Along Those Lines
The World in Books and on the Internet
by George G. Morgan

Anyone who reads this column on a regular basis knows that I am a bibliophile--a lover of books. I've been reading, working, playing, and researching in libraries as far back as I can remember, and one of my earliest adult friends when I was a child was our town librarian, Mary Scott Johnson, in Madison, North Carolina. She, my mother, and my father's sister began me on a lifelong journey through literally hundreds of libraries and archives.

My love of libraries has exposed me to books old and new, common and rare, and manuscripts, journals, magazines, vertical file cabinets, databases, and rare, one-of-a-kind items that give me goose bumps. I'm always on the lookout for great books and online websites. In "Along Those Lines . . ." this week, I want to share some of my newest favorites with you.

Online Genealogical Books
Have you worked with the online books in the Ancestry.com Family and Local Histories Collection? This collection of more than 20,000 titles contains local histories, family histories, biographies, historical encyclopedias, the Daughters of the American Revolution Series, Slave Narratives, Biographies of Local Americans, and hundreds of other reference books. Each book has been digitized and indexed and is therefore searchable. You can also browse through an individual book, referencing the cover, table of contents, chapters, the index, appendices, and, in some cases, through the illustrations if these are included in a separate indexed list.

In my column of 14 October, 2005, Locating Local and Family Histories Online, I discussed a personal experience with using the Ancestry.com Family and Local Histories Collection. If you haven't used them, they are a tremendous resource you have missed. They are a part of the Ancestry U.S. Deluxe Membership subscription. The collection is expanding over time and it seems that I always find something to help my research every time I use the collection.

New England Court Records
I just received a review copy of Diane Rapaport's brand new book, New England Court Records: A Research Guide for Genealogists and Historians. This is what I would call a very important work. Published by Quill Pen Press, LLC, in Burlington, Massachusetts, the book is the essential reference work needed by researchers to understand and locate legal records in the New England states for so long. Researchers of New England ancestors will want to consider owning their own personal reference copy.

Ms. Rapaport begins with the basics of understanding the United States legal system, its different courts, and their respective areas of responsibility. From there she proceeds to discuss New England state and federal courts, the types of court records that are produced, and where to look for these records. She then provides a chapter on each of the New England states, its court history timelines, the courts today, and a detailed county-by-county listing of the types of courts located there, the records they hold, and other places where records may reside in document, index, microform, or digital format. She also provides an extensive bibliography as well as known microfilm of court records. Naturalization records are not omitted from the compilation either.

Sample records and cases are presented in the book, along with images of actual records to illustrate research methodologies and what you can expect to find among various court records. The book's appendices include contact information for all of the courts, a compact glossary of commonly encountered legal terms, and additional recommended reading. This book is a winner!

Walking with Your Ancestors
I have always been fascinated with maps ever since I was a child. My parents often gave me the free Esso service station road maps we obtained for long trip and challenged me to keep track of our route. Somewhere along the way, my father would ask for directions and I was always proud to be able to tell him the route that we should take. We never (well, almost never) got lost! This was good practice for what I have to do with genealogical research every day.

Melinda Kashuba has penned another important work titled Walking with Your Ancestors: A Genealogist's Guide to Using Maps and Geography. While everyone knows how to read a road map, there are scores of maps that we encounter in our research. And, as Ms. Kashuba states so well, "No two mapmakers will draw identical maps of the same environment. . ." It is important to recognize that two maps drawn by the different cartographers at the same time will contain different information. This is a point I have repeated thousands of times in seminars!

This book, specifically geared toward a genealogist, is the reference that has been needed for so long. Many different types of maps are shown and described in understandable text. The book includes chapters devoted to topographic maps; land division map, county maps and atlases; migration trails; military maps; fire insurance and other urban maps; the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS); and more. The "Map Analysis Worksheet" will be a tool that you will use again and again. There is no doubt that the book will profoundly increase your map-reading and -analysis skills. An appendix of major map collections in the U.S. is included for your reference.

Without doubt, Walking with Your Ancestors, paired with E. Wade Hone's Land and Property Research in the United States will provide your genealogy book collection with the strongest resources available for U.S. geographical research.

What Did They Mean By That?
Old documents and books can be confounding in their use of now-archaic words and phrases. How would you define oxgang or cupping if you encountered them in your reading? And do you know the occupation of a collier when you see a reference?

My printed and favorite online dictionaries do not always include some of the old words and/or definitions, and I'm too cheap to buy the 20-volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary ($1,500.00 U.S.)! The answer to my dilemma is a book by Paul Drake, J.D. titled What Did They Mean by That? A Dictionary of Historical and Genealogical Terms Old and New. This 335-page book is an invaluable reference if you work with older documents. Words, terms, and phrases are arranged alphabetically in dictionary form and are well-defined. Cross-references to the more uncommon or obscure terms point you to the more common entry. As an example, the term night chair references the term closestool, a potty chair or box with a seat and designed to hold a chamber pot. (You can also look up chamber pot.)

And just to answer the questions above:

• An oxgang is a very early term in use in the eighteenth century meaning twenty acres of land.
• Cupping was the medical practice of bleeding a person. It was used to relieve infections and/or to reduce fevers. The process involved making an incision in the skin, placing a warmed glass over the wound, and cooling the glass so as to create a partial vacuum.
• A collier was, in early times, a term for anyone who digs coal. Later, and more recently, the term refers to anyone who digs, polishes, or sells coal.

Drake's book will be a great reference for your personal library, and it makes fascinating reading any time!

Like What You See?
I'm sure you can find something helpful in these books, both online at Ancestry.com and in print. Search new and used online booksellers to locate copies for your own collection, or check local library catalogs. These books will feed your mind and your research. The bibliography below should help you find the books mentioned this week.

Happy Reading!
George

Bibliography
Drake, Paul, J.D. What Did They Mean by That? A Dictionary of Historical and Genealogical Terms Old and New. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books. 2003.

Hone, E. Wade. Land and Property Research in the United States. Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Incorporated. 1997.

Kashuba, Melinda. Walking with Your Ancestors: A Genealogist's Guide to Using Maps and Geography. Cincinnati, OH: Family Tree Books. 2005.

Rapaport, Diane. New England Court Records: A Research Guide for Genealogists and Historians. Burlington, MA: Quill Pen Press, LLC. 2006.

Visit George's website at http://ahaseminars.com/atl for information about speaking engagements. He will be appearing at the following locations this Spring.

• 11 March 2006
  Tallahassee Genealogical Society, Tallahassee, FL
• 14 March 2006
  Citrus County Genealogical Society, Lecanto, FL
• 21 March 2006
  South Bay Genealogical Society, Sun City Center, Ruskin, FL
• 23 March 2006
  Muskogee County Genealogical Society Meeting, Muskogee, OK
• 24 March 2006
  Writers' Workshop, Muskogee, OK
• 25 March 2006
  Muskogee County Genealogical Society Conference, Muskogee, OK
• 11 April 2006
  Brandon Area Historical and Genealogical Society, Brandon, FL
• 22 April 2006
  Virginia Beach Genealogical Society, Virginia Beach, Virginia
• 27 April 2006
  The Villages Genealogical Society, The Villages, FL
• 28-29 April 2006
  Ohio Genealogical Society, Toledo, OH
• 26-28 May 2006
  Ontario Genealogical Society, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

Listen to "The Genealogy Guys" podcast each week at http://genealogyguys.com!

Copyright 2006, MyFamily.com
All rights reserved.

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Ancestry Quick Tip
Recorded Interviews Bring Back Memories

I have been interested in oral histories and personal interviews for quite a while and I have gotten better at setting them up so that I get a quality tape. Recently though, I was taking out some of the first tapes that I had started with to transfer them over to the computer and burn to a CD. I discovered that I really had gotten better at it, but I also found something that I was missing. The first time I had ever tried to record some of the family stories on tape I had simply put a pocket recorder on the table where all the aunts and uncles were sitting after lunch. They started telling stories, laughing, and having a great time just like so many family get-togethers that I remember. Listening to that tape it was hard to pick out some of the stories because so many people were trying to talk at one time, but the laughter and good times made it all seem so real and brought back many memories of the whole family being together. It is wonderful to have your aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents tell their story while you record it, but you need to have these "impromptu" sessions to put some life into those stories.

Robert McLain

Thanks to Robert for today's Quick Tip! If you have a tip you would like to share with researchers, you can send it to: ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest, please state so clearly in your message.

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Clipping of the Day
Syracuse Herald (Syracuse, New York), 03 March 1906, page 1:

Stories of Horror

Russian Immigrants Tell of Their Escape From That Country.

SOME GET AWAY ON RAFTS
. . .

New York, March 3.--Stories of escapes from the Russian frontier on rafts and of massacres alleged to have occurred in the cellars of Moscow homes during the recent outbreak there were told here to-day by some of the 2,000 Russians and Russian Jews who arrived here yesterday on the steamer Pennsylvania from Hamburg and who passed the immigration inspection to-day.

Rebecca Isaacs, 15 years old, one of the refugees from Moscow, said that she was the last of a family of twelve and that her father, mother, brothers and sisters were killed by soldiers during the late uprising. She said for two days she was hidden in a dark corner of the cellar in her home, which soldiers entered at intervals in search of the occupants. The other members of the family, she said, were found and killed, some of them so near her that she heard their unavailing cries for mercy. She is now on her way to West Virginia, having been taken in charge by a family named Michaelovitz, which is going there.

Michael Slatovitch, who lived near the Austrian frontier in Russia, escaped with his entire family by crossing the river Vistula to Austrian territory on a raft under cover of darkness. A patrol of soldiers, which was on the lookout for parties attempting to escape in this manner, heard the noise made by his raft in the river and fired in the direction of the sounds, without, however, hitting anyone. Many other Jews, he said, took the same method of getting out of Russia.

Subscribers with access to the Historical Newspapers Collection can view this clipping.

Subscribe to the Historical Newspapers Collection at Ancestry.com.

Fast Fact
Upcoming Online Genealogy Classes at MyFamily.com

For $29.95 (unless otherwise marked), each class includes:

• Four weeks of lessons and interaction with a genealogy expert.
• 30-day free access to applicable Ancestry.com collections. (For details on which collections will be available, see the individual class descriptions.)
• Tips and advice on how to find ancestors online.
• Lessons through site interaction and worksheets.
• Ability to create your family tree using Online Family Tree software and downloadable genealogy forms.
• Collaboration with other site members to grow your family tree over the course of a year.

To learn more about these classes, see George G. Morgan's article from the 11 July 2003 Ancestry Daily News.

Upcoming Classes

• Basic Family Tree Maker 2006
  09 March 2006 with Cindy Rowzee
• Scottish Research
  09 March 2006 with David Webster
• Immigration and Naturalization Research
  23 March 2006 by George G. Morgan
  

More Classes

• Basic German Genealogy Class, 06 April 2006
• Irish Research Class, 06 April 2006
• Native American Research, 20 April 2006
• Intermediate Genealogy Research, 27 April 2006

Click here for the complete list of genealogy classes with links. Click here for investigative courses.

Product Spotlights

		Land and Property Research in the United States by E. Wade Hone Normally, this book retails for $49.95, but today you can buy it in the Shops@Ancestry.com for only $39.95.

Thought for Today
Emily Dickinson, 1924

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!