Author: Aunt Barb's Papers

MGS Day at MSA

Saturday I attended “MGS Day at MSA”.  Maryland Genealogical Society members were invited to register for a session on accessing records at the Maryland State Archives and taking a behind the scenes tour of the library.

Although I have done research at MSA many times, I still decided to register.  The fee was nominal and you never know when you can pick up some new tips.  I also had a few general questions about some records and hoped for an opportunity to get those questions answered.

Michael McCormick, the Director of Reference Services for MSA (I hope I got that right) led the session.  Time was short (an hour) but I managed to get my questions answered and pick up a few hints about specific record series.  Yay!

Then it came time for the tour.  It is hard to visualize the amount of records the Archives houses while you are searching the website, or even when you are there requesting records to be pulled.  You fill out your pull slip and the staff goes back to that mysterious room in the back and comes out with a book, a box, etc. for you.  Saturday I got a peek at that mysterious room.  Rows and rows of shelves of materials, it was awesome!  Especially when we were told that the room we were in was one of four floors of records with even more stored off-site at another facility.

I still have lots of ancestors to find in all those stacks!!

We also got a look at the areas where digitization and conservation takes place.  Very interesting but sad as well to see types of destruction that has happened to some of the records.

Insect damage to a Colonial Patent book

After the tour I had some lunch and then did a little research.  I had done my pre-visit research and had a list of records to take a look at.  Although I didn’t get through everything I had on my list I got copies of several items on my list.

All in all, a successful day at the Archives!

Genealogy Geeks Unite

Tonight a genealogy discussion group I belong to had a “Lock-In”.  About 50 of us were locked in a local public library for 6 hours this evening to do research.  It was my first lock-in so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

 

The night was long, but enjoyable.  Several people, including me, volunteered as “experts”.  I was able to help a couple people with their research, which was great!
People were able to collaborate on research, share ideas and use library resources. 
I decided that I would take the evening scanning many of my random notes into Evernote in my effort to “go paperless”. I got everything I took scanned and ready to index much quicker than I thought.
I scanned all the random notes in these notebooks using the CamScanner app on my iPhone. It worked great!
I very much look forward to the next lock-in event. 

Will American Genealogy Change?

Last Saturday I attended the Baltimore County Genealogical Society’s Spring Seminar.  The speaker was Dick Eastman, who if you don’t know, is the author of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter (http://www.eogn.com).

Dick presented 4 topics; “Going Nearly Paperless – How to Get Started”, “The Organized Genealogist”, “Using MyHeritage.com Effectively” and “The Family History World in 10 Years’ Time”.

Although I enjoyed all of his presentations, I found his last session (“The Family History World in 10 Years’ Time”) fascinating.  The session was kind of geared more toward societies, but he presented thoughts and opinions that, honestly, made me think “Wow!”

The highlights:
Dick summarized his view of the “versions” of genealogy.

  1. Genealogy 0.5 existed up to about 1920.  It was an expensive hobby as the records available were mostly original records and compiled sources (which rarely included source citations). Most genealogists were elitists whose main goal was to connect themselves to a royal family. There were a few genealogy societies, again, mostly for elitists.
  2. Genealogy 1.0 was the period from about 1920 to 1980.  The invention of microfilming meant records were starting to become more readily available, along with reference books and better source citations.  The release of popular books, particularly Alex Haley’s “Roots” caused a more wide-spread interest in genealogy.  More genealogy societies appeared.
  3. Genealogy 2.0 was the next “version”, from 1980 to 2015.  The emerging availability of digital records, social networking and the myriad of genealogy focused television programming has captured not only traditional genealogists, but a whole new audience.
  4. Genealogy 3.0 is where we are now.  There are a tremendous amount of on-line records as well as genealogy information, resources and education found on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikis, Blogs, Google Books, etc.
So, what does that mean for the future of genealogy in Dick’s opinion?
  1. “More records on-line.”  We are already seeing this.  The amount of records available on-line is staggering.  Digitizing and transcribing original records will help with record preservation.  Everything from present-day microfilm, books and paper records from small local repositories are being digitized.  The ability to archive email and websites is powerful.  Not only will future genealogists will have access to a huge amount of records, but there will be archival copies for government offices.
  2. “Online, everywhere, all the time.”  Cloud services are expanding and genealogists have access to records anytime, anywhere from traditional computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones and whatever else comes down the pike.
  3. “New and better software.” New cloud-based software will allow better collaboration and works on all platforms.
  4. “A changing audience.”  Genealogists are getting younger.  Because genealogy is “mobile” and TV shows and other media dedicated to genealogy are more popular, genealogy is now cool!  However, the younger genealogists do not have the same interests.  They are more interested in the stories of a handful of ancestors, not the names and dates of all ancestors.  They probably will not care about pedigree charts and family group sheets.  They also may not join societies.
Why would future genealogists not join societies?  I LOVE the societies that I am a part of.  I am lucky in that a large majority of my ancestors lived very close to where I live.  I have broken through some brick walls because of information at local societies.  I always recommend to people that they join societies, not only for the records available, but also for the people.
However, a recent group of college aged historians who were taking a family history elective were polled about their family backgrounds.
  • 40% were not born in the US
  • 90% had at least one grandparent born outside the US
Pick up any “how to do genealogy” book, ask any genealogist, “how do I begin researching my family?”  The answer is to first talk to family members and gather information from home and second, look at census records.
Based on the group above, census records are essentially useless to 90% of them.
More on this sample group:
  1. 50% classified themselves as non-white
  2. 50% did not share a surname with their fathers
What does this mean?  We need more available global resources for these next generation researchers.  They aren’t going to find the same set of records useful as many, if not most genealogist do now.
Dick offered no answers to these questions/potential problems but he certainly gave me something to think about.  Hopefully libraries and societies can find a way to still be “relevant” down the road.  And hopefully we can expand the resources we use so that the next wave of genealogists can find the stories of their ancestors.
Please visit Dick’s website at http://www.eogn.com.

Gotta get back in time

A very cool video showed up on my Facebook timeline this morning.

A photographer and animator in Moscow, Russia has taken pictures from several U.S. cities in the 1900s and animated them.

Visit PetaPixel to see Alexey Zakharov’s “The Old New World” video.

And if you are interested, visit Alexey’s page on Behance to see other projects by Alexey.

Enjoy!!

This Week’s Genealogy Craze – "Place" Pedigree Charts

There is a fun little exercise going around many of the Facebook groups this week.  I’m calling them “Place” pedigree charts because I’ve seen them for birth places, death places and marriage places.  The idea is to create a pedigree chart that color code your ancestors locations for births, deaths, or marriages.  Basically, you could do it for anything you wanted, cause of death, burial locations, etc.

This morning I did two of them, one for births and one for deaths for five generations.  I knew that mine would not have the colors of the rainbow like some I’ve seen but mine are BORING!!!

Here is my five generation birth place pedigree chart:

Birth Place Pedigree Chart

Four boring colors.

And here is my five generation death place pedigree chart:

Death Place Pedigree Chart

Two boring colors.

I created my charts using Excel.  I used conditional formatting to easily color code the cells.

Go ahead, give it a try.

Are You Using Chronicling America? If You Had Germans in Baltimore, MD…You Should!

One FREE resource that has been very valuable to me is from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site.  This post will cover some basic information for the site and an example of the value of using the site.

If you aren’t familiar, Chronicling America provides information and content for historic newspapers in the United States.

Information about newspapers – One of the cool things on the site is the U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present.  This allows you to identify U.S. newspapers by locations and dates AND how they may be accessed.  As of the writing of this post, there are 153,913 newspaper titles listed.  The directory search allows you to search by various fields such as state, date, language, keywords, etc.

For example, I want to find information on what German newspapers were published in Maryland.  I have a lot of German ancestors that immigrated to Maryland and many remained in Baltimore.
I fill out the search form as such:

Chronicling America Newspaper Directory Search for German Newspapers in Maryland

Pressing “Search” gives me a list of results:

Chronicling America Newspaper Directory Search Results for German Newspapers in Maryland

Clicking on any of the newspapers in the list will provide a page with tabs that have information on when the paper was published, where it was published, how often it was published and where it can be found:

About Täglicher Baltimore Wecker. (Baltimore [Md.]) 1867-1877 
Libraries that Have It: Täglicher Baltimore Wecker. (Baltimore [Md.]) 1867-1877

Content – The other cool thing on the site is the content.  They have free, yes FREE digitized historic newspapers from 1836 to 1922.
Disclaimer:  They do not have all newspapers, nor do they always have entire published date range for a particular paper.  As of the writing of this post, there are 10,610,118 digitized pages available.

For example, I want to see what digitized German newspapers are available for Maryland on the site.
I fill out the search form on the “All Digitized Newspapers 1836-1922″ tab”

All Digitized Newspapers 1836-1922 search

The results show that there are 2 newspapers available:

All Digitized Newspapers 1836-1922 search results

Next, we will look at an example of why I LOVE this site for my research.  Let it be noted that I am lucky in that “Der Deutsche correspondent” covers the location and time period that I am interested in.

As I said previously, I have many German immigrant ancestors that came into Baltimore and decided to stay in Baltimore City, so it is very possible that “Der Deutsche correspondent” may have articles about my ancestors.

So for my example we are going to look at my 3rd great grandfather Heinrich Bensel.
I first found the exact death date for Heinrich in June of 2004.  I narrowed his death down by searching using the U.S. Federal Census and the Baltimore City Directories and headed to the local library to search microfilmed newspapers starting in 1898.  Finally in the July 19, 1898 edition of the “Baltimore News“.  I found 2 articles.

On page 1 was a simple death notice that read:
BENSEL – Died. Monday, at 6:15 P.M., after a short illness, HENRY BENSEL, aged eighty years and five days.
The funeral will take place from the residence of his daughter, Elizabeth Enders, Wednesday, 20th inst., at 3 o’clock.

On page 11 I found a more extensive obituary that read:
Henry Bensel
Mr. Henry Bensel died yesterday morning at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Enders, 2120 East Fayette street. He was born July 13, 1818, in Germany. He emigrated to this country in 1847, two years later marrying Miss Mary Stocker. He was a skillful carpenter, at one time being in the active service of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad until he was put on the pension list. His wife died on April 2 of this year. Two children survive him. They are John Bensel and Mrs. Enders.

A few months later I went to the Maryland State Archives and got his death certificate.  There wasn’t much more information except that his “short illness” was thermic fever that he had for 4 days.

That is all the information I knew until I decided to search “Der Deutsche correspondent”. I searched Maryland papers for “Heinrich Bensel” and came up with several results around the date of his death.
The first one was on July 19, 1898, page 6, column 4:

“Der Deutsche correspondent” July 19, 1898, page 6, column 4

Well, the first problem is that I do not know German,  Luckily, the site allows several options for seeing the page:

First, I saved and filed the PDF file to my computer.
Next, to try and “read” what this says I used the “Text” option.  This displays the page in OCR text:

Then I searched the page for “Bensel” so I could find the section that had the article:

Next I highlighted the area of the text I wanted and did a Ctrl +C to copy the text.
Now I head to Google Translate and paste my OCR text and see what happens:

Google Translate results

You will notice that because of the line breaks in the original, some of the translation doesn’t work.  By editing the German side and taking out the breaks I get a better result:

Google Translate results after editing

You will see that this article does not give me any more information than I already had.  Actually, there is some conflicting information.  Did he come to Baltimore in 1842 like the German paper said, or 1847 like the American paper said?
Further searching found an article about his funeral in the July 21, 1898 edition on page 6, column 8:

“Der Deutsche correspondent” July 21, 1898, page 6, column 8

I tried the same process for translating the article in Google translate and no matter how much massaging I did I just couldn’t get a good translation.  Since I don’t read German, I cannot recognize all of the OCR mistakes that the article may contain.

No worries, there are plenty of resources to help with the translation.
My first stop will be social media.  In my case, that worked.  I took a screenshot of the article and headed over to the Genealogy Translation group on Facebook.  This is a closed group but it has been so very helpful to me in translating documents.
I posted my request at 4:40 PM on March 14 and had a translation at 8:13 PM:

The burial of Mr. Heinrich Bensel, who passed from this life on Monday at the age of 80 years in the home of his daughter, Mrs. Elisabeth Enders, 2120 East Fayette St., occurred yesterday afternoon from the mortuary to the Loudon Park Cemetery. Pastor/Reverend John Hörr from St Martus Church on Broadway and Fairmount Avenue officiated, and six grand children of the deceased acted as pallbearers: Friedrich, Johann and Wilhelm Enders and Harry, Johann and Louis Bensel. Mr. Bensel was born on 18th July 1818 in Lobenhausen near Ulrichstein, Grand Duchy of Hessen and came to New York in 1847, and shortly thereafter to Baltimore. Two years later he married Miss Marie Stocker. The marriage produced 8 children of which two, Mrs. Elisabeth Enders and Mr. John Bensel, are still living. Also surviving the deceased are 21 grandchildren. His wife died on the 2nd of April of this year.

This gave me so much more information to start looking at.  I now have a church name to search records for, children to double-check to make sure I have them all, grandchildren to check (names and number of grandchildren).  I also have an immigration city and and location of birth.  I always assumed he came directly to Baltimore and I could never find his immigration information,  Now I know I need to check New York.  This article is the only place that gave me an exact location of birth.

Had I not been able to get an answer within the translation group, my next step would have been to reach out with local societies that I belong to to see if anyone within the society could help.  I have had success with that in the past.

So, in summary:
1. Check out Chronicling America.
2. For your immigrant ancestors, take some time to investigate foreign language newspapers.
3. See if Google Translate can help with foreign language translation.
4. Seek help with translations from social media or local societies.

Happy searching!!

Ancestry DNA Testing

If you have been considering doing a DNA test with Ancestry, please use my referral link to order a DNA kit at a 10% discount.
Personally, I have been tested through Ancestry.com and have also tested several family members.
The test is easy to take and attaching the results to my tree has allowed me to connect to several cousins and helped further my research.

  • My ethnic breakdown was a little surprising as I am much more “Viking” than German, and by testing other members of my family I have been able to separate out the ethnicities a lot easier.
  • I have also been able to narrow down matches quicker than if I had just tested myself.
  • In addition, by testing the oldest member of my family (my since deceased 93 year old great aunt), I have been able to make connections that didn’t show up strongly for me.  Since she is 2 generations closer to my ancestors, some matches that were on the 8th or so page on my matches were on the 1st or 2nd page of hers.

So, what are you waiting for?  Click below to get 10% off an Ancestry DNA test through my affiliate link.

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2016 Maryland Area Genealogy Speakers

2016 promises a couple of must attend events for family historians in the Maryland area.

First, on Saturday, March 26, 2016, Judy G. Russell (A.K.A. The Legal Genealogist) is speaking at the Pratt Library Annual Genealogy Lecture.
Get the details for the lecture here: Pratt Annual Genealogy Lecture: Judy G. Russell, The Legal Genealogist
This is a free event but you should register by calling the library.

And then on Saturday, April 16, 2016, Dick Eastman is speaking at the Baltimore County Genealogical Society’s Spring Seminar.
Get the details for the seminar here: Baltimore County Genealogical Society Spring Seminar: Dick Eastman
The seminar is open to all, no membership needed but the $30 non-member seminar fee will include membership to the society to the end of 2016.  The member fee for the seminar is $15.

Both events are sure to fill up so register NOW!

I JUST Bought Family Tree Maker 2014…What?

Yup, you read that right.  I just purchased Family Tree Maker 2014.  This is why…

Unless you have been under a rock for the last month you know that ancestry.com announced that as of December 31, 2015 the sale of Family Tree Maker was being discontinued.  The software will still be supported until January 1, 2017.

I use Legacy Family Tree as my desktop genealogy software and I do not plan on changing that.  I have used it pretty much since I started genealogy and I like how it works.

But, I recently read a blog article on The Ancestry Insider entitled “Why Buy Family Tree Maker While You Can?” The reason made sense to me.
I have several trees on ancestry.com, both public and private.  I use them mostly for “cousin-bait” and collecting hints.  Because ancestry.com does not interface directly with Legacy Family Tree (and I am OK with that) and I don’t upload and download trees a lot, I have never found a reason to take a look at FTM.
However, I do see the need to maybe “backup” my on-line tree.  One advantage of FTM is that it will download the sources attached to your tree, something not possible with a standard GEDCOM download of an ancestry tree.

Now, that one advantage was not worth the full price of $70 for FTM software.  But, I did find FTM 2014 on Ebay for $22, so I pulled the trigger.  To me $22 is worth a year of being able to sync what I have now to make sure grab all the sources I have collected on my ancestry.com trees.  I also think the ability to generate a temporary tree for some of my “Genealogy Go-Over” families will be advantageous.
I have also closely watched recent posts on Facebook from FTM refugees who have adopted Legacy and how their FTM converted files import into Legacy.

And if it doesn’t work out the way I think (hope) it will I am only out $22.

Wish me luck!!!