The September 2014 meeting of the Madison County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on Thursday, September 11, at 7:00 pm.

President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.

The following is the Treasurer's report for the month of August:

• Total Assets as of August 1, 2014 - $19,421.90
• General Fund - Beg. Balance $7,110.88 - Income $40.46 - Expenses $40.00 - End Balance $7,111.34
• Publications Fund - Beg. Balance $12,311.02 - Income $59.00 - Expenses $45.00 - End Balance $12,325.02
• Total Assets as of August 31, 2014 - $19,436.36

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, Petie Hunter, at [email protected], about a gift membership.

On September 11, 2014, Kathy Nevin, the O'Fallon Family History Center Training Coordinator, presented a program titled, The O'Fallon Family History Center. Kathy has been doing family history since 1982, when she volunteered in the then Branch Genealogical Library in Caribou, Maine. Kathy is a native of Wayne County, Pennsylvania, but has lived in various states, following her husband's Air Force assignments. She has worked in a family history center wherever the Air Force took her and is well acquainted with the changes and technological developments in the centers over the past 30 years.

The O'Fallon Family History Center is located at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Fairwood Hills Road in O'Fallon, Illinois. The Family History Center (FHC) is a branch of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. FHC provides access to most of the microfilms and microfiche from the Library by making them available for rent and view at the Center. FHC has a collection of fiche and film that are on permanent loan and a list of what is available can be viewed at the FHC. The hours of operation are Tuesday and Thursday 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. and 6 pm - 8 p.m; and Wednesday evenings and Saturdays by appointment. During the winter months, when the weather is bad, FHC may be closed. As a general rule, if the O'Fallon school district is closed, FHC will be closed. It might be a good idea to call ahead during the hours of operation. You can now register for a Family Search Account and have access to all the family trees as well as all the digitized records. This will allow you to share your research data and collaborate with others.

Printed resources differ from one FHC to another. The O'Fallon FHC has some local cemetery records, reference material for German research, DAR lineage books, misc. resources from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and other states. They also have a collection of Illinois county histories.

The reader/printer is very popular. You can make paper copies, but several patrons have discovered they can save money and trees by copying their documents to a flash drive. There are also nine computers with Internet access for patron use. With Internet access, you can find all your favorite genealogy websites and log into your personal email account. While researching, you may find a web page or a document that you want to save and email to yourself so you can review it or download it at home. You can also bring a flash drive and save your documents on it.

Unique to all Family History Centers is the FHC Services Portal. This gives patrons access to premium websites (those that usually cost money, but are free when used at the FHC). Using the Portal, you can get to the Premium websites, online film ordering, review online classes and workshops, or get assistance from the FamilySearch Research Wiki. You can also move directly to FamilySearch by following the navigation bar at the top of the page. Or, if you click on the FamilySearch logo, it will take you to the FamilySearch.org homepage. Clicking on "Family Tree" will direct you to log in with your personal FamilySearch account and take you to your tree. "Memories" allows you to add pictures or documents to your FamilySearch account. "Search" takes you to the FamilySearch records search screen. Clicking on "indexing" allows you to sign in or register for the indexing program. From the Family Search Research Wiki, you can get research advice, or learn where to find record collections. Recently, there were 79,708 articles on the Research Wiki. That is a lot of information! You can search by place or topic or click directly on any of the available links.

Online Research Courses are available that might give you some help in your research. You can browse hundreds of online genealogy courses. There is a series of Beginning Genealogy videos, five minute videos designed for the beginner, but they can be helpful to intermediate and advanced researchers as well.

The following websites are available right now on the FHC portal:

• 19th Century British Newspapers contains a text searchable database of two million newspaper pages. You can browse the publications by location or simply do a basic search using standard techniques.
  
• Newspaper Archive has claimed to be the world's largest online newspaper archive and therefore the best resource for historical and genealogical information.
  
• American Civil War: Research Database contains indexed, searchable information on over four million soldiers and thousands of battles. You can view photographs, regimental rosters and officer profiles.
  
• American Civil War: Civil War Letters and Diaries is a collection of diaries, letters and memoirs that have been carefully indexed so this database can be searched very thoroughly.
  Images of the American Civil War includes thousands of images from the fields of battle, politics, and general home life of that time. There are currently over 12,200 images showing camp life, hospitals, prisons, and military leaders.
  
• Ancestry.com - The FHC has the library edition membership and includes everything and anything that Ancestry has published to their hugely organized web center. One of the fairly new features of Ancestry is the ability to send your document home when you find that all important record. You just select the "Send document" button on the left of the record page and follow the onscreen prompts.
  
• FindMyPast offers more than 1,000 exclusive collections that you will not find online anywhere else. They have a collection of British newspaper archives from England, Wales & Scotland; Parish records that include 40 million baptisms, marriages and burials from across England and Wales and dating back to 1538; Passenger lists of ships leaving the UK between 1890-1960 to the US, Canada, and Australia....among other things.
  
• Fold3 provides access to US military records, including stories, photos, and personal documents of many of the men and women who served. You can browse military records by any war, beginning with the American Revolution through the Vietnam War, as well as some records for recent wars including Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn casualties.
  
• The Godfrey Memorial Library is a library that specializes in genealogy and history, located in Middletown, Connecticut. Patrons of the FHC have online access to books and periodicals including biographies, genealogies, state and local histories, city directories, cemetery and funeral records, church records, newspapers, and family bibles. The capstone of their collection is the American Genealogical Biographical Index (AGBI), an index of more than four million names from more than 800 books. For a small fee anyone can subscribe to Godfrey Scholar Plus and gain access to an immense reservoir of online databases to search, but if you use this resource at the FHC, you do your searching for free.
  
• Heritage Quest Online contains US Federal Census records from 1790 through 1940. Some of the years are not indexed, but those that are can also be searched by place of birth, age, ethnicity, and other variables. There are also 25,000 fully searchable family and local history books. If anyone has ever published a book about your family name or a book about the history of your town or county, there is an excellent chance that you can search that book here. You can search the PERSI Archive, which is an index of over 2.3 million genealogy and local history articles published between 1800-2009.
  
• Historic Map Works is the world's largest online historical map resource. There are over 1.6 million searchable images in their collection.
  
• Legacy Stories is a FamilySearch partner that is working on motivating and activating people to record their living memories before they are lost forever. They have developed a "Legacy Stories" app to help you preserve vintage family photos and then record the story that made the photo special. They call this a Pict-Oral Memory. Once you have created a Pict-Oral with the app, you can upload it to your free Legacy Portfolio on this website.
  
• Paper Trail.org was created by the Oregon-California Trails Association to provide a database from information in original writings of the emigrants who experienced the overland trails. This is a searchable index with names, places, and a survey of the text. However, searching for information in this index might require a little patience and probably more than one try.
  
• World Vital Records allows you to search a massive collection of genealogical information quickly and easily. This data is gathered from many sources including birth, marriage, and death records; US Censuses; Newspapers beginning in 1739; and over 30 million tombstone photos.
  
• FamilySearch: Memories is where you can add photos, stories, and documents for your ancestors. Adding a photo to Memories is similar to uploading a photo to Facebook. You "tag" the photo with the name of the individual and "attach" it to them in Family Tree.
  
• FamilySearch: Categories - You can search millions of indexed records or browse through images of records that are waiting to be indexed by location. More are being added every month. This is the result of the world wide indexing program. You can also search what is now being called "User Submitted Genealogies." This is a set of lineage linked trees provided by users. They could be from either the old Ancestral File, the Pedigree Resource File, or some other trees. You can also submit your tree here. It will be preserved indefinitely, and can be reviewed or even removed if you desire. You have full control of this tree. You can search through the catalog of genealogical materials made available by FamilySearch. Whether you use places, surnames, titles, author, subject, or keyword, if you find a record or book that is on microfilm or microfiche and you would like to look at that record, you can place an order to have the item shipped to your local Family History Center.
  
  Online Film Ordering - You MUST have a FamilySearch account to order films. There are two types of loans - short-term and extended. Short-term is now defined as 90 days from the day it ships to the day it is due back. Extended loans and microfiche do not have a due date - they become a permanent part of the FHC's collection. After you have searched the catalog and found the film you want to order, you can click on the film number and then select your loan type and click the "Add to Cart" button. When ready to check out, click on the shopping cart in the top right portion of the screen. You will have a chance to review and confirm your order. Payment is made with a debit or credit card and they even now accept PayPal. Once your order is processed, it will be forwarded to your FHC and you will be notified when it arrives. The short-term loan will be $7.50 and the extended film loans are $18.75. Fiche are $4.75 no matter whether it is one page or more than one.
  
  Family History Books. You can search for historical books by surname in the Family History Books collection of digitized genealogy and family history publications. The books in this collection can be viewed and saved in PDF format. That means that you not only can read them online, but you can also save them to your own computer or a flash drive.
  
  You have an opportunity to help Family History Center. We take volunteers! You do not need to be a Latter-day Saint to volunteer a two- or four-hour shift. You can work one shift a week or one shift a month, as often or as little as you wish. One of the advantages of working at the Center is that it is designated time for doing genealogy! After training, if there are no patrons to assist, the time is yours to take advantage of the online classes or do your own family history research. You can also help the world wide indexing program by registering as an indexer. The procedure is simple and the indexing can be done when it suits your schedule. The indexing program is what made it possible to search many of the digitized records online at FamilySearch.org. There is a video you can watch to find out what indexing is and how it works. If you click on the link for "Test Drive" you can find out how easy indexing can be.

  This presentation was very well attended, very well received, and produced several questions and comments from the audience.

  
  
  

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