Dear Friends and Cousins, I've been pushing membership in the wonderful New England Historic Genealogical Society for many years, here on the Sisson List, and among my genealogy friends, both virtual and real. If you have New England ancestors, Sisson or otherwise, membership in this organization is hard to beat, particularly as nearly everything is available online, and published genealogies can be borrowed through the mail. The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. David Arne Sisson NewEnglandAncestors.org The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, is the country's oldest genealogy organization. The five charter members (Charles Ewer, Lemuel Shattuck, Samuel G. Drake, John Wingate Thornton, and William H. Montague), a group of merchants and book dealers, envisioned an association devoted to "collecting, preserving, and publishing (occasionally) genealogical and historical matter relating to New England families". Throughout its 158-year history, the New England Historic Genealogical Society has been a leader in the genealogy world. This society has always taught its members the proper methods of genealogy scholarship. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (notice the slight name change from that of the Society) is one of the leading examples of high-quality genealogy research with scholarly articles published about many New England families. It is also the oldest of all the genealogy publications, having been published four times a year for the past 155 years. The NEHGS Register system, used in that publication, is a standard method of listing genealogy information in narrative form. Many other publications also use the Register System as invented at NEHGS. The Society's library and archives in Boston hold some of the best records available anyplace for those researching New England ancestry. In fact, the manuscript collection of the Society is priceless, with a wealth of information not available elsewhere. The focus is primarily New England, but in recent years this has been expanded to include the ancestral homelands of many New England's immigrants: eastern Canada, England, Ireland, and more. There is but one problem: these documents are located in Boston! Not everyone interested in these records can easily travel to read them. This is a large society with more than 20,000 members, more than half of whom live outside of New England. Even those who live within a few hundred miles of the Society's location in Boston may find it inconvenient to go to the library in person. Luckily, the Society has found an excellent method of serving those members. While steeped in tradition, the New England Historic Genealogical Society also has become a high-tech organization in recent years. Under the guidance of Executive Director Dr. Ralph Crandall, the New England Historic Genealogical Society now is a leader in electronic publication. Luckily for Society members who do not have convenient access to the Boston repository, this information is available at home, both online and on CD-ROM. I have written reviews of a number of NEHGS CD-ROM publications in past newsletters. This week I spent some time on the Society's Web site, available at www.NewEnglandAncestors.org. Some of the introductory information is available for everyone to see. However, the "good stuff" is kept behind user IDs and passwords and is available only to Society members. The crown jewel in the online site has to be The New England Historical and Genealogical Register - 1847-1994. The Register has featured articles on a wide variety of topics since its inception, including vital records, church records, tax records, land and probate records, cemetery transcriptions, obituaries, and historical essays. Authoritative compiled genealogies have been the centerpiece of the Register for more than 150 years. Thousands of New England families have been treated in the pages of the journal, and many more are referenced in incidental ways throughout. These articles may range from short pieces correcting errors in print or solving unusual problems to larger treatments that reveal family origins or present multiple generations of a family. Every page of this publication is available online through 1994. The register is searchable by a combination of first name, last name, start year, and end year. In addition, the search may be for exact spelling of words, "begins with" searches, or Boolean searches. The user can also find information by entering the exact page number(s), a useful feature after finding a reference to the Register in some other publication. The appropriate page from the Register is displayed on-screen as a graphic image. Each image can be printed or saved to a local hard drive as a GIF image, the latter of which can be imported into other applications. The Register is but one of the online publications available. It isn't practical to list all of the other publications available on the Web site, but here is an abbreviated list that will give you some insight as to the kinds of publications that are available: Baptisms in the Second Religious Society of Pembroke, Massachusetts (Now the First Congregational Church of Hanson), 1749-1825 Baptisms Performed in the Church of Christ, Westfield, Massachusetts, 1679-1836 Bill of Mortality for Dover, New Hampshire - Deaths from 1708 to 1802 Boston Sea Fencibles' Signal Roll Boston Tax List, 1831 Bristol County, Rhode Island, Divorces, 1819-1893 A Catalogue of the Members of the North Church in Salem Cemetery Transcriptions from the NEHGS Manuscript Collections Census of the East Ward, Framingham, Massachusetts - 1837 Church Records of Greenwich, Connecticut Church Records of Killingly, Connecticut Church Records of Madison, Connecticut Commissioners Records of Lincoln County, Maine, 1759-1777 Death Notices from the New York Evening Post, 1801-1890 Death Records of Waterville, Maine, to 1892 Deaths Reported in the Boston Recorder and Telegraph, 1827 and 1828 The Diary of Israel Litchfield, 1774-75 The Diaries of the Rev. Thomas Cary of Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1762-1806 The Diary of William Ingersoll Champney of Boston, Massachusetts, 1814 Divided Hearts, Massachusetts Loyalists, 1765-1790 The full list goes on and on and includes a number of family genealogies. Some of these are available as images of old books while others are textual databases with words that can be copied-and-pasted into other documents. To be sure, you could purchase most of these publications on paper or on CD-ROM to add to your personal library. The cost, however, would be thousands of dollars. It is far more cost-effective to join the Society and then use the online Web site instead. As valuable as these resources of genealogy information may be, they are only a part of the available information on NewEnglandAncestors.org. Other features of the site include: a.. NEHGS Library Catalog b.. Helpful Guides for New England Research c.. Research Columns: articles on a wide selection of topics, updated weekly, by noted genealogical authors, members of NEHGS, and fellow researchers. d.. Locality Research: The articles in this section will provide you with detailed information on how to do genealogical research in the New England states, New York, eastern Canada, England, and Ireland. e.. How-To Guides, such as: a.. Making Optimum Use of the IGI by Helen Schatvet Ullmann, CG, FASG b.. A Research Trip to the Family History Library: Twenty Reasons You Should Go by Paula Stuart Warren, CGRSSM c.. Family History Fun for Children by Maureen A. Taylor d.. and more. f.. Other articles on: a.. African American Research in New England b.. Family Health and Genealogy c.. Genetics and Genealogy Again, the above is an abbreviated list. All of the above is a sample of what you can find on www.NewEnglandAncestors.org. It is not a full list. A complete description of everything on that Web site will fill more than one newsletter. If you have New England ancestry, NewEnglandAncestors.org is probably the best online resource for you. It is available to members of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The present membership price is $60.00 per year; however, that will increase very soon to $75.00, so I'd suggest that you join now at http://www.newenglandancestors.org/rs1/membership/main/ To learn more about this online treasure house of genealogy information, go to: http://www.newenglandancestors.org