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GENEALOGY SOCIETIES & RELATED LINKS

  • DUBUQUE FAMILY HISTORY CENTER - LDS Church, 685 Fremont Avenue, Dubuque, IA 52001 Phone: 563-583-6851
    Public Hours: Tuesday 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. and 6:00 - 9:00 p.m., Wednesday 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. and 6:00 - 8:30 p.m., Saturday 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Services Provided: Microfilm Rental, Computer/CD Research, Internet w/free Ancestry.com subscription, NEW digital imaging system that allows download to CD/printing of microfilm and microfiche
    For more information, contact Julia Krapfl, FHC Director
  • INTERNATIONAL INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY (IIGS) April 1999 Newsletter http://www.iigs.org/newsletter/9904news/index.htm
  		• FAMILY SEARCH - online LDS data base (Ancestral File, IGI) Download free PAF 5.2 for Windows. http://www.familysearch.org/
  • On February 12, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) made available their "Access to Archival Databases
    (AAD) System" to the public via their website, www.archives.gov/aad/. AAD provides researchers access to over 350 databases containing over fifty million historical electronic records created by more than twenty federal agencies. Researchers may search these records by first choosing from subject, geographic area, organization, time span, and creator. Drop down menus are available for each of these search options, to help the user quickly find the infomation needed. Once a specific database is selected and submitted, a general database page appears, showing the creator of the record, a brief description, and a link to a more detailed page. From this page users may search for information contained in the file. A small selection of the databases available are as follows with descriptions taken from the website:
    • Korean War File of American Prisoners of War, ca. 1950 ­ ca. 1953
      World War II Prisoners of War File, ca. 1942 ­ ca. 1947
      Index to the Gorgas Hospital Mortuary Death Records (Contains "records of 26,213 U.S. military soldiers and officers, employees of the Panama Canal Commission and its predecessors, and Canal Zone civilians processed through the Gorgas Hospital Mortuary between 1906 and 1991.")
      Famine Irish Data File (Identifies "604,596 persons who emigrated from Ireland to the United States during the era of the Irish Potato Famine [1846­1851], and the ships on which they arrived.")
      Civil War Events File, 4/12/1861 ­ 5/13/1865 "Of 10,500 armed conflicts in the military history of the Civil War, the file contains information on 384 conflicts that the Commission identified as the principal battles. Each record identifies the following information: state and county or counties of the historic site, the type of battle or event that occurred there, the theater of operations and the campaign to which the engagement relates, the dates of the battle or event, the current ownership of the site, and the assessment of three subject area experts of the military significance.
  • Surname Resource at RootsWeb
  • Virtual Cemetery Project http://www.genealogy.com/vcem_welcome.html?Welcome=1050186667 The Virtual Cemetery Project is a collection of tombstone photos and a fully searchable archive of transcriptions. Members of the Genealogy.com community contributed all of the tombstone photographs in this collection, and people are encouraged to add their own.
  • INTERNATIONAL INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY (IIGS) PROJECTS REGISTRY. Please visit http://www.iigs.org/projects_registry/index.htm for information on how you can list your projects with descriptions and, if volunteers are needed, the skills that will be needed to assist in your projects. The projects registry is currently available in English, Dutch, French, Norwegian, and Swedish. Pages in other languages will be added as translators volunteer to prepare them. If you want to enter your project or know of some projects that should be included, please complete the online application form. The projects should be of interest to a significant part of the genealogical community.
  • The Board for Certification of Genealogists lists their roster of certified genealogists by geographical area.
  • The Federation of Genealogical Societies held its 2001 conference in the Quad Cities. This year was the organization's 25th anniversary. The event was a success in spite of the terrorist attacks on the east coast. More info is available at their web site at http://www.fgs.org.
  • Afican American Historical Museum & Cultural Center of Iowa http://www.blackiowa.org
  • The British in Iowa by Jacob Van Der Zee, Copyright 1922 by the State Historical Society of Iowa

IMMIGRATION & PASSENGER LIST LINKS

  • Bremen Passenger Lists 1920 - 1939http://db.genealogy.net/maus/gate/index_en.html Inquiries and/or questions to the Bremen Passenger Lists will be replied to by members of DIE MAUS at [email protected]. The Bremen Chamber of Commerce at [email protected] only replies request on unpublished passengerlists when the name of the ship or the departure date is known.
  • S.S. UNITED STATES. 50,000 people are known to have immigrated aboard this ship. If you sailed as a passenger or worked as a crew member aboard the UNITED STATES, tell the S.S. United States Foundation your story (500 words or less). Send stories and photos to [email protected]. Legal Disclaimer: All stories sent to the SS United States Foundation's Web site for posting become the sole property of the foundation. The foundation reserves the right to edit and or refuse to post stories it receives.
  • The Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild (ISTG) began its work on September 16, 1998, with 50 volunteers within the first week. Now nearly 500 volunteers are transcribing ship passenger lists that will be posted on the ISTG Web site. The guild accepts new volunteers on a quarterly basis. More than 300 passenger lists are now posted at the Web site and new passenger lists are posted weekly. http://istg.rootsweb.com
  • "New information about some MAYFLOWER ancestors"
  • The General Society of Mayflower Descendents http://www.mayflower.org/

NOTE: Ellis Island and Liberty Island are closed to the public indefinitely since the terrorist attacks in New York City.

The American Family History Center opened on April 17, 2001, receiving an estimated 10 million hits per day. The newest URL for Ellis Island is http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/ Because of its popularity, patrons may get a default error or the message, "Thank you for your interest in the American Family Immigration History Center. Due to an extraordinary number of visitors, we must limit access to the site. Please keep trying, or check back later." It is estimated that 40 percent of the U.S. population today can trace back to one or more ancestors who came through the Port of New York. The site is a joint effort by the U.S. Park Service, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It offers a searchable records database with 22 million names, covering 71 percent of the immigrants who came through Ellis Island between 1 January 1892, when Ellis Island opened, and December 1924.

The process of extracting these records started in 1993 when the church began the volunteer effort of digitizing them. The process was completed in late 2000. It took 12,000 volunteer church members from 2,700 congregations in the U.S. and Canada approximately 5.6 million hours to complete the entries. The church also devoted 100 full-time volunteers to work on the project. They compared the original microfilms to extracted data and made corrections as needed.

The names were taken from the microfilm of New York passenger arrival manifests. They include aliens, U.S. citizens, crew members, nonimmigrant aliens, deportees, and those who literally missed the boat. Information usually includes: traveler names, name of vessel, ports of departure, ports of arrival, and dates of arrival. Other recorded information pertains to age, sex, marital status, nationality, name of relative or friend outside the United States, name of relative inside the U.S., exact birth date, and place of birth. An average of 15 information columns were used in the early years of Ellis Island, while up to 36 columns of facts were collected in the later years.

The painstaking work performed by the church's volunteers included deciphering almost impossible-to- read microfilms and photocopies. They scrutinized century-old handwriting, and hand-copied and typed isolated pieces of information that were originally recorded by multiple scribes, who took it down from people of different nationalities speaking different languages.

"This was a fairly sizeable project," says Wayne J. Metcalfe, director of the Field Services and Support Division of the Family and Church History Department. Sizeable is right. If stacked flat, the 3,678 boxes of microfilms examined by these volunteers would exceed three times the height of the Statue of Liberty, from the hem of her robe to the top of her torch.

The church originally purchased microfilm copies of the passenger lists from the National Archives. "This seven-year project tested the persistence and best extraction skills of our church-member volunteers but was most certainly worth the effort," says Metcalfe.

"The end result is a database which will allow as many as 100 million living descendants of U.S. immigrants to find information about their ancestors or confirm their ancestors' first steps on the land of their hopes and dreams."

From MISSING LINKS: RootsWeb's Genealogy Journal by Julia M. Case and Myra Vanderpool Gormley

IRISH LINKS

MISCELLANEOUS LINKS

WAR RELATED LINKS

Are you new to online research? Here's a list of links that will help you understand the process of using the Internet for family history research.

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