Leland Meitzler just reported that The New York Times has opened up a large portion of its archives.
As of midnight Tuesday, access to nearly all of the material that had been limited to TimesSelect users will be free. Article archives going back the last 20 years will be free, and so will older archives from 1851 and 1923, which are in the public domain. The Times will still charge a fee for access to archived stories published between 1923 and 1986. [Link]
Some hugely wonderful news out of the Windy City:
If all goes as planned, newly digitized versions of county records such as birth and death certificates and marriage licenses will be available beginning in January on one searchable Web site that will revolutionize how such research is done, [Cook County Clerk David] Orr said.
The Web site is part of a massive yearlong effort to digitize the county's 24 million vital records, which date to 1871, when record-keeping began after the Chicago Fire wiped out previous stockpiles, clerk's office spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said. [Link]If you need some Chicago resources to tide you over until January, check out Joe Beine's Cook County page.
The Library of Congress's Chronicling America project finally came online this afternoon. As I mentioned back in January, this phase offers digitized newspapers published between 1900 and 1910 in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. They also have an excellent directory of American newspapers published since 1690, with info on repositories where copies may be found.
You have to admire the British government's commitment to both genealogy and ornithology. Their DoVE (Digitisation of Vital Events) project is progressing nicely, with 40 million of 70 million historical UK birth records now included in the EAGLE (Electronic Access to GRO Legacy Events) database.
Yet another bird's name has been chosen as the acronym for the third project - MAGPIE (Multi Access to GRO Published Index of Events). This will provide online indexes to the newly digitised records, and will be accessible via the internet, hopefully by April 2008. [Link, via Featherstone Genealogy]Their fourth project will undoubtedly be dubbed "PELICAN" (Project to Encourage Licentious Implementation of Cute Avian Names).
If you'd like to test your transcribing skills, head over to the Decipher mailing list archives. Almost all of the messages are from KYGenWeb volunteers working on the Kentucky Vital Records Project, which has digitized and indexed more than 126,000 death certificates so far.
I've transcribed tens of thousands of handwritten names over the years, but I still get stumped. The trick is knowing when you should consider yourself stumped, and knowing how to find a "backdoor" solution. I'm glad to see that some respondents on the Decipher list are going beyond the digitized document to confirm their hunches with census and other records.
I'll admit, it's also fun to read the conflicting answers they sometimes give.
Looks like Ase
Joe or Ace
I think it looks like Gee, possibly short for George.
I think it's Lee with an "overly fancy" L.
I learned through Irish Roots Cafe of a provocative new article by Emily Heinlen called "Genealogy and the economic drain on Ireland: Unintended consequences."
Heinlen argues that digitizing genealogical records has had the negative effect of discouraging people from traveling to Ireland and spending money. As more records have gone online, she says, fewer genealogy tourists have made the trip. The number of visits actually increased from 1999 to 2000, but dropped by almost a quarter in 2001, and remained stagnant through 2004.
I'm curious why she fails to address the obvious explanation for a precipitous drop in tourism in 2001. Given the aftereffects of 9/11, I'm not sure that the correlation between digitization and lack of tourists is as strong as Heinlen needs it to be. (You can check out Irish visit stats for all classes of tourist here.)
That being said, some of Heinlen's recommendations to raise more genealogy tourism revenue are worth a read. And listen to the January 30 Irish Roots Cafe Podcast for an interview with the author.
Update: Megan says She's Got It Backwards on her Roots Television blog.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (1841-1902) is arguably the most genealogically valuable historical newspaper freely available on the Web. 147,000 pages were digitized five years ago with a $239,000 grant, and every month they draw about 45,000 visitors staying 15 minutes or longer.
Still, the Eagle Online is wanting in one respect:
Problem is that it covers only the period from 1841-1902. All the remaining pages of the Brooklyn Eagle up to 1955, when it folded, remain in yellowed clip morgues and on clunky microfilm. As Brooklyn grew, so did the circulation and the page count of a daily copy of the Brooklyn Eagle. Therefore, the price tag to digitize the second half of this treasure is about a million bucks. [Link]Present circumstances prevent me from footing the bill on my own, but I know that most of my readers are extremely wealthy, and that some have a passing interest in genealogy. Therefore, I would ask them to click over to the Eagle support page and donate a few thousand to the cause. For every dollar you donate, I pledge to spend a moment sincerely considering making a donation myself.
The Digital Gallery launched last March by the New York Public Library is one of my favorite places to loiter. The Gallery now contains "more than 337,000 images from primary sources and printed rarities including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, illustrated books, and printed ephemera."
Searching for my own surname, I found the seductive image of a woman named Maudie Dunham emblazoned on a cigarette card. The resemblance is uncanny.
Searches for place names—for instance, Salem, Massachusetts, or Dubuque, Iowa—are amazingly productive. The Gallery includes thousands of stereographic images and tinted postcards from cities and small towns across the nation (for a nice sampling of the latter medium, try searching for "California postcards").
For other genealogically relevant material, see Ellis Island Photographs from the Collection of William Williams, Commissioner of Immigration, 1902-1913, and other collections filed under "History & Geography." Also check out the Maps, Atlases & Charts, which will be especially useful for those researching New York and the Middle-Atlantic region.
In honor of the most recent of my alma maters (please, no comments about Latin plurals), I must commend the Historic Pittsburgh project mounted by the University of Pittsburgh.
What began in 2001 as a collection of historical maps of and texts about the city has blossomed into a full-scale genealogical treasure trove. You can now view a detailed chronology of Pittsburgh history, or search census schedules from 1850 to 1880 by first or last name, place of birth, occupation, sex, or (for 1880) street name.
The Historic Pittsburgh Image Collections were launched in September of last year, and now boast 7,674 photographs from 27 different collections. Explore by time, location, collection, or by one of four themes—Pittsburgh at Work, Pittsburgh at Play, Pittsburgh at Home, or Pittsburgh Personalities.
This website has become essential for family historians with roots in Western Pennsylvania—and for Pitt graduates nostalgic for their days in the Cathedral of Learning.
It's sometimes easy to forget that we family historians are historians. As historians, we're required sometimes to look beyond the names and dates in our GEDCOMs and place the knowledge we've gained in context. That a great-great uncle drowned in the mill stream in 1897 is interesting enough, but the diligent researcher will look further. Was there a freshet that day? Was he suicidal? Context may be found in local newspapers, town and county histories, and—especially for events or trends of national significance—at American Memory.
A project of the Library of Congress, American Memory features collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, films, sound recordings, and more. Need a map of the Battle of Chancellorsville? Or architectural drawings of a Nebraskan sod house? How about one of 2,300 narratives of ex-slaves?
The map collections at American Memory include digitized works from every age of American history, and every corner of the country. Most large cities and many large towns are represented, often by multiple maps drawn over a span of decades.
Photographs in the collections range from the earliest daguerreotypes to Ansel Adams' photographs of Japanese-American internees. Those looking for pictures to complement the text of a family history—whether yours is a family of fishermen, lumberjacks, or prairie farmers—would do well to search here first.
A personal favorite: Words and Deeds in American History, a collection of 90 digitized documents which tell the tale of our nation through the words of an eclectic group of Americans.
