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Illuminated Heritage

March 18, 2008

79,000+ Newspaper Pages Online

The Library of Congress has recently added over 79,000 pages of newspapers to their nearly half a million already up at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site. It represents 61 newspapers ranging from 1900-1910.

posted by Kay at 3:09 pm | Comments (0)

November 5, 2007

FamilySearch Indexing Project

Last week the Genealogy & Local History Networking Group had the Family History Center coordinator for the 7-state area out to talk about what was going on with FamilySearch, the FHCs, etc. Part of the presentation was about FamilySearch Indexing which is a project YOU can become involved in. They are looking for volunteers to help index/transcribe all sorts of genealogical data including censuses (censi?), birth, marriage, and death records from all over the world. Everything is done online from their site and through the software provided AND in small (half hour or so) batches. I thought this sounded like fun so I signed up last week.

After the initial read-through/click-through training provided on the site and downloading the software, I grabbed my first batch of records. I was trying to get some records from Germany, but that didn’t work so I hit the button that gave me whatever they thought was most important to get indexed at the time. I ended up with the Minnesota census, which was fine, I grew up in a town founded by the Swedish so I can read Johnson and Jorgeson just as well as the next person. I didn’t even get a full page - just 27 lines! However, as it was my first and I was getting used to the handwriting, it did take me more than half an hour, but not more than an hour. I’m sure as I do more I will get used to the handwriting.

The process is very cool though - it highlights each of the fields on the original so you know where you are and what you are entering in your table. It also tries to save your typing as much as possible giving you the option of choosing what you just typed in the field above. For example, if you’re doing a family and the parents were both born in Germany, it auto-selects Germany for you until you tell it something else. Very easy and really rather fun. There’s also the whole “hey, maybe I’ll run across one of MY relatives” treasure-hunt mentality and the feel-good aspect of knowing you’re helping someone else out.

Anyway, give it a try - if you’re anything like me you’ll find it a challenging, fun and rewarding experience!

posted by Kay at 1:14 pm | Comments (0)

October 16, 2007

Ancestry Press Update

As promised, I found out the pricing for the printed bound heritage books you can make at Ancestry Press. A 24-page 8.5×11 book is $29.95 and each additional page costs 39 cents. Comparing that to Shutterfly, where I got my pet photo book, it’s a little cheaper, especially if you add pages and it’s a bit more space, since it’s a larger paper size. Mine was 8×8 inches, $29.95 for 20 pages and $1 per additional page. Of course, it’s not really apples and apples, since Ancestry Press is geared toward genealogists or family historians so it wouldn’t really work for my pet photo book!

posted by Kay at 10:03 am | Comments (0)

October 9, 2007

Your Own Book

Recently through a very nice offer from Catster and Shutterfly, I was able to create this extremely cool 8 x 8 bound book of photos of my pets. Ok, that isn’t THAT exciting to most of you, but pets are what I have and it was SO much fun too! I was really surprised how easy it was to put together my own book and I was even more surprised when I got it in the mail to find that it was a hardbound real book, not a scrapbook with printed pages slipped in page protectors (which is what I was expecting). It’s a REAL book like one you’d find in the children’s department at your library. The offer was for a free 20 page ($30 value) book with $1 for each additional page. I scoured all my photos - physical and digital - scanning in what I needed that wasn’t already digital and uploaded them to the site. Originally I was just going to do the cats as we’ve had 10 but then I thought I should definitely add the horse and then I felt bad for leaving the 3 rabbits and 3 dogs out, so I paid a little extra and included everyone. Once I decided on my “story” and the photos I wanted to include, I was able to go through with this nice little utility to layout my pages, choose backgrounds, fonts, number of photos per page, photo borders, etc. When I was pretty happy then I was able to go through and preview the entire book on one screen, which was really nice to make it flow better. A little shipping information, a click of the mouse and a week later the book was at my door! I know other photo sites offer this service, such as Kodak Gallery.

Once I got the book I brought it in to show all my friends (you want to see buzz marketing in practice, that was it!) and we came up with even more ideas on how to use these books. You could do one a year for each child as they attend school, special BIG parties (like special anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, baptisms, etc), vacations, mementos of special people, and maybe even a family history. However, when I looked I really found the tools for family history lacking - how was I going to do a family tree or something complicated like that?

Well, today I found my answer….Ancestry now offers AncestryPress which will do the same type of service with a family history angle. You have to upload your family tree to Ancestry and I’m not sure how private you can keep that, so I’ll have to look into that. Also, I have yet to see the price for this beastie and I’ve looked all around. I need to look more - but if you know, drop me a comment! Apparently you can print off a page at a time by yourself or order the whole book bound and printed. It appears that it only comes in 8.5 x 11 instead of the 8×8, 12×12 or 6×6 formats you can get elsewhere.

Something to keep in mind for Christmas presents and that should give me some time to really explore it! If you’ve already done this, drop me a comment!

posted by Kay at 10:37 am | Comments (0)

October 4, 2007

10-Day Free Access to Some US Census Data

News Flash! A “large portion” of US Census data from 1790-1920 will be going up on WorldVitalRecords in the next few days. These are not indexed, but they are browsable images. WorldVitalRecords is allowing free access to them for about 8 more days, so hop on over and start looking around!! From Dick Eastman’s blog…full story.

posted by Kay at 2:21 pm | Comments (0)

October 1, 2007

FREE Genealogy E-Books

Well, lookie what I came across today! On the Genealogy Librarians News blog they have a new “Book of the Day” feature where every day they will put up a few PDFs of entire books which you can then download and keep! Today the features are books about Brooklyn NY, Gilmaton NH and Santa Clara County CA. Be sure to subscribe in one form or another to keep up on each day’s treats! Here’s the full story.

posted by Kay at 11:29 am | Comments (0)

September 28, 2007

Hunting Down Those Rare Books

Ok, so this week I got wind of a book that looked like the answer to my prayers for researching the von Bieberstein family I have so desperately searched for for so many many years. On one of the Rootsweb boards that I’d forgotten about for a while, a fellow researcher mentioned he’d see “Die Geschichte des Bibersteins.” Oh boy! That sounded perfect (History of the Bibersteins) and I ran right over to WorldCat to look it up. Lo and behold! A hit! Oh my, this had to be fate, but fate that was tempered by the fact that only Yale and 2 libraries in Germany had it listed. Alas, in agony I trotted next door to my friendly reference librarian who helped me sort through the record, suggested I try Yale and then write the publisher. It was fairly new, 2005, I had hope. So I found the publisher’s site, dropped them a line and waited for the next morning to hear from them and our ever-bearing ILL person. Meanwhile I hunted down my fellow researcher’s e-mail and asked him for more information about the book.

Next morning, I find that Yale will lend it (for a fee) but I wait for the publisher - just in case. I hear back from my fellow researcher and WAIT, the book I have in my sights is from 2005 and he saw the book in 1997. Oops, this isn’t right - so after a flurry of e-mails and WorldCat searches we find this is NOT the book he saw, but another one. And doggone it all - it’s about the VILLAGE of Biberstein, not the FAMILY. Hopes dashed up against the rocks….if it’s probably too go to be true, well, you know how that goes. Much later I hear from the publisher - no longer in stock or being published but try the antiquarian dealers (cha-ching). So, thus begins my wild and crazy searching in about 3 different languages, just to see what’s out there. In order for us all to get some value out of this, these are the sites I’ve bookmarked that I found most useful in my search and that I’d recommend:

Ebay - I’d recommend setting up an automatic search that will e-mail you if anything with the terms you chose shows up. I’ve done this for some very obscure things and found it very helpful!

Alibris - You can set up BookFetch to notify you if the title you are searching for gets listed. I used this years ago to find an autographed copy of “Father of Radio” for the hubby.

Eurobuch - This is what the publisher recommended - it searches mostly German booksellers….be forewarned you better know some German and be quite adept at sorting out the jumble you get from Google Translate! The buttons are in English, but that’s about it…

BookFinder - This searches American as well as some European booksellers. I got some of the same hits here that I got from Eurobuch.

UKBookworld - based in the UK, of course.

AbeBooks - Has international partnerships so searches a lot of different places.

Powell’s - Once in a while, you’d be surprised what you find there! One of my favorite haunts - you can also set up a title search to notify you when the book you want becomes available.

Perhaps you already knew about a lot of these, but it never hurts to pass on some resources!

And what did I find? Well, the book my fellow researcher saw, which may or may not be useful, is mostly about the business dealings of the Biebersteins and yes, I found a few copies but at nearly $300 a pop, well, anyone want to buy it for me??? And no, I never found the one I had originally tried to search out so I will probably go back to Yale, pay the fee, and check it over myself.

And if anyone out there is researching the von Biebersteins/Bibersteins, drop me a line! I’d love to hear from you…I still don’t know what branch we’re on…

posted by Kay at 3:41 pm | Comments (0)

September 27, 2007

Excellent Reference for Photographic Processes

I ran across this EXCELLENT reference from the Library of Congress today about photographic print processes (limited to what’s in their collection - but really? What are they missing?). Each process is put in a time line, has a brief explanation of it and then sends you off to examples in the collection plus some other good solid links about that process. This is a fantastic resource and I highly recommend that you bookmark it somehow (del.icio.us works for me!).

posted by Kay at 9:49 am | Comments (0)

September 11, 2007

Cook County Records to Go Online

In case you missed this last week, the Tribune reports that Cook County records (BMD) will be available online in January. They finished digitizing the 24 million records earlier this year and are uploading about a million records a week. For the full story…

posted by Kay at 1:52 pm | Comments (0)

September 7, 2007

GeoGen

For those researching German or Austrian surnames, Geogen is a nice tool. It does surname mapping in Germany and Austria so you can find the areas of th highest concentration of that surname. Check it out…

posted by Kay at 10:59 am | Comments (0)

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