How Can I Sign Maine Banking Presentation

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hello and welcome to this installment of our webinar series what's new at americanancestores.org my name is jenevra morse i'm the vice president at american ancestors new england historic geological society for education and programming i'll be moderating today's event we are a non-profit organization supported by our members and donors we provide resources and expertise in nearly all aspects of family history and we are pleased to offer such programming for our members and friends around the world and before we begin i do want to note that we are broadcasting from our homes to your home uh with various limitations and distractions we do apologize in advance if there are any interruptions from our end and we thank you for your patience and if we do lose connection for any reason um not to worry you will still have access to a full recording on our website so our presenter today is don leclaire don works on our database collections and is responsible for the search experience on americanancestores.org he has 30 years of experience in the software industry working in and leading engineering and product management teams don is a longtime member of nehgs and enjoys tracing his ancestors through new england and new york so this webinar series is held every three months and reviews the most recent additions and changes to our award-winning website americanancestores.org after a brief introduction to our website don will highlight our newest databases and additions to our digital collections then we'll discuss a few projects that are in progress and wrap up with questions from our listeners at any point during the presentation feel free to type your question in the panel to the right of your screen we'll address those after the session there is no handout for this presentation but we are recording this event and starting tomorrow you can easily go back and review any of the content from the presentation on our website there's also a fantastic subject guide that i know don will point to on how to make the most of your searches on americanancestores.org so that's another resource that you have access to and if you missed anything on today's lesson of first listen you can always go back as i said and listen to the recording tomorrow so without further ado i will turn things over to dawn thanks very much welcome everyone i'm glad you joined us today for this update on what's new so given that it's a quarterly what's new webinar our focus will be on things that have been uh updated or brand new since between the periods of july through september so as we talked about in the agenda just a moment ago we'll be focusing on the search side of the database uh that we have databases that we have online as well as the digital library so the items appearing under these two circled items on our home page so we'll start off a little bit on the database side so under search we have a couple different ways to start you can many people jump right in and do search across all of our databases that's one way to go you also have an option to go into browse databases and we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a couple of minutes but i wanted to give you just a little bit of context about what do we have what the what are the databases that we have online and how do they fit and how might you use them so as of today we have 472 online databases so each database then represents a source of information would be vital records or a book in those databases we have about 1.4 billion searchable names at this point and you can see by the pie chart here what are some of the most prevalent databases we have so you can see the green wedge in this picture which is a little over half maybe 60 percent is vital records uh then we have things in the census tax and voter uh items on genealogies and biographies and then probably the next largest would be the court land and probate files probate collections so that gives you sort of a scope in terms of what kinds of information we have and then the locations we go forward certainly there's a lot of this uh the content is focused on the united states but we do certainly have content from around the world including um uh various places in europe germany england scotland and so on and as well it goes across pretty much all the states in the united states so it's a it's a wealth of information that we have for you to search now we're not going to really go into depth on how to do searching we just did a webinar on that a couple months ago but i just want to make sure if anyone's joining us today that's relatively new to american ancestors that you know how to get to some of those uh bits of information to help you to get the most out of your investment in search so if you look under the learn menu which is circled in red here under the webinars lectures and how to's you can see the red arrow you can click on resources at american ancestors and when you get to that then there's a section here there's a the searching databases at americanances.org and this was a webinar that was given by my co-worker molly rogers does a great job which really gets into a fair amount of detail on how to do searches different techniques and some advanced techniques for searching to help you out and then also on that same same area you can see on the lower right hand corner there we have a link to that study guide or the research guide on how to make a make the most out of search so this is essentially a text version or a reference version of how to do search and you can read through it from top to bottom but you have here at the top of the page um a set of topics that are linked to so if you just wanted to check into how do i use wildcards for example you go click on the using wildcards it'll tell you how to use that in your to help you with your search and filtering down your results in search so that gives you an update on how to search and then the other thing i just wanted to point out is that the things that we're presenting today are uh various projects that we've announced and released over the last quarter and if you're interested in getting hearing about them as they come out we have a blog it's a dbnews.americanancestores.org and then this whenever we post a new database or an update to an existing database you'll see it appear on the blog page here and they're obviously in date sequence and if you'd like to further be alerted and when there's something new to go looking for you can just enter your email address into that bar there hit subscribe and you'll get an email when as soon as that update comes out so it's a good way to take advantage of uh timely updates and introductions to what comes out and added in the online databases so that's a very brief discussion about uh what's how to go about doing searching and how you can stay current with our updates let's now jump into what's happened in july through september in our database area so i did mention there were a couple different ways to find databases one of the things i think could be very helpful somewhat underutilized based on my exposure and talking to some of us is the browse databases a to z which you can see highlighted here underneath the search menu so this gives you a searchable list of all the databases that we have and you can use that so if you're if you hear about a new database and you want to go and you you're not exactly sure which one it was you can go into this search page and be able to find the database you're looking for either based on the name or based on additional information like something that's referenced in the citation text or in the description of that database and so the way that works is in this searchable field you can either put all or part of a name or just when you start typing it starts narrowing that list from the over 400 databases down to the ones that meet your search criteria so here for example i started type the word roman is in roman catholic and i i mean immediately get a list of all of the databases that we have that are related to roman catholic uh records in our databases and that just also happens to be we're going to be starting off today in terms of what's new so the biggest project we've been doing in in my time here at nhgs has been indexing and producing all of the records for the archdiocese of boston the catholic archdiocese based headquartered in boston so in over the last quarter we have produced added 15 new parishes with 87 new volumes of information so as of the end of september we have over 866 indexed volumes and 10.3 million searchable names so this has been a a pretty remarkably large project that we've had and during this quarter we also met a major milestone so our original agreement with the archdiocese is that we would only index things through 1900 and then about a year ago we agreed to extend that so we can actually index records up through 1920. so as of this quarter we've now actually finished that first milestone so all of the parish records under archdiocese of boston through including the year 1900 are now indexed and available online and we've continued to do updates that move into the second phase which is indexing everything up through the year 1920. so it's been a really a wonderful project to go through we have found in many cases it's almost surprising to me that there's a lot of records that have been recorded in the archdiocese of austin that you don't find in vital records for one reason or another maybe it's particularly with some of the immigrant families as they were coming in in the late 1800s and whatnot they they didn't always get recorded in vital records so if you're trying to do family research and you think you may have some catholics in your background this could be a really excellent resource to work with and just as a quick indication of what the search page is like you can see here that we have uh pretty thoroughly indexed it this is the database specific search page so all of the terms here are relevant to uh things that we have indexed so you have first the usual first name last name year's record types which will span essentially potentially all of the sacraments catholic sacraments so that would include baptisms which usually have birth information in them marriages deaths times confirmations are included so uh quite a bit of information different kinds of record types location naturally and then we have things both the confirmation name so in in the case of confirmations we can see what someone was confirmed as and we also have captured family members rather extensively so the family members will include mothers fathers of spouses and witnesses uh for events which typically you see on the both on weddings and on baptisms and then if you page down and this is true of any one of our database search pages those happen to be showing it to you for um catholic records we provide information in terms of search tips so we'll explain um what is available to you in those search fields so for example what kinds of family members are typically indexed we'll show up here under the search tips we'll have a note on wildcard characters which can be very helpful for doing searches we have some sample pages so you can just see what the records in this database look like and then going on to a description of the database so if we go forward uh one of the interesting things about this database is that the uh the official language of the catholic church is latin which means that in a large percentage of these records the names are recorded with latin names so the record for example and we're showing here at the top of the page is dionysium which is the latin for dennis so we have to the best of our abilities captured the original latin from those texts and then provided the english translation which in some cases can be interesting because many of the latin names have multiple english equivalents so um when you're doing your searching it's a good thing to keep in mind in that you may find that um we have a perhaps a different translation than the english name that your your ancestor actually used when they were recorded into the record books of the catholic church and then the other thing that notices that this is an example of one of the pages one of the marriages so many of the early books are free form essentially free-form text written by the priest um they can be a little bit exciting to read but you will notice here that the text itself is actually in latin um and we have here in matrimonium the latin for that and you can see here the the name dionysium uh kelly so this is the kind of thing you will see yeah so perhaps maybe more than other databases that we have online the fact that we have uh indexed this it might cause you to look at the transcript to make sure that you're properly reading what you see here on the pages and you may you'll get some appreciation for the difference between these records and potentially uh records like vital records and that the priests don't always have beautiful handwriting where town clerks don't maybe not always have beautiful handwriting either but maybe they're a little better than some of these are so it can be a little bit of a challenge to read but still it's a really valuable resource and i think people will be able to get a lot of value out of it so the next new database we have is we have done work with the first congregational church of bosco in new hampshire so they actually approached us a little over a year ago we had done some work with the second congregational church of boston so it's a town in central new hampshire that was formed in 1740 and we have digitized 13 volumes of the church record books and some additional items like sunday school records as well as some other church groups like the women's christian temperance union so we have that information there it is fully indexed the one of the congregants at that uh church was a person by the name of daniel webster who you may have heard of uh so you can actually find some references to him he up when he first got his degree in law he settled in bosco and then and worked there for some time before going on to the rest of his rather famous career and this would be the search page for the the church records uh for the boscoin church we have similar to the catholic records at least where we have them we have family members have been captured so mothers fathers and spouses as well as the person's name most of the records will be in the town of basquin but there are occasional references to things that happened outside of that particular town so that the primary record types you'll see are births baptisms and marriages but there are also some information about deaths uh chur people who admissions and dismissals from the church some people who've moved in and out of the area as well as other information um which will just be recorded with a record type usually of a church record just being found the person's name uh referenced in some particular area and uh so it's you can have this opportunity to find a variety of different kinds of information uh because the church recorded a lot of different activities in the church not just the equivalent of the sacraments that the catholic church has had and this is available is online you can find this database in the search databases a to z and we have the link there as well so the next database we have for this quarter you just made it in at the end of september is the the completion of the project around the hebrew immigrant aid society so this was an organization in boston that helped um a lot of jewish families who were moving from europe either to boston or if you will going through boston out to other parts of the country so we had released a part of this uh collection about uh the end of last calendar year and then in september we released the final six volumes which was roughly 16 000 searchable names just about doubled the size of the database so it is now complete and we're really happy to have this set of information it's a time where there's a lot of activity as far as immigration into the united states so this was an excellent resource to find information about people where they came from and ideally where they were going to um we've been working with the jew sh heritage center about this or the weiner family jewish heritage center on this project and the parts that are in the database are the records from 1904 to 1929. after 1929 the uh he grew hebrew immigrant age society also known as hayas i started capturing information more in like a case study format so there was a free-form text as opposed to lists of passengers so those case studies are part of what we've been producing and saving in the digital library and archive so this is the case where we have related sets of records before and after 1929 part of it is in our online databases which we finished here and the other part is in the digital archive uh an ongoing project we've had is we call the the database is called the vital records from the nehgs register um this is a database that originally been around uh for many years and has essentially an extract of vital records and the difference between it and the regular numerators are genealogical register database is that this one has the actual dates of the events such as the date of birth or date of death whereas in our index for the register itself the index is based basically on the person's name and the year that that issue came out so if you had someone from uh in the volume 13 in 1859 you'd have their name and they would say 1859 that was the year the article was published the vital records database would actually take it a step further and say that well we had uh daniel woods born in 1745 we would have that birth date and the place for it so we started this project we've been going through and revising this database to index far more of the content that's in the register really sort of freeing that up or making it much more accessible and we released volumes 11 through 13 which added 54 000 new searchable names over what we had previously so the next couple of things we want to talk about is our research projects or study projects excuse me study projects are ongoing uh initiatives to go out and acquire information and enrich do a publication of original data on various folks the western massachusetts families the the topics are based on people or families that appeared in western massachusetts and were included in the 1790 census um helen allman is the editor of this and here you can see a list of the uh roughly a dozen new sketches that were presented so the the structure of this particular database is that we have a sketch or a few pages about each person they come out in in this online database and then periodically as we have a sufficient number of new families written up then we produce a new volume of this book series so you can see on the right hand side of the screen the cover of the volume 3 of this database excuse me of this study project which came out last year and then uh you can see some more information about uh this project one of the interesting things about this project if you go to look do a little bit of reading about this the study project itself is that this uh helen the editor of this helen allman will take sketches written by other interested parties so if you've been doing research or you have fam history in your family in the late 1700s in western massachusetts then you might be interested in submitting a sketch and work with helen to having that included in the project so we have a reference here to where that study project is defined then you can see then that we have a place you can go enter a submission and then helen will get in touch with you to work out the details in the early new england families study project this is done by alicia crain williams this one is really is based on families that came um or excuse me that are included in the tories new england marriages prior to 1700. so the organization here is we produce sketches about these families for which they're if you've ever looked at the tories book or manuscript it's very terse it will list a person who they married and where with some uh abbreviated uh references to where uh torrey found that marriage information so what uh alicia crane williams who's the author of this one's been doing is put out producing more full uh formed sketches about these uh these couples and their families so you can get a more thorough view of who they were where they lived and who their children were so in the last quarter we introduced two new ones uh edward bishop who lived in salem in beverly and then richard hyde of salem and here you notice that the we have a reference to the year they were married which is part of the uh the definition of what that sketch is so you can so we have the name of the person the town and the year they were married which is essentially how they appeared in the torres book so if you look at the the to search this database there's really a couple of ways you can navigate it if you hear the presentation like today or through db news you know there's a new sketch available you can just go to the right hand side in the volume pull down list so you can see the list of all of the available sketches so the sequence of the sketches is alphabetical by last name so you can browse through them that way and then given that there's a relatively small number of sketches so you know a few hundred sketches it's not too hard to go find the one you're looking for of course you also have the option of using the normal search which will find the subject of the sketch as well as anyone else that's referenced in that scratch sketch including the children of that family so if i search here for example for richard hyde then i can see the information about richard hired the specific records i can see here his marriage information in 1641 and one of the things that is provided in this particular database is that you can uh from the search results directly download the pdf of that sketch so you you can you go to the page and look at it or you can download the pdf directly from the search results page that is something that is just we've always done that for this database it's not something that's typically available for all of our study projects but we last year we introduced a print range feature and you can now do a print range from any place within any of our databases and print out a set of ranges and if you target that print to a pdf you can download the results as a pdf so that covers the new databases that we've produced in this quarter i we also have a new search feature that i'd like to mention today we call it saved records and basically this is this opportunity to uh find things or save something that you find for your own future reference i guess i would describe it for myself it seems like it's pretty typical when i'm searching for something on one person i say i sort of see some record or some other thing that seems interesting i'd like to go read about it and rather than uh have to write that down or get distracted from my immediate goal i could have to write some go figure out where that thing is and take a look at it so saved record gives you now a way to save one or as many records as you want off have them memorize then be able to come back and find them later the feature is available on the record display page so if you've done a search which we're showing here we've done a we found a record for ruth goodly goodly um if i click up on this top right button where it says save record then it goes into my saved record list and that's really all you need to do it's now saved and you can come back and find it to find them again if you go to the advanced search screen up at the top right hand corner of the advanced search page we have a new button there that says saved records it's right next to the saved searches which we're not going to talk about today but we had the we've had the facility for some time to save and name uh search but now we have the ability to save individual records that's the new feature that we've added so if you're on advanced search and you click on the saved records button then that will take you down to the set of saved records that you have so if you look at this you'll you'll note that it looks remarkably like the search results page i have a hyperlink with the record with the name it tells you what database it came from it will tell you the volume in the database and the page it came from so and then off on the right you see a created date that was the date that you actually saved that into your saved records uh uh list and then you can from from this page either then click on the name in this case click on ruth goodly and that would take me to her specific uh record or i can remove it from my saved records if i've already got you i've already processed this and i just forgot to delete it i can just click on remove from my records on this page and then that record will be gone and there's no limit to how many records you can save so i think it's a handy tool and i personally i think it helps you to stay a little more focused and not go off uh getting distracted by other interesting things while you're doing your research and reading through the records online now it's a related item um given that that is set from the record display page we wanted to make it as convenient as possible to get to the record display page so if you have been browsing through a set of images or looking at the transcripts we change the transcript display page so that the entry uh has a hyperlink on the name and that hyperlink will take you from that transcript which would list all of the people on a page back to the record display page for that individual person so in this case for example if i browsing through messages final records i see someone with the last name of gaspar which i'm interested in oddly enough there's no first name with it if i just click on gasper then that will take me down to the page with that particular record with you can see the full transcript for this particular record so then you can hit the save record button if it is indeed something you would like to save but another nice uh point of this is is if there's an annotation on the record then you would see that annotation many of you may have seen annotations before but a little over one or two years ago we added this feature that if we see something that is wrong in the source document and one of our books that we can add an annotation to it to identify a correction so in this particular case this is massachusetts vital records the the gender actually first name of this child uh casper is not recorded so we have the name is highlighted in yellow that says there's an annotation on the name and it tells you at the bottom then what the annotation and there could be multiple annotations if necessary they'll tell you that we believe the child was actually female even though it was blank in the vital records and then there's a reference with a hyperlink in it in this case to go see find anna gasper was listen to the 1900 census as a three-year-old female child in in that family so um that link from the transcript page would just help you get to uh to this page so you can save the records and then give you a chance to just see the actual case of an annotation if you will in action here on american ancestors so we're always interested in corrections or errors if you see any i think it's been mistranscribed we just fix those but if we see something where the transcription is correct but the underlying source is bad then we have this ability to add an annotation to the record when we have a link to an authoritative source so with that view on databases let me take let's take a look at the digital librarian archive uh last quarter we called this digital collections but let's provide a little more information about this so if you go to the la to the home page under library you can see digital book and manuscript collections and the difference i would say between the things you'll find in the digital uh the digital book and manuscript collections is that rather being records oriented databases these are family pacer papers or books where you could essentially be doing a full text search as opposed to a records oriented search and the materials come from one of several different areas within the organization so if i click on digital book manuscripts collection then that takes me to this page of what's now called digital library archive so we had a major revision to the software we use here which adds a variety of new features in a different somewhat different look and feel so if you've come here before you'll find it looks a little bit different than it did for example last quarter and we have a easy-to-remember url it's digital.americanancestors.org so if we look at i mentioned there were three different areas that we have uh content from in the digital uh library and archives so the first one is the weiner heritage weiner family jewish heritage center i mentioned earlier our work with them on the highest project hebrew immigrant aid society so those papers as well as many others are available under the heading of the jewish heritage center the our stanton avery special collections is a lot of our manuscripts here at nhgs and then the research library has been going through and digitizing and adding a variety of rare books uncommon books and making those directly available from this as well so you go to the digital library archives new opportunity to look across these or in in individual sections of the digital collections to see that information now as i mentioned we just have done a major upgrade this to this software and uh sally benny who works here at nhgs is the curator of our digital collections and she'll be giving a full webinar on this next month so maybe you could mark your calendars for november 19th to sign up for this class and hear more about really how to use search and take advantage of the new digital librarian archives so in terms of new content most of the in the last quarter the most of the content that we added or pretty much all the content we've added in the last couple of months few months have been in the area of the research library books and so the focus has been on family history oriented books so uh the first ones they mentioned here are um a book of essentially additions and corrections in this case to the descendants of peter mills written by helen schatfett allman who i mentioned earlier is the editor for our western massachusetts families database uh slug that branches the redway family tree and the berkshire vermont chaffee birch of vermont chaffees and their descendants by the chaffee association so these are three of the first three of the books that we have available to you if you're not familiar with this just if you see one of these books and you're interested in finding more a couple of ways to find it one is if you look at the top of the page on the digital library archives you can either just type in for example the name of the book in here and press search or you can press the search button up at the top right corner and go to the search specific page so i want to just if i want to look at that search specific page we can click forward and you will see the search so i do a search here for redway family tree and that happens to go directly to a total of one book so you can see here at the bottom this is the link to that book we have on the left hand side you can see that we have a small thumbnail of the title page of that book and then you can drill down and get into the details of that book if your search gets many results there's also some things to filter on the page or just need to filter the results and we'll let sally get into some of those details with you once you get into the book you can see here it opens to the initial page page one there are i circled in red on the left and right there are arrows you can use to page through the book to scroll through it essentially to read it you also see on the right hand side uh here that there are page images for each of the individual pages so you can use that to skip to a direct page and we always like to remind people to page down though if you go just below that view of the book then you can see that we have additional pages we also have the full description of the book which is in the terminology of the system as an object so you can get uch more information about who the authors were when it was published and other information links to the catalog other things about this particular book so very complete all in one one place information to look at the book as well as browse through all the pages in it so some additional books that came out uh in this quarter um things about the uh mason and denning's family um also the massey lee and extra families and then uh one on thomas mall if i hope i pronounced that correctly the salem quaker which is interesting uh perspective about free speech in massachusetts bay uh which i'm sure with a quicker background in early new england was could have been an exciting time and then addition to that um descendants of matthew marvin the howard family and the families of hogan so we have these nine different books that we've come out uh as part of our digital library and archive over the last three months and uh there's plenty more content in there a variety of different kinds so if you haven't taken advantage or browse through some of the information in the digital archive i would certainly encourage you to do that and as well to sign up for sally benny's webinar to hear even more about it next topic a little bit different from the above is um some library databases that are currently available from home um so if we look at this this is we've uh during the pandemic we've had some groups that have been willing to extend to our members the ability to go off and do searches on these external databases and so to find them if you look under the search menu there is an item here that says called special interest databases and if you click on that entry then you'll see a list of the special interest databases that we have so the ones that i'm focusing on for our discussion today are these during the coveted emergency the we've had arrangements with several groups to put these databases available make them available to you online as a member by uh going through the uh nhgs page to the american ancestors page to get to that specific database so we have the early american newspaper series uh history geo on maps and those sorts of things uh the parsham and notarial database and then proquest databases which include newspapers.com full three and historical newspapers so this full set of things are uh going to be available have been available for uh the last couple of months and will hopefully stay available for the next few months as we're all home many of us are home dealing with the pandemic so some additional resources that you can take advantage of for your research another thing that's useful that that has become available is the subject guides in some updates that we've made there so if you haven't been used we talked about the subject guide for how to use american ancestors but we also provide subject guides on how to do genealogical research in a variety of different both cultural groups as well as locations so if you want if you've not looked at the subject guides the way you will find them is you would start on the home page on the learn menu and you could just see here the expects expert subject guides for help history research you can click see all topics and this will give you then a list of all of the subject guides that we have available and that list changes over time so this is the top of that page there are general topics but then including using american ancestors.org and then you see here in the just below the or above the sort of fold there is the research on resources so this is things about different kinds of research you can see african american genealogy but if we now click down to the other locations we can see that we have things for new hampshire and different physical locations as well as different individual groups so one of the brand new research guides is main genealogy and generally speaking the structure of the research guides is very similar and that you have up at the top you have hyperlinks down to individual topics so essentially this is like a thinkable table of contents to what's in this guide this one being written by trisha healey starts off with a short introduction about maine and some key dates in maine history but you can then how do i find out about burial and cemetery records published genealogies various different kinds of things that you see here all focused around doing a research on maine so it's a great resource you're getting information from some of our our best genealogists who are really experts in the area and giving you some information to help you the next item that we added here in this category is research in the state of new hampshire this one by david lambert and tom dwyer same kind of context here in terms of the structure of information that's available one of the things to keep in mind is when we do these the the information we provide is not just information on how to do research on american ancestors.org it gives you information that you can information about resources outside of our own so other websites things that can help you with your research so it's really a useful tool another new one we have added is for the province of ontario and canada now in this one you can see here at the top we have some general topics on doing research in canada so there's a short section of things that are general uh pointers about how to do research in family history in canada and but then we get into the specific items about land records and periodicals and what not in the province of ontario itself this wouldn't be done by an others and rhonda mcclure on our staff and continuing in the canadian updates here we have a similar one from david lambert on the province of new brunswick which was originally part of nova scotia having recently been doing work with a variety of things on mayflower ancestors we had quite a number of our early settlers moved back and forth between new brunswick and nova scotia so oftentimes if you have new england connections you may also have connections into eastern canada so this could be very useful and then we've had one for prince edward island that we did an update to that one so originally done by marie daley also uh updated by melody mccomb so we've sort of covered the eastern end of uh canada very uh explicitly here with our subject guides and and uh so today we give you the highlights of what's new in that area and uh if you but if you're not familiar with what's out there then it might be a good place to go look and see if areas where you're getting stuck or having problems you can get some tips on how to do research in those areas so one of the last things i'd like to cover today is projects in process there's a little bit of a preview uh we have usually talked a little bit about in these sessions about areas where we're looking for volunteers to help us but uh here's one where we're still looking for volunteers it's a project we're doing with the provident institution for savings which was in boston and we got uh working with the boston athenaeum we've uh partnered with them and got copies of what they call the signature books which as you might guess would be the books that getting signatures when a person opens account as well as some of the waste books which despite that name has interesting information about families and transactions as well in those accounts so what's interesting particularly about the provident institution for savings is that it was created for the primary purpose of serving poor and immigrant communities so these people may very well be underrepresented in other sources of information and the records provide some interestingly valuable information about the person's name where do they live what was their occupation and perhaps most importantly where they came from uh so this gets you'll find many uh immigrants in coming into the boston area in the uh early to late 1800s and you may find a significant uh set of people here that are related to you in this book the setup book sorry and so we're gonna we will be releasing next week um the first of these books it's about a 400 page uh book on signatures in the 1852-1854 period um but we're still have quite a bit of investing to do we'd love to get folks involved so i talked about what's in the book it's a little bit hard to read the page but what you see here is information about what we captured in a nice little line uh one liner on each person's you've got william cashman here on the top and if we click forward we can zoom in a little bit read that a little bit more easily so here we have william cashman he's the first item uh when it says first place interestingly enough for the irish uh contingent which probably is it'll vary but probably over half of the people here were people that came from ireland people in these books i mean and rather than just say they came from ireland it tells you which county they came from so i don't know how many of you folks have been trying to do uh tracing your ancestors back to ireland but it can be really critically important to take your step back to know what what county they came from it really makes it much easier to track them down and then for the address it will tell them if it's in boston itself it will have a street address and if it's one of the communities around boston like in this case to make a plane they'll tell you the name of the community they lived in and then it will tell you off on the right hand side what that person's occupation was so in this case uh william cashman was a coachman um and i believe it tells you in this particular case who he was working for and they will tell you how much money they open the account the account number how much money they opened the account with so really a unique perspective really valuable information for a lot of people are trying to trace their families back not only to ireland but we see immigrants from germany and many other places across europe showing up in the the providence institution for savings books so if you're interested in getting involved and pretty much all you would need to do is be able to read handwriting these are handwritten records you don't need to have any particular technical skills uh access to excel uh it would be particularly useful um but you could just get in touch with rachel adams she's our volunteer coordinator uh you there's no minimum on how many hours you need to work you can work from home very easily so if you have a little time to give this would be an opportunity for you to help bring this information available online so a few hours we could help other family researchers find their their families in the future so i think a lot of people found this to be a very rewarding activity to spend some time on and we would love to have your help now as related item is by next week at this same time uh eileen paranthi will be giving a webinar on the topic of how to use bank records in your family history research so uh she'll be providing much more in-depth perspective on what kind of records are available not just from provident but from many different sources and now you can take advantage of them so if it's something that this topic of using bank records is of interest to you i would encourage you to sign up for her webinar before she gives it next thursday so that that now covers the activities for the last month uh just as a reminder uh we provide our database updates on our blog at dbnews.americanancestors.org we also have the weekly genealogists which many of you may subscribe to which we bought once a week we'll have a quick recap of some of the new databases there and often we'll have things in vita brevis about new databases or other topics of general interest for genealogists and always if you have any questions any problems using the website or doing search with database please email us at webmaster nehgs.org all right well thanks dawn for that recap and update and look ahead at americanancestores.org and all of the materials that we've been adding and continue to add so let's get to your questions if you have anything that you'd like to ask go ahead and type it into the questions panel and we'll try to get through as many as we can in the next uh 10 or 12 minutes so let's see we have a a question from sherry who asks for databases and manuscripts would you consider those primary or secondary documents and or does it depend on the database that we're talking about i think it's an excellent question and it does depend uh some of our databases or many of our records are vital records in which case if the database is a vital record then it's a primary source i would say that in the um in the database areas we also have databases that are secondary sources such as the bay flower silver books or other published indexed books so we have a combination of those in the database side on the digital librarian archive i'd say probably the majority of the information there will be secondary sources there will be family genealogies family histories other research notes that have been assembled by researchers and provided to us in a book or manuscript format so not not they're not the original records but they're certainly uh useful uh and the ones in the digital library side then they're organized differently so rather than be organized by record they're organized around the book and being able to find references to names places and other things within the text of that resource thanks and jackson asks if there is if we have special databases for cemetery records we do have a number of cemetery records databases so if you we talked about that browse databases a to z function if you just go to that you can you type in the keyword of cemetery and you will see a list of quite a number of them we've we've had uh a couple of uh efforts in fact uh very early efforts at nehgs back in the late eighteen hundreds was there was a recognition that uh many gravestones uh were following the disrepair and being weathered away and so we had a lot of manuscripts around the idea of providing transcriptions of those records and you can see a number of those online there's one database in particular called the north american cemetery transcriptions but we've also done some recent work with some of the churches in boston as well other places to get other cemetery records published so feel free to take a look we've got a bunch of those online and marilyn asks is a paid membership required to access the study guides or the subject guides i'm happy to answer that no you do not need a paid membership to access our subject guides all of those are freely available and we're constantly adding to those subjects if you have any recommendations on a subject guide that you would like to see us work on um you can always reach out to me at gmorse nehgs.org let's see another question for you now if we have a few questions about you know do we have databases for certain areas or certain topics what is you mentioned the browse databases is that really the best way to see what we have do you need to be signed in to even access kind of the browse database feature so you can you don't even have to be signed in to use the browse database feature it's available um to anyone at any time um if you want to actually see res you do a search and see the records then you'll have to be signed in and depending on the database then you may have to be signed in and be a paying member versus a guest member i mean we have approximately 40 databases that are available a little over 40 they're available to guest members but if you go to the browse databases a to z you can do that without logging in and you can use that to help find databases of interest all right thank you and if folks have suggestions on databases that think that we should have or you know ideas on what would make a good database who can they reach out to and do we solicit such uh suggestions yes we love to hear those things so you can reach out to me directly um but probably the the most effective way to email us at webmaster nhgs.org and then either myself or one of my colleagues will answer that so yes we've actually uh acquired uh several databases from someone who's reached out to us for something that we've done inspired interest we talked about the boscoin uh first hurch uh database that was one where um people in boscawen had seen an announcement about something else in their area and came in touch with us to see if we could uh index and put that database online so we're always interested to have that discussion with people and see what you might have so uh we're interested in your inputs and if you have something to offer directly either way let us know we'd be happy to follow up and talk to you and see what's possible and you also mentioned uh you showed us the annotations and how to report an error um if there is an annotation or we see something that's wrong on either the transcription or in the um in the kind of backup the original document how does that work do we need to provide proof that what we're saying is accurate or do you do the research or how does that work no great question up for transcription errors i mean pretty much if you report them to us and you can report the most by either emailing us or or better yet there's a on all the database screens there's a box labeled comment or question and typically as well a button that says report error either one of those will generate an email to us with a link to the page you're looking at so you don't worry about giving us a lot of reference information so for a transcription error just let us know um what the error is and we can fix it if you're saying that the underlying book was incorrect or in the example i showed uh in this discussion there was information in the vital record that was wrong just misrecorded then we would need you to help do the research the ideal situation is that you have an another source in that in the case that we showed earlier was a first name and gender missing in vital records well they provided us the source of a um a link to a webpage with uh census information that you could tell was the same family and we could make that update the cases will vary depending on error you have to report but yes you can provide us a link to an authoritative source that we can we will add that annotation all right and um lisa uh kind of a specific question but lisa asks would new bedford bay 1790 to 1800 be included in boston and the term boston um if you're not sure of that answer how would you suggest uh she find out i do not know if new bedford bay would appear well it's when you say boss i guess it means if that's what you mean like if you meant um from the perspective of location or from a um you know a book or um i think within our databases if if we say something you know if we call something like austin massachusetts you know vital records 1790 to 1800 might new bedford may be included yes okay thank you expanding in that little bit so our naming convention for databases is that if the database is specific to a town then we would put the name of the town and the state that it's in first so in in the case of like the bosque and church records it's bosco in new hampshire colon and our semicolon and then the name of the the text and the year range that applies so if it says you bedford then clearly it applies to new bedford if the database has is the name has the name say massachusetts as in massachusetts vital records then um there's a certainly a good possibility that that would be covered meaning it's some kind of a statewide database and you probably need to go double check the database description to see if we would know for sure if new bedford or new bedford bay or harbor would be covered but yeah so if it's a town it starts with a town if it's a state or a county we will list the state or county that that the database is primarily associated with to help help you figure out where you want to go looking and if names change i mean should we use if we're searching by place or by a town i mean do you suggest searching by the original name of the town or what it's known as now the i would recommend searching by the modern place name i can't say that's we've been creating databases for a long time and some things are kind of interesting like to make a plane uh which is now part of boston maybe could be show up here as jamaica plain or boston but our general approach certainly for new databases is to use the the current place name so you can find that on a map and know what you're referring to so that would be our recommended approach all right well thank you again don it looks like that's all the time that we have again if you have more specific questions or we didn't get to your question today you can reach out to webmaster nehgs.org also if you'd like more hands-on help with your family history research you might consider scheduling a consultation those can be done over the phone or online and you can learn more about that service by contacting consultations at nehgs.org all of our genealogists do give consultations and offer one-on-one advice and then um if you'd like more assistance on doing research on your behalf you can also consider hiring our research services team i'm going to be including this information as well as that webmaster email address that i just mentioned and some other links and goodies in a follow-up email later today so i want to thank you again for joining us today as you leave the event you'll have the opportunity to fill out a survey and give us your feedback as we continue to expand our webinars and online offerings any and all feedback is extremely helpful and appreciated and this free webinar was made possible by the generous support of members and friends around the world please consider making a gift to american ancestors to keep these programs free and to create more free programs for you and others if you'd like to access more how-to resources or learn about upcoming online educational programs please visit our online learning center at americanancestors.org education stay safe stay healthy and i hope to see you at our online programs in the future goodbye for now