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.
World Vital Records is announcing the addition of the largest number of records to be released in a single day since the site launched in 2006. To commemorate this , for the first time World Vital Records is offering FREE PUBLIC ACCESS to its entire online collection beginning August 11 through August 13, 2009. According to them no credit card is required to get free access.
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:
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.
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:
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
New Reports:
New Functionality within Publishing
Source Improvements
Improved Data–Manipulation Tools
Improvements within Research tools
Import Improvements
Place Improvements
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.
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Exciting things are happening at Footnote! On May 8th, Footnote released the 1860 U.S. Federal Census
as a new addition to its already extensive Civil War Collection. This project was a joint effort with FamilySearch, who provided the images for the 1860 US Federal Census title. From those images, Footnote created an index enabling visitors to simply type in a name and search the millions of names contained within this title. The index created by Footnote is now available on FamilySearch as well.
Similar technology used on the interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial has enabled Footnote users to interact with the 1860 US Federal Census in ways that have never been previously available. Not only can Footnote users search and find names, but now they can upload or connect documents related to a particular individual. “Now they’re not merely names on a document,” explains Russ Wilding, Footnote CEO. “They become people as the contributions start to tell a story about that person.”
Check Out the 1860 US Federal Census today !
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:
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.
