Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter A Weekly Summary of Events and Topics of Interest to Online Genealogists Vol. 4 No. 19 - May 8, 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. Do not reply to this email. This is a post-only mailing; mail sent to this address cannot be answered. Information on how to obtain a free subscription to this newsletter or how to change or cancel a subscription is given near the end of this document. 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. ============================================================ ============================================================ - 1881 British Census Available on CD-ROM The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) made a major announcement this week: 1881 British Census Available on CD ROM - Largest Ever Automated Census With Over 30 million Names Salt Lake City, UT - After 11 years and more than two-and-a- half million hours of volunteer labor, the largest census ever to be automated is now available on CD-ROM for home use. The automated 1881 British Census, which contains information for over 30 million individuals, was announced today by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The data comes from England, Wales, and Scotland. (Note: the 1881 census for Ireland does not exist.) "The story behind this project is one of tremendous individual participation and the cooperation of literally thousands dedicated to the creation of the most complete, complex, and largest census database ever created to date," said Elder D. Todd Christofferson, executive director of the Family History Department. Begun in September of 1987, the automated index is the result of a collective effort of volunteers from the Federation of Family History Societies in the United Kingdom and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Every effort was made to reproduce the information as it was originally recorded by the British census-takers in 1881. Even obvious errors were left to allow users to make their own evaluation of the information," Christofferson added. "Each page of the census (over one million pages) was transferred to microfilm and photocopied," said Richard E. Turley, Jr., managing director of the Family History Department. Turley explained that each letter and name of the census was painstakingly copied twice by transcribers, often from almost illegible photocopies or microfilm, then double- checked for accuracy. To protect the integrity of the data during this transfer of historic information, every entry was carefully evaluated a third or fourth time by trained individuals prior to entering it on computer. Project Factoids: * 11 years to complete * 1,211,695 pages of the original census * 1,400,000+ hours to transcribe * 1,200,000+ hours to enter transcribed data on computer * 10,000+ volunteers and transcribers * 369 computers * 11,266 floppy diskettes were submitted, containing all of the census entries Among the 30 million entries, users will find the following interesting entries along with a host of others: Charles L. Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll)- a "M.A. Student & Lecturer" at Oxford University. Joseph R (Rudyard) Kipling - a 15 year old attending school in Devon. Master Winston Churchill - Six year old son of Lord Randolph Churchill, Member of Parliament. The census will be published on 25 compact discs, including an eight-disk national index and viewer that allow users to quickly search across the entire database of 30+ million names. To make the census indexes more manageable and easier to use, the data has been divided into eight regions: East Anglia, Greater London, Midlands, North Central, Northern Borders and Miscellany, Southwestern, Wales and Monmouth, and Scotland. "Users will be delighted to find that the census includes enumerations for the Royal Navy in 1881. That means it lists all people living, working, or traveling on a boat or ship at the time the census was taken," said David Rencher, president of the Federation of Genealogical Societies. "The Miscellany Region even includes people who lived in 'poor-houses,' mental institutions, workhouses, schools, hospitals, and other non- traditional residences when the census was counted." It includes the FamilySearch(r) Resource File Viewer 2.0, which allows powerful and flexible search capabilities. Users can tag and make notes for records and download the data into RTF (Rich Text Format). The census is available for purchase in its entirety or by region through the distribution outlets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The cost for the entire census (25 CDs) is only $33 U.S. To order, call 1-800-537-5971 in the U.S. or order on-line at http://www.familysearch.org. System Requirements * Pentium(r) processor (or equivalent) * Windows 95, 98, or NT 4.0+ * 8 MB RAM minimum (16 MB recommended) * CD-ROM drive (8x recommended) * SVGA monitor with 256-color-capable video card * 25 MB hard disk space For more information, contact Family History Support via e- mail at [email protected] or telephone at 1-801-240-2584 or 1-800-346-6044. The Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is committed to producing high-quality products for the family historian. It maintains the world's largest repository of genealogical resources. To promote local and family history (genealogical) research, the Church also maintains the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and over 3,400 Family History Centers in 64 countries. ============================================================ ======================== - ANIMAP Available on CD-ROM ANIMAP is a great program that provides over 2,300 maps in color, showing the changing county boundaries for each of the 48 adjacent United States for every year since colonial times. This can be a great resource when trying to find an old town that has long since disappeared from the map. It also is useful when you cannot find county records in the place you expected; for example, a town may have been in a different county many years ago! If so, the town records are probably at another county, but which county was it? ANIMAP includes all years, not just the census years. Maps may be viewed separately, or the program can set them in motion so you can automatically view the boundary changes. Also packaged with the product are maps of the full U.S. that show the changes in state and territorial boundaries from 1776 to the present. Each map includes a listing of the changes from the previous map, making it simple to keep track of parent counties. ANIMAP has been available on diskettes for several years. A new version is now available that ships on CD-ROM and includes many new data sets. One of these database sets is SiteFinder, which contains listings for more than 200,000 places in the United States plus more than 35,000 variant names. Each listing gives the name of the place, the county where it is (or was) located, and includes latitude-longitude coordinates for 97% of them. You can extract items from SiteFinder and plot them on the maps in ANIMAP Plus. Included in the listings are: Cities & Towns, Railroad Stations, Trading Posts, Farms & Ranches, Plantations, Ruins, Country Schools, Stagecoach Stops, Mining Camps, Ghost Towns and more. You can find more information about the latest version of ANIMAP at http://www.goldbug.com/AniMap.html or you can send e-mail to: [email protected] ============================================================ aders. ============================================================ - Canadian Post-1901 Census Project A major squabble is developing in Canada over access to the census records of this century. The Global Gazette seems to be leading the fight. Quoting from their Web site: It is obvious to many concerned Canadians, that the legislation, which enforces permanent concealment of post-1901 census from the public eye, must be changed. If new legislation is not passed by Canada's parliament to change the laws that conceal our post-1901 census, those records may never be available for future generations or us. Worse yet, they may be destroyed. The bureaucrats at Statistics Canada, the holders of post-1901 census data, are firmly on the side of withholding census data. In fact, the census data would already be destroyed if it were not that the records couldn't be destroyed without the approval of the National Archivist. The former National Archivist was determined to see these records preserved. Unfortunately, at the moment, we do not even have a National Archivist! Nor have we had a National Archivist for more than a year. I hope this means that post-1901 census records, though unavailable to the public, are still safe from destruction! Of course, once a new National Archivist is appointed we will have to see if they have a different opinion of the need to preserve these records and if they are up to the fight with the privacy commissioner and Statistics Canada! There is a lot more information available at: http://globalgenealogy.com/census/ Rick Roberts of The Global Gazette has decided to try to do something about it with some good, old-fashioned political pressure in support of legislation to make each census available after ninety-two years. Rick has set up a Web site listing all members of parliament, along with their currently expressed position on this issue and contact information for them, so that their constituents can contact them and express their desire to see this legislation reversed. His efforts are explained at: http://globalgenealogy.com/gazed26.htm ============================================================ - Fairfield County, Connecticut Vital Records on the Internet Nancy Ring Kendrick sent the following announcement this week: As the listowner of CTFAIRFI and CTFAIRFIVOL through Rootsweb, together with being the co-coordinator of the CTFAIRFIVOL Transcription Project, I am proud and "pleased as punch" to announce the premier of the CTFAIRFIVOL's first 50 pages of transcribed records. The records contained within these pages were all transcribed and financed by the CTFAIRFI volunteers. The CTFAIRFIVOL's are dedicated to making vital records for Fairfield County, CT available to the Internet genealogical community at no charge. Here, you will not have to sign up for a membership, send for a CD-ROM, or jump through hoops to access vital records for your Fairfield County, CT genealogical research. Over the next several months you will see our completed records grow. The CTFAIRFIVOL's will be transcribing Fairfield County, CT; death, birth and marriage records from 1850 to 1900. Upon completion, those transcriptions will be uploaded to the Rootsweb server on a regular basis. The towns of Wilton, Greenwich, and Bridgeport are coming soon. Please check back regularly as we have pages 572-601 of Bethel yet to upload, and numerous Wilton pages completed and waiting in the wings for webpage design and graphics! The CTFAIRFIVOL's hope that the records we transcribe from microfilm during our free time will help each of you add branch after branch to your own family tree. Good luck! And now to what you all have been waiting for. . .the very first of our efforts . . . .The CTFAIRFIVOL's are PROUD to premier the CTFAIRFIVOL Transcription Project through Rootsweb: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ctfairfi/ctfairfivol/ctfairfivolcover.html ============================================================ ======================= - Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner at the Jefferson's? The dinner in question will be at the Thomas Jefferson family reunion on May 15. For the first time, descendants of Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemings, will attend the annual gathering, held at Monticello for the past 86 years. But a battle looms over whether the Hemingses will be fully accepted as Jefferson's kin. The reunion will be the first one held since DNA test results last fall found that the author of the Declaration of Independence may have fathered at least one of Hemings' children. (See the November 9, 1998 newsletter at http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/eastNov9-98.htm for details.) Because of those findings, a white, sixth-generation descendant of Jefferson plans to challenge his cousins to formally admit the Hemings descendants into their family organization, the Monticello Association, during their private meeting May 16. "I don't see what the big deal is unless the big deal is racism," said Lucian K. Truscott IV, a best-selling author and member of the Monticello Association. "They take my word that I'm a descendant and they don't take their word, despite the oral histories and DNA tests that back their claim. That's racist on its face." "Yes, it looks racist, but it's a genealogical question," Monticello Association President Robert Gillespie countered. "We've got historical records. We need to go over some gaps in their genealogy." The genetic tests do not prove that Jefferson was the father. The tests do prove, however, that a member of the Jefferson male line fathered a Hemings son. The father may have been Thomas Jefferson or his brother Randolph or one of Randolph's six sons. Historians are using records of the whereabouts of the Jeffersons at the time of Hemings' pregnancies to determine paternity. "We're not ready to say yes, but we're definitely not saying no," said Gillespie, a lawyer from Richmond. Last week, the Monticello Association sent the descendants invitations to the reunion dinner, which will be held at a nearby historic tavern May 15, and a tour of Monticello, Jefferson's home. 34 members of the Hemings family have responded saying that they will attend this year's reunion. About 150 members of the Monticello Association are expected at the reunion. ======================================= COPYRIGHTS: The contents of this newsletter are copyright by Richard W. Eastman and by Ancestry Publishing and by others so designated. 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