Fredericksburg Marriage License Project Update – Marriage licenses are now digitized back to 1857. We can almost see the end of this project, which will include marriages back to the mid-1700s! Fredericksburg Circuit Court Digitization Project – Fredericksburg marriages are now digitized through 1889. Fredericksburg is only the second municipality to request database access earlier than 1890. FRGS members are working on this project. The court received funds this winter to allow their land records to be digitized. And their archivist is busy digitizing other records. FRGS member Ray Maki gave his Making Sense of the Census to the Heartsfield… Continue Reading »
Miscellaneous
African American Research Tips
Last Wednesday evening our genealogical society had the honor to host Char McCargo Bah, owner-CEO of Finding Things for U, LLC. Ms. Bah educated those in attendance with her presentation: We Were Always in the Courthouse: What You Can Find on African American Court Records. Char’s Hints: You can’t research African American ancestors without tracing the white population. No one is an island; we are all part of a community. Don’t skip anything when researching genealogy. At some point you’ll come to a brick wall and you’ll need that piece of information you skipped over. If you’re using information that has… Continue Reading »
Save those Images – Now!
It was recently brought to our attention that images on sites like FamilySearch.org are not guaranteed to be there forever. Three years ago we captured an image of a marriage certificate from Cook County, Illinois. Today that image is no longer available on that site. Why? Because FamilySearch contracted with Cook County for those images to be available for about two years only. Now an index of what is available appears on their site and anyone needing a certificate has to go to http://www.cookcountygenealogy.com and pay $15.00! How many times have we, as genealogists, get caught up in the search… Continue Reading »
Virginia Vital Records Available – The Rest of the Story
Dick Eastman’s announcement reads: “Governor Terry McAuliffe recently announced the completion of a two-year, public-private collaboration between the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and Ancestry.com that fully digitizes the state’s vital records. To date, more than 16 million records have been digitized and indexed. Scanned images of the original, public* documents are available online through Ancestry.com. Access to the indexed information on the records is available free of charge through VDH’s Division of Vital Records’ and the Library of Virginia’s websites. So far, birth and death records from 1912 to the present, marriage records from 1936 to the present and divorce records from 1918 to the present have been… Continue Reading »
Fall 2014 Update
Lackawanna County, PA Marriage and other records. http://www.lpa-homes.org/LPA_Applications.htm This is the link to the Recorder of Deeds, if you select Public Records you get a drop down menu. http://www.lackawannacounty.org/index.php/departmentsagencies/county-government/recorder-of-deeds Creative Director at the In-Depth Genealogist – FRGS is pleaed to announce our member Shannon Combs-Bennett has recently joined the leadership team. Congratulations, Shannon. We are so proud.