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FamilySearch App Maps Ancestors’ Birthplaces
A new app for FamilySearch.org users lets you map your ancestors’ birthplaces. It retrieves information about your ancestors from your data at FamilySearch.org. It’s called Family Map and it looks like this:
Family Map app for FamilySearch.org users.
While there are lots of maps online, it’s fun to see your relatives all mapped at once (with no extra effort from yourself). This tool is especially great for sharing your family history with relatives. They can see at a glance your family migration patterns, remark on the number of people who stayed in the old hometown (or didn’t) and put themselves in context.
Thanks to Devin Ashby at FamilySearch for tipping me off to this app. The app is FamilyMap – Scoutic and is available
on iTunes for $1.99.
3 Reasons You Need the New Version of Google Earth Just Released
Google celebrated Earth Day by releasing Google Earth 7.1 and announcing some great new content! And there are three reasons you will want to make the upgrade:
1. New Hands-Free Navigation Technology
The big news with version 7.1 is Leap Motion support, a touch-free 3d technology that lets you “navigate Google earth with simple hand gestures.” The Leap Motion Controller ($79.99) will start shipping mid-July, so you’ve got some time to get to know Google Earth a little better before you start flying around in it like this:
You KNOW I have to get me some of that!
2. More 3D City Views
There’s also exciting new 3D data in Google Earth, most notably for New York City. But there’s also more imagery for other cities around the world: Innsbruck, Austria; Dijon, France; Cagliari, Italy and the Spanish cities of San Sebastian, Santander, Pamplona, Manresa and Burgos. Other U.S. cities with 3D coverage include Miami, FL; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Encinitas, CA and Spokane, WA.
3. The Addition of the 50th Country to Google Maps’ popular Street View Feature
You can now view 50 countries buy lasix medication online with Google Maps’ popular Street View feature. The newest nations to be added are Hungary and Lesotho (a tiny country within South Africa), and there’s new or updated coverage for Poland, Romania, France, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Thailand and other locations worldwide. Google calls this “the largest single update of Street View imagery we’ve ever pushed, including new and updated imagery for nearly 350,000 miles of roads across 14 countries.”
Help for Using Google Earth for Genealogy
How can you access these fabulous features, both for fun virtual travel and for seriously fun genealogy research? Upload the latest version of Google Earth for free (for PC, Mac or Linux). Then check out my Google Earth for Genealogy 2-CD Bundle. There’s a reason is this one of my best-selling presentations: Google Earth is one of the best genealogy research tools around! In these CD presentations, I show you how to locate and map ancestral homesteads; use historical map overlays; identify where old photos were taken; create 3D models of ancestral locations; create custom family history tours and much more.
Church Records for Genealogy on Archives.com
UPDATE: THIS COLLECTION HAS BEEN EXPANDED AND IS NOW ALSO AVAILABLE ON ANCESTRY.COM.
About 4.6 million genealogical records from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are now available on Archives.com.
This project represents a unique collection for Archives.com, which partnered with the ELCA Archives to digitize and index about 1000 rolls of microfilmed records of affiliated church. According to the company, this collection represents records that have never been online before. It eliminates the major barriers we usually have in researching church records: not knowing which specific congregation an ancestor attended; not knowing where those records are now and not having easy access to them.
According to a company press release, “The records in these collections date from the mid-1800s through 1940 and include births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and burials. Details vary from church to church, but often include parents’ names, dates and places of the event, and other biographical details. Many of the churches were founded by immigrants from Norway, Sweden, and Germany and had immigrant families as their members.”
I was curious to see what I could find in the collection on my own family. You can imagine how happy I was to find this record (image below) of my grandmother, Alfreda Sporowski (image right) from Gillespie, Illinois:
Church record naming Alfreda Sporowski, from Archives.com’s collection of Evangelical Lutheran Church records.
I remember years ago writing a letter to the church and receiving a letter in reply with this information. Now I’m looking at the original document in just seconds from my home computer. We’ve come a long way!
Not a member at Archives.com? You can sign up here for a free 7-day trial membership.
