Books To Share

    

  Found these three books in a going-to-the-dump

pile and rescued them! Will send them to you for postage.

Garden of the Sun: History of the San Joaquin Valley: 1772-1939 by Wallace Smith, 2004

Collected Poems of Robert Service, "poet-bard of

the Yukon"

The Fountain & the Mountain: The University of Washington Campus, 1895-1995, by Norman J. Johnston

Snowbound Stagecoach

The people involved in this account came from the following families;  Stephens, Miller, Allphin, McClain, Scott, Mulkey, Riddle, Davis, Glover, Nichols, McDonald, Niles, Jeffries, Moody, Gay, Jagger, Graham, Irvin, James, Wellington, Bolton, Wilson, Thompson, Hogg, Hunter, Stocking, Johnson and others.

"Snowbound Stagecoach" is available from the publisher, Moonglade Press, or from Amazon.

20% Off on All Products at Family Roots Publishing

Here's another great Labor Day Weekend special from Leland Meitlzer at Family Roots Publishing:

Help Us Celebrate! Take an Additional 20% Off on All Products purchased at Family Roots Publishing Co. Website This Weekend!

On Sunday, September 1, Patty and I are celebrating our 45th Wedding Anniversary, along with our sons and their families. It just happens to also be Labor Day Weekend.

In honor of this milestone anniversary, Patty and I are doing something we've never done before at the Family Roots Publishing Co. website. We're offering a Labor Day Weekend/45th Wedding Anniversary sale of 20% additional off on all products on the site. To take advantage of the offer, just put the number 45 in the Offer Code box at checkout. Please remember to put 45 in the Offer Code box. Otherwise you won't get the additional discount!

This is a FamilyRootsPublishing website sale only. We're not taking phone orders, and purchase orders are not allowed for this sale. Credit card sales only. We're doing the sale this way as we're letting the computer do all the work. We won't be working. Instead, we will be celebrating! Items purchased will be shipped on Tuesday through Thursday, dependent on sales volume. The sale starts now, and runs through Midnight MDT, Monday, September 2.

If you wish to read about the wedding that took place 45 years ago, click here.

To take advantage of the additional 20% off on all products (making many discounts add up to 22 to 40% off), click here.

Happy Anniversary, Leland and Patty!

Labor Day Weekend Specials

The following genealogy companies have Labor Day weekend special offers:

Got Swedes? ArkivDigital has a discount on their annual subscription (995 SEK or approximately $153 US - regular price is 1195 SEK or approximately $184 US) which ends Sunday, September 1st. You can also purchase shorter or longer subscriptions if you prefer. Even if you currently have a subscription, you can take advantage of this offer. The new subscription will be put on hold until your current subscription expires. With a ArkivDigital subscription you get access to about 43 millions color images (Swedish church records), easy-to-use software to navigate among all the documents, and hopefully exciting stories about your Swedish ancestors. There is no clear time zone listed for when this offer expires, so act fast!

This Labor Day weekend you can save money on some of your favorite genealogy products. From today through 11:59 p.m. EDT, Monday, September 2, 2013, you can order any product available at www.genealogical.com at a discount of 30% off the current selling price of the books(s) or CD(s) of your choice.

To take advantage of this holiday discount, simply add the special code LD13 (caps, no spaces) in the Discount Code box on the "Shipping and Handling" page of the check-out process.

You can use your special LD13 discount code as many times as you like, so long as you place your final order by 11:59 p.m. EDT, Monday, September 2, 2013.

Ancestry.com is offering free access to its U.S. Immigration Collection through 2 September 2013 at http://www.ancestry.com/cs/us/immigration. These include Passenger Lists, Border Crossings and Passports, Citizenship and Naturalization Records, and other records.

In honor of Labor Day, MyHeritage.com is providing free access to the complete US Census collection from August 31 through September 2 - during Labor Day weekend.

You can find out more about your ancestors, and their professions, in hundreds of millions of records in this collection of US Federal Censuses spanning 1790-1940.

Happy Hunting!

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.

Good Reading: Civil War Diaries

In this, the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War, you may wish to hone up on your history of that time period. And what better way than by reading diaries written by people who actually lived in those days? Harold Holzer of The Wall Street Journal recently recommended five titles:

• Mary Chesnut's Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981) - written in 48 notebooks by a Southern woman, whose father was a plantation-owning South Carolina governor, and whose husband was a pro-slavery U.S. senator from Virginia, later a military aide to Jefferson Davis. Often quoted in Ken Burn's classic PBS special, The Civil War, this title is available at the Spokane Public Library.
• The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 1835-1875, edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (1952) - in four volumes, the third covering the Civil War period, it also is quoted by Ken Burns. Templeton was a lawyer who helped organize the U.S. Sanitary Commission.
• Diary of Gideon Welles, edited by Howard K. Beale (1960) - As Secretary of the Navy, Welles was fondly referred to by Lincoln as "Father Neptune."
• A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, by John B. Jones (1866) - a popular fiction writer who was too old to volunteer, he joined the Confederate War Department as a clerk. His accounts, unlike many others from the South, were never rewritten or sanitized later after the cause was lost.
• My Diary North and South, by William Howard Russell (1863) - Russell was a celebrated London Times war correspondent traveling through both sections of the country, who ended up making enemies on both sides of the war after sparing "neither salve-owning Southerners nor incompetent Union officers." His press credentials were revoked in 1862, and his diary was published the following year.

Look for these books at your local bookstore, at online stores such as Amazon.com, or order them through Interlibrary Loan at your local library.

New Titles in the Genealogy Room: Land Patent Books

EWGS librarian Juanita McBride announced that the society recently purchased five volumes of the Family Maps series of land patent books with the 2009 Memorial Book fund. These include all the volumes currently available for Washington and Idaho:

• Spokane County - WA
  
• Whitman County - WA
• Walla Walla County - WA
• Asotin County - WA
• Kootenai County - ID
  
• Latah County - ID

The following is a description of these volumes from the publisher's website and author, Gregory A. Boyd:

The Family Maps series of Land Patent Books are published county by county, state by state, for original settlers whose purchases are indexed in the U.S. Bureau of Land Management database. For the first time, you can locate your ancestor's federal land purchase by simply finding them in a surname index, then an all-name index, which directs you to a map of first-land-owners. And now you can learn who your ancestors' neighbors were! The Family Maps books are a helpful visual reference tool that make your federal lands research easier than ever.

Each Township has a Patent Map, Patent Index, Road Map, and a Map we call an Historical Map, which includes Waterways, Watercourses & Railroads. The Road and Historical Maps also include the City-centers and cemeteries that can be found at NationalAtlas.gov. There is also a Surname/Patent Index and a Surname/Township Index to help you dive into the right area of the County. Included Appendices identify multi-Patentee buying groups and also list the numerous Aliquot (section) parts you might find.

Attorney, genealogist, and software engineer, Gregory A. Boyd, has mapped the federal land patents (original land-owners) contained in the indexes of the Bureau of Land Management and Arphax Publishing brings you the resultant new books each week. Each volume provides you maps of indexed federal land patents for a county, with one map per Congressional township. Also included are two additional maps per township that geo-reference the land-tracts to existing roads, waterways, communities, cemeteries, railroads, etc. The Patent Maps are essentially plat-maps, but contain first land-owners, no matter what year they acquired the tract.

This series provides the best tool ever for re-constructing frontier neighborhoods, migration-patterns, and devising maiden-name possibilities. Many "burned" counties magically become researchable, thanks to these tools being generated from Federal records.

These titles are held in the Genealogy Room on the third floor of the Downtown Branch of the Spokane Public Library at 906 W. Main Avenue. With the branch now being open on Mondays, you will have even more opportunities to utilize the many genealogical resources there!

Book Release: Webmasters Guide to TNG 7.0

This is one of several press releases I've received in the past week or so. My apologies: I've been remiss on posting them in a timely manner.

John Pfost is pleased to announce the release of his new book the Webmaster’s Guide to TNG 7.0: From Novices to Experts. This book provides all of the information needed by genealogists to easily build and manage dynamic, database-driven family history Web sites using "The Next Generation in Genealogy Sitebuilding.” TNG - as it’s commonly known - is the world’s preeminent software for creating custom, feature-rich, expandable, secure, and collaborative family history Web sites.

Unlike conventional desktop genealogy programs that build Web sites by converting GEDCOM files to HTML Web pages and then uploading all of the pages to a Web server, TNG allows users to upload a single GEDCOM file to a database hosted on a server. Web pages are then rendered dynamically based on requests by site visitors. Using cutting-edge technologies, the data is easily packaged for fast and efficient display including individual pages, family pages, family trees, media galleries, specialty reports, and more. More importantly, when the data changes – such as when you locate additional family members or extend the knowledge about your families – you do not need to regenerate all of the Web pages from the GEDCOM file and then re-upload them. You or your designated site users can modify the data directly in the database.

TNG comes with a number of pre-built templates that can be applied as-is, or customized in countless ways. You can change the theme, colors, layout, graphics, menus – pretty much anything that you wish – to create a stunning presentation and unique user experience. Even without any modifications, you will not end up with a canned and stilted Web site typical of those produced by desktop genealogy programs. What’s more, you are provided access to all of the source files so that you can further customize and enhance TNG to suit your needs. You do not need to perform any computer programming to work with TNG, but rather can simply tweak some code to achieve any desired result.

Because of the vast capabilities of TNG, many users find it somewhat challenging especially early on. The Webmaster’s Guide provides step-by-step procedures to get you up to speed quickly and efficiently. You can easily have a TNG-based family history Web site up and running in a weekend. What’s more, you’ll learn how to extend TNG’s capabilities to achieve nearly any existing Internet functionality. You can, for example, integrate slideshows, Wikis, forums, blogs, guestbooks, or integrate TNG with common content management systems. And, this is all in addition to controlling and managing your data – your genealogy – in a secure, user-friendly environment.

John has posted a couple of white papers that introduce TNG:

** “Introducing The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding” - provides a brief history of genealogy Web sites, an overview and description of TNG, a listing of its notable features and functions, a discussion of the underlying technologies, and a description of the system and personal requirements to implement a TNG Web site.

** “Getting Started with The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding” - provides a detailed description of the products and services one would need to develop a dynamic TNG-based family history Web site. It describes the key components - TNG, the Webmaster’s Guide, a domain name, and Web services hosting provider - that are required, as well as the many additional resources that are available.

You can download these papers from the TNG-Resources site at http://www.tng-resources.com by subscribing to the TNG-Resources newsletter and then accessing the Additional Resources page.

For additional information about the Webmaster’s Guide to TNG, visit www.tng-resources.com or email info@tng-resources.com. For information about The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, visit http://lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php.

New Book in Collection: Italians of the American Northwest

Recently, EWGS librarian Juanita McBride announced a new addition to the collection of the genealogical holdings. Italians of the American Northwest, by Charley Vingo, is a 793-page, illustrated volume published in 2001 by a Spokane author. It is available in both the Genealogy Room (3rd floor) and Northwest Room (2nd floor) of the Downtown Branch of the Spokane Public Library, and is cataloged under call numbers GEN 973.0451 ITALIAN and NW 973.0451 ITALIAN, respectively. As a reference book, it cannot be checked out.

If you have Italian ancestry in the Northwest, you will want to consult this volume. For those out of town, you may wish to call the information desk at (509) 444-5300 to have a librarian do a lookup for a surname for you, or e-mail EWGS's researcher Charles Hansen.

The Last Bell - The Country Schools of Stevens County, Washington

As an alumnus of the Colville (Washington) School District, Leland Meitzler's post today, over at Genealogy Blog, caught my eye. He's got a book review about The Last Bell, written by Alpha Naff. Originally published in 1984, it was reprinted in 2005, and "deals with public education at the turn of the century in Northeast Washington – the 'country schools' of Stevens County." Reading the table of contents of the old one-room schools was like coming home. My parents live off Aladdin Road and the old Aladdin Schoolhouse is now a private home, just a few stones' throw down the mountain. In fact, when I was a teenager in the '80s, we had some elderly neighbors whose kids had attended that school in the '60s. No school buses in those days, they had simply walked the three miles literally down the mountain and back every day, taking shortcuts through the woods until they reached the old logging roads that are now part of the county road system.

Only last week, while on vacation up in the Colville National Forest, I had passed two other former schoolhouses, the Addy Schoolhouse, now the Old Schoolhouse Trading Post (a combination convenience store and museum) and the Tiger Highway Schoolhouse (abandoned; although not long ago it was a private home).

Today the 107 schoolhouses of Stevens County have been abandoned, destroyed, or used for other purposes, and six school districts cover the county, the largest being the Colville School District. The district's bus routes cover an amazing distance daily...my guess is that the average is a 25-mile trip--one way-- over mountain roads with the city being the hub of the circle. We never had a snow day in all the years I can remember, even though it was often an iffy three-mile trip down to the bus stop over ice and many inches of snow!

I've got a lot of connections to this district; besides myself, my brother and sister also graduated from this district, and our dad, nearing retirement, begins his 29th school year as a staff member this fall. This book looks like it would make a great gift for my family members; I know I certainly will enjoy it! If you have Stevens County ancestors who lived in the area between 1875 to 1930, I'm sure it will make a nice addition to your home library. Besides, a purchase of this book will benefit the Northeast Washington Genealogical Society!