| FHC Info | |
Hours of Operation:
Mon: Closed
Fri: 9:30 am-1:00 pm
Saturday:
9:30 am-4:30 pm
Tues, Wed, Thurs:
9:30am-4:30pm, & 7-9:30 pm
Directors: Linda & Kurt Christensen Washington DC Stake Carol & Gary Petranek, Silver Spring MDStake |
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WDC FHC News
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Thursday Night & Saturday Classes
Our Thursday evening workshops provide one-on-one assistance to improve your skills in using FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, RootsMagic, FindAGrave, Billion Graves, Puzzilla. After a brief demonstration of a website feature, our staff will work with you to increase your proficiency in any of these websites.
To extend this learning to those who cannot attend on Thursday nights, the 3rd Saturday class in February will review the materials covered on Thursday nights.
In February, the training modules will be FamilySearch Family Tree:
1. Hints - how to make the most of hints.
2. Sources - understanding sources.
3. Sources - creating, adding, how to use the source box.
4. Adding sources from other websites; adding a document as a source versus of adding it in Memories.
Thursday night workshops begin at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, February 21 class begins at 9:30 a.m.
We invite you to join us! No registration is required. For further information, call the FHC at 301-587-0042 or email: info@wdcfhc.org.
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WDC FHC Focus Group Schedule
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Join a Focus Group to Enhance Your Research Skills
African-American: weekly on Monday mornings at 10:00.
Beginning Genealogy: weekly on Tuesday mornings at 10:00. Contact Lorraine Minor at ldgene@verizon.net for further information.
DNA Group: bi-weeky the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month. No meetings in February. Next meetings: March 11 and March 25.
Eastern European Group: monthly on the 4th Saturday at noon; focus countries: Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Irish Group: bi-weekly meetings on the 1st, 3rd & 5th Tuesday evenings at 7:00.
RootsMagic Users Group: Monthly meetings on the 2nd Saturday at 9:30 a.m.
All are welcome - no registration needed.
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Making Your Family Photos Digital
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by John McLuckie
After stone tablets, good paper and microfilm
are the most durable media for recording information*
WDCFHC patron, John McLuckie, has written an article, "Making Your Family Photos Digital," which he generously submitted for this newsletter. John clearly explains the many facets of this technology: digital evolution, digital scanning, archival preservation, digital storage in various forms, and digital migration.
John's article is written in layman's terms and he makes a complex topic easy to understand. We appreciate his desire to share his knowledge with our patrons. Thank you, John!
John's article can be accessed here.
*Quote from Mary Mannix, Maryland Room Librarian Manager at the C. Burr Artz Library, Frederick, Maryland
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Understanding Dates: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid
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by Laurence Harris
It is important to record key events of our ancestors, including the date when each event occurred.
Usually several sources indicate an event's date. For example, for a death: the date may be indicated on a death certificate, a headstone, a newspaper obituary and in a Grant of Probate (which authorizes distribution of a deceased person's estate). However, those dates would have been documented using the calendar and recording conventions of the geographical location and time when the event originally took place, rather than the calendar and conventions with which today's researcher would be familiar. Failure to take into account the original context of an event or document often results in mistakes in understanding when an event actually happened.
Here are five of the most common mistakes that can occur in interpreting dates, together with suggestions as to how these mistakes can be avoided or corrected.
1. Mixing up American and English date formats
2. Failure to recognise and convert Julian dates to Gregorian dates
3. Misunderstanding dates from other special/religious calendars
4. Confusing an event's date and the date when it was registered or recorded
5. Assuming that the dates in a document were recorded accurately
Each of these topics is discussed in detail; click here.
Source:
MyHeritage Blog, January 12, 2015
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Analyzing Census Records: Context Matters!
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by Elizabeth Shown Mills
A census record is a snapshot, a blink of a lens on one day, freezing in time a person or a family. Still, there is much more that we can glean from a census if we make it a habit to always analyze our person-of-interest in community context. To do otherwise, is to snip one negative from a roll of historic film and assume that the other negatives on that roll are totally unrelated subjects.
For starters, with the census records we use, we should
- extract full information on everyone in that household, even if our person is said to be just a boarder.
- extract full information on individuals in the area who bear the same surname.
- identify our person's neighbors-at least a dozen dwellings before or after.
- comb the neighborhood at large for families with similar naming patterns, migration patterns, or occupational patterns.
- note the identities of community ministers, attorneys, doctors, and other professional men who might have left records.
Source: Evidence Explained Blog, "Quick Tips," January 31, 2015
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Finding Your Ancestors' Stories in the Records
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Source: Ancestry.com YouTube, December 26, 2014
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What Happens to Your Genealogy Research When You're Gone?
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by Lorine McGinnis Schultze
Have you thought about what will happen to your genealogy research after you are gone? I don't know about you but I have several filing cabinets full of genealogy papers and records that I have compiled over the years. It's unlikely that any one person would be willing to take all these home and start going through them.
Often there is only one genealogy addict for each generation. I'm the one in my generation and have been for over 30 years. That means no one else is very interested. Oh sure they like the occasional interesting story of an ancestor but to scroll through reel after reel of microfilm or puzzle over a census record for clues - nope.
After we've done all that work for the past 10 or 20 or 30 years, it is human nature to want to see it passed on and not discarded as if it had no meaning or importance.
Read the full article: here.
Source: Olive Tree Genealogy Blog, January 21, 2015
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New Website to Find Freedmen's Records
| | by Diane Haddad
A new website called Mapping the Bureau will help you research African-American ancestors after the Civil War.
The site, created by African-American history and genealogy experts Toni Carrier and Angela Walton-Raji, has an interactive map of field offices of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, a federal agency set up after the Civil War to serve indigent black and white families. The same map also shows contraband camps (communities of African-American fugitive slaves, or "contraband," during the war) and bureau hospitals. When you click a Freedmen's Bureau field office near a place where your ancestors may have lived, you'll see a pop-up showing the National Archives microfilm numbers which the records for that office, as well as links to the digitized versions, if available, on the free FamilySearch.org website.
To read the full article with details about this site, click here. Source: Genealogy Insider, Januar 9, 2015 |
How to Preserve Old Photographs Guide
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Feeling overwhelmed with the idea of organizing your family photography? Does the thought of losing all those family memories in a disaster leave you sick to your stomach? Feeling lost because you don't even know where to begin when it comes to organizing and preserving all those old family photos?
This guide will help you.
This guide will take away the worry and mystery by giving you an actionable plan to preserve, organize and save your family's photographic history. This guide is also meant to show you how to preserve old photos while having a little fun too.
A little time, organization and knowledge of the best practices plus a little effort can keep your photography in excellent shape for people to enjoy for years to come.
Note: This article is a comprehensive guide; click here.
Source: glowimagery.com July 7, 2014
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Where Did Your Ancestors Live? An Introduction to City Directories
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by James Tanner
One nearly constant feature of American life has been the mail order catalog and the city directory. Because of the availability of online searches and organization lists, the venerable telephone book has passed from common usage. But beginning in the 1700s or even much earlier, books that listed the names, addresses and ethnicity of all of the businesses and people in a town or city became very common. It was natural, when telephones were invented, to add the telephone number of residents.
These extensive directories are extremely valuable to locate and track the movements of your ancestors. Collections of old directories may be found in many archives, museums and libraries around the country.
The full article, including links to resources, can be found here.
Source: Genealogy's Star, January 27, 2015
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Genealogy Tip of the Day
| | | by Michael John Neill
How Many Writers? Do not assume that only one person wrote on a document or record you are using in your research. Carefully look at the handwriting to determine if it looks consistent throughout the document or if multiple writers could have been involved. Census records and record copies documents in courthouses are generally written by only one person. Original documents (such as a death record, or records in a pension file) may have had more than one person who wrote the information on a specific page. And if the different handwriting means a different person wrote the information on the document, it could be that there was a different informant. And those informants may not have been equally reliable.
Before You Grab That First One. Don't just assume that the first "hit" is your person of interest when searching a record or a database--make certain other non-name details are consistent. There could be more than one person in the database or the general with the same name or with a very similar name. And, it's always possible that the wrong person's name was spelled correctly and the right person's name was spelled totally incorrect.
Skim is for Milk, not Genealogy. Do you read documents in their entirety or do you skim them over? Do you read the "important parts," skipping over what appears to be meaningless? Sometimes the biggest genealogical clues are buried in the boring legal tedium of a court document.
Which can be easy to miss if you are only looking for the "important parts."
Bible Entries May Not Be Contemporary. Bible records are a great genealogical source. But researchers should remember that in some cases, the dates of birth, marriage, and death may have been written in years after the events took place--perhaps by someone who was not even present at the original event. Seeing items in the same color of ink and script is a clue that this was the case. Clues that the entries were possibly written as the events took place include:- slightly different color of ink
- slightly different handwriting--perhaps changing slightly as the writer gets older
A copyright date in the bible of 1900 would also indicate that entries from the late 1700's were not written in as they took place.
Denomination Deviations. Don't assume that your ancestor was always a member of a specific denomination and ignore nearby churches of that "wrong"denomination. You could easily be wrong about your ancestor's lifelong commitment to a specific church. They could have attended a different church for a short time, particularly if they lived on the frontier and there was no nearby congregation of the "right" denomination.
In the Wrong File Box? If that packet of court papers is not in the "right" file box, try the box before and the box after and remember that files in any box of court papers may not be in order. It is also possible that a researcher was using two separate file boxes and switched the boxes in which the files were supposed have been placed. Packets of papers usually have the box number written on the outside. Look in the box where the missing file is supposed to be and see if a file is in the wrong box. The box where that file is supposed to be may be where your missing file was accidentally placed.
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Research Tips & Resources
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Access Genealogy. A free resource website: http://www.accessgenealogy.com.
U.S. Historical Newspapers. Recently updated online newspapers listed at The Ancestor Hunt.
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Thank you for subscribing to Generations. We hope this publication will motivate you to successfully begin or continue your family history research. We would like to hear from you! Please submit your questions, research tips, and favorite websites to us at info@wdcfhc.org
Sincerely,
Carol Petranek, Newsletter Editor
Linda & Kurt Christensen
Gary Petranek
Co-Directors, Washington DC Family History Center
10000 Stoneybrook Drive, PO Box 49
Kensington, MD 20895
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