New England Ancestors - Fall 2008 Issue Table of Contents

The Fall 2008 issue (Volume 9, Number 4) of New England Ancestors, published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, came this week. The Table of Contents includes:

FEATURES

* A Tale of Two Women: Seventeenth Century Coffin and Starbuck Matriarchs, by Alison M. Gavin - page 21

* Researching Nantucketeers: Using the Barney Genealogical Record and Other Resources, by Georgen Gilliam Charnes and Lynn Betlock - page 25

* Notes on Nantucket Families, by Gary Boyd Roberts - page 28

* Franklin's Nantucket Connection, by Michael J. Leclerc - page 29

* A Starbuck Surname Study, by George Redmonds - page 30

* Suggestions for Researching Colonial New England Women, by Marjorie Hubbell Gibson - page 32

* Origins, Passages & Destinations:

** The Search for Sebastian Trabold's Home in Germany, by James R. Miller - page 34

** Using Passenger Lists to Trace Twentieth-Century British Immigrants to Canada, by David Allen Lambert and Lynn Betlock - page 37

** 'When Traveling conditions permit': The Ancestry.com U.S. Passport Applications Database, by Scott C. Steward - page 39

* How Did Great-Grandfather Vote? Uncovering Your Ancestors' Political Affiliations, by D. Joshua Taylor - page 43

* Notes on the 2008 Presidential Candidates, by Gary Boyd Roberts and Christopher Challender Child - page 45

COLUMNS

* Computer Genealogist: Communication Options for Genealogists, by Rhonda R. McClure - page 47

* Genetics & Genealogy: Revised Conclusions from the Rice-Royce Y-DNA Study, by Robert V. Rice, PhD, and John F. Chandler, PhD - page 48

* Manuscripts at NEHGS: The Hardinge Family Collection, by Timothy G.X. Salls, - page 51

* Tales from the Courthouse: Native Americans and Africans in Nantucket Court Records, by Diane Rapaport - page 54

* Diaries at NEHGS: Selected Excerpts from John B. Dale's Journal of the U.S. Barque Consort, by Robert Shaw - page 56.

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This issue has much information about Nantucket Island families. While I don't have any ancestry on Nantucket, the articles were interesting to read. As always, even though the articles don't have information on my particular family names or localities, the procedures and resources used to solve genealogy problems are very useful to me, and all researchers.

Everton's Genealogical Helper - September 2008 Table of Contents

I downloaded the September-October 2008 issue of Everton's Genealogical Helper magazine the other day, and read through most of the articles. The Table of Contents includes:

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FEATURE ARTICLES

page 10 -- Musings and Gleanings from the World of History and Genealogy,
by Richard Hooverson. Mr. Hooverson writes about Bare-Knuckle politics, the Port of Cuxhaven, Germany; the value of county histories, the Depression and the World’s Fairs and Expositions of the 1930s.

page 16 -- Figuring Dates When No Birth or Death Records Exist, by Jennifer Sheppard. Jennifer writes about how to figure out dates, be they nearly exact or “circa,” for those genealogical events for which no birth or death documents are available.

page 20 -- Sounds and Family History, by Loretta Evans. Loretta writes about how sound plays into family history—especially the music and voices of the past.

page 24 -- Hole in the Wall Genealogy, by Thomas Fiske. Tom writes of the genealogical adventure sparked by once again looking at a longforgotten letter that spent most of its life encased in the wall of an 1859 home.

page 28 -- The Sinnett Genealogies, by Donna Potter Phillips. Charles Nelson Sinnett (1847-1928) typed genealogical manuscripts on over 200 families. This information is available for your research today.

page 30 -- Whereas, by Jeffrey Bockman. Jeff tells about a source that he ran across twice within a month. Many local and state governments, educational institutions, and professional organizations create Memorial Resolutions to honor deceased citizens, friends, and members. These sources are detailed in this article.

REGULAR COLUMNS

page 36 -- Scandinavian Research: Scandinavia—Questions & Answers, by Ruth Ellen Maness, AG

page 40 -- Germanic Research: The Rhenisch Open Air Museum in Kommern, Germany, by Dave Obee

page 44 -- Relatively Speaking: The Mystery of Fred Bullard, by Michael Siciliano.

page 44 - Bless Those In-Laws! by Margaret G. Irwin

page 46 -- Ancestor Stories for the Soul: About the Kindness of Strangers, by Peter Summers.

page 52 -- Beginner’s Corner: Women’s Roles in U.S. Military History, by Donna Potter Phillips

page 54 -- The Next Generation: The Art of the Oral Interview, by Hailey J. Campbell.

page 58 -- News to Peruse: News briefs for genealogists.

page 68 -- Computer Helper: CD-ROM Reviews, by Leland K. Meitzler

page 75 -- Net Family History: The Best British Commonwealth Sites
on the Net, by Jeffrey A. Bockman.

page 108 -- On the Bookshelf: Description of new books for genealogists.

page 128 -- Bureau of Missing Ancestors:

page 146 -- On the Horizon: Calendar of upcoming events.

page 160 -- Marketplace: Classified advertisements.

page 166 -- Surname Index: Entries indicate the first instance within an
article, entry, story, etc.

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Each of the feature articles was excellent, as was the Best British Commonwealth (United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc.) Sites on the Net compilation.

This magazine reviews every book, CDROM or other media submitted for review, and there are a wealth of new books available for localities and surnames. The Bureau of Missing Ancestors is always intriguing - everyone has elusive ancestors - these queries are free, as I pointed out here (but my query hasn't appeared yet).

The neat thing with the PDF version of this magazine is that the reader can Find a surname or locality mentioned in the magazine quickly.

Genea-Musings is going on the road

Hmmm, I guess Genea-Musings is staying where it is on the Internet, and I'm going on the road. Oh well...

I'm off to Santa Cruz for the weekend to take care of my grandsons while their parents enjoy an anniversary weekend away from home. The boys and I should have lots of fun, and will make more family history over this weekend.

I have several posts ready to go, and will be able to access my email and the Internet every day, but I'm not sure how much time I will have to read, write and post.

I wonder what monumental genealogy announcement will occur over the weekend I'm gone? It always happens when I go away.

Blogging may be light! I will have to hold the "Best of the Genea-Blogs" post until Tuesday next week.

Genealogy Software Reviews - Your chance!

Louis Kessler has unveiled his new web site - Genealogy Software Reviews at http://www.gensoftreviews.com/.

There are over 300 genealogy software products here at present, just waiting for you, and others, to evaluate and rate them.

Each software review has information about the provider, a short program description, and a ratings box. Windows, Mac, Unix, handheld and online programs are included. The summary includes whether the program is free or purchased.

Program types include full-featured, GEDCOM utilities, website builders and other programs useful for genealogy.

The user ratings are in five categories:

* Whether you enjoy using it
* Do you use it often
* Does it have easy input
* Does it have useful output
* An overall rating.

You can write a short review and list the program's biggest benefit and biggest problem.

Or you can read the ratings and read the reviews and decide for yourself which program you want to download and use.

The site also has Frequently Asked Questions, Links to software providers and articles about software, and a suggestion page.

Over time, this will be an indispensable web page for genealogy software users.

"Internet Safety" with Tom Underhill

Tom Underhill, the founder of Creative Continuum, and writer of eight books, presented Internet Safety for Genealogists and Everyone Else to the Chula Vista Genealogical Society yesterday at the program meeting held at the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library.

The summary of Tom's talk and his CV are here.

Tom's presentation was based on ideas and concepts found in his recent book (co-authored with Andy Pomeroy), Lock the Boogie Man Out of Your Computer. The talk was more than about genealogy research - it also focused on risk avoidance and Internet safety for all family members, including children. The talk included segments on understanding the danger, keeping your computer system up-to-date, computer location in the home, social networks and online dating guidelines, user passwords, understanding your browser, email security, and dealing with Instant Messaging (IM), texting, peer-to-peer (P2P) and cell phone images.

For me, the most useful segment was setting secure passwords - Tom recommended avoiding using names, birthdays, dates or easy words, and he recommended using letters, numbers and non-standard characters in one word that you can remember. His example was b0xc@r (where the "o" is a "zero" and the "a" is an ampersand). Then have a unique password for every web site based on your "secret word" by combining it with the web site. For instance a password for http://www.dell.com/ might be b0xc@rdell and for http://www.blogger.com/ might be b0xc@rblogger. That sounded pretty easy to me. Now for a secret word to remember...

His warnings about Internet browsing was to understand how popups work, and to not click on them. For email, he advised that you not open attachments, and be very wary of email from banks and web sites that might be scams or hoaxes. You should keep your operating system, browser, and email software up-to-date. He pointed out that most anti-virus software is reactive, not proactive.

Tom recommended that parents reserve the right to check all emails and messages to and from their children (and do it), and that the family computer be placed in an open area where everybody can see who is using it and what they are seeing online.All in all, this was an excellent program for everyone with a computer and children (or grandchildren). Tom has five children, so he has lots of experience in dealing with these issues.

His book expands on the issues, and many more, that he discussed here.

This was an informative and timely presentation for the 30 society members, and there were many questions and comments after the talk. And yes, Tom threw kisses during the talk for questions, answers and comments.

Getting to Know Randy and Genea-Musings

Surely you know "Randy at Genea-Musings" by now...but I signed up for a blogging challenge from Terry Thornton at the Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi blog, so here is my entry:

I am a native San Diegan, a graduate of San Diego State University, a retired aerospace engineer, a genealogist and a family guy. My wife (Angel Linda) and I have two lovely daughters married to smart men, and four darling grandchildren. We love to visit them and have them visit us. Angel Linda and I love to travel to visit friends and relatives, to sightsee, to cruise or to do genealogy. Our travels have taken us all over the USA, to England and Scandinavia.

Since I last retired in 2004, my "work" has been "fun" - I do genealogy-related things every day and sometimes all-day long. I am a genealogist and family historian, but I'm not a professional genealogist (meaning taking paying clients) or a certified genealogist. My genealogy activities include:

* pursuing family history research on my ancestors and their families;
* helping friends and colleagues with their genealogy research;
* serving as President of the Chula Vista Genealogical Society (2007-2008), and leader of the CVGS Research Group (2003-present).
* writing on four blogs - Genea-Musings, The Geneaholic, the Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe, and Randy's Busy Life;
* preparing and delivering genealogy and family history classes and presentations to San Diego area genealogy societies and social groups;
* participating in the Transitional Genealogist Study Group and Professional Genealogist Study Group monthly studies and discussions.

My goals for writing on Genea-Musings has changed over time, and now includes:

* Analysis and commentary on genealogy news and issues - I have opinions and offer them for thoughtful discussion. My view is usually that of an informed genealogist - hopefully typical of my society colleagues.
* Evaluation and analysis of genealogy web sites and genealogy software - often with step-by-step directions for how to do a certain task.
* Participate in genealogy-oriented Carnivals and memes that bring genea-bloggers together and showcase genea-blogger talents.
* Offer my own research results, photographs and documents as examples to other researchers - good and bad. One benefit is that the ephemera are "backed up" online if something disastrous happens here in the Genea-Cave.
* Link to interesting, strange, and funny news items, web pages or databases, even make up new words to describe things through Randy's semi-twisted genea-vista.
* Support and publicize genea-bloggers with comments about posts, including the weekly Best of the Genea-Blogs series.

II. The brightest, breeziest and most beautiful articles that I've written over nearly 30 months of Genea-Musings (almost 2,300 posts) include:

* The best work (brightest!) is: Dear Genea-Man: What Is Proof? I chose this article because it helps a society colleague, helps the genealogy community (at least those reading blogs!) and summarizes my thoughts on a difficult research question.

* The breeziest work is: My Census Whacking Index. This is a collection of the work I've done finding funny, strange and nearly-profane names in the census records.

* The most beautiful work is: My Tribute to Mom - Betty Virginia (Carringer) Seaver. It was Mother's Day 2007, and I wanted to pay tribute to my mother on my blog.

So - that's who I am, and what Genea-Musings is all about.

Let me ask you --

* What do YOU like about Genea-Musings?
* What would you like to see more of?

Family Photographs - Post 24: DJ and Abbie Smith in early 1870's

I'm posting old family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

Here is one of the most precious (to me) images from my Smith/Carringer family collection:


This picture was taken at the same time as the picture of the Smith children posted here, probably in 1870 to 1872. It is the same size and the same style of photograph as the Smith kids photograph. Attached to the back of the photograph, inside the frame backing, is a white piece of paper that seems to say "Devier & Abbie / married in 1861 / on April 6th." I don't know whose handwriting it is - it may be Della (Smith) Carringer's.

The persons in this picture are Devier J. Smith (1839-1894) and Abigail (Vaux) Smith (1844-1931), who married in Rolling Prairie, Dodge County, Wisconsin (I have 4 April 1861 as the date from the Family Bible).

I didn't want to take this photo out of the frame and casing so I tried scanning it "as is" and got a very blurry image. I elected to take a photograph in natural light of the framed picture and then cropped it in a photo editing program. It is still somewhat blurry.

During my recent "furniture moving" exercise, I went through several boxes and file cabinets in the Genealogy Cave and this picture was found (again) in one of the boxes. I knew that I had it, but I had not seen, or not remembered, the names on the back of them.

The provenance of this framed photograph is from Devier and Abbie (Vaux) Smith, to Henry Austin and Della (Smith) Carringer, to Lyle and Emily (Kemp) Carringer, to Fred and Betty (Carringer) Seaver, to me, Randy Seaver. It was "found" last in the papers and photographs provided to me by my mother in the 1988 to 2002 time period.

Who's Number 107?

Genealogy web site traffic has been an occasional subject for Genea-Musings (see here and here, for example) and for Kory Meyerink at ProGenealogists.

Sean Sexton writes occasionally on his Sean on Family History blog, and he posted Survey of Family History Sites - August 2008 today. He has done a lot of work to generate this information, which is very revealing to me, especially in the Social Network site listings.

Sean used the web site http://www.compete.com/ to generate the statistics he uses in his Top 160 (or so) genealogy web site list. Here are the top 10 genealogy web sites (ranked by visits per month. "Uniques/mo" are unique visitors per month, and Avg-visits/mo is the average number of visits per unique visitor):

All sites - visits/mo uniques/mo avg-visits/mo

1. ancestry.com - 15.3 million 4.9 million 3.1
2. myfamily.com - 6.66 million 987,000 6.7
3. familysearch.org - 3.02 million 990,000 3.1
4. myheritage.com - 2.47 million 923,000 2.7
5. genealogy.com - 2.19 million 1.16 million 1.9
6. findagrave.com - 1.72 million 643,000 2.7
7. rootsweb.com - 1.43 million 687,000 2.1
8. geni.com - 1.34 million 397,000 3.4
9. footnote.com - 1.03 million 790,000 1.3
10. newspaperarchive.com - 976,000 805,000 1.2

Please go visit Sean's post to see the rest!

I don't see any big surprises in the Top 10. I don't recall MyFamily.com being so high in earlier lists - Meyerink had it at #6.

Dick Eastman's http://www.eogn.com/ (which includes his Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter blog) is #50. The recent startup, http://www.itsourtree.com/, is #100.

When Sean breaks the sites down into categories, he uses the total number of visits to the site, not the number of visits to the specific topic - like the family tree or social network part of the site. The statistics for the Social Network sites are interesting - there are many with very few visits.

Sean did not include many blogs in his list, mainly because most blogs use another domain. If he had tested http://www.geneamusings.com/, he would have found that in August this blog had about 6,100 total visits and about 3,500 unique visitors (according to my Google Analytics statistics). That would put it at about #107 or so on the basis of total visits, just after http://www.werelate.org/.

Sean did a great job on this post - it's a keeper for me!

A Genetealogy Dilemma - Any Ideas?

At the CGSSD meeting on Saturday, a lady in the audience posed this problem to the speaker, Barbara Bowling Gosink, an expert in DNA research:

"I don't know who my father is. He and my mother had relations in Naples, Italy back in the 1950's and I was born. I have no siblings. My mother did not tell me his name and there is no father's name on my birth certificate. Can DNA research help me?"

As I recall, the answer from Barbara was essentially "no" if the name is unknown and she has no male sibling from the same father. With a name and a male sibling, research could be done in Naples to find family members with the surname and they could be tested in hopes of finding a Y-DNA match. But she has no male sibling to test Y-DNA, and mitochondrial DNA is not passed from the father, so there is no hope of determining the father's identity.

Is all of that correct? Are there any other opportunities based on the whole genome of this woman, comparing the genome of her mother (assuming a sample is available), and determining the parts of her DNA she inherited from her father, then finding a match somehow with genomes of persons in Italy? That's a big order, but it might be possible at some time in the future. Perhaps there are sperm bank or criminal blood samples from the time period in Naples that could be compared.

Is that too far-fetched? Even for 20 years from now? I would appreciate any thoughts on how to help this woman with her search for her father.

I am in awe of the research that has gone into developing genetic genealogy over the past ten to twenty years. It is incredibly complex, and they have managed to reduce it to fairly simple terms and relatively low costs for Y-DNA and mtDNA testing.

Need a research job done? Try Genealogy Freelancers

The web site http://www.genealogyfreelancers.com/ was announced last week by IRBO, Inc. The headerr says "Connecting your family through genealogy specialists around the globe." The site summary says:

"Genealogy Freelancers is an affordable way to connect you to a genealogist, researcher, translator and other genealogy specialists in any country of your ancestral roots. Let the specialist come to you rather than lose time searching for them so Post your project today! For the specialist; we offer freelance professional genealogists, researchers, translators, publishers, village photographers, and more the opportunity to work independently in their genealogy field. Choose from posted projects that suit your specialty and bid NOW!"

This site is sort of the eBay of Genealogy Services - if you need a research job done, you can post it to the site and researchers will bid on it. If you are a researcher, you can bid on jobs and if you are the accepted bidder than you do the work. An interesting concept. Here is a screen shot of the top of the web site:



And a screen shot of the middle of the web site page, with the latest projects being bid on.

For the Genealogy Seeker: "Just post your project, compare the bids you receive, then choose the best specialist for the job. Let us help you to connect to a freelance genealogist researcher, photographer, translator or people locator at rates you can afford."

For the Genealogy Specialist: "We can help you find clients from all walks of life. Just browse the right project for your expertise and place your bid. Sign up for free and start working full time or part time in the field you love."

What's interesting to me is that, in the screen shot above, all of the "Latest Projects" listed are not in the United States! They are in Europe and Mexico.

I signed up, for now, as a Seeker. You have to agree to the Terms and conditions before submitting your information. The T&Cs are very detailed - you can see them at https://www.genealogyfreelancers.com/index.php?action=register - scroll to the bottom of the page.

Project guidelines are detailed here. An example of how the site works is here. There are fees involved for both the seeker and the specialist, as detailed on the "how the site works" page.

For Genealogy specialists, the registrant needs to the categories in which they have expertise, their location, their language translation capabilities (source>target), and their membership level (free, silver or gold).

It seems to me that this web site business plan is very well thought out, and that the terms and conditions cover many, if not all, potential problems. It would be useful for an attorney to review them to determine any problems for seekers and specialists.

It will be interesting to see how this web site expands, and succeeds or fails, in the genealogy marketplace. The concept is novel, and might be a welcome alternative to the classical methods of seekers contracting with a researcher and for specialists in finding clients.