Upfront Mini Bytes

Upfront Mini Bytes

Welcome to the ninth edition of our bi-weekly feature Upfront Mini Bytes.  In Upfront Mini Bytes we provide eight tasty bits of genealogy news that will help give you a deeper byte into your family history research. Each item is short and sweet.  We encourage you to check out the links to articles, blog posts, resources, and anything genealogical!

We hope you found the past editions helpful:

first edition	fourth edition	seventh edition
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Do you have questions, suggestions for future posts, or comments?  Please post a comment or send an e-mail to [email protected].

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Researching French ancestors?  Check out this great article by Kimberly Powell (About.com), French Actes d'Etat Civil — How to Find & Use Them Online. From my own personal experience with French research, I found Geneanet a great resource.  I was able to identify people researching my husband’s Alsace-Lorraine area family and also found someone who was able to acquire some not-yet digitized and online vital records.

One doesn’t think of Manitoba, Canada, as having a French-speaking community and yet it has had one for over 100 years! There is now an online archive of La Liberté – the community’s 100-year-old weekly newspaper. Read more about this neat archive and access the archive here.

Brethren Digital Archives available via Internet Archive. The Mission of the Brethren Digital Archives is to digitize some or all of the periodicals produced from the beginning of publication to the year 2000 by each of the Brethren bodies who trace their origin to the baptism near Schwarzenau, Germany in 1708.  This is a world-wide collection. You can browse by title, look at sub-collections, or search the collection.

Do you have ancestors who died in New York state from 1957 through early 1963?  If so, check out this article about a new online death index (by Dick Halsey).  You can access the database directly here, though I strongly suggest you read Dick’s article first!

The ability to overlay modern maps on old maps, and vice versa, is such an important tool in our genealogy toolbox.  Read this post, Old Map, Current Map, Homestead - Mappy Monday on My Ancestors and Me to see how the author she used known information and photos along with maps (old and new) to determine “where” her ancestors lived.

Speaking of land, Missouri Digital Heritage has a Land Patents:1831-1969 database and Beth Foulk (genealogy decoded) has a great article, Missouri School Land Records, where she talks about this subset of records and how valuable they are to one’s research.

Google Translate just keeps getting better!  It can now handle more than 70 of the world’s languages.  This just increases our ability to access non-English documents (e.g., the documents in our ancestor’s native language) that are important to our understanding of our emigrant ancestors. Read more about this milestone or access Google Translate.

Did a relative or ancestor served in the US field artillery?  If so, check out the Field Artillery archives, part of the Morris Swett Library Digital Collections & Archives. Learn more about this archive and a new catalog via this article Find field artillery archives with new online catalog posted on www.army.mil.

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