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Several of my MOGenWeb counties have new coordinators and new homes! Carter County is now managed by Denise Woodside. Gentry County and Worth County are now managed by Bob Jenkins. Clinton County, Morgan County, Pettis County and Saline County are available for adoption! When Ancestry shut down the free websites on Rootsweb to “update” for “security reasons,” a lot of the USGenWeb counties were lost. Oh, many of them are still there. They just can’t be accessed by the county coordinators for updating. The sites were down for YEARS and many coordinators moved on. The result? There are way too many counties up for adoption. Check out this list at MOGenWeb. You don’t have to be a Website Wizard to be a County Coordinator. And there are a lot of people to help you. It is with great sadness that I’ve learned of the passing of Vicki Piper on 15 February 2020. She was a huge help here, contributing many indexes and doing look-ups from hard-to-find books. She will definitely be missed. Edit: Her obituary is no longer available at the Marshall Democrat-News site. My Christmas present this morning — apparently another section of the site is down due to, I think, some kind of server update. How long has it been down? I have no clue. As is usually the case, the error message isn’t helpful at all. Also, as is usually the case, no one noticed or cared enough to let me know there was a problem. I’ve had a suspicion for a long time, and am again reminded, that the only users for the site are me, a couple of dedicated contributors (Monica and Justin) and the Google bot. So I’m thinking I’m going to be taking a break for a few months. Actually, not much happening this past month of October, and probably pretty quiet for the rest of the year. I’m taking some time off to watch old Hitchcock movies and read silly books. 🙂 The problems with the Google Newspaper Archive continue, but we still got a few newspaper death notice indexes from Monica. Added the Standard Atlas of 1905 and 1930 Plat Book to Morgan County, and the Morgan County sections from History of Cole, Moniteau, Morgan, Benton, Miller, Maries and Osage Counties, Missouri, Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1889. The Photograph Andrew County Tombstones (PACT) Project pages, including the obituaries, are no longer in a bunch of difference places. It’s going to be a bit of a shock for old users (we’ve already heard from a couple), but it is actually better once you get used to it. New users will wonder what all the fuss was about. 🙂 Updated some Carter County cemeteries with photographs. Added the 1877, 1897 and 1930 plat map books for DeKalb County. . . . [Yes! There’s more!] It’s been a busy month! I wish I had a kewl prize to offer if you make it through the whole thing. 🙂 Google Newspaper Archive: As you might know, Monica makes extensive use of the Google Newspaper Archive to index the death notices in the old newspapers for us. A few weeks ago, she started having problems with it and it’s become pretty much unusable at this point. There’s a discussion thread about it in the Google forums — and it’s not just her having issues. While it doesn’t appear anyone with any clout from Google is weighing-in, we hope you will. Interesting that the comments indicate it’s genealogy researchers who are using that archive, eh? Facebook Changes: Facebook recently made a change that no longer allows for automatic posting of blog posts to the Facebook page. It’s still possible to add the posts to . . . [Yes! There’s more!] Lots of stuff happened in July. Well, I think it’s lots — you might not. 🙂 The Morgan County MOGenWeb project now resides in three places, which is going to be confusing for the time being. The Rootsweb site is back up and while Rootsweb was down, most of the material was moved to the MOGenWeb.org server. Once the material has been harvested from Rootsweb, and once I can get logged into MOGenWeb.org, those will be deleted and redirected, so please update your bookmarks. I spent the better part of July, as with most of the past months, working on the St. Mary’s Cemetery in Hurlingen, Buchanan County, Missouri. I could probably work on this cemetery for another year and still not call it “finished.” Monica, as always, was busy indexing newspapers and we have these gems from her: Work has begun on cleaning up the Morgan County MOGenWeb project pages and moving them from the MOGenWeb server. There is a lot of information there, so it will take awhile. Most of the email addresses on the Surnames list and the links to researchers’ pages are broken — some as a result of the Rootsweb problems, and also because they were abandoned long ago. There’s contact information on almost every page for County Coordinators who are no longer active. Unfortunately, there continues to be a problem accessing the old site on MOGenWeb to update those pages. Your patience is appreciated while that gets resolved. Are you doing research in Morgan County? Do you have a personal website that contains information about families or places there? We will be happy to link to your site, the only requirement being that your page must deal . . . [Yes! There’s more!] This month was spent almost exclusively researching the families buried in the Saint Mary’s Cemetery, Buchanan County. There’s a lot of merging going on as we find parents, children and siblings, the main goal being to establish the maiden names of the ladies who died before the death certificates were available. As always, there were plenty of updates to the Andrew County cemeteries because Monica stays on top of that! She also finished up her index for the 1913 Death Notices from the St. Joseph Gazette, St. Joseph News-Press, St. Joseph Observer and The Eye and has commenced work on 1914. Yay! We finished transferring what we could find for the Carter County MOGenWeb project, formerly hosted at Rootsweb, from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. A lot of the MOGenWeb county sites are down and/or lost because of loss of their Rootsweb hosting, and a significant percentage of them need County Coordinators. Larry Flesher, the Missouri State Coordinator, would love to hear from you if you can help! We heard from Justin Watkins this month and he submitted some additions/corrections for the DeJarnette Family Cemetery in Pettis County. In the good news/bad news department, he also asked, “What happened to the pictures?” This is how I found out that some database changes back in August 2016 broke many of the Pettis County cemeteries, and probably other counties as well. I really don’t know, at this point, how extensive the damage is or how long . . . [Yes! There’s more!] Monica Schirmer Eshelman spends most of her day indexing St. Joseph, Missouri, newspapers using the free Google News Archive. As she completes each year, she sends them to me, I turn them into PDFs, and they’re uploaded to the Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society website and the Cousin Collector Media Library. She’s also started maintaining the Great and Powerful Index Index of all surnames in her yearly indexes, the latest being for the years 1845-1912. She’s working on 1913 now. As with most things, what’s clear to some is not so clear to others, and that seems to be the case with these indexes. Monica gets a lot of email from lost souls. 😀 The death notices themselves are freely available from the Google News Archive. At the top of each index page is a list of the newspapers . . . [Yes! There’s more!] All of my efforts to date to get a handle on the bots and site scrapers can only be classified as an epic fail. They are determined and they are legion and they are automated. And they consume alarming amounts of bandwidth. In the past, I tried requiring user registration for the TNG section of this site, but that wasn’t working. If registration was open, I was deluged by spammers. If registration required administrative approval, it never failed people wanted “in” while I was sleeping. Or working. I do sleep and work. 🙂 So, in a bit of a comprise, I’ve settled on requiring a login BUT it’s sweet and simple. You don’t need to register! Just follow the instructions on the login page and you’re in in the time it takes to type ten characters. Let’s you in and hopefully keeps them out. Since I implemented . . . [Yes! There’s more!] Most of Rootsweb is still down and the Carter County MOGenWeb project was one of the casualties. The content has been resurrected via ample use of the The Great and Powerful Wayback Machine and is now available once again. It’s quite a relief that it was possible to recover all that data. Julie Huggins and her mother, Daisy Samples Andersen, did a TON of work on the cemeteries, and those records are priceless! Monica’s latest project has been to index the surnames from her death notices in St. Joseph, Missouri, newspapers indexes, The Index Index! The 1845-1911 Surname Index for Death Notices in St. Joseph MO Newspapers is now online. I don’t know where she finds the time! As was anticipated, Ben Glick’s Dropbox account is now no longer available. The transcriptions are still available from the Carnegie Public Library site, though I don’t know how recent they are — Ben was constantly updating them. Ben Glick’s photos and cemetery transcriptions for Gentry County and Worth County, Missouri, have now been uploaded to the Gentry County MOGenWeb and Worth County MOGenWeb project sites. He also prepared a surname index. These pages should load relatively quickly, even on dial-up. If you do get a 500 or 504 server error, simply reload the page as some of the cemeteries and documents are quite large. It is with great sadness that we report that Ben Glick, a great friend to anyone doing research in Gentry and Worth counties in Missouri, passed away on September 27, 2017. While we had discussed including his photos and cemetery transcriptions on site, the sheer volume of material and his frequent updates made that impractical. However, in order to preserve his work, we’re now in the process of uploading it. Monica Schirmer Eshelman has sent in her abstract of the 1906 deaths mentioned in the St. Joseph Gazette and the St. Joseph News-Press. She has since commenced working on 1905 which should arrive soon, considering her dedication! In my PACT Project Update at the end of December, I mentioned I was contemplating a hectic year and needed to get organized in a hurry. Not only am I still not organized, but this year so far has greatly exceeded my expectations busy-wise — and it’s only just started! Adding to that, I’ve been unable to work on my personal research with any regularity for about five years. I’ve got boxes of stuff to scan and document, as I’m endeavoring to Go Digital. For one thing, my printer went feets up, so printing everything like I used to isn’t an option. I also got the “bug” again the other day when I had to dig through one of those boxes. I found what I was looking for (and I’m going to write about it soon, as it’s so KEWL!), but I also found a ton of stuff . . . [Yes! There’s more!] Monica Schirmer Eshelman has sent in her abstract of the 1895 deaths mentioned in the St. Joseph Missouri Herald and Daily News. She’s able to work faster because there are now only two newspapers, but also because the further you go back, the fewer obituaries and death notices are available. But she still parties on! Thanks, Monica! 1895 Death Notices in the St. Joseph, Missouri Herald and Daily News Monica Schirmer Eshelman has sent in her abstract of the 1896 deaths mentioned in the St. Joseph Missouri Herald, Gazette and Daily News. Got the email I’ve been waiting for — the 1966 Missouri death certificates have been scanned and are ready for indexing. In the past, if you didn’t get on it pretty quickly, you were left out. It only took two or three days to get the job done. However, now they are also indexing the parents’ and spouses’ names, among other things, so it takes longer, but it’s well worth it. It also gives you plenty of time to help! You can email Kelsey Berryhill, the volunteer coordinator, to add your name to the list of volunteers. Thanks for the help! 🙂 Monica Schirmer Eshelman has sent in her abstract of the 1898 deaths mentioned in the St. Joseph Missouri Herald, Gazette and Daily News. Monica Schirmer Eshelman has sent in her abstract of the 1897 deaths mentioned in the St. Joseph Missouri Herald, Gazette and Daily News. |
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