The Handbook of Texas Online a Great Free Resource

If your family history research takes you to Texas, then you may be able to use a wonderful expansive free online resource, The Handbook of Texas Online. Though it does not give host family trees, or indexes to vital records it provides a great deal of factual information on Texas history that may help you understand your own family history. In addition, the handbook includes a large number of biographies of Texans.

The Handbook of Texas Online is a multidisciplinary encyclopedia of Texas history, geography, and culture sponsored by the Texas State Historical Association. Its source material is the
The New Handbook of Texas which is made up of more than 23,000 articles on people, places, events, historical themes, institutions, and many other topic categories. The scope is broad and inclusive, designed to provide readers with concise, authoritative, and accessible articles that provide factual, nonpartisan accounts on virtually every aspect of Texas history and culture.
The starting point for the editors of the New Handbook was the two-volume Handbook of Texas, published in 1952, and the Supplement published in 1976. Almost every topic that received an entry in those three volumes has been retained in the New Handbook. To this base of approximately 16,000 articles the editors added another 7,500 entries that dramatically expand both the scope of topical coverage and the level of detail.

Its articles represent the efforts of more than 3,000 authors from many walks of life. They include professional scholars, amateur historians and genealogists, college and university students, and numerous other individuals with special knowledge and a willingness to write about it.

All this information is available free online at http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/. Considering the scope of the content of this site it is user friendly and easily navigated. If you have an interest in American history, the migrations of families or specifically Texas history, I guarantee you will enjoy this site. If you have Texas roots, then possibly you, like me, will find that you can be absorbed for hours by this collection.

By the way, though it is free they do accept donations.



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Content copyrighted 2009 by Susie Williams. Content may not be used in any commercial way, including sold or charged for. If content is used for a non-commercial purpose it must include the credit "From It's Family Research Blog copyrighted 2009 by Susie Williams."

Free Family Tree Sites Some Rules of Use

I mentioned in previous post that I have had good results using Google to find leads on difficult to locate or follow ancestors. It's seems like a shot in the dark kind of strategy that requires patience but occasionally you will be led to a family tree that mentions your ancestor. If you are really lucky you may actually be led to a site that is specifically about one of your surnames and links you to one or more generations. Hallelujah!! These sites are free to visit and often represent years of research. There are some unwritten rules of etiquette to using this research of which you should be aware.

Even though offered freely on-line the information on family sites should be respected in that same way of any published material. Often the researcher has placed a copyright notice on the site and this means that the material must be treated in the same way as any copyrighted material. Nothing can stop you from taking notes off these sites for your own personal information and including it in your family files.

However, if you are going to include research off of one of these sites in your family files you should always document the source. You may need to double check it later or want to confer with the researcher. If you are at any time going to publish your own tree and research on-line or in a book you should credit the researcher whose site was the source of your information.

If you are going to use a description, impression, opinion or speculative statement of the researcher in your own family tree or book of family history, you should first ask permission to quote them. Usually you can find a contact email on the site in order to make contact. If you are unable to get a response and permission to quote the individual researcher, you can still use the statement, but you must credit the individual.
Contact Us at itsfamilyresearch09@gmail.com.


Content copyrighted 2009 by Susie Williams. Content may not be used in any commercial way, including sold or charged for. If content is used for a non-commercial way it must include the credit " From It's Family Research Blog copyrighted 2009 by Susie Williams."

Free Genealogy Not a Thing of the Past

Kim Powell, at About.com asks on her site, "Is free genealogy a thing of the past? With the constant addition of subscription genealogy databases on the Internet, people often wonder if there will soon be an end to free genealogy research via the Web. For those of you with this concern, take heart - free genealogy databases aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Web sites from all over the world contain free genealogy information of use to family tree researchers which has been contributed by individuals, companies and even governments. Birth records, marriage records, military records, ships passenger lists, surnames, census records, immigration records, wills, photos and much, much more are available on the Internet for FREE if you just know where to look."

Well, yes, that is the trick. Knowing where to look for the elusive free genealogy information. My experience has been that what is free one day, may not be the next. Somehow many "free" sites suddenly have their information available via links that lead to subscription databases. Not to fear, however, the role of this blog is to try to keep up with the changing face of where the free info can be accessed. And we will do our best to post that information here.

In the meantime, Kim is not just filling space on her site with the above declarations on the question. She has put together a list of 100 free genealogy sites with links. Now I admit, I am not sure how current Kim's information is, but I've always found About.com a reliable resource. Some may have been hijacked by the fee based sites since Kim compiled her list, but it can't hurt to try the free family history resources she lists on About.com. Here's the link: http://genealogy.about.com/cs/free_genealogy/a/free_sites.htm.

Copyright 2009 by It's Family Research & Susie Williams.


Contact Us at itsfamilyresearch09@gmail.com.

Content is copyrighted and may not be used in any commercial way, including sold or charged for. If content is reproduced for a non-commercial use it must include the credit " From It's Family Research Blog copyrighted 2009 by Susie Williams."

Google Your Ancestors

It may seem like a waste of time for those with a precise research plan or at best a "shot in the dark," but I have come across some jewels of information in my family history research simply by using Google.

You don't need to know some secret bit of techological how-to to use this research tool. Like any other thing you might be looking up on google, you can just type in the google search bar the name of the ancestor you are looking for. This works if the name is very unusual like Zilpha Harvey.

For more common names, something like John Williams, put the name in quotation marks and add a date and location. If you are just trying to find anything on the guy put in the birth date. This prevents your having to week through hits on John William from 1988. If you are looking specifically for an illusive death location or marriage location then put in a date around the time of those events. You can also narrow down the results by putting in a location either with a date or without, if you know one. Your entry would look like ..."William Martin" 1799 South Carolina.

I've also stumbled on to information by just putting in an unusual surname with no first name in an effort to locate early residence of a particular family. For example the entry "Brabham" led me to the "Buford Bridge, Barnwell County, South Carolina" where there are Brabhams still living. I took this desperate measure when I could not pick up the trail of my ggg-grandfather Rueben Brabham who showed up in Dallas County, Alabama in 1820 from some unknown place.

By going to the http://www.usgenweb.org/ and searching for Barnwell County South Carolina, I found that this family settled there in the early 1700's. Further research led to a family tree with Reuben listed and the note "went to Alabama; unknown location."
Content copyrighted 2009 by Susie Williams

Questions or for more information, advise or to share yours contact me at itsfamilyresearch09@gmail.com

Fast & Free Family History on Family Search

A good free source of genealogical information I've used a lot recently is FamilySearch.org. It is a resource from the archives of the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City. You can register on the site if you are inclined, but you can also do searches without registering. This site has a fairly powerful search engine, but as you can imagine this an international collection with millions of indexed records and more being added monthly. Sometimes a search comes up empty handed though you know there has to be something there. I have found some tricks to working with this site that have enabled me to find information when it has already told me there is none there.

Before I go through my method of using this site, however, I should say that this is a wonderful source of death records after 1890. You can see and download the actual record and often glean some useful information from it. This is also true for many census records. Unfortunately, some of the census records you will find take you to another site on which you must pay to view the record.

1. Go first to www.FamilySearch.org.
2. Click on Records Search in the menu bar at top of home page
3. Go to Search Pilot
4. A new window with a form will open. Fill out the relevant information
5. Before hitting Search, look at the options at the bottom right next to the search button.
If you are fishing for info, click the down arrow and then click on "exact, close, partial."
6. Now hit search

A list of possibilities will pop up and you have several options at this point that are time savers but that may lead to some vital information. How many times have you opened a census record for example and scrolled down the dimming handwriting to discover that this is not your person at all? That won't happen on this site. With each hit listed you have the following possibilities.
1.You can view the information provided for each hit on the screen to decide if this your guy or what you are looking for.
2. If you are unsure you can mouse over the name and a pop up will give you more information on the hit.
3. Maybe this is Grandpa Joe, but maybe not...click on the individuals name and a side bar will slide open with more details from whatever record you are looking at.
4. Many but not all of these indexed records have the image available for viewing and in many cases downloading. If the image is available there will be an icon by the name on the original list, and also on the right hand side of the sidebar that has just opened.

Free, fast family research. It's a resource I like.
copyright 2009 Susie Williams

Questions, advise, corrections email me at itsfamilyresearch09@gmail.com.

Keeping Genealogy Free

A wonderful source of free information for family history researchers is the USGenWeb site and its links to individual state and county sites. To explore USGenWeb go to http://www.usgenweb.org/.

You will find an explanation of the volunteer run organization and in the left side bar there is a list of states. After clicking on the state you are most interested in you will reach that states GenWeb site, where you can usually search its statewide archives or if you know the specific county you are interested in you can click on a list of counties. You will eventually reach a website for that county.

The motto of USGenWeb is "Keeping Genealogy Free." To explore this site and its affiliate state and county sites you do not have to sign in, register or pay a fee. However, like any volunteer driven organization the affiliate sites are only as good as the volunteers they have attracted. The sites are not uniform in the amount of information available for family research. Some states host wonderful sites, as well as some counties within those states, but not all.

Check out www.usgenweb.org for what could be a valuable gateway to your family research.

Copyright 2009 Susie Williams

Texas is not Somewhere Else

My interest in family history started in 1957 in my 6th grade class in the four room school in a small mining town in Colorado. Our teacher introduced a segment of World Geography with the assignment that we should go home and ask our parents where our family had immigrated from to become residents of the United States of America. Originally our families were all from somewhere else, we were told. I volunteered that my family was from Texas and quickly learned that Texas did not qualify as somewhere else in the world view my teacher was trying to foster.

During Geography the day after we received this assignment, our teacher pulled down the big map of the world, which was on a retractable roller like a window shade, and called us one at a time to the front of the room, where we would get to hold the pointer and point out our ancestral home. I felt pretty confident that I would get more use out of the pointer than anyone in class, with the possible exception of Dorothy, who was somehow distantly related to me. I was more right than I knew.

Each 6th grade class member, I believe there were eight of us that year, went to the board took up the pointer and pointed to either Italy or Poland. Some pointed to both Italy and Poland, like my friend Gloria whose mother was Italian and father Polish. Then it was my turn. I pointed out England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, and France. I was ready to explain that we were also Pennsylvania Dutch, but that did not mean Holland. It meant Germany.

My two minutes of fame was marred, however, when the whole class and the nosy fifth graders across the room started laughing. They thought I had made a good joke of the lesson. How could you be all those things? We all only had two parents, after all. I sheepishly returned to my seat, as our teacher took the beloved pointer from my hand and shushed the room. Now it was Dorothy's turn and I knew that her work with the pointer was going to clarify my intention. Dorothy was shy and quiet, but she was never any body's fool. She skillfully stopped the pointer on England, handed the pointer back to the teacher and sat down.

What I learned that day in World Geography is that if you are not clearly from one or two cultures you are nobody. I decided that day to find out how I had really come to be born in San Antonio, Texas and living in Colorado, U.S.A. I began pestering my maternal grandmother for information. A woman who loved history and a good story, like my paternal grandmother and all three of my great grandmothers, she was glad to oblige. I was eleven years old.

My original intent was to learn from what country and when our family arrived in North America. I had no idea then, or for many years after, that that intent would take me on a decades long circuitous journey through American History and some world events. In the earliest years, I diligently wrote down the stories, the names and dates, my grandmothers told me. Later in my college library, I searched through books and old newspapers for info on the surnames I knew. As a young mother my "time away" was not to go shopping at the mall, but to drive to the local LDS library and spend an afternoon looking at micro-fische images of old census records, court, marriage, birth and death records. I made trips to the Texas State Library and the Tennessee State Library part of my family's summer vacation. I searched through dusty court house records in Tennessee and Georgia on girl trips with a best friend who shared my interest. I sent off request for death certificates and waited weeks for something to arrive in my mail box, and little by little pieces fell into place on some of our family lines.

A new day dawned in genealogy with the advent of the Internet and the speed at which information can be shared. I may have found one or two pieces of information a year prior to the development of Internet research. Now I might run into the documentation of several generations in the click of a wrist. Both good and bad for researchers, the Internet can connect us to other researchers on the same family lines with good documented information, but can also proliferate misconceptions and errors of information and allows years of research and public records to be hijacked and charged for by organizations whose search engines are cumbersome and often ineffective. There are ways around all that; ways to protect against error. Copyright 2008 Susie Williams

Watch this blog for more information and links. Questions or comments email me at itsfamilyresearch09@gmail.com.

This post is excerpt from an unpublished book of my family history. This material is copyrighted and may not be used without credit to the writer.