Geneabloggers.com: 33 more blogs revealed!

Here are another 33 blogs focused on genealogy and family history just discovered by Geneabloggers.com's Thomas MacEntee. There are now 1,662 genealogy blogs on the site.

This week's varied topic crop includes individual family history, UK, photography, US, Poland, Canada, Sweden, Hawaii, education, vendor, roots travel, Civil War, military, African-American, cemetery, library, Georgia, Australia, surname, Minnesota, Pacific Island, Kentucky, diary and crafts.

Ainscough Family History-Mawdesley
Individual family history, UK genealogy

Belden Family Alliances: From Then Til Now
Individual family history

Bigger Families, Faces from the Past
Photography blog

Blundering Blindly Backwards
Individual family history, UK genealogy

Byron City Cemetery, Peach County, Georgia
Cemetery blog, Georgia genealogy

Campaspe Genealogy
Australian genealogy, Genealogy library blog

Census Junkie
Genealogy education, Individual family history

Climbing the Genealogy Tree
Genealogy education

Families of Old Hawaii
Hawaiian genealogy, Individual family history, Pacific Islander genealogy

Hawaiian genealogy sure has come a long way from the days when I 1st started searching the web back in 1998. There were a handful of personal sites with info on Hawaiian genealogy back then and some are still around, the same site from the nineties frozen in time. Some are updated and some vanished never to be seen again. Here’s a list of the personal pages (now called blogs?) I have bookmarked, that are still around…

Family History Alive
Individual family history

Finding the Feitner Family
Individual family history (FEITNER, Germany->NY)

A Forest of Oakes
Individual family history (OAKES)

Hearts Turned
Individual family history (LAMOREAUX, HOLLADAY, CLUFF)

The author just turned 19 and says "Too often our generation procrastinates this great work or puts it on others’ shoulders, but there is much we can be doing now. It is our responsibility just as much, if not more, than the older generations."

Heritage Heart
Crafts blog, Genealogy education, Individual family history

Family history can be exciting for today’s generations and it is my quest to offer ideas and solutions for making it fun! No more boring facts, but great stories and ideas for incorporating family heritage into our personal spaces as a reflection of who we are today.

Highland Experience SCOTLAND
Genealogy vendor, Scottish genealogy

The author (now living in New York) runs a custom tour company - Highland Experience Tours USA - focusing on Scottish roots.

Kendricks of San Francisco
California genealogy, Individual family history (KENDRICK)

Kentucky Kinfolks
Individual family history, Kentucky genealogy

Let Freedom Ring!
African-American genealogy blog, Individual family history, US Civil War blog

150th Year anniversary of the American Civil War ~ a blog documenting my personal journey and research riscoveries of the people, places, events, and other things related to the Civil War era.

May Hill’s WWII Diaries
Diary blog, UK genealogy

Blog editor Tom Ambridge is the grandson of May Hill, an English seaside villager who wrote wonderful diaries and poetry during WWII. Her diary began November 27, 1940. Each entry appears exactly 70 years after the original was written.

Minnesota Native Daughter
Individual family history, Minnesota genealogy

My Genealogy Obsession
Individual family history

My Journey Back
Canadian genealogy, Individual family history

My Savage Family
Individual family history (SAVAGE, UK->US)

Ontario Genealogist
Canadian genealogy, Individual family history

Polish families from Żywiec-Zabłocie, Polska
Individual family history, Polish genealogy

My Polish great grandpa was orphaned during the Chicago flu epidemic of 1918 & spent his life looking for all of his siblings. Some family stayed in Chicago & some returned to Poland. Some family was Catholic, & some are believed to be Jewish.

Prairie Bluestem
Individual family history

Saint Cross Upheaval
Individual family history

Stray Bones
Individual family history

Tipton Tales and Trails
Individual family history (TIPTON)

Vintage Aerial Blog
Genealogy vendor blog

Vintage Aerial connects personal memories and family history to photos of the places where the memories were made and the history took place. ... Our collection of over 25 million photographs spans the second half of the 20th century, documenting a time in American history when life revolved around rural communities and small farms. ... It uses the latest in digital imaging and data storage technology to preserve these heirlooms. We are saving yesterday’s memories with today’s technology, for the tomorrows to come.

Whispers From The Past/Tales Told
Individual family history (TOMLINSON-HEPWORTH-KIDGELL-CASHMORE-BURNS-MACDUFF-PERRINS-PHIPPEN-HUDSON, etc.)

Witch Genealogist with a Black Cat
Individual family history, Swedish genealogy

WorldFamilies.Net
DNA genealogy, Genealogy vendor blog, Surname blog (BARTON)

One of the largest Surname DNA Projects (250+ members) in the world, as well as a Barton family-wide historical society, newsletter, database, website. Evolved into World Families Network (2004) to help other Surname Projects by sharing learning and providing general information. ...

Read much more about each blog here at Geneabloggers.com, or visit those in which you may have an interest.

Scotland: Jewish history

ScottishGenes, a great blog written by Chris Paton, has a guest post written by the well-known Jewish genealogist Harvey Kaplan of the Scottish Jewish Archives Center.

Chris covers everything connected to Scotland, and Tracing the Tribe was very happy to see Harvey's post, which is a must for anyone who had Jewish ancestors in Scotland.

... The first Jewish community was established in Edinburgh in 1816, then Glasgow in 1823. Later in the 19th century, communities were also set up in Aberdeen and Dundee. There are five places which once had a Jewish community, but no longer: Ayr, Dunfermline, Falkirk, Greenock and Inverness. Jews in Scotland have generally lived in an atmosphere of tolerance, respected by the Presbyterian Scots as the ‘People of the Book’. Scotland is one of the few countries with no noticeable record of antisemitism.

A wide variety of source material awaits those researching Scottish Jewish family history. Obviously, Jews appear in the indexes of births, marriages and deaths in Scotland since 1855. Because Scottish birth certificates give the date and place of marriage of the parents, the certificates of children born here to parents who were married in Europe often provide a clue to town/country of origin. Another clue might be provided by census records - especially for 1881, 1891 and 1901.

Harvey's post lists naturalization records, city directories, passenger lists and other records. He mentions the misspelling of immigrant names.

The Scottish Jewish Archives Centre, located in Garnethill Synagogue (Glasgow, Scotland) collects and preserves material related to the Jewish history in Scotland. Items include synagogue registers, burials, subscription records, organizations, membership lists, newspapers, photos and more, including the Historical Database of Scottish Jewry with records on nearly 35,000 Jews in the country.

For more information, read the complete post at the link above, access the Center's website or send an email.

New blogs: Another 18 found by Geneabloggers!

Thomas MacEntee at Geneabloggers always appears to be working overtime - he's found an additional 18 new geneablogs this week.

Here are the names, type and link to the new ones, but read his entire post for much more on each.

Take a look at these if they address your geographical or other interests. This week's new blogs cover such topics as genealogy education, New York, genealogy societies, California, vendors, UK, individual family histories, forensic genealogy, France, Massachusetts, New England, professional genealogist, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, West Virginia, Canada, surname history, Colorado, Scotland.

Bella Online Genealogy - Tina Sansone
Genealogy education, genealogy industry

Central New York Genealogical Society
Genealogical society blog, New York genealogy

Contra Costa County Genealogical Society
California genealogy, Genealogical society blog

Currach – Discovering My Ancestry Before The Canvas Frays
Individual family history

d kay s days
Individual family history

Family Tree Folk
Genealogy vendor blog, UK genealogy

Généalogies
French genealogy blog, Individual family history

Highlands Ranch Genealogical Society
Colorado genealogy, Genealogical society blog

Identifinders - forensic expert Colleen Fitzpatrick
Forensic genealogy

MacArthur Genealogy Services
Massachusetts genealogy, New England genealogy, Professional genealogists

Nina’s Genealogy
Georgia genealogy, Individual family history, Kentucky genealogy, Mississippi genealogy, Virginia genealogy, West Virginia genealogy

On Being A Bridge Builder
Individual family history

Pioneer Portraits – Miller/Swain Family History
Genealogy education blog, Individual family history

Schwans and Lohr Family Roots Blog
Individual family blog

The Jones Surname
Surname history blogs

The Passionate Genealogist
Canadian genealogy, Professional genealogists

The Scottish Emigration Blog
Scottish genealogy

Trace My Family Tree
A new blog by established blogger Amir Dekkel
Genealogy education

Click on Thomas' post to read much more about each new blog. Enjoy!

Historic Newspapers: 40 million pages to digitize

A partnership between the British Library and online publisher brightsolid will digitize some 40 million pages of historic newspapers over 10 years.

According to the press release, brightsolid (FindMyPast, AncestorsOnboard, Friends Reunited and GenesReunited) is taking on the project's commercial and technical risks, with no direct costs to the British Library.

Some important points from the press release:

-- The firm will digitize content from the British Library Newspaper Library, which it will then make available online via a subscription website to launch next year. It will be available for free to users onsite at the British Library.

-- The goal, according to the press release, is to build a ‘critical mass’ of material for researchers – particularly in the fields of family history and genealogy."

-- The project will include out-of-copyright material from the
newspaper archive – pre-1900 newspaper material – and the partnership will also seek to digitize in-copyright material, with the agreement of relevant rightsholders. This copyrighted material will, with the publishers' express permission, be made available on the planned website.

-- The Library’s newspaper hard-copy collections will be moved from the current building at Colindale to a purpose-built storage facility (£33m funding) in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Access to the collection will be via microfilm and digital copies at the Library’s main site at St Pancras from 2012. Read more here.

-- It will help the collection remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, who are more used to accessing information via laptops than travelling to a physical location.

Copies of scanned materials will be held in the library in perpetuity.

Parts of this resource will be available online for the first time. The Library's collection spans 350 years and includes 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles. Its Newspaper Library in North London is used by 30,000 researchers in many subjects, including family history and genealogy, and the resources are mostly hard copy and microfilm.

A minimum of 4 million pages will be digitized in the first two years.

The Library's Dame Lynne Brindley outlined how the partnership will transform access to this collection and added that the success of the 19th Century British Library Newspapers website demonstrated the public’s huge appetite for digitized historic newspaper content:

“Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail. Mass digitisation unlocks the riches of our newspaper collections by making them available online to users across the UK and around the world; by making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print. brightsolid have an excellent track record of digitising archive materials and making them available to new audiences – I look forward to announcing the web service resulting from this partnership, which will launch and then steadily grow from next year.”

Digitized material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across some 350 years, and will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Other categories will be developed.

It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than travelling to a physical location.”

Chris Paton's Scottish Ancestry has a five-minute video of the announcement.

Tracing the Tribe looks forward to more information on the planned new subscription website.

UK: 'Finding family' workshop, Dec. 17

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain will focus on finding family in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, at its meeting on Thursday, December 17.

The meeting runs from 7.30-9.30pm at the JGSGB Library in London.

The session will cover information for beginners as well as those more advanced, and for confident and less-confident computer users.

To register, send an email to reserve a place. Fee: JGSGB members, free; others, £5.00.

For more information and address, click JGS of Great Britain (JGSGB).

DNA: Solving adoption mysteries

While DNA tests seem to attract family historians, there's another side to genetic genealogy - helping adoptees find their biological families.

Howard Wolinsky focused on just this issue in this online article in March's Ancestry Magazine.

Jeff Brickman always joked that he was a Scottish Jew. Really, he had no idea about his birth family’s place of origin. But thanks to a DNA test, Jeff found out that his joke answer might be right.

With blue eyes, straight, light brown hair, freckles, and light skin, Jeff Brickman never blended in at family gatherings.

Standing 5′ 8″, he towered over his dad’s family, where everyone had curly, dark brown hair and brown eyes. And in his mom’s family, the brown-eyed men stood tall at 6’ 4” and 6′ 6.”

I just don’t look like anyone in my family,” says Jeff, who grew up with a Jewish family in Phoenix and Boston. There was a reason he looked different from his parents, who were of Eastern European Jewish origin. Jeff had been adopted.

The story discusses the Y-DNA and mtDNA testing conducted at FamilyTreeDNA.com.

“I’m not looking for my parents. The whole interest for me was where I’m from genetically. Why do I look the way I do?”

In addition to confirm family relationships or learn about deep ancestry, male adoptees can find their paternal lines. Jeff had his Y-DNA (male) and mtDNA (female) tested.

According to FamilyTreeDNA's adoption expert Max Blankfeld - also VP of operations and marketing - says 30-35% of adoptees who use his service “end up finding their biological paternal line, which means that they get to know what their paternal surname would be if they were not adopted.” He stresses that the Y-DNA test is not a paternity test.

Jeff ’s testing showed 15 matches, including close ones—and some surprises.

Blankfeld told Jeff that based on Y-DNA testing, he could say “with almost 100 percent certainty that your biological paternal line was a Beall and that line was of Scottish ancestry.”

Regarding his maternal line, Blankfeld said he is probably of Jewish ancestry as the genetic signature is consistent with several people who have stated Jewish ancestry and others from Eastern Europe, and added:

Interestingly, since from the Jewish perspective the maternal line is what counts for one to be Jewish, you are not outside the group in your family get-togethers.”

Jeff's in the military and will be deloyed to Iraq. His wife is making a blanket of Beall tartan to take with him, and Jeff said he may have a tartan kipa also to combine his family traditions.

He's contacted some Bealls online and been welcomed; the story details some of those connections.

All Jeff knows is that he was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1970.; the adoption files were destroyed in a fire. He's run a Google search on Columbus Bealls but the list is long. It is possible that through this search he might find his biological father and possibly his biological mother. What would he say if he ever meets them?

“I would say to them, ‘Thank you for giving me to a wonderful family. ’ And the only question I would have is ‘What were the circumstances?’ And that’s it. I’m not looking for my parents. That’s not why I did it.”

Read the complete story at the link above.

New York: Sleuthing for roots

Psychologist Gayle Berg of Roslyn Heights (Long Island, NY) says people 45 and older have reached a stage called "generativity" which drives them to reassess their lives and to become concerned about passing on culture, values and history to the next generation, adding that younger people don't feel this "inner need" to delve into the past.

While I disagree with this - I see an increasing trend among younger people to research their families with some 30-somethings as major contributors - this Newsday story (Sleuthing for roots: Seniors explore genealogy), by Cara S. Trager, focuses on an older group of researchers.

Spotlighted, among others, are Renee Steinig, former president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island and the well-known John Martino of the Italian Genealogy Group.

The web and its myriad resources has encouraged people to connect their ancestral dots. On Long Island, it means one doesn't have to trek into the city (Manhattan) to turn endless rolls of microfilm or go overseas to search dusty archives. As Renee Steinig says in the story, today's technology means researchers can now do genealogy in their pajamas. However, researchers need to be prepared for what they find - research usually raises as many questions as it answers.

There's the story of the mission of Rosemarie Courbois, raised Catholic, who has found relatives in Scotland and Ireland, but has learned about Jewish family members from her great-grandfather's town in the former Czechoslovakia. The mother's maiden name was Schwager; they perished in the Holocaust.

Steinig, 61, began her obsession with her roots more than 30 years ago - when a cousin in Israel sent her a family tree based on her father's side of the family.

"I decided to invest in creating the equivalent for my mother's side," said the Dix Hills resident, who went professional about a decade ago with the research skills she had honed as a hobbyist. The Holocaust plays an important part in my desire to memorialize family members who perished in the camps."

Your fingers do the walking

Years ago, Steinig said, her genealogical research required her to make frequent treks into the city - to the National Archives, the Municipal Archives, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the New York Public Library. In addition, she made about a dozen journeys to Washington, D.C., to the National Archives and the Library of Congress and at least three trips to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, in Israel.

Attendees at the 2006 International Jewish Genealogy Conference in New York were fortunate to hear John Martino speak. Since 2000, his group's 500 members have created an online index of more than 12 million pages of military discharge, naturalization and vital records - some dating to 1848 - in New York and New Jersey.

"You still need to write or go to the repository to get the original document," said Martino, who spends at least eight hours a day hunkered over the computer in his basement, scanning and downloading indexes for Web-accessibility. "But, eight years ago, if you wrote Nassau County for a record, it would take six to eight weeks to get it. Now, with the index, which we've also given to the county, it takes a week to get the document in the mail."

The story does, of course, mention that not everything is online ... yet. There are a host of possible problems that necessitate checking original documents and materials that may never be online.

Other topics addressed are DNA, family secrets, working with professional genealogists, as well as a shortlist of some online sites.

The complete article is at the link above.

Quest: From Glasgow to Latvian shtetl

Dr. Richard Woolfson's trip "home" takes him from Glasgow, Scotland to Riga, Latvia and the shtetl of Tukums some 70kms inland, on the trail of his maternal grandfather Jack Newman (who arrived in Britain in 1903) and even earlier ancestors.

The story mentions Glasgow genealogist Harvey Kaplan and his assistance in Woolfson's quest, discovering the original family name of NEY, Jack's parents' names Elias and Hannah NEY (in the 1897 All Russia Census) and their street address in Tukums.

The impending arrival of his granddaughter Esther was the impetus for this journey.

Read the the story here.

Scotland: Check in for genealogy

Those who travel in rarified circles at luxury hotels avail themselves of many concierge-provided personal services. Now there's a new twist.

Guests at Edinburgh's Sheraton Grand Hotel & Spa now have access to a Genealogy Concierge service with expert Sheila Duffy.

Some 50 million people world-wide have Scottish ancestry and visitors to Edinburgh can now explore their heritage. Guests will receive a pre-check-in questionnaire to complete to give Duffy some idea of where to start.

Sheila will then sit down with guests for a one to one, hour long consultation for a fee of £70 ($139). She will establish what the guest already knows about their Scottish connections, and give practical advice about how to develop their search for their Scottish forebears.

It might be a bit disappointing though for guests who expect to leave with their entire family history (Scottish records date to the mid-1500s) in a beautifully embossed folder: "Rather than giving all the answers, the aim of consultation is to provide the knowledge and skills on how and where to look for information."

Read more here.