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Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
| June 1, 1998 |
- 1851 British Census on CD-ROM The Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) has been computerizing the 1851 British census for some years. They have now released the first of several CD-ROM disks containing that census. The disk released a few weeks ago contains the 1851 census for Norfolk, Devon and Warwick counties. While that is only three counties, it does contain listings of 1.5 million people. The other counties are also being computerized and will be released in coming months and years. I had a chance to use this CD-ROM disk this week and can report that it is an excellent genealogy product. The data on this new Windows CD-ROM disk is not a simple index like most of the other census CD-ROM disks I have written about in the past. The 1851 British Census on CD not only contains information on the head of household, it also has information on each person residing within the household. The data contained on the CD-ROM includes each person’s name, age, gender, relationship to the head of household, marital status, census place (where each person lived when the census was taken), occupation and the place where each person was born. Each record also contains source references pointing to the page and volume numbers where the data is found in the original records. This level of detail is unusual in genealogy CD-ROM disks. The 1851 British Census CD-ROM will work on Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows NT. There is no Macintosh version. The included software will operate in 4 megabytes of RAM memory on Windows 3.1, but the producers strongly recommend 8 megabytes or more. It also requires a super VGA video card and monitor combination running at least 256 colors. This CD-ROM disk uses Folio Views as the "search engine," an excellent choice in my opinion. Many other genealogy CD-ROM disks also use Folio Views, and they are all easy to use and intuitive. This one is no exception. All the required software is included on the CD-ROM disk itself. You do not need to obtain any other programs or "viewers." I installed the software within a couple of minutes and immediately dove into the data without reading the user’s manual. The first screen that appears is a menu that contains four choices:
I chose "Individual Search" and the next screen prompted me for Name, Birth Year, Birthplace and Census Place. You do not need to fill in all the fields; you can leave some of them blank. I do not have any ancestors who were living in England in 1851, so I decided to invent a few. I entered the name George Eastman and found three matches. I clicked on one of the listings, which displayed detail that showed the name twice: a 40-year-old Head of Household and a 7-year-old of the same name residing in the same household.. To show the data available, I did a "cut-and-paste" of the data on the CD-ROM disk into this newsletter although I did have to rearrange it a bit to fit the space available here:
If you are looking at this with a proportional font, the above columns may not line up properly. They do display properly in a non-proportional font and obviously they do display correctly when viewed with the CD-ROM’s Folio Views software. You can see that George Eastman was the head of household. Other members included his three children plus two others listed as "visitors." Notice that there is no wife listed within the household. Perhaps she was deceased; the census records offer no clues about that. The listing shows a household in Combmartin Barnstaple, Devonshire. The listing gives full names of everyone along with their places of birth. 40-year-old George was born in the same place, so you know to look in records for 1811 (give or take a bit) to find his birth or christening record. Notice the field called "Neighbors" in the above listing. What you don’t see in this newsletter text is that the left and right "arrows" are highlighted; you can click on them. When you do so, you move to the next record or the previous record in the census listings. This is an excellent resource as you can easily find other relatives who may have lived nearby. I do not recall seeing anything like that on other CD-ROM disks of transcribed data although obviously it is easy to see that information when looking at images of the original records. The bottom line in the Head of Household listing gives the standard genealogy source reference that points to the original page in the census records and even shows the microfilm number you use when ordering a microfilm rental of those records. While the data shown on the CD-ROM index appears to be complete, you will still need to look at the original record. This is necessary to insure accuracy, of course. The people who transcribed the original census are not infallible; there are likely to be a few errors. In addition, there is a feeling of satisfaction that I find difficult to describe when you look at the handwriting of the person who actually talked to your ancestor. Speaking of errors, I bet there aren’t many. I did not validate these records myself, but I am told that each record was entered twice. The process used by the Family History Department requires that each original census record be sent to two different people for data entry. Each of them enters the data as he or she believes it is recorded on the originals. A computer program then compares the two records. If the two are identical, the record is accepted. But if there is a difference in the two transcribed copies, an error report is generated and sent to a third person who then looks at the original record as well as both transcribed versions. This third person then makes a determination as to which transcribed copy is correct, if any. The results from these two or three people are then entered into the database used to create the CD-ROM disk. That process does not guarantee 100% accuracy, of course, but I bet it reduces the error level to a very small percentage. Next I experimented with the "Household Search" and found that it operated in much the same manner as the Individual Search. However, there are more fields to choose from in this search, including Occupation and Birthplace. Searching for Occupation turned out to be a bit of fun. If you have heard that the individual you seek lived in Devonshire and worked on the railroad, you can enter "Devonshire" into the space for Census Place and "Railway" into the Occupation field. You will quickly find the 345 Railway Laborers, Railway Engineers, Railway Porters, etc. listed. The "Household Search" contains data from several kinds of residences. Not only will you find single-family homes, you can also find boarding houses, hospitals and even prisons listed as a single "household." I was frustrated to find many convicts listed only by their initials, not their names. For instance, Warden John Jameson is listed as "Head of Household" for "Convict Prison Lidford" in Tavistock. Here is a partial listing of the hundreds of individuals listed within his "household:"
No first names, no surnames. Just initials! The "Relationship to Head of Household" is Conv which obviously means convict. The ages, occupations and places of birth were listed but not the names. Of course, this is the way the data was entered in the census books in 1851, it has nothing to do with the transcription process of the 1990s. The listing may help a historian studying demographics of prison populations in nineteenth-century England, but the data seems useless to the genealogist. The "A to Z Listing" seemed to be a simple listing of all individuals. When you click on any name within that list, a full listing appears that is identical to the ones described earlier. I would like to offer a warning about copyrights: Those of us in the United States usually think of census records as public domain data. In fact, this isn’t always true, even in the U.S. The original records certainly are public domain, but transcribed copies do have some copyrights applied: those of the organization that added value to the original data by converting it to another format. However, there are even more considerations when looking at the British census records. Unlike U.S. census records, the British Census records are copyrighted information. In the case of the CD-ROM disks produced by the LDS church, the church had to obtain permission to release the data from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in England and the General Register Office in Scotland. They are the ones who really control the use of the data. Keep this in mind if you want to copy large amounts of data from these disks. You are always allowed to use the information for your own genealogy research, and you are encouraged to share that information with your own relatives. But if you copy large amounts of information about people other than your own relatives, you may not redistribute that information to others. You would be violating British copyright laws, and those laws are honored by the U.S. government and most other governments. Interested in purchasing your own copy of the 1851 British Census for Devon, Norfolk and Warwick counties? The CD-ROM disks are available now ,and you can order it for the magnificent sum of $5.00. No, that is not a misprint. This excellent CD-ROM disk of high-quality genealogy data, complete with all needed software, is available for five bucks. The first time I saw that price I assumed that it was a misprint. I asked the director in charge of the project, and he assured me that five dollars is indeed the correct price. If you have British ancestors or even other relatives that probably were in any of these three counties in 1851, you need this disk. Period. For more information or to order the 1851 British Census CD-ROM disk, anyone in the United States should call 1-800-537-5950 during normal business hours. Canadian residents can call 1-800-453-3860, extension 2031. Anyone outside North America can call 1-801-240-1126 or write to:
The Family History Department of the Mormon Church has published genealogy data on CD-ROM disks for several years, primarily the International Genealogical Index and the Ancestral File. However, these disks have never been available for sale to the general public. To use these CD-ROM disks, you need to visit a local Family History Center, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City or one of the other libraries licensed to have these disks. (I am ignoring a small beta test of in-home use conducted a few years ago. That was a very small test.) I wrote about the new Genealogy SourceGuide CD-ROM in this newsletter two weeks ago. That valuable genealogy resource is produced by the LDS church and is available for purchase today. It does not contain any actual records of genealogy data. It is a "how to" guide. The new 1851 British Census Records CD-ROM disk marks a radical departure for the Mormon Church: for the first time they are now selling transcriptions of original records to the general public on CD-ROM disk. Not only that, but I believe the quality of the data on this CD-ROM disk is much higher than that of the Ancestral File or the International Genealogical Index. This quality is a result of the double data entry method I mentioned earlier. The 1851 British Census Records CD-ROM has proved to be very popular. The Family History Department made a guess as to how many copies they would sell; they produced what they believed would be a one-year supply. The disk sold out in about two weeks. A new batch is either in stock now or will be within days. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also has released 4.8 million records in the Australian Vital Records Index. These records are from the states of New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia. Again, the Family History Department made a guess as to their one-year requirements. That initial inventory sold out in four days! I have not been able to obtain a copy of that CD-ROM disk, but I do hope to write about it soon. The British 1881 Census CD-ROM is an announced product that is not yet available. This set of CD-ROM disks will contain about 29 million records. It is the culmination of a project covering over a decade and involving thousands of volunteers, both members of LDS Church and nonmembers as well. The extraction is complete and a microfiche copy is now available. The CD-ROM version will be available on several disks, each one covering one region. These disks will become available one at a time as the Family History Department completes them. Look for the first disks to become available later this year. The U.S. 1880 Census is another "announced product" that is not yet available. This massive project has taken well over a decade to extract the data. The index is not available on microfiche. It numbers about 50 million records. This will also cover several CD-ROM disks and again will be released by regions as they can be manufactured. Finally, for years researchers have had access to the International Genealogical Index (IGI), a listing of more that 280 million records of christenings, births and marriages from around the world. However, even more records have been extracted than what shows up on the IGI, and those additional records are going to be released as part of the Vital Records Index. This new Index will contain about 25 million records of christenings, births, and marriages for different parts of the world. Again, these will be available for purchase To the Family History Department of the LDS Church: I believe that all genealogists say "Thank you." We appreciate your making this information available. We especially appreciate the fact that we can purchase these CD-ROM disks for very modest prices.
Last week I wrote about a new online database provided by the General Land Office. The Automated Records System (ARS) is now available online on the World Wide Web and contains federal government land grant records from a number of states. That article generated a lot of e-mail feedback and I have been trying to consolidate all the information I have received in the past week. Here is a collection of different comments from a number of people:
From a different writer:
Another e-mail discussed California records:
I suspect this story will go on and on for a long time yet as new data becomes available. Stay tuned….
The following announcement was sent this past week:
- Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Two weeks ago I wrote about the geographic name server at MIT. This is an excellent database of geographic names from around the U.S. and can be valuable to genealogists trying to find a small town mentioned in old records. Several people wrote to me after I published that article to tell me of still other online name servers. I have looked at several but the one that really impressed me is the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names produced by the Getty Information Institute. This online geographic name server is much like the one I mentioned earlier. However, it contains nearly 1 million place names representing approximately 900,000 places around the world. For instance, anyone looking for a town called Billericay can quickly find that it is in Essex, England at 51 degrees 38 minutes North, 00 degrees 25 minutes East. A good map of England can then be used to quickly locate these geographic coordinates. I tried a harder search: I entered "Wassookeag" and quickly found the listing for the lake where I spent boyhood summers. It is at Lat: 45 01 N Long: 069 18 W. Every name I could think of was in the name server. It even has multiple variations of each location. Beijing, Peking, Pei-Ching and Pekin all point to China’s capital. Some of the locations have brief descriptions, such as this one for a remote city where I once spent two weeks of my life:
If you are looking for that small place where your ancestors lived, check out the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names at: http://www.gii.getty.edu/tgn_browser My thanks to Dave Rencher for letting me know about this one.
- New Member of the Ellis Island Committee In last week’s newsletter I wrote a rather disparaging article about The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. In short, if you send $100 to the Foundation and a bit of information about an immigrant ancestor, the Foundation will place that info on The American Immigrant Wall of Honor at Ellis Island. The same information is also available on the Foundation’s new website. My complaint is that nobody does even the slightest sanity check of this data; some of the listings are pure fantasy. Many, including one that I mentioned, are geographic impossibilities. What bothers me is that most genealogy newcomers who find this information will believe it to be accurate. After all, "It is listed that way at Ellis Island." The incorrect information will be repeated time and again, perpetuating the myths. I was delighted to read an announcement this week stating that Loretto Szucs has been invited to join the History Advisory Committee of The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. The announcement goes on to say that Loretto (or "Lou" as most people call her) "..will be among a select group of scholars who review and comment upon the foundation's projects." Lou Szucs is Ancestry's vice-president of publishing. She's also the coeditor of The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy and is the author or editor of several other Ancestry books. I know Lou personally and I have a very high regard for her work. She maintains very high standards of quality in the books and magazines she writes or edits. I suspect that the History Advisory Committee of The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation will benefit greatly from her membership on the History Advisory Committee.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that New Jersey has authority over the landfill portion of Ellis Island, which makes up most of the surface of the historic immigration gateway. The 6-3 decision is a defeat for New York, which claimed jurisdiction over the whole 27.5-acre island, not just the original 3 acres that existed in 1834. The ancestors of about 40 percent of all U.S. citizens entered the United States through Ellis Island's immigration station between 1892 and 1954. The island is in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, N.J., and a mile from the tip of Manhattan. In the majority opinion, Justice David Souter wrote: "The issue in this case is whether New York or New Jersey has sovereign authority over this filled land. We find that New Jersey does." He also wrote, "We appreciate the difficulties of a boundary line that divides not just an island but some of the buildings on it, but these drawbacks are the price of New Jersey's success" in suing under the 1834 agreement. The compact, which was agreed to by both states, ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, put the boundary between the states in the middle of the Hudson River and New York Bay. Under the agreement, in 1834 all land under the waters on the New Jersey side of the boundary belonged to that state and the land under the waters on the New York side belonged to that state. The compact also gave New York "jurisdiction" over Ellis Island, which was then just under 3 acres. Since 1891, however, the federal government has extended the island through landfill to 27.5 acres. New Jersey has always claimed jurisdiction over the landfill area. This creates an interesting twist for conscientious genealogists who try to maintain accurate records. First of all, most of the buildings at Ellis Island are on the landfill, which the Supreme Court now says have always belonged to New Jersey. Yet most people believed those buildings to be in New York when the immigration station was in operation. One of the "standard rules" of genealogy record keeping is that you always record locations as they existed at the time of the original record, not as they exist today. For instance, if an ancestor was born in a particular county and then the county boundaries changed at a later date, you always record the event as occurring in the county which existed at the time of the birth. You do not apply today’s boundaries to events of yesteryear. However, if you recorded your ancestor’s arrival location as "Ellis Island, New York" the U.S. Supreme Court now says that the arrival location always was in New Jersey, not New York. This week’s decision says that the claimed boundaries of that time were inaccurate and should have said New Jersey, even in 1892. So do you enter that record as Ellis Island, New York or New Jersey? Personally, I think I would enter it as "Ellis Island, New York" regardless of this week’s Supreme Court decision.
The following is a list of some of the genealogy-related World Wide Web home pages that have been listed recently on http://www.rootscomputing.com. Some of these sites may charge a fee for their services:
To submit your home page to this newsletter, enter the necessary information at: http://www.rootscomputing.com/register.htm. Due to the volume of new Web pages submitted, I am not able to list all of them in the newsletter.
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