Freedmen's Bureau Records Events at Oakland FamilySearch Library

On June 19, 2015, the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth (when the Emancipation Proclamation was finally enforced in Texas), a major media event took place in Los Angeles to announce that all records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly called the Freedmen's Bureau) have been digitized and placed online at FamilySearch.org.  The event also was used as a platform to encourage participation in FamilySearch's indexing (transcription) of the records to create a searchable database, which will make the records far more accessible than they have been in the past.  The digitization project was a joint effort of FamilySearch, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society, and the California African American Museum.

The records are extremely important in black family history research because they are the contemporary primary source that indicates the last slave owner of a formerly enslaved individual.  In many of the records created by the Freedmen's Bureau, one of the questions asked was "What was the name of your last owner?"  That owner's name is critical to finding more information about the individual prior to Emancipation.

The difficulties with using the Freedmen's Bureau records to date have been numerous.  Very, very few of the records had indices.  Though the complete collection is available on microfilm at every branch of the National Archives, the quality of many of the records was poor when they were microfilmed, and searching on microfilm was tedious and headache-inducing.  And that was after you figured out in which part of the collection you should start your search, an adventure in and of itself.  Some of the records had been digitized previously — some were on Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and the Internet Archive — but no one site had all of them, and not all of them were searchable.

I'm on staff at the Oakland FamilySearch Library.  The people putting together the June 19 event actually wanted our library to be part of that event, but our director thought we needed a little more lead time to make sure we would be prepared.  Well, we've gotten organized, and now we're going to have a media event.

On Thursday, July 16, 10:00 a.m.–12:00 noon, the Oakland FamilySearch Library, 4766 Lincoln Avenue, Oakland, California, will host the Northern California event to celebrate the completion of the digitization of the Freedmen's Bureau records on FamilySearch.org.  All members of the genealogical community are welcome to attend the event.

In addition to the celebration event, the Oakland FamilySearch Library (OFSL) has scheduled five sessions to explain how to transcribe the digitized records to create searchable databases and to sign up volunteers to help with the transcription project.  This is the same class being offered five times; you only need to attend one.  Genealogists in particular are being encouraged to join in transcribing the records, though everyone can help.  You will have choices about the records you work on, and maybe you will discover your own ancestors in the process!  You will also be helping make it easier for other researchers to find their lost family members.

The scheduled sessions are:
Thursday, July 16, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. (same day as the celebration event)
Friday, July 17, 2:30–3:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 18, 10:00–11:00 a.m.
Wednesday, July 22, 7:00–8:00 p.m.
Tuesday, July 28, 7:00–8:00 p.m.

All sessions will be taught by Kim Miller, OFSL staff member.

Please help make these records searchable for everyone.  I cannot overstate the importance of the records for helping identify enslaved ancestors' former owners, a key piece of information needed to be able to trace those ancestors prior to Emancipation.  Tony Burroughs, the well known black genealogist and author of Black Roots, mentioned in a recent keynote presentation that in all the research he has done, only about 15% of emancipated slaves took their former owners' last names.  That means that 85% of us need the information that can be found in Freedmen's Bureau records.

You don't have to wait for the library event to help; you can actually start transcribing records today if you want to.  Information about the indexing project and how to contribute is available at

http://www.discoverfreedmen.org/

The purpose of the July 16 event is to help publicize the importance of the records and the effort to transcribe the records and create the index.  The transcription work itself is an ongoing effort.

If you want to watch a recording of the June 19 event, it is available on the Freedmen's Bureau Project Web site.

In addition to all the regular media coverage of the digitization and transcription projects, Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist, explained how the records are important to everyone doing Southern research, not just those with formerly enslaved ancestors.  And Danica Southwick wrote a great article about the project for the Jackson Sun prior to the media launch.

Angel Island Family History/Reunion Day, Satuday, July 11, 2015

On Saturday, July 11, the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and Angel Island State Park will hold a Family History/Reunion Day at the site of the former U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island.  The program will feature Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, Korean, and Russian researchers, either in person or via videotape, and an open house where people can learn about the former Immigration Station, which is a National Historic Landmark.  The open house will begin at 11:00 a.m., and the formal program will run from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.  Expert genealogists from the community and Ancestry.com will be available to able to help people search for their roots until 3:00 p.m.

The Immigration Station was in use from 1910–1940 and processed one million immigrants from eighty countries, including Chinese immigrants who left poetry during their often long periods of detention as they sought to avoid the restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Japanese picture brides, Jews escaping the Holocaust in 1930 and 1940, Koreans escaping Japanese control of their country, Indians affected by additional anti-Asian laws in 1917 and 1924, Russians escaping the impact of the revolution, Filipinos suddenly affected by immigration restrictions after their country was on the road to independence, and many more.

Speakers will talk about their families’ experiences, and those attending in person will be available to help answer questions.  One story will be that of Rosa Ginsberg, who was profiled on AIISF’s Immigrant Voices Web site.  The article was about Ginsberg’s immigration file at the National Archives in San Bruno and how she fled Nazi-controlled Austria and hoped to reunite with her boyfriend, Herbert Klein, in New York.  AIISF noted that it did not know what happened to Rosa and Herbert and asked readers to contact them if they had additional information.  Rosa and Herbert did marry, and their son Jeffrey discovered the story online and contacted AIISF to give an update and much more, which he will present at the event on July 11.

In addition, experts from the community and Ancestry.com will be present to show families how to use online resources and to give advice on where to find materials detailing ancestors’ immigration experiences.  Organizers recommend taking the 9:45 a.m. ferry from San Francisco’s Pier 41 or the 10:00 a.m. ferry from Tiburon to get to the island; after that they can take the 25-minute climbing walk or catch a shuttle for a fee.  Ferries from Oakland and Vallejo make connections to the Angel Island ferry.  The open house and program will cost only $5.00, $3.00 for ages 6–17, and free for ages 5 and under.

For more information, including ferry and shuttle prices and details, a list of speakers, and advance tickets, please visit AIISF or call (415) 348-9200 x11.

Wordless Wednesday

Two Genealogy Journals Finished and Sent to Members

I'm a little behind on announcing that the latest issues of ZichronNote and The Baobab Tree have been finished and distributed to members of the respective genealogical societies.  As usual, I think I found a good mix of topics for the journals, and I learned something from each article.

In the May 2015 issue of ZichronNote, two articles, by John Althouse and Jeff Lewy, address the problems and pitfalls of spelling as it relates to finding our relatives in indexed records.  Not only should we take into account the education levels, languages, and writing skills of both the people reporting the information and those recording that information, the talents of whoever creates the indices we use in our searches have a huge effect on our possibilities of success.  Daria Valkenburg wrote about displaced persons' camps in Europe after the end of World War II.  SFBAJGS member Rebecca Elliot contributed an article about how she discovered and met her half-brother; until recently, she had not even been sure he was still alive.  Krzysztof Bielawski, the man behind the Kirkuty Polish cemetery Web site, gave us a little bit of history on how the site came to be.  And I (the person who hates to write) was moved to write about my encounter with Leonard Nimoy (z''l) after his recent passing.

The Spring 2015 issue of The Baobab Tree has a fantastic lead story:  AAGSNC board member Nicka Smith discovered that her grandparents knew Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, during the short period the Kings lived in Chicago.  Following that is an excellent resource article from Eric Johnson on how to look for black soldiers in early U.S. Army records.  Angela Williams Brown, who has just recently started family history research, talks about some newbie lessons she has already learned.  Betsy Monroe enlightened us as to early black settlements in the Capay Valley area of California.  And Jackie Chauhan, the AAGSNC historian, wrote about the 10th anniversary of the Sacramento African American Family History Seminar, which was held this past March.

All you need to do to receive these journals when they are published is to be a member of the respective societies.  So if these articles sound interesting to you, visit the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society (for ZichronNote) and the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California (for The Baobab Tree) to join and you can be reading them soon.

The other way to receive the journals is to be a contributing author.  I could be promoting your article here!  Have you had a breakthrough in your family history, solved a family mystery through painstaking research, discovered a better way to use resource materials, or walked where your ancestors walked as part of a heritage trip?  Do you have an interesting story about your family history in the San Francisco area?  We would love to read about it in one of the journals.  Submission guidelines for The Baobab Tree, including deadlines, are available online, or you can send me a message regarding either journal, and we can talk about it!

Father's Day: Siblings and Children

This year for Father's Day I wanted to show a photograph of my father with his father, but I ran into a problem very quickly:  I don't have any.  I don't know if that was accidental or deliberate, but with all the photos I have, not a single one shows my father and grandfather together.  Admittedly, my grandfather was apparently the semiofficial photographer for the Sellers family, because he is in very few photos himself, maybe only half a dozen.  But it still seems a little odd.

What I do have, however, are photos of my father with his sister (half-sister, actually) from his mother, with all three sisters (half-sisters) from his father, and with all four of his children.

Lynn, sister Ruth, and niece Ruth Anne, Easter, circa 1942

Dottie, Carol, Lynn, and Mildred, 2009

Janice, Laurie, Lynn, Mark, and Stacy, 2011

Easy Custom Genealogy Maps beyond North America

A few weeks ago, for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked readers of his blog to create custom maps of U.S. states and Canadian provinces they had visited, and then to create maps of where their ancestors had lived in some given year.  This was a fun exercise, and it was interesting to see the results.  I was disappointed, however, that I was unable to map several of my ancestors, because they were not living in North America.

Surprisingly, Facebook came to my rescue.  One of my friends posted a link to MapLoco, a site that creates custom world maps of places you've visited.  They're not as detailed as the maps from the first site — you can only indicate visited or not, as opposed to the four levels of visits available on the other site.  The world map site also doesn't have an option to export a graphic file of your map.  Instead, you can generate a URL to a page that shows the countries you marked.  But the site does give me a quick, easy way to map the rest of my ancestors' locations!

For the SNGF exercise I used the locations of my ancestors in 1865, which I had generated the week before, and mapped those in the U.S.  For this new map I took those same locations, added the European ones (the only other continent where I had ancestors in 1865), and clicked those places on the world map site.  The site then automatically generated a URL for my custom map.  Instead of using the URL itself, you can do a screen capture of the map and use the image.  The map the site shows when you use the URL looks like this:

You can see that the title is "Countries I've Visited", and underneath that it lists the countries "I've been to."  There's no way to change the title, which for this map should be "Countries Where My Ancestors Lived in 1865."  The legend on the left indicates Not Visited and Visited.  If you're doing a screen capture, you could easily cut out the "Countries I've Visited" banner, but the text below that is helpful because it lists the countries, which might be difficult to recognize from the map alone.

You actually have two options for images, though.  While you're making the map, it looks like this:

The advantage here is that the Not Visited/Visited legend and "I" text aren't part of the map.  On the other hand, you don't get the list of countries spelled out.

Something I noticed when mapping my ancestors was that due to border changes, I had to fudge a little.  Many of my ancestors lived in the Russian Empire, but that no longer exists.  So I marked the modern countries (Belarus, Latvia, and Ukraine) that control the specific areas where they were.

You might think of that as being a problem relevant mostly to 19th- and early 20th-century research, but I even had the same situation when I created a map of the countries I have visited myself:

Quite a few border changes have occurred during the latter part of the 20th century.  Two of the countries I have visited are the USSR and the Panama Canal Zone.  Neither one exists today.  For the USSR I marked the countries corresponding to the Soviet republics I visited.  But the Canal Zone is just gone, incorporated into the country of Panama, which I visited separately from the Canal Zone.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there were a site that could generate maps for any given year, with the appropriate corresponding country borders?

I'm Going to SLIG!!

I am again a very fortunate person.  The genealogy gods are smiling on me.  I received the news tonight that I have earned a scholarship to the 2016 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy!

I have wanted to attend SLIG for several years, and I'm already looking forward to this great educational opportunity (even if it does take place in Salt Lake City in January!).  The class I'll be attending is "Research in the South", coordinated by J. Mark Lowe.  I chose this class primarily because of my volunteer activities with the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California and the Alameda County Youth Ancestral Project, both of which have large numbers of people with family roots going back to the South.  I look forward to sharing what I learn about research resources and techniques, particularly regarding lost and missing records, a common problem in Southern research.

I'm also looking forward to some research time in the Family History Library.  I didn't accomplish nearly as much as I hoped to when I was in Salt Lake City in February for RootsTech.

Doing the genealogy happy dance around the house . . . .

Wordless Wednesday

Loving Day

On one hand there was an Irish Catholic girl from Brockton, Massachusetts, near Boston.  She became a nun in a nursing order.  She served at a hospital in Kentucky, then left the order and worked as a nurse in Baton Rouge and San Antonio, finally going to Santa Monica, California, where two of her aunts lived.

On the other hand there was a young Sikh man from Khatkar Kalan, in Punjab, India.  He came to the United States to go to college.  Whether or not he did so remains unverified, but he stayed in the Southern California area, where his uncle lived, also ending up in Santa Monica.

The young Sikh fell in love with the beautiful redhead he passed almost daily on his way to work.  At some point he stopped and talked with her.  Things went on from there as these things do, and the young man converted to Catholicism to marry his love in 1948.

Though I'm sure there were many in Santa Monica who commented on the marriage, this couple was lucky to live in California, where they were allowed to marry.  If they had been living in the South, the young man's dark skin would probably have prevented their marriage.  Almost twenty years after they married, the Supreme Court struck down laws preventing interracial marriage in the case of Loving v. Virginia (1967).  And now every year on June 12, we celebrate Loving Day and the right of a man and woman to marry whom they choose.  And soon, perhaps, we will celebrate another victory for more loving couples.

Wordless Wednesday

Big Trouble with Newspaper Digitization

We all know how convenient it is to have research resources available at our fingertips through online databases.  I routinely post when new newspaper databases are placed on the Web, and I use these databases on almost a daily basis.  I love it when I read announcements about more partnerships that will bring more newspaper archives online.

Unfortunately, it seems that one company that partnered with many newspapers to digitize and make available their historic news photograph archives will not be able to deliver on that.  The bigger problem is that it currently has control of the physical archives of many, many newspapers.  I sincerely hope that nothing is lost or destroyed during what looks like will be an acrimonious litigation process.

The Salt Lake Tribune has an article about the debacle because it is one of the newspapers whose archives is in limbo.  Other newspapers listed by name in the article:

Boston Herald
Chicago Sun-Times
Contra Costa Times
Denver Post
El Paso Times
Los Angeles Daily News
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
New Haven Register
Oakland Tribune
San Jose Mercury News
Seattle Times
St. Paul Pioneer Press

An article from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette names these additional newspapers affected by the situation:

Alameda Times Star
The Argus
Berkshire Eagle
Daily Breeze
East County Times
Hayward Daily Review
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Redland Daily Facts
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Tri-Valley Herald
Whittier Daily News

And the Minneapolis Post (which has a little more background details in its coverage) includes the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age among newspapers from Australia and says that the archives of 72 New Zealand newspapers are part of the mess.

If I understand the articles correctly, with the American newspapers it seems to be photo archives, but the Australian and New Zealand newspapers surrendered the archival papers themselves.  Many people are not willing to talk or give a lot of details, which is understandable, given that there are several active lawsuits.

As my friend Joe would say, "Bad, bad.  Very bad."

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Best Discovery in May

I wasn't sure if Randy Seaver was going to post a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge this week, as he's having so much fun at Jamboree, but he managed to squeeze in the time for one.

1)  I am away at the SCGS genealogy Jamboree this weekend, having too much fun (I hope!).

2)  What was your best genealogy research "find" in May 2015?  It could be a record, it could be a photograph, etc.  Whatever you judge to be your "best."

3)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, or in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook or google+ post.

There's no question my best find in May for my family research was the online index to deaths published in the Belvidere (New Jersey) Apollo/Intelligencer, hosted at the Warren County Library.  I found listings for my great-great-grandfather Cornelius Godshalk Sellers, third-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers (two obituaries!), third-great-grandmother Rachel G. Sellers, Franklin Sellers' brother Dr. Tobias Sellers, and five more relatives.  Not only that, the library doesn't charge for copies of the obituaries!

** genealogy happy dance **

I plan to post about the information I learn from the obituaries after I receive the copies from the library.  Oh, I hate to wait . . . .

Skeletons in the Closet: Family "Ogres"

This is one in an occasional series of posts about less-than-pleasant subjects which may arise during your family history research, or which may be glossed over entirely by some relatives.  A page listing previous posts in the series can be found here.

It would not be logical to believe that all of our ancestors and relatives were equally liked within the family.  But what do you do when you learn that there's someone who was just a nasty person?

Along with the many happy stories that my grandmother told me about the family while I was growing up, there were also some that were not so happy.  Some I always remembered were about one of my grandfather's sisters.  To hear the stories the way my grandmother told them, she seemed like an ogre right out a fairy tale.  One of her grandchldren happened to be adopted; she always said that he wasn't really her grandchild and treated him more shabbily than her other grandchildren.  When her daughter was ill with cancer and near the end of her life, she ordered her daughter around like a servant and had her make dinner for her.  Overall, she didn't sound like a very nice person, but I took it with a grain of salt, because I thought the stories might have been exaggerated.

Once while traveling I had an opportunity to meet the adopted grandchild.  I was thrilled to do so, because he had been my mother's favorite cousin growing up, and she had always had good things to say about him.  When I did meet him, he at first was hesitant and pointed out that he was "only" adopted.  I convinced him that I felt he was just as much a part of my family as everyone else and I was happy to know him.  He eventually confirmed the story about his grandmother treating him as second-rate.  So much for exaggeration in that instance.

Later I was able to meet her son.  While he did not specifically confirm the stories I had previously heard, he also didn't have anything positive to say about her.  He pretty much agreed that she had been unpleasant most of the time.

Eventually I decided to try to find out the truth of the last story my grandmother had told me.  Apparently my great-grandfather had also not been fond of this particular daughter.  I had been told (more than once) that in his will he left her $1, to make sure she couldn't argue that he had "accidentally" forgotten her, and left everything else to the other siblings.  I put off ordering his probate file for a while, because it was a significant cost ($70, and that was about fifteen years ago!), but I finally sent the money.  I discovered that my grandmother had exaggerated — but only a little.  The will had bequests to five of the six children of a thousand dollars or more for each, but only $100 to this daughter.  Then came bequests to many charitable institutions, an amount for a new tombstone for his father's grave, and the like.  After all of these he stated that the remainder of his estate should be divided equally between all of his children — except for her.

Now that I had seemingly confirmed all the negative information I had been told, I had to decide what to do with it.  I certainly wasn't going to excise the woman out of the family tree; that would essentially be lying, not only because she existed in the first place, but because she had been married, had children and grandchildren.  She was part of the family.

On the other hand, I realized I didn't have to trumpet what I did know.  I haven't buried it, but I have documented and saved it.  It did show that, once again, genealogy isn't simply finding out names and dates, but learning about who you come from, good or bad.  It's discovering the people behind the curtain of your life.

When you find out there's an ogre in the family tree, acknowledge her for who she is, warts and all, including trying to understand her circumstances and her past as much as possible.  If you have the opportunity (I didn't), you can try to find out why she was like that and maybe (maybe!) end up with some empathy for her.  Then celebrate who you are and be glad you don't have that person living with you now!

Wordless Wednesday

Northwest Genealogy Conference Registration Is Open

The annual Northwest Genealogy Conference, hosted by the Stillaguamish Valley Genealogical Society, will take place Thursday–Saturday, August 13–15, at the Byrnes Performing Arts Center in Arlington, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle.  In addition to three full days of genealogy with several nationally known speakers, there is also a half-day of free beginning genealogy classes on Wednesday, August 12.

Two of the conference days have themes:  Friday will be DNA, with CeCe Moore being the featured speaker, and Saturday is courthouse research, with Judy G. Russell, JD, CG, CGL.  There will be many other speakers on each of the days, including me on Saturday.  I will teach about how resources primarily focused on Jewish research can be useful for non-Jewish family history.  A PDF version of the full conference schedule is available for download.

Early bird registration is currently available for a limited time.  The deadline isn't stated on the site, so it looks as though sooner is better than later.

Visit the conference Facebook page and Like it to keep up with the latest news.  And I hope to see you in Arlington this August!