Mappy Monday: US Enumeration Maps on Family Search

Gosh I love a good map! Have been known in times past to grab an world atlas or the AAA Road Atlas off the shelf and just take a browse. It always made me happy. So now it makes me real happy whenever I find a good map that's also helpful in my genealogy pursuits.

Over at RootDig, Michael John Neill wrote about FamilySearch's browsable US Census Enumeration District maps, and you can see his post here. Usually, I am reluctant to jump into big browsable record set, but on Sunday morning it seemed the perfect thing to do, provided I had a big cuppa.

It was so easy to find what I was looking for that I almost felt like a hidden hand was guiding me, or maybe the path to what I was looking for was well organized. Yeah that's probably it. First you go here to FamilySearch and NARA's list of states and microfilm roll numbers. And thank you FamilySearch for scanning and putting these online! If you go there you'll see that it's pretty easy to scroll on down and find the state you're looking for.

I'm looking for Maryland so that's where I click. Now I'm into the pool and have to swim. It's a-browsing I do go. After a couple of stabs at it I find Baltimore city and Anne Arundel County, and then Allegany County which is located in the western mountainous part of the state and what I was looking for. There's a couple of maps and I am easily tempted to stop and take a meander but I press on and find the little mountain town of Frostburg where my family and ancestors come from. Here's the map I saved to the computer.

SOURCE: "United States Enumeration District Maps for the Twelfth through the Sixteenth US Censuses, 1900-1940," images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-35062-11566-70?cc=2329948&wc=92VW-3TT:1077258501 : accessed 29 Jun 2014), Roll 26, Maryland, Allegany-Worcester 1900-1940 > image 578 of 596; citing NARA microfilm publication M1882, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.


It might not look pretty or like much to you but it's solid gold to me! I could sit here all day looking at it and I just might. Here's a close up.

 

 

If you click to enlarge and look closely you'll see little dots. Those are buildings, such as residences. Imagine what you can do with that!

 

Did I mention I really like maps? Mappy Monday turned into Happy Monday!

 

 

A downtown view of Frostburg about 1906. You can see more of the album it came from by clicking on the tab "Album: Nat'l Pike" at the top. 

 

A fall view of Frostburg, 2012.

 

 

Mappy Monday is a blogging prompt fro GeneaBloggers.

 

 

The URL for this post is:

Wisdom Wednesday: Where did they put that?

Oh gosh! Either I'm getting old and the mind is going or stuff is changing too fast! Maybe a bit of both:) Because it's Wednesday, I'll try to keep track of it all and use the GeneaBlogger's blogging prompt called Wisdom Wednesdays.

FamilySearch: Oh no you didn't! Just when I thought that I was finally getting the hang of finding my way into the FamilySearch site in an orderly and useful manner, they went and moved it all around again! Much blogging has been done about what it all means and how to now make your way in to find what you're looking for. Here's what Randy Seaver wrote on Genea-Musings, and you might want to bookmark this as a guide. He quoted Dear Myrtle on the subject: "In this day and age, bookmarks on a specific computer should not be the mainstay for Internet researchers." I missed that post from Ol' Myrt but as usual she hits it on the head!
I understand from fellow bloggers more in the know that I that FamilySearch feels that just 11% of their users are dedicated genealogy and family history buffs. The rest are casual visitors. Really? I do find that difficult to comprehend. Do they mean the population of unique visitors? Maybe I could understand that and they are thinking in terms of being similar to Ancestry.com with lots of people who come and go, but mostly eventually go. But what about page loads and time spent on that site? (I could possibly account for a tenth of all their measured user time on that site because some days I feel like I'm just "parked" there all day long.) Really, FamilySearch? Really?
Keep Randy's Genea-Musings on your favorites. I know that he'll lead us through.

New-To-Me Cousin, Rich, who knows what he's doing! I just love meeting new cousins on the ol' internet thingy! Well, Mom met him first way back when, because they both have been doing this for years, or should that be decades? I like Rich because he's easy to communicate with and is willing to share. Cousin Rich is going to visit Mom this week. As you might remember, Mom is 94 and still working on her Big Tree. Rich and she have been emailing for about 10 years and they've never met, as happens in this crazy game.
Do you also run into new-to-you cousins who just want a copy of a document or to pick your brain and then disappear in the night? Hello, you there cousin? No reply or just a short email back saying they aren't working on that anymore. (Yeah, but I am!)
Must say that I've run into a couple of really lovely cousins lately and that feels super good! I just love "community"! Guys like Cousin Rich make it all worth it:)

GEDmatch! Where art thou? Just when I started loving the heck out of GEDmatch, they crashed and burned. But late yesterday they got back up. I was sitting here with two ID numbers in hand that I needed to compare chromosomes with and a juicy GEDCOM waiting to be uploaded and no way to get to the goodies. But now it sure looks like they are making a come back, and with a newly designed layout and sign-in feature too. It took me a moment to realize the GEDCOM upload feature wasn't yet functional, and another little minute to locate the old features I had been using. Never mind, they'll get there.

Haplogroup H: New Info! Where did we come from, ask the folks on the Haplogroup H3 message board where so many have Irish ancestors! A new article which you can find here reveals a lot about we Hap H people.
"Says Dr Brotherton, "This is a very interesting group as they have been linked to the expansion of Celtic languages along the Atlantic coast and into central Europe."
So Ireland it is:)

This has been such a crazy busy week... and it's only Wednesday!

Wills Creek Bridge near Cumberland, MD.

Photo by Curtis, about 1910.

(See tab at top, Nat'l Highway, to view full album.)

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/wisdom-wednesday-where-did-they-put-that.html

The Creative Process: Can I Afford My Hobby?

 

This series is about the cross-over skills and concepts between creating art and doing genealogy. Admittedly, it's all very blue-sky.

When I was teaching studio art at the local college back a ways, a goodly number of students were taking advanced drawing for personal enjoyment and were what we might call "older learners" who came joyfully to this adventure after working a lifetime. They had earned it and now were fulfilling a dream to make art. Some had nurtured a fantasy of painting their way through retirement making and selling art. A lovely dream.

One of the shocking things that hit them when they took the first art class was that making art costs money, a lot of money and there were many who forgot all about it after getting the supplies list on the first day of class and joined a book club instead. It often seemed to me that everyone was making money on making art except the artists.

Having been at one time a fool for art, I decided not to travel down that same road for genealogy. I set a strict budget for monthly expenses and try to stick to it. When it's gone, I wait until next month. No telling myself, I need that, as an excuse to splurge. My subscriptions are a big chunk out of the budget and if I don't use one for a week or so, I sit here wondering if I need it or not. Oh sure, I could wing it and just spend freely, but knowing myself as I do, I like that feeling of being in control of the money I throw at finding solutions to brick wall problems.

In the classroom I always felt bad for the students who couldn't spend a great amount of money on art supplies. A lucky affluent few bought anything they wanted and always came to class with too much stuff carrying every imaginable art supply. But you know what, it didn't make them better artists than the rest. As a matter of fact those who did more with fewer supplies and really knew how to use them were the artists who succeeded and impressed the rest of us. I wonder if that's true in genealogy?

It seems in this realm of hunting down your ancestors no one hardly ever talks about how expensive it can be, and how exclusionary that can be, separating out those who can't afford some subscriptions, books, or tools from those who can. It's all about access isn't it? Equal access. That's one thing that I especially like and respect about Family Search. It's free to all. And so was the live stream of RootsTech sessions. We all like that, don't we? Count my vote in the column that believes that the more people out there doing genealogy the better and healthier will be the community in general. But that's just me:) How about you?


Nutshell analysis and the obvious take-aways:
* It's about equal access that doesn't depend on ability to pay and that's more inclusive.
* If you have access, can you share what you have with others? Sponsor a local library's access to a paid web site? Donate a subscription to a raffle? Oh, come on, you'll think of something:)


On Fridays if I make a new post in the Creative Process series, I'll also post a painting of mine... just in case you don't care for the post, you might enjoy looking at the painting instead:)

"Pacific Waves"

24 by 30 inches, oil on canvas

Diane K. Weintraub

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-creative-process-can-i-afford-my.html

Using FamilySearch

In a previous post I mentioned that my FamilySearch.org skills were wanting, or at least that's how I felt. And thanks from me to those of you who kindly offered suggestions to broaden my knowledge base:)

Someone suggested the tutorial videos in the Learning Center, and that sounded good to me. My objective was to start at the beginning and make sure I had a grasp of all that was there on the site and was using features to full advantage. And I do like watching videos so that's where I began.

It's paying off. I'm watching the introductory videos from the most basic onward. Have watched about a dozen and in just the first couple have picked up some good tips and tricks, mostly that have to do with features I've overlooked. Just these two tips, below, will make the whole effort worth it.

The first tips is about using filters in my search. By using a combination of search terms that widen the search as well as filters that limit the search I think that I'm doing a bit better of searching and finding. I liked it in the video when the narrator showed that just by x-ing the term out you could eliminate it. No need to start over. Cool!

The second tip that was totally new to me showed how to reverse the image in an effort to better and more clearly see the letterforms. The example was a census page that when reversed, that is when the dark writing on a light ground became light writing on a dark ground, sometimes the features of letters can be seen more clearly. Also cool! Honestly, guess I thought that reversing an image meant that everything was backwards;) Ha! But it was a tool that could help me out.

Now I'm starting to feel that I'm not missing the good features!

Here's a link to the videos mentioned in this post in case you want to watch some. Have fun!
https://help.familysearch.org/kb/videos/en/index.html


Picture of the day from the Archive:

Aunt Louise Kelly Chaney, about 1941
My Dad's youngest sister,
And just as beautiful as this photo!

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/09/using-familysearch.html