Tag: web sites

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Family Tree Research is Big Business!

While I was taking a break from researching my family tree I took a look at a finance site this morning. My attention was drawn, because of my interest in Family History, towards a report on Investors.com about a stock that’s been one of the market’s big winners during the past year and a half in the USA.

Read more at:http://www.investors.com/Education/DailyStockAnalysis.aspx?id=576677

It is, of course, Ancestry.com Inc. the group of family history web sites, including Ancestry.co.uk, that many of us use or have probably used in the past to dig into our family tree and dig up things like births, marriages and deaths, census record and more. It became listed in November 2009 and so it is considered to be relatively new to the market.

But already Investors.com reveals that:

” … a lot of people seem to be interested in that information. Sales growth ranged from 36% to 41% during the past four quarters.
* Earnings growth has had some big swings, but came in at a hefty 125% last quarter.
* Looking ahead, analysts see earnings rising 51% this year and 30% next year.
* The stock’s Relative Strength Rating is 96. That rating compares Ancestry’s price performance to the rest of the market. So Ancestry is outperforming 96% of the other stocks in the market.
* Still, its Accumulation/Distribution Rating is a D-. So some big investors have been selling the stock.”

All this shows that, across the world, people like us are so taken by the Family History bug that we are willing to spend money in the pursuit of our hobby.

Now I know, from feed back on my blog and on my facebook page, that some people believe that the subscriptions to sites like these are getting out of their reach. It would seem that the Israeli owned MyHeritage may have understood this trend in the market as it is reported on another website I found called Businessinsider.com, that they are developing a way to share the costs of subscriptions to their site.

MyHeritage, which makes it money from advertising as well as premium subscriptions has a quite clever way of getting family history researchers to pay for premium subscriptions to its site and that is to encourage your friends and family to chip in.

According to Business Insider:

“You can create a “Family Goal” to encourage other family members to subscribe.

This has some precedent, in different ways, in online fundraising campaigns, which encourage donors to reach a goal, and in group buying. Obviously it makes sense in a genealogy site, where a family may be involved in matching their heritage, but it can also make sense for any site that is used by a group (for example a group publishing platform).

It’s a clever mechanic, and it will be interesting to see whether it works for MyHeritage and whether other social sites implement something similar.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/myheritage-social-payments-2011-7#ixzz1RyYprp7U

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Researching family in Jersey, part 1: where to start

An Old Jersey House

You’ve traced an ancestor to Jersey, and you are wondering what you can find out about them. To your frustration, you rapidly discover that birth marriage and death records for Jersey are not available online. So what can you do?

Well, there are at least some useful Internet resources out there to help you get started. The most obvious one is the Census: Channel Island censuses from 1841 to 1901 are available both through Ancestry and Findmypast, and the 1911 census is on FindMyPast and will soon be fully available on Ancestry too.

A word of caution, though: the transcription is not entirely reliable on either site, and on top of that, some database search engines have problems with “divided” surnames like Le Sueur or Du Feu (not to mention Le Vavasseur dit Durell). So here’s a shameless plug: if you are going to do a lot of searching of censuses, you could do worse than purchase the paper census indexes produced by the CIFHS. They are a lot more accurate (well over 99%), and can (with a bit of fiddling) be cross-referenced back to the census images on the Internet.

There are also military records. If you’re looking at Channel Island relatives who served in the First World War, it’s well worth investigating at greatwarci.net – this is the website of the Channel Island Great War Study Group, and they maintain a very comprehensive list of people who served. The list is rather more complete than Ancestry’s transcript of what’s in the National Archives simply because Jersey residents served not only with the British armed forces but also with the Canadians and Australians. There were also at least a couple of thousand French nationals who joined up with the French military, but records for them are very scanty. If you are looking at other periods (and bear in mind Jersey had a garrison to protect it from the French right up until the 1930s), you may find references to service in Jersey on the military records of Chelsea Pensioners kept on FindMyPast, or on the GRO Regimental Indexes of birth marriage and death.

There are other useful resources too on Ancestry. There are three Channel Island postal directories – covering 1839, 1903 and 1927 – that may help to link a name to an address.

You may also be fortunate enough to find online family trees. Ancestry host them, as do Genesreunited, and there are also numerous independently-produced web sites. The general rule of thumb is to treat these as a guideline: they may be inaccurate, or they may tell the truth as far the researcher knows it – but not the whole story.

Aside from this, there’s a couple of major Internet resources based in the Channel Islands that may help you with your research. More about them next time. À bétôt!

Guest blog by James McLaren from the Channel Islands Family History Society


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Find Your Ancestors and Build Your Family Tree The Right Way

Here is a great article for family history buffs that I came across. It teaches new researcher just how to put the Family tree together in the right way. For the more experienced among us it may be a timely reminder!

Find Your Ancestors and Build Your Family Tree The Right Way

By Elizabeth Larsen

You get a little bug in your brain to find your ancestors, at least your grandparents and great grandparents. They might be easy to find right at home in the family Bible or in drawer that is set aside for important pictures and documents.

It is so exciting to find anything on your family and one find leads to another. You may leave home and search the clerk and recorder documents in the courthouse. There you may find marriage licenses and birth and death records. Stop right now and cite those sources.

Citing your sources means writing down the source that you used to find a certificate or document or even a phoned statement from your aunt about her sister. I know this is as exciting as watching snow melt. Get in the habit of documenting your sources right as soon as you start researching your ancestors.

As your adventure unwinds of finding your family, you will be amazed at the number of notes, sheets of paper, pictures, certificates and documents you will accumulate. If you don’t start right off writing down where you found all of those, you will end up with an awful mess.

Without documentation, your hard work will be useless. Some people think you just jump on the internet or visit the courthouse a few times and “voila” a family tree appears. You may spend hours, even years accumulating all the data necessary. If you haven’t written down the sources for all that data, your children, cousins, nieces or nephews, whoever is going to carry on that tree, will not know where to look for that information for their own satisfaction.

If your family has a common name, you may have recorded the wrong family. If you type that online or send it to a relative, that information will be replicated as truth. However, if you have a source for that data, your receiver will be able to check on the accuracy.

If you produce a quality genealogy, you will be able to go back to the original sources and find the facts. And, those facts should be proven. Many counties publish books about all the families in the county. If you use such material, you must cite the source and give credit to the folks who wrote the book.

Family tree software that is available for the computer will help you document your sources. I have to confess that I have now documented my sources in my online tree. I do know the sources, but have been too lazy to put them in. That would be a good New Year resolution.

I also have not kept track of all my research. That is dumb as it wastes valuable time as you look at the same web sites over and over. Or even make trips to the courthouse or wherever to look up the same people.

Quality genealogy and family trees are well worth the effort you put into them. They are priceless keepsakes for the family. Start off right and keep a research log and cite all your sources.

Elizabeth Larsen has researched her family tree for 35 years. For more information on beginning a good genealogy, good tips and good books to help you go to http://www.squidoo.com/basicgenealogy

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elizabeth_Larsen
http://EzineArticles.com/?Find-Your-Ancestors-and-Build-Your-Family-Tree-The-Right-Way&id=5543118

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Secrets to Avoid Barking Up the Wrong Family Tree

Anyone who does research will testify to how frustrating it is to follow leads up blind alleys. In terms of genealogy, this could mean following wrong family lines. Anyone who has had a go at genealogy will undoubtedly be familiar with this scenario. It could be that you have been given a bad lead or perhaps misread some information that you have found. Either way, it mounts up to a lot of wasted time.

So how can this pitfall be avoided? Far from giving you a clever answer, I don’t believe that there are any, there are some general tips that I can give that might help you with your genealogy research. In fact the general principles could be applied to any type of research.

The first thing you should always do is keep a track of all of your resources, every book, every article and every web site. And get detailed information too. If your source was a book for example, get all the detail down to the ISBN number. If your research is by word of mouth, write down names, times and dates. Genealogy is all about information, so backing up your facts is critical.

Following a similar theme, you need to organise yourself and your research. File everything and file things where you know how to locate them. You will find yourself back tracking continuously, so make that side of genealogy as painless as possible.

Check your facts. Not just the literal snippets of information that you pick up, but also the logical order of things. Do the facts that you have collected make sense? Apply common sense to all of your findings and question them.

Do not accept carte blanche research from sources you don’t know. What I mean by this is really the types of research that one often sees advertised, offering to write up your family tree for a fee. Beware of these types of offers. The type of research upon which these tress are founded are often questionable. Save your money and do the research yourself. That is after all, part of the fun of genealogy!

If your family has spread it’s wings across borders, be very careful when collecting facts. As one example, dates can be written differently depending on where in the world you are at the time. Easy mistakes can be made under these circumstances. The date 05/04/75 means something different to people in the USA than it does to people in the UK.

Do not make assumptions about any piece of information that you might come across. Stick with the facts that you yourself have collected. One small assumption can lead you in all sorts of directions that you didn’t really want to go down. Remember that we refer to things differently now than we did in years gone by, so when something is taken from letters 100 years ago, it might not mean the same thing to you as it did to your forefathers.

Join up with web sites that have expertise in genealogy. Talk with like minded people and get the benefit of their experience. Not only will they have tips of their own to share to help you, they will have access to sources you might never have thought of. It is well worth your time talking to other genealogists.

Get an extensive look at one of the most remarkable Genealogy Reference Books there is available on the market today. Discover what going on in genealogy today!

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

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