To celebrate the treasure of family this Thanksgiving, Worldvitalrecords.com is offering FREE ACCESS to colonial and Revolutionary War databases! The free access includes vital records, land records, court records, war records spanning from the 1600s to the 1780s.
Enjoy!
Thanksgiving greetings everyone!
I read a great article I saw posted at www.genealogywise.com and it put into words exactly what I was going to say today, so I thought I'd share it:
As we approach the holiday season, our thoughts turn towards family. Afterall, this time of the year brings with it family dinners, parties, letters and cards from family far away. It is a great time to get together and to catch up.
Sometimes as genealogists we spend so much time chasing after our dead ancestors that we forget to include living family members in our research. The holiday season is a great time to update your pedigree charts and family group sheets with all the changes that have happened during the year; including marriages, births and deaths.
Instead of just sending a greeting card with your signature and nothing else, consider sending a letter detailing your research and questions you have about the family. Encourage extended family to help out by providing copies of photos or documents. Show your family what you have been up to by giving gifts that reflect your research, like calendars that display pictures of ancestors or commemorate important dates in the lives of your ancestors.
For some additional ideas about genealogical gifts, see Kimberly Powell’s About.com website article, Family Tree Project and Gift Ideas at http://genealogy.about.com/od/make_family_tree/a/gift_ideas.htm.
This is a great time to enhance your family history by sharing your love of ancestors, adding to that information and continuing your research by updating descendents.
Enjoy your discoveries!
One of the National Archives' most popular record collections, the US Federal Census, is coming to Footnote.
Footnote already features the 1930 and 1860 censuses, now we'll be adding the other available census years, dating back to the first US Census in 1790.
This valuable collection will be part of the current All-Access Memberships at no additional cost!
The census acts as a historical highway leading back to the 1700s. The information contained in these valuable documents helps trace individuals and can lead to additional discoveries contained in records on Footnote.com.
Learn more about how the interactive census experience on Footnote and how you can stay up to date with our progress on each census year.
Habla espanol? Fala gallego? Parle vous frances? Do you need to correspond with a genealogist who speaks a different language? Are you having a hard time trying to read documents from one of your ancestors that's written in another language? Not to worry! The Internet has some great language translation tools; some of them are even free!
Your first stop is Google. Google Language Tools allows you to translate text as well as read websites across a variety of languages. It doesn't get it right 100% of the time, but you'll definitely get the jist of what's being said. To use Google Language Tools, go to Google, and click on the link to the right of the search engine box that says "Language Tools". You can then use one of the language tools to translate a letter you want to write or a letter written to you. You can also use Language Tools to translate a website or search for websites in a different language.
Another language translation tool I like is www.babelfish.yahoo.com or you could try www.freetranslation.com There are a number of services online that you can pay for as well, but starting with the free ones is the way to go in today's economy!
Former "Friends" star Lisa Kudrow is taking celebs back to their roots for the family tree reality series "Who Do You Think You Are?" "It's far from the E! True Hollywood Story.
We have a tendency to put celebrities on a pedestal. No show has treated stars this way before,' Dan Bucatinsky added. "Who Do You Think You Are?" is a 42-minute show with commercials, and producers are working closely with a team of historians and genealogists to trace back celebs' roots. NBC.com is working on a partnership with online genealogy powerhouse Ancestry.com to create a cross-platform interactive Web site to coincide with the launch of the series. The hope is that people will tune in because it's Sarah Jessica Parker or Susan Sarandon," Kudrow said.
How can t-shirts be a part of genealogy? My creative daughter cut out the feature back portion of dozens of t-shirts she would no longer wear but wanted to keep the memory, and quilted them together into a college bound blanket. Now her memories can go with her!
