Not Enough Characters at Your Reunion?

TamaGenerations.com (Warning: obnoxious music) lets kids combine their two favorite activities: learning about family history and supporting the Japanese toy-making industry.

It's time to start thinking about planning your summer family reunion and what better way to do it than by researching your family tree so you know who to invite! Celebrating the new Familitchi V5, the newest version of the highly popular Tamagotchi Connection toy, www.TamaGenerations.com provides kids the chance to create family trees of everyone's favorite Tamagotchi characters as well as collect hidden family heirlooms. With help from partners Family Tree Magazine and FamilyReunion.com, kids can create a personalized family tree online and learn fun tips on planning their very own family reunion party. But the fun doesn't end there! Finding 20 family heirlooms will give one lucky kid the chance to win an Ultimate Tamagotchi Family Reunion for 25 family members with a special appearance from the special and fun Tamagotchi characters. [Link]

If "special and fun Tamagotchi characters" show up at my family reunion, they better know how to perform a keg stand. Oh, and some of my older relatives might demand an apology for Pearl Harbor.

Everything He Knows About Hyman Victor

Everything I Know About Hyman Victor got a coveted kottke link today. The content isn't revolutionary, but the mode of presentation is great.

(Note: Hyman has shown up here before.)

Taking Heed of the Headless

The question sounds so much better in French: "Avez-vous eu un ancêtre décapité pendant la Révolution?"

Les Guillotinés offers the most complete online list yet established of the French Revolution’s victims and invites users to discover the answer to a terrible question: “Do you have an ancestor who was decapitated?” Hundreds of thousands of people have consulted the death base, created by Raymond Combes, a computer programmer and amateur genealogist.

Many more are likely to follow suit. According to one estimate, up to five million French people are descended from victims of La Révolution. [Link]

NYT Gets to the Problem of The Root

The Washington Post has just launched an online magazine called The Root that aims to be a "Slate for black readers." One section of the site is devoted to helping African Americans trace their ancestry. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is editor in chief, and (the New York Times snidely notes) has a financial interest in getting readers to give up their DNA.

[The site] will also urge people to have DNA testing, which can help them trace their backgrounds to specific ethnic groups and parts of the world. It will offer links to companies that do the testing.

One such company the site will direct people to, www.AfricanDNA.com, is co-owned by Mr. Gates, a relationship that would be prohibited at some publications.

“I don’t see a conflict of interest,” he said, because The Root will fully disclose his roles and will link to every company that does the DNA testing. [Link]

(Almost) Forgotten Ellis Island

Lorie Conway has filmed a documentary about the 22-building hospital complex at Ellis Island. There are also a Forgotten Ellis Island book and website.

Ms. Conway found that hundreds of thousands of patient records had essentially disappeared; she hopes that her film will turn up new clues as to where they have been moved.

Over years of research, Ms. Conway said, she was able to find only one complete patient record — that of Ormond J. McDermott, an Australian who was not trying to immigrate, but merely visit to New York, in 1921. He accidentally left his passport on a ship, and was detained at Ellis Island while the authorities investigated his claims to be a sales apprentice, rather than a contract laborer. While on Ellis Island, he developed scarlet fever; he died. Mr. McDermott’s file ended up at the State Department after his father, part of an influential Australian family, filed a complaint and asked for an investigation. [Link]

Even God Needs a Good Index

The GRO's digitized index of UK vital records is still a couple of years away, the microfilmed records are scarcely usable, and the paper originals have just been removed from public view.

There will never again be public access to the paper records, the index to where in the country all the births, marriages and deaths were registered, but - as so often with government IT projects - the timetable for the online version intended to replace them has collapsed. According to a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for the General Records Office, "the present target is to have the online index available by mid-2009".

In the meantime, researchers are invited to use microfiche, which means, one furious researcher said, that "not even God himself is going to be able to find most of this stuff". [Link]

If God is impatient, He can try these resources:

• England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index: 1837-1983 (Ancestry.com, free partial index)
• England & Wales, FreeBMD Marriage Index: 1837-1983 (Ancestry.com, free partial index)
• England & Wales, FreeBMD Death Index: 1837-1983 (Ancestry.com, free partial index)
• England & Wales, Birth Index: 1984-2005 (Ancestry.com)
• England & Wales, Marriage Index: 1984-2005 (Ancestry.com)
• England & Wales, Death Index: 1984-2005 (Ancestry.com)
• England & Wales, Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes, 1837-2005 (Ancestry.co.uk)
• England & Wales, Births, Marriages and Deaths: 1837 - 2005 (findmypast.com)
• Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates - Complete BMD Index 1837-2005 (The Genealogist)
• Official GRO Birth, Death, Marriage Indexes 1837-2005 (familyrelatives.com)

Google Brings Me Back to School

Ain't it amazing what you can find online? While playing around with Google Book Search today, I found this—a floor plan of the first school I (and my father and my brother and sister) ever attended.

Despite the title, the report is actually for the year ending Dec. 31, 1891. The school was built in the summer and fall of 1889, and was expanded to three rooms over the years. The building now houses Greenwood's town office, and is also the first place I ever voted against anyone named George Bush.

As a bonus, Google included this image of the book-scanner's fingers. It's good to know that they use protection.

Georgia On My Mind

Renee reports some very, very good news:

FamilySearch and the Georgia Archives announced today that Georgia’s death index from 1919 to 1927 can be accessed for free online. The online index is linked to digital images of the original death certificates. This free database will open doors to additional information for family historians and genealogists with Georgia ties. The index and images can be searched and viewed at www.GeorgiaArchives.org (Virtual Vault link) or labs.familysearch.org.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

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]

My Kind of Town

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.

Old Notables and the Notably Old

Generians is a website that lists notable people aged 90 and up (once you gain supercentenarian status you're notable just for breathing). It's not quite as fun as Dead or Alive? or Who's Alive and Who's Dead, but it does offer some neat info. For instance, did you know that the United States' oldest man and Great Britain's oldest man were born on the very same day (June 6, 1896)? Hurry and impress your friends with that bit of trivia while it's still true.

[via Neatorama]

Images First, Index Next

I think the most exciting revelation from Tuesday's announcement of FamilySearch's Record Search Pilot is their apparent openness to letting users "Find and view images that have not yet been indexed."

Indexed images are great, but it will take years (decades?) for volunteers to fully index all the digitized records piling up in the Vault. Genealogists raised on microfilm are used to scanning page after page for a single relevant record; there's no reason to hold back digitized records until every name is cataloged. Providing the images online with simple finding aids should suffice for researchers eager to ferret out family facts.

Besides, isn't it more satisfying to stumble upon your ancestor's name after hours of mind-numbing work than after a five-second search? And what clues are missed by the family historian who looks only at those pages where his last name appears?

Take Me to the Pilot

Visit the FamilySearch Lab blog for info on their newest tool to test—the Record Search Pilot.

We are publishing historic records and images on the Internet to help people find evidence of their ancestors. The site is being tested now with limited records and participants. You can sign up to be notified when additional capacity is available.

After the thrilling experience of registering, you can enjoy a short video on how to log in and search. It's almost as fun as logging in and searching.

Angelina Awaits

There's a new Web 2.0 genealogy site called Famillion whose founder hopes to have "the world's Jewish population mapped out by the end of the year, and the entire Western world mapped out in two years." I'm more interested in mapping out a path to Brad Pitt's girlfriend.

Famillion is the only genealogical system that allows you to find unknown pathways to any other person in the world. You might discover family members you never knew you had or find connections to the world's Albert Einsteins, Madonnas and Bill Gates. You may find yourself chatting with Angelina Jolie. As the Famillion family grows, your possibilities become limitless.

Get Grandpa's FBI File

We nosy genealogists have long known the magic of FOIA requests, but a website called Get Grandpa's FBI File is bringing the method to the nongenealogical masses. Fill in the fields and they'll produce form letters for you to send off to the G-men in Washington and at field offices. Of course, RootsWeb SSDI does the same sort of thing for SS-5 requests.

Just understand that it might take time.

[via Boing Boing]

Doughboy Diaries In Demand

The superb Veterans History Project has launched a new effort to collect firsthand accounts of the First World War. Learn more at Experiencing War (World War I, the Great War).

World War I is among the least documented wars of those covered by the Veterans History Project, and the number of collections relating its experiences are not likely to grow dramatically. Because all but a handful of WWI vets are no longer alive, oral history interviews are out of the question, so we must rely on the generosity of relatives and friends of deceased veterans to donate written accounts in letters, diaries, and memoirs, as well as precious collections of photographs.

While I Was On the Roof...

I've been busy since last weekend putting a new roof on my great-aunt's garage, but I'm pretty sure I haven't missed any big genealogy news. Except that THE WHOLE FREAKING GENEALOGICAL WORLD HAS CHANGED!

Here's a rundown of the week's biggest announcements:

• FamilySearch announced a Records Access program that will speed up indexing of digitized records and help archives and heritage societies bring their collections online.
• More than 4,500 FamilySearch Family History Centers will get free access to WorldVitalRecords.com and FamilyLink.com, and also to Kindred Konnections and the Godfrey Memorial Library website. Selected centers will soon have access to HeritageQuest Online as well.
• Footnote.com is publishing full Revolutionary War pension files online, and offering free access at Family History Centers.
• The final obstacles to cracking open the Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen have been overcome. There is a lengthy article about the archive in this week's U.S. News & World Report that warns researchers to pack a lunch:

  So far, two thirds of the archive has been scanned. Yet genealogists and historians hoping for quick answers may be in for a letdown. Though the Nazis were enthusiastic recordkeepers, their crimes took place in more than a dozen countries, and victims spoke every language on the continent. The ITS has 849 different spellings of the name "Abramovich" alone. Even birthdates are unreliable. "People lied about their birthdays to seem older so they could survive selections at Auschwitz," notes Gabriele Wilke, an ITS archivist.

  Schelly at Tracing the Tribe has blogged about further limitations on access to be imposed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Museum responded to criticisms on Wednesday.

Get Your Descendants Off the Couch

Time in a Capsule is a website devoted to geocapsuling—a neat spin on geocaching. Instead of stashing treasures for fellow geocachers to find, you stash treasures for your descendants to find months, years, or decades from now.

Founders Alan and Nancy Bixby have thought of every contingency, like, what if your children have no interest in retrieving your cached items?

If your dead-beat progeny are jailed, or lazy, or ex-patriots or whatever, then a “fail-safe relative” will make a decision to give the information to someone else in the family who will likely relish this challenge. We’re just offering an opportunity for our descendants to enrich their lives. We’d even be happy to return to our drop site locations with them. They might ask other more adventurous friends or relatives to reclaim their containers if they are practicing sloths. Honestly though, they'd have to have the brain of a speed bump to ignore this curious opportunity. Someone at least will gain from the experience…as we have. [Link]

My, How Things Have Changed

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see old versions of websites as far back as 1996—around the time I started my first genealogy website. Here's what Ancestry.com looked like on Oct. 28, 1996, and here's RootsWeb from May 1997. Genealogy.com was home to the German Genealogy Home Page in 1996.

Seeing these pages makes me nostalgic for the good old days when nothing I needed was available online.

Expired Copyrights Excite Me

Thanks to Illuminated Heritage for pointing out that Stanford has placed online a Copyright Renewal Database. Included are books published in the U. S. between 1923 and 1963 whose copyrights were renewed between 1950 and 1993 (records since 1978 were already searchable).

Anyone who transcribes data to place online should be aware that anything published before 1923 is fair game, but works from 1923 onwards may still be protected. Here's a snippet from elsewhere on Stanford's excellent copyright site:

Thousands of works published in the United States before 1964 fell into the public domain because the copyright was not timely renewed under the law in effect at that time. If a work was first published before 1964, the owner had to file a renewal with the Copyright Office during the 28th year after publication. No renewal meant a loss of copyright. [Link]

If a work does appear in the database, that means it is protected for an additional 95 years from the date of renewal. A quick check of the database confirms what common sense would suggest: most family histories and locally-produced town histories published before 1964 are in the public domain, and now belong to us all.

N. B. Journals like the Register and TAG are not included in the database. The copyrights for their 1923-63 volumes were probably renewed, and copyrights for individual articles could (in theory) have been renewed by their authors. In other words, hands off.