Madison
County Genealogical Society
Minutes of the Meeting - October 13, 2011
The October 2011 meeting of the Madison
County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on
Thursday, October 13, at 7:00 pm.
President, Robert Ridenour, called the
meeting to order.
GIFT
MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE
Do you have a family member that is
interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison
County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will
be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.
The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $20.00
Patron Annual Membership $30.00
Life Membership $250.00
Contact our Secretary, Barbara Hitch, at racerbarb@aol.com,
about a gift membership.
October
Meeting
On October 13, 2011, the Madison County Genealogical Society held its regular
meeting at the Edwardsville Public Library. A program titled Using Family
Search Organization Free Digital Records and Microfilm was presented by
Kathy Nevin, training coordinator for the O'Fallon,
Illinois, Family History Center.
Ms. Nevin started out by telling the audience the Family
History Center is a branch of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
They provide access to billions of online records and to a circulating
collection of 2.5 million microfilms from over 100 countries. The center
provides limited assistance for research. The staff members are volunteers and
most are learning by doing  researching their own ancestors and hoping to
learn something that will help you in your research.
Kathy then described the resources available at the Family History Center:
The FHC has some local cemetery records, reference material for German
research, DAR lineage books, misc. records from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and
other states. They have a catalog of microfilm and microfiche that are on
permanent loan at the Center that can be viewed by all the patrons. The
reader/printer is very popular. You can make paper copies, but several of the
patrons have discovered they can save money and trees by copying their
documents to a flash drive. There are also several computers with Internet
access.
Unique to all Family History Centers is the FHC Services Portal. This gives our patrons
access to premium websites (those that usually cost money, but are free when
used at the FHC). The premium websites include the following:
The 19th Century
British Library Newspaper Digital Archive. This collection contains
full runs of 48 newspapers specially selected by the British Library to best
represent nineteenth century Britain. It includes national and regional
newspapers, as well as those from both established country or university towns
and industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands. Scotland, Ireland and
Wales are included. You can save, print or email the article images.
The Newspaper Archive
is supposedly the world's best resource for newspaper articles. It contains
tens of millions of searchable newspaper pages, dating as far back as the
1700's. You will want to review the available newspapers because not all papers
in all areas are included.
The American Civil
War Research Database is the definitive online resource for researching
the individuals, regiments, and battles of the American Civil War. This
database contains indexed, searchable information on over 4 million soldiers
and thousands of battles as well as over 17,000 photos. Basically, it includes
a record for virtually every soldier who served in the war.
The Family History Center has the family history library edition of Ancestry.com.
That means we have everything available on ancestry that would cost you a
pretty hefty subscription if you had it at home. You can use it at the FHC for
free.
Find My Past
was the first website to make the complete birth, marriage and death records
for England and Wales available online, back in 2003. Since then countless
other historical records have been published on the Internet. Until civil
registration it was local parishes that kept records of important events. Find
My Past, in partnership with the Federation of Family History Societies, is
publishing these local parish records online. As with a lot of Internet
sources, it is a work in progress.
On August 18, 2011, Footnote announced their intention to create the finest and
most comprehensive collection of US Military records available on the Internet
and changed the name of the site from Footnote to Fold3.
The Genealogist has a large number of databases which
can be searched individually. Key records include the census for England and
Wales (1841-1901) and the civil registration indexes of births, marriages and
deaths (BMD) 1837-2005.
Genline FamilyFinder is basically a software program that
allows you to search, view, and print pages from Genline's
Swedish Church Records archive. This is specialized software and only available
on two of the FHC computers.
Most of you are probably familiar with Heritage Quest since it is available through most libraries.
These are the records it gives you access to.
Historic Map
Works is a high quality, full color digital collection of historic
maps. The core of the collection consists of almost 1.5 million maps detailing
the geographic and development history of the US over a period of several
hundred years.
Paper Trail
is the newest website available at FHC and was created by the Oregon-California
Trails Association. It is based on a searchable index of the American westward
migration journeys. The database includes a list of libraries where the
original historic documents can be found but requires patience and creative
spelling to search.
FamilySearch.org is
a website provided by the LDS Church and available at the FHC. You do not have
to be a Latter-day Saint to use it. In fact, you will have to use it to order
microfilm that will be sent to the center to be viewed by you, so you will need
to have your own account. Free research guides and genealogy forms are
available for downloading from this site. You can even take online genealogy
classes. And last but not least, you can do a search for your ancestors in the
indexed records.
How can FamilySearch.org
help with your research? Take a look at the search options. You can use the
Records Search to search for your ancestor by name, or by location. You can
search for your ancestor using the Tree search. This gives you access to what
some of you may remember as Ancestral File or Pedigree Resource. You can search
through the Library catalog using places or surnames - or you can even search
for a specific book title or author.
This presentation was well received and
generated quite a few questions.