Occupations

In researching a family on Minnesota on the 1880 census, I found an occupation that I hadn't seen before: gooser. (Honestly!) Which leads one to wonder in a city such as St. Cloud, whether flocks of geese were keep? Or did he defeather the geese? Or did he eliminate the geese, as a possible nusiance? I have no clear answer. Other family members worked as a baker, as a dressmaker, a laborer, while the younger children went to school. Fascinating stuff, as it always is!

Success in the search!!!!

Teoma as a search engine

I utilized Teoma as a genealogy search engine today and had two surprises- one was the fact that they have merged with ask.com. Secondily was how weak the responses were to my genealogical queries. (I didn't care for the display on the search result page either.) While some of the entries I've seen before surfaced, others did not and while I know that this IS the main reason to utilize sevral search engines, I found few links to genealogical message boards and web pages, which one would believe would be a top ranked query response. So the search for the perfect combination of genealogical search engines AND the ancestry of Benjamin Dupuy of colonial South Carolina continues!!!!!

RootsFest April 22

Coming up here in the Twin Cities on April 22 - RootsFest! A local Family History Center is hosting the event that morning at the New Brighton location, just off of Highway 94 on Silver Lake Road. Start time is 9:30 and they plan to end at noon, so I believe that with 45 minute sessions, you would be able to attend three sessions. At this point I know of a few of the topics and will give a more complete list when it becomes available. Overview of Immigration to the U.S., Genetic Genealogy, Scandanavian Genealogy, and FamilySearch.org. Always good to try to get to a few conferences each year to stay current and network with other obsessed researchers!

Verification?

Once again, in using one of the major genealogical database sites, I find a lineage extended back further than my research had taken me and also across the ocean to the "mother country" for about 500 years. Quite impressive, right?

However, NONE of the documentation is included, nor a way to contact the researcher to discover the sources. How can we ask for serious academic recognition when we don't document properly? Any reliable data should be cited/fottnoted or the submitter runs the risk of submitting a suspect conclusion and suspect pedigree.

What do you think?

Archiac Medical Terms

We've all read some medical terms on documents for genealogy and family history that leave us scratching our heads! Now there's an online source to help in several languages and promising to expand to most European languages, given time. Check it out at www.antiquusmorbus.com

Right now, English and German are the main languages available. (Now you can answer some of those bizarre death certificate causes of death!)

"Internet Genealogy"

I received my first copy of the magazine "Internet Genealogy", which promises to be a valuable addition to the market for serious researchers. I haven't finished my read-through yet, but the publishers picked well-known authors to launch the maiden edition with and I suspect that equally fine articles will follow. The publisher said the overall response and initial number of subscribers surprised him and he believed that the time had arrived for just such a magazine.

Some of the topics included in this issue were: Linkpendium, a detailed discussion of how to use Google in your genealogy searches, Polish Genealogy sites, Canadian records, and the Illinois State Archives. It's worth checking out and I'll continue to update you on the magazine.