Any time I quote another source, I will highlight that in pale peach.
When I refer to a document, I will either type it up or cut and past a snippet from it.
In order to help you understand why I cut and paste, I thought I'd help you out with the resources I use as well.
For years, I have used ancestry.com. Sometimes I don't pay for a subscription, when I don't have time to research. Sometimes I pay for a basic subscription. If I link to their website, to a census record or a ship's manifest....you won't be able to see what I see, unless you pay for access to their site as well. So in order to let you see what's there, I cut and paste just that portion of their page.
If you want the actual link, and you pay for their services, just let me know. I'll be more than happy to send you the link. And again, you can reach me through a link on the home page of this blog.
For the last 6 months, I have tried out the "all access" account. Yes, it is very, very expensive - $399 per year!!! But it includes a subscription to newspapers.com and fold3.com.
After using this for 6 months, I would definitely recommend it if you have exhausted other sources. I have found so much. I even upgraded the newspapers.com subscription to include the "lifestyle" sections.
But here's a thought. I doubt a ph.d candidate, or someone just looking for a "story" will pay $399 for a subscription to ancestry.....let alone pay for any other research site! My question is, how can you research if you don't exhaust all the possibilities out there?
I have 70 family trees posted on Ancestry. Most of them are private - so no one can see them unless I invite them to do so. 27 of those trees relate to Cotopaxi, either the Jews or the other people living there in 1882. I can quickly look up any relationship, any grave, any person that I find in a newspaper article or other document.
For the most part, I have linked each person in those 27 family trees to every census record, ship's manifest, document, gravesite, newspaper article, etc that is out there. And in this blog, I am trying to share on a very limited basis some of those findings, such as the post on "Finding Little Lena." That post was an attempt to show the genealogist how to read a census, but to also share my findings about that family's history.
I can download any tree in a ged.com file and upload it to my personal software. I use a Mac, so I prefer Reunion, but I have used FamilyTreeMaker for the last 5 years as well. Now that ancestry no longer supports it, I will be going full time to Reunion - I love the style of trees that it creates. I've shared plenty of them in this blog so you can get a feel for how it color codes each generation, making it easy to "count cousins".
The rest of those 70 trees are either my own family, or families of people I'm doing research for. Once again, I have never received a penny of compensation for the work I've done. Well, I take that back. Someone once gave me $50 and I sent it to a charity in Israel. You can feel free to donate anything you want....I've put some links over on the right side of the home page of this blog.
Let's pause here for a moment and talk about links. When you see something underlined, click on it. That will take you to something else - another blog post, a website - something that will help you have further understanding of what I am writing about. Don't just ignore those links. They can be critical to a story....and keep me from repeating myself!
I use familysearch.org. It's free. Has a ton of valuable information. And you can post your trees there as well. This site is sponsored by the Mormon church and I took all of their classes back in the 1980s. I highly recommend that you consider taking their classes if you haven't done so.
Cemeteries. I can't begin to explain the value of walking through a cemetery even though you can see almost every headstone at findagrave.com. There is something about seeing the placement of headstones - who is buried beside your ancestor, that puts a story together. The middle name of your ancestor could be the last name of someone buried in the same row as they are. It's the relationship of headstones, one to another, that you can't see on a website.
I have been to the cemetery of a 3rd great grandmother back in Indiana. Buried next to her is one of her great nephews. Why? It certainly brings questions to mind when you see the actual layout of the headstones and you won't see that on findagrave.com.
Obviously newspapers. Almost every state has a list of historical newspapers and many are free. But many require a subscription. I'd recommend only one at a time - otherwise you'll get overwhelmed!
Libraries. Many old microfilm rolls have not been digitized and are not online at this time. Many of those old newspapers have been microfilmed at the library and are not yet online. I know - it is incredibly hard work to sit and read column after column, page after page of newspapers on a microfilmed roll. But when you find something - it's great!!! I'm heading out later today to take another look at some old Canon City Newspapers. They haven't even been put on microfilm yet!
Clerk & Recorders offices. The same thing. Most of the documents have not even been indexed, let alone digitized. But access is free. I can't begin to count the number of hours I have sat looking at these old ledgers, scanning page after page - just to find a familiar name and then realize it was something that happened in a different part of the county! On the other hand, I have yet to find the land declaration at Cotopaxi for Schradsky and I know they had a farm close to Zedek and Nudelman. I have looked at every single document in 1882 and it's just not there. (ok, that link under those last 4 words will take you to a blog where I've already told you about hundreds of documents being found in a local trash bin - the importance of looking at these links!)
State Archives. In Colorado - it's in a box in storage and you have to decide from an index what box you might want, then make arrangements to go to Denver and physically inventory that box. A lot of museums are the same way. Takes forever to find something, but well worth the search! And when I say "forever" - I have spent days looking for a single item. I don't live in Denver - I'm 125 miles away. So I spend the night with friends, or pay for a hotel and go do my research. It takes money to be a genealogist!
JGSCO.org. I'm a gentile, but I have attended all of the Jewish genealogy classes this group offers....and I have learned so much about my own family tree. The classes forced me outside my normal little box of thinking. Could my ancestors be Jewish. They aren't. But these classes forced me to think differently and I value what I have learned with them.
This past year, JGSCO has focused their training on DNA and again, I have learned so much. Membership is just $30 per year and again, I highly recommend their meetings.
Land records, surveys, patents can all be found at blm.gov - I used this site all the time. Unfortunately, they have not digitized all of their records so manual microfilm searches are still a good source of information.
You can't do it all online. I started this in 1968 before there was a hint of an internet. And in genealogy, you still need to go out in the field and manually search through records one at a time.
Learning how to read 1800s handwriting is critical to your success. The ability to be creative at how a surname might have been spelled, how the spelling might have been changed or why/how a name might have been changed is essential as well. Saltiel, Saltiele, Saltiell, Saltell, Saltwell.....not to mention someone who made a typo, or just wrote it down wrong. Every single surname can be digitized incorrectly. Something as simple as Annie Hart had been digitized as Annie Hurt because someone interpreted the handwriting incorrectly!
Here in this tiny little town of Canon City, we have the library, the history center, the Fremont County Historical Society, the Western Fremont County Historical Society and then the Southern Colorado Genealogical Society in Pueblo. We have a Mormon library in town as well. I'm sure your community has all that or more to offer assistance with your research.
Finally, a reminder about copyright. That's another reason I cut and paste just one line from ancestry. I do not want to violate their copyright laws. And while I have the entire page linked to my family tree, I do pay for the right to use their site.
You will rarely see a newspaper article in it's entirety here. That's a good copyright question. Anything that is over 75 years old is not bound by copyright law. But I have decided to type up each one so that it can be easily searched. I recently paid a lot of money for a digitized book that could not be searched. What a pain! I had to read every single page and then still didn't find what I was looking for! So while I will put my typed versions out here, I do have the original copies in my files.
For this blog, you do not have permission to cut, paste, copy, or reuse anything that I have written. All you have to do is link to an individual page or the blog in general. That's pretty simple. But it protects what I have written in the context I have written it in.
As of today, there are 40 posts in just 3 1/2 months! These post have been viewed 1270 times. I think that's amazing! I hope that the story excites you and that my research hints and tips will help.
With all the resources available today, you can prove your family tree, and you can prove the oral stories that your family has handed down from one generation to the next. And you can prove history. Which is exactly what I'm doing with the history of Cotopaxi and the Jews who were there.
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