May I Introduce Mr. and Mrs. Fools, and Their Daughter, April

Someone, either a poet or a tax protester, once said that April is the cruelest month, and so it may be (though I'm rather fond of it myself).

But could anyone have really been so cruel as to name their daughter April, when their family name is Fool?

Ms. April Fool, are you out there?

Apparently so.

The family name of Fool or Fools, while not terribly common, is not unheard of, either. It may be a variant spelling of Fowles, and names of that ilk, but whatever its origins, there is no shortage of Fools out there in the world.

But really now...April Fools?

According to Intelius, one of the most comprehensive public record lookups, there are three April Fools in the US (in Ohio, Illinois and Minnesota), along with two women named April Fool, one in New York and one in Nebraska (I'm assuming April is a girl's name...no one would be so cruel as to name their son April!).

The Nebraska Ms. Fool has a relative by the name of Ima Fool, indicating a family with a sense of humor, or (more likely) someone filed a phoney form down at the local DMV.

The sounds-like search at Ancestry.com offers up a few variations on the name, including April Fewell, April Foil, and April Foyil.

From FamilySearch and other data bases come other variations: April Fauls, April Fowles, April Falls, April Foiles, April Fulce, and April Fales. And let us not overlook Miss May Foole.

There are many other families in history who could have given rise to an April Fool, but apparently chose not to (or at least, didn't leave a record behind), including:

• Charles Fool-Bear, and other assorted foolish animals: Foolbull, Foolscrow, and Fool Hawk, among them.
• According to CWSS, Dick Fool wore the Grey, and James Fool the Blue in the Civil War.
• Bepiah B. Foolchand once walked the earth, as did Mohssen Fooladjoush, Charles Foolkroynik and Edith Fooler.
• There's someone named Gold Fool and another named Fishin Fools. 
• And according to Forces Reunited, there was once a British Soldier with the unlikely name of Tycloldicafoolo.

 However, according to the Canadian Genealogy Centre, there are no Fools in Canada.

 And no...I'm not fooling!

 
Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Is Frank Sinatra in Your Family Tree?

Today's Free Genealogy Tool is an unusual one.  Your mirror. 

Go on, take a look.  Do you see a pair of blue eyes looking back at you?  If you do, then you're related to Frank Sinatra -- Ol' Blue Eyes himself. 

Genetic researchers, back in 2008, published a ground-breaking paper showing that all blue-eyed people are descendants of a blue-eyed common ancestor.  What's more, the blue-eyed branch of the human family is a fairly new development, from a genetic point of view, arising perhaps as recently as 6,000 years ago.

The blue-eyed mutation arose in Europe, possibly in the area of Afghanistan.  Prior to that time, scientists theorize that all humans had brown eyes.

Of course, six millennia is a good stretch of time, so your relation to someone else with blue eyes is likely to be many, many times removed.  Still...there's some sort of family connection there.  If you see a fellow blue-eyed person, feel free to call him or her cousin.

You can read more about it in this nice write-up in USA Today on blue-eyed genealogy.  

Or if you prefer, you can dive into the original paper itself, though it's really only for hard core geneticists. Just look for the one with the title:  Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression. 

Sinatra not your type?  If you prefer, you blue-eyed types are also related to Brad Pitt.  And Marie Curie.  And Paul Newman.  And...

Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Historical Phone Books from East Europe

The good old phone book can be a genealogist's best friend. Telephone directories provide a detailed name and address listing (and phone number, of course).  But beyond that, collections of phone books can bracket how long a person lived at a particular address, showing when their listing first appears, when it changes to a new address, and when it eventually disappears, as an ancestor moves out of town, or out of country, or passes on.

The Library of Congress has a wonderful hard-copy collection of European directories, largely focused on the decades just before and after WWII.

A few of their phone books from Eastern Europe have been digitized, and are fully available online:

• Bulgaria:  Directories for 1917, 1919, 1945 and 1947 are available. These include various combinations of individual and business listings, as well as government officials. There are also sections with maps, photographs, information on royal families, and so on. Text is in Bulgarian and German.
  
• Poland:  The Library has a 1923 business directory, as well as a 1939 directory of residential and business listings for Warsaw and the surrounding areas.
  
• Romania: This is the largest online collection of phone books, with intermittent coverage from 1923-1970. The books chiefly focus on the area around Bucharest, though there are listings for the rest of Romania as well.

Telephone books being what they are, these tend to be very large files if you try to download the entire directory. However, the LoC makes the directories available in a page viewer that allows you to flip through the content without having to download the entire volume. Very handy.

Looking for more historical directories? Check out the online collection at the Genealogy Indexer, which covers mostly Eastern Europe, but has a bit of material from the UK, France, and South America as well.


Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

A Very Useful Irish Family History Page

The Primary Valuation of Ireland 1848-1864 at Ulster Ancestry is not quite a census of 19th-century Ireland, but it's close. 

This country-wide survey of property owners and households in Ireland was undertaken (of course) to determine who owed how much in terms of taxes.  It is also known as Griffith's Valuation, after Sir Richard Griffith, who directed the whole effort.

The look-up at Ulster Ancestry requires entering a full or partial surname of the person you're looking for, along with the County in which they lived. 

Search results provide first and last name, along with the Townland (a uniquely Irish jurisdiction, I believe, with great names like Drumreagh Otra), and Parish, along with the County name. 

It's a handy, pretty easy look-up to use, and worth an explore, even with the fairly limited information that's provided with the free interface. 

Also have a look at the other free Irish family history resources available here, including:

• Old Irish Names History
  
• 1609 Pardon List
  
• Mayflower Passenger List 1620
  
• Passenger Lists
  
• Censuses and Rent Rolls

and a fair number of other resources as well.  

Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

NARA Naturalization Records

A little-known genealogical dataset from the National Archives and Records Administration is the group of NARA naturalization record indexes that are available online, covering a period from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.

These are name indexes, rather than actual records themselves.  They are neither huge nor comprehensive, but for those with family roots in the covered geographical areas, they are a useful resource.

The records generally show names, dates, and country of origin, and sometimes include very useful aka remarks, such as the alternative surnames shown here:

• Ditondo     Angela     6/23/1936     Italy     aka Angela Yeradi, Ieradi

The largest name index looks to be for naturalization records from St. Paul Minnesota and surroundings.  You'll find a lot of Scandinavian, Prairie Home Companion-sounding names here, like Odmund, Herm, and Erithjof, along with a large number of European names, and smaller numbers from all over the world.

There are other online name indexes for:

• The Dakota Territory and South Dakota
  
  
• North Dakota
  
  
• Nebraska, McCook Division
  
  
• Nebraska, Chadron Division 
   
• St. Louis, Missouri

In addition to the name indexes, there are a small number of actual naturalization records from NARA available online, includuing declarations of intention (to become naturalized as a U.S. citizen) and petitions for naturalization requesting citizenship.

Head to the Naturalization Page of ARC (the Archival Research Catalog) and click on a country of interest to see the actual records available.  Take note of the ARC search terms that are automatically used, as you can easily modify these to fine-tune the search, or to look for specific names.

Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

For finding someone, Intelius is the best people-search service on the web (but I'd suggest steering clear of their 'special offers').

Keep an Eye on TinEye

So, you're searching on the internet, looking into your family's past, and all of a sudden you come across an interesting old photograph: 

• a street scene that just may be from the town where your great grandparents lived
• an image of a faded and hard to read birth certificate
• or best of all, a portrait of someone who, quite possibly, is directly in your family line.

Trouble is, there's not much information accompanying the photo, and you're really not sure where it came from or what it shows.  How can you find out more about it?

One very neat tool for checking further is called TinEye, a self-proclaimed reverse image search engine.

This is a very cool tool.  TinEye will quickly spool through more than a billion images in its collection to see if it can find a duplicate of the picture you need more information about.  If it does, it directs you to the websites where those duplicates can be found, and with a bit of luck, to more information about the provenance of the photographs.

Let's take the photo I ran with the FGT post, What's in a Place Name.    Suppose you came across that image, and wanted to know more about it.  There's not much information about the picture on FGT itself.  But a quick TinEye search uncovers six sites carrying the exact same photograph, including the Library of Congress site that is the original source of the photo. 

Russell Lee. School children singing. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940.
Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-372. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34151. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of CongressRussell Lee. School children singing. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-372. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34151. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Not bad, eh?

By the way, TinEye isn't a face recognition program.  It won't find different photos with the same people.  Instead, it's designed for one task...to find copies of the same photograph in other places around the web. 

TinEye is still a pretty young site.  It searches through more than a billion photos, but that's actually only a small chunk of what the web has to offer.  Give it a try, and definitely add it to your Favorites for checking back as its collection grows larger. 


Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

For finding someone, Intelius is the best people-search service on the web (but I'd suggest steering clear of their 'special offers').