Indexing for the NYGBS

I have finally found a volunteer opportunity that suits me.  Several weeks ago the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society asked for volunteers to index part of their collection.  That is something I could do at home.  They also had folks in NYC scanning documents.  The initial push is done but some of us are continuing to index.  They send me a set of files and I access their cool indexing system and input the data.  Given how much I rely on online resources for my genealogical work, it is great to be able to contribute in that way.  Last week I went to the local Family History Center to look at some microfilms I had requested.  I had forgotten what a painful process that is.  I'm happy to do anything I can to make data more accessible.

Where are we?

Haven't posted for a while, so thought I would catch up.  We drove to NJ on July 13th so W would be ready for his surgery on the 16th.  Have been laying low so he can recover.  He is doing extremely well and we will head back up to camp next week.
I did get out yesterday for an expedition to the Burlington County Historical Society.  W has lots of Quaker ancestors who were part of that community in the 1670's.  The woman who works in the library there is a gold mine.  She knew of every family I mentioned and pulled out resources for most of them.  Can't wait to get it all in my database.

Lancaster and Genealogy

One of the reasons we stayed over in Lancaster was to do some ancestry sleuthing. W and I are both descended from the founders of Downington, PA and I wanted to at least see the area. About all we accomplished was to peer through the trees toward the stone house built by Thomas Downing in the 1730's and still standing. I was informed by a local historical society volunteer that the current owner didn't like history-types nosing around, so I couldn't get a good view of the house. Here is a better one, from the satellite view on google maps.

FBG in Gap, PA

After my quilt fabric shopping on Friday (see the previous post), I headed for a B&B I had found on the web -- The Creekside Inn. It was very nice, and I met some other quilters who come to the shows every year. The owners told me about yet another fabric store which I went to Saturday morning.

Then I headed to the Sadsbury Friends Meeting House in Gap, PA.

One of the founders of the meeting (Andrew Moore) is an ancestor of W's and I wanted to see if I could find any graves of his descendants in the Friends Burial Ground (FBG is a common term on genealogical sites). From what I could tell from information on the web, the current building is not on the original site and I was not successful in finding any more about where the oldest graves are. Apparently even if you can find them, many are worn so much you cannot read them, and many of the ancestors were buried in unmarked graves. But many of the graves in the Sadsbury FBG contain names very familiar from my tracing the Moore ancestors.

Genealogical Research

I did lots of on-line genealogical research this week, with some fascinating findings. It just goes to show "you can find anything on the web".

I found someone who has the same great grandparents that I have. I think that means we are third cousins. We are now sharing our findings about our ancestors.

I ordered photos of the headstones of ancestors buried in Indiana in the mid-1850's. You can do that at http://www.findagrave.com/. They have volunteers who take email requests and go out and take the photos.

I found out which cemetery they were in from a family tree on http://www.rootsweb.com/. On that same very extensive family tree I found ancestors way back to the 11th century in England. And they include King Henry I, one of whose large number of illegitimate children is supposedly an ancestor of mine. That particular ancestor has his own entry in Wickipedia. Who knows whether the data that far back is correct, but it is fun to look at all the same. I'm going to concentrate on tracking down those ancestors who immigrated to this country. There are lots of ships lists available on the web so I'll see how many I can find. Several of my ancestors were on the Mayflower and the ships that followed soon after.

Then there are the digital books. I ordered a county history on CD from Amazon. It includes digital versions of 4 books of Pennsylvania history and I found several good leads, including photos of some ancestors' homes.

http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ led me to the Google book search. You can put in a name in the vital records website and it leads you to occurrences of the name in digital books through which you can search on books.google.com.

I also learned abut the GEDCOM file standard. I can export my data from Family Tree Maker to GEDCOM files and there is lots of free software on the web that can turn those files into HTML. My ultimate goal is to create a website with all the genealogical data hyperlinked together.

And best of all, I finally know how to spell "genealogy".