Welcome to our
newest 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!
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Though we always
hope that our Revolutionary War soldier filed a pension or had a nice and
detailed service record, unfortunately, that just isn’t always the case. Tom Kemp recently posted on the
GenealogyBank.com blog about using newspapers, etc., as a way of Piecing Together
the Clues about a Revolutionary War Soldier.
Photos, photos,
photos – they do speak volumes! We get
so used to seeing landmarks fully completed as they have been in our
lifetime. And yet, they were once under
construction. Check out Photos of Famous
Landmarks While They Were Still Under Construction to see some neat photos. Maybe your ancestors worked on these projects?
Do you live in San Francisco (CA) or did your ancestors? There is a website called History of SF Place
Names that is fun to
explore. You can search on a street name
or you can browse the map and click on a
highlighted street or landmark and a window will pop up with some details.
Click on “read more” and you will be taken to a relevant Wikipedia page.
Digital
Preservation isn’t just for libraries and archives. We also generate and collect a lot of digital
content in the course of our genealogy research. Learn about Fifty
Digital Preservation Activities You Can Do as published on the Library of
Congress’s blog The Signal: Digital
Preservation.
If your ancestor
obtained land through a Federal Land Patent, it can be fun and frustrating to
correlate that land description (meridian, township, and range) to determine
exactly where that land would be on a modern map. On her blog Roots, Branches, and a Few Nuts, Beverly McGowan Norman has posted Finding the Old
Homestead where she takes you step-by-step
through the process of using your ancestor’s original land patent to eventually
plotting it on Google Earth.
Did you
know that Native Americans served in the War of 1812? Apparently in upper New
York, the Oneida and Seneca had tribal members who participated. Read Native Americans in
the War of 1812, which is posted on the Preserve
the Pensions (a project to enable the digitization of the War of 1812 Pensions) blog. Read more about Oneida involvement here or watch this video (War of 1812 – Oneida’s Part). [note to self: image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_people]
It used to be that if your family was involved in a “trade,” frequently several
generations of ancestors were employed in that same trade (basket making was
big in my Lancashire family in the 19th and early 20th
centuries). Nowadays that is not the
case. In fact, research shows that many
children deliberately choose a different trade. Read Following
the family’s trade now the exception on scotsman.com to
learn more about this change. Obviously,
some of the change is due to job obsolescense. How might this impact future
genealogists?
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