Subscription sites for genealogical research

In the world of subscription Web sites, dedicated to providing genealogical source material, the number of sources added each month is almost overwhelming. There are four major providers with huge offerings and a few others that have more specialized collections. There are also large and less mentioned Web sites which include access to newspapers and journal articles which are available only to libraries or universities. I will not attempt to provide an exhaustive list but merely an overview of the major players, easily available to the average genealogical researcher, in this expanding field in this field in the United States. The number of original records on these sites is so vast as to almost be beyond comprehension. Many countries, other than the United State, also have fee based or subscription services to provide access to original source records, but those are the subject of another day's post.

Not in any particular order, the main online subscription services are Ancestry.com, Heritage Quest, WorldVitalRecords.com, and Footnote.com. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The fees for subscribing vary with the duration and extent of the license. For example, Ancestry.com charges either a monthly or annual fee for its membership. Ancestry.com is $19.95 a month after a 14 day free trial up to $24.95 a month for the World Deluxe Membership billed in one annual payment. For those of you without a calculator handy, that is $299.40 a year. Membership in WorldVitalRecords varies from $5.95 per month up to a World Collection Membership for $119.40 a year. Footnote.com has two levels of membership, $11.95 a month or $69.95 a year. Heritage Quest is a little different, it is available through libraries and is free if you have a library login. I use my library card at the Maricopa County Library to get free access on my home compter. In fact, if you live near one of the larger Family History Centers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) mostly in the western U.S., you can get free access to all four.

Since these services are constantly adding names and sources to their collections, it is a good idea to periodically review your research every few months or so. Even if you did not find anything useful, additions to the huge databases may change that situation at any time.

Ancestry.com is the largest online database. They advertise access to billions of names and they are constantly adding new names. This strength is also a weakness because you can get hundreds or even thousands of responses to a search each with the same name you are searching. Ancestry.com does have an indexed copy, with digital images, of the entire U.S. Census from 1790 to 1930. However many of the other Ancestry.com entries are indexes only and do not have digital copies of the original records. Ancestry.com does have a very good search engine that allows a lot of variations in the search criteria. There are hundreds of comments and articles about Ancestry.com on the Web. A Google search on Ancestry.com showed over 38,000,000 hits. Ancestry.com is part of The Generations Network, Inc. which also owns Myfamily.com, Genealogy.com, Rootsweb.com, TGN.com, FamilyTreeMaker.com and Ancestrymagazine.com

Footnote.com is a newer Web site and has a partnership with the National Archives to digitize all of the records in the National Archives. Millions of records are added each month. To quote their promotional materials, "Footnote.com is a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past." By having a digitized copy of some documents I wanted to examine, Footnote.com saved me a trip to the Denver Branch of the National Archives.

WorldVitalRecords.com is an aggresive participant in the world of supplying original documents online. Like Ancestry.com, WorldVitalRecords.com claims to have the records of billions of individuals. Their records include birth, marriage and death records, census records, passenger lists, immigration lists, emigration records, foreign newspapers, cemetery records, reference materials, land records, family histories, historical records, city directories, business directories, township histories, civil service records, telephone directories, government records, war records, and maps, atlases, and gazetteers.

Heritage Quest is a different type of Web site than the other three. It is part of ProQuest, a major supplier of online services to libraries. Its subsidiaries include Chadwyck-Healey; CSA; eLibrary ; ProQuest; Micromedia ProQuest; RefWorks-COS; Serials Solutions; SIRS ;UMI Dissertation Publishing; and UMI Microfilm. To quote their promotional material, "HeritageQuest Online includes all of the images, and extensive indexing, from the 1790 - 1930 U.S. federal censuses. It offers more than 20,000 book titles, including nearly 8,000 family histories and over 12,000 local histories. Additionally, there are more than 250 primary-source documents such as tax lists, city directories, probate records, and more."

"Many other distinctive and invaluable sources of information can be found within HeritageQuest Online. These include Periodical Source Index (PERSI), a widely recognized resource guide, updated annually, that covers more than 6,300 genealogy and history periodicals written in English and French (Canada) since 1800. There are other valuable collections such as the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, which identifies more than 80,000 American military, naval, and marine officers and enlisted men."

Another interesting subscription site is NewEnglandAncestors.org the Web site for the New England Historic and Genealogical Society. An annual membership is $75 and gives you access to not only their online collection but also to their research library in Boston. You may also wish to consider the Godfrey Memorial Library. The Godfrey Memorial Library has a basic membership for $35 a year, expanded memberships that give access to additional records and includes a membership in WorldVitalRecords, is $100

Before signing up for any of these services, you may wish to investigate the extent of their collections and the time you will actually use the service. But I can say, without reservation, that all of these services have provided me personally with hundreds of original records, saving me years of work.

Extensive list of family history Web sites

Professor Kip Sperry at Brigham Young University has compiled an extensive list of helpful Family History Internet Sites. Many of these sites contain specific information rather than general discussions of procedures. I have no feel for how up-to-date the list is or how often it is maintained, but it appears to be a good shorter reference list. Check it out.

Center for Family History and Genealogy

You may have never heard of The Center for Family History and Genealogy. This is an organization at Brigham Young University whose mission is to utilize BYU resources to simplify the finding of ancestors and the discovery of the world in which they lived; and support the training of students for life-long temple and family history service. It shares a partnership with several other organizations including

• Religious Education
• Department of History
• School of Family Life
• Family, Home, and Social Sciences
• Computer Science Department
• State Archives of Niedersachsen, Germany
• State Archives of Bavaria, Germany

I have found few references to the Center but nevertheless it has a lot of valuable resources. It's student employees provide some of the support for the Immigrant Ancestors Project which uses emigration registers to locate information about the birthplaces of immigrants in their native countries, which is not found in the port registers and naturalization documents in the destination countries. Volunteers working with scholars and researchers at Brigham Young University are creating a database of millions of immigrants based on these emigration registers.

The Center for Family History and Genealogy also has a number of publications and other resource materials available for sale and on-line. Although its Web site appears to be poorly maintained, you should be aware of this resource.

Changes in genealogy and fear of change

In a recent conversation, I heard about a common problem. Surprisingly, this problem is not limited to older genealogists, but is a common challenge for many, young and old. It is the fear of change. The person in this conversation has a ten year plus, older computer running Windows 98. She is still using a dial-up modem and has all of her records in PAF. Many of her family members are more advanced in computers and constantly try to get her to buy a new computer. She lives on a very limited budget and cannot really afford the expense of adding a cable connection. But the real problem is not the cost, the real problem is breaking out of her comfort zone and trying some of the newer products.

In helping people with their research, I commonly get into situations where I get real hostility from someone who knows how to do the research and doesn't want me to tell them anything different. One lady, sitting across from me at a genealogy library, was in tears. It turned out she was looking for her grandmother's maiden name and was so frustrated she could no longer control her tears. When I offered to help, her reaction was surprising. She got huffy and mad at me for suggesting that there might be someplace she hadn't searched. After talking to her for fifteen or twenty minutes, I could see she did not want any of my suggestions on additional resources, even though it appeared that she didn't even know what sources she had already searched.

These stories happen almost daily. What can we do? Probably not much for some of the people caught in this trap, but it is important to realize that there is an every changing and increasing amount of primary information available every day on the Web and change is inevitable, we might as well enjoy the ride.

For example, Record Search Pilot has new records in the 1850 US Census, the 1870 US Census, and the 1900 US Census, just for one instance. Keep and open mind and you may just break through that wall stopping your research.

Genealogical surprises on the Web

When I was younger, I used to occasionally look through a toy kaleidoscope. Inside a cardboard tube, there were three mirrors in a triangle with a small viewing hole in one end and a translucent covering on the other end containing some pieces of colored rocks or glass. Looking through the viewing hole, while holding the kaleidoscope up to the light produced images of complex patterns caused by the reflections in the mirrors. No matter how beautiful the pattern was in any given moment, the slightest movement would change the pattern to something else. This ever changing pattern is a good analogy for the constant developments on the World Wide Web, particularly in the area of genealogy.

This past few days, in doing some research on Danish ancestors, I came across another of those surprises. I found that the Danes have been busy putting photos of thousands of grave markers with their indexes on the Web. In the traditional Danish fashion, these are all very well organized and readily available for free. They shouldn't be at all difficult to locate, if you know how to read Danish and can search for a particular parish. It is a little more difficult if you only read English, but not impossible. The key site is a portal called Amt-Herred-Sogn (Counties-Districts-Parishes) or DIS-Danmark. When you reach the site, there is an icon of a little British flag. When you click the British flag, the site turns into English. The entry to the grave markers is found through following the organization geographically to the individual Parish sites and then looking for the "Gravsteder" if there is one available. Like many resources, this is a work in progress, but the quality of the site and the huge amount of information is impressive. You may also wish to search on "Billeder af Gravsten." Be aware that the English translation of the site only goes so far, as you get into the more useful portions of the site you will find that everything is in Danish and you may wish to have a Danish/English dictionary handy.

Here is a link to one of the Parish sites, just in case you can't make your way through the site's organization on the first try.

As you work with the Web, you will soon realize that, just as with my childhood kaleidoscope, every day there are changes and new patterns. I feel truly sorry for those people who cannot enjoy the changing patterns and realize that the explosion of information is an answer to prayers.

In genealogy, the only constant is change itself

One of the hallmarks of the new developments in the world of on-line genealogy is the need to use updated computer systems. One of the basic components of such a system is a high speed Internet connection. Fortunately, in many places of the world, such connections are becoming more available and reasonably priced. In some areas these connections may be free in connection with other services. In our neighborhood, we just got a flyer announcing that high speed fiber optic cable was now available. New FamilySearch is graphics and data intensive, without a higher speed connection, it is almost unusable.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) has specific recommendations for computer systems for the best results in using FamilySearch. Here are the combinations of operating systems and browsers needed:

Browsers Operating Systems
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and newer running under
• Windows XP (Home and Professional SP1 and newer)
• Windows Vista
Mozilla 2.0.0.1 and newer, including Firefox also running under
• Windows XP (Home and Professional SP1 and newer)
• Windows Vista
Safari 3.12 Mac OS X (10.4 and newer)
You can use other browsers and operating systems, though some features may not work as well.

Other Requirements
• A VGA or SVGA monitor with a screen resolution of at least 800 x 600 pixels and at least 65,000 screen
colors
• A dial-up Internet connection of 28.8 kbps or better (broadband is recommended for using the online
overviews that teach how to use the system)
• (Optional) Adobe Reader version 6.01 or higher to view and print instructions for FamilySearch
• (Optional) Adobe Flash Player version 7.0 or higher to see online overviews for FamilySearch

This information comes directly from the New FamilySearch Web site.

In today's electronics market, computer systems running this software, with more than the capability to connect to the Internet and process genealogical information, start at considerably under $500. For example a new HP a6610t with a 19" monitor and 2 GB SDRAM and a 250 GB hard drive is $499.99 at Costco. Similar prices and systems are available at many other outlets such as Best Buy, system for $379.99 and Walmart, system for $415. If you are serious about keeping up with the progress in genealogy, part of your consideration, besides spending time, should be to have the right equipment.

New FamilySearch Affiliate Ancestral Quest

Incline Software, LC, dating from 1994, is one of the oldest genealogical software companies still publishing under the same name. It currently produces two premier tools, Ancestral Quest, one of the first Windows genealogy programs available, and PAFWiz, an add-on utility for Personal Ancestral File 5 (PAF), which is one of the family tree programs derived from earlier versions of Ancestral Quest. This direct relationship between Ancestral Quest and Personal Ancestral File, Version 5 makes for an easy transition from PAF to a much newer and more useful program. To quote from their company history:

Over the years, Incline Software™ has aligned itself with various other companies in an effort to market Ancestral Quest. From fall of 1995 through fall of 1997, Ancestral Quest was also sold by Infobases, Inc. (and later by an affiliate of Infobases, Ancestry, Inc.) From the fall of 1998 to the fall of 2000, Incline Software partnered itself with The Hope Foundation.In 1999, with some strategic help from The Hope Foundation, Incline Software helped The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints develop its Windows version of Personal Ancestral File® (PAF). Ancestral Quest, (including programs derived from Ancestral Quest), has become the most widely used genealogy software program in the world.

Importantly, Ancestral Quest Version 12.1 is the first complete data base program to synchronize data with the Family Tree of New FamilySearch. As such, Ancestral Quest is certified by the FamilySearch to access and update the Family Tree database of new.FamilySearch.org. To further quote their Web site, "it is also a FamilySearch certified PAF add-in, which means that a user of PAF 5 can use AQ 12.1 to synchronize his/her local PAF database with the Family Tree of new FamilySearch. So whether you use AQ by itself, or want to use PAF with AQ as an add-in, you will be able to synchronize your data with new FamilySearch." What is more important, the working released version of the program is available right now in December, 2008.

Like many genealogy programs, Incline Software's Ancestral Quest has a free trial offer. The free download is fully functional for 60 days and then will revert into a "Viewer" mode until you purchase a registration key.

One interesting feature of Ancestral Quest is that the program automatically looks up information available in Ancestry.com and shows you the number of related records available. Of course, if you don't have a subscription to Ancestry.com, this feature is some what useless. What is probably most important about the program is that it has the "look and feel" of Personal Ancestral File and if you are moving into a new program and have little experience with other lineage linked data base programs, Ancestral Quest can provide one of the least painful transitions to much more useful program.