Month: March 2006

Deeper Genealogy Dig May Uncover Irish Relatives

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Carmen Villa Prezelski has a good article in the Tuscon Citizen (AZ), Deeper genealogy dig may uncover Irish relatives, about getting into genealogy and family history research, as well as looking at Irish and Mexican/Spanish genealogy links. The Irish-Mexican links are particularly interesting – according to Prezelski, Thousands of Irish farmers, soldiers, miners and merchants resettled in Mexico in the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve heard this mentioned before, but never thought about it.

NY Times and Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation – Promotional

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Somebody emailed me this, and I’m still not sure exactly what is is or involves – it looks like the New York Times and the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation have teamed up for some kind of promotional that involves access to the Foundation’s database of genealogy/historical records for free, but you are encouraged to spend almost $500 on a keepsake.

Illinois Civil War Records Online Thanks to Fred Delap

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Jenny Barkley writes in the Paris Beacon News (Illinois) about Fred Delap’s efforts to put Illinois Civil War records online. Illinois has done a lot of work to put records online for genealogists and historians, and its because of people like Fred Delap. This covers almost 300,000 soldiers from Illinois, and their number of descendants could literally run into the millions. Before now, these records were only available in offline, in person at the archives where they were stored, and you had to look through ledgers (which probably didn’t help with preserving the ledgers from a historical perspective).

South Dakota, Vital Records, and Genealogists

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Things are getting more and more ridiculous. Dirk Lammers has written an article for the Associated Press, published in the Aberdeen News, Law changes leave vital records indexes out of sunshine, about some of the restrictions placed on South Dakotans who are interested in genealogy. All in the name of security. I can understand not obtaining recent records, but some restrictions that other states (not necessarily SD) are passing are getting really silly (or scary, however you want to look at it). David Bordewyk, general manager of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, points out just how ridiculous this is – South Dakota is doing this, basically in advance of what may or may not happen at the federal level (and don’t get me started on the federal government telling the states how to maintain their records).