Immigration Records From Harvard University

Harvard University has made available a digital collection, Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930.

There's a lot here.  As the collection notes say, they have about "...1,800 books and pamphlets as well as 9,000 photographs, 200 maps, and 13,000 pages from manuscript and archival collections."  There's a strong Massachusetts focus, not surprisingly, but a good deal of other materials as well.

Off on the left-hand side of their page, you'll find several search options:  a Keyword search box, along with links to Search the Collection and Browse the Collection.  I'd suggest giving them all a try, as they access the records in different ways, and turn up different results, even for the same search.

Italian immigrants at work in New York City, ca 1909

The Immigration collection is part of Harvard's larger Open Collections Program.  It's worth a look around here at some of their other materials, which include materials of both general interest, as well documents of value to family history researchers.  Their Women Working collection is of particular note.


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.

Advertising as a Family History Resource

Finding your ancestors is one thing.  Finding out how they lived their day to day lives is another thing entirely.

Some interesting and often overlooked resources for getting a sense of everyday life are the advertisements of a given time and place.  What did your great grandparents see when they opened a local newspaper or magazine, or rode a horse and buggy past an early billboard or an ad-painted barn? 

Mmmm. Ox-tail soup!  Everyone's favorite. 

Turns out, Duke University has a deep collection of early advertisements.  Several collections, actually:

• AdAccess includes images of over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.
  
  
• AdViews contains thousands of early television commercials from the 1950's through the 1980's.
  Emergence of Advertising in America contains images of 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920.
  
  Protestant Images.  An odd collection of articles and advertising images of Protestant children and families in the U.S. from Protestant-supported or targeted magazines.
  
  
• Medicine and Madison Avenue. Images of over 600 health-realted advertisements and historical documents dated between 1911 and 1958.

Some historical advertising sources worth exploring outside the Duke collection:

Adflip bills itself as the world's largest searchable database of classic print ads from 1940-2001.  It's a subscription site, but many of the ads can be viewed for free at medium resolution.

Ivory Project.  From the Smithsonian, 1,600 advertisements about soap, mostly Ivory Soap...1838-1998.  Imagaine that! 

HardToFindAds.  A motley assortment of print ads covering most of the 20th century.  Some good stuff, here, but I wish the ads all had dates and sources!

FullTable is one of the, ahem, more unusual sites you're likely to come across, but it has an intriguing collection of historical images, ads and otherwise.  Not really a site for research, this is more a place for some fascinating browsing.  It's worth a look!

Magazine-Ads.  1410 new and old ads in 108 catagories   Ads are for sale, but can be previewed online.


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

And you can't beat old newspapers for old ads, so 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.

What's In A (Place) Name?

So, you've finally filled in the blanks of your family's history, and tracked your ancestors in Pie Town, New Mexico; Spuyten Duyvil, NY; or Trinchinopoly in India.  Where do those names come from?

What's the connection between Kentucky in the US, and Quinté in Canada?  Is Palermo, in Italy, really derived from Greek?

Questions like these can be explored -- and quite possibly answered -- with dozens of online place name dictionaries.  Here are some of the best that you should know about.

School kids (some shoeless) in Pie Town, 
but how did it get that name, exactly?

US:
The origin of certain place names in the United States

The book of place-names (US focus, but with lots of international information)

Scotland:
Place-names of Scotland

Scottish land-names: their origin and meaning

Ireland:
The origin and history of Irish names of places

UK:
Geographical etymology: a dictionary of place-names giving their derivations

The place-names of England and Wales

South America:
Aztec place-names: their meaning and mode of composition

Canada:
 Place-names of Canada

Worldwide:
Names and their histories: a handbook of historical geography and topographical nomenclature

Bibliotheca classica: or, A dictionary of all the principal names and terms relating to the geography, topography, history, literature, and mythology of antiquity and of the ancients

Glossary of geographical and topographical terms and of words of frequent occurrences in the composition of such terms and of place-names


There are hundreds of place names dictionaries and gazetteers for more local areas, like a particular state, county or city.  To find them, try searching at Google Books and HathiTrust.

And Pie Town?  Sure enough, guy opens a shop at some crossroads, sells homemade pies that everyone likes, and the rest, as they say, is history.


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.

Translating Family Papers and Records

The story is told of one of the early machine translation systems that was asked to translate the phrase The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak from English, into Russian, and then back into English again.  When the final results appeared, the computer came up with The wine is good, but the meat is rotten.

Online computer translations have gotten better since then, and can generally handle The spirit is willing test.  I often use Google Translate to help out with foreign language websites, as I did with my French Revolution post.  Still, machine translation will only get you so far.  My post on Arab genealogy, where I Google-translated some book titles, led to some pretty strange results.

The Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition of 1900

Sometimes, you just need a human translator to help you work through grandpa's birth records from the old country, or a letter in your family files in Hebrew, or Estonian, or wherever it is your family's roots have led.

A full-fledged translation service can be a big expense, but happily, there are some kind folks out there who will translate reasonable-sized passages (usually no more than a few paragraphs) at no charge.  Here are a few good ones.

• Freelang.  Email a translator directly, with a polite request for some help, and they will usually oblige.
  
• Cucumis.  A free human translation system based on points.  You can earn points if you translate something for someone else.  But even if you're a one-language moron (like me), you still get points to use just for signing up.
  
• Linguanaut.  Click on Free Translation to get started, and they'll put you in touch with a translator.
  
• WikiTranslation.  Simply enter the text to have translated, the from and to languages, and hopefully, a kind and resourceful human being will soon do your bidding (thanks to commenter Bob for pointing this one out).

Isn't the internet grand?


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.

Vive La Revolution! Vive La France!

Here's a...ahem....head's up on an unusual site.

If you had an ancestor who lost his or her head during the French Revolution, now you can find them. A site named Les Guillotinés de la Révolution Française asks the crucial question:

Avez-vous eu un ancêtre

DECAPITE

Pendant la Révolution ?

and answers it with a large list of many of the tens of thousands of people who were executed during The Reign of Terror.

The last moments of Marie 'Let Them Eat Cake' Antoinette.

Here is the English version of Les Guillotines homepage, courtesy of Google Translate.

This is a quick and easy lookup, handled by clicking on a letter of the alphabet.

A small number of the resulting names are hyperlinked, leading to additional information about the person beheaded, generally including their age, the charges brought against them, and the date and site of their execution.

The story of the French Revolution isn't pretty, but then again, family history often isn't, ne c'est pas?

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.