The Library of Congress has been digitizing Sanborn maps for a few months, and they finally got to Washington State. So here is the URL for three pages of Sanborn Maps:
( https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/index/location/?fa=location%3Awashington )
TIP OF THE WEEK –
MyHeritage Live 2018 – Online
At the beginning of November, MyHeritage hosted their first ever 3 day user conference in Oslo, Norway. It was a big success. Hundreds of people attended from 28 different countries. Now, for those that were not able to attend, two dozen of the lectures were recorded and are available for viewing online, absolutely free. Thanks to Dick Eastman, one of the presenters at this conference, for this great tip.
Visit MyHeritage Blog for a list of each of the lectures, as well as a brief description, and a link to each lecture video. You’ll find the MyHeritage Blog here:
https://blog.myheritage.com/2018/11/myheritage-live-2018-lectures-now
TIP OF THE WEEK –
CAUTIONS ON SHARING DATA
It is easy to become lackadaisical and accept research data you have found in a public family tree at face value. Remember to treat information you get from someone else’s family tree as a helpful hint to aid you in your own research. No matter how credible their source citation looks, until you have examined a source yourself, it is just hearsay.
Likewise, don’t put speculative information in your public tree, where it can be perpetuated by others. A good practice is to have two family trees. A tree you make public should only have substantiated data in it. Research you are still working on, not yet verified, should be in a private tree, your WIP (work in progress) tree, so to speak.
TIP OF THE WEEK –
Improvements to AncestryDNA Results Page
Ancestry has made some improvements to the AncestryDNA Results page. They are now showing the shared total DNA cM and segments in a prominent position near the matched member’s id. So it is no longer necessary to click on the grayed icon to get that information. Also looking toward the right, under the green and white “View Match”, is a new blue “Connect” with an intersecting circles icon. Click on that blue “Connect”. It displays a side-by-side comparison of your data and your DNA match’s data.
Fun stuff, in a more efficient, user friendly format.
TIP OF THE WEEK –
RESEARCHING AT REPOSITORIES
October is American Archives Month. If you feel you’ve already found everything you can at the usual genealogy websites, don’t overlook what genealogy resources are available to you at the state archives, as well as at local, university, and historical society libraries.
Study the library website and search their online catalog and indexes to get a feel for their genealogy collections. Need ideas for records to consult? Run a search of the FamilySearch.org online catalog for your ancestors’ county or town, then browse the record categories to see the types of record collections available.
“OUT OF THE ARCHIVES” is a newsletter published by the Washington State Archives. It is designed to educate you on how to access and best use the collections available to you, through them. To read back issues, or subscribe, use this link :
For all of you Lighthouse affectionatoes out there! The NARA online catalog now includes Lighthouse Plans and Maps, 1793-1939, Records of the U.S. Coast Guard, RG: 26. These include architectural drawing, maps and much more info on Lighthouses in the U.S. If one of your ancestors was a Lighthouse Keeper, don’t miss browsing through this collection. Sign up for the NARA Newsletter for regular updates on collections added to the NARA Online Catalog. https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog
TIP OF THE WEEK –
Washington State Library Awarded $280,000
This recent $280,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant will enable the Washington State Library’s Washington Digital Newspaper Project to add 100,000 pages of culturally and historically significant newspapers from Asian-American, African-American, and World War II-era publications to its free public archives.
The grant is the fourth National Endowment for the Humanities award for the Digital Newspaper Project. Under the State Library’s participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program, more than 300,000 pages of historic Washington newspapers have been added to the 13 million newspaper pages publicly accessible at the Chronicling America website of the Library of Congress.
The lesson to be learned, it pays to keep checking sites such as Chronicling America often because records are being digitized so rapidly.
TIP OF THE WEEK –
COUNTY LINES ON GOOGLE MAPS
In the eyes of genealogists, a shortcoming of Google Maps is that they do no display county lines. A few days ago, in Dick Eastman’s blog titled “Displaying County Lines on Google Maps”, he introduces a couple of tools by Randy Majors to overcome the problem. The first will overlay county lines on Google Maps for the US, UK, or Ireland. The second is a tool that will display historical county lines on a Google Map for locations in the US, as of a certain date that you provide. Check out these tools for yourself at :
https://www.randymajors.com/p/countygmap.html
https://www.randymajors.com/p/maps.html
TIP OF THE WEEK –
ARE YOU MISSING PART OF THE eNEWS!
Attention GMAIL users. Have you noticed your eNews! seems to be cut-off abruptly? It will look as if there are paragraphs, feature articles, or photos missing. Well, GMAIL does what they call “trimming” of long emails (above a certain size in bytes, a unit of measure for digital information). This happened to the last issue of the eNews! and some readers were left a bit confused.
If you see an ellipsis, three dots, hover over it with your cursor and you will see the message “See Trimmed Content”. Click on the ellipsis and the full eNews! will be revealed to you.
No matter what email service provider you use, a fool proof way to avoid “trimming” problems, omitted photos, and inadvertently missing large chunks of the eNews! , is to train yourself to always use the View it in your browser feature. That is in the upper right hand corner of the eNews! directly after the question “Is this email not displaying correctly?”.
Try out the View it in your browser option on the last edition of the eNews! Use it on this current edition; then make a habit of using it. You’ll be glad you did.
TIP OF THE WEEK – AMERICAN ANCESTORS.ORG
Ancestry, fold3, and Newspapers.com are not the only research database websites available for use on the computers in our SGS Library.
Founded in 1845, the NEHGS (New England Historic Genealogical Society) is a leading resource for family history research, with expertise ranging from 17th-century colonial New England through 20th-century immigration research. Their website, AmericanAncestors.org, is a online repository for more than 1 billion searchable names from America and beyond. SGS subscribes to AmericanAncestors.org and it is available for your use on the patron computers in the SGS Library. Come in to see what you can find.
Hours at the SGS Library are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. and Sunday 1:00 pm to 5:00pm.