What is it?

The Ancestry Card Catalog is a way to search all of Ancestry’s 25,000+ database titles.  Now it is even easier to find the database you are looking for.  Search by title and/or keyword to narrow a search or focus on a particular record type.  Additionally, searches can be limited to a particular time period or geographic region you’re researching.  There is even an option to search by the date that the database was last updated to see what new additions exist.

How do I find it?

Go to the Search tab on Ancestry.com and click on the “Card Catalog” link on the right hand side of the page under the section “Search Resources”.    (http://www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/alldblist.aspx)

The catalog can also be found by clicking on the “list all databases” link in the lower right hand corner of the Search page on Ancestry .com.

Big Benefits? Yes!

• No longer have to browse through our databases, you can search them!
• Find databases you never knew we had
• See what databases have been recently updated
• Focus on a particular time period, record type, and/or geographic region to find the database you need
• Forgot the name of a database that you searched recently, but remember it contained the word “Louisiana” in the title…simply use the card catalog to search and find it again!

Across
2. __________ Manager Suite organizes your photographs and other multimedia
5. Quickly compares your family file with another family file for possible matches
6. Software for viewing Legacy on a Pocket PC: _____ Genealogist

Down
1. Legacy Charting __________ creates fan, hourglass, and bow tie charts
3. Creates large wall charts from your Legacy family files
4. Software for viewing Legacy on a Palm device

Click on the image below for the solution:

Question from Kimberly:

"How do you print your articles from Legacy home view?"

Viewing these Legacy News articles from within Legacy Home (version 6 feature), is very convenient - just click on the article's link and you're there.

Printing the articles from within Legacy Home is almost as convenient. While there is no print button (yet) in Legacy Home, when you're viewing the actual article, simply right-click on the page, and select Print.

However, this will print the entire page, including the links in the columns on both sides. If you just want to print the text, highlight the text, right-click and select copy, then open your word processor and paste it. You can then print the article from within your word processor.

Lillian Asplund was the last American survivor of the Titanic sinking. She died last Saturday at the age of 99. There are two more survivors, both British, who were too young to remember the experience.

Read the complete article here.

Obituaries are great resources for our research, right? Hopefully your obituary is not published before your time has come. . . .

Wikipedia has a list of obituaries that were published a little too soon.

Read the obituaries here.

Thanks to Christopher Dunham for pointing this one out.

One of the cardinal rules that most new genealogists are given when working with census records is, "Make note of surrounding families on the census population schedules." While you may have been told to note a different number of families on either side of your family, such as two, four, six, or some other number, I heartily agree with this strategy.

Continue reading . . . .

The Wisconsin Historical Society recently released its Pre-1907 Wisconsin Marriage Index.  The index includes over 1 million names entered on Wisconsin marriage records dated between 1852 and September 30, 1907.

Vital records, including marriage records, were maintained at the state and/or county level. The Society owns microfilm copies of state level vital records. The online database was created in 2005 by reformatting the state’s microfiche index, adding 27,000 names from delayed birth records, courtesy of the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society, and adding several hundred thousand names from marriage records in counties (Richland through Winnebago) that had not been included on the microfiche index.

The society has been busy. Just a couple of months ago they released their birth index.

To access the indexes, visit http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/vitalrecords

Legacy's Research Guidance

The next update of Research Guidance will include new links to these databases, making it easier than ever to quickly locate new information about your ancestors.

Each year, Brigham Young University sponsors a Family History Technology Workshop. This year's workshop featured Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. Lectures discussed emerging technology that will impact our genealogy research.

In case you missed the conference, BYU has now published abstracts and slides of the lectures. Take a look at some of the lecture titles:

• Exploring Syllables, Romanization, and Analogy in Names
• Assessing Geo-Location and Gender Information in Han Chinese Personal Names
• Genealogical Implicit Affinity Network
• Binarization for OCR
• Towards Searchable Indexes for Handwritten Documents
• The Bit Mountain Research Project
• ScanStone: Automated Exposure
• Using Structured Neural Networks with Record Linkage
• Census Index Merge
• Identifying Genealogical Content on the Web
• Family Finder Prototype
• Extensible Linear Manager
• High-Level View of a Source-Centric Genealogical Model: "The Model with Four Boxes"

To access the abstracts and slides, click here.

If you have old video recordings on VHS tapes, it's time to start thinking about converting them to today's technology. Unfortunately, each time you play a VHS tape it wears out a little more. Your old celluloid movies are becoming more brittle and silently fading away more each day. It's time to think about breathing some new life into your video collection.

Marlo Schuldt, producer of Legacy's add-on, Photo Collector & ProMedia Manager Suite, has written an article about the procedures of preserving your old movies. The article outlines the following:

Step #1- Answering the First Question

Step #2- Deciding How the Video Clips Will be Captured

Step #3- Should Do It Yourself?

Step #4- Getting Movie Clips into Your Computer - doing it yourself

Free video editing software

Step #5- Professional Capture and Conversion Considerations

Step #6- Preparation and Organization

Step #7- Using Video Clips in Family History

Step #8- What to do with new video clips?

Read the article here.

We all have ancestors we would swear were somehow skipped or overlooked by the census taker. It's more than likely that some of them were. More often, however, it's an indexing error that has us running in circles. When online census indexes leave you pulling out your hair in frustration, try these census search tips for locating your 'misplaced' ancestor.

Read the complete article here.