The Genealogy Guys Podcast #440

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Foreign.

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Welcome to episode 440 of the Genealogy Guys Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet. I'm your host, Drew Smith, and together with co host George G. Morgan, we cover news tips and solutions for the genealogist community. In this episode, we share some of the awards given out at the most recent NGS annual conference. We tell you about Newspaper Finder, a relatively new free tool for locating and accessing digitized newspapers. George updates us on new records added the past few months at MyHeritage. I share some details about an international archivist conference that took place in Kazakhstan, and I highlight new records released by FamilySearch. We share an email from someone giving us feedback on my appearance on Dear Myrtle's most recent online show. And I discuss genealogical institutes, including grip, where I recently taught online. The Genealogy Guys podcast is sponsored by MyHeritage and Roots Magic. And now on with the show. Welcome to another episode of the Genealogy Guys Podcast and I am joined, as always, by my co host, George G. Morgan. George, how the heck are you today?

A

I'm doing pretty good. What about yourself, Drew?

B

I have no complaints and I'm, you know, I'm in good health and I haven't fallen off any ladders or anything today, so.

A

That's not funny.

B

It's not funny. My brother unfortunately made a mistake and, and he was cleaning gutters, fell off the ladder and landed on his feet on a, I don't know, stone patio or whatever, brick patio, whatever it was, and fractured both of his heels. So he's going to be kind of laid up for about eight to 12 weeks. But if he's listening to the podcast, this is a get well, Jeff and, and, and a warning to all of us that many of us are getting older and should not be trying certain things in terms of home management or home maintenance. Right, George?

A

My, my motto is hire help. Yes.

B

Higher help that's much younger and that's insured if they have, you know. Oh, yeah, let's make sure about that, George. There was recently the National Genealogical Society had its conference and they always announce awards. Tell us about some of those awards. We obviously can't cover them all, but we know some of the awardees.

A

Okay, that sounds good, Drew, but yes, there were lots of awards given at the National Genealogical Society Conference. We're going to hit the the highlights of the ones that relate to us a lot. The first one is the President's Citation, which was awarded to Rick Voight, who's the president of Vivid Pigs, who was a longtime sponsor of this Podcast. So congratulations to Rick. The next award we'd like to mention is the award of NGS Fellow, and this was given to C. Ann Staley. And Ann is an old friend of ours from Florida. We've known ann for over 30 years, and this is certainly well recognized for her. The National Genealogy hall of Fame Award went posthumously to Don Divine, who many of you will know as one of the fathers of our genealogy community these days. And last, but most certainly not least, is the Shirley Langdon Wilcox Award for Exemplary Volunteerism, and that was awarded to Jane Van Tour posthumously. And Jane was in California. We saw her and worked with her and had fun with her at the Southern California Genealogical Society conferences for many years. And she is the epitome of volunteerism, and I'd like to congratulate her over this award.

B

Next up is announcement of a really cool product. It's a catalog relating to newspapers. Now, many of us have enjoyed having digitized newspapers. Of course, not all the newspapers in the world are digitized, but a lot are now getting that way. And the problem we have is, because different companies have digitized different newspapers, is finding where the newspapers are that may have been digitized. And so this wonderful product is called Newspaper Finder. And so what you can use it for is to see where all the digitized newspapers are, who's got them. That's really the kind of key thing just to give you some numbers here as to what we're talking about. There's over 10,000 newspaper locations. There is. It covers actually 25 different databases. Most of you would know not only the ones from the Library of Congress, the newspaper collections that are part of Chronicling America there, but Also, of course, newspapers.com, newspaperarchive.com, genealogy bank, and Old News. Those are all well known to many genealogists, but there's also others. Fulton History and the Google News Archive. Well, guess what? This product, Newspaper Finder, actually looks at digital newspapers from over 25 different databases, which is 125,000 different individual newspapers. So, again, lots of titles from some of the ones I've already named. Oh, and it includes British Newspaper Archive, too. So that's really good place to look for it. So I suggest you go take a peek for newspaperfinder.com and you can use that product. It is free, and you may be able to find all the newspapers that are digitized and for the areas that you do research in. Okay.

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And we'll include the URL in the show notes.

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We will. We will. George, what's up from myheritage.

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These days, oh, Myheritage stays busy, busy, busy. To celebrate the America's 250th anniversary, they established the America 250 website. So you can go to their website@myheritage.com, go to the bottom of the page, click on blog and you'll find a link to the article on that. In the meantime, they've been busy adding records again. And I just want to hit some highlights here. In May, they added 66 million historical records across 15 new and updated collections from Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the US and more. The collection includes newspaper records, birth records, marriage records, death records and passenger list. And many of these include images as well. So that was for May. For the month of June, they've been busy again. They added 414 million new historical records across 32 new and updated collections from the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Italy and more. And that includes newspaper records, census records, marriage and death records, and military pension and burial records. One thing I'd like to say, Drew, is that Old News contains more than just English language newspapers. It includes languages around the world. And MyHeritage also has has facilities that help you with your research to do searches in 41 languages. In the new records for the month of June, they included just from the newspaper standpoint, Baltic newspapers, over a million 200,000 records were added to their database. The Canada newspapers, they added another three hundred and thirty thousand more. We have Ireland newspapers. From Old news we have 12,406 newspaper added pages added. And Italy newspapers, a million 450 new pages added for a total of 7 million plus. That's tremendous. And finally amongst the newspapers, it includes The Mexico newspapers. 2,491,000 new records there. In the meantime you'll find some things including the Greece Thessalonica death certificates, the 1929 Ireland census, which God knows we've been waiting for forever. And those are just the highlights. So Drew, as I always say, myheritage leads the way in international research.

B

Speaking of international. Now of course I'm, I'm going to end our new segment with talking about FamilySearch and I will get to the records they've added because of course they keep busy adding records too. But what was interesting from the end of June is that a group of archivists from 30 different nations gathered together in Kazakhstan. And so this was, and FamilySearch was a sponsor. This was the three Congress of Archivists, the Digital Archive Expo. And so they actually were sponsors of this archives conference. So People are really, you know, again, people from different places to give you an idea of what went on in these kind of conferences. But they've certainly talked about, you know, the purpose, why do we do this? You know, this stuff the archivist talked about, you know, they are witnesses, these records. They type a child to parents, people to their past, an entire generation to its inheritance. So there was a lot of discussion about preserving records, DNA, how that has reshaped archival research. And so when people combine records with DNA, they make a lot of breakthroughs. And finally, certainly a big part of what they were doing was collaboration. The idea is that nations can't really work all by themselves. They must collaborate between different countries to make access to these records. And so they are hoping to, again, encourage collaboration. So that's a big part of what FamilySearch has been into. So, again, that was exciting to hear that there is this international cooperation and collaboration between countries in terms of the archivists of these countries. Now, let me finish with the discussion of the news. The records that are out there, the records in May, they were. Oh, let me see what was really good. There was a lot of significant stuff. 48 million new records from England and Wales, 37 million records from the UK, 9 million civil registration and church records in the Philippines, 4 million civil and church records from Italy, and 7 million records of many types from the United States. And then finally in June, they didn't slow down in June either. That update included 102 million new records, 22 countries. So a lot of that was again from the UK vital church and probate records from the UK, nearly 12 million civic and church records from Mexico, and more than a million civil and church records from both Belgium and the Philippines. Now, again, I can only cover the highlights here because they added from many countries. You need to go out to familysearch.org and see what is new for the areas in which your ancestors lived.

A

But again, and that's a good reminder, Drew, that if you haven't been to FamilySearch for a while or MyHeritage or some of the other sites, if you haven't been there for a while, put it on your to do list to contact those sites again and do research there because of the literally millions of records that are being added on on a monthly basis.

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That's right.

A

That's right.

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Okay, George, I think we're going to stop and take our commercial break. We love our sponsors. And so after the commercial break, we have a piece of email and we're going to get into what well, what I've been busy with for the last month or so, and we'll talk about some other stuff, so stay with us. In this episode of the Genealogy Guys Podcast, we talked a lot about newspapers, and one thing that comes up these days for genealogists is old News, a massive database of digitized newspapers. We're talking about a name index of over 2.3 billion records in English language newspapers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, over 300 million records from newspapers in Spain, over 300 million records in the Netherlands, and millions more records from Argentina, Uruguay, and French Canada. Many of these digital newspaper images cannot be found anywhere else. You can search by first or last name, by year of birth, or by place. You can create a citation for the image or print it out. Newspaper research is one of the most surprising ways to learn about your ancestors, and old news definitely helps you find those surprises. Why not try it out? Go to OldNews.com for more info. When you use a software program for many years, you may discover that it has a lot of features that you had forgotten it had, or that you simply hadn't gotten around to using. Let's take RootsMagick as a good example. I primarily use RootsMagick to record my conclusions about my family, such as who is related to who and when and where people were born, married, or died. But before I get into serious research, it's a good idea to pause and see what else I can learn about my rootsmagic file. For instance, when I click the home menu choice, I can see what my family tree file is called, where it is stored on my computer, and when it was created. I can see when it was last modified, how many people are in it and how many families I have. And I can see how many different place names I'm using. There is much more to be learned about my research files, but RootsMagic gives me the big picture. If you're not already a RootsMagic user, you might want to discover these things for yourself. Go to rootsmagic.com and look for the free version of RootsMagic called RootsMagic Essentials to try it out. Welcome back. You're listening to the Genealogy Guys Podcast with me and my co host, George G. Morgan. And we heard from Gene in Huntington Station, New York, who said hello.

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Hi Jean.

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Yes, said hello, George and Drew. I hope all is well with both of you. Well, I've been a big fan of Dear Myrtle's YouTube channel for years and was very happy to see Drew on our episode from May 25th speaking about the Coalition for Responsible AI in Genealogy. And this is of course a very important topic. I thought Drew spoke very well about the concerns that face genealogists at this time. Also I hope Drew has great success with his teaching experience at GRIPPE and also best of luck at IGHR and hope you have a great summer. Thanks, Gene. That was a very. I enjoyed being on Dear Myrtle's show. That's. She's taken a little break for some health reasons. So the May one was. There won't be one in. There wasn't one in June, there won't be one in July and we don't know yet about August.

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But.

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But it's important that Dear Myrtle take care of herself and her health. Of course. But that was great opportunity to talk about what's going on with the coalition. All righty. So George, I know I was at home, but I was tied up in my office for about a week and.

A

Yeah, you were pretty much mia.

B

Yeah, well, I was. I was missing from the household but I was involved with grip and those of you don't know anything about grip. This, this is the research institute in, in Pittsburgh. It's. It's actually a combination of on site which they do on some days or some weeks and then they also have virtual. And I was in one of the virtual. There were eight different courses to understand what an institute is because I had not attended one before, let alone presented at one. It was wonderful to do it. Institutes are a kind of a high intensity way to learn about all kinds of topics. And just to give you a rough idea how they work, the virtual one was all. Was basically from around 10:30 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon Monday through Thursday and then just the morning on Friday. There were some other associated meetings, optional things and so forth. Normally we had about 20 students. Each of the courses is usually capped. It's some number. It might be 30 depending on the course. And so students attend virtually for the virtual ones. That's all I'm going to talk about because I haven't been to an in person one. But people attend virtually and then there's multiple instructors is typical. So Kelly Jo Bergheimer was the lead. She's the one that put this together, proposed it. GRIP accepted it. It was about being an intentional genealogist. We discussed a lot about, about how to be organized and, and to make sure that you know what you're doing is not wasting time and everything is where it needs to be, your documents and everything else. So there was actually me And Kelly did. Of all the 15 or so sessions, she did all. She did all but about six of them, I think six or seven. And I did some and Katie did some, and we had a great time. I met some new people. They were attendees from all over the world, from California to New England and down into Florida.

A

So, George, what were the different courses that were our tracks that were presented there?

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Yeah, there was eight different tracks. I'm going to see if I can tell you what they are, the different courses. One was of course ours. The other another was AI, which was led by. Which was led by Steve Little and Mark Thompson. Just to give you an idea of what the courses, some of the other things were, they do cover sometimes they cover various ethnic areas or different geographies for that. And I'll give you an idea. So there was an advanced DNA talk. There was the AI talk I mentioned researching the lives of Revolutionary War ancestors, one that a lot of our friends were involved with. Carrie Taplin, Paula Stewart Warren and Cindy Engel were all involved in. One on about farmers, the lives of farmers, the records they left behind. That was really important. Paula did another one on digging deeper. And Judy Russell led one on research methods for the hidden half of the family, the women and the children. And then finally Katherine Wilson led one on the reformers, crises and movements that transformed the 19th and 20th century America. So as you can see, they cover a broad spectrum of topics and, you know, and they get a whole week's worth of education, a very strong education in one week. George, any other comments or questions?

A

Oh, that, that's great. Just. I just wanted you to provide an overview of this particular institute. There are other institutes that convene during the year, and each one has its own unique set of courses and materials. And the fact that these institutes are primarily hybrid events, in other words, in person attendees and virtual attendees, means that all of these courses are accessible to anyone anywhere around the world.

B

Yeah, and the next one I'm involved with is IGR, which is based out of Georgia. They're the Georgia Genealogical site.

A

I G, I G H R stands for.

B

Oh boy. I want to say the International. No, it's not I Institute. I'm sorry, for Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research.

A

Gotcha.

B

And they've got a bunch of courses they're doing actually in the end of July, but they're doing once a week courses also. That's sort of another format of you go to the class once a week for however many weeks. I'm speaking in that one because there's One of the courses is on researching your South Carolina roots. And I'm speaking on that.

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Should be fun.

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It should be migration into and out of South Carolina, where I grew up. And so that's really good. Most of the again, there may be a wait list that explained that these courses are really popular, and you may you have to rush to get into them. And you may be put on a wait list if you can. George

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sure. Great stuff.

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It is great stuff. And there's just again, so many topics. Other other institutes are out there. Take a look at them. There's slig, which is and don't ask me what these all stand for, George. But they're that one's in Salt Lake City. And then there's GenFed, which is in Washington, D.C. which covers federal records. So lots of different institutes. Another way to learn, other than going to conferences, other than watching just webinars online from your home, this is more these are more intense where you may have assignments and you may that's when you can meet with the same group of people for a week. You can send the first week, first day, you can say, go do this, and you can talk about it later in the week. So it's another way to learn. And

A

I really like the idea of the immersion institutes Drew with courses with concentrated focus on a particular topic or group of records. I think that's very effective because and not only is it effective, because it presents so much information, it does allow for the interaction through these homework assignments, as you mentioned, through discussion between the attendees. And again, those discussions are between person to person and virtual attendees as well.

B

And George may remember my attending one in 1999 in the summer, which was in a librarian institute in SUNY Plattsburgh, where I learned about information literacy.

A

And you also learned not to get orange juice in New York.

B

Well, it wasn't as good, but I got apple juice, and that was wonderful.

A

Yeah, well, apple apples are apples are indigenous.

B

That's why I decided that was better than orange juice in New York. Okay. But I encourage people to look into the institutes and make your plans early because they fill up fast once they open them up. Those are there's only so many slots and boom, you have to. Yeah. So let's. Okay, George, I think we're going to finish up by talking a little bit about, well, Patreon, for one thing. What did you want to say maybe about Patreon for this episode?

A

Patreon is a is a way for those of you who are listening, who would like to give us some Assistance financially in maintaining the podcast and upgrading to new technology as we go along. And Patreon allows you to set up a contribution month to month basis, whether it's a dollar or, or, or lots more. That. Right, that. Very, very welcome. Drew, you and I are. Because of changes in the technology in the Apple environment, we are going to be looking at supporting the new operating system called Golden Gate, which will be coming out probably about mid September.

B

Correct.

A

And so that means that we need to upgrade our computers.

B

Our desktops are not. Yeah, they've stopped supporting us with Golden Gate. The only. Just for you techies out there, the new operating systems require Apple chips, not the intel chips. And we have computers from so 2020 that run still had, still the intel chip. So yeah, we're going to have to make some major purchases in time around October. Yep.

A

And one of the things I think about Drew, is that we can't stay still with our computer systems with the advent of all of these artificial intelligence sites and that kind of research, which takes a lot of, lot of bandwidth, takes a lot of processing speed. The computers just need to be able to support that in a really efficient and effective manner. No more these days, Drew, like my first computer was a used IBM computer and it had a 10 meg hard disk. And I thought, I'll never ever fill this up. You can fill up 10 meg with 1,1 software update these days.

B

Yes, that's true. One more thing about us buying new equipment, George, and one reason we really do need to is because many of the artificial intelligence tools, yes, you can run them on websites, but if you want to run them on your computer using apps that you install on your computer, many of them require more recent apps, faster chips. And that's true in the Mac environment, is we're going to have to pretty much in order to keep up with that on our Mac OS devices, we're going to need to upgrade to more recent chips. So there's always a thing about technology, about keeping up with it. George,

A

I just would like to comment. We have a good friend, Stuart, who posted on Facebook a short while back the fact that he had downloaded an image of a, of a land record, of a survey record. And he took that, that image and submitted it to Claude, the AI search engine, and, and asked it to, to draw an image of what that piece of property looked like as it was surveyed. And sure enough, it did. And it's amazing. It showed almost exactly where the property was and, and what it looked like. The shape, the, the dimensions. It was very, very impressive. But I thought this is just one, one way to tap the power of artificial intelligence and use it in a very positive way in your research.

B

That's right. One more thing, we want to hear from you because much of our content, we try to answer listener email questions or respond to comments and we need to hear from you. And that's that. Still, that has not changed in any way over the years. That is still genealogyguysmail.com both George and I see those. And so please do send your emails to that.

A

George, we've been all, we've been doing these podcasts almost 21 years. Do you realize?

B

Yep, yep. So in September it'll be 21 years. That's right.

A

That's right.

B

So, yep. And we want to keep doing it as long as we can. So just be aware of that. We're going to, we're working on it. But there's always other things in life that get in the way. So we hope to be back on the air with you again very soon. And with that, George, I think we're going to give our listeners just wish them a very good successful research week or research month. And we look forward to talking to you again in our next episode. George, anything final to say?

A

And we want to hear from you about your research, your research problems, your challenges, and we'll take a look and see if we can give you any insights as well. Absolutely. We also insist that our listeners are our best friends because they, they believe in collaboration. So if someone writes us an email and is asking for suggestions, we certainly appreciate our listeners responding and we forward those things on to, to the original questioner. And by doing so, we hope that the collaboration makes you more successful. But we're here for that as well.

B

We are. Take care, everybody. We'll be back with you soon. Bye bye.

A

Happy, happy hunting.

B

Sam. Sa.