Good Genealogy Luck – Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Each Saturday, Randy Seaver of Geneamusings issues a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun blogging challenge. This week’s subject  is to talk about a time when we had a big ol’ dose of good genealogy luck.

That’s an easy one. In June 2003 I was living in England. My new boyfriend (now husband) and I decided to do a fly-drive holiday in Sweden. The purpose of the trip was to conduct some genealogy research on my dad’s side as well as have a bit of a vacation in beautiful southern Sweden.

We started just south of Stockholm and drove westerly over five days. It was quite an adventure, seeing places well off the tourist trail, stopping at rural village churches, old farmhouses, and staying in countryside B&Bs.

I didn’t want my genealogy side-excursions to take over the trip, so we stopped in Vadstena, in the province of Östergötland. There we found a pretty town, dominated by an amazing castle next to a giant lake. While doing the self-tour of the castle, we saw a sign pointing to the province’s archives. In the castle.

Yep, I’d accidentally stumbled upon the region’s record office. My husband, the good guy he is, immediately offered to run to the car to get my files. While in the archives, we looked at several original parish registers and were able to take a family line back a further generation. Sadly, we only had about an hour until closing time, but the staff there were brilliant and helped us out. It didn’t hurt that we were the two of the three researchers that afternoon!

I want to post some photos of our time at Vadstena (and all my Sweden photos including a very well-kept headstone of my 3x-great-grandparents and of us meeting my dad’s second cousin and his family) but they’re on another computer right now. I’ll add them here soon.

Genealogy Software: WGBP #28

Goodness, has it really been two months since my last post here? My excuse: pursuing a new focus as a web designer in a new town has given me many opportunities to learn, share, network and do some interesting work along the way.

Moving on, this week’s genealogy blogging prompt is about the software we use in our genealogy research.

I’ve already written extensively about Reunion for the Mac. Some of the other fun features I’ve taken advantage recently is the ability to save charts as graphic files (PNG):

Ancestor Chart

Other software worth mentioning

• iTunes is great for downloading genealogy podcasts,  such as the UK’s The National Archives Podcast Series (UK) or The Genealogy Guys Podcast, not that I’ve ever found the time to listen to them in full….
• Twitter apps such as Tweetdeck keep me up to date in the world of genealogy and genealogy blogging. There are some fabulous genealogists on Twitter, all of them a fun and lovely bunch of people.

  Also, if it weren’t for Twitter, I probably wouldn’t have followed the recent controversy related to GenealogyWise. I think it’s safe to say they’ve learned their lesson about what a social network is and isn’t to its members.

http://rootsfinder.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/what-i-love-about-reunion-9/

London Metropolitan Archives: My Favourite Records Repository WGBP #19

This weeks Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #19 is to answer the following questions: Describe your favorite records repository. Why is it your favorite? What types of records does it contain? Do you have any advice for first-time visitors? Special thanks to Geneabloggers and WeTree for  promoting and creating the blogging prompts.

My favorite records repository is the London Metropolitan archives, located in north central London. Besides their amazing array of records in one organization, they have helpful staff; nice facilities (plenty of lockers and a place to sit and eat your lunch); good opening hours; plenty of computers connected to the Internet, their own databases and subscription genealogy databases; WiFi;  an excellent selection of London history books;  an amazing map collection; and parish register microfilms for nearly everywhere in London*.

View Larger Map

From their website:

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is the archive repository for many London-wide organisations. The archives of the City of London Corporation (COL) and the former Greater London Council (GLC), London County Council (LCC), Middlesex County Council (MCC) and their predecessors are held here. LMA also holds records for many religious, public, business, local authority and other organisations based in London. The dates of items that can be found here range from medieval to the present day, and our collections are constantly expanding. At the moment, there are documents to fill around 72 km worth of shelving! You can find out more detailed information concerning our holdings by looking at our collections page.

Some of my notable finds in the LMA are:

• Finding a detailed 1783 birth record of my husband’s gr-gr-gr-gr grandaunt in an original Account of Married Women book of the British Lying in Hospital (genealogical jackpot!)
• My Yorkshire ancestor’s brother in city directories going back to 1740
• The 1822 removal order for my husband’s ancestors from Lambeth parish back to St. Martin’s in the Fields (they were admitted and discharged from the workhouse on the same day, so a good friend or family member must’ve bailed them out!)

For first-time visitors, the London Metropolitan Archives’ website contains a lot of useful information for anyone wishing to visit or ‘virtually’ explore this fantastic repository.  I have also written a blog post on How to do genealogy research at a city or county record office in England. The LMA can be reached by public transportation. Personally, I recommend figuring out the buses ahead of time, instead of using the Underground (aka Tube). You can have wonderful tour of London on the upper deck of a London city bus, plus it really helps being above ground to understand how London is laid out.  The Transport for London website has an excellent online journey planner.

*  Be sure to check their catalogue to  check the parishes they cover. Click Log in to start.

P.S. The Hampshire Record Office wins 2nd place!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – Top 10 Genealogy Sites

Randy Seaver kickstarted the topic Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – Top 10 Genealogy Sites, so here are mine:

1. www.ancestry.com – Ancestry.com is a one-stop-shop for online genealogy resources. While not cheap, I find they are good value and they are constantly adding more records.
2. books.google.com – Google Book Search contains a huge variety of books, particularly old county history books and published family history books. I’ve found some great gems in there.
3. www.cyberdriveillinois.com – This is the site that has searchable indexes of vital records, military service, coroner’s records, naturalization etc for the state of Illinois. Coverage is spotty but it’s a huge time saver and they’ve always been very quick when I’ve ordered copies. A more integrated global search would be nice though….
4. www.chicagoancestors.org – Chicago Ancestors is a Newberry Library project and has digitized city directories (hooray!), street finding aids (hooray!), historic maps (hooray again!) and links to useful places on the web. I bet they did it to ward off the zillions of questions they had to answer repeatedly, but whatever the motivation, I like it!
5. www.footnote.com – They haven’t got the content I need (yet) but their interface is so freaking slick and highly usable. Well done, you guys.
6. www.rootstelevision.com – Some day when I have a several hours, I’m going to watch a huge stack of these genealogy videos. I’ve seen Megan Smolyenak Smolyenak’s portable film studio at NERGC – quite impressive!
7. www.familysearch.org – IGI and FHLC catalog are great for general research
8. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline – The Documents Online service from The National Archives (UK) is fab. I’ve impulse-purchased wills and service records more often than I’d like to admit!
9. www.newenglandancestors.org – Loads of databases and events to look forward to. Their library in Boston is impressive.
10. www.genealogybank.com – I’m a new user of Genealogy Bank but I’m excited by their coverage of historic newspapers and other records. There’s some great stuff in there that would take far too long to find using the old way.

Canadian Border Crossings on Ancestry

Exciting stuff! Ancestry.ca has published Border Crossings: From U.S. to Canada, 1908-1935 on it’s site. I was hoping to find my grandfather there, but no luck. Please tell me he didn’t slip through the border in the Minnesota woods or something…he was about 10 years old, so I’m told. That sounds pretty dangerous.

I did, however, find his uncle Peter Kowalenko and Peter’s wife and daughter in the records in 1927. Peter’s birthplace is listed as Hordinka, Austria.

Peter is listed again in 1930, and was rejected from entering Canada to see a friend. Peter’s birthplace here is listed as Hordenka, Poland (pesky border changes). Peter and wife were living in Michigan at the time. Interesting!

It’s probably Horodenka:

View Larger Map

I haven’t been able to locate the family in church records yet. Two trips to the Family History Library and no finds on my Ukrainian family yet…

Challenge: who are these residents of “the valley of the northwestern lakes”

While on GenealogyBank, I found my brickwall ancestor Oren Briggs inside a document entitled ‘Petition of citizens of the United States residing in the valley of the northwestern lakes, praying the adoption of measures to procure the free navigation of the St. Lawrence. April 11, 1850. Referred to the Committee on Commerce. June 4, 1850. Ordered to be printed.’ Publication: Serial Set Vol. No. 563, Session Vol. No.1; Report: S.Misc.Doc. 111;

Is the “valley of the northwestern lakes” the area around Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes? Can anyone confirm? Several of these men lived in Belvidere, Boone County, Illinois in 1850.

Genealogy Technology – Weekly Prompt #14

My first Weekly Genealogy Prompt post! Thomas at GeneaBloggers sends us each weekly prompt, chosen from Amy’s We Tree blog topic list!

Prompt #14 asks us to talk about the technology used in our genealogy research.

• First and foremost, I’d like to thank my MacBook for allowing me to perform family history research so beautifully. It’s such a joy to take it into an archive and enter sourced information directly. The days of tedious note-taking and transcribing is (mostly) over.
• For organizing my family trees, I use Reunion 9 for the Mac. Prior to my the switch to Mac, I used Family Tree Maker for about nine years.
• This WordPress blog is the new home of my personal genealogy research. Even though I know my way around building websites, I can relax with WordPress and only worry about content, not the code.
• I interact with other family historians on Twitter and Facebook.
• MacSpeech Dictate allows me to blog freely without unnecessary RSI pain. Through a headset, it converts my voice into text onto any of my Mac applications, including directly into WordPress. I’d truly be distraught without it! I haven’t dared bringing it into a genealogy library yet!
• Pages by iWork helps me create professional looking reports and documents.
• I’d be lost without TomTom, the portable satellite navigation system. TomTom has guided us on several genealogy research trips in the US and Europe.
• I’ve been a full subscriber of Ancestry since 1999.
• I’m also a big fan of The National Archives Documents Online, Origins Network and Rootschat (all UK).
• All of my RSS feeds come through NetNewsWire. There’s no way I’d have time to visit all the great genealogy blogs and genealogy news sites out there, or remember where they were, but with RSS I can keep up with everything. So much is happening in US genealogy these days and I’m struggling to keep up with it all!
• iPhoto stores my photos but I’ve yet to come up with a meaningful tagging system.
• The Nikon D40 (now old technology!) takes amazing photos. Now I just need to revisit every cemetery and 2003’s family reunion again….

Technologies I wish to embrace more fully are:

• Footnote — I’ve recently rediscovered it and I’m loving it!
• An iPhone. I need to buy one first though. But first I think I need to get my US credit history active again since it’s contract only!
• I had TNG: The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding on a previous website I started in 2004. If I find the time, I’d like to use it again.
• Handheld voice recorder … got it, don’t utilize it.

When I began researching my family tree 10 years ago, the technology was very crude. A handful of websites, mailing lists/ forums and a meager selection of subscription sites. It’s so much better now!

Sources will be provided upon request

I have come the same conclusion as many others with genealogy blogs and busy lives. Sadly, there’s not enough time for me to properly source every piece of information in my biographies. My time is better spent posting additional information and making headway on research.

If you would like the source for particular piece of information, please get in touch (my e-mail address is on my About page).

Divorce 1848 style!

My 4x great grandparents Oren Briggs (also spelled Orren, Orrin or Orin) and Susan Bowder have got an unusual and mysterious past. Their marriage was her second and at least his third marriage! She was 25 and he was 51 years old.

The following took place in Belvidere, Boone County, Illinois in 1848.

• May 16: Sarah Ann Briggs files for divorce 
against husband Oren
• May 17: Oren’s civil lawsuit settled
• May 18: Susan’s divorce to John Tittle granted
• May 20: Oren’s divorce granted
• May 24: Oren and Susan get married

Busy week!

How to do genealogy research at a city or county record office in England

I’ve written an eHow article on ‘How to do genealogy research at a city or county record office in England.’ I enjoyed writing it and I’ll probably write some more British genealogy articles.