| 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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NEW! Check out our updated WDCFHC website
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WDCFHC Annual Conference - May 2
registration is now open
The 9th annual WDC FHC Conference will be held from 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 2 at the Washington, DC Stake Center (the building which houses our FHC).
This free conference offers 20 sessions of topics ranging from beginning to advanced genealogy. The keynote speaker will be James Bartlett addressing the topic "DNA - Genealogy Will Never Be the Same."
Seating is limited and we recommend that you register soon.
Information and registration can be found at:
http://wdcfhc.org/Conference/
For questions, please email: conf2015@wdcfhc.org
or call 301-587-0042.
Many thanks to our webmaster, Scott Shaffer, for his outstanding work on a refreshing new website design!
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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 March, the training modules will continue to explore features of FamilySearch Family Tree:
March 12 - Source Box
March 19 - Editing Relationships
March 26 - Puzzilla
Thursday night workshops begin at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 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. Next meetings: March 11 and March 25.
Eastern European Group: Note: March meeting will be on Saturday, March 21 (one week early); usual meetings are 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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The Avuncular Guardian
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by Judy G. Russell, The Legal Genealogist
Note: Many of us wonder about old guardianship laws which did not automatically give a widow legal rights to manage the affairs of their children. This article by Judy Russell explains the legalities of this past practice.
Why not the mother?
Reader Jeanie Attenhofer was struggling to understand what happened when her third great grandfather died in 1828.
He was killed, she said, along the Santa Fe trail - shot with his own gun ("he fell asleep at the switch, as it were," she reports) - and left a wife and four minor children.
And that's when something happened that she couldn't figure out. The children were placed under the guardianship of their mother's brother. "But why?" she asked. "Why would her brother have been given guardianship of the children if she was still alive?"
The Legal Genealogist understands Jeanie's confusion here. We are, after all, 21st century women accustomed to taking care of ourselves and our families. But that wasn't always the expectation in the past - and it certainly wasn't what the law expected.
To read Judy's article, click here.
To read her follow-up post on this issue, click here.
Source: The Legal Genealogist, March 2 & 5, 2015
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Researching Female Ancestors
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by Kimberly Powell
The March issue of About: Genealogy has three articles with tips for researching female ancestors:
Invisible Women Ancestors
...how can you, as a genealogist, locate someone who is "invisible?" Tracing the female side of your family tree can be a bit difficult and frustrating, but is also one of the most rewarding challenges of genealogy research. By following a few basic research methods, with an added measure of patience and creativity, you'll soon be learning about all of the women who passed their genes down to you. Read more here.
Top 9 Places to Find Maiden Names
Discovering the maiden name of a female ancestor can sometimes be difficult, but can lead to a whole new branch of your family tree. New surnames, new families, new connections. To read more, click here.
Her Story: Uncovering Women's Lives
Our female ancestors have wonderful stories to tell - legacies which extend far beyond sets of names and dates in the family tree. Yet, women's lives have historically been less visible than men's lives in history books and genealogical records.
To read more, click here.
Source: About: Genealogy Blog
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Why Obituaries Contain Hidden Family Trees
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Where do you find these hidden family trees? Try looking at an obituary. An obituary can provide a wealth of information
about families, not just information about the deceased.
Most obituaries can be divided into two parts: - The first part talks about the deceased
- The second often talks about the family of the deceased.
A listing of immediate next of kin in an obituary can provide an excellent base for creating a family tree. This is because obituaries often list parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, children and grandchildren. A typical obituary lists two or three generations of a family.
Obituaries have other advantages for someone looking to
construct a family tree: * Obituaries tend to be fairly accurate and complete as they are usually written by a close family member.
* Obituaries are one of the few documents where family secrets are laid to rest. Often family connections that are not revealed when a person is alive are laid bare in an obituary. How many times have you read an obituary and asked yourself a question like "I never knew he had a brother" or "I never realized that was her second marriage"?
It really pays to look at obituaries. Not only do they provide clues about the deceased, they also provide excellent leads about the family of the deceased. Stitching together the names found in even a couple of obituaries can create the foundation for a pretty good family tree.
So, the next time you read an obituary, read about the living as well as the dead.
[Note: This has been redacted from a longer article at
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The Digital Public Library Video
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This video gives an introduction to the ever-expanding Digital Public Library.
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| The Digital Public Library | |
by Dick Eastman
The Digital Public Library of America is one of the most useful online libraries available today. It is new, having been formed less than two years ago. It is not a genealogy library. Rather, it is a general-purpose library that just happens to have a lot of genealogy material in addition to other topics. The Digital Public Library of America's mission is to make cultural and scientific works more accessible to the public.
At the time these words are being written, the Digital Public Library of America lists 8,416,553 items from libraries, archives, and museums. A search on the word "genealogy" returns a list of 65,707 items available via the library's online portal.
NOTE: An "item" might be information about a book, a photograph, a manuscript, a sound recording, music score, chart, map, moving image, or other object.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together content from America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. In fact, the DPLA does not own any of the items in its catalog but instead allows users to access them through its own website.
To read the full article, click here.
Source: Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, February 27, 2015
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Voter Registration Records
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by Kimberly Powell
...Voter registration records can provide an address where our ancestors were living during the gaps between census records, but we may also find naturalization information, voting records, or even an ancestor's signature. Additional information can be gleaned by checking the voter laws in effect at the time in that area-many places enforced a residency requirement of a certain period before allowing an individual to become a registered voter.
What You May Find in Voter Registration Records
- Name
- Date of birth
- Place of residence
- Naturalization information (possible)
- Signature
- Occupation
- Marital status
- Whether they owned any land
To read the full article which includes links to online records, click here.
Source: About.com: Genealogy
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Add Information to Scanned Photographs
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One of the best activities you can do to help preserve the family heritage is to scan the numerous family photos....However, there is one item that many forget to do when they scan these vintage photos -- that is to properly label and add notes about the image. If you just place a series of numbers when saving each image, it becomes very hard later to identify the photos, especially if it is someone else examining them.
- The first thing is to place as the SAVE AS title for each image after scanning is a brief description.
- The next thing is to provide some more details about the place, people or event in each photo.
- Have your database of family tree names and information to add birth-marriage-death dates.
To read the full article with photos and detailed instructions\s about adding this metadata to photos, click here.
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Tips for Using the David Rumsey Historical Map Website
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Old maps can help you locate an ancestor's hometown and bring it to life. Comparing maps of a place published over time can help you see changing borders and jurisdictions.
One of the historical map resources you can learn more about in our Historical Maps of Europe Premium Collection is the David Rumsey Map Collection website, which I used recently to find maps of my great-great-grandfather's birthplace: Steinfeld, Germany.
Here, I'll share a few tips that might make it easier for you to find maps of your ancestral places:
- Try to find out as much as you can about your ancestral hometown.
- Search for maps using the search box at top right.
- Search not only for your ancestral town, but also for nearby towns and other geographical divisions.
Full information on each of these point, plus samples of illustrated maps can be found here.
Source: The Genealogy Insider, March 3, 2015
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Genealogy Tip of the Day
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Was He Mixed Up with His Brother or Son?
Census enumerators make mistakes. In 1900 Henry/Hinrich Sartorius was enumerated as Herman Sartorius. The census enumerator may have confused Henry with his son of the same name--or perhaps his late brother.Sometimes people just get one or two things mixed up. Situations like this are one time when a manual search of the record itself or a last name only search of the database may be necessary.
What Obituaries Leave Out. Family written obituaries provided to newspapers can leave out as much as they include. Previous spouses may not be included, children can be left out, which spouse was the parent of which surviving children may not be clear, individuals listed as children may not be biological children. One relative of mine had an obituary that did not list his three children by a first marriage and only listed three of his four living children with his second wife.
Spelling Irregularities are a Necessary Evil.
Variations in how your ancestor's name was spelled can be endlessly frustrating. However, it's worth remembering that a variation of how your ancestor's name appears in an index can arise from a variety of situations:
- Your ancestor did not know how to spell his name
- Your ancestor could not read
- Your ancestor did not speak clearly
- Your ancestor had an accent with which the writer of his name was unfamiliar
- The clerk didn't care
- The clerk had bad writing
- The transcriber could not read the name
- The transcriber did not care
- The transcriber made a typographical error
- The document has faded and is difficult to read
- Or something else
Keep in mind that one of more of these could explain why James Rampley ends up indexed as Jarvis Pample.
The Three Source Rule. There is no "three source" rule in genealogy. Just because three sources agree does not mean that they are necessarily correct. They could actually have the same informant giving the same information at different points in time for different records. The key is to try to obtain the most reliable accurate sources you can and augment that with additional sources and information--ideally with other informants providing the information. Two independent sources that agree can easily be correct. But there's always the chance that a new source provides conflicting information. There are eight or more sources that indicate my great-great-grandmother's maiden name was Haase. Problem is that those sources are all incorrect. Contemporary sources to her birth provide her actual maiden name of Bieger.
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Research Tips & Resources
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Fairfax [Virginia] Genealogy Society Spring Conference.
GenGophers.com. More Than 40,000 Digital Genealogy Books Now Fully Searchable and Downloadable for Free at GenGophers.com.
Free Google Book Lists New York City Voters in 1919
The List of Enrolled Voters of the City of New York is a 484-page book available for free to everyone in the U.S. at Google Books.
(Source: Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, Feb. 24, 2015)
DAR Library Offers Purchases of Supporting Documentation
Read more here.
Old Chicago Maps Online
ChicagoinMaps.com is simply a website to gather together links to various historic maps of Chicago.
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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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