here’s a list of the kinds of articles they may show up in from my book How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers:
- Advertising: classifieds, companies your ancestor worked for or owned, grocery or dry goods stores ads (for historical context), runaway slaves search and reward, ship departures.
- Births & deaths: birth announcements, card of thanks printed by the family, obituary and death notices, “Community Pioneer” article upon passing, funeral notice, reporting of the event that lead to the death, or the funeral.
- Legal notices and public announcements: auctions, bankruptcies, city council meetings, divorce filings, estate sales, executions and punishments, lawsuits, marriage licenses, probate notices tax seizures, sheriff’s sale lists.
- Lists: disaster victims, hotel registrations, juror’s and judicial reporting, letters left in the post office, military lists, newly naturalized citizens, passenger lists (immigrants and travelers), unclaimed mail notices.
- News articles: accidents, fires, etc. featuring your ancestor; front page (for the big picture); industry news (related to occupations); natural disasters in the area; shipping news; social history articles.
- Community and social events like school graduations, honor rolls, sporting and theater events; social news like anniversaries, church events, clubs, engagements, family reunions, visiting relatives, parties, travel, gossip columns, illnesses, weddings and marriage announcements.
Learn more about researching family history with my book, available in both print and e-book format. And don’t forget to keep checking Chronicling America for stories and clues about your ancestors’ lives.
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 6, 2013 | 01 What's New, History, Newspaper
Newsboys or “newsies” used to sell the news. But for a time in American history, they were the news!
Newsboy. Little Fattie. Less than 40 inches high, 6 years old. Been at it one year. May 9th, 1910. Location: St. Louis, Missouri. Wikimedia Commons image, original at Library of Congress.
You’d know them by their common call: “Read all about it!” It was their job to sell stacks of inexpensive newspapers on every street corner that would support them. The Library of Congress has posted a fascinating page about the history of newsies, including their own appearance in the papers.
In 1899, newspaper prices rose–and that cut into the profit margins of boys who had very little profit to begin with. In New York City, many newsboys refused to sell papers published by Pulitzer and Hearst. Over the next few years, the newsboys didn’t exactly unionize, but they did organize. Eventually they formed the National Newsboys’ Association, which evolved into today’s Boys Club and Girls Club.
It’s interesting to read how the newspapers reported the doings of the boys who were essentially their salespeople. I bet it was a tricky place to be caught: a newspaper couldn’t afford to totally alienate their own best salesmen. Those salesmen were actually children, whom nobody wants to be accused of targeting. But their activities were aimed at driving down prices. In some cases, you see newspapers taking “the high road” and reporting charitable efforts to help these boys, like this story from the 1909 Washington Herald:
Click here to read this full story on Chronicling America. And click here to “read all about” newsboys and their role in American newspaper life.
Remember, stories like these are the kind that shaped our ancestors’ lives. Whether we find our relatives mentioned directly in the paper or we just see what life was like around them, we can learn so much from reading the same newspapers they did. Learn more from my book How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers–and Genealogy Gems Premium Subscribers can check out “Getting the Scoop on Your Ancestors in Newspapers” in the Premium Videos section.
by Lisa Cooke | Jun 12, 2015 | 01 What's New, Records & databases
Every Friday, we blog about new genealogy records online. This week’s findings include a major Cincinnati newspaper collection, Cuban genealogy resources, a burial index for New York City and records for a mental hospital in Surrey, England. Might any of the collections below include your ancestor? Check out our weekly Google search tip at the end of the post, too–it’s about finding images associated with the records you come across.
CINCINNATI NEWSPAPER. Subscribers can now search over a quarter million pages from The Cincinnati Enquirer (1841-1922) at Newspapers.com. This collection covers 80 years of history for one of the largest inland cities in the U.S., which was a major landing spot for Ohio River travelers and home to thousands of German immigrants.
CUBAN GENEALOGY COLLECTION. The Digital Library of the Caribbean now offers access to the Enrique Hurtado de Mendoza Collection of Cuban Genealogy. According to the website description, the collection “includes thousands of books, handwritten and typed letters, photos and other primary documents relating to Cuba and Cuban genealogy, collected over four decades by Felix Enrique Hurtado de Mendoza….: rare 17th and 18th century books, long out-of-print publications and periodicals that few, if any, U.S. libraries hold in their catalogs. Additionally, thousands of unpublished family genealogies and manuscripts make this collection particularly significant.” Read more about the collection in this article, where we learned about it.
NYC BURIALS. One of New York City’s oldest and largest cemeteries has put up a free database with thousands of burials, among them Civil War soldiers, former slaves and more. Green-Wood cemetery has about Green-Wood currently has more than half a million burials dating to 1840. Those who find an ancestor in the database should consider ordering a search of Green-Wood’s archival records.
UK HOSPITAL RECORDS. Over 11,000 Surrey, England Mental Hospital admission records (1867-1900) have been newly digitized and published by Ancestry, in partnership with the Surrey History Centre. Each record contains the patient’s name, gender, marriage status, occupation, residence, religion, and their reason for admission (diagnosis).
Here’s your weekly Google search tip: don’t forget to look for images associated with the types of record collections you find! Where one record exists, another may also. For example: search “Surrey England mental hospital,” and then when the results come up, click “Images.” You’ll find tons of photos of that hospital, some of them quite old. You can further filter these (or any image results) under Search Tools. Most commonly when searching for old pictures, I will choose “Black and White” under the Color tab (which naturally limits results to mostly older photos) or “labeled for reuse” under the Usage Rights tab (more likely to find images I can publish). This tip is brought to you by The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox by Lisa Louise Cooke: the fully-revised and updated 2nd edition is packed with great search tips like these!
