| 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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Summer Break
The FHC will be closed from Monday, August 17 to Saturday, August 29 and will reopen on Monday, August 31.
Saturday Classes
No Classes in August
Saturday, September 19, 9:30 a.m. (rescheduled from June)
Linda White, Co-Author: Back There, Then, a Historical and Genealogical Memoir
Linda will share her insights into composing a family narrative and organizing the myriads of pieces of information into a meaningful and well-written memoir.
Saturday, October 17, 9:30 a.m.
Charles Howard: City Directories
Often overlooked by researchers, city directories can offer more than just an address. Charles will demonstrate the many hidden clues found in this record collection.
Saturday, November 21, 9:30 a.m.
Denise Nelson: Precious Heirlooms, a Voice from the Past.
Items our ancestors treasured can tell us surprising facs about who they were, who hey associated with, their status, their ethnicity, their surroundings and their personal thoughts. Often neglected as a research tool, examining Gems and Jewelry owned by our ancestors provide us with a rather personal glimpse at our ancestors and their stories.
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. Every 2nd Monday, there is special training to learn how to index Freedmen's Bureau records.
Beginning Genealogy: weekly on Tuesday mornings at 10:00. Contact Lorraine Minor at ldgene@verizon.net for further information.
DNA Group: Now on summer break; meetings will resume in September, bi-weekly the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month at 7:00. Next meetings will be September 9 and 23.
Eastern European Group: 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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| "Fuel the Find" - Join the FamilySearch Worldwide Indexing Project | | |
The FamilySearch Worldwide Indexing Event is coming August 7-14, 2015, and this year it's one week long!
We are going for a record 100,000 volunteers (the current one-week record is 91,721), but big numbers mean more when we're helping meet the greatest need. English speakers have billions of records to search on FamilySearch.org-20 times more than all other languages combined! Let's help others across the world to find their ancestors too! All it takes is one batch indexed sometime during the week to be counted.
You have one week to participate by indexing one batch in the language of your choice. We especially need help indexing records in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The goal is for 100,000 people to participate in one week.
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by Diane Haddad
Try these quick, beginner-friendly tips for using genealogy websites:
1. Start with a general search on your ancestor's name. Run additional searches as needed using initials, maiden name, nicknames and spelling variations.
2. Pay the most attention to top matches. Most genealogy websites prioritize your results to put the best matches at the top.
3. Use search filters. These let you sort matches by place, time period, record type and more. Remove filters if you get too few matches.
4. Note potential matches. You may find records that look mostly right but have important discrepancies. Note possible matches for further evaluation later.
5. Broaden name searches. When you don't know someone's full name, enter part of his name plus the name of a parent or spouse. This is a great way to find women's maiden or married names or to find a couple's children.
6. Look for less-common names. Ancestors with common surnames sometimes had family members with less-common names. Try searching for those names instead-and then look for your ancestor in their records.
7. Explore specific record sets. Some sites have database catalogs or lists. Search or browse within specific databases, such as collections of death or marriage records from an ancestral county.
8. Find search advice. Look for search tips on sites you search, such as whether a site lets you search with wildcards to catch similarly spelled names (such as cars* to find Carsidy, Carseldine and Carsley).
Source: GenealogyInsider
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| Journalism's Voyage West | |
This animation is taken from the interactive data visualization of the Library of Congress' "Chronicling America" directory of US newspapers. It shows all newspapers in all languages published in the US from 1690 to 2011.
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by Jim Bartlett, DNA Specialist
[Note: To help readers better understand the use of DNA in genealogy research, this newsletter will feature extracts of monthly posts from Jim Bartlett's new blog, Segment-ology.]
What Is A Segment?
A DNA segment is a block, chunk, piece, string of DNA on a chromosome. It is typically determined by a start location and an end location on a chromosome. A segment refers to all the DNA in between and including the start and end locations.
We use the term segment in at least two fundamentally different ways:
- An ancestral segment is one which is passed down from an ancestor. Ancestral segments are passed to you from your parents, who got them from their ancestors. Each of your chromosomes are made up of ancestral segments - much more on this later.
- A shared segment is one which both you and a match have. Both you and your match have segments which are identical from start to end. Also sometimes called an HIR (Half-Identical Region). Also sometimes referred to as a matching segment. NB: a shared segment is determined by a computer algorithm - it may or may not come from a common ancestor - much more on this later.
IBD: When a shared segment comes from a common ancestor, we say it is IBD (Identical By Descent). Both you and your match have these identical segments on a chromosome because these segments came from the same ancestor.
To read the full article, click here.
Source: Segment-ology, May 7, 2015
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World War I Draft Registration Cards
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by Amanda at Geni Blog
Between 1917-1918, every male between the ages of 18 - 45 living in the United States was required to sign up for the draft, regardless of citizenship.
During the War, there were three registrations. The first took place on June 5, 1917 for all men between the ages of 21-31. The second, on June 5, 1918, required the registration of all males who turned 21 after June 5, 1917. The third, held on September 12, 1918, included all men age 18-45.
Although information found on World War I draft registration cards varies slightly with each registration, generally, you will find these genealogical nuggets:
- First and Last name
- Date of birth
- Age at time of registration
- Physical description
- Race
- Citizenship
- Name and address of closest relative
- Occupation and employer
- Address
By 1918, about 24 million men had registered; 2.8 million would be drafted into the military. Remember to keep in mind that not everyone who signed up for the draft served in the military and not all men who served registered for the draft.
To read the full article with images of WWI Draft Registration cards, click here.
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Czech & Jewish Research
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by Kimberly Powell
"Routes to Roots" (http://www.rtrfoundation.org/archdta1b.shtml)
Jewish genealogists seeking family documents from Eastern Europe are now able to search this single online source for listings of their ancestral towns. The database includes the combined archival holdings in Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland and Ukraine (as well as selected archive holdings from archives in Russia, Latvia, and Romania). Also are included are documents from civil registration offices in Poland (Urzad Stanu Cwyilnego offices) and civil registration offices in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova (ZAGS Offices); the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw, Poland); Pinkassim collection of the V. Vernadskyi Library (Kiev, Ukraine); Regional Museum (Ostrog, Ukraine) and the private collection of Rabbi Moishe Leib Kolesnik (Ivano Frankivsk, Ukraine).
5 Places to Begin a Search for Czech Ancestors
The present-day Czech Republic in Central Europe borders Poland to the northeast, Germany to the west, Austria to the south, and Slovakia to the east, encompassing the historical territories of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as the small, south-eastern portion of historical Silesia. If you have ancestors who came from this small landlocked country, then you won't want to miss these five online databases and resources for researching your Czech roots online. To read the full article with links to databases, click here.To read a blog about Beginning Czech genealogy, click here.
Holocaust Genealogy
Whether you're searching for information about relatives who disappeared or were killed during the Holocaust, or want to learn whether any relatives survived the Holocaust and may have living descendants there are a number of resources available to you. Begin your venture into Holocaust research by interviewing your living family members. Try to learn the names, ages, birthplaces, and last known whereabouts of the people you would like to trace. The more information you have, the easier your search. To read the full article with links to databases, click here
Source: About.com Genealogy, July 28, 2015
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Problems in Finding Towns of Origin
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by Michael LeClerc
For the most part, we are tracing families who migrated from one place to another. If you are lucky, your ancestors may have stayed in the same place for long periods of time. But for the vast majority of Americans, our ancestors moved multiple times through the generations. This results in having to identify numerous places where they lived.
One of the problems we have is that most often the records we use were not created in the original location. People are born in one place, marry in another, and die in a third. And in between they can live in countless other locations. Often we are looking at information about place of birth on a death record. The death could have been recorded hundreds of miles away or more, by people who had never heard of the places.
Another problem that genealogists run into is the accent issue. Usually when we discuss accents, the mind immediately jumps to non-English speaking immigrants from other countries. Letters are often pronounced differently, such as the v/w reversal between German and English. This can result in oddly-spelled versions of town names. Many of these individuals may not even be able to spell the name of the place where they came from.
In addition to these issues of foreign-born immigrants, we have the issue of internal migration. As the United States expanded from the east coast to the west coast, people moved from location to location. And regional accents became mixed. These accents can cause communication issues. A New York native living in Indiana and speaking with someone originally from the deep South may easily misinterpret the words he or she is hearing.
Another complicating factor is that information is often provided by a third party. This is especially true for death records, where information can be provided by children or grandchildren who themselves may never have seen the names of places of origin spelled out, only heard spoken.
To read the full article, click here.
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Organize Digital Photos (2 Articles)
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by Denise May Levenick
Photographs are the treasures of any family history collection. Documents can verify kinship and share the details of everyday life, but photos allow us to see firsthand the same eyes or broad smile we inherited from our forebears. Organizing all those photos may seem overwhelming, but with a simple plan you can organize and preserve your photos for the next generation.
Read the first article here.
In its simplest form, Digital Asset Management is all about capturing, storing, and accessing your images. Each step of the workflow refines these tasks so you can easily locate images for editing and sharing the end product, and be confident that your photo collection is secure. This article explains each of these steps:
2. Image import
3. Renaming
4. Backing up
5. Tagging
6. Archiving
7. Editing and sharing
Read the second article here.
NOTE: Remember that the WDCFHC has a Kodak digital scanner than can image 500 photos per hour and is free to use. |
Navigate the Confusing Maze of Name Variations
| | by Lorine McGinnis Schulze
1. Don't be confused by spelling. How often have you found a name in a census or other genealogy record, that was close to the name you were seeking but not exactly the same? My Peer ancestors have also had their name recorded as Pier, Pear, Peare and Pierre. Don't discard a record with a variant spelling of your name! Remember spelling didn't "count" and it was not consistent before the early 1900s. Many of our ancestors had little or no schooling and often they could not write their own names. That meant they could not verify that the way their name was recorded was in fact correct.
2. Foreign accents also confused English speaking clerks and that is when phonetics kicked in with clerks and census takers recording what they heard. If you are puzzled by a document, say the name out loud. Does it sound like the name you are looking for? Perhaps it is!
3. The surname you found may be the result of an error in transcribing or indexing. Look for the original document to verify what was written. Handwriting and formation of letters changed over the centuries. Early forms of the letter "S" can be mistaken for an "L" and vice versa. I once attempted in vain to explain to a client that her ancestor's name was not Lamuel but Samuel. The double "ss" in a surname was frequently written in a way that we read it as "fs. My husband's Massey ancestors are frequently found erroneously indexed as Mafsey.
4. Look at other clues such as spouse, children, ages, occupation, location, etc. Could the individual you found be your ancestor?
5. Remember that your ancestor may have deliberately changed his name or may be using an abbreviated form of it. It might also be a nickname that has become the surname in use.
To access the full article, click here.
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Genealogy Tip of the Day
| | | by Michael John Neill
Why Naturalize?
Not all immigrants to the United States naturalized, especially before the early twentieth century. It is possible your ancestor never bothered to naturalize. If your ancestor had no interest in voting, he may have never seen a need to naturalize as that's a key element of citizenship. In some locations and in some time periods, aliens (generally non-naturalized immigrants) were not able to own land. State statute would indicate when that changed. During the time period when only citizens could own land, that was for many a key reason to naturalize.
Derivative Citizenship
If your immigrant ancestor has a "derivative" citizenship, then what likely happened is that they were a minor when their father naturalized or they became a citizen upon their marriage to a man who was already a citizen. Naturalization law is complex and slightly confusing, but if your immigrant ancestor indicates in a census or other record that he was naturalized and you cannot find a record of his or her naturalization, consider the possibility that they obtained citizenship status through the father's naturalization or their marriage. And naturalization law and procedure has changed over time-make certain you know what the law and procedure was at the time your ancestor was alive and naturalized. Of course, like everything else...there are exceptions.
Voter Registration Lists
Have you tried to locate voter's registration lists for your ancestor? Typically kept at the local level (usually the county) they can provide detailed information on your ancestor. Some may provide citizenship details, residential information, and age. At the very least they would imply that the relative was eligible to vote. [A blogpost on this subject can be accessed here.]
Pre-1850 Heads of Households
Don't assume that the oldest male in a pre-1850 household is the person named as the head of household. In some cases the named head of household may be a younger male or in some cases the oldest female. Don't assume.
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Research Tips & Resources
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Ancestry Adds Social Security Applications & Claims Index
Ancestry.com has recently added "Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007" to their list of searchable databases. Info came from the SS-5 card, and includes parents' names. Ancestry can be accessed free at any FHC or most public libraries.
Baltimore Family History Workshop
The Maryland Genealogical Society's Fall Seminar
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Identifying Your Ancestors and Telling Their Stories Four Presentations by Dr. Thomas W. Jones
Holiday Inn-Laurel West 15101 Sweitzer Lane Laurel, MD 20707
Irish Catholic Records Go Online The National Library of Ireland's entire collection of microfilms of Catholic parish registers has been put on-line at http://registers.nli.ie. New York Directories online Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, Staten directories are online at archive.org -- no charge. Digitized Welch Newspapers The National Library of Wales has updated its free Welsh Newspapers Online website with a new look and 400,000 pages from newspapers published between 1804 and 1919: http://newspapers.library.wales/ Finding Lost Russian and Ukrainian Family This blog with links to archives and resources can be found here: https://lostrussianfamily.wordpress.com/ |
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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