I am so excited about the most recent press release from FamilySearch.org!

Free Classes Make Genealogy Expertise Accessible Anywhere

SALT LAKE CITY–It is rare that Marcia Covington can make the trip from her home in State College, Pennsylvania, to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Now, however, people like Covington can take classes from the world-famous library without ever leaving home.

The FamilySearch Family History Library is now making its popular classes available at FamilySearch.org, where anyone anywhere in the world can access them for free at a time that is convenient for them. The classes have been offered on-site in Salt Lake City for years. Until now, attendance has been limited to those patrons who are fortunate to live in the surrounding community or happen to be visiting the library as part of a research trip. Making the classes available online allows access to many more patrons.

“Most people do family history whenever they can fit it in their busy lives, on evenings, holidays, weekends, and so forth. Whether you are a beginner or experienced researcher, you can choose subjects of interest to you from the available classes and watch them anytime and anywhere,” said FamilySearch Community Services Manager Diane Loosle.

The online classes are a great complement to the free personal research assistance the Family History Library offers to its patrons in Utah and through its family history centers worldwide. According to Loosle, the free online classes are one part of the growing number of tools FamilySearch is building for its online patrons. That is great news to people like Covington.

“Very few people have the opportunity to come to Salt Lake City, but these classes give me the same access at home as I can get in Utah,” Covington said. “Our distances here are pretty long, and for some people it is a 40-minute drive to the nearest family history center. These classes make it possible to get training in your home whenever you want, and it is so nice that it is free.”

There are currently 23 Family History Library classes available online, with subjects ranging from European research to United States military records. The most popular offerings are the Beginning Research Series for Ireland and England and a class on descendancy research.

The classes vary in length from 6 to 58 minutes, with most lasting about 25 minutes. The format of the class varies, depending on the content being presented. One type of class shows a video that alternates between the teacher and the PowerPoint slides. Another kind of class integrates video of the presenter, the accompanying PowerPoint slides, and links to supplemental materials all in one screen.

Several of the classes are interactive, such as a course on reading German handwriting. In these classes, the teacher is represented with still photographs and audio narration, and the student can actively participate in learning activities, such as matching English and German characters or transcribing selected words from a document. As a student types, the correct text appears in green and incorrect answers appear in red, providing immediate feedback.

FamilySearch is continually adding new online offerings; classes on how to read English handwritten records are currently in development. All of the classes can be accessed on www.familysearch.org by clicking on Free Online Classes on the home page.

ABOUT FAMILYSEARCH INTERNATIONAL
FamilySearch International is the largest genealogy organization in the world. Millions of people use FamilySearch records, resources, and services to learn more about their family history. To help in this great pursuit, FamilySearch has been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years. FamilySearch is a nonprofit organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Patrons may access FamilySearch services and resources free online at FamilySearch.org or through over 4,600 family history centers in 132 countries, including the renowned Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

If you plan to publish your family history online (which isn’t a bad idea! It’s a great way to share information with distant relatives and current relatives who might not share your enthusiasm for research), I would like to share one of my favorite examples of an Italian American ancestral web page done right!

The Mangiaracina family web page is just brimming with all sorts of helpful and interesting resources for their particular family–maps, photographs, stories, and pedigrees–a perfect model for anyone who would build their own family site.

When sharing your family tree with your loved ones, multimedia is a good way to make history come alive in the hearts and minds of those who might not be the history buffs that we are.

So check out the Mangiaracina’s web site and build your own. Then send me a link, and I’ll be sure to tell others about your site, too. Who knows–maybe I’ll help connect you with another site, assembled by your long, lost Italian cousins!

I heartily recommend this fabulous book to anyone with Italian ancestry who wants to explore their family history:

But now you want to climb back further in time, exploring the branches in your family tree that originated in Italy or elsewhere. The bad news is that overseas records are not available online, but the good news is that they are available to you in the form of microfilm!

The Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah has been filming birth, marriage, and death records for Italy and hundreds of other countries–their collections are extensive, with some towns’ records going back as far as the 1500′s!

Here’s how you can look to determine whether or not your ancestor’s hometown is available to you on microfilm:

1. Go to www.FamilySearch.org. Click on the “Library” tab at the tops of the page, then the “Library Catalog” tab that appears in the drop box, as seen here:

2. Click on “Place Search” from the menu buttons that appear on the Library Catalog’s page, as seen here:

3. Enter the name of your ancestor’s town of origin in the “Place” box, then enter their country of origin in the “Part of” box that you will see, as pictured here. For example, if I were looking for records from the town of Ottone in Italy, my search query would look like this:

4.  After clicking the “Search” button, you will see a list of results if this town’s records have been filmed. If the town’s records have not been filmed, you won’t see any results. Here is a look at the types of results you should expect to see:

5. Click on the record set you would like to work with first, and you will see a more detailed explanation of what is contained in that record set.

6. Next, click on the box that says “View Film Notes” in the upper right-hand corner of your screen:

7. You will then be taken to an inventory of the microfilms and their films numbers. On the left-hand side of the screen, you will see each film listed with its contents:

8. On the right-hand side of the screen, you will see a call number assigned to each film. If, for example, you suspect that Great Grandma was born sometime in the 1820′s, you would want to order the first film in the list above, because that film contains “Battesimi” for the years “1673-1823.” So you go to the right to the film numbers, and you see this list of call numbers:

9. You write down the call number of the films you want, then take them to your local Family History Center, and they order the film to come from Salt Lake for you to look at. You have to pay a six dollar shipping fee, then the film stays at that center where you can research it for a period of time (time allotted depends on the rental time you chose).To find a Family History Library, go back to Step #1, and select “Family History Centers” from the “Library” tab at the tops of the FamilySearch.org page. You will see a screen like this, where you can enter your information to find a Family History Center near you:

10. Once you get your film, you scroll through its contents, looking for Great Grandma’s baptism record. Here is an example of an Italian Baptismal record, one that I printed off of a microfilm from my local Family History Center:

Laura Schenone’s Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family  is a touching and poignant memoir of the author’s search for authentic Italian family recipes–a journey that becomes more than a recipe hunt, as the author comes to know much more about her family, her ancestors, and her self as a result of this culinary quest.

Here’s a video where you can watch the author making her famous ravioli:

I recommend this book to everyone I know–regardless of heritage–for the way it so beautifull illustrates the way a personal memoir should be: open and honest, entertaining, and worth the time any reader would dedicate to its pages. With this book, I was delighted to find all of those things and more, as I learned not only the fascinating tricks and techniques to authentic homemade ravioli cooking (you’ll never eat out again!), but also the way a family’s triumphs and tragedies are more easily understood when applying a historical perspective, the perspective that says, “Hey, your ancestors had it rough, too, so you’re not alone. Now stop whining and enjoy life! Live, love, laugh, and make fresh ravioli!”

Okay, so it’s really not that simple, but I’m sure you get my gist: that history makes the present more palatable for those of us who struggle to understand our immediate and extended families and their respective “issues.”

Can you believe I got all of that from a book about ravioli? Oh yeah–read it yourself, and see what YOU find, too!

The site is in Italian, so if you do not speak or read the language, here is some help:

• Type your ancestral surname into the box on the left under the word “cognome”
• Click the red arrow
• The resulting map shows the distribution of that particular surname in present-day Italy

Not only did mom’s efforts spark an interest in family history, but they also instilled in me a love for my predecessors and a desire to honor their name–my name. As a result, I lived my teenage years in a manner that would reflect well on our family name, and avoided some of the common traps of adolescence (rebellion, partying, etc) as a part of this effort.

Today I am highlighting a product that I recommend to families who want to instill a similar familial pride in their Italian American family. I recommend watching the following documentary together.: The Italian Americans, a History Channel special on DVD. To order this DVD, click here.

Catholics told not to give LDS parish data
By Geoffrey FattahDeseret News
Published: May 4, 2008

The Catholic Church has ordered dioceses across the globe not to give information in parish registers to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Vatican Congregation for Clergy issued a letter directing all Catholic bishops to keep LDS members from microfilming and digitizing information in registers, according to the Catholic News Service.

To read the complete text of this article, click here.

On a lighter note, a prominent UK writer had some funny arguments against this restriction of church records to researchers. You can read it here.
]]> http://genemem.com/2008/12/15/restricting-access-to-catholic-records/feed/ 0 Jenny Tonks