UpFront with NGS: History

Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

18 July 2017

Union County Iowa Fair Accepting Genealogy & History Department Submissions!

Union County Iowa Fair Accepting Genealogy & History Department Submissions!

I love this!

Summer is a slow time for genealogy news and so I was just searching around on genealogy + news + July + 2017 (sometimes news just doesn’t fall into my lap!) and I came across a blurb about Union County (IA) and its upcoming fair and that genealogy & history submissions were being accepted.

I had no idea that county fairs included such. Of course, I live some place where we have a state fair and no local

I accessed the Fair book online (check out pages 29-32) and the divisions included are (1) Records & Legal Documents, (2) Books & Stories, (3) Charts & Maps, (4) Single Pictures, (5) Pictures in Display with Related Items, (6) Heirlooms & Artifacts, (7) Funeral & Cemetery, (8) Historical, (9) Research, and there is also a (10) Junior (Ages 16 and under) division. Additionally, two beginning genealogy workshops and a children’s coloring contest are held!

Sounds like such a fun event and what a great way to show pride in your ancestors and share such with the community.

Of course, I had to see if there are other fairs that include genealogy materials! And, yes, there are. Here is a smattering of the few I discovered:

(1) Monterey County Fair (CA)

(2) York County Fair (NE)

(3) David County Fair (IA)

(4) LaPorte County Fair (IN)

(5) Decatur County Fair (IN)

What other county or state fairs showcase genealogy and/or history-related submissions?

Have you shared your “ancestors” to county fair attendees?

Editor’s Note: I learned about the fair via Wanting genealogy exhibits at county fair (Creston News Advertiser)

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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09 June 2017

Is There an App?

Is There an App?

Reading the newspaper, I learned that the North Carolina Museum of Art now has an app full of information. My mind immediately wondered if armchair genealogists might not be taking advantage of apps from places afar, just because they didn't know that such exist or hadn't thought to look ?!?!

Just because we won’t physically visit a museum, historic site or related, doesn’t mean that we cannot sit on our couch and learn about something relevant to our family history research.

An obvious place to start is the HISTORY Here^TM app. I say obvious because it is GPS driven and will tell you about what history is near you and also places you might be visiting and locales where ancestors were found. Similarly, there is Next Exit History (includes over 60,000 sites)

Many apps for historic sites help you navigate around – which is very helpful – though, not quite as helpful when sitting on your couch. Some though, provide an in-depth look at history such as the Slavery at Monticello app. Others fall in-between – useful info when visiting and then historical elements such as found in The Mount Vernon App.

What about event apps? The Civil War Trust has some battle location apps. Additionally, you can find apps for Revolutionary War battlefields (android – there also is a French and Indian War one) and Revolutionary War history (itunes).

Family connected to Savannah – a couple of options are AIA Savannah’s Historic District and S.G. Adventures Historic Savannah (itunes, android)

There are also apps for the Smithsonian, NARA, Library of Congress, and National Park Service.

Because some apps are only available on iTunes or Google Play (for Android), you will need to do some store-specific exploring to identify apps to check out.

I guess it’s fortunate that at the moment my smartphone is a bit short on memory, otherwise, I’d be very distracted trying out all these apps!

I have just scratched the surface of what I am sure is out there! Now it’s your turn to explore and share what you discover!!!

What history-related app have you found most beneficial to your genealogy research?

What is your favorite history-related app?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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30 May 2016

Roots … an iconic mini-series back in 1977 and today! Catch the new version starting tonight!

Roots … an iconic mini-series back in 1977 and today!

I want to make sure you are aware that the mini-series Roots has been re-produced and will be airing on four consecutive nights, starting tonight, Memorial Day, at 9 p.m. ET/PT and 8 p.m. Central. It will be simulcast on A&E, Lifetime, and History.

Roots was a ground-breaking book by Alex Haley in 1976 and an even more powerful television event in 1977. Roots made clear to anyone who did not know it already how affecting family history can be. It also brought a full sense of the inhumanity of slavery into American living rooms 112 years after the end of the Civil War.

In my case, I had started looking into my family history in 1973 when my father's great aunt gave him a family Bible and a dozen pages of family history notes. When the book Roots came out, I devoured it, and I watched every minute of the mini-series. For me, Roots is not just a family history event, it's a family event, the dramatized story of an American trauma that is still working its way toward redemption.

I hope you will consider watching the re-made Roots with your family, renewing your interest in your own roots, and considering what America has been and is becoming.

-- Jordan Jones, President, National Genealogical Society

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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02 June 2015

New & Free collaborative guide for teaching about WWI

The School of Education at UNC (this time along with Virginia Tech) continues to create resources that both help educate on historical topics of interest to family historians while expanding the ways that youth can be engaged in learning about the history behind family stories.

The most recent partnership is with the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC).

ABMC, a government agency that administers America’s overseas Armed Forces cemeteries, established a partnership with LEARN NC, the outreach arm of the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Virginia Tech to create a guide to help educators teach about World War I. The initiative matched curriculum-development experts from the two universities with middle and high school teachers from North Carolina and Virginia to study an American WWI cemetery in France and to develop a multimedia teaching guide from what they learned.

You can access the FREE guide, Bringing the Great War Home: Teaching with the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, via this link.

Read more about the project on the UNC site and also on the ABMC site (you can also access the 10 chapters of the guide or it is available to be downloaded via iBooks with a link provided).

Are you aware of other collaborative efforts between academia and a government entity (whether Federal, State or Local) we should be aware of?

Editor’s Note: Previous Upfront with NGS post, UNC, Ancestry.com collaborate to create new history teaching guide -- Family History in the Classroom discusses another collaborative project involving the UNC School of Education which has relevance to family historians.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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23 April 2015

Disappearing History ... Post Civil War Black Towns are Dying

I always hate to hear about the loss of history – be it documents, memories, stories, buildings, communities, and more.

This was reaffirmed as I read “Black towns, established by freed slaves after the Civil War, are dying out” in the Washington Post last month.

Sugarland was founded on Oct. 6, 1871, when three freedmen — William Taylor, Patrick Hebron Jr. and John H. Diggs — “purchased land for a church from George W. Dawson, a white former slave owner, for the sum of $25,” Reese says. The founders made a small down payment and continued to pay until the debt was settled. The deed dictated that the land be used for a church, a school and “as a burial site for people of African descent.”

Today, Sugarland is mostly horse country with million-dollar homes that sit on rolling hills. Many of the houses that former slaves built have been torn down. The forest has overtaken lots where freedmen once lived. The winding dirt roads that separated this black community from a white world are now paved.

This article gives fascinating insight into not just Sugarland and into the history of the rise and fall of the so-called Black towns established after the Civil War.

A related article, also published in the Washington Post is All-black towns across America: Life was hard but full of promise.

If you Google Search “Black Towns” or “All-Black Towns” you will find many references to these communities and unfortunately, many of them are to the fact that they are disappearing, such as “One by one, Missouri’s black towns disappear.”

Did your ancestors live in an All-Black Town? Does it still exist?

Editor’s Note: This past weekend I was in Washington DC and couldn’t believe how far along the construction on the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Though the physical elements of historical black towns will probably continue to disappear, this museum is part of the effort to help preserve African American History, including all “Black Towns.”

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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15 December 2014

Lots of Unsorted (and Unindexed) Documents Waiting to be Discovered by Family Historians

Created by Uwe Kils (iceberg) and User:Wiska Bodo (sky). [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen, Auditor General: Federal archives sitting on mountain of unsorted documents, states ....

The federal archives is sitting on a backlog of 98,000 boxes of undocumented government records, some dating to 1890, says Canada’s auditor general...

There is a wealth of material to be sorted, including: 24,000 boxes of military records, 9,800 boxes from Transport Canada, 7,200 boxes from Industry Canada, 6,400 from Public Works and Government Services Canada, and 5,200 from Justice Canada.

Let’s now multiply a version of this by all Federal Archives, State Archives, and more and that is a LOT of documents that are waiting to be discovered by us and future genealogists!

A 2008 Prologue Magazine article, Attacking the Backlog – NARA Archivisits Mobilize to Make Unprocessed Records Available to the Public, states ...

One million cubic feet. Two million boxes. Billions of pieces of paper. No, this isn't the cumulative total of records held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It's only the amount of records we received in our two Washington, D.C.–area facilities from 1995 to 2005.

Of course, the above doesn’t include private collections, religious records, and a whole bevy of other types of records which are archived also! The University of Central Florida Libraries has a page on its web site titled Unprocessed Special Collections which explicitly lists such collections. Though other archives may not have such a web page, they do maintain internal lists with the same types of information.

This reminds us that for all the resources that have become more readily available online (either directly or via an index or finding aid), there is so much more which we don’t even know exists.

What way to get a look into the holdings which have not been processed or made publicly available is to see if there have been inventories created for an archive or collections held by it. For example, when I wonder if the NC Archives has certain “historical” records that I am not seeing in the available catalogs (online & on-the-ground) or finding aids (online & on-the-ground), I check into inventories that were made showing what the “counties” had in their possession. One was made in the 1960s and is physically at the archives and an earlier version (1938), The historical records of North Carolina: the county records, Volumes 1-3, is available via Internet Archive.

Such inventories are helpful because they also give a window into whether any records “disappeared” between 1938 and the 1960s or between the 1960s and today. Some losses are explained by record retention policies and others by ... possibly misadventure. Odds are that any facilities which might hold the records that interest you, might similarly have "inventories" created at various points in time. Do ask.

So, as you do your research, recognize that every archive and records repository has a huge iceberg of records and we are only “seeing” the tip!

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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12 December 2014

UNC, Ancestry.com collaborate to create new history teaching guide -- Family History in the Classroom

For years our local genealogical community has talked about how it would be so great if teachers used family history as a means of teaching history in our local schools. I know that my favorite way to learn history is through the stories of the people I research (though, a good museum is a close second for me!)

Well, using family history as a means of teaching history has just gotten easier. There was a “collaboration between Ancestry.com and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education’s outreach arm, LEARN NC, to create a multimedia how-to guide for teachers to use family history resources in their classrooms.”

You can download the textbook as an ibook or in PDF format via this page.

Accessing Ancestry, Newspapers.com, and the Fold3.com databases, the involved educators reflected on their experience and the textbook provides resources for other educators to create their own family history classroom experiences in this enhanced digital textbook which features video, images, interactive presentations, and downloadable handouts.

Share this with the elementary and middle school teachers that you know. You just might be paving the way to a future generation excited by both history and family history.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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23 September 2014

Digital Version of Entire Warren Commission Report Released

Many alive on 22 November 1963 remember where they were or what they were doing. To be honest, I was a little kid and I have no recollection of the event and I know that my dad talks about it.

What am I talking about? The assassination of President John F Kennedy.

Last year, in conjunction with the Boston Public Library, the Government Printing Office (GPO) released the Warren Commission report.

Today, the GPO released “a digital version of the entire Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy to commemorate the 50 years since the printed version of the report first rolled off the agency’s presses.”

Read Printing Office Releases Digital Version of Report on JFK Assassination to learn more. There is also a link at the bottom to a video about the original release of the Warren Commission report and this effort to digitize the entire Warren Commission report.

You can access the entire report here.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Lori Thornton (Librarian at Carson-Newman College) for posting about this on FB.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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12 September 2014

Old Roads and Trading Paths -- the superhighways of our ancestors!

Indian Trading paths in North Carolina (conjectured routes) by Mark Anderson Moore
courtesy Noth Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh
source: NCpedia -- Indian Trading Paths (by Tom Magnuson, 2006)

Roads, roads, roads ... we love them, we hate them. They get us places, they are clogged with traffic. And, compared to our ancestors and how they traveled, often the same roads and yet very different experiences.

This came to mind since old paths and colonial roads have very much been the news locally!

The Joel Lane Museum House last Sunday held this event "Applying Technology to Find Colonial Roads in Back Country NC" by Dale Loberger where Dale’s presentation told the story of how he was finally able to tease valuable information from old documents that were never intended to reveal such specifics. Through his quest, he learned an appreciation for the historic construction of maps to allow him to properly deconstruct them for use in modern Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.

In mid-August the “Tar Heel of the Week” published by the News and Observer was Historian Top Magnuson who charts old roads that help explain the Piedmont in the 1700s and founded the Trading Paths Association (FB Page).

Just a few miles from Tom Magnuson’s home, a trench 12 feet deep and 10 feet wide cuts through a patch of woods.

Hundreds of years ago, this road would have bustled with wagons and oxen, Native Americans, laborers, tradesmen and slaves – all looking to cross the Eno River at the same place year after year.

The old road is one of dozens that Magnuson has charted across the state and beyond – largely forgotten paths that he prizes for their insights into a time and place that is scarcely recorded in written history.

Just back in July we posted Plank Roads and Wagon Roads -- many of the roads our ancestors used have disappeared ...

Additionally, NC has an organization called the William P. Cumming Map Society (FB Page and website) whose goal is to bring together individuals who share a common interest and enthusiasm for maps. Many of the maps discussed are colonial maps and directly relevant to our pursuit to understanding the lives of our ancestors.

As you can tell, I’ve been doing 1. a lot of driving lately, and 2. trying to imagine how our ancestors traveled and what a different experience that was. A trip that takes me minutes, took them hours. A trip that takes me hours, took them sometimes days. Though it’s nice that I can get places quickly, I do sometimes wish the pace of my life was sometimes slower. As is often said “Life’s a journey, not a destination” and when we zoom by everything, we often miss the details of the journey that our ancestors had more awareness of. You can find much more along this “train” of thought by reading ...
Ramblings from a train ... using travel as an opportunity to "see" the world as it is now and as it was!

All of the efforts by the individuals and organizations mentioned definitely enrich my understanding about how and where people traveled in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries here in North Carolina.

Do you have similar local efforts and programs?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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