Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Are Your Major Genealogy Research Challenges?

Randy Seaver is back with this week's challenge (a key word this week) for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  What are your major genealogy challenges — the family mysteries that you haven't been able to crack to date?

2.  Tell us about five of your real genealogy challenges with a short paragraph, and links to blog posts if you have written about them.

3.  Share your challenges in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky, or other social media post.  Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.

Okay, here's my list.

• Who was the biological father of my paternal grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. (1903–1995)?  He was informally adopted by his mother's husband when he was seven months old and used the name Sellers his entire life.  See "I'm Apparently a Sellers via Informal Adoption" and "Looking for Mr. Mundy (or a variant thereof)."

• What happened to my cousin Raymond Lawrence Sellers (1945–?) after his mother put him up for adoption?  I was unable to find anything about Raymond before my aunt passed away, but her other children would still like to know.  See "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:  Your 2024 'Dear Genea-Santa' Letter."

• All of my Jewish research is a challenge, but the especially difficult lines are those who were living in what was Grodno gubernia in Russia, now mostly in Belarus.  The Nazis were particularly thorough in destroying archival records about the Jews in the area.  So my Meckler (Mekler), Novitsky (Nowicki), and Yelsky lines I'm really, really stuck on.  See "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:  Your Best Genealogy Research Find in May 2018."

• And speaking of the Jewish part of my family, I had a few cousins who ended up in Cuba when they fled Eastern Europe.  I have managed to acquire only four records from their time there (which ranged from the late 1920's to the early 1960's).  I don't know if going back to Cuba will help with my research on the Szochermans.  See "A Declaration of Intention — from Cuba."

• My ex's father (and therefore the grandfather of my stepsons), Karm Singh, was from Punjab, India, born when it was still controlled by the British.  The British barely bothered with records for their own people in India; they didn't really care about the Indians.  So I've gotten absolutely nowhere so far on finding any records for the family.  I have been told I would have better luck if I could travel there and talk to people in person.  See "'Finding Your Roots' – Margaret Cho, Sanjay Gupta, and Martha Stewart."

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Who Are Your Spouse/SO's Grandparents and Great-grandparents?

It's time for everyone's favorite weekend genealogical activity, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  Have you researched the ancestors of your spouse (or significant other)?  Please list the names and vital records data for your spouse/SO's grandparents and great-grandparents as in an Ahnentafel report.

2.  Have you written a genealogical sketch and/or biography for each of them?

3.  Share your list of your spouse/SO's ancestors in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky, or other social media post.  Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.

Of course I've researched my ex's ancestors!  What kind of genealogist do you think I am? <grin>

Now, do I have the information handy?  No, because I upgraded my computer a few months ago, and I still haven't been able to hook everything up again and make all my files accessible, including my Family Tree Maker program.

But let's see what I can do from memory . . . .

Hugh's Ancestors

Generation 3 (grandparents)

4.  Kartar Singh Sandhu, born date unknown, probably in Punjab, British India (probably in Khatkar Kalan); married date unknown, probably in Punjab, British India (probably in Khatkar Kalan); died date unknown (probably before August 16, 1947, i.e., before Partition), probably in Punjab, British India.

5.  Raj Kaur, born date unknown, probably in Punjab, British India; died possibly between 1970 and 1971, possibly in Punjab, India.

6.  Hugh Vincent McKenney, born about May 11, 1886, possibly in Belfast, County Down, Ireland; married about 1913, probably in Brockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts; died January 24, 1961, Quincy, Norfolk County, Massachusetts.

7.  Honora McSweeney, born about September 3, 1879, Ballyvourney, County Cork, Ireland; died February 18, 1958, Santa Monica, Los Angeles County, California.

Generation 4 (great-grandparents)

8.  <unknown given name> Singh Sandhu, probably in Punjab, British India (probably in Khatkar Kalan); married date unknown, probably in Punjab, British India; died date unknown, probably in Punjab, British India.

9.  <unknown given name> Kaur, probably in Punjab, British India (probably in Khatkar Kalan); died date unknown, probably in Punjab, British India.

12.  Patrick McKenney (unconfirmed).

13.  Mary McElaney (unconfirmed).

14.  John McSweeney, born about October 1826 in Ballyvourney, County Cork, Ireland; married about 1859 in Ireland, probably in County Cork; died 1910–1914, probably in Brockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts.

15.  Catherine O'Leary, born about December 1834, probably in Ballyvourney, County Cork, Ireland; died December 14, 1921 in Brockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts.

Well, that's what I am able to reconstruct at this time.  I'm pretty sure it's most of the information I have in FTM.  I might have nailed down some specific dates that I don't have here.

I haven't written a genealogical sketch or biography (particularly not with AI) for any of them.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (on Sunday!): RootsTech!!

Here I thought Randy Seaver wasn't going to have a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun during RootsTech, but what does he do?  He makes RootsTech the theme!  But I had no chance to answer the questions yesterday, so I'm playing catch-up today.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

(1) Have you gone to Rootstech?  If so, which years?  

(2) Describe your experience.

(3) Who was your favorite speaker?  

(4) Did you talk with any genealogy "rock stars?"

(5) What was something you learned that you use over and over?

(6) Describe something you enjoyed in the vendor area.

(7) Do you watch the streamed classes live? 

(8) Did you visit the Family History Library?  Describe your experience.

(9) What was your favorite Salt Lake City experience not genealogically related (a restaurant, a landmark, etc.)?

(10) What was a pleasant surprise about your visit that you did not expect?

My thanks to reader Jacquie Schattner for creating this list of questions!!

Okay, here are my answers.

1.  Yes.  I went for the first time in 2015, because I won a contest through Randy's blog, and I have been to the last four, 2017–2020.

2.  I try to attend as many sessions as possible, because I want to get the most out of this kind of educational opportunity.  I usually make a pass through the exhibitor hall once or twice.

3.  My favorite speaker from all the RootsTechs I have attended is probably Myko Clelland of FindMyPast.  I have attended several of his sessions over the years.  I really enjoy his presentation style.

4.  I have spoken with Blaine Bettinger, Thomas MacEntee, and Judy Russell.

5. I learned invaluable information about FamilySearch's Freedmen's Bureau online records collection in 2017 when I attended Ken Nelson's talk about how the collection was assessed, digitized, and indexed.  Because I teach about the Freedmen's Bureau records myself, learning this background information helped me understand the collection better and therefore teach about it better.

6.  My all-time favorite vendor experience at RootsTech was in 2015, when E-Z Photo allowed attendees to scan as many photos as they wanted on very cool Kodak scanners (which then became available in many Family History Centers).  I was able to scan about 350 photos in half an hour, two sided, at high resolution, and 500 total before the end of the conference.

7.  Nope.

8.  I didn't visit the Family History Library this year, but I have during my previous RootsTech trips.  I always found something related to my research.

9.  My favorite Salt Lake City experience not related to genealogy was when I was able to attend concerts by the Utah Symphony, which I did twice.

10.  I had a very pleasant surprise this year, when by pure chance I met someone who is helping coordinate a genealogy society for research in India and the Indian diaspora.  I am still working on trying to find more information about my stepsons' grandfather's family (he was from Punjab).  The group had a meeting on Saturday evening this year, which I was able to attend.  I'm optimistic that this will help a lot of people learn more about their families.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Where Were You in 2000?

For Saturday Night Genealogy Fun this week, Randy Seaver is asking us to reach back in our memories almost twenty years.  Let's see how I do compared to him.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Do you recall what you were doing in 2000?  Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc.?  If this doesn't work for you, what about your parents?

(2) Tell us in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook post.

As usual, I am amazed at Randy's amount of recall.  This is what I could cobble together.

I was living in Oakland, California in the house I had bought in 1993.  I no longer had a housemate.  The friend who had cosigned with me to purchase the house had moved out in 1998.  In mid-1999 I had a friend who needed a place to stay, so I let him have the extra room.  By the time 2000 had rolled around, however, he was gone.  He had gone out drinking on New Year's Eve and had apparently spent the night with a young lady, who then took all of his money and disappeared — which is exactly what the housemate did for several months, being too embarrassed to admit what had happened.  I finally tracked him down three or four months into the year and got him to take all of his stuff out of the house.

In 2000 I had been working for the Seismological Society of America for two years.  I was the publications coordinator — at that point I was not yet editing one of the journals; my work was administrative only — and the "junior Webmaster" — I assisted the primary Webmaster with maintaining and updating the society's site.  I don't remember if I had learned HTML by that point or not.  I was probably doing only really basic stuff with the site.

The Seismological Society of America (SSA) is a scientific membership association.  Most members are seismologists and geologists, with a smattering of volcanologists and other geological specialties.  SSA holds an annual conference, as do many scneitific societies, where members and other attendees present talks and posters on recent research.  The 2000 conference was held in San Diego right after my birthday.  I remember there was a field trip of some sort to Old Town, which was enjoyable if somewhat touristy.  I also remember that was the year I met Shri Krishna Singh.

See, there was an international enclave of seismologists at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National University of Mexico).  Certainly there were scientists from Mexico, but they also had Kostoglodov from Russia, a Japanese man whose name I've forgotten, and Shri Krishna Singh from India.  I met him in San Diego when I heard someone speaking fluent Spanish behind me, turned around to see who it was, and was momentarily nonplussed when I saw a man who pretty clearly seemed to be from the Indian subcontinent.  It took a few seconds for my brain to process, and then I realized who it had to be.  I had communicated with him by e-mail prior to that but had never met him in person.

(Years later, when I was with my stepsons' father, whose father was born in India, I contacted Shri to find out if he had any advice for doing genealogy research in that country.  He told me that after he had been a successful scientist for several years, he went back to India himself to try to find some record of his birth.  He was dismayed when he could find absolutely nothing and learned that his brother had literally made up a birth date for him when he started school.  He told me I was pretty much out of luck.)

In August I'm prettty sure I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for GenCon, the largest gaming convention held in the United States.  I don't remember whose booth I would have been working at.  It might have been Reaper Games or Pegasus Publishing.  I just learned from reading the GenCon page on Wikipedia that the 2000 convention was the first year that Hasbro owned it, having bought Wizards of the Coast the previous year right after the 1999 convention.

There's a good chance that I also attended the Origins Game Fair in Columbus in July.  That's another game convention, I believe the second largest in the United States.  Again I don't remember who I worked for.  If I did go, I probably visited my aunt's sister, who lives in Columbus.

It's almost guaranteed that I went to two of the three game conventions in Los Angeles run by Strategicon:  OrcCon over Presidents' Day weekend and Gateway over Labor Day weekend.  I don't know if I went to the Memorial Day weekend convention, Gamex; it was a significantly smaller convention, and it wasn't always cost effective to attend.

If I still had access to the e-mail address I used at that time, I could easily check on all of this.  Unfortunately, Eudora has not been supported for many years now, and I don't have access to the old files.

All of those conventions used to use up all of my vacation time, so I usually didn't do much additional travel other than that related to work.  I might have gone to one or two professional training seminars for SSA.

I was doing genealogy research back then.  As I recall, I had Family Tree Maker 3.0 for Macintosh (before Ancestry abandoned it!)  installed on my work computer.  I think I had upgraded my home computer to a 486 because I needed a hard drive to use the PC version of FTM I had discs for.

2000 was the year I began volunteering to help at the Oakland Family History Center, after having used the library for several years for research.  I kept helping people, so one day one of the staff asked, "Would you like to volunteer here?"  I said I wasn't Mormon, and he said it didn't matter, so I signed up!

That's about all I can recall for now.  Maybe something else will percolate up through my brain during the next few days.  If so, I'll post an addendum.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Genea-Bucket List

Wish lists are always fun to create, because you can really go nuts with what you would like to do.  And that's what Randy Seaver is asking us to do for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you:

Knowing that a "Bucket List" is a wish list of things to do before death:

(1) What is on your Genealogy Bucket List?  What research locations do you want to visit?  Are there genea-people that you want to meet and share with?  What do you want to accomplish with your genealogy research?  List a minimum of three items, more if you want!

(2) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please give me a link in Comments), a comment to this post in Comments, or a status line or comment on Facebook.

Think big!  Have fun!  Life is short - do genealogy first!

Ok, here's mine:

1.  Locations I want to visit:
• Burlington County, New Jersey for an extended research visit, because that's where most of my father's family was from:  Armstrong, Gauntt, Gibson, Sellers, Stackhouse, and other families
• Trenton, New Jersey, because it's the location of the New Jersey State Archives
• Research repositories in New York City and extended area, because that's where most of my mother's ancestors lived after they immigrated to the United States
• Kamenets Litovsk (now Kamyanyets), Porozowo, and Kobrin (minimum), Belarus, all locations from which members of the Meckler and Nowicki branches of my family came
• Kreuzburg (now Krustpils, Latvia), the (claimed) origin of my Brainin family line
• Kamenets Podolsky (now Kamyenets Podilskiiy, Ukraine) and Kishinev (now Chisinau, Modolva), where Gorodetsky family members were born and lived
• Khotin, now in Ukraine (I think), where one branch of the Gorodetsky-Kardish family lived
• Manchester, England, home to my Dunstan line for several generations
• County Cork, Ireland, particularly Ballyvourney, home to my stepsons' paternal ancestors on the mother's side
• Punjab, India, particularly Khatkar Kolan and Patiala, home to my stepsons' paternal ancestors on the father's side

That's the short list.  I can come up with even more if I try.

2.  People I want to meet and share information with:
• Any relatives I can find in the above-mentioned locations :)
• Relatives with whom I am in electronic contact but whom I have not yet met
• Relatives whose names I have from previous research but whom I have not yet met
• Anyone else I find I'm related to
• After I determine who my grandfather's biological father was (see below), people from that branch of the family

3.  What I want to accomplish with my genealogy research:
• Determine who my grandfather's biological father was
• Meet as many relatives as possible
• Collect photographs of as many ancestors as possible
• Learn as much as possible about my ancestors and other relatives as individuals
• Create books or other collections to share with family members
• Document family members who perished in the Holocaust for Yad Vashem
• Find someone else in the family to carry on my work after I'm gone, because I'm going to assume I can't resolve all the questions before I go

Learning a Little More about Sikh Family History Traditions

When I have met people of Sikh ancestry here in the United States, most of them are far enough removed from traditions in Punjab and India that they have not known "how things worked", such as naming practices, who keeps family information, etc., which of course drove this genealogist nuts.  I lucked out last week and found someone who knew a little more and was generous enough to add to my small accumulation of information.

Previously, I knew that men carry the last name Singh ("lion") and women have the name Kaur ("princess"), but that family names exist also.  I had been told that the tradition was for a man to use the name Singh until he married, so someone might be known as Karam Singh.  When he married, Singh would become his middle name and he would add his family name, e.g., Karam Singh Sandhu.

I had always wondered what happened with the women's names.  My guess was that when a woman married, she probably added her husband's family name after Kaur.  So if Raj Kaur married Karam Singh, her name would become Raj Kaur Sandhu.

The woman I spoke to last week had a hyphenated last name and a middle name of Kaur.  Well, I know Kaur is associated with Sikhs.  We had a few minutes, so I asked if she minded me being nosy.  Lucky me, she said it was ok!  I told her the few bits I just wrote about above and in particular that I was wondering about her hyphenated last name after Kaur.

She started out by saying that one of the original ideas behind Sikhism was to eradicate the castes, so that everyone was equal.  That reasoning was behind the names of Singh for men and Kaur for women — everyone would have the same names, no name could take precedence, everyone would be equal.  No surprise, not everyone was on board with this concept, and so, she told me, three different naming traditions now exist.

Those individuals who thought "no castes" was a great idea took on Singh and Kaur, and that's all they used.  They left behind the family names.  So you had the name Singh, and when you married you were still a Singh.

Many people of higher castes weren't as willing to give their names up.  Some who maintained family names used the system I had already learned about, where you take on the family name after marriage.  But some, such as the family of the woman I met, used the family name from birth.  So if a family used this tradition, Karam's name would always have been Karam Singh Sandhu.

What was particuarly amusing about this woman's specific situation is that her hyphenated name was a combination of her family name and that of her husband, who is Muslim.  The naming tradition with which he is familiar dictates that when a woman marries, she takes her husband's given name as her middle name and his family name as her own.  So if I use the names from above as examples (even though they are Sikh names), Raj Kaur would have become Raj Karam Singh (or possibly Sandhu) on marrying Karam Singh.  The reason my acquaintance maintained her own name is that her college degrees are in that name and she was already an established professional.  She told her husband there was no way she was negating that by taking his name and dropping her own.  As a thoroughly modern woman, but one with knowledge of her people's history, she created her own tradition.

I also discovered last week that there are indeed Sikh family genealogists!  When I learned about Hindu family genealogists on the Sanjay Gupta segment of Finding Your Roots in 2012, I suggested at the time that it could mean Sikh family genealogists existed, especially for prominent families.  Well, I was looking up something on Wikipedia, and it led me to another page, and somehow I found a page about Mirasi, the genealogists of India and Pakistan.  The section on the Mirasi of Indian Punjab specifically mentions Sikh subgroups.  Of course, I still don't speak or read Punjabi, Urdu, or any other Indian languages, so it might be difficult for me to communicate with any of these genealogists if I could find them, but I definitely think progress is being made!  One of these days, I am convinced I will find more family information for my stepsons' grandfather (and maybe even prove that their great-great-grandfather really was the headman of the village).

Happy Independence Day!

Permission granted to use image under terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

After you have enjoyed the fireworks today, take a few minutes and read about fireworks in India, written by a homesick American.

The Night of Shab-i-barāt, Style of Govardhan, Mughal (Delhi), c. 1735–1740

The "Good Maharajah" Is Honored Again

A few years ago I wrote about Prince Jam Sri Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja, called the Good Maharajah, who generously offered to host Polish children, many of them orphans, who were suffering due to changing national alliances during World War II.  He brought the children to his summer palace, and they stayed there through the end of the war.  A school was even set up for them by delegates from the Polish government-in-exile.

In 2012, the Warsaw (Poland) City Council passed a resolution to name a city square after the Good Maharajah.  The square was dedicated in 2013.

An Indian journalist wrote about the Maharajah and the children, first in a Ph.D. dissertation in 2006, and then in a book published in 2013.

Now a new exhibition at the United Nations is honoring this man.  The exhibition, which began on April 22, was created by Robert Kostro, Polish historian and director of the Museum of Polish History, for India's Mission in New York.

Loving Day

On one hand there was an Irish Catholic girl from Brockton, Massachusetts, near Boston.  She became a nun in a nursing order.  She served at a hospital in Kentucky, then left the order and worked as a nurse in Baton Rouge and San Antonio, finally going to Santa Monica, California, where two of her aunts lived.

On the other hand there was a young Sikh man from Khatkar Kalan, in Punjab, India.  He came to the United States to go to college.  Whether or not he did so remains unverified, but he stayed in the Southern California area, where his uncle lived, also ending up in Santa Monica.

The young Sikh fell in love with the beautiful redhead he passed almost daily on his way to work.  At some point he stopped and talked with her.  Things went on from there as these things do, and the young man converted to Catholicism to marry his love in 1948.

Though I'm sure there were many in Santa Monica who commented on the marriage, this couple was lucky to live in California, where they were allowed to marry.  If they had been living in the South, the young man's dark skin would probably have prevented their marriage.  Almost twenty years after they married, the Supreme Court struck down laws preventing interracial marriage in the case of Loving v. Virginia (1967).  And now every year on June 12, we celebrate Loving Day and the right of a man and woman to marry whom they choose.  And soon, perhaps, we will celebrate another victory for more loving couples.

More Newspaper Links Added to Wikipedia Page

I was stunned when I discovered I had not written about new links on the Wikipedia newspaper archives page since last December.  It has been on my list of things to do, but somehow it kept slipping further down the list.  I'm glad I have caught up for a while, at least a little.  This batch has some locations with little available online, such as Kenya and Puerto Rico, plus I personally found the Belvidere newspaper obituary index very useful for my own family research.  If you're researching in Iowa, there are six new archives listed.  And all of these new links are free, just like last time!

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive on the Vanderhoof Public Library site has three digitized area newspapers.

• Ontario, Canada:  Digital Kingston has a site with newspapers going back to the early 19th century.  It overlaps with Kingston papers in the OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers Collection but has some earlier and some additional newspapers available.

• Ontario, Canada:  Thunder Bay Public Library has several downloadable PDF index files available on its site for birth/marriage/death notices, obituaries, social news, and even some World War I references for 1914.

• India:  The University of Heidelberg has digitized copies of most of the 1781 issues of Hicky's Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser.

• Israel:  Five newspapers have been added to the online holdings of the National Library of Israel, three published in Israel and two in New York.

• Kenya:  Virginia Tech hosts a digital archive of the Kenya Gazette.  Currently the collection runs from 1972–1989; plans are to digitize all issues of the Gazette, going back to the 1890's.

• Puerto Rico:  The Gazeta de Puerto-Rico has been added to the Chronicling America collection.  The date range is 1837–1893, but there are gaps.

• Arkansas:  Index to Benton Courier (Saline County) obituaries from 1930–present, downloadable as PDF files.

• California:  The San Mateo County Genealogical Society has downloadable PDF files with indices of newspaper birth/marriage/death notices and of obituaries (along with indices to various county records).

• Illinois:  The Evanston Public Library has a searchable index for the Evanston Review that currently covers 1925, 1966–1972, and 1999–2004.

• Iowa:   The Appanoose County Historical Society has an online archive of Centerville newspapers.

• Iowa:  The Monroe County Historical Society has an archive of newspapers for Albia and other locations in the county.

• Iowa:  The Museum of Danish America has digitized some Danish-American newspapers and a scrapbook.

• Iowa:  Sioux County has a second historical newspaper archive site, this one through Advantage Preservation.  The coverage is not the same as that through Newspaper Archive.

• Iowa:  Taylor County has an online collection of digitized historical newspapers ranging from 1859–2009.

• Iowa and Missouri:  O'Dell's Abstracted Newspaper Index covers southwest Iowa and northwest Missouri for 1859–2014.

• Minnesota:  The Great River Regional Library has an obituary index for the St. Cloud Times that covers 1928–2013, which is helpful, because the Times itself is available only for recent years via a ProQuest subscription database.

• New Jersey:  An index of obituaries and other death announcements has been created for the Belvidere Apollo/Intelligencer/Apollo Journal (as with many newspapers, the name changed over the years), downloadable as PDF files.  So far the index runs from 1826–1914, and the volunteer creating it plans to finish the entire run of the paper, through 1953.  I am thrilled this index is available online, because my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers published the newspaper under the Intelligencer name.  The index includes obituary listings for him, my 3rd-great-grandmother Rachel G. Sellers, my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, and a few more relatives.  (Though I unfortunately did not find a listing for Cornelius' step-brother, William/John Mathews.)  I will soon be sending a request for photocopies to the Warren County Library!

• New York:  The Troy Irish Genealogical Society has created an index of death notices appearing in Lansingburgh newspapers from 1787–1895.  It also has an index of death notices collected by the Burden Iron Company in Troy.

• Ohio:  Obituary indices for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1841–2012, downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Barberton Public Library has indices to obituaries in four local newspapers, covering 1892–1960.  They are downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Huron County library has online birth announcement and obituary indices for the Willard area.  I can't find a way to tell what years they cover.

• Oklahoma:  The Muskogee County Genealogical Society has an index to all deaths that were found in Muskogee newspapers, not just from obituaries and death notices.

• Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania State University is hosting a 1937–2014 obituary index for the Centre Daily Times.  Many years also have images.

• Pennsylvania:  The Lititz Public Library has a downloadable PDF file with an obituary index for 1877–1998 for two local newspapers.

• Rhode Island:  The Cowl, the student newspaper of Providence College, has been digitized from its beginning in 1935 through 1980, except for 1944–1945 (which I suspect will be added soon).

• Washington:  The Bainbridge Review 1941–1946 has been digitized and made freely available on the Kitsap Regional Library Web site.  The newspaper is significant because its publishers consistently published editorials railing against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  The project is also special because volunteers transcribed the articles instead of relying on OCR.

• United States National:  Transport Topics, the national newspaper for the trucking industry (I had no idea there was such a thing), has begun to post archival content free on its site to celebrate its 80th anniversary.

In other newspaper news, there was another sighting of a rare newspaper on Antiques Roadshow. In Charleston, West Virginia, a woman came in with issues of the 1945 Oak Ridge Journal bound in two books.  Oak Ridge, Tennessee was the town created to house people working on the Manhattan Project.  The woman's mother was the editor of the newspaper.  Looking at the paper's listing on Chronicling America, it seems that mostly a few scattered copies are known to exist, and certainly not the entire year for 1945.  As I said when a four-year run of the Confederate newspaper The Family Friend was appraised last year, how do we find this woman and convince her that these papers should be digitized and shared with others?  At least in this situation I think it's less likely she'll be tempted to turn around and sell them.

Unfortunately, I've had a negative experience recently with online newspaper listings.  I read a blog post where someone copied an entire section from the Wikipedia newspaper page, literally word for word — even including the internal Wikipedia links — and wrote about it as though it were their own work.  So many people believe that because something is on the Internet, they can just copy it and not credit where it came from.  Conveniently for the "author", the blog is not set up to accept comments.  Well, if nothing else, I consider this type of behavior a great way to learn who I would not want to work with or trust for research.

"Finding Your Roots" Begins Its New Season

The new season of Finding Your Roots has started, but I'm running a week behind on viewing, because PBS is airing the program against NCIS.  I'm sorry, but I've found it easier to watch Finding Your Roots at alternative times than to wait for NCIS to appear in my On Demand menu.  So maybe I'm not totally obsessed by genealogy after all.

As anyone knows who has watched both programs, the premises behind Finding Your Roots and Who Do You Think You Are? are very different.  A WDYTYA celebrity starts out by talking about a specific question he wants to know the answer to or wondering if something in her family background has any relationship to what she is like.  The program sends its celebrities around the country and sometimes the world in search of documents, even though they are not doing the research themselves.  We watch the process of discovery and follow one clue to another (though as I often comment, the path shown may have huge leaps and departures from logic).  The question voiced at the beginning is handled by the end of the episode.

In Finding Your Roots, on the other hand, we do not see any of the research.  Each episode has a theme of some sort and three to four celebrities whose stories tie into that theme.  It would appear that the theme and a predetermined narrative are chosen, and the producers then look for celebrities whose stories fit, though it's possible they have a pool of celebrities they research and then put together themes and narratives based on what they find.  Our host, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents each celebrity with a completed book, and during the episode a few items are highlighted and sometimes discussed.  We are completely removed from the research process and rarely have knowledge of how information was discovered or how one piece connects to another.  We're very much on the outside looking in.  From my perspective as a genealogist, there's little to comment on, because it is impossible to follow the flow of research.  All that's left is an entertainment piece and possibly finding out about a new research resource, such as the episode featuring Sanjay Gupta, in which I learned about the existence of some written family records for Indians prior to Partition.

So far I have seen only the first episode of the new season, "In Search of Our Fathers", featuring Stephen King, Gloria Reuben, and Courtney Vance.  For differing reasons, each of the celebrity guests grew up not knowing their fathers.  As expected, various discoveries were made about their fathers, and they came away knowing more than they had.  But some things puzzled me.  For example, Gloria Reuben said that she had not been able to learn the names of her father's parents from her mother.  The way the story was presented, it appeared that Reuben's parents had married in Canada.  Canada's marriage licenses require both parties to list their parents' names.  So why was the information not available from that resource?  Did they not marry in Canada?  Did they marry at all?

Then I thought that several parts were phrased poorly.  When discussing King's father's decision to change his name from Pollock, Gates acted surprised that the researchers were not able to find out why he changed it.  What's the big surprise?  It's rare to find documentation of a name change in the early 20th century for anyone.  When Gates talked about the influenza pandemic, he said it "wreaked havoc across the country."  That's quite an understatement, considering that part of the pandemic's infamy comes from the fact that it was worldwide.  And when speaking of Vance's father, in the beginning Gates said he was a foster child, then later used the word adopted without any explanation for the change in terminology.  The foster care system and adoption are very different legally and emotionally for the people involved; the terms are not interchangeable.

On a personal level, I don't like hopping back and forth between each celebrity's story.  I find that technique merely emphasizes the lack of continuity that is inherent in not following the research process.  I find Gates' habit of reading directly from his notes to be somewhat stilted.  I also don't like Gates' heavy reliance on DNA and how much credibility he gives autosomal results.  Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist, has explained very clearly that these numbers are essentially "cocktail party conversation" and nothing more.  On the other hand, something I really enjoy about Finding Your Roots is that since it's on PBS, I don't have to suffer through an Ancestry ad during every commercial break; they're limited to one appearance in each of the beginning and ending underwriter sequences.

Maps, World War I Heroes, Jewish Sperm Donors, and a Synagogue

I've recently come across some interesting opportunities to help with genealogy projects.  Maybe you can assist with one of them!

The New York Public Library is looking to crowdsourcing from "citizen cartographers" to identify details on digitized 19th-century New York City atlases.  The Building Inspector project allows you to use a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone.  If you know New York City well, you'll be a valuable addition to the team.  The library plans to use the information to make the maps interactive and link them to other historical digitized documents.

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In conjunction with the UK's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the British newspaper The Sun has launched a campaign to create a photo database of the gravesites of Victoria Cross (VC) servicemen, and to bring attention to the sites that are most in need of restoration.  Some of the VC honorees date back to the Crimean War and the 1857 Indian Mutiny.  A list of 544 VC burials is included on the Web page.

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A memorial plaque for Second Lieutenant John Douglas Lightbody of the Royal Air Force, who died November 4, 1918, just days before the end of World War I, will be unveiled in Scheldewindeke, Belgium on November 10, 2014.  The organizers of this year's ceremony are looking for any living relatives of Lt. Lightbody, both to share information about him and possibly to attend in person.  An online article has more information about Lightbody and the search for relatives, including the e-mail address of a person to contact.

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Attention Jewish Men:  Did you donate sperm during the 1980's?  Seeking light-featured Jewish men who acted as anonymous sperm donors in the Los Angeles/UCLA area, between (but not limited to) 1981–1985.  Your offspring are seeking medical information.  Please contact 1980donor@gmail.com (for anonymous communication, create a new Gmail account).

Please feel free to share this with *everyone* you know, repost, attach to mailing lists, etc.  The more people who see this, the more likely it is that 1980donor@gmail.com will find the person he is searching for.

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I never post about fundraising efforts, but this is a little different.  A film raising money via crowdfunding is pledging half of the money to help restore the subject of the film.  The synagogue of Sabbioneta, Italy is a UNESCO World Heritage site but has suffered damage due to recent earthquakes.  The film, an independent comedy, is about a tombstone found in the town's Jewish cemetery.  Read more about the film and the synagogue here.

More Newspapers Listed on the Wikipedia Newspaper Archives Page

Maybe because of the holiday season, I didn't find many new links for newspaper databases over the past couple of months.  On the other hand, all of the new additions are free!  You can find all of these links added to the Wikipedia newspaper archives page.

• British Columbia:  The Herald (under various names over time) for 1900–2013 has been made available through the Terrace Public Library.
• Philippines:  The Manila Standard from 1984–2003 is online.
• Scotland:  The South Ayrshire Libraries now have an online index of births, marriages, and deaths that appeared in the Ayr Advertiser from 1801–1835.
• Connecticut:  The Wilton Public Library has searchable indices for obituaries (1937–2005) and articles (1997–2005) published in the Wilton Bulletin.
• Montana:  The Big Timber Pioneer (1893–1949) and Saco Independent (1912–1922) have been added to the Montana Memory Project.
• Ohio:  The Warren County Genealogical Society has lists of names of obituaries published in county newspapers, covering 1810–2010.  New names are added regularly.
• Ohio:  The Williams County Public Library has a searchable obituary index that covers 1862–2013, with gaps in coverage for years and newspapers.  The library will also send copies of the obituaries.
• Washington:  The Ellensburg Daily Record from 1885–2005 is online.
• Washington:  The North Olympic Library System has an obituary index that covers 1916–present.  It isn't clear from the site whether the obituaries are only for Port Angeles.
• Multistate:  The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University has a map plotting the growth of newspapers across the U.S., created using data from the Library of Congress Chronicling America database.  The map also works as an alternative way to search for newspapers from the Chronicling America collection.
• Multistate:  The Library of Congress has a page with links to directories from 1869–1920 listing American newspapers that were being published.
• Worldwide:  The Handwritten Newspapers Project is really interesting.  It lists items from around the world, with dates ranging from 59 B.C. to A.D. 2011.  One handwritten Indian newspaper has been published in Urdu since 1927.

Have you found anything interesting in a historical newspaper recently?

"Nilgiri Hills: Christian Memorials 1822–2006"

Another resource for Anglo-Indian research will be available soon.  Dr. John C. Roberts and N. P. Chekkutty wrote a book earlier this year on Christian burials and memorials in towns of India's Malabar coast, which was published by the South India Research Association (SIRA).  Now SIRA, a volunteer group of researchers and scholars registered in New York, is getting ready to publish Roberts and Chekkutty's second book, Nilgiri Hills:  Christian Memorials 1822–2006.  The comprehensive research took two years and covered cemeteries and many isolated graves.

The Nilgiri Hills book will be about 500 pages, with detailed maps of the cemeteries and of coffee and tea estate locations.  It will also include full-color reproductions of historical images of the area.

As with the previous publication, this will be a limited edition.  A production run of 250 copies is the only printing planned.  The anticipated release date is February 15, 2014.  The prepublication subscription price is 1,000 Rs.; after publication the price will rise to 1,250 Rs.  Postage outside India is 500 Rs; postage within India is free.  You can place your order through info.sira@yahoo.in.

Actually, they said that there would be a less expensive second printing of the Malabar book, but I haven't heard anything more about it.  In this age of computers and electronic publications, perhaps they might want to consider some form of e-book.

Unidentified Portraits from India during the Raj

The illustrations in question were done in 1908, most likely in Calcutta, by an Englishman named Whitwell Tryon Nash, who spent a number of years in India prior to World War I.  He was a civil engineer and worked with both railroads and waterworks in places such as Calcutta, Cawnpore, and Kasara (to use the spellings current at that time).  After serving with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the war, Nash returned to India in late 1919 and was there for some indeterminate time before immigrating to Canada, where he died in 1948.

His descendants have a number of these illustrations—clearly caricatures of people he knew and perhaps worked with—and are trying to identify them. If you think you might have an inkling of who any of these people might be, they would appreciate hearing about it.  Nine portraits are posted online; contact information is on the site.

Golf, anyone?

British Oral History Project

Niamh Dillon, a British Library staff member, is researching a Ph.D. thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London, on migration within the British Empire in the 20th century, and particularly on the lives of British people living in India in the period leading up to independence from Britain. She hopes to record interviews with people who experienced life in India before independence, and their subsequent experiences after moving to Britain post-independence.

If you or someone you know is willing to help her with a recorded interview, please contact Dillon by e-mail at n.dillon@gold.ac.uk or niamhdillon@hotmail.com, or by post to Niamh Dillon, National Life Stories, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB.

All recordings will be conducted in accordance with the ethical principles laid down by the Oral History Society. With the interviewee's consent, the recordings will be archived at the British Library, where Dillon has been managing oral history projects since 2003.

Wikipedia Newspaper Page Additions

Several new links have been added to the Wikipedia newspaper archives page, most of them European.  This time around, all the new links are free.

• Denmark (first link for this country!):  Illustreret Tidende [Illustrated Journal], 1859–1924.  Magazine-style newspaper.  Browsable by volume or year; includes two searchable indices.  Uses DjVu, or you can download PDF's.
• France:  La Gazette de France, 1786.  Downloadable PDF that includes issues 1–104.
• France:  Mercure François, 1605–1643.  Browsable by date, but no search.
• Germany:  Augspurgische Ordinari Postzeitung [Augsburg Post], 1768–1839.  The paper carried national, scholarly, historical, and economic news.  This one has a search function.  Plans are to digitize issues through 1848.
• Ireland:   Free State (1922), Hibernia Magazine and Dublin Monthly Panorama (1810–1811), Leprecaun (1905–1909), and Walker's Hibernian Magazine (1811).  These are part of the Villanova University Digital Library.
• Netherlands:  Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1618–1995.  Historical Dutch newspapers from the Dutch East Indies, Netherlands Antilles, Suriname, and the United States.  The search allows you to specify distribution location and type of article; currently the options to choose newspaper title and place of publication are not available.
• Sri Lanka (another new country listing!):  Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union, 1908–2005.  This is posted as PDF files with no search.  The site also has many genealogies and information about the Dutch Burgher Union itself.
• Switzerland:  Bande Mataram ("Monthly Organ of Indian Independence"), 1913–1914.  This was published in English.  Three issues are available.
• Alaska:  Petersburg Herald (1924–1926), Petersburg Press (1926–1931), Petersburg Weekly Report (1914–1924), and The Progressive (1913–1914).  These are online at the Petersburg Public Library site, which allows you to search or browse.
• New York:  Fatherland (1914–1917), The Vital Issue/Issues and Events (1914–1919), and World War (1914–1916).  These were German-American publications in English, published in New York City.  World War was a translation of the German publication Weltkrieg.  These are part of the Villanova University Digital Library.
• Pennsylvania:  Clan-na-Gael Journal (13 issues between 1902–1918) and Irish Press (1918–1922).  These were Irish-American newspapers published in Philadelphia.  They are also part of the Villanova University Digital Library.

Antique and Vintage Maps of India Discovered

1863 Map of Delhi

Last year, an Indian woman who was walking around London and browsing through items on the roadside found a large collection of old maps of India.  Though she originally planned to cut them up and reuse them for other purposes, friends advised her to have someone evaluate what she had found.  What she had thought about turning into placemats and coasters turned out to be some of the Survey of India's first maps of India, ranging from 1871 to 1928.  India was part of the British Empire during this period.

Some of the more significant items are a 1912 map of Delhi (now Old Delhi) and a 1928 map of Mt. Everest.  Also dating from about 1928 are accurately detailed travelers' maps of two UNESCO World Heritage sites, the Ajanta and Ellora caves in the state of Maharashtra.  The earliest maps are for areas that are in or near present-day Bangladesh.  The maps were purchased by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, and about 30 of the items were displayed in their offices until the end of April.

Maps are useful in genealogy because they show the development of cities and other areas over time and often include buildings and roads that may be connected to family members.  For example, the Delhi map shows the early British occupation of the city and the areas of the city where the native Indian population lived.

More information about the maps is in a Times of India article.

A Vintage Jewish Indian Cookbook

I just learned about a blog called "The Shiksa in the Kitchen", written by a recent (2010) convert to Judaism who has been exploring the world of Jewish cooking, including kashrut (the rules for keeping kosher).  She posted about a copy of an Indian Jewish cookbook published in Calcutta about 1922.  I found a few references to the cookbook online, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere, and I'm sure it was printed in only small quantities to begin with.  She mentioned it has "several kosher Jewish Indian recipes", but I'm not sure if all of the recipes are kosher.

I love Jewish cooking and Indian cooking and now just have to find a copy of this book!  One year for Passover I even cooked an Indian-themed seder, including mulligatawny-spiced matzoh ball soup and an egg curry.

Recipes and food traditions can sometimes impart information about family history.  This cookbook, for example, probably has recipes that follow Sephardic traditions, because most of the Jewish communities in India had Sephardic roots.  But first I need to find a copy of the cookbook to read the recipes ....

European Christian Burials in Malabar, India

Earlier this month a new book on Christian burials and memorials in towns of the Malabar coast was published.  Malabar:  Christian Memorials 1737–1990 was written by Dr. John C. Roberts, a social anthropologist, and N. P. Chekkutty, a journalist in Calicut.  It details Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English gravestones in the region. The book includes a transcribed list of Europeans buried in several cemeteries in Kannur, Thalassery, and Mahe during the past two centuries, based on burial registers maintained in various churches.

The book lists burials at St. John's Anglican Church and Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Kannur, St. John’s Anglican Church and Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church at Thalassery, and St. Theresa’s Church and cemetery at Mahe.  Burials at the German Basel Mission cemeteries at Kannur and Thalassery are also included.

There is information about European regiments and native troops stationed at the Cannanore Cantonment and details on deaths in the armed forces.  Most entries have information on the cause of death.

The book was published by the South India Research Associates (SIRA), a network of researchers and scholars registered in New York.  It has two maps and many photographs.  The current publication is a limited deluxe edition with historic illustrations.  It can be ordered through info.sira@yahoo.in; the order will be processed through Thejas Books in Calicut.  A less expensive second printing is scheduled to be available on Flipkart in India and Alibris internationally in the near future.

Dr. Roberts has finished a second book, this one on churches and planter burials in the Nilgiri Hills.  Plans are to release it in early 2014.  He is now working on other areas of Malabar, including Portuguese burials and the Dutch Cemetery at Kochin.

Some of Dr. Roberts' research led him to Thrissur, where the tombstone of a man with a family connection to Christopher Columbus is now located.  The article mentions that all this information being collected could be good for tourism, as people look for where their ancestors are buried.  Gee, you think?