Yeah, Right

Click to enlarge.


I hear people say they've traced their family tree back to Adam and Eve...

Sorry, I'm still a skeptic.

Prison Inmates Volunteer For Indexing

A good friend who knows I love genealogy sent me the link to this article. I found it inspiring. When I'm doing anything genealogical, I know how much that spirit of genealogy rewards and fulfills me, and I'm not doing time in jail. Imagine how these men are touched by their service. What an outstanding idea.

Famous Cousins

Dr. William Williams Keen was United States' first brain surgeon, who once participated in a procedure removing a cancerous tumor from the jawbone of President Grover Cleveland.

His grandson, Dr. Walter Freeman, was famous for his practice of transorbital lobotomies. Thousands of mentally ill Americans, and some not mentally ill, underwent these operations at his hands, not too many decades ago.

Drs. Keen and Freeman are descendants of my Keen ancestors from Pennsylvania.

I'm... not sure how to feel about this. :)

Fun With Death Certificates

Call me morbid, but I love reading death certificates - probably for the same reason I love my grandmother's huge "Modern Medical Counselor" book from the 1940's. Diseases and causes of death are horrible, but fascinating.

ANYWAY... Ancestry.com has an impressive collection of death certificate images, with the LDS Church hot on its heels as more volunteers index records and collections of records are made available on Familysearch's pilot site.

Lately my favorite genealogical amusement is to narrow down people in my PAF file who died in the state in question and within a certain year range, and start looking people up. For example, the Kentucky collection on Ancestry ranges between the years 1852-1953, so after I've set up my list of people who died in Kentucky between those years, I'll search out those people.

By doing this, I've found women's maiden names I didn't have before, parents' names, children who died young whose existence I was unaware of, places of burial including cemetery names, and quite a few new family members I didn't have in my collection. A death certificate is also a great way to verify old information, so even if you think you know everything about Grandma Gert, it's still worth your time to check out her death certificate.

If you're an Ancestry.com subscriber, the easiest way to find a state's death record collection is to head to the home page, then scroll down to the list and map of the United States, then click on that state to see what it offers.

If you're like me and "free" is your favorite price, you can take your chances at the Familysearch pilot site. As fast as those indexers can type, they're indexing and digitizing thousands and thousands of records. They recently passed their 25,000 indexed record milestone and have reason to be proud. I've had some success with Washington state's death records on that website.

Before too long, you too can be living it up with death certificates. Good luck!

Still Here.

My genealogy took a major back seat to other things a few months ago, but now that I've combined my PAF records (I created two almost identical files, then added some new names to one, new information to the other... what a mess), I'm back to work and finding new people and information.

If you use Personal Ancestral File to organize your records, you might be happy to know that if you ever make a boneheaded mistake like the one I made - making two different files, then having to combine them back into one again - the Match/Merge feature works well and will even combine exact matches automatically. I didn't know this until after I'd matched and merged about half my people (roughly 7,000) one at a time, and sometimes with the help of PAF Insight while at my local Family History Center. It pays to know what your computer program does, but what a fun surprise, after all that work, to find that I was off the hook for the rest.

Straight to Heaven with That Man

I saw Schindler's List about ten years ago when it was broadcast on the NBC network, and cried and cried - not only for the horrible circumstances the poor Jews went through during the Holocaust, but also for the goodness of one man.

Today I was nosing around Ancestry and saw that among their new databases, Schindler's lists appear for searching. The names of the Polish Jews he saved are listed here, with a few pertinent facts about each one.

To read more about Oskar Schindler's heroism, click here. It's truly inspiring to read of the risks he took, the "laws" he broke, and the help he received from American and Swiss Jewish associations. In a completely dark time in history, he was a bright little spark, doing what he could to shed some light.

Hi there!

Yes, it's been a while... summer's over, school has started, and we just found out we'll be able to move to a nicer home, so I don't see my genealogy days becoming any less hectic. Sorry I haven't been around much.

I keep tabs on a couple of genealogy blogs I find interesting, and at Ancestry Insider, I found this post about Familysearch Indexing.

Indexing is a volunteer program that allows anyone to download images of microfilms and type the information found on them - names, dates, places, parents' names, etc. - into a grid, then send it back to Familysearch headquarters. The volunteers are helping to make a list, basically, of all the microfilmed information in the granite vault near Salt Lake - by name, location, date, subject, etc. This will all be made available online one day, free for anyone to see.

It's interesting work, but as the above post points out, sometimes you find situations that are hard to read about. Still, it's inspiring to know that because of a few minutes you spent volunteering, someone someday will be able to find his ancestors that much more easily.

It Never Rains, But It Pours.

For months we sat there at the FHC, working on our own family history because no patrons came in or needed anything. Tonight, the reprieve was over. Here's what I kept busy doing at the FHC tonight:

1) Helped Connie do a name on TempleReady

2) Helped a lady named Betty order microfiche (something I've done once in three years), learn how to download PAF to her home computer, and learn how to use it

3) While I was on the phone with the FHC director, making sure I did the microfiche order right, she asked me to make a sign for the door of the FHC saying that our day shift is closed tomorrow

4) Answered a phone call from a lady in my ward who said that the lady who was supposed to meet Otto at our place, showed up somewhere else and was all upset

Then I messed around with more new FamilySearch (trying to convince Connie that yes, it's safe to upload her stuff to FamilySearch - she should just use an alias if she doesn't want people to know who she really is) and match/merged more of my PAF people. I can't believe I forged together two files with over 15,000 people in them but yes, I was stupid.

We also discussed paranoid funeral home directors vs. awesome ones who can't help you enough. At one funeral home, Connie and Brian were accused of everything but digging up the body while trying to get funeral records for one of his relatives. The funeral home guy was convinced that "all they wanted was [the dead guy's] Social Security number."

This is just my opinion, but if you're going to be an identity thief, showing up at a funeral home and claiming to be a genealogist seems like a really hard, jump-through-hoopy, roundabout, stupid way to do it.

The night ended with a run to Wendy's.

"Wow, you really ARE a geek!"

For the Independence Day weekend and my family reunion, I was in beautiful Eastern Oregon, in a lovely campground just outside Union. Union is a tiny town outside La Grande (off I-84) and is probably best known for its now 20-year-old mayor who won in a write-in election almost two years ago.

As happens with camping, we had to run to town for something we needed. On one of these trips, we took a drive through Union and enjoyed its small-townness ("Can we move here?" "NO"), ending up at the cemetery. Because, as you probably know, all roads lead to the cemetery... eventually.

I had my camera with me, and well, one thing led to another... pretty soon my husband was sighing exasperatedly as I bounced out of the car to grab a few pictures. Clicking away excitedly, I walked through the small cemetery, loving the sunshine and pine trees and atmosphere - they take immaculate care of this cemetery. It's very pretty.

While there, I found this amazing, totally unexpected treasure: the headstone of a man named Nephi Loveless.

The "Nephi," a Book of Mormon name, first caught my eye, but the phrase that really jumped out at me was "Nauvoo Legion." This man was a Nauvoo Mormon, a peer of Joseph Smith. He probably knew Joseph personally. Being in the Nauvoo Legion, he probably served in the Mormon Battalion as well... and now he's here, in Union, Oregon? How interesting. Apparently the Church has quite a little presence in Eastern Oregon from quite a way back, including a sugar beet farm in La Grande.

It was a neat find, but I'm not sure how to feel about having to admit that I spent part of my vacation in the cemetery. Hmmmmm...

Throwing Kisses

I'm very happy to announce that after many unsuccessful tries (it turns out I had to register as a Family History consultant - again), I registered and obtained a username and password tonight on New FamilySearch.

So kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you'll wait for me... you probably won't be seeing me for a while. I'll be hunkered down with my new pal NFS, having a killer time.

My temple district is in its 90-day rollout period, which means that we consultants have been given the use of it so we can learn it and be ready to teach it when everyone in our district receives access to the website.