The Amelia County, Virginia VAGenWeb Project is now located at http://www.usgenwebsites.org/vagenweb/ and is available for adoption.
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The St. Joseph Public Library has been indexing obituaries for the St, Joseph News-Press and St. Joseph Gazette. The Obituary Search has been down for maintenance for quite a long time. I actually wrote them a few months back to ask if it was gone for good. Thankfully, that turns out not to be the case, and it’s back! Not all years are indexed, but it’s a great resource, especially for those “dead years” between 1985 and 2010 for the News-Press. Edit: The link for the obituary search is no longer active. The database may still be available, but I couldn’t find it. While Rootsweb itself has been down more than it’s been up for a couple of years, the mailing lists have been a mess for a lot longer than that. They’re active again, it appears, but in what way, shape or form remains to be seen. The mirrored emails from the message boards in the past have been stripped to the point of being illegible. Whether or not they will even be mirrored anymore I haven’t been able to tell. Have you? Monica let me know today that she gets inquiries from people who want copies of the articles listed in her death notices indexes. Good news! The newspapers from which these indexes are created are available free online at the Google News Archive! Didn’t know about that? With this new resource and the 1967 Missouri death certificates online, your weekends are booked for months to come. 🙂 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!] Jessica Reynolds has completed her final segment on how she created the family history binder as a gift for her father-in-law. The posts address the materials she used and how to obtain them, the how and why of her dividers, sections on photos, timelines, maps, and the documents she included — the last one being the one I was waiting for. 😀 It’s a wonderful project and she’s set forth great ideas on how to handle such things as including information on photos in an easily accessible and readable way. Even though she says she created the blog to as an easy way to answer the flood of questions she received when she first mentioned her project in The Organized Genealogist Facebook group, I’m just guessing we might see more of her creative ideas posted on her blog. I, for one, am going to continue to follow . . . [Yes! There’s more!] I was so excited to read this morning on Dick Eastman’s blog that Oklahoma has finally thrown a bone to home bound genealogists with roots there. Unfortunately, the interface isn’t easy to use. Oh, the form fields are clearly labeled, etc., BUT in my last attempt, I got an error message that the search resulted in 17 results and the parameters needed to be adjusted accordingly. Um . . . Good luck if you’re looking for a “Smith” or “Jones” with a name that changes with every census enumeration. That said, it’s a start. We who embrace this “hobby” are nothing if not determined. Last week, Jessica Reynolds posted information in The Organized Genealogist Facebook group about a family history binder that she made for her father-in-law for Christmas. It really is amazing. Her post generated so much interest and questions about how she did it, she’s created a blog about her process called Do as I’m Doing. This is great news for those of you who aren’t on Facebook. Her father-in-law, of course, was thrilled with the gift. What a great idea! I was chatting with Monica via email the other day. She was telling me that some family property was sold in the early 1900s and it resulted in only $500. I was thinking, considering how many people had to share that, it was hardly worth fighting for — she said they each received maybe $20. I was suddenly reminded that what is “only” to us today might have actually been quite a lot 100+ years ago, and set about looking for a currency converter. Turns out, in today’s dollars, the sale brought in about $12,500 and each heir would have received about $500. Now we’re talking some money for most of us. That reminded me of a distribution for one of “my” families in the 1880s. I haven’t yet figured out where that money came from, but it was a total of $2,000, $50,000 in today’s dollars. Now . . . [Yes! There’s more!] Missouri Digital Heritage has launched the Missouri State Penitentiary database! This database is an index of the penitentiary records, and includes mug shots when available, but they weren’t taken as a matter of course until 1928. Unlike the death certificates project, PDFs of the records aren’t available online, but obtaining the records is easy and cheap: a buck and an envelope. I love the Missouri State Archives! |
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