A Free Resource for WWII Records, Military and Civilian

A terrific new resource will help you unearth family history records from the 1940s and 1950s. And guess what...it's free! 

Preparing for D-Day

Digging through World War II era records is very challenging, both because there's so much available online, but also because so many important records haven't been digitized yet. The folks at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans have put together Researching American Military and Civilian Records from World War II to help you sort it all out. Just register at the site, and download the guide at no charge.

There's good stuff here for researching veterans, employees of the military and plain old civilians. The guide includes write-ups on specialized sources including:

• MEDICAL RECORDS
• NAVAL AVIATION TRAINING JACKETS 
• MISSING AIR CREW REPORTS
• MERCHANT MARINES
• PRISONERS OF WAR (POWS)
• FEDERAL CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES
• JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNEE RECORDS
• RED CROSS RECORDS
• US CADET NURSE CORPS

Some of it's online, most of it isn't, but the document is a good guide to what's what. Hopefully, it will help you track down genealogy information that would have been elusive otherwise.  

And don't forget, a few other pages on my blog here include enlistment records and American military records from the Revolutionary War onwards.

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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

Newspaper Archives for Genealogy

It's not just presidents, celebrities and sports heroes who get mentioned in the newspaper. 

Mulberry Street, NYC

Small town papers, in particular, have always covered the big events in the lives of ordinary citizens: a high school graduation, opening a new bakery or shoe repair shop, enlisting in the army, an engagement, a wedding, a new baby.  A new publication, Newspapers Give Us the Rest of the Story, does a nice job of showing how to use newspaper archives for a detailed search on family history.

This free ebook (at 14 pages, more of an article, really) is provided by GenealogyBank, a subscription newspaper search service. It details the search of the author's ancestor, one William Kemp, who arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s. The author uses several online tools, including shipping records and immigration records to focus his research in newspaper archives. He then goes on to do a splendid job of using newspapers to uncover the trials and tribulations of his ancestor's journey to America.

It's well done, and worth a download. Keep in mind, though, that in addition to GenealogyBank, there are other newspaper archive resources. You can find plenty of free newspaper archives online, as well as subscription services like Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.

Good hunting!

Search BillionGraves

Are there really a billion grave sites listed at BillionGraves? Unlikely...but they might get there one day.

This is an interesting site, with a deep database of listings, in the US and around the world. Data is provided by volunteers who use the Billiongraves app to photograph grave sites and upload the GPS data for the site along with the actual record of who's buried there.

The GPS component makes it easy to survey surrounding graves. Since families are often buried in close proximity to one another, the site can provide clues to family relations that you might have missed at other sources. If you visit the actual grave, the Billiongraves app on your phone will guide you directly to the site.

Searching is free, as is access to the first tier of information, which is a pretty full listing of the individual grave record. If you want the full record though, including neighboring graves, you'll have to subscribe to their Plus service.

A search at Billiongraves, along with a search at Findagrave, gives you enormous access to records of the deceased. Add in the military grave databases and....wow!

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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

Half a *billion* free records from Ancestry.com, at WorldConnect

A piece of George Washington's family history

Talk about large databases!

Forget millions, WorldConnect gets you more than three-quarters of a billion records. Just about everyone's family history is reflected here, to some degree, so certainly pay a visit to this powerful and free genealogical search tool.

WorldConnect is a collection of family tree information that follow the GEDCOM format -- Genealogical Data Communications. GEDCOM allows family tree data from different systems to 'talk' to one another through a common format.

The format was developed by the Mormon Church (the folks who brought you FamilySearch), and WorldConnect is housed at Rootsweb, which is run by Ancestry.com. This may well be Ancestry's largest database, but unlike its other, subscription-based resources, you can access this data at no charge.

Searching is easy. Just be sure to use the actual WorldConnect search boxes, rather than searching at the advertised sites on the page, which also have First Name/Last Name search boxes.

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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

Latvia Vital Records of the Late 19th, Early 20th Centuries

Raduraksti:  Pick a language, any language!

Here's something you don't see every day.

The Latvian State Historical Archives has created Raduraksti, a new online feature housing millions of vital records -- births, deaths, marriages and baptisms -- from a period that seems to cover the late 1800's and early 1900's.

This is not a database of names, towns, and so on. Instead, it is a collection of scans of the actual town registers used to collect the original information. As such, this is information to be browsed by town/date/event (birth, death, etc), rather than the usual name lookup that is so familiar (and so easy!).  All told, there are more than 4.6 million pages of original records available at Raduraksti.

The records themselves are a hodgepodge of eastern Europe languages...you'll find hand-written scripts in German, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish (for the Jewish enclaves), and (I suppose) Latvian.

However, the site interface and instructions are available in English (well-written English, too, which isn't always the case!). Once you register at the site, browsing the actual records is not at all difficult, though the page images themselves are sometimes slow to load.


JewishGen, the Jewish family history site (and a fantastic resource in it's own right...I'll have to profile them one day soon) has created a small dataset of births and deaths in Goldingen, a Latvia town currently named Kuldigas (or Kuldiga), if I have my provenance correct.

The Latvia Archives are worth a look, even if you don't think you have any family history in the area. More and more archive sites are making these sorts of original records available, and providing search interfaces that can be used by English-only miscreants like myself. It's worth becoming familiar with this type of resource, so you can best take advantage of vital records archives when they become available in your ancestral neck of the woods.


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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.