The Mad Genealogist

World Vital Records is extending their promotion of for their offering of FREE PUBLIC ACCESS to its entire online collection to August 18, 2009. Originally it was suppose to end on the 13th.

I just received an email like many of you probobly have, about upgrading to Family Tree Maker 2010.

This is what they claim is new:

• Easy family tree download from Ancestry.com – Import your Ancestry.com family tree, along with attached photos.
• Improved organization – Enjoy new ways to organize photos and other media.
• Slideshows – Create slideshows from photos in your tree.
• Family books – Publish beautiful keepsakes and books to share with friends and family.
• Standard source templates – Cite the right information every time.
• A new person view – View relationships within the context of your entire family tree.
• Scanner support – Add photos directly from your scanner.
• Family migration paths – View timelines and interactive maps highlighting events and places in your ancestors’ lives.
• Better Performance – Experience faster load times and navigation.

The upgrade cost is $19.95 if ordered before Aug 18th. I will upgrade mine and see if it is worth it. If you want to see for yourself then visit their FTM2010 Webpage.

In addition to the population schedules, federal, state and local governments have requested special information for administrative decisions. These special schedules can be quite useful for family historians.

An act of 3 March 1879 provided that any state could take an interdecennial census with partial reimbursement by the federal government. Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, and the territories of Dakota and New Mexico returned schedules to the secretary of the interior. The schedules are numbered 1, 2, 3, and 5.

• Schedule No. 1: Inhabitants Lists the number of dwellings and families. It also identifies each inhabitant by name, color, sex, age, relationship to head of family, marital status, occupation, place of birth, place of birth of parents, literacy, and kind of sickness or disability, if any.
• Schedule No. 2: Agriculture Gives the name of the farm owner and his tenure, acreage, farm value, expenses, estimated value of farm products, number and kind of livestock, and amount and kind of produce.
• Schedule No. 3: Products of industry Lists the name of the owning corporation or individual, name of business or products, amount of capital invested, number of employees,wages and hours, number of months in operation during the year, value of materials used, value of products, and amount and type of power used.
• Schedule No. 5: Mortality Lists the name, age, sex, color, marital status, place of birth, place of birth of parents, and occupation, and gives the cause of death for every person who died within the year ending 31 May 1885.

The schedules are interfiled and arranged alphabetically by state and then by county. Schedules for a number of counties are missing. The National Archives has microfilmed the Colorado (M158, eight rolls) and Nebraska (M352, fifty-six rolls) schedules.The originals are in the National Archives.

The 1885 census is useful for locating data about individuals who were living on rapidly growing frontiers: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Florida, and North and South Dakota; for locating and documenting newly arrived immigrants from Europe; and for documenting small businessmen and farmers—many of them immigrants—who were just getting started in their businesses. The manufacturers schedule for 1885 is the latest one available for research.

TGN is letting users get acquainted with all the new features during an upcoming free webinar that will be held March 12, 2009 at 8pm EST. They say they will show
you what’s changed as well as demonstrate how to do some new things in Family Tree Maker 2009 like:

• Use the new extended family chart
• Keep track of important dates in the new calendar
• Take advantage of new data entry enhancements
• Clarify the process of citing sources with new source templates
• Create family history books and more with the new desktop book–building tools

There will be a 20–minute Q&A session afterward. They will also be answering questions that have been submitted from the Family Tree Maker community. To submit a question, please visit the Family Tree Maker blog.

Speakers will be Duff Wilson, the Senior User Interface Designer for Family Tree Maker, and  Michelle Pfister (the Moderator), the Senior Product Manager. Hopefully this will answer some of the many Questions we as consumers and users have. But you have to register on their site in order to attend the Webinar at https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=135327

I received this in my email last night. If you’re program won’t update the right mouse-click on the icon and run as administrator.

This upgrade is FREE to all Family Tree Maker 2009 owners. With this latest update, you”ll be pleased to find a robust set of new and enhanced features. This new update includes the following new features and enhancements:

• BOOK BUILDING – You can once again create family history books compiled from charts, reports, and text documents.
• DATA ENTRY FLOW – You can now more easily enter information about your family in the Family view using the keyboard. Simply press Ctrl+Enter to navigate to and add or edit the next person in the family.
• SOURCE TEMPLATES – When entering a source, users can continue to use our traditional source functionality. Or they can use templates that follow the “QuickCheck” models. You can also migrate data from a source you”ve already created to a new source template.
• CALENDAR REPORT – The Calendar Report is back! It includes options for setting colors and including birthdays and/or anniversaries.
• CUSTOM REPORT – The custom report will now allow you to export the report to a “columned” format when exported to CSV so that it can be brought into a spreadsheet program for sorting.
• EXTENDED FAMILY CHART – The new Extended Family Chart shows the people in your tree aligned horizontally by generation. You can specify how many ancestor and descendant generations to include. This chart is not a replacement for the “All-in-one” chart although it can display everyone in your tree. We plan to add the All-in-One chart in a future release.
• CHART/REPORT LABEL OPTIONS From most chart and reports, select any fact in the “Items to Include” dialog and click the fact options button (below the list of facts). It now includes options for how you want that fact”s label to appear in your chart or report.

Family Tree Maker 2009 owners should receive an automatic update. If by chance they do not receive an update they can manually download it from the link destination below.

I received my email last night to upgrade to the new Family Tree Maker 2009 in an email which stated in part:

We’re pleased to provide you with a FREE upgrade to the newest version of Family Tree Maker. Thank you for your patience, helpful comments and suggestions. We’ve come a long way over the last year, and we want you to enjoy all the latest additions and improvements at no cost.

When I clicked on the link I got a server overload message. So i decided to sleep on it and try again this morning.

Well this morning I tried it again and now I get this message

Due to the high popularity of our FTM 2009 free upgrade offer, we are unable to fulfill your order at this time. Please check back later. Thank you, The Generations Network, Inc.

This is not a great start to Family Tree Maker 2009, especially after all the bad reviews out there with the previous version, Family Tree Maker 2008. So I can’t say yet whether it is a great, bad or average product yet. Hopefully some of you were able to download this upgrade and have been playing around with it. Let me know how it is.

I have heard this is a much greater improvement over ftm2008. Here are some of the stated improvements.

General Features

• Streamline your data entry with one-click editing of individuals from any workspace in the software
• Enjoy faster startup times and improved file performance
• Find your ancestors more easily with improved Web Search. You can even choose to ignore irrelevant results.

New Reports:

• Genealogy reports (Register and Ahnentafel, both full and simplified)
• Data errors report
• Enhancements to many reports
• Hourglass
• Vertical pedigree chart
• Horizontal hourglass chart
• Bow tie chart
• 180–degree fan chart
• Family tree charts
• You can also use custom templates or design your own

New Functionality within Publishing

• Book layouts for main charts
• Saved settings in charts/reports
• Saved templates in charts
• Ability to show siblings within charts
• Single page PDF export from charts
• Enhancements to the RTF export
• Ability to add boxes in charts to “Marked Box” category and modify box settings
• Preparer information in chart footers

Source Improvements

• Simplify sourcing with “cut and paste” source citations

Improved Data–Manipulation Tools

• Change place name tool
• Find–and–replace dialog
• Edit person dialog, streamlining data entry from any workspace
• Spouse order setting in the person menu
• Ability to set the media order on a person
• Find Individual Dialog
• Find Duplicate Person Dialog
• Fact Data Options Dialog that allows for:
  • Ability to change fact types
  • Ability to move description to place or place to description
  • Ability to make information private
• Symbols in text fields

Improvements within Research tools

• Ability to ignore hints
• Option to delete existing facts in individual and web merge
• Inclusion of married name, AKA and titles in index
• Automatic simple backup at shutdown

Import Improvements

• OLE objects (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF) from previous FTM versions
• Improved name parsing
• Import previously ignored hints lists

Place Improvements

• Place map toolbar that allows free text place searches
• Pinpoint places such as libraries, churches and courthouses
• Track — and print — your ancestors’ migration paths on interactive maps with the new Places timeline

So take a look at Family Tree Maker 2009 yourself and when i can get it i will let you know what I think.

UPDATE 09/12/2008!

I just received an email back from Ancestry on the issue of the broken upgrade link:

I am so sorry for the inconvenience.  Apparently there was such an incredible response to the email and everyone was responding to it at the same time so it caused this error.  You should be receiving another email later today with instructions along with another code so you can upgrade for free.

Well I will be watching…….

UPDATE 09/14/2008!

Still no new update email. I looked to make sure this was not April 1st. I am still looking for someone who has actually gotten the program and has given it a test run…..

UPDATE 09/16/2008!

I got my email yesterday and it worked! But the upgrade is not a download so now I have to wait until I receive it in the snail mail. But at least it is on the way… I hope

GRRRRR! Memorial Day is a United States Federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who perished while in military service to their country. It is not in honor of all veterans. I am a vet myself and have the utmost respect for all vets who serve, but the day that honors them is Veterans Day not Memorial Day. This is the day we honor those who died. All media outlets are doing stories to honor the living vets but nothing on the ones who died which is why this day was originally created. Thats what makes me mad.

So today honor those who died. Thats what today is for.

History from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War, it was expanded after World War I to include casualties of any war or military action.

Following the end of the Civil War, many communities set aside a day to mark the end of the war or as a memorial to those who had died. Some of the places creating an early memorial day include Charleston, South Carolina; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Carbondale, Illinois; Columbus, Mississippi; many communities in Vermont; and some two dozen other cities and towns. These observances eventually coalesced around Decoration Day, honoring the Union dead, and the several Confederate Memorial Days.

According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed in 1865 by liberated slaves at the historic race track in Charleston. The site was a former Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who had died while captive. The freed slaves reinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to individual graves, fenced in the graveyard & built an entry arch declaring it a Union graveyard – a very daring thing to do in the South shortly after North’s victory. On May 30, 1887? the freed slaves returned to the graveyard with flowers they’d picked from the countryside & decorated the individual gravesites, thereby creating the 1st Decoration Day. A parade with thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers was followed by patriotic singing and a picnic.

The official birthplace of Memorial Day is Waterloo, New York. The village was credited with being the birthplace because it observed the day on May 5, 1866, and each year thereafter, and because it is likely that the friendship of General John Murray, a distinguished citizen of Waterloo, and General John A. Logan, who led the call for the day to be observed each year and helped spread the event nationwide, was a key factor in its growth.

General Logan had been impressed by the way the South honored their dead with a special day and decided the Union needed a similar day. Reportedly, Logan said that it was most fitting; that the ancients, especially the Greeks, had honored their dead, particularly their heroes, by chaplets of laurel and flowers, and that he intended to issue an order designating a day for decorating the grave of every soldier in the land, and if he could he would have made it a holiday.

Logan had been the principal speaker in a citywide memorial observation on April 29, 1866, at a cemetery in Carbondale, Illinois, an event that likely gave him the idea to make it a national holiday. On May 5, 1868, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization, Logan issued a proclamation that “Decoration Day” be observed nationwide. It was observed for the first time on May 30 of the same year; the date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of a battle. The tombs of fallen Union soldiers were decorated in remembrance of this day.

Many of the states of the U.S. South refused to celebrate Decoration Day, due to lingering hostility towards the Union Army and also because there were very few veterans of the Union Army who lived in the South. A notable exception was Columbus, Mississippi, which on April 25, 1866 at its Decoration Day commemorated both the Union and Confederate casualties buried in its cemetery.

The alternative name of “Memorial Day” was first used in 1882, but did not become more common until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967 . On June 28, 1968, the United States Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which moved three holidays from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend and for the first time recognized Columbus Day as a federal holiday. The holidays included Washington’s Birthday (which evolved into Presidents’ Day), Veterans Day, and Memorial Day. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971 . After some initial confusion and unwillingness to comply at the state level, all fifty states adopted the measure within a few years, although Veterans Day was eventually changed back to its traditional date. Ironically, most corporate businesses no longer close on Columbus Day or Veterans Day, and an increasing number are staying open on President’s Day as well. Memorial Day, however, has endured as one holiday during which most businesses stay closed because it marks the beginning of the “summer vacation season,” as does neighboring Canada’s Victoria Day, which occurs just before, on the third Monday in May.

On the eve of Memorial Day, Ancestry.com is making its entire U.S. Military Collection — the largest online collection of American military records — available for free to the public. From May 20 through May 31, people can log on to http://www.ancestry.com/military to view more than 100 million names and 700 titles and databases of military records, the majority of which come from NARA, from all 50 U.S. states.

They list some of their Feature Databases which are:

• U.S. Navy Cruise Books – Yearbook-style books detailing sailors and others on board U.S. navy ships, dating from 1940
• WWII Missing in Action or Lost at Sea – More than 80,000 names of Military Personnel reported Missing in Action or Buried at Sea during WWII
• Headstones Provided for Deceased Union Civil War Veterans, 1879-1903 – Details for more than 166,000 gravestones provided by the government for deceased Union veterans
• U.S. War Bounty Land Warrants – Over 76,000 Bounty land warrants issued between 1789-1858 to veterans of the U.S. Revolutionary War and the War of 1812
• U.S. Army, Register of Enlistments, 1798-1914 – Records detailing personal information about men who enlisted in the U.S. Army from 1798-1914
• World War I Draft Registration Cards – Draft registration cards for more than 24 million men who registered for the WWI draft in 1917 and 1918
• World War II Draft Registration Cards – Almost 6 million draft cards of men who registered for the fourth WWII draft in 1942
• U.S. World War II Army Enlistment Records – Collection of more than 8 million names of U.S. Army enlistees during WWII, 1938-1946
• U.S. Civil War Soldiers, 1861-1865 – Collection of military service records, containing more than 6 million names of servicemen – Union and Confederate – who fought in the U.S. Civil War, 1860-1865
• U.S. Veterans Gravesites ca. 1775-2006 – Burial and grave site information for almost 3.5 million veterans of the U.S. military, 1775-2006

Obviously they have many more databases span all the Major conflicts the U.S. has been in. It is well worth the time to browse their stuff while it is open to the public.

I have been using the Rootsweb County pages almost since its inception. Mainly with mixed results. Some County Coordinators (henceforth abbreviated as CC) do a fabulous job putting relevant information on the web, while others take the CC position and do nothing then disappear. The rest do an average job keeping the pages updated.There is a core group of CC’s that have been there for years and are really dedicated to the rootsweb philosophy of keeping Rootsweb free to all. Some have many websites in order to keep some counties from being abandoned. I have hosted a site or two over the years and it takes a certain amount of dedicated time in order to keep things fresh and active. I salute these people who have now or in the past been a CC of the rootsweb sites.

While the CC’s maintain the pages its really the users that donate material and money to the rootsweb project that really makes people come back to rootsweb time and time again. Apparently the donations that kept rootsweb free to the public dried up and things changed in a hurry.

RootsWeb.com had been growing in popularity for many years since it began in 1993. It started as a RootsWeb Surname List. Then a search engine, obituary lists, message boards, an ancestry search-engine list, volunteer genealogy projects, calendars, and other things were added over the years.

While the popularity grew, so did the expenses and cost. In 1996, RootsWeb began accepting donations from researchers to help support the Web site but the donations did not grow as fast as the expenses, and the non-profit operation was facing a bleak financial picture. The Generations Network (formerly MyFamily.com), which owns Ancestry.com, acquired RootsWeb in June 2000. Many people thought this to be a win-win situation and others thought it to be the first step to adding all the free information on rootsweb to Ancestry’s pay sites. The marriage seems to have been working out great and hushing the naysayers.

But earlier this year though, the decision was made to move Rootsweb to the Ancestry.com servers with the stated goal of making it easier for users of the two genealogy sites to access both resources. Here is the announcement to the CC’s:

RootsWeb Announcement Thursday, March 13, 2008

As you know, The Generations Network has hosted and funded the RootsWeb online community since June 2000, thereby maintaining RootsWeb as the world’s oldest and largest free genealogy website. TGN remains committed to this mission and believes that RootsWeb is an absolutely invaluable and complementary resource to Ancestry.com, our flagship commercial family history site. We believe in both services and want to see both communities prosper and grow.

As part of this goal, we have decided to “transplant” RootsWeb onto the Ancestry.com domain beginning next week. This move will not change the RootsWeb experience or alter the ease of navigation to or within RootsWeb. RootsWeb will remain a free online experience. What will be different is that the Web address for all RootsWeb pages will change from www.rootsweb.com to www.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Again, the RootsWeb experience is not changing.

The decision to host RootsWeb on Ancestry.com is being made for one primary reason: we believe that the users of each of our two main websites can be better served if they have access to the best services available on both. Simply stated, we want to introduce more Ancestry.com users to RootsWeb and vice versa.

Today, despite the fact that Ancestry.com and RootsWeb.com are the two most frequently visited family history sites on the Web, only 25 percent of visitors to Ancestry.com visited RootsWeb in January 2008, while only 20 percent of visitors to RootsWeb visited Ancestry.com (according to Comscore Media Metrix). We think we will serve our users best by doing a better job of letting them know what is available on both Ancestry.com and RootsWeb. Hosting RootsWeb on Ancestry.com is the first step towards making this happen, but we will absolutely look for more and better ways down the road to advance this goal.

Hosting RootsWeb on Ancestry.com will also make it easier for us to make changes and improvements to the RootsWeb experience in the future.

All old RootsWeb URLs will continue to work, whether they are bookmarks or favorites, links to or from a hosted page or URLs manually typed in your Internet browser. We will have a redirect in place so that all old URLs will automatically end up on the appropriate new RootsWeb URL. You will never need to update your old favorites or links unless you want to. We have worked to make the transition as seamless as possible for our users, and this change should have a minimal impact on your experience with the site.

RootsWeb will remain a free online experience dedicated to providing you with a place where our community can find their roots together. If you have questions regarding this change please email them to feedback@rootsweb.com.

Thanks,
Tim Sullivan, CEO, The Generations Network, Inc.

This has brought the naysayers back out of the woodwork. Basically at the top of every rootsweb hosted page is basically and ad for ancestry.com. The question is if this is ok to do. After all TGN actually pays for the servers that host the free rootsweb sites so don’t have a right to place a little something up there for there trouble. On the surface I would say yes. But many CC’s do not see it that way and a great many of them have moved there sites off of the Ancestry servers to their own personal or donated servers so the county site will not show an ad by ancestry.com. about 90% of the maillist I am a member of have already sent their new urls to the list audience. Are most of the others doing the same? I bet they are.

So what happens when TGN realizes that half (which is just a guess, could be more and could be less) of the County pages have moved. Will they care? or will there be retribution against the “rebel” CC’s. I don’t know but I guess we will all find out soon enough.

My Henry Nichols died in Hinds County MS in 1833. Well abt six months later a Wright Nichols died and a few months after that his wife died. I found this quite a coincidence that 2 Nichols in the same county both from north carolina and both died in 1833. Now Wright Nichols was both bet. 1760-1770 in probably Caswell County, NC. He is not listed on the 1830 Hinds Co census. There are 3 Nichols in Hinds in 1830. They are William a Solomon and my Henry. This William could be Wright Nichols but I am not sure.

Anyways Wright Nichols Married Sarah Burch 11 Jan 1791 in Caswell County, North Carolina. He is the son of Willis Nichols of Caswell & Person County NC. There is no 1790 Census for Caswell County and by 1800 Henry would have been in SC or GA. So my question is that is Wright related to Henry. Were they Brothers? Thats one theory I need to follow up on.