Afro-American Genealogical Society of Chicago Book Initiative

Afro-American Genealogical Historical Society of Chicago presented info on the 30th Anniversary Heritage Book initiative at the APG conference.


Members and non-members are invited to submit multiple 500 word articles with photographs to be included in the upcoming publication honoring their Afro-American ancestors. For more information, see the society's website: http://www.aaghsc.org.

November 1, 2009 is the current deadline for submissions.

I am going to submit a few articles and see what happens!

Family Search Upgrades!

The following was received from FamilySearch. Please address all inquiries to Support@FamilySearch.org.

3 September 2009

August was a banner month for FamilySearch Indexing. Twenty five (25) projects were completed and 19 new projects were added, including 10 international. A Swedish interface was also added to accommodate new Sweden church records projects. Completed projects will published at FamilySearch’s Record Search pilot for online viewing.



New Projects Added in August



· Argentina, Mendoza, San Juan—Censo 1869

· Canada, British Columbia—Deaths, 1872–1986

· Chile, Concepción—Registros Civiles, 1885–1903 [Parte 1]

· Mexico, DF—Registros Parroquiales, 1898–1933 [Parte 2]

· Mexico, Hidalgo—1930 Federal Censo

· Mexico, Jalisco—1930 Federal Censo

· Nicaragua, Managua—Registros Civiles, 1879–1984 [Parte 1]

· Sverige, Södermanland—Kyrkoböcker, till 1860 [Del 1]

· Sverige, Uppsala—Kyrkoböcker, till 1860 [Del 1]

· Sverige, Örebro—Kyrkoböcker, till 1860 [Del 1]

· U.S., Arkansas—County Marriages, 1837–1957 [VII]

· U.S., Indiana, Benton County—Marriages, 1811–1959

· U.S., Indiana, Ohio County—Marriages, 1811–1959

· U.S., Iowa—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Ohio—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Texas—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Utah, Salt Lake County—Birth Registers, 1890–1908

· U.S., West Virginia—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Wisconsin—1920 Federal Census



Recently Completed Projects



(Note: Recently completed projects have been removed from the available online indexing batches and will now go through a final completion check process in preparation for future publication.)



· Argentina, Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman—1869 Censo

· Australia, NSW—Bounty Immigrants, 1828–1842

· Australia, Sydney—Cemetery Inscriptions, 1800–1960

· Belgique, Charleroi—Registres des Décès, 1851-1900

· Canadian 1861 Census

· Mexico, DF—Registros Parroquiales, 1886–1933 [Parte 1]

· Mexico, Yucatan—1930 Federal Censo

· Nicaragua, Managua—Registros Civiles, 1879–Present

· Perú, Lima—Registros Civiles, 1910–1930 [Parte 1]

· U.S.—Freedmen Marriages, 1861–1869

· U.S., Arkansas—County Marriages, 1837–1957 [IV]

· U.S., Arkansas—County Marriages, 1837–1957 [VI]

· U.S., Delaware—Birth Records, 1861–1922

· U.S., Georgia—Deaths, 1930

· U.S., Indiana, Adams County—Marriages, 1811–1959

· U.S., Minnesota—1885 State Census

· U.S., Oklahoma—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Oregon—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Pennsylvania—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Tennessee—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Utah, Salt Lake County—Death Certificates, 1940

· U.S., Virginia—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Washington—1920 Federal Census

· U.S., Washington—County Marriages, 1858–1950

· U.S., Wyoming—1920 Federal Census


About FamilySearch

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Lowcountry Africana Announces New Florida State Coordinator

I'm proud to announce that I have been selected as the State Coordinator for Florida for Lowcountryafricana.com, an amazing website that is collecting documents related to African-American heritage in the lowcountry (South Carolina, Georgia and Florida). As State Coordinator, I'll be able to help grow their data collection by coordinating the efforts for Florida. In addition, I'll be sharing tips and information about genealogy research in Florida. I will maintain this blog about general genealogy and African-American research, but the Lowcountry site will enable me to reach a wide audience interested in Florida research.


Read the full announcement.

Ancestry.com Member Connect

Good idea...bad implementation. Anyone who's used Ancestry.com for more than one tree knows that Ancestry will list results from your other trees when you are searching on a person who exists in all of your trees. So, you'd think before they implement Member Connect, the new social networking feature, that they would correct this. I mean, I'm a programmer too...how hard is it to exclude results from trees associated with the same username as the one conducting the search? Apparently, it's really hard because they didn't fix it. Witness:

I log onto Ancestry.com and am excited to see that Member Connect has found one other person searching for Major Reddick and that person has records and timeline events. Great! I may have found a new cousin. Click....click through the "Welcome to Member Connect" intro...and there it is:
The other person searching for Major Reddick is ME! They gave me a result from my other tree...

Ancestry, get it together please....

BBC on African-American Genetic Genealogy

via news.bbc.co.uk

The BBC has an article about Americans looking for their roots through their DNA. There is some criticism of how African Ancestry interprets their results. I used African DNA for my tests because African Ancestry was a bit expensive ($349).

The criticism of African Ancestry is not unwarranted. What I liked about African DNA was that they were very clear to state that maternal DNA CANNOT conclusively link you back to a tribe in Africa for several reasons. Chief among these reasons is that the database that your DNA is compared to comes from people who are "known" to be--or say they are--of a particular tribe or region that are living. It's simply not conclusive.

This is not to say that the information is not useful. It can give you some ideas, confirm some leads and even offer new leads. DNA doesn't stand alone, but it can be combined with thoughtful genealogical analysis to draw conclusions about ancestry.

I was particularly offended by the quote from Mr. Ofori Anor, Asante magazine editor, "African Americans just want to be able to say they were once kings and once ruled the world." That is simply not true. What African-Americans want is what was TAKEN from us: our history, our heritage and our culture. We want connections to understand how we came to be here. We want a better understanding of what our ancestors believed and what gave them the strength to survive the holocaust that was American slavery. It's a shame that Mr. Anor fails to grasp the power of knowing your roots.


Found via the The Genetic Genealogist

What event or person inspired you to start your genealogy research?

Genea-Musings posted a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post asking the question: What event or person inspired you to start your genealogy research?

I started doing genealogical research on my family in my sophomore year in high school (1994). During the previous summer, I attended my paternal grandmother's family reunion where I had received a tree full of names. I wondered if anyone knew more about these people. What did they do? How did they meet? When I started school, my psychology teacher mentioned that she was into genealogy (I had no idea that's what this art/science was called) and she wanted to start a Genealogy Club. So, I gathered the names and recruited some folks and served as President for 2 years (until she left and we couldn't find an advisor).

I think what really hooked me was the trip to the National Archives. We didn't have the wealth of genealogical resources on the internet that we do now and I had no idea back then how fortunate I was to live 45 minutes away from the Archives (wish I lived there now...Houston is SO far). Anyway, I found my family names in the Archives and there, in the census, my first questions were answered: my great grandfather was a sharecropper. He couldn't read or write, but his grandson had a scholarship to a university and his great granddaughter would eventually go to MIT.

That trip was inspiring for me. I've been doing genealogical research ever since then. Every year, as more documents become available, I learn more and want to go out and find more. I've found cousins and documents that tell stories about my family that were long forgotten. In those stories, I see my past and my future.

Family Search Adds New Content

I know it's been a while, but I got so excited about the new content at the Family Search Pilot Search website that I had to post.

One of the things that irritated me about the old Family Search is that they rarely had any unique content or content that I hadn't already paid for on Ancestry.com. Well, they've changed that with their new content. The content recently uploaded includes more data from death records than I've seen available anywhere else. I searched the Florida Death Records for my Reddick relatives, thinking I'd find the same information that I find on Ancestry: name, date, location. To my surprise, the records on FS have the key piece of info that helps me disambiguate the 3 Albert Reddicks I found on Ancestry: Parent Names. Also included is the cemetery name and burial place. With this new database, I've found at least 4 new records in the past 10 minutes alone.

The search interface is slick, fast and efficient. You can copy and paste the data onto your desktop in 2 clicks. I did notice a lot of spelling errors though. One way to improve the site would be to add in features to allow family members to correct some of those errors. As usual, you should search on various spellings of the names you're looking for to make up for human indexing errors.

Find the Florida Death Records and more new US records at the Family Search Pilot Site. AND, be sure to volunteer to help index records so that Family Search can put even more records online for us!

Happy searching!