Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Genealogy News for December 2007

Here is the genealogy news of interest to me since late November. I've separated them into categories below.

1. GENEALOGY WEB SITES

* MyHeritage Research, the genealogy search engine on www.MyHeritage.com, has been significantly upgraded. This genealogy tool specializes in finding ancestors and advancing your family research. There is nothing else quite like it on the Internet. It is free and you're invited to use it on this link: http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/myheritage-research.php. You can search over 1,000 databases (some commercial) with this search engine.

2. NEW GENEALOGY DATABASES

a) at www.Ancestry.com - now available for FREE at San Diego FHC.

* New Jersey Will/Inventory Indexes, Volumes I - III
* Many historical newspapers - Bennington VT, Florence SC, El Paso TX, Yuma AZ, Flagstaff AZ, Ruston LA, San Antonio TX, Newport RI, Honolulu HI, Pinedale WY, Kingsport TN, Oil City PA, Albuquerque NM, Uniontown PA, Winnipeg Manitoba, Brandon Manitoba, Lethbridge Alberta.
* Early Boston MA births, Marriages, Deaths
* Books on Atlantic Canada provincial history
* Early New York state vital record books

b) Www.WorldVitalRecords.com - now available for FREE at the San Diego FHC. New items FREE at WVR for 10 days.

* Many (hundreds) of out-of-copyright books - W to Z surnames in December.

c) www.Footnote.com - now available for FREE at San Diego FHC. Information added:

* Thousands of US Air Force photos in the digital World War II collection. This release coincides with the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing, and contains tens of thousands of original World War II photos and documents from the National Archives. Among this collection are missing air crew reports, documents from allied military conferences and photos of Japanese air targets.

d) LDS FamilySearch Record Search site has more databases at http://search.labs.familysearch.org/recordsearch/
* Freedman's Bureau, Virginia Marriages, ca 1815-1866 -- images and index for 5 Virginia counties
* Georgia Deaths, 1914-1927 -- images and every-name index complete
* Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953 -- images and every-name index complete
* Ontario Deaths, 1869-1947 -- every-name index and database, no images.
* Texas Death Index, 1964-1998 -- every-name index and database, no images
* US Social Security Death Index -- every-name index and database, no images * Utah Death Certificates, 1904-1956 -- every name index and images complete.

3. GENEALOGY SOFTWARE

* FamilyTreeMaker 2008 Service Pack 2 is now available - see the announcement at http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2007/11/28/service-pack-2-rev-2/. This service pack adds many reports, including Genealogy Register Report, Genealogy Ahnentafel Report, Hourglass Chart, Vertical Ancestor Chart, Updates to all reports to better display facts and notes, Updates to exporting of reports to RTF and HTML. It also added many fixes to reported problems.

4. GENEALOGY EDUCATION


* The New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston has a number of relatively short online seminars for members to benefit at a distance from the expertise of the NEHGS staff. The seminars currently offered at http://www.newenglandancestors.org/education/main/online_lectures.asp. These seminars are FREE to all.

5. ANNOUNCEMENTS


* The Generations Network and www.ancestry.com announced that they will convert their "Online Family Tree system" to Ancestry Member Tree format. This apparently is the Ancestry World Tree GEDCOMs. Submitters are urged to convert their trees to Ancestry Member Trees before March 2008. See http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2007/12/19/online-family-tree-announcement/ for more information.

* www.Ancestry.com will be available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and at 13 large Family History Centers, including San Diego. The story is at http://tgn.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=116. There is no indication which version of Ancestry will be available.

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