Friday, November 15, 2013

NEHGS (AmericanAncestors.org) Has the Great Migration Project Sketches Online

If you have a significant New England ancestry like I do (hey, it's not my fault!), then you really should be a member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) (www.americanancestors.org).  Access to their library in Boston, the quarterly New England Historical and Genealogical Register (the oldest peer-reviewed genealogical journal) and the American Ancestors Magazine (a bi-monthly magazine) are three great reasons to join the society, but there is much more.

The AmericanAncestors.org website is a gem for New England researchers, with new databases constantly being added.

If you have immigrant colonial ancestors who came into New England before 1635, then sketches for those ancestors are probably in the book series The Great Migration Begins, Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633 (3 volumes) and the book series The Great Migration, Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635 (7 volumes).

Those volumes are all available to read online in The Great Migration Study Project collection.  Here's an easy way to access them:

1)  On the home page, after logging in, I click on the "Advanced Search" link located above the search field:


2) The "Advanced Search" link opens a search box on another page.  Here I can add a first name, last name, year range, record category, database, record type, country, state/county, and city/town.  Names can have wild cards.  The user doesn't have to enter information into the other fields, but then all databases will be searched.

I wanted to look for George Allen (ca1580-1648) of Sandwich in the "Great Migration Study Project" category, so I entered his name and picked the right item in the Category:


3)  The search results gave me 16 entries in the collection:


4)  I clicked on the first match, and saw the first page of the sketch in Volume I for George Allen of Sandwich:


5)  Below the page image, there are controls to print, save, rotate, magnify go full screen, and restore the image:


There is also an index for names and some information from the page, but not a transcription.

I've started reading this resource for many of my early Massachusetts colonials and sourcing the information gleaned in my genealogy database.  I also save the pages to my computer file folder for the specific family so that I can easily find it again.  I don't attach the page images to persons or facts in my database, however.

Because of my extensive New England family history (about 60% of my possible 9th great-grandfathers), the NEHGS AmericanAncestors website is invaluable to me and my research.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/11/nehgs-americanancestorsorg-has-great.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks Randy for the excellent article! I love their Newsletter and articles. Since 80.00 is a slice out of the Budget for me I wrote NEHGS and asked if I could become a member and pay monthly a portion of the 80.00. I was disappointed to receive an answer back saying NO!!

Marcia Crawford Philbrick said...

Randy, Is there a guide somewhere to the coding used for the documentation?