Older News

As news items on the Home Page are replaced by newer ones, those of lasting interest will be placed here.

FIND offers totally free access to a range of constantly updated maps from reputable sources such as the Ordnance Survey and Google. The site offers a free toolkit which allows users to draw on the maps and to insert text and graphics. It also allows you to instantly measure, style, color and print finished maps or save them as PDFs.

Another map site, HistoryGeo.com features a mixture of free and subscription-access maps, many of them based on original land-ownership maps.

IRISH HERITAGE - The Irish Government's Certificate of Irish Heritage has gone live giving millions of people with Irish roots the chance to be officially recognized by the Irish State. Although the Certificate will be issued by the Irish Government, it is not a certificate of citizenship nor does it give the holder rights or entitlements of a citizen of Ireland. But it does recognize those of Irish heritage in an official way and gives a practical expression to the sense of Irish identity felt by millions. For details, visit www.heritagecertificate.ie.

The Swedish American Genealogist is among the various digital collections available in the CARLI Digital Collections, created by member libraries of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois.

At our recent seminar, Cyndi Howells provided a sneak-peek at the upgrade that the 15-year-old Cyndi's List has been undergoing. It is now live, so take a look! Don't forget, Cyndi's List was born at the Tacoma-Pierce County Genealogical Society!

Footnote.com recently announced the publication of the first digital versions of War of 1812 Pension Application Files. This collaboration with Federation of Genealogical Societies and the National Archives offers free online access to these records. Read the full story.

And don't forget there are other databases on Footnote.com that are always free! One of these is the entire series of the Pennsylvania Archives. If you have Pennsylvania ancestors, you will want to check this out.

Others include: Papers of the Continental Congress; South Carolina Estate Inventories, 1732-1872; Social Security Death Index (SSDI); WWII Army Enlistment Records; Civil War Widows Pensions; Select Photo Collections; and Select Town Records.

Michael John Neill, author of Casefile Clues, a weekly subscription newsletter, as well as several informative blogs, has just announced the new Casefile Clues for Beginners, which would make a great gift for those "baby" genealogists out there.

Need to learn more about a new area of research? FamilySearch now offers 140 free Online Courses — everything from Basic Italian Research to Courthourse Research and much more. Check it out!

The TPCGS Spring Seminar on May 7, 2011, with speaker Laura Prescott, was wonderful! I hope you were able to attend, and found her presentations interesting and informative.

If you attended the seminar, and still need a copy of the missing handout, please contact me at: jane_irish_nelson@yahoo.com

Have you ever wondered what the music Grandma and Grandpa listened to actually sounded like? Now you can actually experience it — The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment created the National Jukebox website with 10,000-plus rare historic sound recordings produced in the United States from 1901 and 1925.

Tidbits of Trivia
During the Civil War, "Women who volunteered to serve often faced immediate rejection by governmental agencies. A group of more than twenty women in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia wrote to the Confederate Secretary of War stating that they had organized a volunteer regiment and wanted to play a part in the conflict. The Secretary of War politely declined their offer. All across the North, black women volunteered to serve 'as nurses, seamstresses, and warriors if need be.' Local officials refused their services, both because of their race and because of their sex."
~Anita Silvey, I'll Pass for Your Comrade: Women Soldiers in the Civil War

At the March 2011 meeting, Margaret Barton shared some wonderful Mayflower Stories. The pre-meeting dealt with German Research, and you can download Sue Foster's Handout and Jane Irish Nelson's Handout.

AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas Libraries have completed a three-and-one half-year scanning project to make the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Texas and Mexico (1877-1922) available online. See this article for more information: Libraries Complete Fire Maps Scanning Project.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—the agency that houses federal records including censuses, passenger lists, military service papers and more — launched its redesigned Archives.gov website on Monday, December 13^th. Features include: A new home page, selected by public vote in July; A new interactive map of NARA’s facilities nationwide; Historical documents and streamlined access to military service records; Topically organized sections focused on the needs of both casual browsers and professional researchers; and easy links to NARA's social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and blogs.

FamilySearch has announced several changes for its family history website, FamilySearch.org. Online patrons will find millions of new records and images, over 40,000 helpful articles, over 100 interactive courses of instruction, and a dynamic forum to ask personal genealogy questions. The changes have been in testing for some time. FamilySearch will continue to implement the new website in phases to ensure all critical elements are functioning as desired. Once complete, the website will be promoted more broadly.

In other words, what was the "Beta" site, has now replaced the site we were familiar with.

The 60,000 piece Kendrick Photograph collection has now been sorted and is finally on it’s way to the Washington State Archives in Cheney. The images depict early agricultural techniques in the Big Bend region, interiors and exteriors of retail and commercial businesses, towns, street scenes and Kendrick's early photographs of the Northern Idaho wilderness and a look at general day to day life on the farm.

In an effort to “build a better GEDCOM,” a group of genealogists and programmers have established a wiki workspace called BetterGEDCOM. GEDCOM (for GEnealogy Data COMmunication) is the language genealogy software programs use to communicate with each other—when you export family data from your genealogy software, you create either a file native to that program or a GEDCOM file that other genealogy programs and websites can read. But the GEDCOM file format has some shortcomings — one being that it hasn’t been updated in 14 years.

Do you have Revolutionary War ancestors? If so, check out this list of free online Sources of Revolutionary War Service.

You can research your ancestry anywhere in the United States with Family Tree Magazine's list of the 2010 Best State Websites for Genealogy. Who knows, maybe one of these sites contains just what you've been looking for!

The biggest genealogy news recently: Ancestry.com to acquire iArchives, which includes Footnote.com. Read the press release here. What will this mean for Ancestry and Footnote subscribers?

We all know how important it is to back up our computer files in case of disaster. A new service BackupMyTree recently went live, offering a free service to help genealogists back up their family tree files. Just for genealogists, the software automatically finds family tree files and creates a remote, off-site backup that the user can restore when disaster strikes. Read a blog review of this service by Randy Seaver here.

The Tennessee page on the FamilySearch Research Wiki has recently been updated and now includes a wealth of new information and resources to help people find their ancestors in the Volunteer State. The link for this revised page is: https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Tennessee

The FamilySearch Research Wiki is a free resource created by the genealogy community. The core content for the Tennessee page was contributed by the expert researchers at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. The page also includes tips and research advice from local experts. The Wiki staff is currently working on updating all of the state pages. The Washington State page is here: https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Washington. Check it out!

The FamilySearch Research Wiki has announced a new program for societies and organizations to "adopt" one or more state and/or county pages on the FamilySearch Research Wiki. This is a great idea! The Adopt-a-Page information is at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Adopt.

Have you just started researching in a new location? Then check out the Research Classes Online offered by FamilySearch. Offerings include England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, and a new class on U.S. Research.

Jump start your research by checking out one (or more) of these sites:

A free website called London Lives has posted 240,000 manuscripts and 3.35 million names of “non-elite” 18th-century Londoners. Sources include criminal and court records, parish registers, workhouse records and more.
FamilySearch has added a multitude of records to its Record Search Pilot site and Beta Search site. The two sites use different search engines, so check both.
Dale H.Cook has now completed his Consolidated Index to Plymouth Colony Records. It indexes all twelve volumes published in the 1800s and the volume of probates published in 1996. It is a large (1.45 mb) PDF file which can be read online or downloaded. http://plymouthcolony.net/resources/pcr.html
Check out the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, now available online from The Newberry Library. Choose a state, choose a date, and see how the boundaries of the counties change over time.

The Washington State Library is experiencing difficulties during the current budget crunch, and has sent out the following message. If you have not used the Obituary Request Service, I highly recommend it!

Top

Tacoma-Pierce County Genealogical Society PO Box 1952, Tacoma, Washington 98401, USA Updated Thursday, 12 January 2012, 02:29:31 PM MST Hosted by RootsWeb
Copyright © 1996-2012 by TPCGS. All rights reserved. This site may be freely linked to but not duplicated in any fashion without the consent of TPCGS. All graphics property of TPCGS.