RePost from 2015: Catholic Parish Registers at the National Library of Ireland

A post this morning by the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) brought this to my attention. The National Library of Ireland (NLI) has just put its microfilm collection of Catholic parish registers recording baptisms and marriage from most of Ireland's parishes in Ireland and Northern Ireland up to 1880 online for research and download. Starting dates for these records vary from region to region and parish to parish.*

[National Library of Ireland on The Commons, photostream on flickr]

Read what the NLI says about its mammoth project:

Church registers of marriage and baptism are considered to be the single most important source for family history researchers prior to the 1901 census. In many cases, the registers contain the only surviving record of particular individuals and families. With growing numbers of people engaged in family history research and limited on-site facilities at the NLI in Dublin, the decision was taken in 2010 to digitise the parish register microfilms. Following a tender process, the contract for digitisation was awarded to AEL Data who converted 550 microfilm reels, containing over 3500 registers into approximately 373,000 digital images. These images correspond to a page or two-page opening within a register volume. 

Of course since these records are organized by parish within each county, searching for your Irish ancestors will be easiest for those who know where to start. The NLI has a useful section on its Help page on finding the right parish with links.**

[St Saviour's Church and the Tait Memorial Clock in Limerick. National Library of Ireland on The Commons, photostream on flickr]

The NLI site is well-designed and easy to use. Best of all, it's FREE!

*The several counties (Meath, Armaugh and Galway) didn't have anything earlier than the very late 18th century.
**For more information about Irish genealogy in general, this link is a very good place to start.

© 2015 Copyright, Pat Hartley, All Rights Reserved.


© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Research: Were My Kin’s White Neighbors Descendants of My Ancestor’s Owners?

This useful guide to researching relationships between freed people, their descendants, and their white neighbors came to my attention through a post on New England Historic Genealogical Society's (NEHGS) Facebook page.

Originally posted on The Root, Henry Louis Gates Jr. consulting with Christopher Lee, a researcher from NEHGS, responds to the query Were My Kin’s White Neighbors Descendants of My Ancestor’s Owners? with a variety of avenues to explore.

What we found illustrates the close relationship that the emancipated people and their former owners frequently had in the years following the end of the U.S. Civil War, and the ways old patterns of power and economic interdependency endured.

NEHGS also has a free webinar about the topic posted earlier this year on YouTube.

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Fantastic Find: Catholic Parish Registers at the National Library of Ireland

A post this morning by the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) brought this to my attention. The National Library of Ireland (NLI) has just put its microfilm collection of Catholic parish registers recording baptisms and marriage from most of Ireland's parishes in Ireland and Northern Ireland up to 1880 online for research and download. Starting dates for these records vary from region to region and parish to parish.*

[National Library of Ireland on The Commons, photostream on flickr]

Read what the NLI says about its mammoth project:

Church registers of marriage and baptism are considered to be the single most important source for family history researchers prior to the 1901 census. In many cases, the registers contain the only surviving record of particular individuals and families. With growing numbers of people engaged in family history research and limited on-site facilities at the NLI in Dublin, the decision was taken in 2010 to digitise the parish register microfilms. Following a tender process, the contract for digitisation was awarded to AEL Data who converted 550 microfilm reels, containing over 3500 registers into approximately 373,000 digital images. These images correspond to a page or two-page opening within a register volume. 

Of course since these records are organized by parish within each county, searching for your Irish ancestors will be easiest for those who know where to start. The NLI has a useful section on its Help page on finding the right parish with links.**

[St Saviour's Church and the Tait Memorial Clock in Limerick. National Library of Ireland on The Commons, photostream on flickr]

The NLI site is well-designed and easy to use. Best of all, it's FREE!

*The several counties (Meath, Armaugh and Galway) didn't have anything earlier than the very late 18th century.
**For more information about Irish genealogy in general, this link is a very good place to start.

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Great News: Freedmen's Bureau Records To Be Digitized and Made Available Online Free!

By now you've probably heard of the announcement from last Friday* that 1.5 million records from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen's Bureau) will soon be available online free. It's estimated that these handwritten documents, which provide invaluable documentary sources of information for the four million newly freed people, ** will be completely digitized by late next year in time for the opening of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington.

[Illustration showing an African American soldier at his wedding in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Contributor Names: Waud, Alfred R. (Alfred Rudolph), 1828-1891, artist; Created / Published:1866.Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. ]

[Marriage Certificate of Thomas Harris and Jane Harris (Shute) Issued April 28, 1866

Tennessee, Lebanon, Wilson County, sent to Freedmen's Bureau Headquarters, 

Washington, DC, M1875, roll 4. National Archives]

But getting all these records online is only the beginning. Until they've been indexed it will be difficult and time-consuming to hunt for individuals.*** If you're looking for a worthwhile project to spend time on, you can help by going to this website and becoming one of the Project's volunteers.

To help bring thousands of records to light, the Freedmen’s Bureau Project was created as a set of partnerships between FamilySearch International and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro­-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), and the California African American Museum. 

Tens of thousands of volunteers are needed to make these records searchable online. No specific time commitment is required, and anyone may participate. Volunteers simply log on, pull up as many scanned documents as they like, and enter the names and dates into the fields provided. Once published, information for millions of African Americans will be accessible, allowing families to build their family trees and connect with their ancestors.

I was one of the thousands of volunteers who helped get the 1940 U.S. Census indexed and online in an earlier joint project. It was expected to take a year, but we got it done in five months!****

I'm looking forward to getting involved in the Freedmen's Bureau Project too.

*Which appropriately was June 19th, the 150th Juneteenth.
**"The Freedmen’s Bureau made records that include marriages and church and financial details as well as full names, dates of birth and histories of slave ownership." (quote from The Guardian article referenced above.)
***To date only a very few records have been indexed.
****It was very interesting, getting a view into people's lives from over 70 years ago. And given some of the handwriting of the census takers, there was also an element of puzzle-solving.

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

2 Good Sources for Finding the Vital Records of the U.S. and U.S. Territories: FamilySearch.org and the Center for Disease Control

The symbols of vital records. Vital Records Collage. users Jane41 and DiltsGD, 30 Sep 2010. Digital image. FamilySearch wiki. http://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/File:Vital_Records_Collage.JPG

Vital records: birth, marriage, divorce, and death.

Every state and territory in the United States has its own unique history and timespan of generating vital records and making them available. It is necessary to contact the particular state or territory when you want vital records that are not already available online (although more and more do become available through free and fee sites).  There is no U.S. Federal department that has centralized these vital records, with the exception of records taken through an embassy or consulate for Americans living abroad.

The Division of Vital Statistics, part of the CDC/National Center for Health Statistics, maintains an easy to use index of states and territories called Where to Write for Vital Records that gives the basic facts on how much each vital record type costs, where to contact for more info, time range of available records, and which entity that holds/generates the records.  The pages are updated as needed.

The FamilySearch.org wiki article United States Vital Records goes a step farther, with more background information on each state,why and when records were created, and their availability. In fact, FamilySearch.org's Creation of Records is a nice summary on why it is important to understand how and why a record is created in the first place, and how it can improve your research.


Ancestry.com has a list of states and territories in their U.S. Birth, Marriage, and Death Records wiki article, based on Ancestry's Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.  This link is best used if you have a subscription to Ancestry, though, as it links to many of Ancestry's vital records databases, although the information from the Red Book is very helpful in general for understanding the following records and resources across the U.S.:
Vital Records
Census Records
Internet Resources
County Resources
Background Sources
Land Records
Probate Records
Court Records
Tax Records
Cemetery Records
Church Records
Military Records
Periodicals, Newspapers, and Manuscript Collections
Archives, Libraries, and Societies



© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

How FamilySearch Does Indexing Projects

This week Jake Gehring at FamilySearch Blog wrote "Where Do Indexing Projects Come From?"  It is a good reminder that not only are most records not online, but that it takes a real and concerted effort to get records online in a way that is useful.


© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Notary Public

I'm considering becoming a notary public.  According to the Civil Law Notary article on Wikipedia:

Scribes have existed since recorded history, but the notary's authentication tools were first invented in the Fertile Crescent where in Babylon the use of signatures and distinct signs in clay tablets was required. Egypt innovated the use of papyrus and the calame, added legalistic formalism to document preparation, and had specialized notary-scribes, called sesh n pero' "pharaoh's scribe" or sesh n po "scribe of the nome"[19]—agoranomos in Ptolemaic times—who gave authenticity to instruments without the need for witnesses. In Ancient Israel there existed a similar institution of the notary-scribe known as the sofér. Greek city-states lacked uniformity, but, universally, public instruments, usually deeds and conveyances, were kept in official registers and drafted by scribal mnemone (or basiliki ipographi "king's scribes") who were tied to a certain district and whose written acts trumped oral testimony.[20] These innovations would be combined and adopted under the Roman empire.

The notary public article on Wikipedia makes a distinction between notary public and civil law notary:

A notary public (or notary or public notary) of the common law is a public officer constituted by law to serve the public in non-contentious matters usually concerned with estates, deeds, powers-of-attorney, and foreign and international business. A notary's main functions are to administer oaths and affirmations, take affidavits and statutory declarations, witness and authenticate the execution of certain classes of documents, take acknowledgments of deeds and other conveyances, protest notes and bills of exchange, provide notice of foreign drafts, prepare marine or ship's protests in cases of damage, provide exemplifications and notarial copies, and perform certain other official acts depending on the jurisdiction.[1] Any such act is known as a notarization. The term notary public only refers to common-law notaries and should not be confused with civil-law notaries.

In genealogy I constantly use documents, like estates and deeds, which were created by people in some sort of official capacity to make those documents official.  I think it will be interesting to play a small part in creating documents which might be used by future genealogists!

Since I'm in California I will go through the Secretary of State as that is the office which "may appoint and commission notaries public in such number as the Secretary of State deems necessary for the public convenience. Notaries public may act as such notaries in any part of this state" (Government Code 8200).

I also found this brief helpful discussion by Vicky LaCelle through a workshop from Fremont College on becoming a notary public in California.



© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

The Census Takers: A Little Thursday Humor

Hannibal Lecter: 

"A census taker once tried to test me. 

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."

As someone who uses the American censuses regularly, I often think of census takers.  What was it like to do that job?  The job has always entailed weird and sometimes dangerous situations, but it must have also had it's share of humorous encounters.

The situation of asking perfect strangers questions about their household has always provided comedic fodder for fiction (much of it not politically correct BTW):

• this 2000 SNL "Census Taker" skit, 
• the 1940 Three Stooges "No Census, No Feeling,"  
• the short play "Taking the Census in Bingville" (published 1911),
• the poem "The Puzzled Census Taker" (published in 1883), 

The blog YesterYear Once More found this gem (1830).

The Census Bureau itself posted some humorous examples in the Census in Pop Culture Through the Decades.



© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.