I received a review copy of roll 536, which contains surnames Longby/Longley through Lorance. The review copy did not come with any instructions, so the installation was a bit confusing. I inserted the CD and it began the installation setup process. However, the first thing it did was indicate that the Digital Archive Viewer (from earlier HQ CDs) that I already had on my computer was no longer needed and asked if I wanted to remove it. When I clicked yes, I got the ominous warning that I was going to completely uninstall this Archive Viewer, and was I sure that was what I wanted to do. At first I said no, but then nothing else happened. So I tried again and said yes and it uninstalled the Digital Archive Viewer. When it was done, nothing else happened. So I went to Start/Run, selected Browse, and found the setup.exe file on the CD and selected it. Installation finally began and proceeded without a hitch from there, although I did notice that it removed another older HQ viewing product during the installation. Hopefully those who purchase the CD will get instructions on how to proceed if they encounter these issues.

The installation puts a shortcut icon on the desktop, so getting into the CD’s data is easy. The screen is split into thirds. The top third contains the search options and a search criteria window. The middle third contains the digital image. The bottom third is a page-by-page table of contents to the CD. The first fourteen pages are introductory material about this microfilm series and should be read by anyone using these records for the first time. A lot of misconceptions about the records will be answered in this material.

Within the bottom third, you can scroll through each page and you’ll see the image number, page number, state served from, surname, given name, and claim number. If the person you’re looking for is listed, you can click once to view the digital image of that page. On the digital image, you can click to magnify, with the magnification increasing for each click. There is a tool bar within the image area that allows you to change the magnification, rotate the image, move forward or backward between images, enhance the image, save, copy, and print the image.

I was unable to obtain a printed copy of an image. I tried several different images, I inverted the image, and I read the instructions in Help, and each time the image that printed was completely black. However, I was able to save the images to disk as a .tif, open my photo editing program, and view and print the image from there. The image that finally printed was beautiful, and certainly better than copies I’ve made from microfilm at the National Archives. Hopefully Heritage Quest will fix the print problems from within the CD.

The search is limited to the information that is contained in the table of contents in the bottom third of the screen. This means that the images are not completely indexed and you can only search on the names of the applicants. It would certainly be wonderful if all of the images were completely searchable for names and places, but that would take an enormous amount of work.

I noticed while scrolling through the list at the bottom of the screen that one of the names appeared to be entered with a “0" instead of an “O”. The name is “Lomis.” Just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, I attempted to search on the Surname field for that name, selecting the Contains option instead of the Exact option (the name in the surname field is listed as “LOOMIS/L0MIS”). If I used an “O” in Lomis, I received no hits. If I used a “0" in Lomis, I received all the hits from the listing as recorded above. This is a lesson to those who do searches in databases. If the name you’re interested in contains an “O”, try using a “0" as a substitute if your search is unsuccessful. This is another item that should be fixed by Heritage Quest as soon as possible.

If your ancestor served in the Revolutionary War and was eligible for a pension or bounty land, you might be interested in obtaining a copy of the CD containing your ancestor’s records. However, before you purchase, I recommend you research to find out if your ancestor is even among those contained in these records. One way to quickly search is to check Ancestry.com. Ancestry has multiple Revolutionary War databases on its Web site. I was able to search on Jacob Loomis (the soldier discussed above), and found him listed as a NY Pensioner. The data corresponded with the data on this CD. Additionally, many libraries have the alphabetical index to these pension files called Index of Revolutionary War Pension Applications in the National Archives (“Hoyt’s Index”) (Rev. Ed., National Genealogical Society Special Publication 40, Washington, 1976).

System requirements for the CD are Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000, Pentiium 100+, 16MB RAM, 4x CD-ROM, and 88MB free hard disk space if your system doesn’t have Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater. You can order the CDs from Heritage Quest at http://www.heritagequest.com. They are currently on sale for $14.96 each, with a regular price of $19.95 (members pay $11.21). You can also rent the microfilm from HQ if you’re a member.

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, co-creator of the new family health history program GeneWeaver, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry. She can be reached via e-mail at gceditor@ancestry.com.