The October 2011 meeting of the Madison County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on Thursday, October 13, at 7:00 pm.
President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.
The following reports were presented.
Financial report for the month of September 2011, as follows:
Do you have a family member that
is interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership
in the Madison County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful
gift. A gift card will be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.
The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $20.00
Patron Annual Membership $30.00
Life Membership $250.00
Contact our Secretary, Barbara Hitch, at [email protected],
about a gift membership.
On October 13, 2011, the Madison County Genealogical Society held
its regular meeting at the Edwardsville Public Library. A program
titled Using Family Search Organization Free Digital Records
and Microfilm was presented by Kathy Nevin, training coordinator
for the O'Fallon, Illinois, Family History Center.
Ms. Nevin started out by telling the audience the Family History
Center is a branch of the Family History Library in Salt Lake
City. They provide access to billions of online records and to
a circulating collection of 2.5 million microfilms from over 100
countries. The center provides limited assistance for research.
The staff members are volunteers and most are learning by doing
researching their own ancestors and hoping to learn something
that will help you in your research.
Kathy then described the resources available at the Family History
Center:
The FHC has some local cemetery records, reference material for
German research, DAR lineage books, misc. records from Missouri,
Illinois, Indiana and other states. They have a catalog of microfilm
and microfiche that are on permanent loan at the Center that can
be viewed by all the patrons. The reader/printer is very popular.
You can make paper copies, but several of the patrons have discovered
they can save money and trees by copying their documents to a
flash drive. There are also several computers with Internet access.
Unique to all Family History Centers is the FHC Services
Portal. This gives our patrons access to premium websites
(those that usually cost money, but are free when used at the
FHC). The premium websites include the following:
The 19th Century British Library Newspaper Digital Archive.
This collection contains full runs of 48 newspapers specially
selected by the British Library to best represent nineteenth century
Britain. It includes national and regional newspapers, as well
as those from both established country or university towns and
industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands. Scotland,
Ireland and Wales are included. You can save, print or email the
article images.
The Newspaper Archive is supposedly the world's
best resource for newspaper articles. It contains tens of millions
of searchable newspaper pages, dating as far back as the 1700's.
You will want to review the available newspapers because not all
papers in all areas are included.
The American Civil War Research Database is the
definitive online resource for researching the individuals, regiments,
and battles of the American Civil War. This database contains
indexed, searchable information on over 4 million soldiers and
thousands of battles as well as over 17,000 photos. Basically,
it includes a record for virtually every soldier who served in
the war.
The Family History Center has the family history library edition
of Ancestry.com. That means we have everything available
on ancestry that would cost you a pretty hefty subscription if
you had it at home. You can use it at the FHC for free.
Find My Past was the first website to make the complete
birth, marriage and death records for England and Wales available
online, back in 2003. Since then countless other historical records
have been published on the Internet. Until civil registration
it was local parishes that kept records of important events. Find
My Past, in partnership with the Federation of Family History
Societies, is publishing these local parish records online. As
with a lot of Internet sources, it is a work in progress.
On August 18, 2011, Footnote announced their intention to create
the finest and most comprehensive collection of US Military records
available on the Internet and changed the name of the site from
Footnote to Fold3.
The Genealogist has a large number of databases which
can be searched individually. Key records include the census for
England and Wales (1841-1901) and the civil registration indexes
of births, marriages and deaths (BMD) 1837-2005.
Genline FamilyFinder is basically a software program
that allows you to search, view, and print pages from Genline's
Swedish Church Records archive. This is specialized software and
only available on two of the FHC computers.
Most of you are probably familiar with Heritage Quest
since it is available through most libraries. These are the records
it gives you access to.
Historic Map Works is a high quality, full color
digital collection of historic maps. The core of the collection
consists of almost 1.5 million maps detailing the geographic and
development history of the US over a period of several hundred
years.
Paper Trail is the newest website available at FHC
and was created by the Oregon-California Trails Association. It
is based on a searchable index of the American westward migration
journeys. The database includes a list of libraries where the
original historic documents can be found but requires patience
and creative spelling to search.
FamilySearch.org is a website provided by the LDS
Church and available at the FHC. You do not have to be a Latter-day
Saint to use it. In fact, you will have to use it to order microfilm
that will be sent to the center to be viewed by you, so you will
need to have your own account. Free research guides and genealogy
forms are available for downloading from this site. You can even
take online genealogy classes. And last but not least, you can
do a search for your ancestors in the indexed records.
How can FamilySearch.org help with your research?
Take a look at the search options. You can use the Records Search
to search for your ancestor by name, or by location. You can search
for your ancestor using the Tree search. This gives you access
to what some of you may remember as Ancestral File or Pedigree
Resource. You can search through the Library catalog using places
or surnames - or you can even search for a specific book title
or author.
This presentation was well received
and generated quite a few questions.