The ESSSS Project [Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies]

The ESSSS project was created by Vanderbilt University to preserve and digitize Catholic Archival records relating to Africans and their New world descendants in the former Spanish colonies of Brazil, Florida, Cuba and Columbia. The oldest Catholic registers began in the 16th century and continue to the early 1900s.  These ecclesiastical entries include baptisms, burials and marriages of slaves and free persons of color from the beginning of colonization. Catholic registers are valuable to genealogists because they allow you to reconstruct several generations. The ESSSS project is also of historical importance in that details are provided about the lives of African slaves and their descendants in the Latin colonies of the Western Hemisphere. The ESSSS project can be assessed at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/esss/

RS

Baptism of a Cuban slave

Using JSTOR for Genealogical Research

JSTOR is a digital library collection containing older and current issues from over 2,000 Academic journals covering over 50 disciplines. JSTOR is a useful, non-traditional source of research for genealogists looking for references to their ancestors. JSTOR can be accessed through the Houston Public Library website with a Library Card if you follow these steps.

1.  On the HPL homepage, click Research
2.  Click the Resources by Category tab
3. Click on Magazines, Scholarly Journals and Publications Resources

4. Stroll down until you see JSTOR

5. Once you click the link to JSTOR, you should either be on the homepage or if you are at home, enter your library card number and password.

6. Click the advanced search tab and type genealogy.

7. The results should pull up every article that mentions the term "genealogy"

Manumission papers of Free people of Color in Petersburg, Virginia from the

The Journal of Negro History

Vol. 13, No. 4 (Oct., 1928), pp. 534-538
[After doing a search for "Virginia Emancipation"]

To narrow down your results to the most relevant information, go to the journal filter and restrict the categories to Anthropology, History, African-American Studies, History and Population studies. These are the disciplines most likely to provide relevant genealogical information on your ancestors.
You can also vary the keywords you want to search. For example, you can do searches for "Farmers in Virginia" or "Civil War Maryland" to get a wider variety of search results. You can even type a name of an ancestor.

Happy hunting!!


RS

 

 

Ancestry and Genealogy Collection at Hathi Trust

The Hathi Trust Digital Library Collection is a huge collection of millions of books and other documents digitized from Libraries worldwide that can be accessed for free. Hathi Trust allows a researcher to create public collections compiled from digital sources to make it easier for anyone to explore material related to specific subjects. The Ancestry and Genealogy Collection includes over 2,000 digitized family histories published as early as the 17th century to the 1960s.https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=332123463;sort=date_a;pn=2

RS

American Indian Histories and Cultures

The Houston Public Library system recently added a new research database titled, "American Indian Histories and Cultures" that includes primary historical sources relating to Native Americans in North America. One can browse or search for travel journals, 19th century newspapers, maps and rare books that reference the hundreds of Native American ethnic groups. The American Indian Histories and Cultures database can also be useful as a nontraditional source for genealogists seeking to verify or learn more about their Native American ancestors, as well as the history of particular nations and their historical interactions with Europeans. Researchers can access the American Indian Histories and Culture research under the History and Social Sciences category.http://www.aihc.amdigital.co.uk/

RS

Free Perks with Access Newspaper Archive

One of Houston Public Library's newspaper databases, Access Newspaper Archive, has free features that both customers and staff should find useful. By creating a free account on the website, users can save articles and view past searches.

Access Newspaper Archive through Newspapers Resources or Genealogy Resources on the Houston Public Library website.

After creating an account, go to the "My Account" tab and view the drop down menu.

"My Treasure Box" is where you will store articles. You have two opportunities to save articles: on your search results list and also when you have your article opened. Organize all your saved articles by creating folders within your Treasure Box. Note that when you save from your search results list you can not save to a specific folder, unlike when you save the article as it's opened.

From your search results list you can save directly to your Treasure Box.

You can also save an article to your Treasure Box when you are viewing it, and save it to a specific folder.

Another handy feature that comes with creating a free account is the ability to view past search criteria you've used. It's like a research log keeping track of all the searches you've performed.

Although the "My Archive" tab looks like it's available to you, from what I can tell, you can't really share or send your archive page to other users, unless perhaps they have a paid subscription. I tried to share my archive with someone, but it only sent a generic, ad-type email to that person. Worst yet, it has sent them more ad emails since!

JO

Free people of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past

Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past is a digital collection created by a Louisiana State University Archives compiles historical documents and other resources related to the history of free persons of color in Louisiana from the French to the late antebellum period.

RS

http://lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/fpoc/

Staff Meeting Notes - 04/10/2017

Staff were provided a tour of the Jungman Library by Jungman Manager Dominic Spinelli.

(SK) Family Search Film Return:  Sherry Bush (LDS) officially notified us to no longer send back our short-term loan microfilms to LDS; It is now OK to advise patrons to order short-term loans instead of long-term loans, since neither are being sent back and it will save patrons money; We will eventually consolidate the short-term and long-term lists into a single list of holdings which we hope to have posted on our website by 2018; SB will notify the House volunteers of this policy change as well.

(SK)  Sue's Schedule:  Sue will be at TLA next week (Tue. Apr. 18 thru Sat. Apr. 22)

(SK)  Meeting Room Policy / Cell Phone Use / Food & Drink in the Library:  We are working to standardize both policy understanding and procedural enforcement of these issues so that all staff are on the same page and handle issues in the same way; Also want to increase visibility of these rules for patrons through better signage, information sheets for staff at Reference Desk, etc.  Stay tuned.

(BG/IW) Interlibrary Loan Returns:  When accepting the return of an ILL at the ref desk, be sure to:
(1) confirm that they are completely done  and not just turning it in for the day;
(2) go into SIRSI and immediately discharge item AND make note of discharge date in ILL notebook
(3) put ILL item on BD's or IW's desk

(SB)  Slide Scanner Demo:  SB provided  staff training on how to use the slide scanner, how to set it up for a patron, and how to reserve a time slot for a patron; We may get a few sign-ups since SB's article about it in the Clayton Town Crier just came out April 1st;  Please ask SB if you need a refresher on it or any assistance with it.

SB

Irish Research Webinars

On the Legacy family Tree website (http://familytreewebinars.com/) are a series of 12 webinars by John Grenham on doing Irish genealogy research. Each is about an hour long.  They are called: “Foundations of Irish Genealogy …of 6” or … of 12.” The first 6 were made, then 6 more to continue the series. The first 6 really get you started on research in the beginning of the 1900’s and throughout the 1800’s. They are called:

Foundations of Irish Genealogy 1 of 6: The Raw Materials of Irish Genealogy

 “ 2 of 6: The Major Records I, General Register Office

 “ 3 of 6: The Major Records II, Censuses

 “ 4 of 6: The Major Records III, Church Records

 “ 5 of 6: The Major Records IV, Nineteenth-Century Property Records

 “ 6 of 6: Bringing the Major Records Together

If you want to watch one webinar that brings the record sets together and tells you what happened to the major records of the 1700’s and 1800’s watch John Grenham’s “Why are Irish records so weird?” on the same website.  Free online core collections discussed include:

• Civil Registration (birth/marriage/death) beginning in 1864 --- www.irishgenealogy.ie
• Griffiths Valuation (1847-1864) --- http://askaboutireland.ie
• 1910/1911 Irish Census --- http://census.nationalarchives.ie
• Catholic Parish Registers --- http://registers.nli.ie

All of these webinars tell about the digitization of these records and where you can find them whether they are still original paper, on microfilm, or digitized.  These webinars are on the site where Sue paid for a subscription and gave us her login.

IBW

Digitized Clayton Library books now appearing in HPL catalog

Over the past few years missionaries from the LDS church have digitized books in the Clayton Library collection that were out of copyright. They have been made viewable on the familysearch.org website. Now Clayton Library staff is connecting the links for these digitized books to the HPL catalog. When the process is completed, the link appears in the catalog entry as:

URL:: View the electronic version of this item.

All the customer needs to do is click on that phrase and the digitized book will open in another window. About 280 books have been linked so far, with more to come. This process will take many months, and again, will only be for books already digitized by our LDS missionaries.

JO

Powerful Portal to Texas History

"The Portal to Texas History is a gateway to rare, historical, and primary source materials from or about Texas. Created and maintained by the University of North Texas Libraries, the Portal leverages the power of hundreds of content partners across the state to provide a vibrant, growing collection of resources."

The Portal to Texas History is a powerful site providing historical primary source material from or about The Lone Star State. The site is a project of The University of North Texas Libraries. It presents a diverse range of historical material by integrating content provided by hundreds of partners from around the state.

The material includes newspapers, photographs, maps, legislative documents, personal and business letters, video and audio clips, and many other ephemera. The power of the site comes from the search and filtering it provides. A user can enter a generic search term, then drill down to specific collections, locations, material types, and even dates. 

The portal also provides information on digital standards for archiving. There is even a list of equipment used to preserve and present this valuable resource.

MC

Mining Ancestry.com Record Collections

Ancestry.com is famous for the shaking leaf icon, symbolizing a "hint" of a possible record for someone in your Member Tree. Sometimes it is valuable information, but often the lead is as dead as that ancestor. The most frustrating thing is the seeming random nature of the hints. Someone you aren't actively researching, possibly in a database of dubious value. Not very efficient, but it keeps you clicking through those Ance$try pages.

Randy Seaver and Russ Worthington have developed an extremely useful "hack" of the Ancestry search function that can zero in on those hints with laser-like focus. Randy Seaver is the author of the Genea-Musings site, and was the originator of this workflow. When Ancestry changed its search syntax in 2016, it was Worthington who updated the code. Worthington is probably better known in the genealogical community as Uncle Russ.

Seaver noticed that each online family tree is assigned a unique tree number by Ancestry. He also found that each record collection has its own unique database number. A little trial and error, and he was able to create an Ancestry.com search string that will compare a specific Ancestry Member Tree to a single Ancestry database. The results will be all the matches, or hints, for that database.

For example, I have several lines of research in Indiana. I could do a separate search for each ancestor in Indiana, Death Certificates, 1899-2011. That would be time consuming and always leave me wondering if I missed someone. By using the search string template developed by Seaver and Worthington, I get a tailored list of people in my Member Tree who may be in that dataset. Not every hit is correct, but the accuracy is much higher than doing individual searches.

The blog post outlining this technique can be found here. The post also contains a handy list of frequently used database IDs you can plug into the template.

Happy Hunting!

MC