Here is some helpful information from Rita... the one who does so much work with successions From: Rita Curry-Pittman <mpittman@sstar.com> To: R. Hotard, Degruy List Administrator [Please do not send me anonymous, forwarded, chain emails. Thank you.] <degruylist@earthlink.net> Renee, I dropped the following in from a "stached" email. Some folks find it helpful. This is a basic email I forward folks from out of state or who are new to doing genealogy. 1. I suggest you always only ask for the surname without the given name. This is called a "wild card" search and some sites ask you not to do them. If a person's name was William and you ask for William, the search engine will not find that man if he was recorded as W or as Wm. Also, the search engine will offer all records for the surname, William, and any man with that first name regardless of surname. Data is constantly being placed online. Go back every few months and check again if you don't find the one you want. To find out-of-state help for free, click on http://www.raogk.org and choose a state. Then choose the county (or parish in Louisiana) and it will list various volunteers. The only thing raogk.org asks is that you volunteer to get something for someone else. They ask that you do one look-up per month but I get several requests a week. You can accept or reject requests and stop at any time. Volunteers willing to do minimal research requests and mail them to you for cost and may require parking or gas fees, etc. but no labor fee. The New Orleans Public Library is in Orleans Parish. Nearby Jefferson Parish Public Library can provide a substantial amount of Orleans information. To find a RAOGK volunteer to search the State Archives, look for someone in East Baton Rouge parish. Louisiana is the only state using Parish instead of County. My favorite free site is www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb <http://www.rootsweb.com/%7Eusgenweb> various states are listed, just pick a state. Once you have a state that you are going to access all the time, add that specific site to your "favorites". I use www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/la/lasearch.htm <http://www.rootsweb.com/%7Eusgenweb/la/lasearch.htm> for Louisiana and have that added to my "favorites" box. To get back to the main site, remove the last part and you can go to the national genweb site where you can choose another state. The site for Orleans Parish is at http://www.rootsweb.com/usgenweb/la/orleans.htm . To get to the Jefferson site, just change the word orleans to jefferson. Jefferson Parish and Jefferson Davis Parish are different parishes. Records are online for each individual year and may be repeated in composite files covering the following time frames: Births 1796-1900; Marriages 1800-1899; Deaths 1877-1895. If you know the year, you can make a search request such as, "Orleans death 1899 Armbruster," to find a specific record. Or, ask for "Birth 1796-1900 Armbruster," to get the composite list. Keep in mind, more records are available than what you find in these composite files or in a specified search. If a name was misspelled originally, it won't come up unless you ask for that specific alternate spelling as in: Ambruster, Armbuster, Armbrister, etc. If you know of 27 spelling possibilities try all of them. . .I found a Dauenhauer family member listed as Bauenhauer on a ship record so expect similar results in looking for your data. Anything can happen. A cousin of mine was listed as black in one census but as white in all other census records. So, never discount a record just because there was an error that didn't quite fit. The records are official vital statistics. The dates given are followed by two sets of numbers indicating the volume and page number needed to get a copy of the certificates from the State Archives in Baton Rouge. For maps I like www.maporama.com/share <http://www.maporama.com/share> or terraserver.microsoft.com. The first gives you a drawn map and if you zoom in it will put the names of the streets on the map. The second is for satellite maps and is especially fun to play with. Google also has a very nice map service. The New Orleans Public Library is at www.nutrias.org <http://www.nutrias.org> Open "City Archives" and from there you have to choose a sub-file. Most things online via the NOPL, will come up when you make a query in the rootsweb.com/~usgenweb site. However, some things you have to dig for. From City Archives you go to a screen with four major groups of information. The third group down is Genealogy. The first line under that heading is for newspaper obituaries that are being entered there by workers hired by the HNOC (Historic New Orleans Collection) who acquired a grant to do that work. As of May 2005 they are still in the beginning alphabet. Where they have completed the A files, as in Armbruster, if the woman had been a Thoman, then her record would come up if you asked for Thoman or for Armbruster. So, for the time being, the latter alphabet online only contains obit records of woman whose maiden names are known. However, this helps you find women who married an unknown individual. The Jefferson Parish Library site is at www.jefferson.lib.la.us <http://www.jefferson.lib.la.us> Pick "Reference" then "Genealogy" then "Obituary search" to find obits from the paper between 1972 and 1980. These are incomplete but are being worked on. It fills a gap left when the NOPL stopped the obit index and later started doing it again. JPL card holders can access HeritageQuestonline by entering the library site from home and following directions on screen. This site gives you 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, 1830, 1860, 1870, 1900, 1910, 1920 census records. You can't ask for names by soundex codes which would find misspelled names. Through JPL you can get to Ancestry.com with limited access similar to going online and getting to it by Google or other search engines. At Ancestry you can get the 1880 Census records for free but they don't give you the full page coverage as found on HeritageQuest. If you go into the library, you can access AncestryPlus which expands the data available in the USA but it limits what you can ask for outside the USA. The HeritageQuest offerings print small and they suggest using Adobe Acrobat. There is another option. If you need your printout enlarged and you have a photograph program installed on your computer such as "CompuPic" or "PhotoShop," you can get to the census page and click on the right hand mouse button to copy a census page (or photograph), save it, then print it from your CompuPic program. www.sec.state.la.us/archives/gen/passenger.txt <http://www.sec.state.la.us/archives/gen/passenger.txt> This one gets you to the state archives site and one year of ship records-1851 I think. ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com will get you to Social Security Death Index, great for modern persons with an unknown death date. It often only gives you a month and year but that is better than nothing. Stumbled upon this site http://www.saxonyroots.com/ships/ and found it helpful and with definite future potential as more gets put there. Their blurb said: "There seem to be *zillions* of transcribed Passenger Lists on the Internet, but they are extremely hard to find. Our database is intended to serve as an "index for all free" available Ships- and Passenger Lists on the Internet and to direct you to the proper website with just a *click*. If you find any Passengerlists which are not yet in our database, PLEASE, let us know." Rita Curry-Pittman