Social Security Database - New Links

This from the KYGENWEB List:

Happy Easter everyone! One of our coordinators emailed me yesterday about
an email she received from Rootsweb/Ancestry. Wesley Exon is a content
marketing manager for RW and is trying to reach coordinators who have their
sites on RW. The Social Security database link has changed and he wants yo
to be aware of it! If you get an email from him, please answer! For the
rest of the coordinators (no matter where your site is), if you have a link
on your site to the SSI Database, please make sure the link is correct. The
new link is:  http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3693


Thanks,
Suzanne Shephard
Assistant State Coordinator
KYGenWeb is part of the
USGenWeb Project

Just got this after posting the above!

FYI: RW's (Ancestry.com's) Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is no
longer free.  It was moved over to their subscriber's side many
months ago.  I believe they sited privacy concerns, if you can
believe that.  I changed my link to the SSDI at FamilySearch.org (
https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1202535 ).  The main thing
that I miss is being able to search by exact birth or death dates;
with FamilySearch's SSDI database you can only specify by year or a
range of years.  There are a few other free SSDI databases out there,
but I found this one to be the most reliable and easy to use.

Brian K. Caudill
Malabar, FL

"Genealogy is Like a Very Big Puzzle"

I have always liked to solve mysteries and to put together puzzles.  I was making a comment on one of MyFamily.com groups of many of my West family and other related families.  We have pooled our resources and what we already have learned to attempt to fill in the gaps of our family history.  I suddenly wrote that it was like we were all working on one very big puzzle.

We are finding the puzzle pieces, but we need to be able to put them all together. As with puzzles, many of us start by finding the flat edged pieces to put together the outer edges (frame) and then concentrate on areas of similar characteristics putting the pieces in one by one until they all connect and the puzzle is complete. This is what we are trying to do, except it is hard to make that frame and there are so many pieces that seem to be the same! :) Also because we can not find some documented records, the pieces are not complete or some of the image of the piece was damaged (lost). No matter what, it is very hard to put together a puzzle if you do not have all of the pieces.

When we first start researching our families, there are just a few that we know who may be of help to us.  As time goes on we build a network of researchers and resources.  We use libraries, DNA, courthouses, friends & family, genealogical societies, the Internet.  Many now are using resources like Ancestry.com, Heritage Quest, bulletin boards, USGenWeb, MyFamily.com and so many others.  What we are doing are looking for the pieces of the puzzle and trying to connect the pieces.

The group I mentioned is a good sized group of cousins that are trying to find these puzzle pieces and then try to put them together as a large diverse group of people.  When I work on a picture puzzle, it seems to get put together so much faster when there are several working together.

Genealogical societies provide resources to help us put together our family puzzles.  Working with others who are researching the same family can increase your chances of finding missing pieces and then connecting them.

My point is that our family puzzles have been scattered about and some pieces are lost or damaged beyond recognition.  We can not rely on just one resource or one person to gather most of these pieces.  We need to work together as much as we can and we can put together that family puzzle.  Of course, once we get that puzzle done, we start expanding the frame!  Hopefully, putting together the puzzle will be fun and enlightening as you go.

- Written by JGWest

"Historic Evansville Newspaper Online!"

'

The Evansville Argus...
... an excellent local African-American newspaper that was published for about 5-6 years from 1938 to 1943. It is a very interesting paper that should be of great help to historians & genealogists. It can be found on the David Rice Library at the University of Southern Indiana.

My good friend, Taneya Koonce, sent me a "heads-up" on this new data online. She has a great blog that she calls - "Taneya's Genealogy Blog" that you can visit to learn more about this great news. I met with Taneya a couple years ago at Willard Library. She is a medical librarian with 1 0+ years in information management & organization. She holds a Masters of Science in Library Science – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC – 1999 and a Masters of Public Health – Vanderbilt University School of Medicine – 2010. Taneya applies her professional experience in the identification, selection, evaluation, & critical analysis of information resources to her genealogy hobby pursuits. Her own quest in family history research started in 2006 after rediscovering family tree notes taken during interviews with her grandmothers approximately 10 years earlier. Already an active volunteer with the national USGenWeb Project and dedicated to helping others locate additional information to enrich their own family history knowledge, she is also an active blogger and participant in the Internet genealogy community. Her particular interests lie heavily in technology and historical newspaper research. Taneya has contributed a lot of great blogs & information to the TSGS Cruiser Blog! Thanks, Taneya!

- Compiled by JGWest

USGenWeb Project

An Internet resource that I have not mentioned lately is the USGenWeb Project. This project began as an idea by a man named Jeff Murphy about 1996 as a way to gather important information and data for genealogists into one web site for Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Jeff was quickly joined by others to do the same in each county of Kentucky. As word spread others jumped in to begin other state projects and in early 1996, the USGenWeb Project was in a race to see which state would be first to have a county coordinator for every county in the state.


Around April of 1996, I read an interview of Jeff Murphy in Everton's web page via AOL, I was very impressed and volunteered to be a county coordinator for LaRue Co, KY that was available. I did not know anything about creating & maintaining web sites (I often stated that I did not know my FTP from my HTML). I was taught in about 4 weeks how to make web pages all by email from Holly Fee Timm. It did not take long for every state to have a County Coordinator (CC) for every county in the United States. Although there are some minimum standards required for each county, the CC's put up data as they submit and other researchers submit. So, the information for each county is significantly different. Besides data, you often can learn where to research in the county, hours for the library or courthouse, maybe a list of the cemeteries (sometimes including photos of the tombstones), etc.

Now, that every county is online, the goal is to keep them updated. The project has always been free to all researchers and will remain that way.

Here are links to the project:
USGenWeb Project - http://www.usgenweb.org/
ILGenWeb Project - http://ilgenweb.net/
INGenWeb Project - http://www.ingenweb.org/
KYGenWeb Project - http://www.kygenweb.net/

- Compiled by JGWest

Cyndi's List

.
Cyndi's List? What in the world is that?

What is Cyndi's List?
A categorized & cross-referenced index to genealogical resources on the Internet.
A list of links that point you to genealogical research sites online.
A free jumping-off point for you to use in your online research.
A "card catalog" to the genealogical collection in the immense library that is the Internet.
Your genealogical research portal onto the Internet since 1996!


When I first started being active on the Internet with my first web sites back in 1996, I began with Larue County, Kentucky for the new network called the KYGenWeb Project. Soon the project expanded to become a the USGenWeb Project. Late 1996 or early 1997, a housewife by the name of Cyndi Howell asked if us KYGenWeb folks would consider listing our sites on her site called Cyndi's List. We all wanted as many people to come to our sites as possible... so most was happy to have her list our sites. I visited her "list" and was impressed because she had about ten thousand (10,000) links to all kind of things related to genealogy & history. She had at least 40-50 categories with some really cool sites listed. I wrote to her requesting her to link my Larue County site and mentioned that we had an adoption site. She wrote back that she visited the adoption site and had just started a new category - "Adoption" and Becky's was one of the first five listed.

Today, Cyndi's List contains 257,600 in 180+ categories, 9,520+ new & un-categorized for a total of 267,130+ links for family history! Visit her site: http://www.cyndislist.com/

- Compiled by JGWest

RACING DOWN the RIVER -Brief Genealogical Notes

KYGenWeb State Coordinator

Elected National Coordinator

USGenWeb Project

Sherri Bradley, KYGenWeb State Coordinator, was just announced as the newly elected USGenWeb National Coordinator. Congrats to an Internet friend and associate. I have worked with Sherri over the last five years or so through the KYGenWeb Project.

John G. West, TSGS President