Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter A Weekly Summary of Events and Topics of Interest to Online Genealogists Vol. 4 No. 13 - March 27, 1999 This newsletter is sponsored by Ancestry Publishing, a leader in providing print and electronic research information to genealogists. To learn about Ancestry's state-of-the-art online genealogy databases and other fine products, visit the Ancestry HomeTown at: http://www.ancestry.com Past issues of this Newsletter are available at: http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/index.htm ========================================================== Copyright (C) 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. All rights reserved. If you do contact any of the companies or societies mentioned in this newsletter, please tell them that you read about their services in this newsletter. ============================================================ ============================================================ - Holocaust Group Seeks LDS Data According to the Deseret News, the LDS Church has been asked to provide genealogical records that could help identify between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish Holocaust victims who may have established bank accounts in Switzerland. Church spokesman Dale Bills confirmed that the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand asked for copies of records to further their work with the Volcker Commission. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is heading up an audit of Swiss bank accounts, hoping to identify Holocaust victims who had untold millions deposited that were never retrieved. For years, the descendants of those victims have said they can't get enough information from Swiss banks to determine whether assets still remain that are rightfully theirs. In response to the request, Bills echoed comments by Michael Otterson, director of media relations for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who told Reuters news agency that "our intent is to respond to it as a goodwill gesture, but we are still waiting to see if there are any objections." In 1995, the church signed an agreement with the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors to stop doing proxy baptisms in its temples for Jewish Holocaust victims. The agreement came after that organization strongly objected to the posthumous baptisms, which Latter-day Saints perform not only for their own ancestors but for millions of others who have died. The agreement also stipulated that the church would "remove from the next issue of the International Genealogical Index (IGI) the names of all known posthumously baptized Jewish Holocaust victims who are not direct ancestors of living members of the church." Bills said those names have been removed from the IGI, which is a database that is available to the public for research on family history. The database is also one source of names for which Latter-day Saints perform proxy baptisms and other ordinances in their temples. The complete story is available at: http://www.desnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,75001152,00.html ============================================================ - Gibson County, Indiana Cemetery Indexes Online Chawn E. Caniff, with assistance from a number of other people, has developed a valuable Web site for anyone with Gibson County, Indiana ancestors. The site lists all the cemeteries in the county. In addition, volunteers are transcribing the tombstones of the cemeteries and placing that information on the Web site. Not all of the cemeteries have been completed yet. However, when I looked at the site, I found a lot of listings. The Web site's main page has links to the individual pages for each cemetery. Each individual page will eventually contain a transcribed listing of the graves in that cemetery. One of the neat functions of the site is the availability of an on-line mapping capability showing the location of the cemetery. The GPS coordinates are passed to Tiger Mapping to allow this function. A view is then displayed, showing the location of the cemetery along with other cemeteries in close proximity. Not all the cemeteries have the GPS coordinates listed, but the coordinates are being added frequently. I wrote an article in Genealogical Computing last year about the use of a GPS receiver to find cemeteries. I suspect that GPS receivers will become standard equipment for genealogy research in the near future. I keep a GPS receiver mounted on the dashboard of my car at all times and have found many uses for it. For instance, I record not only cemetery locations but also the precise location of land purchased by my ancestors or towns where they lived. With data from Chawn E. Caniff's Web site, I can easily drive to cemeteries in Gibson County, Indiana, even if they are on back roads and overgrown with weeds and underbrush. To look at the Gibson County, Indiana Cemetery Indexes, set your Web browser to: http://www.usroots.com/~jmurphy/gibson/gibcem/gibcem.htm. ============================================================ - Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie Online The Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in The Hague was founded in 1945. Since then it has become the largest center for family history and genealogy in the Netherlands. The Bureau presently has: * an extensive library (100,000 bindings) with, amongst others, publications on genealogy, heraldry and both regional and local history, in Dutch as well as foreign languages. The foreign publications mainly refer to countries of importance for Dutch emigration and immigration. * about 60,000 files with genealogical manuscripts, biographical data, etc. originating from the work of hundreds of amateur and professional genealogists. * millions of newspaper cuttings and family announcements about birth, marriage and death (from circa 1795 up till the present) * 'primary' genealogical data in the form of microfilm-copies of thousands of registers of births, baptisms, marriages and burials in the Netherlands, the former Dutch East- and West-Indies and the Dutch border areas. As well, there are copies of municipal registers up to circa 1910 and personal record cards used in the municipal registers from 1939 till 1994. However, the Bureau has cards only of deceased persons of that period. Large parts of these collections have been catalogued in the automated CBG-Catalogue (CBG-Catalogus). Here you can find information mainly on books and journals, files ('dossiers'), newspaper cuttings ('familieadvertenties') and family announcements ('familiedrukwerk'). The catalog is computerized and is available online now. However, remember that this is an online catalog, not the details themselves. ============================================================ - African-American Genealogy Group The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an interesting genealogy story in their March 25, 1999 edition. It describes a Philadelphia-based genealogy group with 130 members called the African American Genealogy Group. The society holds workshops, hosts guest speakers, and offers field trips to libraries and archives. The entire article is available online at: http://www.newsindex.com/cgi- bin/result.cgi?http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Mar/25/pa_west/WROOT25. htm =========================================================== - More On NGS Convention Accommodations In last week's newsletter I mentioned the shortage of available hotel rooms at this year's National Genealogical Society annual conference. Then I wrote, "By the way, is anyone interested in going to the NASCAR race Saturday evening after the convention is finished?" The joke is on me: The race is sold out. I don't think any of us will be able to obtain last-minute tickets. - Home Pages Highlighted The following is a list of some of the genealogy-related World Wide Web home pages that have been listed recently on http://www.rootscomputing.com. Some of these sites may charge a fee for their services: Mulnix family Web site: http://mulnix.family.webjump.com Guild of One Name Studies for the surname of WEBB(E): http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/2009 Sikes/Sykes Families Association: http://www.sikes- sykesfamilies.org Tower/Wheelock family from Massachusetts and pictures from Hingham, Massachusetts relating to Tower: http://hometown.aol.com/deaton6365/index.html Garner/Gardener family research: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Garden/2238/ Information on Downing Family Historical Society of America. Also genealogy t-shirts: http://www.genealiTEES.com The Treadway Web - lineages of Nathaniel Treadway of New England, Thomas Treadway of Baltimore and Harford Co., Maryland, and Richard Treadway of Baltimore Co., Maryland: http://members.tripod.com/~Randy_T/treadweb.html Reynolds and over 100 other surnames: http:// www.geocities.com/westhollywood/3865 A site about Middleton Manchester, UK as it was before 1964 with links to former Middletonians or "Moonrakers" as they are known locally: http://www.vmims.com/middleton.htm Burchett families in Johnson and Morgan counties, Kentucky: http://homepages.infoseek.com/~randall30/index.html To submit your home page to this newsletter, enter the necessary information at: http://www.rootscomputing.com/register.htm. Due to the volume of new Web pages submitted, I am not able to list all of them in the newsletter. ========================================================== Are you interested in the articles in this newsletter? Would you like to learn more or ask questions or make comments about these articles? Join this newsletter's online discussion group on CompuServe's Genealogy Techniques Forum. CompuServe members using Netscape, Internet Explorer or CompuServe 2000 can go to http://go.compuserve.com/GenealogyForum. If you are using Classic CompuServe, you can GO ROOTS. ========================================================== COPYRIGHTS: The contents of this newsletter are copyright by Richard W. Eastman and by Ancestry Publishing and by others so designated. You are hereby granted rights, unless otherwise specified, to re-distribute articles from this newsletter to other parties provided you do so strictly for non-commercial purposes. Please limit your re-distribution to one or two articles per newsletter; do not re-distribute the newsletter in its entirety. Also, please include the following words with any articles you re- distribute: The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Thank you for your cooperation. ========================================================== Subscription information: To subscribe to this free newsletter, send an e-mail message to the following address: [email protected] The message title is unimportant. The first line of text in the message must have the words SUBSCRIBE ROOTSCOMPUTING followed by your first and last names. For instance, if your name is Jane Doe, you would write a message of: subscribe rootscomputing Jane Doe That is the entire message; nothing else should be in the message text. To cancel an existing subscription, send an e-mail to: [email protected] The message title is unimportant. The text of the message must be exactly: signoff rootscomputing Please note that the address of [email protected] is an "e-mail robot" and messages sent to that address are only read by a computer. If you send any more text in the message, it will be ignored. If you want to see the current issue as well as back issues of the newsletter, look on the World Wide Web at: http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/index.htm Please feel free to copy this subscription information and pass it on to anyone else who you think might be interested in obtaining a free subscription. ========================================================== About the author: Dick Eastman is the forum manager of the four Genealogy Forums on CompuServe. He also is the author of "YOUR ROOTS: Total Genealogy Planning On Your Computer" published by Ziff-Davis Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]