Thursday, November 17, 2011

Do you have GILBERT, OSWALD or POTTER in Your Family Tree?

If so, and if you hadn't already subscribed to these family newsletters back in the 1980's, you will want to read the Gilbert Gallery, Oswald Outlines and Potter Profiles issues for free at Genealogy Today.

Donna Potter Phillips produced these newsletters, and asked me to digitize and host the issues on my web site so that genealogists could access them. It took some time, allowing for the original paper copies to travel cross-country, get scanned and then posted online, but all three publications are now completed and available for download.

These newsletters are filled with interesting articles, subscriber queries, photographs and loads of information about the families -- Donna refers to this as the "good stuff."

If you have materials produced in the pre-Internet age, and would like to share them with online genealogists, I'd be glad to digitize and host them for you at no charge. Contact me for instructions as to where to ship the materials.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Biographical Timelines, a Useful Tool for Genealogists

I've used timelines for my own personal research for many years. They're a great way to summarize the facts from the documents you've collected, and they help to highlight areas that you've missed. So, I was thinking they might be a good way of highlighting some of the resources gathered and published by Genealogy Today.

There are a lot of different types of documents and transcriptions on my web site, and this new area will be a way of stitching together the pieces for individuals. In addition, lots of new information is being added just for the biographical timelines.

The first step in the process was gathering up all of the ancestors for whom dates of birth and death were known (or at least death and age). Some of these were rolled out to the site with just birth/death years, while I go back at review/capture additional information. While over 100 citations are being added to the timelines almost every day, it will take some time before the content is consistently more substantial across the pages.

Visitors are welcome to contribute documents (links to online transcription or database records, scanned images and/or photocopies) to the project. Sorry, but the timelines in this project will all be substantiated with citable references, so you may not send in an email with facts you may "know" and request that a person be added.

Stop by and take a look. If you don't see any of your ancestors today, take a look tomorrow... you never know who'll show up unannounced!

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Exciting Genealogy Discovery: The Alice S. Champlin Files

Several months ago, at a regional book and paper show, one of my "regular" dealers showed me a small accordian file organizer, which was touted as "family history notes" -- not something I can resist. After a little price negotiation, the files came home with me.

The organizer is comprised of two dozen individual envelopes, most filled with clippings and correspondence. While at first glance, it would appear to be someones personal research, a closer inspection yielded the discovery that this was work of a turn-of-the-century professional genealogist!

The researcher was Mrs. Alice S. Champlin of Westbrook, Connecticut (wife of Charles C. Champlin), and over the next few months, I will be carefully digitizing and recording all of the components of this collection.

I did a little poking around online, and she's listed in the "Connecticut Deaths and Burials, 1772–1934." Index at FamilySearch. It appears she past away on February 2nd, 1913. In the 1910 U.S. Census, she and Charles were living at 13 East Main Street in Westbrook. Alice lists profession as "none," so its unclear if she was ever paid for her research efforts.

Expect to see blog posts about these files as I progress through analyzing and recording the information contained within those envelopes.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Branches and Twigs, Not the Family Tree Type

Talk about a crazy week... on October 29th (last Saturday), my part of the World was hit with a freak snow storm that cause more damage than Hurricane Irene. I've spent the last week (except for a few hours on Wed & Thur) without electricity.

This is the reason why many of the updates to Genealogy Today have been delayed, including The Genealogy News. Thankfully, power was restored yesterday around 5:00pm, and high-speed Internet followed shortly thereafter.

Kudos to my recently acquired Motorola Droid3, which kept me connected to the outside world while I sat patiently in the dark each evening. I even managed to perform a variety of administrative web site tasks using the phone -- none of which I ever imagined would be possible when I decided to upgrade my phone. And for the two days we had partial power, I was even able to use the phone as a mobile hotspot and accessed the Internet via the 3G connection. Pretty nifty feature.

Hopefully, life will get back to normal, and the regular flow of unique genealogical information to Genealogy Today will resume (likely tomorrow). Thank you for being patient, especially those of you who made purchases or requested lookups.