ScotlandsPlaces records now free to access

Major news from Scotland, in that the records collections on ScotlandsPlaces have now been made available free of charge. In the past the site hosted a mixture of records, some of which were free to access (as was the case when the site was originally launched), and others which required a subscription of £15 +VAT, i.e. £18, although transcripts of some of those records were free to access.

The sources for the collections are the National Records of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (now part of Historic Environment Scotland).

A complete list of the records available to search can be found at Genes Blog.

Colouring Your Tree with Newspapers.com

Gordon Atkinson of Ancestry.com gave a presentation titled “Coloring Your Tree With Newspapers.com” at the recent at 2016 BYU Conference on Family History and Genealogy.

Ancestry has forty million newspaper pages. But newspapers are indexed through OCR (optical character recognition) and OCR results don’t surface very well on Ancestry.com. So Ancestry took some fold3 technology and created newspapers.com. They launched in 2012 and, just four years later, have 160 million pages from 4,200 newspapers. They are adding nine to ten million pages every month. Newspapers.com is successful even outside the field of genealogy.

While they are owned and operated by Ancestry.com, newspapers.com requires a separate subscription from Ancestry. However, Ancestry offers an all-access bundle.

Because publications from 1922 and before are in the public domain, newspapers.com can publish them without having to pay royalties. After 1922 they have to enter relationships and pay publishers to republish their newspapers. They just did a deal with Tronc to publish the L.A. Times. Last year they signed an agreement with Ganett to do all eighty-two of their newspapers.

To cover the additional costs of the royalties for these modern newspapers, newspapers.com has added a “Publishers Extra” premium subscription. The basic subscription gives access to 100 million pages of older newspapers. The Publishers Extra subscription adds access to 71 million more. The + sign next to a title indicates a Publisher Extra subscription is required. However, some titles have issues both before and after 1922. There is a line and different colors indicating the issues requiring the Extra subscription.

When asked about newspaperarchive, Gordon said that newspapers.com has similar content, but if newspapers.com doesn’t yet have more content, they soon will. And he said the newspapers.com site experience is better.

To get new newspapers, they work with institutions and libraries across the country, but mainly with publishers. He said they take recommendations, but they don’t digitize paper newspapers. All their content is from microfilm and there are plenty of newspapers available on microfilm.

The vast majority of their papers are from the US. Sometimes you’ll see gaps in their coverage. There are lots of reasons for this. The microfilms may have been destroyed or lost. The issues may never have been microfilmed. Sometimes newspapers.com makes mistakes and they are filed in the wrong place, but usually gaps are because the issues are not available.

Newspapers.com website uses a technology called HTML 5 instead of the older Flash technology, so it now works on mobile devices.

There is a button to save to Ancestry. It will let you select a particular tree, and then pick a person. The clip shows up in the Other Sources section of the person page. They are working to make the experience better, passing information over to Ancestry.com, showing a thumbnail, and associating it with events.

If you clip anything, then anyone can view, not just the clip, but a free view of the whole page. We think that some people will be interested and subscribe, although we just want people to have a positive experience, Gordon said.

You can view a collection of clippings that others have done. We have one user who likes to find horrible crimes and clips them, Gordon said. We’ve had a user clip chess matches. Someone called and said, “You have the best website for learning about building supplies in Texas in the 1930s.” She said she needed the information for a master’s thesis.

You can search the clipping page. If you click on the clipper’s name, you see their profile. If the user has allowed it, there is a contact me button. From their profile, you can see all the clippings they’ve made. It helps you organize.

Gordon said several things about searching. They are working on improving their search technology. Clippings have a high score and float to the top of search results. You can use quote marks in search, but text must match exactly. You can save a search so that you receive an email when new matches are added. You can filter results to those added in the recent past.

When clipping you can’t join together portions of an article that are not adjacent.

On the title page of a paper, you can click follow and be informed if they add issues.

Source: The Ancestry Insider

New Scotlands People website launched by National Records of Scotland

If you have Scottish ancestors and have never visited the ScotlandsPeople website, now may be the time to do so. ScotlandsPeople – the website which helps people search for their Scottish ancestors online, has been revamped and relaunched with a new look and a number of new features.

National Records of Scotland (NRS) operates ScotlandsPeople, which has on average 3.4m site views a year and around 1 million unique users since its launch in 2002.

As part of the most extensive upgrade to the service since 2010, for the first time users will not be charged as they formerly were to search an index relating to the birth, death and marriageregister, old parish register, and open census records. If you do not have an account with ScotlandsPeople, all you need to do is set up a free account. You will only be asked to buy/use your credits if you want to view or download a record image.

The cost to use this Scottish government website, however, has increased slightly from £7 for 30 credits to £7.50 ($13CDN, $10US) for 30 credits. Thirty credits enables customers to purchase five images at cost of £1.50 ($3CDN, $2US) per image of a document.

The new site also features an improved web design which allows customers to access ScotlandsPeople across digital devices, and an enhanced search function which allows them to locate and view records with greater ease.

31 Days to Better Genealogy

American genealogist Amy Johnson Crow is back this year with a new version of her 31 Days to Better Genealogy, a free series of emails designed to give you practical steps to make your research more productive.

Whether you are just beginning to climb your family tree or have been doing this for years, you can adapt the tips and methods in 31 Days to Better Genealogy to suit your needs. It begins October 1, but you can start any time after that.

Best of all — it’s FREE!

When you sign up for 31 Days, you will receive a daily email with a tip or resource plus access to a Facebook group

Newly released Irish collections free forever at FindMyPast

irish-ancestors

Following up on my previous post in August that Findmypast planned to release four Irish record collections in September 2016, they have now announced that the newly released collection of more than three million historic Irish records will be free forever. Until this release, you could only access these records by visiting the National Archives of Ireland’s reading rooms in Dublin.

The four collections are:

Original Will Registers 1858-1920 Over 181,000 records the largest collection of surviving wills for the post-1858 period for the Republic of Ireland. The registers allow researchers to explore the pages of wills to discover where their family lived, what assets they had, if it was left to relatives, and if anyone was left out due to a family feud.

Qualification and Convert Rolls 1701 – 1845 – Lists of over 52,000 Catholics who swore loyalty to the crown or converted to Protestantism. During the harsh Penal Laws of the 18th century, Irish Catholics were restricted from owning property or running businesses. Many chose to either convert (at least legally) to the established Church or swear loyalty in front of a court in order to qualify for certain rights

Valuation Office books 1824-1856- These land and house surveys kept by the Valuation Office of Ireland contain over 2 million names. The books that make up this collection were preparatory to the Griffith’s Valuation, and provide a comprehensive assessment of the rental value of Irish lands and property from the mid-1820s to the mid-1850s. The books reveal where and when individuals rented or owned property and provide rare glimpses of life in pre-famine Ireland

Merchant Navy Crew lists 1857-1922 – These indexed lists records the details of over 832,000 men and women who served with the Merchant Navy. The original lists were extensive and provided detailed information for each crew member, where and when they were born, and their life at sea. The lists not only cover Irish sailors but also include natives of Norway, Russia, Sweden, America and Germany, to name but a few

Learn more about these collections at Findmypast.com. Once there, it’s easy to find a particular record collection by clicking on Search and scrolling down to the card catalogue, A to Z of record sets. Then enter the title of one of the new collections. Or you can just search by name and location.

Guild of One-Name Studies is Now Available at FamilySearch.org

The following announcement was written by the Guild of One-Name Studies (London, UK and Salt Lake City, Utah -September 6, 2016):

The online resource helps people trace the possible origins and variations of their last name.

The Guild of One-Name Studies, a charitable organization that promotes facts about given surnames, and FamilySearch International, a nonprofit and the largest genealogy organization in the world, announced today that the guild’s collections will now be searchable at FamilySearch.org.

The partnership gives guild members another source for preserving their great work while also allowing more researchers across the globe to benefit from exploring the variant spellings of their personal surnames and possibly connect with others throughout the world who have the same last name.

The study of one’s last name (or surname) involves researching all known occurrences of that particular surname in all identifiable resources worldwide, as opposed to researching only the ancestors or descendants of a person. These rich compiled studies can assist a family history researcher to see the geographical distribution of surnames in their tree over centuries, which can help in reconstructing family lines bearing variants of those names. A common hope of customers who use surname studies is to identify the actual geographic locale of origin of a family surname. This outcome could very well happen for unique surnames, but common surnames that reflect an occupation (such as “Farmer” or “Fisher”) or patronymic-type surnames (such as “Johnson” or “Williamson”) may not have a single place of origin.

For more information on this historic collaboration, please read Dick Eastman’s blog post.

Historic Irish Birth, Marriage and Death Records online –free!

Have you ever heard the saying, “Everyone wishes they were Irish and those of us lucky enough to be so are proud of it”? Well, if you do have Irish ancestry, you have a bit of Irish luck today.

Finally, after a long wait, the General Record Office of Ireland has made millions of civil registers of birth, marriage and death available online on their state-run site, www.irishgenealogy.ie. On September 8, 2016 the following announcement was made from their website:

“The Indexes to Birth Records over 100 years, the Indexes to Marriage Records over 75 years and the Indexes to Death Records over 50 years are available to search.

The Birth Records Indexes date from 1864 to 1914, the Marriage Records Indexes date from 1845 (1864 for Roman Catholic Marriages) to 1939 and the Death Records Indexes date from 1864 to 1964.

Regular users of the site will also notice the enhancement of the Marriage Indexes, with both parties to the Marriage now being shown from 1882 onwards. “

What is even more incredible is that this is all available for free!

The Irish civil records can be searched by name, district, and year or browsed by district/office. We are now able to view digitized images of the full birth, marriage and death registers, instead of the basic indexes to the records that have been available on the website since 2014.

In many cases, genealogists will no longer have to order an official certificate or visit the General Register Office of Ireland in Dublin.

For privacy reasons, however, the indexes to births less than 100 years old, the indexes to marriages less than 75 years old, and the indexes to deaths less than 50 years old are not available.

Searching

From the home page, select church records.

When you begin your search, you will see the index information. Click on Image beneath it to see the scanned register. Often, you will find the mother’s maiden name, father’s occupation, street where they lived, cause of death, along with the date of the event.

Unfortunately, not all registers are available, and there is no mention in the Help section about when, if ever, the missing ones will be digitized. Depending on the registration district and time period, the availability of images can be a bit hit and miss. But the number of digitized registers currently available is astounding and we can only hope that there will be more added in the future.

To find the availability of an image, look for a number beside Group Registration ID. If it says, N/R, there is currently no image.

Good luck with finding your Irish ancestors!

Elephind: A Digital Newspaper Collections Search Engine

Elephind is a great service that searches online digital newspaper collections. Best of all, it is available free of charge.

On a personal note, I was a bit skeptical at first, as most of my relatives are definitely not famous or newsworthy, but on researching one ancestor who was a merchant marine captain there were ten or more pages of articles, mostly shipping news, but well worth going through.

Elephind.com is a search engine that operates much like Google, Bing, or other search engines. The one thing that is different with Elephind is that it searches only historical, digitized newspapers. It enables you to search, for free, across many newspaper sites simultaneously, rather than having to visit each collection’s web site separately.

At this time, Elephind has indexed 2,779 newspaper titles containing more than two and a half million editions, ranging from March 1803 up to January 1, 2015 in some titles. The Elephind search engine has indexed 149,363,907 items from 2,779 newspaper titles. These include such well known sites as the Chronicling America (the U.S.’s Library of Congress) and Trove (National Library of Australia), as well as smaller collections like Door County Library in Wisconsin. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com.

For more information on using Elephind, please click here.

Give it a try, you may be surprised and pleased at what you find.

Source: Dick Eastman, the Daily On Line Genealogy Newsletter

Free UK Genealogy

Free UK genealogy is a CIO (Charitable Incorporated Organization) acting as an umbrella organization for FreeBMD, FreeREG and FreeCEN.

Free UK Genealogy is committed to supporting the transcription of public records and making these available as free access public databases. We actively support other genealogical transcription projects: FreeREG is transcribing parish records and making them available in a searchable form for free online access, and FreeCEN is producing a free online access searchable database of 19th Century census returns. Volunteers have been working since 1999 concentrating on the censuses from 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1891.

The recording of baptisms, marriages and burials in parish registers began in England and Wales in 1538 and is separate and distinct from the civil registration process that began in 1837. (The latter is covered by our companion project, FreeBMD.) We want to make it easier for researchers, no matter where you are in the world, to find a specific record relating to your ancestor within a church register.

Each of the projects is a significant undertaking and overall since the beginning more than ten thousand volunteers have contributed over 350,000,000 records. This achievement allows over 40,000 people each day to search the databases helping them in their family history research. More recently the organization has begun to investigate how these databases can be made available under Open Data licences to provide additional benefit to researchers and the public.

Free BMD

FreeBMD was founded in 1998 by Ben Laurie, Graham Hart and Camilla Gemmingen von Massenbach after they realized the potential that the online genealogy community had to make records accessible to support research. Volunteers came together online to transcribe the General Register Office (GRO) indexes of Births, Marriages and Deaths for England and Wales.

Work continues to complete a transcription database covering the indexes from 1837 to 1983. All three founders are still actively involved with supporting and managing the organization.

In 2003 the organization registered as a charity under the name FreeBMD. In 2014 we changed the name to Free UK Genealogy which better reflected our aims, and in 2016 we became a CIO (Charitable Incorporated Organization).

FreeReg

The aim of FreeReg is to provide free Internet searches of baptism, marriage, and burial records, which have been extracted from parish registers, non-conformist records and other relevant sources in the UK. It is a relatively new project but due to the work of a dedicated set of volunteers we already have some 35 million records in the database. Even so, you should not expect to find all your ancestors in the database yet.

FreeCen

FreeCen provides a search facility for all census records from 1841 – 1891. It is very easy to use and more convenient than other subscription sites. The buttons that allow you to move to the previous household or the next one can help you look for relatives in the neighbourhood. However, keep in mind that not all the census records have been transcribed yet.

If you have 19th century ancestors frm England or Wales, you will certainly find Free UK Genealogy a valuable resource.

Mocavo and Find My Past

The latest post from The Ancestry Insider follows up on the rumour that Mocavo would be making changes to their method of providing genealogy information.

“Good news for Mocavo users and—basically—all genealogists. After my story “Mocavo’s Free Forever Promise No Longer” Findmypast content marketing manager, Jim Shaughnessy, reached out with this comment:

‘All the Mocavo content either is or will shortly be published for free on Findmypast in line with our promise to Mocavo customers. All that is required to access the content will be for users to register and create a free account (just the same as was done for Mocavo)..’

Jim has since informed me:

‘I can now confirm that all US Census years are now free on Findmypast as per our Mocavo promise.’

I verified access to a couple of the census years. I logged in with the free account I created last time. I think it is entirely appropriate for them to require registration. We should expect to put some skin in the game. I didn’t have to provide a credit card number and there is no automatic conversion to a paid subscription. I was able to view complete index entries and images with no hassles. I wasn’t plagued by nag-ware. Findmypast has done a completely classy implementation.

Thank you Jim, and thank you Findmypast for this generous gift to the genealogical community. Hat’s off to you.”

Please click here for further information on the merging of Mocavo into FindMyPast.