Monday, December 31, 2012

Resolutions????


 Too many of us make New Year's Resolutions that have not a chance of ever happening in our lives. Am I not right? I've done this for years but not this year....... not for 2013. I've decided upon a simple, a do-able, a worthwhile and a kinda fun resolution for 2013. This is it:

THROW SOMETHING AWAY EVERY DAY

This might be cleaning out a drawer or a closet but it could also mean (and to me it does mean) going through all these genealogy notes and files and throwing away things that are not right, not pertinent, and not true and downright no darn good. 

It's a day early but I've already begun: I cleaned out the 'fridge today and a pile of To-Dos on my desk! I'm on my way. Care to share your resolutions with EWGS????

2012 Year in Review

Well the EWGS Blog has been pretty busy this year, just for the month of December 335 people visited the blog.

Countries in order of visits were United States, Philippines, Canada, India, Australia, Czech Republic, Ireland, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

Cities in order of visits:  Spokane, Seattle, Fayetteville, Yakima, Coeur dAlene, New York, Pasig, Manila and Sydney.

For the year 4939 people visited the blog and this is some of the top visited posts:

Spokane Daily Chronicle online Free
1940 Enumeration District Maps
Ancestry.com vs Ancestry Library Edition
Hoover Dam Workers and Pioneer Families
Earthquake in Spokane
1940 Census

So here is the list of the top 10 2012 posts with the number of visits:

148  Spokane's Vintage Postcards
148 Personal (Genealogy ) Newspaper Ads
125  Everywhere a Name
118  EWGS Board for 2013
116  Three Biggee Events Coming Up
111  Need A Cannon?
110  EWGS April 7 Meeting 1940 Census Party Pictures
110 Write your own Obit
109  EWGS Fall Seminar a Success
107  Washington State Library Blog
101  Family Search Continues to Teach Folks

Friday, December 28, 2012

Spokan or Spokane

From the Spokesman Review June 5, 1895 page 4.
Spokane was originally called Spokan
Falls, early on the Falls was dropped so
Spokan for a while, but later the 'e' was
added to make Spokane. It was still
controversial in 1895.


Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Christmas Grandmas & Family History

Rosemary and Donna share kids...... her son married my daughter..... and so we also share four grand-boys and newly added two grand-daughters-in-law. But that's not what I want to share with you today! She brought a big box of genealogy papers to give him...... papers documenting her line back to Peter Knopp who served in the Revolution. Rosemary is a DAR member and very proud (rightfully so) of her ancestor.

Also included in the box were some old photos and here she is asking me if I think the young woman is the same as the older woman (I did). Can you think of a better thing to do on Christmas Day than to share/compare/swap/tell/enjoy/look-at and ooh and aah over old genealogy photos and papers?? Maybe this might be a great New Year's Day project for you and ?????

Monday, December 17, 2012

December Meeting Pix





Thanks to our Historian, John Ellingson, for sharing these photos. They're of our December meeting and Book Auction....... EWGS netted $268.00 from this auction (and thanks to Bill, our auctioneer). Mary, EWGS VP, conducted the meeting in her Santa hat and Dolly followed suit with her reindeer head dress. It was a good day.......... EWGS meetings are always good days!!!

Saturday, December 15, 2012

ShipIndex.org...... Used It?

Ever wanted a pix of the ship your ancestor came to America on? Or the ship your ancestor served aboard? This website, www.ShipIndex.org, may give you that pix. Here is the blurb from their most recent (free) newsletter:

What kind of content will you find in the database? ShipIndex.org contains citations for vessels mentioned in books, magazines, websites, databases, CD-ROMs, and more. (You can find a complete list of all resources in the database here.) So, if you see a mention of a ship in a book, it means that that vessel is mentioned in that specific book, on that particular page. (If the page number is hotlinked, that indicates that you should be able to see the actual page through Google Books. This doesn’t always work, depending on how much of the book is visible through Google Books, where your computer is physically located [ie, the IP address of your computer – if you’re outside the US, Google generally hides more content than they do for someone inside the US], and several other factors. But it works, most of the time.)

Many – but definitely not all – citations have links that will take you to the full text. If the citation is at an online location, the link will take you right to the entry. Many digitized resources are available this way; we estimate that fully 85% of the citations in the database can take you to full text. On the other hand, sometimes you can’t get to the full text at all, because the book or magazine or CD-ROM isn’t available in Google Books. What do you do then? I firmly believe that knowing a citation exists is 75% of the way to finding the information itself. If you don’t know the citation exists, you’ll of course never find it.

So, once you know the citation exists, there are several things you can do. In most cases, you’ll see a “Find in a library” link on the results page; if you click this link, you’ll be taken to WorldCat, a massive bibliographic database that can be used to tell you which libraries own the books you’re seeking. Enter your location, and it’ll identify the libraries nearest you with that book or resource. You can also click on the AbeBooks.com link to locate a copy of the book to purchase.

Always feel free to contact a librarian for more help if you need it. Good librarians have lots of little tricks for locating copies of books, and most libraries will borrow the book for you from another library for a small fee, or sometimes for free.

What happens when you have an especially common ship name, like Mary? In the premium database, you’ll end up with thousands of citations, and that is, admittedly, a real challenge. The best way to manage this is to look at the complete citations, and see if you can narrow down the content to something that’s more manageable. For instance, if you’re looking for a ship from the era of the US Civil War, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you should ignore citations mentioned in Passenger Lists of Ships Coming to North America, 1607-1825: A Bibliography or The Private Papers of John, Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, 1771-1782, and you should certainly pay attention to citations in publications like Paul Silverstone’s Civil War Navies, 1855-1883, or Accessible Archives’ Civil War Newspapers collection.

Look at the publication title and also at the citation itself. If the publication title isn’t specific (for example, a journal like Mariners Mirror, or a general title like Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia), the citation might give a lot of useful information. When you see a date, it’s important to remember that that date may refer to almost anything – sometimes it’s the date of vessel launch, sometimes it refers to an event in the vessel’s life, such as a specific voyage or collision or loss, and sometimes it refers to the date of publication of something else – for example, in the Civil War Newspapers collection, dates refer to the year of publication, and may publish a remembrance of an event from many years earlier. The complete notes about the resource will generally tell you more about how to read the citation, and what the year might refer to.

That’s all for this week. I hope you find the database useful! If you do, I’d love to hear how it helped you – or how you’d like to see it improved. You can always contact us via our contact us page on the website. The next issue will talk about notifications, and how you can stay up to date on new content that is added to the site.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

A Christmas Tree/Family Tree Idea


Need a new idea for decorating your Christmas tree? This is the tree displayed on B-1, the International Floor, at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The folks who work on that floor helping patrons with any research other than U.S., Canada, and British Isles, made ornaments from their family photos and then hung them on the tree. It was a most unusual and very striking Christmas tree. If any of you do this, share a photo of it with us (with me), please?

Saturday, December 1, 2012

EWGS Book Sale December 1, 2012

These were the last of the EWGS publications books, on the free by tables.

Two more Free by Tables
These were the books for sale, with Bill Hire the Auctioneer
 Bill Hire and Mary Holcomb before the sale started.