Nu? What's New? Vol. 22 No. 33

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

How a Research Log Will Transform Your Family History Research

One aspect of family history research that is rarely maintained by amateur genealogists is a research log. It is a document of what resources have been used both successfully and unsuccessfully and a list of resources yet to be checked.

Family History Daily has published an extensive article on this subject. It describes how to list which sources you are going to research—censuses, immigration lists, birth, marriage and death indexes, etc. Once one source has been searched, you write down what was found, including an accurate citation of the source. In that way, the next time you work on this same objective you won’t duplicate your efforts.

Consequently, your research log becomes an index to the research you have already performed; something you can refer back to anytime you are researching that particular family group. You will know when you researched, what you looked at, what you found, and be able to easily plan what to do next.

The article can be found at https://tinyurl.com/bsk8pufu.

How to Write An Obituary

Obituaries can be a valuable source of information about families. They often list members of the family, and, of importance to genealogists, married names of daughters and possibly granddaughters.

To assist family history researchers now and in the future, MyHeritage has published an essay on “How to Write an Obituary,” It lists 12 items that potentially could be included in an obituary starting with:
• Where and when were they born?
• Who were their parents and siblings?

The article can be found at https://tinyurl.com/5cyawjyp.

LitvakSIG Vilnius Household Registers Collection Now Has 80,000 Records

LitvakSIG has announced that batch 16 of the Vilnius household registers is now available to qualified donors, bringing the number of available lines to more than 80,000.

The registers were created between 1919 and 1940 when Wilno (Vilnius) city and Wilno voivodeship were part of Poland. The registers contain detailed information about everyone who lived in Wilno at that time, including children, as well as information about many visitors. This can include refugees fleeing the Nazis toward Vilnius in autumn of 1939.

After about 18 months, batch 16 will be added to the Litvak SIG free, searchable, All-Lithuania Database. Batches 1–8 are already in the ALD.

More information about the Vilnius household registers, including a list of all addresses completed to date, can be found on the VHR home page, https://tinyurl.com/VHR-Home and in more detail at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Lithuania/VilniusHouseholdRegisters.html.

Chernigiv Gubernia Jewish Lists Are Online
Ukrainian genealogist Alex Krakovsky has been encouraging his nation’a archives to make Jewish records available online. He now reports that a huge part of 1888 Chernigiv gubernia Jewish lists are now online.

Access to the records can be found at https://tinyurl.com/wzxnd9vv. They include the towns of Chernihiv, Gluhov, Konotop, Kozelets, Krolevets, Mglin, Novhorod-Seversky, Novozybkov, Oster, Starodub and Surazh.

GenTeam Adds 465K New Records

The Vienna-based genealogy site, GenTeam, reports it has added 475K new records to its collection. Included are:
• Austro-Hungarian casualty lists 1914–1919
• Vienna: Coroner records
• Various church records.

GenTeam is located at http://www.genteam.eu.

FamilySearch Adds 10M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 10M index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/f4sjw6sj. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. Those identified with a dagger (†) are church records only. They include records from Argentina(†), Brazil, Chile(†), Costa Rico(†), Dominican Republic(†), El Salvador(†), England(†), France, Guatemala(†), Ireland, Mexico(†), Nicaragua(†), Papua New Guinea, Paraguay(†), Puerto Rico(†), Samoa, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Venezuela(†) and Zambia(†).

Note that at the website, announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. Also note that counts shown in the announcement are the number added, not the total number available in the collection, which can be greater.

New Collections at Ancestry.com

Ancestry has added/updated the following record groups at their site. The list with links to individual collections can be found at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections. Announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. There is also no indication of how many records were added to the updated collections.

New Collections
New Mexico, Select County Marriages, 1877–2000

Updated Collections
Find a Grave Index for various countries
School Yearbooks, 1900–1999
Bessarabia (now Moldova), Marriage and Divorce Records, 1879–1915
Western Australia, Australia, Convict Records, 1846–1930
UK and Ireland, Find a Grave Index, 1300s–Current
Arizona, Naturalization Records, 1909–1991
Various church records

FindMyPast Removes 120M Pages of Historic Newspapers
Who Do You Think You Are magazine reports that FindMyPast has removed 120M pages of historic newspapers from around the world after its contract with Heritage Archives elapsed. Under the contract, signed in 2012, FindMyPast made these pages from the China, Denmark, Germany, France, Jamaica, South Africa and U.S. available to its Pro subscribers.

Additional information is at https://tinyurl.com/58haz6v9.

The Unbroken Chain - Third Edition (First five volumes)

Author Neil Rosenstein has devoted the past 27 years to updating and improving his landmark work The Unbroken Chain and now is in the process of publishing its Third Edition. The new edition is a major improvement to the previous edition both in number of persons and quality of the work.

The volumes identify more than 42,000 people with a full name index. There are 300 illustrations, thousands of footnotes and up to 22 generations.

Addtional informaton, including the a complete list of names can be found at http://www.avotaynu.com/books/UnbrokenChain-1.html. Check to see if your family is included.