‘Who Do You Think You Are’ will begin on March 5

The hit BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? debuted in 2004 and generated great interest—both the archives and libraries all over England attested to the influence with increased visitors. Now that NBC has scheduled the long-anticipated U.S. version to air on March 5, 2010, the preview is now available at the NBC website and reveals the seven celebrities who will trace their ancestry this season.

Note: Ancestry.com partnered with NBC.  Check out the ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ website  for bios of the celebrities featured in the show, photos, and several video clips as well as articles on how to get started in family history.

jesseek

2010 Census timeline

The following are key dates in the 2010 Census timeline:

February-March 1020: census questionnaires are mailed or delivered to households.

April 1, 2010:  Census Day

May-July 2010: census takers visit households which did not return a questionnaire by mail.

December 2010: by law, census bureau delivers population counts to the President for appointment.

March 2011: by law, census bureau completes delivery of redistricting data to states.

Questions are directed to the website:  2010census.gov                      Jessee

Anticipation of the 1940 U.S. Federal Census

If you are like many, you probably are waiting patiently until 2012 for the 1940 U.S. Federal Census to become public.  The official release date for the census is April 1^st, 2012.  Since this date falls on a Sunday, there are questions as to whether it will be released on Monday, April 2^nd, 2012 instead. 

If you want to see the questions that were asked in the 1940 census, open your browser to  http://www.1930census.com/1940_census_questions.php. 

The site also provides links to informaton regarding previous censuses.

New Year resolutions?

We need a genealogy blog entry, STAT! This was the job of the week, as our self-imposed deadline for blog/newsletter entries drew near. Not that the well had run dry of ideas to write about, but the brain had been turned to other directions during the holidays. Certainly we all have that in common, along with our interest in genealogy. Perhaps the directional challenges we face can be the thread we take up together and start to organize our respective research? What better time to start than the beginning of the new year…and new decade!

If you are like me, you never have been one that has made resolutions for a new year. Likewise, if you are like me, you have things piling up and your research discipline has gotten murky and you’re beginning to repeat research patterns. We should use the new year as a starting line to get our material organized and figure out what we are going to do with what we already have.

Are you trying to prove a line of your family so you or one of your relatives can join a heritage society or receive a scholarship from a society, such as the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) or the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)? Maybe you are going to take the wealth of information you’ve gathered and write the family history; or you just want to take what you have and get it organized enough to know where your research has already taken you, so as to stop looking at the same things over and over again…but I said that earlier, didn’t I?

How to get started? What to do, as there’s so much stuff gathered, you don’t know where to start?

Sometimes the key is to just start and wade into the pile of paper, or increasingly, the miles of computer files collected on your flash drive or hard drive, and just start sorting.

Organizing the miles and miles of files is a lot like writing a term paper: we dove into the books and journals to find out all we could on the subject. But putting it all in order and knowing what research source is from where took looking into a style manual to know how to set the paper’s order and cite the resources.

Many of the books on the how-to on genealogy have tips and suggestions on how to organize your research findings. Likewise, a search online with your favorite search site, using “genealogy organization” as a search term, will yield sites with the basics on how to get organized.

If you have a favorite online book seller, you will find the latest publications for purchase. You could do an online search on the library’s website for books, but you should know that what you find in the Genealogy Collection on the 4^th floor of the Main Library wouldn’t be able to be checked out, which is why the branches of the Jacksonville Public Library have books on genealogy basics filed in the Dewey call number of 929.1 which can be checked out for your use.

If you do nothing more than create four files, one for each of your grandparent’s surnames, and file your piles of files accordingly, this is a start towards organizing your research. You could even assign a different color for each surname file. Perhaps you’ve been putting off downloading one of the genealogy software program that will automatically create the lineage associations for each of your entries? What better time to learn the ins and outs of the program and push towards that organization you know you want to have? The point is to start. Here’s hoping you have no brick walls in your genealogy searches, and the walls you find are short ones! Happy New Year!

What’s New at DAR?

For those who are interested in lineage societies, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Society has added a new feature to their website.  It is the DAR online Genealogical Research System.

 “After nearly a decade of scanning, indexing, and other behind-the-scenes work by DAR members and employees, the Daughters of the American Revolution is pleased to announce the availability of the DAR Genealogical Research System on our public website. The GRS is a growing collection of databases that provide access to many materials collected by the DAR over the past 119 years. Included in this collection of databases is the GRC National Index which has been available to researchers for the past few years”, according to Mr. Eric G. Grundset, Library Director of the DAR Library in Washington D.C.

Other resources include the Ancestor database, the Descendants database, and more.    

To obtain more information about the GRS database, the DAR society, and their resources, you may wish to visit their website at http://www.dar.org/library/online_research.cfm or http://www.dar.org.

Genealogy Class: Going Beyond 101

The holidays are here, and no doubt many of us will be spending time with family members, relatives, and/or close friends with whom we may or may not have  seen in awhile. 

What a great opportunity this presents to learn more about our ancestors, their history, their lives, and their legacies.    In basic genealogy research, we learned the importance of interviewing family members and those who knew or had knowledge of our ancestors.  We took this information and started our quest.  Along the way we found evidence, such as birth records, marriage records, family albums, photographs, letters, and so on, that lead us to another piece in our  family history puzzle.  Now we’re ready to look at additional record types to see what sort of ancestral evidence we may find. 

On Saturday, December 19th, 2009, the “Going Beyond Genealogy 101″ class will be presented.  The class will run from 10:00am – 11:00am at the Main Library (downtown) on 303 N. Laura Street.  The class will be held in the Electronic Classroom on the 1st floor.  Registration is not required.  Also, if your holiday schedule will not permit you to attend, do not worry.  This class will be offered throughout 2010.

Please feel free to contact the  Special Collection’s staff at 630-2409, if you have any questions.

Happy Holidays!

No online research access? What-to-do tactics and strategies

In the last 15 years there has been an explosion of sorts in genealogy research, thanks to the growing number of online resources. Ancestry.com, cyndislist.com, HeritageQuest, GenWeb are but a few of the sources we go to for our genealogy fix. However, what do you do when you can’t find a name in an online index, or even if you don’t have any online access at all? 

What do you do if a website is down for maintenance or, just from heavy traffic and usage, is slowed to a crawl? It is conceivable that at one point or another, your WiFi, or cellular, or cable modem, or plain old dial-up will fail you when you are on the chase for that elusive ancestor.

 Where do you go? What do you do when technology fails?

 Don’t panic.

 Think about the what (the type of record), when (what year/decade/century), and where (what locality/county/state/country) you are looking for rather than the who.

 What sort of records would you be looking at to find your ancestor if you were able to go online? If you are browsing online, looking for an elusive clue that specific queries haven’t succeeded in finding, then you might want to re-think how you are going about your research. If you are going online to look through a specific source, such as the census, or tax rolls, or immigration records, consider the library as more than just a good place to get free access to the Ancestry database through the Ancestry Library edition.

 With the library, you have access to hundreds of rolls of microfilm of the Federal Census, as well as the Soundex, which is the coded name index for the census, as well as printed indexes. Some local tax, probate records with some indexed, are found on microfilm. Marriage, death, and divorce indexes for Florida and Georgia are here on microfiche, which are exactly the same records as on Ancestry. We have several microfilm readers for your use: two of which are able to scan images onto a computer and then turned into image files, such as .jpg or .pdf, which can be read on most image editing software that you probably have at home on your computer. If you haven’t used a microfilm reader since your school days, if ever, don’t worry; we’re always available to help get you started.

 There’s another source that libraries have had a long association with that really trounce the Internet for reliability as a resource and accessibility: books! We got ‘em, still buying ‘em, still found to be very user-friendly: No cables or passwords needed. 

Most of what you find on the Internet, if from a reliable site, is a public record that has been scanned and placed online. The same could be said for a fair portion of the books in any genealogy collection. Before the Internet, at some point someone would sit down and transcribe public records and then publish them so others would not have to make a special trip to a far-flung courthouse in the county that your great-great-great-great grandfather lived in to find his will and probate records. But don’t rule out the visit to a far-flung courthouse, as sometimes what you’re needing hasn’t been published, scanned, or indexed yet. 

Regardless of how you do your research, be it online, or wading through rolls of microfilm and stacks of microfiche, or behind mountains of books, keep searching! As you are reading this online, technology shouldn’t bother or intimidate you. Just keep in mind there are tools and sources out there that won’t be online. So when technology issues pop up, you can keep plugging along without running into a brick wall. Good searching, everyone!

Ancestry Library Edition class!

We are offering a class on how to navigate the library edition of Ancestry.com on October 31st. Ancestry Library edition offers the use of almost all of the databases that Ancestry offers, which are significant and being added to on a frequent basis. This class is for you if you have tried to wade through the mountain of information that comes up when you do a search from the main page and would like to learn how to focus your search. If you would like to register for the Ancestry Library Edition class, please follow the links to enroll, or call 630-2409 for assistance. Knowledge on surfing the World Wide Web/using a web browser is recommended. We are limited to 16 people for the classroom, so please reserve your space soon. If you cannot make the class, please don’t forget to cancel your reservation so another person can use the vacancy.

http://jplcalendar.coj.net/evanced/lib/eventsignup.asp?ID=59939

October is Family History Month

 

As we welcome Fall or Autumn, we also welcome the month of October.  In addition to it being the month of Halloween, it is also the month of Family History. It is a month when we take the opportunity to plan family reunions, to see relatives that we’ve not seen in awhile (or have not met), to reunite the bonds of past family relationships, and to share family history.  Part of celebrating Family History Month includes a number of activities.  Such events include starting a family history family tree chart, organizing and hosting a family potluck or cook-out event, and taking a family “road-trip. Other activities include doing something nice for a relative, treating the family out to dinner, visiting a nursing home, treating the family to a movie, or setting up a special Sunday for family and relatives to attend a religious ceremony.  These are just a few ideas to celebrate family history month, and there are many others.  In short, how you celebrate family history month is not as important as is sharing the time with family, relatives, and friends.

New Materials for September

As new material comes in, we post it to our blog for you convenience. Here is our selection for September.

Passenger and Immigration Lists Index 2010 Supplement

Index of compiled service records of soldiers serving in the Florida War from Alabama (Microfilm) 

Basics of Genealogy Reference: A Librarian’s Guide