ANCESTRY HINTS ~ Do you take advantage of this resource?

Maybe it’s only me, but sometimes I get in a rut with my research.  I sit down at my computer, look at my Legacy database, and try to decide who I’m going to work on today.  Or, maybe there was some note I wrote yesterday that’s on my desk that I need to go back to.

What would give me a fresh look and a new direction?  How about looking at my hints on Ancestry?

Do you look at your hints on Ancestry? 
Do you go through all of them?

Here’s what I am in the habit of doing.  I will see a new number up by the “shaky leaf” at the top right of the screen.  I’ll click on that to see what names pop up.  Generally, it’s people in a group I have recently worked on.  I may or may not look at the hint.  I rarely scroll through the hints list or use the other options available to us.  

My habit is to look at the hints, from the Facts page, for whichever ancestor I am currently working on. 

Here is what showed up for me today in the way of current hints.

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I do see two people on that list that I was working with yesterday.  Mary Johnston and Addison Boggs.

Next, I clicked on “See all recent hints in” and selected my primary tree on Ancestry.

That brought up this screen.



WOW!  That’s 13,905 hints total. 
I have 3,535 people in this tree.  NOTE:  I use my Ancestry trees for connections & sharing with cousins, gathering hints and for my DNA.  My primary records are all in Legacy, on my computer.  Any record I find on Ancestry is downloaded to my computer, saved in the appropriate digital folder and added & sourced in my Legacy program.  Ancestry is simply a tool for me.
I have to admit that I don’t do a lot of fiddling with the hints page.  However, maybe I should.
 
You can sort by

• Most recent
• Last name
• First name

Or you can filter by name.

These are all very helpful ways of focusing on a particular ancestor.
 
I love working with and finding photos for my ancestors. I see from the hints page that I have 1730 PHOTO hints.  Let’s take a look at those.  I didn’t sort these in any order, however, you do have that option.

In looking at the first 10 pages of 87 pages of photo hints, most of them were familiar.  They were images that have been added by me and then saved to other trees, or added by cousins.  By the time I got to page 15 I was seeing some new items.
 
It was actually very difficult to not stop and take a look at those items instead of finishing this post.  Guess where I’ll be going back to when this is published?

What about STORIES?  I have 119 story hints.  Those might be interesting to take a look at.

I see lots of interesting items here.  Everything from abstracts of war pensions to lineage to divorce packets to an entry that says “attacked by Indians.”  Certainly many of those are worth looking at.
 
The bottom line is, I don’t take enough advantage of the options offered to us on this website.  Do you?

I’m off to investigate some of those stories and other hints right now.  Please share with me what your experience is and whether or not you use all the options on this website.

OTHER POSTS THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

OCCUPATION FILES ON ANCESTRY - 1600-1995 - What are they?  Have you seen these?

ADDING A RECORD TO LEGACY FROM ANCESTRY - A Step by Step Guide

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

HAPPY 179th BIRTHDAY TO MICHIGAN ~ The 26th state in our United States

My home state!

CLICK HERE TO LEARN 50 FACTS ABOUT MICHIGAN

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

NEW YORK NEWSPAPER LINKS ONLINE

New York!  I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of ancestors in both mine and my husband’s family, that have roots in New York.

It makes perfect sense because of all the immigrants that came in through the port of New York via Ellis Island.  That, of course, wasn’t the only port for our immigrant ancestors, but certainly an important one.  New York also being an early settlement, means many of our trails will lead back to that state.

There was a post recently on Facebook from Kenneth R. Marks who writes The Ancestor Hunt website and blog and has his Facebook site by the same name, click here for the link.

On January 15th he posted an article listing all the sites to find newspaper articles from New York.  There are over 1,000 FREE links for the state of New York.  Yes, FREE.

Here’s the link to that list New York Online Newspaper Summary

I’ve used the first collection, Old Fulton New York Postcards-Hidden Gems, extensively and wrote a blog post about using that particular site.  I’ve found dozens are newspaper articles and obituaries for my family.  However, I wasn’t aware of the many other sites to find my New York ancestors in newspapers.

As an example, using The Ancestor Hunt website, I selected Erie Buffalo NY Courier 1888-1926 to search for my husband’s family, the Finks or Dollers.  When I clicked on the link this is what I found.

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I selected the very first icon for the 1888 edition.  What I see next is this.



It appears, as I click on each of these icons, that this is the complete scanned version of this newspaper, page by page.  The third PDF icon led me to page 1 of the August 26, 1888 edition.  I used CNTRL F to try a search on the page and found out these images have been OCR’d.  Therefore, a search is possible.

It is certainly a slow process, if you are going to search each and every page of a particular edition.  Sometimes this may be necessary.  However, using the methods I displayed in my blog post, going directly to the Old Fulton Postcard website directly, is much more efficient.  In doing a search directly on that site this morning, I located a death notice for my husband’s great grandmother from 1950.



Here’s a close up of Bertha’s name.  This shows us the month, the date and the place of her death.  Oct. 6, in Alden.



As you can see and probably already know, newspapers are one of our best sources for finding information on our ancestors.  Whether it’s the date & place of their death, their marriage, a business they may have owned, a lawsuit they were involved in, an accident or the birth of a child, newspapers were the social media of the day.

I’d love to hear about how newspapers have assisted you with your ancestor’s stories.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY ~ Library Collections

My husband’s father’s family came to San Diego, California between 1910 and 1917. His father, Gordon, was the third child born to Charles & Daisy Bright Hall.  The two older children were born in Pennsylvania.
 
My husband has always said that his father was a cheerleader for the San Diego State Aztecs.  Those were the days when cheerleaders were men and not the girls we see today.

I’ve always wanted to find an SDSU yearbook to try and locate a picture of Gordon during his time in college.

I looked in the yearbook collection on Ancestry.com and didn’t find anything.  However, today I was re reading Gordon’s funeral notice and I read that he was a member of Phi Lambda XI while he attended the university.  AH HA!!

That is information I don’t remember seeing before.  It’s always amazing to me what stands out when I go back over records. 
I decided to conduct a web search for Phi Lambda XI.  I used Google and saw that the second link on the page looked promising.

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Once I clicked on that I was taken to the San Diego State Library Digital Collections page.  OH BOY!  What can I find here?



I clicked on “Collections” and found that this digital library is jam packed with information.  However, the one item I was looking for were the yearbooks.  I scrolled down the page and THERE THEY WERE!

What does that say underneath the image?
  
"San Diego State yearbooks from 1902 to the last published in 1984."



And there they were.  All layed out on the page with the cover of each edition and the year. 



You are able to select the edition you’re interested in and view it or download it.  You can look at each individual page or use the dropdown menu in the upper left corner to advance any number of pages.



I was not able to locate Gordon Hall’s picture in the class photos for 1932, 1933, 1934 or 1935.  In order to find out if he appeared elsewhere in any of the books I will have to go through page by page as there isn’t a table of contents or an index in the editions I looked at.

According to his son, Gordon did not graduate.  I wonder what took him away from his studies?

If you have ancestors from San Diego, who attended San Diego State, this is a wonderful resource.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

COUNTING NAMES ~ How many of your immediate family given names are in your tree?

Family names.  Of my immediate family, parents, siblings and me, how many others in my family tree have the same given names that we do?

My parents – Harry & Patricia

My siblings & me – Diane, Harry, Norlaine, Virginia & John

In order to create this list I used the Search tab in my Legacy 8 program.  Then I used Find, Detailed Search and entered my criteria.  I didn’t use any middle names when creating my lists because I used the criteria “contains,” which will find both first and middle names.

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Please refer to my blog post about using the Legacy 8 search feature for more details. This will give you step by step details on searching.
Legacy 8 - The Search Function - What Can You Find?

Here are the lists created by searching my family names.


JOHN

HARRY

PATRICIA

VIRGINIA

DIANE

NORLAINE

My oldest sister, Norlaine, was named combining my father’s middle name, Norman and his wife, Elaine.  I have never found anyone else with her given name.

By the numbers, here’s what I found.
John – 203
Harry – 20
Patricia – 7
Virginia – 6
Diane – 5
Norlaine – 1

No big surprise that John was the most numerous name.

Have you ever run this kind of report on your family names?  If so, what did you find?

OTHER POSTS THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Name Lists - How to use them in your research

Birth records with incorrect names - What would you think?

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION 

HAPPY 6th BLOGIVERSARY TO ME ~ 2010-2016

Hard to believe it's been six years since I began.  I wrote a few posts those first 3 yrs, but only got "really" serious in the fall of 2013.  Since then I've had so much fun.

• Blogging has made me a better researcher
• I've gotten to know some wonderful people in the blogging world
• I've had cousins contact me, who otherwise may never have found me
• I've discovered a love for writing that I didn't know I had

What could be better than all of that?

THANK YOU READERS

THANK YOU FELLOW BLOGGERS FOR SHARING MY POSTS

Here's to another year of discoveries and connections.

HERE'S A LOOK BACK AT SOME OF MY FIRST FEW POSTS 

My Very First Post - http://www.michiganfamilytrails.com/2010/01/blogging-about-family-research-day-1.html 

How to Find A Maiden Name & Locating a Marriage Record 

Breaking Down A Brick Wall 

Cheers,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

STEVE MORSE’S ONE-STEP WEBSITE ~ If you thought it was only for passenger records–Think again!

When I began doing family research I tried to learn as much as I could.  One of the first things I remember hearing about was Steve Morse’s One Step site for finding passenger records.  The site combined the records from Ellis Island and Castle Garden, making searching easier.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW

Oh, how this webite has changed over the years.

IF YOU HAVEN’T VISITED LATELY I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU TAKE A LOOK

HERE ARE JUST SOME OF THE GREAT RESOURCES YOU WILL FIND

• Passenger lists, not just from Ellis Island and Castle Garden, but Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and more
• Ships lists and photos
• Census information including images, ED finders, maps and more
• Some Canadian and UK census records
• New York Census records
• Some vital records
• All kinds of calendar conversions, zip codes, area codes etc.
• Foreign Alphabet translations
• DNA informaton, publications and more

Let me show you one example of how this site can help you.

I need to find a death record for my great granduncle, Vincent F. Thorp.  I have a Cook County, Illinois, Death Index that tells me he died on 4 Dec 1910 in Chicago, Cook, Illinois.  The index gives me enough information for me to believe this is the right person.  The index does include an FHL film number.

I could go to the Cook County, Illinois website and try to locate a certificate number.  NOTE:  I happen to know that the death record images from this year are not online.

I went to Steve Morse’s site and looked under Vital Records (in the list on the left hand side of the home page).  Then went to Illinois Death Records (pre 1916)

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That takes me to the next screen, where I fill in information to try and locate my record.
 
TIP:  I generally begin with a broad net when I search.  Based on the requirement listed for this set of records, all I entered was a first name and the first two letters of the last name.



Will that be enough information?  Let’s find out.

YES!  Look what came up in my search!!



This certainly looks like the right guy to me, based on the death index.
 
Now I can order a death certificate using that certificate number.
So, now you know, if you didn’t already, that the Steve Morse website is about a LOT more than passenger records.

Please let me know if you’ve used this website lately.  If so, what did you find?

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

DETROIT ~ Street Addresses Renumbered in 1921–Here’s a list with the old and new numbers

Here’s a quick tip for those of you with ancestors who lived in Detroit, Michigan.

On January 1, 1921 new address numbers were assigned to many streets in Detroit.  There is an explanation at the beginning of this book as to why this was done.

So, if your ancestor was living at 107 Clarendon Avenue N. prior to the renumbering in 1921, the new address would be 8868 Clarendon Avenue N.  That’s quite a change.
 
This kind of change would have to be recorded in our family history in order to properly represent the location.  Sort of similar to when all the county lines changed over the decades.

NOTE:  Any location we list for our ancestors should always be recorded as it was at the time.  Not, as it was later on.  This is true of cities, counties, states, countries or street addresses.

This list for Detroit is published by Steve Morse on his website stevemorse.org.  We are all familiar with Steve Morse for his publication of immigration information from Ellis Island and Castle Garden.  But, his website contains much more than that now.

Here is a list of the resources on this site for Detroit, Michigan.



Here is the direct link to the PDF containing those old to new numbers.  Detroit Old and New House Numbers effective 1 Jan 1921.  It downloaded pretty quickly for me.  I immediately saved it to Evernote and tagged it for easy reference.

I didn’t know about this specific resource until it was posted on one of the many genealogy Facebook pages I belong to.  In this case it was the Detroit Genealogy group.  My thanks to Richard Nolan for sharing it.

I think I’ll go back to the Steve Morse site right now and see what other hidden resources he has that I didn’t know about.

OTHER POSTS THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Detroit Free Press Newspaper Now Onine - 1837-2015

City Directories - A Treasure Trove of Genealogical Information

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

TOMBSTONE TUESDAY ~ John Russell 1743-1822 ~ Lawrence County, Ohio

PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT WISEMAN

John Russell – 15 Dec 1743 to 28 Nov 1822

Age about 79 years

John Russell  is my 3rd great grandaunt’s husband’s father.  Not a blood relation or real close relative.  However, he just happens to be the person I was looking at today in my family tree.  He is buried, along with his wife, Patience, in Russell Cemetery, Aid, Lawrence County, Ohio.

He married first Susannah Day, unknown date, and they had 6 known children: James, John, Lawrence, Rachel, Esther and Elizabeth.  Next he married Patience Piles (15 Feb 1773 to 19 Sep 1852) – to them were born Jemima, Anne, Jane, Armilda, Thomas, Manoah Bostic, Samuel, Jeremiah, Sanders, Francis and James.

It is their son, Thomas, who married my 3rd great grandaunt, Lucinda Boggs.

I have a LOT of ancestors from the Lawrence County, Ohio area.  Many of their descendants are members of The Lawrence Register Facebook page.  We communicate and share information all the time.  They are a wonderful group of people.

 

TIP:  I encourage every researcher to take advantage of the groups on Facebook for the areas where your ancestors lived.  Some are more active than others.  But, you will find connections and very helpful people in most of them.  At least that has been my experience.

Now, time to explore a little more about this Russell family and their descendants.

OTHER POSTS THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

A GREAT DISCOVERY - Ask for Help and You Just Might Get It!

MYSTERY MONDAY - Who's Your Daddy?  Brick Wall Post #3 - Rev. Isaac C. Hunter 1798-1842

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

TUESDAY'S TIP ~ Legacy 8 ~ How To Determine When You Last Modified a Record

A quick tip for today.

I was researching a particular line of my family, that I’d not looked at in quite a while.  I don’t have any general or research notes on this person, so I wondered when I had last looked at her. 

Here’s how to find out.

From the Family View – click in the very lower right hand corner, in the blank area, next to the M:1.

 (CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT)

This is the screen you will see next.

Now I know that I have not looked at this ancestor since I entered her into my database on 1 Aug 2011.

HERE'S ADDITIONAL INFORMATION I RECEIVED AFTER I POSTED THIS - If you are reviewing a person in your database, but you haven't made any changes, if you click "save" it will change the modified date.  If you click "cancel" the modified date will remain the same.  I have a habit of clicking save every time I view anyone's record, but I think I will change that habit after learning this.  Sometimes, I'm just taking a look and I don't want the modified date to indicate changes were made.
 
It’s always kind of surprising when I see how long a time passes until I get back to a particular ancestor.  And, surprisingly, I don’t have a particularly large database, just 4796 people.  And, I research almost daily.

That your tip for today.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

IT'S TIME FOR THE YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT ~ FAMILY STATISTICS FOR 2015 - HOW DID I DO?

This is a topic first shared by Randy Seaver on his Genea-Musings blog.  I enjoy seeing my progress for the year, so I’ve taken a look at these numbers for the last 3 years.

These various reports that I generate in Legacy 8 will tell me how much progress has been made in my family tree.

HERE IS THE REPORT FROM 2014

 Have I made progress in my research?

• Have I added more people/individuals?
• Do I have more Master Sources?
• How about my source citations, more or not?
• How does my percentage of citations compare to last year?

 




HERE IS MY REPORT FROM 2015 – Let’s compare

I see an increase in almost every number, so that’s good news.

One of the statistics I’m always interested in is my Citations.  Have they increased from last year to this year?  What is my percentage?
 
To get that number I divide the Citations by the Number of Individuals – 10834 divided by 4796.
 
That gives me a percentage rate, per person of 225.9%.  That’s an increase of +3.2% from last year.  This means I continue to cite my sources and have improved over last year.
 
Let’s take a look at the other numbers compared to last year.

	2014	2015	CHANGE
Number of Individuals	4363	4796	+433
Number of Families	1543	1681	+138
Unique Surnames	1143	1223	+80
Master Locations	1561	1742	+181
Master Sources	712	703	-9
Citations	9719	10834	+1115
Master Events	4228	4861	+633

I’m happy with what I see.  I’ve added 1.5 individuals per day, 3 citations per day and 1.7 events per day. I suspect the small drop in Master Sources is probably just me cleaning up my list, which I do regularly.

My primary goal has never been to see how many people I can have in my tree.  I’ve been researching for 12 years.  Since I’ve been retired these past six years, I research almost daily.  My primary concern is to document what I find and do thorough work, while growing the tree.  These results prove to me that I am meeting my goals.

DO YOU HAVE GOALS FOR 2016? 
If so, what are they?

• Better sourcing
• More people added to your tree?
• Go back & review the family members you added long ago?

Whatever they are, I wish you a successful year.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION