I am a medical librarian/information specialist by profession, and our professional group is the Medical Library Association. New to the annual meeting this year in DC is the e-conference; the ability to register to “attend” the conference virtually and get online access to several elements of the conference – audio of sessions with electronic content, streaming video of keynote & plenary sessions, posters & various 5-minute presentations. The e-conference fee for association members is only $100 (compared to $460 for physical registration).
There is also an interactive online portal planned to accompany the e-conference. This e-conference concept is brand new to our association this year. Last year, online access to posters was experimented with and that must have gone well. I am glad to see the organizers try to provide access for those that can’t attend. The other major component of the meeting, the paper presentation sessions, are not included in the e-conference this year, but maybe they will expand to include that next year if the experiment goes well. I am looking forward to seeing MLA’s after-meeting assessment of how well this approach works.
Wouldn’t an approach like this be wonderful for genealogy conferences?
For the last two months I have been actively monitoring items added to the Texts collection at the Internet Archive (IA). By subscribing to several different RSS feeds, I’m able to check them every few days and see what is being uploaded. For example, I learned that UNC Chapel Hill Library has been adding old issues of yearbooks and blogged about this incredible resource even well before their official announcement. Even then, their announcement was only for the yearbooks from UNC-Chapel Hill, when they’ve added yearbooks for many other schools besides just UNC-CH.
So many goodies are being posted at the Internet Archive, but here is another one definitely worth mentioning. The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has started uploading NARA microfilm records of the Veterans Administration Pension Cards: 1907-1933. Military records are still sources that I’m quite unfamiliar, but a just looking through the records themselves + Google searching quickly made me realize how valuable these can be for genealogical research.
The pension records are arranged alphabetically by surname; the entire collection has 2, 539 reels and includes about 2 million cards (Microfilm collection M850 at NARA). Two types of cards are included – those for soldiers themselves and then the Army/Navy Widow Cards.
What kind of information can you find on them? These listed below, plus more.
Veteran’s name
Unit of service
Rate and dates of payment
Date of death
Home town
And, on the widow cards you’ll find
Wife’s name
Veteran’s name
Rate & record of payments
Record of any payments made to minors
As I write this a little more than 30 reels from the “A” alphabet have been deposited to the IA. To help keep track of them I have created a spreadsheet that lists each roll and I will continue to add to it as they add more. I can only hope that ACPL Genealogy Center will start a list/directory on their website though and/or blogs about it soon – I may get tired before they get all 2,539 reels done! UPDATE: Curt Witcher, Manager of the Genealogy Center, just confirmed for me via email that they do plan on putting all the reels up.
if you want to know the alphabet range for ALL the reels, there is a handy list at the beginning of Reel 1
If you’d like a version of the surname listing for all reels in a more accessible format, I spliced those pages off and uploaded them to Scribd. You can get it below. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these reels come online.
Just a quick post this time, but I’ve had so many connections come out the woodwork this week from sharing family tree information online it’s been crazy.
got an email from a possible cousin based on her husband’s lineage from former slaves on the Kemp P. Battle plantation in Edgecombe County, NC where my 4th great-grandparents were also slaves. There may be a blood connection between the slaves, but we aren’t sure and so are beginning to work collaboratively on trying to figure it all out. She found me based on a blog post I did after Robyn sent me some labor contract information
was contacted through Ancestry from a cousin who is descended from a sister of my 3rd great-grandfather, Edward Kilpatrick of Craven County, NC. I did not have any additional information for his sister Caroline, but through the cousin, I learned that she married a gentleman named Robert White and they moved to Pitt county. More information to add to the family tree!
got a follow-up email related to my stepmother’s Frye ancestry. We think we have linked her tentative 3rd great-grandfather Leonard Frye to a very large Frye family w/ ancestry going way back. more to do on that line…
through my genealogy site was contacted by a Koonce descendant. No relation to me, but since I collect Koonces I have part of his family tree on the site. I will begin adding his branch to the tree later this weekend. He is descended from Phillip H. Koonce of Shelby County, Texas.
was contacted by someone interested in the spouse of someone who’s tree I’ve been working on as the Picot family associated with Washington County, NC – one of my GenWeb projects.
my cousin emailed me tonight to call my great-uncle. He is a brother of my maternal grandmother and is very interested in helping to figure out the origins of his Lawhorn surname. I called him and he saw an obituary in a nearby city paper of a woman whose last name was Lawhorne and informed me as a possible lead. He said his father told him that his father came from Georgia, but we are still working on that. It was great to talk to him too!
All of this has been in the last 4 days. I have hardly had time to follow-up on all of these leads, but I hope to squeeze in some time this weekend. I’ve got major projects due for school over the next couple of weeks and have a couple of activities planned on the weekend, so we’ll see. I haven’t even watched the tonight or last week’s episodes of Faces of America yet!
I have an idea. I’m always on the lookout for something that will help me capture information most effectively for my genealogical research and I like to experiment. This morning, I’ve seen a product that I’m interested in trying out – a hand wand portable scanner.
This portable hand scanner allows you to scan books, newspapers, receipts, etc to an SD card and then download the images to a computer. Why do I want one? If this were to work successfully for me, it would mean that I could save money on photocopies when I visit research libraries. This particular model is by VuPoint and I’ve used another one of their products before; a slide scanner. While the slide scanner ended up not working out for me it was not because of the product, but more the fact that it wasn’t designed for how I wanted to use it.
I’m particularly anxious to try out this hand scanner and will be looking for a source to purchase it. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Guess what? I’m featured as a guest blogger on the Worldcat.org blog! While I have not yet participated in the 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy series yet this year, I was particularly interested in the goal of Week 5 – to explore Worldcat.org. As a librarian, I’ve been familiar with Worldcat for many years and since the Worldcat.org site launched have been an avid user. Just as Week 5 was coming to an end I emailed WorldCat to let them know that many genealogists were exploring the site and posting their experiences with it and that they may be interested in this user perspective.
Then, one the marketing directors, Alice, emailed me back saying that she had indeed been aware of the series and even invited me to guest blog about it! So, my post went live today.
On top of this, I also inquired about WorldCat’s possibility of more extensively linking to books that are available full-text online (for example, through Google Books or the Internet Archive). As a user of WorldCat, I’ve recently seen a potential value as I’ve been closely monitoring books uploaded to Internet Archive. Alice reminded me that they do indeed already have an integration with Google Books and are exploring how to do this with the Internet Archive. Wouldn’t it be great if we could also know of full-text of books from the WorldCat item record? I’ve been very pleased with how responsive WorldCat has been to suggestions & feedback. I think I’ll have to consider this as my post for Week 5 now, even though it’s about two weeks late
Taking a tip from a blog I follow for professional purposes, I’ve added a new series of icons to the right sidebar of my blog. If you read this through a feed reader, here is an image of it just for you.
Through the icons you can follow my RSS feed, get email updates, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Google Buzz, or find me on Facebook. Isn’t this cool? I’ve been wanting to do something like this for awhile now, so finding this setup was perfect. Now I just need to add this on all my other blogs!
This Tombstone Tuesday post is not for someone in my family, but rather that of a co-worker. The furthest back I’ve traced her Faith lineage is to the mother of this ancestor, Balthazaar “Balthus” Faith.
This image of his tombstone is courtesy of an upload from a FindAGrave volunteer at his gravesite in the Calvary Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. Balthazaar was born in April 11, 1811 in Germany, emigrating to this country from Berne, Bavaria. His father died in Germany, but his mother, Mary, came over to this county with him and they settled in Maryland. While in Maryland, Balthus married Emily Gordon and together they would have at least 5 children (that I know of). My coworker is descended from their son Joseph Faith. The family moved to Springfield in 1867.
Even though it’s many weeks later, I wanted to share what Kalonji got for me as one of my Christmas presents in December, for I think it is a beautiful thing indeed. It is Toni Morrison’s The Black Book. It was first published in 1974, in 2009 they published a 35th anniversary ediiton. You can read more about the book at Amazon, but I know I am going to learn each time I pick it up to browse its pages. I would only have asked one thing of the publishers – an index please? Though, I am pleased that it is searcheable in Google Books.
This excerpt from Bill Cosby’s original introduction describes it aptly.
Suppose a three-hundred-year-old black man had decided, oh say, when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook – a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would newspaper articles that interested him , old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters – all sorts of stuff.
He would remember things too, and put those in: stories he’d heard, rumors, dates. He’d remember the first March on Washington, how John Quincy Adams defended Joseph Cinque, the black slaveship rebel — and won; the Jewish Hospital that opened its doors to the wounded during the Civil War Draft Riots.
He would know about black goldminers, and pirates and factory owners and inventors. And, he would keep records of blacks who owned slaves, lyrics of songs he’d sung, voodoo recipes he’d tried — all of that he would put in his book.
And he would end up with a folk journey of Black America a book just like this one – beautiful, haunting, curious, informative, and human. — Bill Cosby, September 1973
Last night I eagerly watched the first episode in the new PBS Series, Faces of America, facilitated by Henry Louis Gates. There’s been a lot of buzz in the genealogy community in anticipation of the show. It comes at the heels of Gates’ popular African-American Lives & African-American Lives 2 series. After the show, I then participated in a fun post-show chat hosted over at Geneabloggers to talk about our perceptions and thoughts.
Many have commented on the desire to have seen more of the research process explained in the show. I understand the show producers may have wanted to focus more on the emotional connections for the show, but in the books that have been written to compliment the African American Lives series and the Finding Oprah’s Roots show, there is more detail and emphasis on the research process. I have both books, In Search of Our Roots & Finding Oprah’s Roots and even learned a few tips and strategies while reading them. The benefit of the show is that in can increase the awareness among the general population and I am hopeful that those that are more serious will take the time to read the books by either looking for them at their local public library or by purchasing outright. I would like to see a companion book published for Faces of America as well.
I’m a big proponent of the social web. I’ve posted before on this topic, but I’ll say it again – I do think there is a missed opportunity from the show producers to leverage the interest and use it for greater genealogical good. With African-American Lives 2, they did establish an online forum for users to share their personal stories and used tagging to help structure the stories that were being shared. But, can you imagine the database that could be built if they also asked people to fill in 3 or 4 generation ancestor charts? They could have an online “facilitator” to help answer people’s questions and guide them to well-established resources, or host their own chat sessions for interested parties. With 4 episodes to air, this could have been a several weeks long endeavor and really capitalize on the generated interest (the website pretty much crashed last night; there was interest!). Many of the stories presented on the older show sites have details, but much of it is unstructured. As a knowledge management and information professional I highly encourage structure.
After watching the show last night, I began to think about the upcoming Who Do You Think You Are series. I’ve never seen the UK show, so off to YouTube I went in search of episodes. I watched two last night – that of actor David Suchet and also that of Zoe Wannamaker. They were excellent! It was cool to see David Suchet b/c he’s known for playing the Agatha Christie character Hercule Poirot. I’ve not seen the British shows with him, but I have read many a Hercule Poirot mystery. I think I have found a new television series to watch and I posted part 1 of his episode as my Featured Video in the sidebar on the right. I am eager to see the NBC show even more now after watching these episodes.
Did you promote the show among your friends and family? I certainly did! I have some coworkers who I dabble in their family trees every now and then and so I told them all and sent them each a little extra piece of family history — one of them is a descendant of long lineage associated with eastern tennessee whom I recently found a book in the Internet Archive with information about the emigrating ancestor that was written in the 1920s; another has ties to Hawaii and I shared with her a new website/blog focusing on Hawaiian genealogy that could be a useful resource moving forward; and the third I was able to send pictures of her ancestors headstones that were just added to FindAGrave within the past two months. Just a little bit to keep the motivation going
So, I’m excited at the prospects and do still look forward to the additional episodes. It had its strenghts and weaknesses, but overall I am glad for this opportunity to promote the need for us all to more closely study and understand our family histories. If you missed it, you can watch in online.
