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hello and welcome to our webinar series what's new at american ancestors.org my name is Ginevra Morse I'm the director of education and online programs at American ancestors and New England historic Genealogical Society I will be moderating today's event we are a nonprofit organization supported by our members and donors we provide resources and expertise in nearly all aspects of family history and are pleased to offer such programming for our members and friends around the world now I also want to note that we are of course broadcasting from home with various limitations and distractions and we apologize in advance if there are any interruptions from our end and we do thank you for your patience even if we do lose connection you know you will have a you will have access to a full recording on our website our presenter today is Don LeClair Don works on our database collections and is responsible for the search experience on american ancestors.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 is the third session of our new webinar series and every three months we will provide a new installment that reviews the most recent additions and changes to our award-winning award-winning website american ancestors.org so after a brief introduction our presenter will highlight some of 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 you our listeners and throughout the presentation we'll also share a few enhancements to the search experience on our website 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 today's session there is no handout for this present but as I mentioned 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 so if you miss something on today's first listen don't worry you can always go back review the presentation later alright so without further ado I will turn things over to dawn and John I can't hear you so you might want to try calling in or okay thank you all again for joining and we appreciate taking your time out of your day to support us this afternoon so the goal today is talk about the new resources that arrives between January and March and will help you how to use the help you learn how to use them and how to get the most in general out of your membership with American ancestors so that focus is what's been new in the last three months and available online we'll talk about what comes up on the database side of the world as well as on digital collections so to make sure we're clear to search our databases you'd start under the search menu at the top left and then you can see the search all databases as well as the ability to search by category and wells browse databases so these are the main areas for our database search function and we're not going to go into a lot of detail about how to use search today but it's also make sure that you do know where to start off when you're doing your search work out american ancestors so for our databases to provide some context we currently have 468 different databases online you can see by the chart here what kind of categories listed a database is fall into in the largest category of information we have is vital records which are birth marriages deaths that sort of thing the next largest would be the census particularly census but the tax and voter lists are in that as well and then we add into genealogies and biographies and then the purple stripe is court land and probate and then the last one we'll be talking about a little bit further on today is journals and periodicals which is a special category here and we have a lot of resources that are not available in any other places so in that collection of databases we have 1.4 billion and names to search and if we move forward you can see that it's certainly there is quite a bit of focus on the United States shown by word cloud but we do have records available from a variety of countries around the world to do to expand your search horizons and if we look at the individual states we can see that it's not just New England that is a question that comes up often with a our name but we cover New York Pennsylvania in pretty much every state in the United States is also a law so it's quite a breadth of resources and hopefully you'll be interested in things that are coming forward coming to tea coming out over the last quarter so as I said the focus of this session is not on how to search american ancestors.org but we want to point out a couple of things important resources that you can leverage to help you with your research so one is if you look under the learn menu we have the expert subject guides for family history research so if you were to click on that there is an item there for using american ancestors.org so this document gives you an introduction to search in general but it goes through pretty much a detailed explanation of how to use different aspects of search using advanced search database category search favorites all of these things so you can either read this through as tisn't inform a formative document on how to do search but you can also click on those links such as using wildcards to see specifically how to take advantage of specific features for your search experience and I would like to if you're interested in rather than reading about search having a at ending participating in a webinar about how to the search experience of American ancestors were excited to be offering this coming May 14th a session on searching databases presented by Molly Rogers one of my co-workers does a great job of explaining how to use search and how to solve interesting problems and provide useful tips and techniques on how to get the most under your search experience so that is on May 14 to 3 o'clock and the registration is available for that and I mentioned at the beginning we will tall us will be talking about the Digital Book and Manuscript collections which is here so basically these are focused typically on books and manuscripts from our library collection they are separate from our databases but there was a great additional resource resource to help you with your research activities and you would find this underneath the library menu so if you were to click through on the digital collections space onto the library menu you'll see there's really two parts to that there's our Jewish heritage center provides quite a bit of information there as well as the our Scandinavia special collections from the library so those two items are there into the digital collections area and in total there's over three quarters of a million pages in that other area known as digital collections so I know we get a lot of questions about database search I think this is maybe one of the underutilized aspects of American ancestors and will hopefully show you some of the things are new and you can take advantage of those in the coming weeks and months as you're doing your research so let's go forward and take a look at the database additions we've done over the last three months so that the presentation that we have here today is going to really expand on the information that we provide in our blog called database news the URL listed there below it's a DB news american ancestors.org so what we do and the database team is anytime we provide a new or updated database we put out a blog entry generally there is never there's usually two or three per week which so you can go to the website to see those and get a description of what's been added you can also go to DB news on american answers on org provide your email address and if you're interested you'll get an email update whenever we have a new addition or update to our databases online so if you miss the session or you're curious what happens you know in between our quarterly updates that's a great place to go see what's happening so it's useful I think to look at information by individual databases so one of the great capabilities we have is the Browse database function and you can see that under the search menu it's highlighted there in brown browse databases A to Z so if you click on that you'll go to our screen which will list each of the 468 databases we currently have online we recently updated the search experience so if you can see where the word Roman is typed you had the ability to put in a keyword keyword could be a location like a state that you could enter Vermont or a topic like for example Mayflower and it will go through and give you a list of the databases that meet those search criteria so in this particular example I've selected Romanus and Roman Catholic and now we've rapidly as I typed it's narrowed down that list to 468 databases - in this case the five that have something to do with Roman Catholics so it's a great way to you're thinking about it topping if we had data in use the Browse HSE function to find out about those databases so given that we do this as a test-case with the Roman Catholic ones I'll start off with what's new with what's happening with our large approach so I'm sure many of you know from previous announcements that we've been collaborating with the Archdiocese of Boston to digitize their sacramental records from their founding in Massachusetts in 1789 up through 1920 and this is our largest ongoing project here at American ancestors it is indeed a work in progress and we're continuing to scan index and provide new content pretty much every week so what we've done over the last three months is we've added 24 new parishes in the eastern Massachusetts side of the world this encompasses 108 new volumes completed a total of six hundred and forty five volumes so far so this project we've index at this point there's over 8.2 million searchable names available so it's really a very large ongoing project to bring forward a really valuable I think set of resources for especially people looking they're Catholic family history if you're looking for a particular parish which many people are you can what look at the blog database news a moment ago you can search for a parish name we always list the names of the parishes that have been added so you could search through the blog to see if that parish has been completed yet and you can also look at the way we create our volume names and the volume names are the name of the parish with parentheses the name of the talent that Paris is in so this is the search page for the best use of Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston records you can see that we have it pretty highly indexed so in addition to being able to provide the first name the last name we have the years of the record the record type now these aren't the sacraments that are recorded by the church so they're typically going to be baptism although there's often birth information in the same area as the baptismal information as well as marriages and to some extent burials and other first comedians are also generally available so it's all of the rights that would be normally recorded in a Catholic Church you can specify a location that you want to search in could be a town and then you can in the case of confirmations if you happen to know a confirmation and you can search for that and last but not least is for family members we have captured family members including the typical mother father and spouse which you would see you know parents for example on a baptismal registration and you would see spouse on a marriage but we also have been capturing the witness names so if someone has come as a witness to a wedding or to a baptism those names are also searchable and are indeed indexed and available in the database so one of the things that was like to point out is that database description the first page is the form perfectly now just displaying the kind of fields that are available but if you page down there is additional information in terms of search tips we have sample images with some specific records from the collection that we have there as well as a full description of the database and this is we're showing the values that are here for the Archdiocese of Boston records but we do this capability for every database search page so it gives you convenience and our reference information that's available on the search page so you can look at it while you're preparing your search criteria and when you drill through to a record will show the same information at the bottom of the screen so don't forget to page down because there's probably something there that could help you out so in this case i'ma show the search results one of the interesting things about doing the Archdiocese of Boston is that especially in the early years many of the records are written in Latin so in addition to providing the Latin names that are what's actually written in those church records we have provided a translation of that last name to an English for person I excuse me so you see in this particular case and I've searched for a Dennis Kelly and I found a record for Dionysian also Dennis Kelly so this works pretty nicely but it's a good thing to be aware of is that not the Latin name - an English name mapping isn't a simple one-to-one relationship sometimes there's different choices in terms of what that mapping might be so if you're if you're confident that you have a relative that you're expecting to find in one of these parish records and you can't then you might suggest if you don't find them initially try reducing or searching without a first name to see if you can find that perhaps the the Latin name was translated to something that was a little less obvious and you didn't find a match because of that and if you do find it they're wrong please let us know in webmaster we're happy to add a corrected spelling so the through in the case I see the search resulted now for my Dennis Kelly you can Li see the handwritten record which was actually written in Latin so it's not typical of our databases but it's an important thing to be aware of when you're going through and using this database so this is our largest ongoing project we have several other ongoing study projects that we also have updates on during the last three months so the first of these is Western Massachusetts families this is edited by Helen Ullman and she produces sketches and the study project has really built around the people who were recorded in the 1790 census in the western part of Massachusetts so she goes and writes as collects the sketches about individual families by town so the focus of this is which town does the person live in and then they'll publish information with the the person that was recorded in the census with their spouse and children all in one sketch this is also available in book form so we should an example here of the Western Massachusetts family oftentimes the sketches come out first on American ancestors in the database and then they'll be compiled into volumes that are sold when new volume is complete and ready to go this database is available to the individual level level and above NEHGS members so you can see the example of the set of sketches that we last month this particular database is indexed by first and last name it's while you volume in page so it's a straightforward level of indexing and one of the reasons why I want to make sure I showed this is that it's useful to you look at the database search page just to see what fields are actually index because if you if you were to switch to the advanced search page if you put in fields that are not indexed then you wouldn't get a hit you can see in the lower right hand corner of this page that there's a button that says switch to advanced search so some people prefer to always use the advanced search that's your choice we tried to make it easy to go back and forth so if you get a link from us are you looking at DB news post and you get taken to a database search page you can switch it back to at the Advanced Search page
nd be able to search that database through that other path the other thing I wanted to mention is at the top right corner is these volumes are the sketch names so if you don't want a search Fernand person like Mary a Merrill you can also just put in use the pulldown in the Browse database find the volume that is Mary Merrill click the Browse button they'll take you directly to the start of her sketch and one other thing I'd like to point out about this particular study project is that it is actually open so if Helen Ullman does indeed write sketches which is also an editor so if you have family that you've researched in western Massachusetts and have people that have birth captured in the 1790 census you're welcome to reach out to hell on and provide that information and see if you could be the author of a sketch yourself and contribute to this ongoing study project and make that information available to other resource researchers in the future you can see the URL at the bottom of this page and what's the process for making a submission to look at that Western Massachusetts family study project so it's kind of a nice one than that we have it open so it's we certainly want to encourage people to participate and provide content for that early doing that families other one of our study projects this one is actually driven by the guide called Tori's New England marriages prior to 1700 so this was a really important early genealogical work that listed all of the known couples that were married in New England prior to 1700 and Alicia crane Williams has been using this as a basis for her study project by identifying subjects in that mistress simple thin marriage record and provide more information full more complete information about these couples and their their immediate families so in the early New England family study project we added these five sketches which came out over the last quarter either the naming convention for this is the persons in this case the man's name that's mentioned in the marriage record and then the year they were married which what ties them back to the story manuscript so those five came out and similar to the early son early earlier study project we do have a published book book series that's been coming out with the only living families as well the search page on this has some additional information and then more than the first and last name we also have the years and the actual record types so we've indexed birth marriage and death information for these study the contents the study project as well as location so you could pick the the state or town that the person may have lived in as part of your search criteria and just as in the previous one there is a volume pulldown so you can go directly to a volume if you hear about or read A Sketch or you could read about A Sketch through an announcement you can go directly and just read that sketch a one special item on this particular database is that in your search results you can search in here I've searched for Samuel Thatcher and I'll get the records that relate to Samuel Thatcher including in this case and we can see in the second case the second one we have spouse names included but we have a PDF link as part of that search results so if you get to a sketch that you're interested in there's a PDF link that you can directly download the PDF of that sketch rather than having to print up potentially the individual pages of three or four pages in a sketch that can save you a few moments then good you get that electronically directly from that search page and the next study project is our early Vermont settlers this is another study project that we had that's based on the people who settled in this what's now the state of Vermont prior to the Revolutionary War Scott Andrew Bartley is the person driving the study project and he has been primarily thus far focused on Windham and Windsor counties in Vermont but his approach then is to go through and sort do a research on these individual families provide eight sketches just like the other projects do providing information about them their spouses and children one thing that's unusual about the the version that came out in this quarters that includes a sketch called fort Dumber soldiers so fort dumber was a fort in in modern-day Guilford Vermont it's actually now a state park there and an included this sketch called fort Dumber soldiers is there's a number of people who spent time at the fort as doing their military service but they didn't necessarily become residents of Vermont or not in that area so the sketch on the fort number soldiers will have a list of the people give you information about when they served at Fort dumber and if they do have failed the information that's provided as part of that one single sketch all of the other sketches will have a family information about the individual people so if we go through and then in this case I'll just go rather than doing a search just to show you can put in fort Dumber soldiers that's the name of the volume for that particular item you can click the Browse button once you've selected that in the pulldown list and then you will get a the first page of that particular all right which is the 36 page item so it's a little someone significantly longer than the typical sketch in this study project but it starts off with a short description of what port number was the period of time that was covered from 1724 1756 and then alphabetically by last name they go through that his soldiers had served in that fort and they may have something like a short entry like the one for Samuel Adams what he was there for six weeks in July of 1749 two others that have were there had spouse and other family members and they will appear in that particular sketch another area where we have ongoing updates is the topic of genealogical journals I think I mentioned a few minutes ago that one of the places where we have a unique set of collections of databases on American ancestors is the genealogical journal area and that we have partnered with quite a number of societies to publish their journals and make them searchable online typically after a five-year five years after they passed so because many of these journals sell reprints for some period of time but we're very happy to announce in the last quarter that we made a new agreement to publish Vermont genealogy online this is the publisher of that is the genealogical society of Vermont but they joined up with us had we added this quarter all of volumes 1 through 19 which period from 1996 through 2004 so that is now current we we added all of the all previously published volumes this quarter and one unto them had a new volume every year and another gene Law Journal that we've been we actually are the publisher for which is the Mayflower descendant we have added volume 63 which was from 2014 it's available online and these journals are available both journals are available to individual and above any HDS members so for the search side of this one I wouldn't just briefly show a category search the journals are indexed and a unique not a eunuch consistent way which is that what's been indexed for them is the name of the individual and then the easier in use your search criteria are the year that that journal was published so it's not the year of for example if they mentioned someone's birth snot could be the year their birth be the year that article appeared in the journal and then new keywords in this case are usually used for searching for article titles most all the databases had the article title searchable so if you run across an article title and you want to follow through on that you can make that part of your search criteria that can also be extremely helpful in a number of journals when articles span multiple releases of the journal that happens in many of them certainly our own the discharge mutual society register will have articles that could span to three or four different volumes of that database so you use that keyword search then you can use that to find how it how the art of that's split across multiple volumes and there's two other things I wanted to point out one is the see all databases in the category so when you're using the category search will search all of the databases in that category right now the category of journals and periodicals has 20 databases the newest one being Vermont genealogy and so if you clicked on that you would be able to see the database A to Z the list for that and then I talked about the advanced search before but we also from the category search we also have the ability to switch to advanced search so having said that to do it just sample search for Elizabeth crown and here I can see there was an article in 2013 for her that was part of my search criteria and I can see that the article is there and I have multiple references for her across several pages of this article under the title of who is the father of Betsy crown and now I can either click on the name which will give me a record display showing me the extract of that or I can click on the view image link and then I will see the page image directly that is in that particular article so in this particular case we've selected for munching the ology view the image and we can see the article who was the father of Betsy crown and the reason is that one of reasons I chose this is because this is I think what are the wonderful values of searching for genealogical journals is that oftentimes they will address interesting or challenging problems the gist of this our goal is that there's a Betsey crown and she's often reported with the incorrect parents and in some cases it's hard to find parents because she'll find multiple families of the same name this case was a little bit more complicated than that but here's some what needs done a professional job of researching this and clearly clarifying the proper parentage of Betsey crown and explaining both what is the common erroneous value as to what the correct value is so this is the kind of thing with that is a great value we had over doing just simple searches for vinyl records and potentially making coming to the wrong conclusions so I'd say if you haven't tried looking at our category of our journal databases give it a try I would recommend using the category search function sticking with just pretty much a first and last name and you'll be able to find some interesting tidbits for your your research activities so next I just talked about a new database that came out just a few weeks ago it's a little bit unusual in that it's about heraldry we have one other one the gore role of arms is called but this was one that interesting was done by the Committee on heraldry here at the New England historic Genealogical Society so we have had a committee for a long time that goes through and authenticates and preserves and records the coats of arms that were born in the United States by citizens living abroad so oftentimes these are people who were 17th century immigrants to New England who had arms from whatever country they came from and then we'll have a page in this book for many of those who showing it I think it just beautifully had Illustrated drawings of the heraldry along with additional information so this one is available to individual members and above but if we click forward we have index this one by first and last name we also have years and we'll show you the layout of a page in a moment but there's really two sections to the heraldry information one is the person who bore the coat of arms in terms they have information on where they lived at least and often some birth or death information about them and there's also information about the person who applied for the arms to verify the arm so you'll have different record types typically we used residents with this record types as they talked about where someone lived but there are also some cases where we have immigration even birth and death and other records in this database and the locations would include both locations here in United States and potentially locations from where those folks came from so if I search for Bridgette Lyle then I would see in this case I've got a residence of 1672 in Cambridge and I can go through and I can click on that one and I will then see the coat of arms that were born by Bridgette Lyle interesting enough because she's obviously a woman with the name of Bridgette and she was the wife of the president of Harvard College from 60 who was a man who served as president of Harvard College from 1617 to 1675 so it talks about where she came from as wellis and that she settled in Massachusetts you've got the description ablaze on or whether what is that coat of arms and you can see the drawing that's there and if you happen to look at this database online we put those images through at a slightly higher resolution than normally we do so you can zoom in on those and get a really nice perspective on the the nice effect beautiful drawings that came along in the database so this is one that I think a few of us we were working on this getting this indexed and put online that's almost fun that just browse through the book even if you're not related those people just to see the interesting coats of arms that are there so then in terms of others database news from the database side we have updated database this was one from the town of Seymour Connecticut we had four volumes of their vinyl records online previously there was another volume available to us that became under copyright laws became available to us so we just recently added volume five which covers the year 1911 to 1914 so now we have those town vinyl records for that period from 1700 3 19:14 the town of Seymour Connecticut was named by the former fourth and former governor of Connecticut Thomas Seymour and previously it had been part of Derby Connecticut so that's a new one available also for individual members that above and here you can see this is a vital records type database we have this one index very nice so your first last name year's location and then often we have parent or spouse names available just as a quick comment on the family members that when those are available we always say in our definition that this is you can use these search teams when available not every record has mother father or spouse in them but certainly if you start doing a search and you get a lot of Records under a given name then being able to specify one other parent or spouse names can be a way to refine that search I would normally suggest you do that after you've got a first return and whatever you are searching for and then use that to winnow down the results to the ones you're looking for and then you see if we collect one then where this is the the this is an extract of the birth certificates from side seam or Connecticut they are not the actual handwritten town records but it's very easy to read an excellent source of reference information for this part of a Connecticut so next we have an update to the Suffolk County Probate file papers so this is a category of databases which was probate file papers for which we have most of the counties in Massachusetts and these are the actual file papers so this is not an extract of probate our transcript that's the actual printed records so you can see you can see the sample up on the cover page or the envelope of the records were in on this particular case so we added to that to the database on the probate final papers additional cases for Suffolk County so this is one where we're still getting additional pages coming through and soon as we can get them online we add them this information is not available on any other location and the this update covers 1842 to 47 and one of the other nice things about this is this database is available to all members so you can be a guest member not have to pay us any money for our paid membership and you can get access to the suffolk county probate file papers as well as the other file paper databases for massachusetts so that gives us a summary of what's new in the database sign so that I wanted as we talked about before we have digital collections and we have additional updates on the digital collections side of th
house so the digital collections as I mentioned before they're really routed our library connections library collections you'll find content from the library they'll have oftentimes manuscripts as well as that so these are things where they're generally text searchable documents and whereas the databases we've just been covering our record oriented around birth marriage death and residence so to look at the digital manuscripts we would go back to the library section of the menu click digital book and manuscripts collection and then we will have V as I said before the Jewish Heritage Center as well as Carr our stamp in Avery collection so we have both sides here what I will talk about first is what's happening on the Jewish heritage center so the Jewish said it's a Jewish hair center or the Winer family jewish heritage center is part of NEHGS and american ancestors they joined us some time ago and they've been providing a variety of manuscripts and whatnot in part through digital collections so if you click through on to the Jewish heritage center you will see there is a definition of this project called that Hebrew immigrant repaid excuse me Hebrew immigrant Aid Society of Boston and this is a project for which they are very actively working at digitizing and bringing these records online so basically this was an organization established in the Boston area to help Jewish immigrants to the United States and help them get settled and there's been sort of excellence project we earlier actually done a a small project on the database side where we have information that was done in a tabular format about Jewish immigrants the United States coming through but later on they switched over to a slightly different format and that was around 1930 to having Case Files so if we click forward and that's the information that we're providing in the digital collections space so for this we have there's a definition about this project which you can see there the case studies provide interesting information more detailed information about the family usually when they came here there's gonna be additional documentation about the people that came through as well so as we said in this one we've added over 3,300 new pages to the paint Society if you were to browse that collection clicking the Browse button that would take you through to give you a list a browsable list of some of the thumbnails on the pages that are available in that if you didn't see given that they're now thousands of pages you can also use the search box at the upper left by putting it a name typically a last name or a location the new searches for individual people but if you click through we looked at one of the examples on a case study file here's a case of a individual that came here in the 20th century from Poland and we actually have in that file a copy of their Polish passport so pretty interesting and useful document for anyone coming in and there are other family papers and documentation available in this collection as well so that's the update for this quarter on the jewish heritage society if we look under the rst of the knavery special collections which is the regular library side of the fence then we have several updates there are some that are open access being that you don't have to have a paid membership to search these and I have some examples here we have diamonds the diary and sermon notes Nehemiah Porter we have the year range and we have a manuscript number which I'll come back to admission in a moment but that parenthetical comment of MMS m SS C 992 is the actual manuscript number which can be useful and then we have a diary from a physician from Chester Massachusetts and then we have some papers from some militia offers from militia officers from King William's war captain Charles Frost and Major John Hill with their family papers were also habit so if you look on the next page we talked or I showed you a moment ago that there's a search page in in the digital collections area you can specify in that search criteria a manuscript number so if you see an update from the digital collections side saying they have a new manager is available online one of the things you could search for is that manuscript number and then be able to find that so the example here I put in MSS C 982 that's for the diary of Nehemiah Porter and that it comes back and now I can see the set of forty-one results that match that you can see in the subject it is the Nehemiah Porter Diaries and you have information about almanac and the other documentation that's available from that manuscript online you can simply click on the thumbnail or the title to go drill down and then see the details for that particular item so here you can see and once I'm into the collection or the this place that particular then that automatic which is part of that set of papers for Thomas Porter I have the screen images there I can zoom now you can see that up at the top left that little red line shows you how much of the original image is currently in the display I can print this I can also download the image and then the up at the very top and that circle will tell you which page you're looking at so we're looking at page 1 out of 40 you can simply click on the next button to go browse through the rest of the content in this particular folder now the next materials are our new updates that came out in the last 3 months for contributing members this would be the equivalent to the paid type memberships which we'll talk about a little bit so the two main items here are a record of fee Aspinwall family and muddy river this is area now known as Brooklyn her part of Brooklyn Massachusetts and this is a handwritten family genealogy that dates from 1891 and then the next one is actually Bible record transcriptions is something we have quite a number of manuscripts on file with family Bible records that have been donated in the library catalog so here where we have 44 that became available I just listed just two of them here just as a sample I'm looking for the Bartlett families as well as the weight and Bentley families so if you click forward into that then we can have here's an example of this is that Aspinwall family Diaries you can see someone with nice handwriting this much nicer than mine is written at the beginning here of a 86 page family history on that family the same things talking about before available with the next and you also have the ability to download images if you want to capture those for your records or keeping electronic copies of things that you would need to refer to for your own research notes so the updates that out for the digital collections normally appear in the weekly genealogist so periodically usually once a quarter or so they will put an entry in the weekly genealogy weekly genealogist this one's actually I think from December which will describe both what's been added to the y-intercept Jewish heritage Center records as well as to the our Santa Avery collections so you can see the format they'll appear so if you watch your weekly genealogist if you subscribe to that you'll get them if you don't subscribe to it the URL for the weekly GOP narrow weekly TV else at the bottom of the page so you can go to that URL you can browse through those you can search through that or you can sign up and have it sent to you through email the last topic we wanted to cover before we open up for question answer is some projects in process so this will give you I think this has two bolts one is they'll give you a peek at some projects that we have in process that are not currently available and maybe it could be an opportunity that if you have some extra time on your hands if maybe now that you're not commuting if you're at home for the next month and you have some time you'd like to be able to do something different with maybe you could get personally involved in the indexing process so we have a couple of projects that I wanted to talk about the first of those is the Provident institution for savings which is seems like it may be unusual database for us but what it is is the Provident institution for savings was founded in the city of Austin in 1816 and especially the first Savings Bank in the United States interesting was set up by James Savage who's did quite a bit of genealogy work and was involved with the early days with PhDs as well as Bishop John Cheverus from the Catholic Chur and the the one of their founding principles was to incur and self-improvement of the poor of Boston so this is a bank saying the institution that was focused on essentially the poor immigrant community in Boston so this is particularly then interesting because we're getting information about people that that were laborers in Boston as well as people that came from other countries and we're now working in the city so oftentimes these records we will find in addition to the name of an individual where they were born and something on the order of half of the people that we've seen in this database so far came from Ireland and if you've done Irish research one of the lovely bits of information ears rather than saying they were born in Ireland tells you which County they were born in in Ireland which is really an invaluable aid through tracking back Irish ancestors into Ireland so here we have an example here where were showing some people that came from Boston but they're also some from Cork in Ireland and others from Germany so yeah there's information that's been indexed then about where they came from last name and it's a relatively straightforward process to read those pages put that into a spreadsheet and send them back to us so they can do from the comfort of your home the other project that we're looking for volunteers for is we've recently expanded our agreement with the Archdiocese of Boston - and one of its organizations is the Catholic Cemetery Association which operates about 25 cemeteries in Massachusetts so cemetery records are separate from the sacramental records from the archdiocese and Catholic cemeteries is a youth as a separate institution itself so here we have some examples from the Catholics about Auburn burials as well as the Holy Cross and Malden burials where we have information about a family name people have been intern people who have acquired plots in these cemeteries so if you might be interested in helping out was it's an opportunity to expand upon that set of information from Catholic cemeteries which are not currently available anywhere else online so I think it's a useful resource for many people and this could be a chance for you to perform a little act of genealogical kindness for other people if not for yourselves you may be able to find things of interest to you but you'll also be helping out other people so if you have an interest in getting involved in volunteering this can be done with a few hours too many hours as much as time and interest as you have you can email Rachel Adams and hds thorgy's our database services volunteer coordinator coordinator she'd be happy to help help you out and get you started as I said do it from home don't have to travel a great way to spend a little bit of your extra time so hopefully this has been a good recap for you ways to stay in touch for the database updates we have the DB news blog which talked about before which you can sign up for the weekly genealogist for the digital collections news we also have our general blog of vita brevis and then anybody has any questions on this feel free to email us at webmaster at NEHGS org with any questions you might have databases or others were happy to help you out can get answers for you so I think I think thank you all for the time today and Turner factory's never thank you done um so before we get to your questions I did want to just let everyone know that we are offering a special discount on new membership this month through the end of April so when you join as a new member you can save $20 you just enter the promotion code April research 2-0 at the time of online checkout you can also become a new member over the phone and just mention that promotion code as well and of course you can always go to american ancestors.org slash join if you're interested in learning more all right so with that let's get to your questions go ahead and type your query into the question panel and we'll try to get through as many as we can in the next few minutes and a reminder that if we didn't get you your question you can always contact us at webmaster at NEHGS org or if you'd like more hands-on help with your research you can schedule a consultation or hire our research services teams so let's see a few questions um let's see so Steven asks um and information found on american ancestors like images citations sources Don do you know if that can be kind of auto copied into a genealogical software program like roots magic are there kind of clipper tools that you can use to kind of extract that information into another program sure thanks Steven good question we do have at least with America ancestries which is a online tree product that we make available for anyone who is a guest member at American switchers there's a facility called the Web Clipper which you can use if you're looking at a search results page for at the record level you can copy and paste the pertinent facts directly from the web page into your genealogical program at this point I'm not aware of any other family tree products online or otherwise that provide that direct level of integration with the website Thanks now Claire asks do you have to be a member or even subscriber to American ancestors in order to be a volunteer you do not have to be a member we'd be we like many of our volunteers are not members they've been interested we've given our long-running history with cosmic migrants we have other members of Catholic societies like Tierra Irish Catholic societies so it is if a project is something that's interested interesting to you we would be happy to get you engaged and let you participate in the indexing great and we I know that we'd love to have more volunteers especially during this time so thank you for anyone who's even thinking about offering and volunteering their time with us a new people are asking about if you can speak to how the databases on american ancestors.org how do those may be generally differ from those on ancestry or other websites on you know approximately maybe how many are unique to american ancestors and are there some special categories that you would find on our website perhaps and not on others sure means there are aspects of American ancestors that are on other sites like our sense of support for US censuses is available through us you can find that at family search you can find ancestry in other places I would say roughly a two hundred and some-odd of our 468 databases are unique to American ancestors some of that I think the key categories that I have unique databases well one is in that the probate filed papers we talked about the Suffolk probate coming out but all of them the actual indexed probate file papers for state of Massachusetts for most of the counties in the state you can't get anywhere else and the that category of journals and periodicals is one that no one else is providing so we have quite a few journals and periodicals the who made a surge unilateral site you register the new Vermont genealogy Mayflower descendants the Pennsylvania Gd local journal Virginia there's quite a you know quite a range of them that are all available and it's really we're very pleased to be able to provide that unique resource to people who are doing research and what a leveraged work done by professional people that have had it published in other locations great and I do also want to mention because I think one person asked you know if we are kind of owned by the same company such as you know ancestry and FamilySearch and fold three we are a non-profit independent organization we were founded in 1845 we're the oldest and largest genealogical society in the country we are very much separate from ancestry and FamilySearch and other organizations or other for-profit organizations well ancestry is for-profit but with that said we also engage in a number o
partnerships with ancestry and FamilySearch and trying to make as much of this information available as possible but we are very much a separate organization another question is there Steven asks is there a master list of databases that non-members can access so you mentioned going through today's presentation that for some some of the databases you do have to be a member of American ancestry to access those resources but we also have kind of a free guest account how would you learn about what databases are available to guest members that's a great question using that databases A to Z or the Browse database function one of the filters that's available there is to say just a list of free databases so that's a radio button on the search form or on that dialog to be on that page that will list just the databases that are free and that's approximately 40 some-odd databases that are available to our guests members and to be a guest remember all you have to provide as an email address and then you have access to those databases right and let's see Brian asks when will all the Catholic Archdiocese records before 1900 be indexed do we have an estimate so we are looking to try to finish the pre 1900 records in the May June time frame so we're pretty close to having that done I guess I didn't get into it in this presentation we did extend our agreement with the archdiocese to include the period from 1900 to 1920 so the way we're managing that is we'll be delivering the remaining parishes that are a lot about a hundred some-odd parishes parishes are left that have records up to 1900 but as we go through and doing the indexing now we actually are indexing up through 1920 so it's not a ha line between the 1900 1920 from a parish or book perspective but we should have everything available for the that first 1900 cutoff in about two months and then it'll probably be another year or probably couple years before we finish everything up through 1920 I think that the rough estimate is the records we had from up to 1900 is only slightly larger than the number of records between 1900 and 1920 it was a period of really rapid growth from the Archdiocese of Boston and for that database in particular if someone is having difficulty locating a specific record maybe a baptism record or something else you know the time period seems right the parish is right but you're just not finding it is there someone that you can reach out to or do you have any suggestions on you know how to kind of locate that record yeah I believe we have a reference on searching Catholic records online if not they'll actually be a new one coming out will they know we'll have some documentation on that but if you're really stuck you're feel free you can also do webmaster at NEHGS Morgan was happy to provide some assistance for you all right and I just a few more questions I know that we're almost at the end of our time together today but rosemary asks has an interesting question is there an index for the articles published in theatre brevis I know that's not a searchable database it is a great resource on our website John do you know if there is a searchable index or a way to search vita brevis on our site I believe that you can look at the typed articles from vita brevis and do a search within your browser for lab I have to double check it's not it's not an indexed database style it's but basically it is there is a capability to get a list of the articles and be able to search through that on your browser Thanks and Joyce one last question Joyce asks does a library or institutional subscription is that the same to kind of an individual subscription are you getting the same databases are there some benefits to individual membership that perhaps you aren't getting through the library or an institutional membership so if you have a library that's an institutional member your town library for example may have ability to do search of the record and census you have access to everything that's available in our databases on American through that subscription if you would like to take advantage of something like American ancestries you're looking for a vehicle for maintaining your family tree itself and you would need to be an individual at least guest member on american ancestors.org to take advantage of that kind of functional because that's tied to an individual as opposed to a group of people certainly and i and you know there are other benefits to individual membership you know you get the magazine four times a year and the New England historical and genealogical register our scholarly journal and four times a year discounts on consultations and research services and a lot of other great things so certainly consider becoming a member and especially take advantage of that member discount that I just mentioned so if we did not get to your question today on you can reach out to a webmaster at NEHGS org especially if you have any questions about the databases or how to search or maybe you see something that's miss you know transcribed or indexed certainly reach out to webmaster at NEHGS org as I mentioned if you'd like more hands-on help with your research you can always consider your scheduling a consultation with one of our experts those can be done over the phone or online and those are that's another popular activity to kind of do while we're all staying at home these days and you can also consider hiring our research services team if you've hit that brick wall and you need help or research actually done on your behalf so thank you again everyone 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 if you'd like to access more how-to resources or learn about upcoming online educational programs please visit our online learning center at american ancestors.org slash educate I hope to see you at our online programs in the future stay safe stay healthy and we'll see you soon goodbye for now
