Merry Christmas to all MoSGA members and friends!
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Silver Dollar City December 2014 |
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Ozark City Park, Christmas 2014 |
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Silver Dollar City December 2014 |
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Ozark City Park, Christmas 2014 |
MoSGA's Winter 2016 newsletter is now available on the website here.
Catch up on all the latest happenings with the organization and Missouri genealogical interests!
The 2017 National Genealogical Society has released details for the upcoming 2017 conference to be held in Raleigh, NC 10-13 May 2017. Check it out here.
Registration opens on December 1, 2016.
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I think I am still full from all the eating and fellowship.
Today there are some great bargains being offered for cyber Monday. Here are a few of my favorites"
Ancestry is offering 30% off their DNA testing. You can get it here.
Legacy Family Tree is offering 30% off on a year-long subscription to their webinars here. This is a great deal on over 400 different presentations on all aspects of genealogical research.
Family Tree Magazine has a deal offering 50% off plus an extra 10% off today site wide.
Flip-Pal mobile scanner also has a sale here.
Family Roots Publishing has a 20% off sale on all in stock items here.
Happy Hunting!
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Photo is titled: Group of Unidentified Military Personnel, no date, #59-1105, courtesy of the Truman Library, Independence, MO |
FindMyPast.com is opening it's vast collection of military records for four days in honor of Veterans Day. The collection includes over 70 million spanning the globe from 1760 through the 20th century.
You can enter as little information as you ancestor's last name into the search engine on the front page. Don't miss access to this great collection today (November 10th) through Sunday (November 13).
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Photo courtesy of Fold3.com |
Whether you are just starting out with researching your family history or are a long-time genealogist, it is often difficult to keep up with new technologies or methodologies in the field. There are many options to help. Both Family Search and Ancestry have blogs and provide free webinars to assist researchers in getting the most out of their efforts. Family Search webinars, numbering at least 75 at last count, can be found on the classes and webinars page here. Ancestry.com's options are listed under the Ancestry Academy, found here. Happy hunting!
Sorry for the long delay between posts. I had a family emergency and spent the last week enjoying fall in the Ozarks with my parents. I am headed home today.
This morning I saw the Legal Genealogist Judy Russell's post on time and thought I had to share it. Judy explains in her blog that even if you know precise dates for important events in your ancestors lives they may not be as precise as you think!
Judy explains the difference between the Julian calendar, in use from 46 B.C. and the Gregorian calendar implemented in the mid 1700s. The difficulty is that many countries changed to the new system on different dates making it difficult to determine accuracy of a
specific date.
Check out Judy's blog for a detailed explanation of the calendars and how they may affect your family tree.
One interesting aspect of European ancestry is that many centuries-old families are represented not only in name, but also by a crest or coat of arms. There are many avenues of research available. This website can help you to better understand heraldry. If you have German heritage this site may be useful. The Allen County Public Library has a guide here.
Another site run by John Lehman offers multiple arms for more common names such as Allen, Smith, etc. Finally, the Library of Congress has a bibliography here.
St. Louis will celebrate German-American Day on Saturday, October 1, 2016 at the St. Louis German Culture Society's Hall. The hall will be transformed into a biergarten with beer, pretzels, Kaffe and Kuchen (coffee & cake) will be available. For more information call Event Chair Dorris Keeven-Franke at 636-221-1524 or check out the website here. Experience German Gemutlichkeit in Missouri!
Award Recipients, 2016 Luncheon |
The Missouri State Genealogical Association (MoSGA) recognizes individuals, groups and organizations that have put forth that extra effort to support genealogical research, activities, and publications in the Show-Me State.
Join us in recognizing the 2016 Award winners at the August 6th Awards Luncheon at our Annual Conference at Stoney Creek Conference Center, Columbia, MO.
A recent post by Genealogist Amy Johnson Crow offered an option for historical currency conversion that would assist a researcher in determining, "How Much Was That Back Then?" Amy suggests the site Wolfram Alpha. It got me thinking about other facts in our ancestors lives and how we can truly understand what their lives were like. I have used the site historicalstatistics.org a few times and have found it useful. The site is located in Sweden which means it has some great European resources, but it lists North American sources as well.
This site includes conversions such as measurements, calendar, clock, birthday, world population, foreign exchange rates and many more.
Sometimes understanding more about how our ancestors lived is only a matter of converting present day statistics and concepts back to a specific time or place.
Happy hunting.
We are really excited about this year's conference with our guest speaker John Philip Colletta. I saw Dr. Colletta in June at the IGHR in Birmingham and he said he was looking forward to coming back to Missouri.
Dr. Colletta is an excellent speaker and will assuredly provide insights into genealogy that beginners and experts will find useful and interesting.
We hope to see you Friday and Saturday, August 5-6 in Columbia! There is still time to register online at mosga.org.
Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.What is music to the genealogist's ears is that the Archive provides "evidence-based research and primary source documentation." There are no opinion pieces here, only facts gleaned from
In a recent article on Ancestral Findings details how the 1973 fire can affect military record availability.
Many U.S. Army or Air Force records (1912-1964) were destroyed at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, in a devastating fire on July 12, 1973.
The article explains how "over 6.5 million records were able to be recovered from the building after the fire, though they were in terrible condition. They were carefully dried, sprayed with mold repellant, and pieces of records that were charred began to be put back together in a painstaking, careful, and slow process."
At the 2015 NGS conference in St. Charles a representative from the Center provided a comprehensive explanation of what has been done to ensure veterans, historians and genealogists have access to the records. He explained that the only way to know for sure whether a record is available is to request it from the NPRC. More than 40 years later many records have yet to be scanned. Instead records are found, copied and preserved by request only.
Guru Lisa Louise Cooke has shared another helpful tip for using Evernote. A recent Genealogy Gems post detailed the process of organizing your notes into notebooks.
This is another tool I use daily. The Evernote Web clipper is my best friend as I can quickly scan emails, articles or other Web information and save items I want to read later or add to my files quickly and easily. I use both tags and notebooks to organize my documents. Items are easy to move or delete which means you aren't stuck with keeping a lot of data you don't want. I tag data with multiple tags so that I can easily find it again with Evernote search.
On her blog Moultry Creek Gazette, Denise Olson recently explained the attributes of the Word Press app upgrade. The app now allows users to "manage Publicize and third-party sharing using the app" and "manage comments using swipe gestures to approve, unapprove or trash them." Additionally users can tag locations by using map search.
I use Word Press for my own blog and find it an effective platform. Even if you don't blog you can set up a free account and follow genealogy, history and local / regional blogs of interest to you.