ELLIS ISLAND FREE DATABASE in NEED OF FUNDS

Recently ELLIS ISLAND contacted me to ask for a donation so that the database, which is free on the Internet, can remain a free service.

I remember how thrilled people were to use that database! One day it was up, and for the next week or two it was so jammed up, it was difficult to get in.

It was my understanding that ELLIS ISLAND was begun as a volunteer project and I never imagined that it would become a pay for play database.

Like any good database it helped thousands of people interested in learning about their immigrant ancestors.

However, many people did not find their ancestors on Ellis Island because they did not realize that this database focuses of those who CAME IN STEERAGE. If a person was on a better ticket, then they got off at CASTLE ROCK.

Above is the link to the free database.

TRAGIC : POLISH PRESIDENT and DIGNITARIES KILLED IN PLANE CRASH ON WAY TO SITE OF UNMARKED GRAVES

For some of us who have roots in Eastern Europe, the recent plane crash that astonishingly resulted in the death of the Polish President, Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and leading dignitaries, to the site of unmarked graves of Poles, killed and deposited there in 1940, will bring up the stories that our ancestors told us about life in the Old Country. "Katyn" is a place in the Russian forest where there are unmarked graves - about 20,000 people are in those graves, many intelligencia, priests, doctors, writers and artists.

IT HAS BEEN A STRUGGLE TO GET THE RUSSIANS TO OPEN THEIR FILES ON THE PRISONERS... Perhaps this is where some GENEALOGY ACTIVISM is required!?

Some of these prisoners are OUR ANCESTORS!

Let me say that about a year ago I discovered that a few persons with a surname in my family had been taken to Siberia... Now, I do not know who these persons are or how or if they are related to me, but possibly this ties in with the story I was told about the Russian soldiers taking my grandfather's brother away... A snippet of family story that I was too young to ask my grandfather more questions about.

Attaching to a Seattle Times article by Associated Press Writer

"Killed with President Lech Kaczynski in the plane crash near Smolensk, western Russia, were his wife, Maria Kaczynska, his closest aides, lawmakers, army commanders, church figures, historic figures, plane crew and relatives of the victims of the 1940 massacre of Polish officers in Katyn and in other places. They had been traveling to Katyn to mark the 70th anniversary.

The Soviet secret police killed thousands of Polish military leaders and intellectuals at Katyn and other places at the start of World War II. It was part of a strategy to subdue the country, whose eastern half it occupied starting in 1939, and better control it..." Minika Scislowska

SOME GOOD REASONS TO HIRE A PROFESSIONAL by Christine of ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

1) WHEN YOU ARE INTERESTED IN YOUR ANCESTRY but YOU have no time, ability, or interest in researching yourself.

2) WHEN you want the research to hold up through documentation ("Proofed"), especially for submission as evidence for entitlement to certain societies (D.A.R or S.A.R. for instance), scholarships, tribal benefits, etc.

3) WHEN you want research that you, a relative, or someone else conducted, to be double checked.

4) WHEN you find yourself stuck in your personal research. (Maybe you need a little advice on where to find resources.)

5) WHEN the research needs to hold up in court (for immigration/INS, wills/inheritance, etc.)

6) WHEN someone approaches you claiming to be related and you are not sure of them. (I've actually met someone quite wealthy that this happened to. Sometimes long lost relatives really are related, sometimes this is someone who is only in touch because they want money...)
7) WHEN someone is making a claim to be a son or daughter or when you wish to find a birth child or birth parent. (Some times genealogy is not necessary in these cases, but will achieve or help to achieve documentation and current location. I highly recommend DNA testing as well.)

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A 1940 TRANSCRIPTION PROJECT YOU MAY WISH TO JOIN (ED)

UPDATE APRIL 2012 by Ancestry Worship Genealogy

I've provided links to the National Archives 1940 information and to the ED converter utility to the left sidebar - top of this blog. I attended a lecture by Steve Morse at Latter Day Saints Family History Library in Los Angeles recently. It was a fun lecture, tracing the addresses of famous cartoon characters such as Donald Duck.

If you will go to this ED converter site and follow the links you will find the names of volunteers who have transcribed ED districts and the various cities, large and small, in the United States that are already done. You'll see what needs to be done.

I've spend the last week getting into these sites and using them, or trying to. I'm one of the millions who crashed the National Archives site last Monday within hours after the grand opening. What has happened is that a third party contractor has been hired to provide additional servers for the traffic. As a result the images are not showing as was planned. The original idea was to get to a ED and see a row of small page icons to click one after another. As the site is functioning at this time, you will click page by page. (Try using the ZOOM function on your computer to reduce these to cut on how much mouse you have to use.)

I had 1930 addresses as well as 1940ish addresses for seven families which I used the converter on. Sadly, not one of these addresses was wrong, but the ED districts that the addresses brought up on the converter were not right. In one case one ED district was brought up but I read seven ED's till I found the family. In two other cases the ED converter did not reduce the number of films much because the street name ran through a few districts, meaning that the street is being read but probably not the house number. YES USING THE MAP and introducing the cross street names narrowed it some, but not much!

PLEASE NOTE THAT IN ABOUT A WEEK I'LL BE POSTING ON ALTERNATIVES FOR FINDING ANCESTORS ON THE 1940.

OLDER POSTS BELOW:
STEVE MORSE has announced a 1940 CENSUS transcription project which you may wish to join.

Let me tell you this... Morse has been an innovator in helping us get into and around the ELLIS ISLAND database. I heard him speak a few years ago and he's probably a genius with a few cohorts who are genius's too. More than anything this is going to take a lot of work and cooperation!

You may already know that we cannot legally see the 1940 until April 1, 2012 but that doesn't mean it will be TRANSCRIBED... and because of the burgeoning population counted yes I AM saying it could be 2015 before you can use it... unless of course you are part of a project in which your transcription work makes your towns of interest available to other genealogists!check this out NOW!

PS : JUST HEARD FROM STEVE (and PARTNER JOEL) HIMSELF! READ STEVE'S COMMENT BELOW!
(The project is not per surname!)

Was there a PRANKSTER in YOUR FAMILY? APRIL FOOLS has BEEN CELEBRATED FOR 500 YEARS

..."By the mid-17th century, the April Fools' prank parade had spread throughout much of Europe under the name "All Fools' Day." It developed into a day on which friends tried to trick each other into running silly errands in search of nonexistent objects, such as pigeon's milk. One of the most infamous early widespread reports of the practice was from the April 2, 1698, edition of the British newspaper Dawks' News-Letter, which reported on a group of people who went to the Tower of London to see a nonexistent ceremonial washing of the lions, a joke repeated annually for centuries to come. "

LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE NOW!

HERALDRY 2

If you're interested in seeing if there is a heraldic crest or shield for your surname, you may want to use books that describe these in the special language of heraldry. There used to be meaning in every color, every animal, every form of shield, and design.

MAYFLOWER by NATHANIEL PHILBRICK : BOOK EXCERPT

MAYFLOWER
A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Viking Press
C 2006 Nathaniel Philbrick

After the Mayflower journeyed to what would be New England, other ships made the journey, including the Fortune.

124) "There were a large number of Strangers among the passengers, many of them single men who undoubtedly looked with distress at the noticeable lack of young women among the Pilgrims. With the arrival of the Fortune, there would be a total of sixty-six men in the colony and just sixteen women. For every eligible female there were six eligible men. For young girls such as fifteen year old Elizabeth Tilley, nineteen year old Pricilla Mullins, and fourteen-year-old Mary Chilton (all of them orphans). The mounting pressure to marry must have been intense, especially since the new arrivals tended to be, in Bradford's words, "lusty young men, and many of them wild enough." Adding to the potential volatility of the mix was the fact that there was no place to put them all. Bradford had no choice but to divide them up among the preexisting seven houses and four public buildings, some of which must have become virtual male dormitories..."

Guess whose ancestors arrived on this voyage? Future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His ancestors name was Philip de la Noye, whose French surname was changed to Delano...

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SIBERIAN ANCESTOR NOT NEANDERTHAL or MODERN HUMAN MATCH !

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter – Wed Mar 24, 3:35 pm ET

"NEW YORK – In the latest use of DNA to investigate the story of humankind, scientists have decoded genetic material from an unidentified human ancestor that lived in Siberia and concluded it might be a new member of the human family tree....The DNA doesn't match modern humans or Neanderthals, two species that lived in that area around the same time — 30,000 to 50,000 years ago."

QUEEN ELIZABETH

MAYFLOWER by NATHANIEL PHILBRICK : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

MAYFLOWER
A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Viking Press
C 2006 Nathaniel Philbrick

I love this writer's work. MAYFLOWER does not disappoint. This book will probably challenge the beliefs you've had about the Pilgrims since history was being taught in grade school.

The Pilgrims had been living in Holland and were concerned that their children were becoming too Dutch, rather than remaining English, so along with fleeing religious persecution they were making a second move for ethnocultural integrity. Even as the deals were made for transportation, non-believers were involved in the early colony. While about half of those who came to the eastern coast of what would be Massachusetts died the first year, they kept coming, and in about 50 years there were dozens of small settlements founded. Relationships with the Native Americans were never easy, because the neighboring tribes were interested in taking over each other's turf. Deals became rife with third party interests. And no the Pilgrims were not Pacifists.

If you can trace your ancestry to the Pilgrims you may find yourself related by marriage to a number of famous historical figures. Why?

Because (page 104), "A few weeks after Bradford's election to governor, Edward Winslow and Susanna White showed the rest of the settlement that it was indeed possible to start anew. Susanna had lost her husband, William, on February 21; Edward had lost his wife, Elizabeth, on March 24. Just a month and a half later, on May 12, Edward and Susanna became the first couple in Plymouth to marry. Six weeks may seem too short a time to grieve, but in the seventeenth century, it was quite normal for a widow or widower to remarry within three months of his or her spouse's death. Children needed to be cared for; households needed to be maintained. And besides, these were exceptional times. If all the deaths had failed to inure them to grief, it had certainly altered them to the wondrous necessity of life."

And guess what? They were married in a civil ceremony as, Bradford, who married them, cited that nowhere in the Gospel does is say that a minister should be involved in a wedding!

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U.S. CITIZEN and IMMIGRATION Link here!

Here's a link to a United States government archive you'll find interesting... It's not a free service but let's face it. Government genealogists probably know just where to look saving you a lot of time and the fees are probably equal to a tank of gas to the closest do it yourself archive.

DANCING at CIRO's by SHEILA WELLER : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW (LOS ANGELES IN THE 1940'S)

DANCING at CIRO'S by SHEILA WELLER

I love to read around the people I'm researching, who become characters in the great play of life. Sometimes you read a book and it brings a place and time alive again too. This is a wonderful excerpt from a wonderful writer, Sheila Weller. Her mother's brother owned the famous Ciro's restaurant which was something of a home to the Rat Pack when they weren't in Vegas... Christine

Page 84 and 85

"There was still an unfinished quality to the place. The whole Los Angles basin, from San Bernadino to Santa Monica, had, two centuries earlier, been a swamp-pocked plain where antelope and wild cattle grazed on patchy grass amid alder, willow, and sycamore; where cacti, manzanita, and buckthorn spouted, giving the ground a scrubby aspect. Into this abyss, several leather-jacketed Spaniards - members of a company led by Captain Don Caspar de Portola (the Spanish Governor of the Californias) and a gray - robed Franciscan friar named Juan Crespi had stumbled in August 1769. They encountered stocky aboriginals who "began to howl like wolves as they drew near to us," their diary reads, but they eventually agreed to barter. They explored and christened their new friends the Gabrieleno Indians.

"Priests, soldiers, and colonists made their way up from Mexico over the next fifty years. The city passed from Spanish to Mexican rule in 1822, and the 1841 Pre-emption Act allowed settlers to homestead for $1.25 an acre. After a trio of events - the Gold Rush of 1848, the cession of California to the United States that same year, and statehood in 1850, Hollywood and West Los Angeles attracted migrants who, over the next thirty years, built citrus orchards on acreage that would later become Melrose, Fairfax, and Fountain Avenues and miles of Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Sunset Boulevards.

"Danish sailor Christian Duen homesteaded 160 acres that squared Santa Monica, Normandie, Melrose, and Western. Kentucky miner John Bower worked a plot between Franklin and Sunset. A 1870's roster of Hollywood fruit farmers includes "a German cripple, a French sailor, a Basque sheep raiser, a Mexican war veteran, a Prussian Calvary officer." Eventually this ragtag lot would disappear, to be replaced by a civic culture so bland, it would lead H.L. Mencken to dismiss L.A. as "Double Dubuque." Yet something of this haphazard diversity lingered, making for a class system that upturned eastern caste rules. The Irish, scorned in Boston, became L.A.'s elite; the Mulhollands and the Dohenys were the young city's Astors and Rockefellers. In Los Angeles, Jews didn't try to "pass." People WANTED to be Jews; many who weren't born Jews later converted.'"

C 2003 Sheila Weller St Martins Press

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