Why Attend a Genealogy Conference

People often think that genealogy conferences are unnecessary because there are so many other learning opportunities available. There are webinars, podcasts, genealogy blogs and, it seems, endless ways to learn just by searching the internet.

Yes, those are excellent learning opportunities, but there are advantages in attending a conference that are unique and not available “on line”.

Develop Your Skills

Do you have a brick wall that you can’t climb or an ancestor that stubbornly remains hidden no matter how hard you look? Do you need to learn more about effectively researching?

Get Inspired

In a conference, you are sitting with the like-minded people. They all are here for a common goal. The conference can take your research to a new level.

Those brick walls and ancestors that are hiding may make you feel as though you can’t get anywhere with your research and you begin to develop that “oh, no, this is impossible” feeling. Listening to experts in their field and networking with other genealogists in person will fire up that research flame again and provide you with opportunities to view your research in a new and exciting way. You will have the “yes I can” feeling again.

Networking

You will not only learn from experienced and knowledgeable educators in their chosen genealogy field but you will also have the opportunity to speak with them in person or join in on a wide-ranging question and answer session.

You will also have the unique opportunity to network with fellow genealogists who are as addicted to genealogy as you are. You may find someone researching in the same area, researching the same general family or find a cousin or other relative. There are more “cousin connections” at a genealogy conference than you can imagine. It is not only networking, that is inspiring! By knowing who will be attending the conference, you can make a plan on what you are going to discuss with them during coffee breaks, for example.

Have I inspired you to attend a genealogy conference? I hope so, because they are an endless source of learning, entertainment and sheer enjoyment. I have attended on-line webinars, listened to podcasts, read blogs, chatted with other genealogists either by e-mail or through social media, but there is nothing that can compare with actually attending a conference. You will go home from it with more knowledge, inspiration and skills as well as new genealogy friends. It is a win-win situation all the way around.

Having said all that, you may want to find a genealogy conference in your nearby area. If you are new to genealogy and have not yet joined a genealogy society, you may want to look into joining a society in your area. Don’t do genealogy in the closet, get out there and attend a conference or join a society, you will never be sorry and will be amazed at how your genealogy horizons will open.

Our Qualicum Beach Family History Society is hosting a conference on April 20^th and 21^st, 2018 in Parksville, British Columbia. We have three dynamic speakers:

Thomas MacEntee, an international speaker from Chicago. His topic is technology and genealogy.

Lesley Anderson, the spokesperson for Ancestry Canada. She will be covering both researching on Ancestry and Ancestry DNA.

Tara Shymansky, a well-known instructor on Canadian genealogy. She will be speaking about researching Canadian records with emphasis on census research.

Then there are the fabulous door prizes, great vendors, chances to network with other genealogists – and the list goes on.

For more information about our conference, please visit our conference website at https://www.qbfhs.ca/workshops/unlocking-the-past-2018-conference/

As if that wasn’t enough, you will be visiting beautiful Vancouver Island, one of the jewels in the world’s crown!

Good luck with your research and I hope to see you at a conference somewhere, some day.

Kathy

Saving a Web Page as a PDF File

I have been searching trees on Ancestry recently and have found trees containing several people in a line I am following, taking one line of the family file I am working on from Canada back to the 1600’s in France. Of course I am fact checking and sourcing every page as I work through the information. But, rather than going back and forth to the various pages and sourcing information on Ancestry, it is much easier to save the web page as a .pdf file.

An article by Tyler Lacoma in the Digital Trends web site tells exactly how to do that in a variety of different web browsers on Windows, Macintosh, Android, and Apple iOS (iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch).

Source: Eastman On Line Genealogy Newsletter

Shedding Light on Brick Wall Ancestors

We all have brick wall ancestors who just refuse to give up their secrets, don’t we? They completely baffle you until you want to just give up in total frustration. You may need to change your focus and shed some light on the cracks in the wall by approaching the problem from another angle.

Lighting the Way with Maps

Many of your ancestors may have resided in several different countries, states, provinces, towns or villages during their lifetimes. If you have determined the general area where your ancestors lived, one of the best ways to familiarize yourself with these places is by consulting maps. Once you learn more about where your ancestors lived, you may be closer to understanding the area in which your ancestors lived.

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection includes over 150,000 maps dating back to the 16^th century, with the majority of North and South America as well as Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. You can search and download maps for free without creating an account. If you do find a map you wish to download, click o Export in the upper right-hand corner of the page and then choose the preferred map resolution.

Old Maps Online is another map resource you may want to check out. It has 400,000 maps from collections all over the world and is very user friendly. After entering a search location several small historical map images with names and dates will load. Click on any of these thumbnail images to view the map and see more information.

Now that you have a general overview of where your ancestor lived, it’s time to zoom in even more to see the towns, buildings and streets where they lived. The Sanborn Map Company has published fire insurance maps covering the residential, commercial and industrial sections of close to 12,000 towns and cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico. These maps were created to help fire insurance agents assess hazards, but these maps show many details of interest to family historians such as the size, shape and use of all buildings, names of streets and businesses, properly lines and house numbers. Even though the names of streets and numbering of residences and businesses may have changed over time, these maps are an invaluable resource for genealogists.

How to Find Genealogy, Family History and Local History Books in the Internet Archive

We always are hunting for more information about our ancestors, and the Internet Archives’ online service might be just what you need to help further your genealogy research. The following is an article from Dick Eastman’s July 6, 2017 On-line Genealogy Newsletter.

“Would you like to electronically search through 129,577 genealogy books? You can do that on the Internet Archives’ online service. Not only can you search these books, but you can do so electronically. A search for a name might require a few seconds, not hours or days in the manner of a manual search through printed books in a library.

The Internet Archive (also known as The Internet WayBack Machine Archive) is a San Francisco–based non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.” It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. This online library now has a collection that fills more than 15 petabytes. NOTE: 15 petabytes is equal to 15 million gigabytes.

The Internet Archive’s collection is growing daily. Best of all, the use of the Internet Archive is always FREE. There is only one class of available service: FREE. There is no upgraded, or ‘pro’ version. The Internet Archive is funded solely by voluntary donations, so everything is free.

The Internet Archive has always collected genealogy, family history, and local history books. However, searching through the huge collection used to require imaginative search terms to find specific references. For instance, searching all of the Internet Archive for references to my last name of Eastman used to find a few genealogy books buried in a listing of hundreds of books related to photography. In addition, a search for family names often also produced listings of book authors who shared that name, even if the book had nothing to do with genealogy. A search for a family name that is also a common English word, such as Black or Street was almost hopeless. Luckily, a change made some time ago has now reduced the search problems.

The Internet Archive now has a dedicated section just for genealogy, family history, and local history books at https://archive.org/details/genealogy. You might want to go to that address first and then conduct a search there.

When writing this article, I went to https://archive.org/details/genealogy, found the box labeled ‘Search this Collection’ and performed a search for: Eastman. That search found thirty-seven books. Unlike searches I have performed in the past, all the books were either (a) books about Eastman genealogy or (b) genealogy or local history books that had the name Eastman someplace within the book. In fact, quite a few of the books were local histories for towns where Eastman families had settled. One book was a history book written by Ralph M. Eastman although the book did not appear to contain any genealogy information. I also tried searching for geographic locations, such as ‘Penobscot County,’ and had equally good success.

A few of the books listed in my searches were about U.S. Civil War histories. Those books had little or no genealogy information but contained great information about the soldiers and sailors who served during that war.

Many of the books were originally published in the 1800s; all of the ones I found were published prior to 1923.

The front covers of each book were displayed, and clicking on the image of any book cover immediately showed the contents of the book. Once I clicked on a book’s image, full source citations also were displayed for that book, including: author(s) name(s), publication date, publisher’s name, Internet Archive call number, number of pages within the book, the name of the person or organization who contributed the book and even the name of the OCR software used to convert the book to text

The searches seem to work best for surnames of families that have been in North America for a century or longer. It does not work well for recent immigrants with eastern European or Oriental or Hispanic names. After all, these books are out of copyright; therefore, almost all were published prior to 1923. Don’t look for more recent immigrant families in this collection. Almost all the books listed are in English although a very small number may be in other languages.

The addition of a dedicated genealogy section on the Internet Archive is an incremental improvement but a very welcome one indeed. It greatly simplifies the searches for genealogy, family history, and local history books in this fabulous online resource.

I suggest you might want to go to https://archive.org/details/genealogy and search for any surnames of interest. You never know what you might find. You probably want to bookmark that address. Did I mention that the service is FREE?”

Source: Dick Eastman blog post, July 6, 2017

Archives.org – A Genealogy Research Site

A recent Genijourney blog post states, “One of the best resources I’ve found has been Archive.org. This site describes itself as a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. From a genealogy perspective, it pulls from a plethora of available historical online resources that have been digitized, indexed and are searchable.”

When you go to archive.org, you can search for items such as Vital Records, family history books, town yearbooks and much more.

The complete article explains how to effectively use archive.org, including several tips to make your search faster and more efficient.

Good luck with your research!

How to Manage your Family’s Digital Assets

Dick Eastman has written a thought provoking article that we should all be aware of as we can lose part or all of our digital media in the blink of an eye at some point if we do not take the time to preserve it.

“In our digitally integrated lives, we create and share most of our pictures and home videos with snazzy digital cameras, incredible smart phones, or other easily portable devices. We download music purchases and perhaps even keep only digital receipts of our purchases through photos or emails. Someone said, ‘That [choose your device of choice] is so versatile that it can take pictures, chop celery, and keep us in touch with relatives as far away as Samoa.’

Now that we have all these digital devices, have we figured out what to do with the fruits of those devices—the mounds of digital files and sources we amass daily, weekly, monthly, yearly? What do we do with all our personal digital content that makes up our digital lives?”

One very interesting and surprising fact is how long the life expectancy is of each individual type of digital media.

“Most of us have not mastered how to effectively preserve our physical family artifacts. Even more of us are probably at a loss about how to effectively ensure our growing digital treasures are safe in the long term. In this article, we will focus mainly on digital assets.

So the questions remain—what do we back up or preserve and how do we do it? The short answer is that you need a personal digital asset plan. ”

The full article has been placed on the familysearch.org website with the permission of Dick Eastman. Please click here to read the entire article.

Using Transcript for Transcribing Documents

Transcript is a little tool, developed by Jacob Boerema that helps you transcribe text from digital media. Eileen Souza, back in 2011, had just accepted a job to transcribe fifty-two early deeds so she began looking for something that might make the job, if not easy, at least easier – and discovered Transcript, a little gem.

At the time she was scanning the deeds in as both TIF and PDF images and Transcript could open both. It could make the image fairly large and even magnify a letter, if needed. The software allows the user to take a transcribed file (in RTF format) and open in MS Word or any other text editor that supports RTF to complete it …

Read more about Transcript by clicking here.

QBFHS members may find this tool helpful if you are working on your “Tell Us A Story” contest. For more information on the contest, please click here.