Family tree - new NB resource

Even though I have now been tracking my family tree since 2007, I still consider myself a "newbie" to it all. It's hard not to when some of the other researchers you are in contact with have been researching almost as long as you yourself have been alive! One of the things I have noticed often since beginning to research is that there are an incredible amount of people out there that seem to be content with just taking whatever info they found on-line and adding it into their own information without doing their own homework to see if it is even CLOSE to being accurate. Myself, I am the complete opposite, I am almost OBSESSIVE about verifying details. If I find something out there that possibly fills in a gap I'll make a note of it then start digging into on-line birth records, death records, marriages, etc., etc., looking for that one document that will confirm or deny the claim found before I even think of adding it into my own research. I just like accuracy (as much as you can be accurate with people that have been dead for 100-300 years!). Sometimes, when researching your family tree looking for those "missing" family members, you get lucky and come across an on-line resource that fills in some of those gaps. Today was one of those days. A big thanks goes out to another family tree reasearcher, genaddict, who has posted the burials for Lower Brighton Cemetery in Brighton, Carleton County, New Brunswick. The booklet, originally compiled by Hubert Bryant of Woodstock, NB in 1992, can be found at the following link: http://genaddict.livejournal.com/8510.html

Marjorie Evelyn (Fitzpatrick) Waddington - 1916-2011

In memory of my grand-aunt Marjorie, sister of my beloved Grampy, who passed away October 31, 2001 in Ontario. Reunited with her beloved husband Tom, brothers, Ralph and Lloyd, and parents Percy and Helen.

For you family tree trackers

Until July 4, 2011, Ancestry is offering FREE access to the US Sons of the American Revolution database

http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2204&o_iid=48528&o_lid=48528&o_sch=Web+Property

Genealogy - Mountain View Cemetery, Vancouver, BC

http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/nonmarketoperations/mountainview/burials/index.htm


A distant cousin passed along this site to me and I had to make sure it made it into a blog incase I ever have to reformat my computer again cause I ALWAYS forget to note my fav websites for genealogy and keep losing them!

Free Marriage Record Access - Genealogy

For anyone researching family members who married in Canada or England, I just noticed ancestry.ca is offering free access to these records ONLY until May 1st! Hurry and check it out while you still can!

Missouri Death Records

If anyone has people who were in the state of Missouri just found a great site that has an index of Missouri deaths WITH images of the records. Records run 1910-1960 Check it out!! http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/deathcertificates/#searchdeat And don't forget the free Civil War era records search ends in a few days on ancestry.com

Washington Research

Thought I would pass along this little gem to any that may have research that takes them to Washington state.

http://www.sos.wa.gov/library/Obituaries.aspx


The Washington State Library has a FREE lookup service for obituaries that appear within their collection. Read the instructions included on the link posted above. If you are unsure of when the person you are searching for died look up the genealogy blog I did back in June, "Where the Heck Did They go? Part 2" for the link for the Washington Digital Archives or check for them on the pilot project of familysearch. I've used this service before, so it IS 100% free!

Happy researching!

Where the heck did they go? Part 2 - United States

So your ancestors have upped and moved away from their homes, their family and everything they knew to try and start a better life. While possibly a great move for them, sometimes for those of us left scrounging to find them, it can be a pain in the butt! Unless you have family stories they tell you where to look, most times you just pray you get lucky and find them in a census return. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Since they were normally only done every ten years (some states also did their own midway between the American census), sometimes you will just have ancestors that you can't find cause they moved around or died somewhere in amongst that ten year gap. Oh how I wish mine hadda stayed here, where I KNOW where to look. If you prefer to have all the census returns at the tip of your fingers in one place and are willing to fork over the cash, then ancestry is probably the way to go. If you are cheap like me (my hubby says I'm so cheap I squeak), then you probably want to find as many census returns as you can for FREE (ahhhh my favorite F word). You can find the 1850, 1870 and 1900 indexes and images on the familysearch pilot site listed below. Completely FREE! There are other ones there as well, but not all have the images available so you can be sure what was transcribed is actually the information that was recorded. The Washington site below has their 1910 images available on their site. You can also sometimes find information on some county/state rootsweb sites. Check them out.

Here are some of the American sites I have stumbled across. Again, some are indexes only so just be cautious. Just cause you find a name that matches someone you are searching, doesn't mean that IS who you are looking for. Investigate further to prove.

Illinois (Cook County) - www.cookcountygenealogy.com/Default.aspx

Maine Marriages - http://portal.maine.gov/marriage/archdev.marriage_archive.search_form

Maine Deaths - http://portal.maine.gov/death/archdev.death_archive.search_form

Massachusetts - http://www.sec.state.ma.us/vitalrecordssearch/

Massachusetts (Early Records) - http://www.ma-vitalrecords.org/Towns.shtml

Minnesota Births - http://people.mnhs.org/bci/

Minnesota Deaths - http://people.mnhs.org/dci/Search.cfm

Minnesota Marriages - http://www.mncounty.com/Modules/Certificates/Marriage/Default.aspx

New York - http://www.italiangen.org/VRECLIST.stm

Ohio (Cleveland Necrology File) - http://dxsrv4.cpl.org/WebZ/Authorize?sessionid=0&next=/html/obit_start.html&dbchoice=1:dbname=necr&bad=html/authofail.html&style=noframe

Oregon - http://genealogy.state.or.us/

Washington - http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/

Wisconsin - http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/vitalrecords/

And of course don't forget my favorite - http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start This site has tons of American records! Check it out!!

Happy hunting!

Where the heck did they go? Part 1 - Canada

So the bug has bit you and you are seeking out your great-grandparents. If they were born in Canada before 1911 you might be in luck! A great place to check for them are in census returns. In most provinces, these were done every ten years. Some you can find on-line, others you may have to actually go into a library to see if they have these on microfilm. Personally, I always try and track down the census returns for "my people" cause alot of times you might find "missing" people from other parts of your tree listed in a family member's home or children you did not know existed cause they died young in between census years. A word of caution, knowing how to SPELL usually was not a requirement to getting the job of being the census taker so you may need to "be creative" when thinking of ways the recorder (and sometimes the transcriber of the original record) MAY have spelled your family members name.

Here are some Canadian sites that may help you track down that illusive Uncle George:

Alberta: http://www.afhs.ab.ca/data/cemeteries/search.php This site contains about 165,000 cemetery records for the province of Alberta. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find any sites for this province that have vital stats.

British Columbia: http://bcarchives.bc.ca/ Click collections under the photo then Vital Event Records on the left. On the right you will find a list of the different vital records you can search. The best thing about the BC records is it lets you see deaths that are as current as 1989. Something not many do, the whole "privacy" thing. This site is basically an index.

Manitoba: http://vitalstats.gov.mb.ca//Query.php Again, more of an index (by that I mean no images with indepth information allowing you to be sure the John Smith you are looking for is the John Smith whose record shows up). This has births, marriages and deaths.

New Brunswick: http://archives.gnb.ca/Archives/Default.aspx?culture=en-CA If you hold your cursor on the word "Search" at the top left a drop down menu will appear with your options of records to search. You'll notice some of these options have arrows. That's cause there are more records available within those. Some of the records you can find here are births, marriages, deaths, Brenan's Funeral Home records and land grants. You can also find the link to the Newspaper Vital Statistics done by Danny Johnson under that search tab too! Here you will find information that was published in New Brunswick area newspapers between 1784 and 1896.

Nova Scotia: https://novascotiagenealogy.com A vital statistic site. Not to knock my own province's website, but this is one of my most favorite Canadian sites cause you can actually view the images of these documents right online, not just the indexed version. Anything that saves me money (not having to pay to order something) and time (not having to wait 3 plus weeks for a microfilm to come from the Provincial Archives) is always a bonus!!

Ontario: http://islandnet.com/ocfa/ This is more cemetery records. While great in directing you to where someone may be buried, it unfortunately contains no information about birth or death dates, just that someone with that name is there.

Prince Edward Island: http://islandregister.com Not like the majority of sites I have posted with Vital stats

Saskatchewan: http://www.isc.ca/VitalStatistics/Genealogy/vsgs_srch.aspx Again, more vital stats, however only birth and deaths at the moment. This is one of my newer finds

Other sites you can use to find cemetery records are www.findagrave.com and www.interment.net - both of these work for the States as well.

www.rootsweb.com is good and so is www.ancestry.com and ancestry.ca BUT the ancestry sites are only fully accessible if you purchase a subscription or your local library has.

But my all time favorite and most used site has got to be http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start This particular one is global. Some of it is just indexed records but some have actual images you can view which is fantastic if you are like me and like to see that stuff to make sure what the index states it is is true (don't forget, alot of these records that are index only have been transcribed by a person who may have read incorrectly or noted it incorrectly and just has been staring at the microfilms for so long they are damn near big-eyed-blind!) When you go to the above link if you click "Search or Browse or Record Collection" you can search specifically by area record instead of the whole database.


******Now I'm not sure about provinces other than NS and NB, but if you know what county your relatives lived in within these provinces you might want to bring up your search engine and type in whatever County NB Genweb. This will usually get you the hit for the individual county's website which could have a great amount of information, and more importantly, a search bar on their site which will allow you to check for your families surname and see if they have any records posted related to them. For the record, I've done this with American counties too.

On-line Canadian Census returns:
www.automatedgenealogy.com Here you will find the 1851 census of NB, 1852 of Ontario and Quebec, 1901 of Canada, 1906 of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the 1911 of Canada.

www.familysearch.org Here you will find the 1881 Census of Canada (as well as 1880 on the states and other records)

www.collectionscanada.ca/genealogy/index-e.html: Here you will be able to find the digitizedimages of the 1891 Canadian census. Also Attestation papers for your family if they served in WW1.

Other than ancestry which requires a paid subscription, everything else I have posted is 100% FREE!! Ahhhh, my favorite F word, despite some thinking it might be fudge.

Happy researching!

Whoooo are you? Who who who who

Now that I've got you all singing that darn song and thinking of Gill Grissom........

As some of you know, I have been researching my family tree for a few years now. Some people I know have expressed an interest in researching their own, but like me when I started, had absolutely NO CLUE how to begin, so instead of sounding like a broken record (in my own head) and repeating this to multiple people I'll tackle it here.

Start with what you know!!!

For me, that was a death notice for my great-grandmother that my beloved Grampy had kept for his mom that I now had possession of about five years ago. She came from a fairly large family (the second of seven) and thankfully her obit listed all her siblings and her parents, so that part was easy, but what then? Well, I had absolutely no clue where to go AFTER that. I was like Hansel and Gretel, wandering around lost in the woods, with no trail of bread crumbs to lead me where I needed to be, so I put it all to the side and forgot about it. A year or so later I met someone who did Genealogy as a job who threw me a trail of breadcrumbs to lead me down the right path. Now that I think about it though, since the family tree addiction has taken its hold, I think I am more lost in those darn woods then ever!

Talk to people

Go to your grandparents! Once you get past the smell of Chanel #5 and Bengay and talks about their bunions and dentures, the stories you may get are a researcher's dream!! So much of who we are and where we come from is lost cause we don't take the time to get to know those who have come and gone before us. Do be cautious though about assuming what you hear is the God's honest truth. It's not that they try to deliberately mislead you, but alot of times they retell stories that they heard from their parents, who heard it from their parents, who heard it from their parents, etc. It's like a hugh child's game of Telephone or telegram, I think we used to call it, where you get a bunch of kids sitting on the ground in a circle and you whisper something in the ear of the kid to the right of you and by the time it makes it back to you it has a couple words that you said, but it now contains more fiction that fact. (Of course, sometimes they do mislead you on purpose if it means revealing family skeletons hehe)

Sources

For the love of Pete, make note of them! Every single solitary little tidbit of information you get, keep track of WHERE you got it. This is the one thing the majority of new researchers DON'T do and wish someone hadda told them TO DO! As you research, it isn't a question of "if" you encounter conflicting information, it's a question of WHEN you encounter it. You do not want to be part of the probably 99.9% of researchers pounding your head against the desk yelling where the hell did I get THAT? Especially not if you are at the library. They tend to frown on that.

Do the work

Don't just go to ancestry, rootsweb, tribalpages or any of the other billions of family tree websites and punch in an ancestors name, come up with a tree (or twenty) that contains the name of the person you are looking for and assume, since John Doe has em listed, that what they have is fact. While a great starting point to point you where to go next, do your OWN work. Look at the information they show then go looking for where it came from. Majority of time these trees are NOT sourced and when you try contacting them, IF you are lucky to find someone with a still current email, chances are they have no idea where the hell the information came from cause they got it from someone else's tree on some site who got it from someone else and on and on. See Telephone game thingy above! Nowadays, there is really no excuse NOT to be able to do the work on your own since there are so many records available on the internet (that's another blog all in itself). Check the web for a state/province archives, or type in your search bar (insert states here) marriage/death/ or birth index.

Family Tree Software

If the bug bites ya, get yourself some type of Family Tree Software to keep your information in. You don't want a bunch of scraps of paper here and there that you KNOW are gonna get lost. Some can be expensive and other can be cheap (I got mine for ten bucks at Radioshack), others can even be FREE! Google is a wonderful thing, try using it to locate free ones. A word of advice with these though, create your gedcoms (a family tree file) and email it to yourself at your yahoo/hotmail/whatever account. Last thing you want to do is lose years worth of work if something happens to your computer. Backing it up alone ain't gonna do diddly squat if someone steals your computer or your house catches on fire.

I'm sure there is more I missed but that's all I can think of. If you made it through the whole thing, you are obviously interested in genealogy and just really damn bored, either way thanks for dropping by!