Passenger Manifest – Jane Foulk

One of the long sought-after pieces of information in genealogy research is the migration trail. How did my family get here?

I found a novel source for my in-laws in a ship passenger manifest. My father-in-law was a career Navy doctor and stationed in Japan in the mid-1950s.  I found a passenger manifest documenting the journey of the rest of the family to join him.  A fabulous find in and of itself; however, it offered the added bonus of listing the birth locations of each of the children.  And there in lies a migration path.  As a military family, they moved fairly frequently from base to base at the same time the family was growing.  Plot the birth locations and dates on a map, and voila! you have a migration trail.

Incidentally, my husband, Robert, was born in Japan.  His was the last child’s birth to be plotted in this migration trail.

Happy researching!

The last I heard, Ancestry.com has north of 10 BILLION records online.  Anyway you slice it that’s a LOT of records, and it’s certainly far more than my humble search skills can comfortably navigate.

That’s why I’m tickled to see that they have introduced Research Guides. Tucked in their free section (no membership required) is a portfolio of subject-specific research guides for anyone and everyone to use.  The guides help you navigate the 10 billion records and tens of thousands of databases on Ancestry.com, which is great in and of itself.  But they also give you subject-specific helpful insight such as history, key terms, abbreviations, and other information far and away beyond a simple description of a database.

Quaker Research

Guide to Finding Quaker Records by Ancestry

One of their research guides is the Research Guide to Finding Your Quaker Ancestors.  It’s an eight-page, well written and designed cheat sheet to understanding the nature and complexity of Quaker research.  Naturally, they explain who the Quakers are with a little blurb on Quakers and Slavery.  Then they break down the nature of Quaker Records – the meeting hierarchy, they explain the birth and death registers and the marriage records.  Then they explain the uniquely Quaker certificates of removal, disownments and apologies.  Finally, there is a discussion of uniquely Quaker terms to help you unpack this world.  I’m surprised that they don’t list the Quaker databases on Ancestry.com.  Maybe there are just too many to list.  (You can go to the SEARCH drop-down list and search the card catalog for the keyword “Quaker,” and probably get the vast majority of the databases.) Nonetheless, it is a very helpful guide.

Loyalist Research

Loyalist Resources on Ancestry

Another interesting guide is the one on Loyalists.  It’s my understanding that one-third of the Colonists were actively supporting the Revolution, one-third were Loyalists (supportive of England), and the last third weren’t interested and had better things to do such as tend to their farms.  No doubt there are plenty of Loyalist descendants looking for information and records.  This guide offers a brief history to understand the Loyalists, then it gives an extended list of hyperlinked databases for your researching pleasure.  Just click on the database of your choice and start searching.  Just follow this link (Loyalist Resources on Ancestry) to get started.

These are just two of the guides you will find.  There are about two dozen at the moment and it looks like they are adding more regularly.  Here are a couple more.

• Search Strategies on Ancestry
• Using Religious Records
• African American Research on Ancestry
• Finding your Immigrant Ancestors on Ancestry
• Find them in WWII
• Black Sheep: 10 Things to Know

Again, this is just a sampling.  Go to the main page for Research Guides in the Learning Center – you can access it here – for the full and updated list.  And check back often, as I mentioned they seem to be adding more and more.  Indeed, you can even submit a suggestion for a new guide.

I’m glad to see Ancestry offering help navigating their vast collection to genealogists.  I hope you’ll find these research guides helpful as I have.

Happy Researching!

Frank E Williams – findagrave – in Evernote

Here’s the problem I invariably run into using FindaGrave. (FindaGrave is a free website with north of 116 million headstone citations, images and memorials. For more on FindaGrave, check out my blog post.)  I find my ancestor’s headstone.  Great!  Now what do I do?  I have a couple less than satisfactory options.

• Bookmark the URL (webpage) that has the citation.  Then over time I have a zillion bookmarks that aren’t connected to any family information.
• Take a screen shot with “print scrn” on my laptop and save that image in my file.  That works, too, but I lose the URL (web page) and I get a bunch of silly ads with my image.
• Right click on the image and save the picture of the headstone.  I don’t have ads now, but I’ve lost the provenance of the picture.  Further, not all findagrave citations have images.  And many have additional information worth capturing.  Neither scenario is addressed with an image capture.

Frustrated, I had the bright idea to use Evernote’s Web Clipper.  (Evernote is a free organization tool that allows you to capture notes, images, webpages, documents, etc. all in one place.  For more on Evernote, check out my blog post.)

The Web Clipper Toy

I just discovered the web clipper for Evernote, which is a free application that is easily downloaded here.  It integrates into your browser – Google Chrome, Internet Explorer among others.  Then when you find a page that has an image, article, FindaGrave page or anything you want to save just click on the elephant icon (Evernote logo) next to your browser bar (where you type in the website name, i.e. www.findagrave.com), and it will capture the either the whole page or part of the page and save it to Evernote!

Frank E. Williams

Frank E. Williams is my husband’s maternal grandfather.  A geologist and professor at Pennsylvania State University, he served as a member of the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) later known as the CIA during WWI.  He’s buried at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia.

You can see his FindaGrave listing INSIDE of an Evernote note at the top of this post.  Not only does the Evernote automatically capture the image and surrounding text, but it also captures the URL from which the page was taken, titles the picture – Frank Ernest Williams (1877 – 1960) – Find A Grave Memorial – and date and time stamps the note creation.

Further, I can add tags to the Frank E. Williams note to help me locate it or associate it with my research.  Good tags might include “Foulk Family,” since he is part of my husband’s tree, or “WWI veteran” because they reflect information I know about the subject but is not evident in the document.  If you’re wondering why I didn’t tag it “Frank Williams” or “FindaGrave” those bits of information are already in the note title, which is by default every word searchable in Evernote.

FindaGrave and Evernote are just wonderful tools for the busy genealogist.  Try using them together to make them even more powerful.

Happy researching!