300 Million Names and New Tools Help Genealogists

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New Resources and Tool

for Family Historians

28 April 2010

Salt Lake City, Utah—FamilySearch International announced today that it has posted an additional 300 million names to its huge family history database. The names come from extracted original sources and include many collections that have never before been available online. The move bolsters FamilySearch's earlier announcements regarding ongoing efforts to digitize the billions of genealogical records stored in its Granite Mountain Records Vault near Salt Lake City, Utah.


The names can be found on the beta.familysearch.org Web site. That site and several other online tools and resources, can be accessed at labs.familysearch.org.
FamilySearch intends to migrate these resources to its main FamilySearch.org Web site later this year.

Midnight Madness! @ Willard Library

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Willard Library

Midnight Madness :

14-18 June 2010

A week long event in the genealogy department at Willard library. The Special Collections Department stays open from 9am to Midnight. This event is free and open to the public. A detailed schedule is available on the Willard Library website. Link: http://www.willard.lib.in.us/calendar_of_events/index.php?m=6

Calendar of Events:

Willard Library http://www.willard.lib.in.us/ in Evansville, Indiana, is famous for personal service and treasured special collections. Whether you're a genealogist seeking to uncover the past, or a reader looking for a great book for yourself or your children, come visit soon!

- Submitted by Vannetta McDowell (Willard Library Special Collections Department)

STAYING AFLOAT in the GENE POOL -Genetic DNA News

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Tibor Fehér New Co-Admin
of Kerchner's R1b Project

For Immediate Release - 27 April 2010


Tibor Fehér of Hungary has joined Charles Kerchner of the USA as a new Co-Admin of Kerchner's R1b Project (a large project) hosted at FTDNA. For more details about this project see: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/r1b/


Charles Kerchner, P.E. (Retired)
Pennsylvania USA
R1b Project Founder and Admin
http://www.kerchner.com/dna-info.htm

Memorial Bookmarks

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Memorial Bookmarks
are nicely laminated obituaries
from the local newspapers.

These are often called "tribute" or "memorial" cards, but are most often used as a bookmark for a favorite passage in the Bible. Commercial companies will laminate the obituary and send a copy free to the contact person for the deceased with the sales pamphlet to purchase more of them to give as thank-you gifts (they include additional memorial services & products). Don Counts submitted 2 of his parents and I have included one of my grandfather back in 1959. Click on the images below to get a larger image that is easier to read & see the detail of these bookmarks.

These memorial bookmarks can make great fillers for the blog when I do not have other items to post. If you have one or several, send them to me. I will not know when I will post any of them, but will try to get what I have within the month they were submitted. It would be nice if the ones we get are 1960 or earlier (at least 50 years), but if you want to send one more recent that will be ok. I will post them in the order of the oldest date of death, first.

- Written by JGWest

- Images submitted by Don Counts & JGWest

"Bonus Time!"

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Yesterday,
I reported that I captured a database that was basically lost to me from an old Personal Ancestral File (PAF) genealogy program. It could not be used on my new computer (wasn't compatible) and the old computer will not start up. I have the PAF program, but it will not install on the new computer. I have the database on a CD, but it can not be used or read without the program. As I joyfully told everyone yesterday, I found a copy of the program installed on a flash drive with the database on it. I can use the PAF program & database by just plugging it into a USB slot on my desktop computer. I decided to make a gedcom and see if I could then add it to my Family Tree Maker (FTM) program on the hard drive of the new computer. It was a snap to convert it to a gedcom and then to the FTM format for a database in that program.

I said it was "bonus time!" Well, here it is... since Ancestry.com owns FTM they have a built-in service to allow FTM programs to search online in the Ancestry.com database. With the 17,063 names (from the PAF database) of mostly relatives of my ancestors, I can just click a little button and it will search Ancestry's database for matches. It is a good search engine that mostly just picks up the same individual you have data on in your FTM program! It includes the census images from the microfilm. This means that about 14,000 people (that were in the PAF program, but not in my regular FTM database) can now be quickly searched on Ancestry with a single click per person... I do not have to type in their name or other info on that person. I have quickly found some of these "new" people in the US Census listing families and locations of where they lived with their ages and sometimes date of birth. This is a nice bonus!

-Written by JGWest

ENGINEER'S Report - Tech Info

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This is a story from
someone that wishes he was a real techno guy...
me!

I found one of my flash drives (AKA: portable, thumb or USB drives) and hooked it into my computer to see if there were any photos on it that I failed to put onto the regular desktop computer. I found that this was the little drive that I downloaded & installed the Family Tree Maker (FTM) program with its database & it also had an installed Personal Ancestral File (PAF) with database. This little drive could be carried around by me anywhere and I could check my database on anybody's computer and I could add, delete or otherwise edit anything in my family files to bring home and put into my desktop genealogy program. The good part was that the computer I would use did not need to have FTM or PAF installed on its computer! This reminded me about the lost Christian County, KY huge PAF database that my cousin Tom Henderson had given me several years back. I bought a new computer about 2.5 years ago with Vista... which was not compatible with the PAF version 5, but not to fear because it was on my old computer that still worked. I was going to make a gedcom of the PAF data to export to my FTM program that was installed on the new computer. But... well, you know I never got around to doing that, of course!

Well, the old computer died on me and I have not been able to access that great database my cousin Tom Henderson gave me. Back to that little flash drive, that I could read that PAF database without any problem - I decided to see if I could export a gedcom copy of the PAF data to my new computer's FTM program. It worked!!!

Now, I can access the file without the flash drive & I can use it in a program that I am very comfortable with its use (FTM ver. 2006). I also have FTM ver. 2009 on the new computer, but it is seriously different than my 2006 version that is similar to version 1 of FTM that I began using in 1996 and upgraded every 2-3 years. Since the gedcom worked from the PAF 5 to FTM 2006, I need to now convert the FTM 2006 to the FTM 2009, just in case the next genealogy program will not be compatible with a gedcom from a program as old as 2006.

I learned a long time ago that if you skip too many upgrades from one version to the latest version that you may not be able to merge your old saved files into the newer version. So, you need to update your files every few years just to be able to access them later.

Perry Heights

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The History of Perry Heights Middle School

Evansville, Indiana

Don Counts attended fourth through eighth grade, graduating in 1956!

Perry Heights Middle School was founded in 1939 as the first public school in the area for grades one through eight. The school replaced three rural schools: Wolf, Schmadel and Bokelman. The school was operated by Perry Township trustees. Ivo Samples was the first principal of Perry Heights in 1939. He remained at the school as principal and teacher until 1946. Perry Heights was first constructed as a four-classroom school. It had a gymnasium- auditorium combination, girls' and boys' dressing rooms, a kitchen, and a dining room. Later the students underwent a great change from one-room to a school with indoor bathroom and a drinking fountain. Classes at Perry Heights were relatively small, about 16 students in a class. Classes had one teacher and contained two grades. Unlike today, the students were not allowed to take their books home at night. Therefore, they had no homework!! The students were taught five subjects: English, reading, spelling, arithmetic, and geography. The lower grades were taught handwriting, as well. Perry Heights had one sport, boys' basketball. It was the only school with a gym, so all schools in the league had practices at Perry Heights. All of these schools were part of the Perry Township School District. This was before the city and county schools consolidated into the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation. Perry Heights did not have a mascot, but they did have cheerleaders. The building had a major change in 1954. The original building stretched from the side of the present building that faces Hogue Road to the first entrance from the present day parking lot. The addition stretched down to the present office. The old cafeteria was split into two classrooms. In the fall of 1961, the school opened to Kindergarten. The years of 1969-1984 were times of great change at Perry Heights. One of the first major additions took place in 1969, when Perry Heights expanded and built the T-hall and the basement. The new gym also came along until 1969. In 1971, Perry Heights became a K-8 school. In October of 1978, Perry Heights' sixth grade class completed its first successful weekend at Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky. This became an annual adventure weekend for 6th graders. In 1984, Perry Heights became a middle school. One of the most well-liked changes was the addition of extra-curricular activities such as the many basketball and track teams, to speech teams and the drama program which became known community-wide. One of the biggest changes that occurred during this time period was in 1976 when the school acquired a new gym. The old gym then became a 350 seat auditorium and the school mascot became the "Panther". Since 1989, Perry Heights has not changed much. One improvement that students seem to take pride in is the cafeteria, renamed the "Paw's Diner". Thanks to Principal, Mr. Charles Goodman and his artistic abilities. Since 1994, every morning during homeroom, a broadcast has been made to inform students and teachers of events going on at school. The "PHMS NewsCenter" was born! During the spring and summer of 1996, air conditioning was added for the first time at Perry Heights Middle School. Perry Heights continues to excel in many areas and many of its graduates have excelled in their lives. There are many reasons to be proud of the Perry Heights heritage. We have come a long way and surely we have new heights to achieve.

-Submitted by Donald R. Counts