← The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection
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Welcome to episode 434 of the Genealogy Guys Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet. I'm your host, Drew Smith, and together with co host George G. Morgan, we cover news tips and solutions for the genealogist community. In this episode, we bring you the Latest news from MyHeritage, FamilySearch and American ancestors. We share listener email about the National Personnel Records center, naming computer files for women's records, tools to print large family tree posters, French spoliation claims, Flip pal scanner software, Evernote agricultural censuses, opening old family tree maker files, poly possible twin births, and finding Tennessee records. And I talk about my past experiences at RootsTech and my upcoming experiences for the Ohio Genealogical Society Spring conference. The Genealogy Guys podcast is sponsored by MyHeritage and Roots Magic. And now on with the show. Welcome to another episode of the Genealogy Guys Podcast. I'm Drew Smith, and as always, I'm joined by my co host, Josh, George G. Morgan. George, how are you doing today?
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I'm doing better than I was.
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Well, both of us were.
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Yeah. We need to apologize for our lengthy absence here.
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Yeah, I went to RootsTech, which was at the beginning of March, and unfortunately, at some point in my travels, probably, well, who knows when I picked up bug, which turned out to be Covid, although I didn't know it, and I was actually Fairly sick at RootsTech near the very end of my stay there, so. But again, I didn't know what was going on. And when I came home, unfortunately, I brought that little Covid bug back to George and so.
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Me a souvenir.
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Yeah, well.
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And. And several days later, I started coming down with it and.
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Yeah, so. Right.
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And I Covid really hit me hard to the point where it's. It's been a little over four weeks now, and I'm. I'm finally just now getting back to.
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Order, really both of us, because it did cause me some. Some congestion and some problems and coughing and sneezing. So anyway, but we are good now. So anyone who was concerned, thanks for your concern. We are back in business. But it did mean that we were not doing a podcast for a while. So we are back. I will talk about RootsTech near the end of the show because there were certainly some good things I got to experience before I got ill. But let's. Let's get into the news because we like to start with the news and George is going to start with some new collections from myheritage. So, George, you got your stuff ready there?
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Yep. First of all, I'd just Like to issue one caveat here because it's been over a month since we produced a podcast. We've got, we've got some extra information and that begins with my heritage and its editions of, of historical records in February and March. And so let me, let me start by saying In February of 2025, they added 235 million new records. And that includes the Canada census of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba from 1926. French baptisms and civil baptism records. Now we have. They just added another 8 1/2 million records for a total now of 162,332,111 records. So if you're looking for burials and civil death in, in France, that's, this is the place to go. An index of church marriages and civil marriages and select marriage bans recorded in France. And another 14 and a half million have been added for a total of over 140 million records. An index of marriage records from North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, between 1874 and 1899. They added a massive 3.7 million records for a total of 7 1/2 million records. So they've just almost doubled that collection. Old News, which is certainly part of Myheritage, they added New Zealand names and stories in newspapers. From Old news, they added 176 million records. An index of historical, national, regional and local newspapers and gazettes from Spain that was created using Myheritage's OCR of articles primarily focused on from the late 1600s to the early 2000s newspaper records. So they added two and a half million new records for a total of 13.7 million. An index to the Swedish census of 1900 has been added. That's almost five million records in Sweden. Old newspapers for Switzerland, they've also added almost 2 million pages. Added to United Kingdom newspapers for a total of over 8 million pages. An index of records of passengers and crew. And these are lists of ships arriving in New York City between 1957 and 1963. So those are newer records. And that's five and a half million new records there. And so there are also new records from the United States newspapers. Let me move on to the month of March 2025. And MyHeritage added a whopping 794 million records. They just don't stop. Index of passenger lists and border entries for individuals arriving in Canada between 1925 and 1935. Passenger Canada passenger list 1865 to 1922. Those are ships arriving in Quebec City, as well as records for some other major portents and select entries from the United States between 1865 and 1922. An index of birth, marriage and death. Records of individuals from from Paris, France between 1700 and 1859. With images. The French parish reconstituted civil status records. Germany newspapers. There are another 2.2 million pages that were added. An index of records of soldiers from the German Empire's armed forces between 1914 and 1919. Over 8 million records. And Grecian, Peloponnesian, Laconia, vital records from 1859 to 1950. Dutch newspapers, Polish newspapers. And an index of records from the British Jewry Book of Honor, first published in 1922. With images. And then finally an index of historical, local, regional and national British newspapers, periodicals and gazettes. Includes advanced optical character recognition of articles dating back to 1665. With images. These are. And that brings that collection up to 8.7 million pages of newspapers. As you can see, myheritage has been very active. They're aggressive with making records available. And here you've heard between February and March they added almost 1 billion records. Wow, Drew.
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They've also been busy in the DNA area. I want to share with you if you have your DNA with MyHeritage, the interesting thing they have added most recently is called Ancient Origins. What they have been doing is looking at DNA samples that have been put into the my Myheritage database and investigating how they fit ancient populations. Now the question, what do you mean, what do we mean by ancient populations back to possibly 10,000 years ago? But to be honest. Yeah, about that. Let me, let me share with you my own results just so you'll understand what you could expect. Now, first of all, you can set the breakdown of your ancient origins according to different models. Mine is set to Great Britain and Ireland because that's where a lot of my ancestry is from. And so mine, if you go starting all the way back to the Bronze Age, which I share, I have 49.8% European Farmer, which is a time period from 6300 to 2800 BC. I also have 42% Western Steppe, which is from 3300 to 2600 BC and 8.2% Bronze Age Anatolian, which is basically Anatolia. We're talking modern day Turkey is 3400-1500 BC. Now, there's two other regions that I don't have any percentage with in the Bronze Age. One is Northwest Africa, which covers areas like Morocco and the area of Western Sahara, that's the Northwest African. And then sub Saharan African, which covers obviously a lot of Central Africa. Particularly I Don't have percentages there. Now the thing is there's a timeline. So if I want to see, okay, that's Bronze Age. What were my ancestors in the Iron Age? We're talking then 52% Continental Celt and we're talking insular Kelt. So the meaning Britain, we're talking Central Siberian, 2.2% and Germanic, I don't have any Germanic, which is heading into the early AD period of 100 to 600. Then Roman era, which gets very interesting. I have a lot from Roman Gaul, which is modern day France, 60% Germanic, 22.2% which covers modern day Germany and Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the picked area, which is up in Scotland, the modern day Scotland I have 14.4% and Roman Britain, 2.6%. And the last ancient origin period they cover is Middle Ages. And from there I have in France 68.8% Germanic, 30.6% and a tiny bit, 0.6% of insular kelt, again being Britain. So the idea here of this ancient origins is to try to find they model the DNA that we would expect to see from descendants from these time periods and these locations. And so if you're interested in maybe where you're distant, distant, distant ancestors, people, you will probably never know their names because there's no records. But you know, that's what you can expect with ancient origins. Now the other thing that they announced most recently, and so this is something new, this is Cousin Finder. That's their trademark. And this does not require a DNA test. What it does is it basically matches your family tree against other MyHeritage users family trees. And therefore you should have common ancestors with these folks. So it's another way to find matches without a DNA test is the idea here. So maybe they're relatives you knew about, maybe you didn't know they were on myheritage. And so that's kind of new, or they might be new relatives. And so that's, it'll show you how they are related to these folks. So this is a way to gain some new insights. And it, what it does is it uses the smart matches to extract those people who are related to you with a common ancestor who you can contact and are likely to be interested in researching those common ancestors. So that's a new feature that's been released in early March and it was discussed, I think at RootsTech. So that was one of the announcements that was made. So, George, you're going to talk about one last thing from MyHeritage. That's a new collection.
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Yeah, we've just got so much news here. Last but certainly not least, and just, just announced a couple of weeks ago, is that MyHeritage has added the United States World War II draft registrations from 1940 to 1947. And that includes 42 million records of men who registered with a Selective service system during and immediately following World War II between 1940 and 1947. And the records span multiple draft registration rounds and include men age 18 to 64 across 33 states and the District of Columbia. And there's some personal details like addresses, occupations, next of kin, and of course, physical descriptions. And so this collection was indexed using cutting edge AI technology developed by our machine learning team at MyHeritage, which was able to automatically and accurately extract handwritten information from the draft cards. Now you may sing, oh, World War II draft registrations. Oh, we already have those someplace else. Well, the answer is probably you would find those at Ancestry. However, they were indexed using a different technique and not the AI technology that MyHeritage has used here. And therefore different, different fields may have been indexed to make them searchable. So you might find some new information or some details you never knew before. So I encourage you to take a look at that collection at MyHeritage. Drew?
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Yeah. One of the things that I get to do, I get to meet with the wonderful folks at FamilySearch on a fairly regular basis where they discuss what they're working on and things that are upcoming. Now, we don't share that publicly. They decide when it's appropriate to share that publicly and to release things. But this allows us, those of us who do get invited to give some feedback. And the newest thing that they released at the end of March, so about three weeks ago or so, is they've been fixing the problems with the FamilySearch catalog. One thing you have to understand as a. As a retired librarian and who worked in the library field for many years, is the catalog is such is a very essential component of any library's collection, because if you can't find what you have, you might as well not have it. So the point of the catalog is to provide that entry point to find what's there. And now, the trouble with catalogs is they are based at least not like the card catalog of our youth, but the physical card catalogs. But the current online catalogs are based on software. And because they're based on software, they can become outdated. They may depend on programs and underlying software that no longer functions. And so FamilySearch has been looking for A way to fix this with something new. And so the stuff in the catalog may be things that you could find online, which is useful as you work from home, might be things that you can look at at a local FamilySearch center, including an affiliate library that might be in a public library near you, but one of the FamilySearch centers near you or at in person, if you go to the FamilySearch library, which is one of the first things I do when I go there, is to look for things that are only there. And so the reason is that there are, as FamilySearch has said. And this is Robert Raymond, who is retiring from FamilySearch, but this was part of his area of expertise. He said you may be wondering why FamilySearch made changes to the catalog. It was running great. However, using a car analogy, the car may still be operating, but under the hood there may be well worn parts that could fail at any time, parts that are no longer being manufactured. Finding replacements could take days or weeks, while the catalog would be offline or the car would be unavailable. Should the engine fail catastrophically, it would take months to replace. So his point is just because you say you think, well, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Well, you don't know if it's going to break any moment now, unless you're using current software that's behind it. And that's what they were doing. So they actually could not make changes to the old catalog after June 2022. So if things were added to the collections, they were not updated in the catalog. And so basically there is some new things. You will see everything, the backlog of New Stuff Since 2022, the physical acquisitions, and they will show up there in the new catalog, also new items. So if there's anything coming in that's getting updated too. The other differences, because you want to know what's different about this new one, is that the search screen is going to look different. It works like the old one. And you can fill in the fields to search for search by place, by surname, by title, by author, by subject, by keyword, by call number, by film number. And you can combine these things and you can also expand or narrow your searches. And so all those things give you options to show what you can expand or narrow to filter. They've also been working since November 2023 on the using a different standard place enhancements. This is the same one that you find on the FamilySearch website, like when you put names in and it says, here's the standard form of this name and to tells you things like when states were in, you know, like US States, for example, were in business, when counties were in business, meaning they actually existed, you can look for those things. And so they basically are covering more parts of the world. They're working very hard on different display names. And so you will find some, and there are some places in the old catalog that aren't on the new one yet. They are to be added. There's also some targeted help. They are quite committed to providing a stable, up to date catalog for many, many years to come. And so just be aware of all of that. So again, play with the FamilySearch catalog. Go out there to find things. It really is a good way to find out what records are held by FamilySearch, whether they are online, whether they are only available at the nearest FamilySearch center or affiliate library, whether they're only available in Salt Lake City. But you can see what they've got. And this is a great way to start your research in any place that you are researching. All right, George, I think you are up next.
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I am. I have a great announcement from American Ancestors up in Boston and they have developed the Family Heritage Experience and that's a permanent exhibit exhibition that explores the connections between us and our ancestors and that is opening this week on the 25th of April. And so the Family Heritage Experience is a state of the art exhibition designed to inspire visitors to reflect on their family heritage, their history, their cultural heritage and that is being staged in a newly renovated building at 97 Newbury street in Boston. And it includes a self guided tour of interactive exhibits, unique family history artifacts and original artworks. As I said, it opens on Friday, April 25th at 10am you can learn more about that by googling Family Heritage Experience or go to the American Ancestors website and look in their blog. There's, there's lots of information about that exhibit and other spaces at American Ancestries that provide some great research support. So get busy, go visit.
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Yeah, if you're in Boston, go visit or make a trip to Boston. It's a great city. Last in the news is something I always like to end the news with. And that's what's new among the records on FamilySearch. This is the most recent update we have which was from April 1 and 32 countries and that's 47 million new records. So let me highlight some of the bigger updates here. We're talking 12 million records, government church records from Colombia, 8 million Social Security and death records from France, 8 million civil registration records from The Philippines. And let me just kind of pop around the world here at some of the bigger things. Zambia, the Archdiocese of Lusaka, church records from 1950 to 2019, 334,000 records. I'm already mentioned the Philippines with that huge collection. Let's talk about anything that might have been interesting. In Canada and the United states, we've got 25,000 more naturalization records. County naturalization records for Ohio, we've got vital records in Virginia, 192,000 more records there. I've already mentioned popping over to Europe, France, but also Ireland, they've expanded the collection of Catholic parish registers. 2 million more records. 141,000 more records for Norway's probate index cards, which covers 1640 to 1903. A lot of stuff in Latin America, Argentina, some census records from 1855, they've expanded that with 127,000 more records. Tons of new records for Brazil, we're talking 1.2 million cemetery records and 1.8 million foreigner files, which go from 1653 to 2022, plus some other large Brazilian collections. I've already mentioned so many new Colombian records, a ton of stuff. Costa Rica, Catholic church records, almost 4 million. El Salvador, Catholic Church records, almost 2 million more records there. And Peru, Catholic Church records over a million. Uruguay, 1.7 million additional civil registration records for there. So. And then Papua New guinea, almost 600,000 more vital records for Papua New Guinea. And they've also added from into their collection Find a Grave. And that's a million more records from Find A Grave. So I hope that is something to convince you, depending on where your ancestors are from, because I couldn't name every country, by the way. Of course, we don't have time for that. But that you could go and see if there's some new stuff for your ancestors, because there very well might be on FamilySearch. All right, George, we've hit the end of our news segment. A lot of news to catch up. I know. And we have a lot of listener email, which we'll get to after our sponsor break. So, folks, stay with us. Drew Smith of the Genealogy Guy is here with two time limited offers you need to know about. First, you may already know that the genealogy guys learn webinars can now be found on their own page at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. But if you've been putting off getting a subscription to Legacy Family Tree Webinars, now is the perfect time. Between now and April 30th, you can obtain a new webinar membership for 50% off the normal annual price. That's right. For only $25, you get access to more than 2,300 genealogy webinars from over 450 genealogy educators with nearly 10,000 pages of syllabus materials. To claim your new $25 membership, go to familytreewebinars.com and use coupon code SPRING25 at checkout. Don't delay. This offer expires April 30th. Second, if you're like the Genealogy Guys, you may already be a RootsMagic user, but between now and April 28, RootsMetric users can get 50% off a new MyHeritage Complete plan. To get this money saving offer, subscribe to the RootsMagic newsletter@roOTSmagic.com Newsletter and then follow the link to take advantage of this limited time pricing welcome back to the Genealogy Guys Podcast. George and I are so glad to be back with you and we are glad to catch up on as much of our listener email as we can. We apologize we can't get to everything sometimes and before we do start, please, as you listen, please be you are welcome to email us@genealogyguysmail.com with your questions, with your responses to what you're about to hear. We want to hear from you. So George, I think you've got a couple of things that we didn't get to. The very last time we did a podcast, there were a couple of additional questions from one of our listeners.
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We've got lots here. Tom Boyer, who's a frequent correspondent with us, stays busy and I've got an email from him from a while back. You said you talked about getting records from the National Personnel Records Center. I've been researching the crew members lost on the submarine trigger during World War II and have requested 89 OMPFs from the record Center. Sometimes I get a complete file, but many times I just get the Individual Personnel Death file ipdf. Sometimes if I resubmit, I'll get the complete file. Other researchers like myself have faced the same issue with the National Personnel Records Center. However, if I use a paid local researcher, they can access the files and make the copies, but each file cost me approximately $80. Do you have any recommendations on submitting a request to ensure getting a complete OM personnel file? Well, I can tell you, Tom, that this is not a new problem. This has been the case for many decades. One of the things that I was told early on if I was requesting copies of personnel files from the National Personnel Records center or any state archive is always add a notation someplace on the order form that says please send complete copies of all file contents. And that kind of alerts them that you're not looking for specific pages, you're looking for the whole thing so that you can go through that and make your determination about what's there and how it applies. The other thing that Tom says is during my research of the crew, a few of them married just before they shipped out to the Pacific. In at least two cases, the sailor married and departed 30 days after they were married. Do you have any recommended literature that discusses these quick kind of wartime marriages? In the incidences that I mentioned, the couple did not know each other prior to their marriage, meaning they were not high school sweethearts or even from the same hometown. Was there a national mindset that encouraged or condoned fast marriages before a service member departed? Wow. Some suppositions there. Tom, certainly recognize that the patriotic furor during World War II was at its maximum. It probably is the greatest certainly of the 20th century, but people were buying war bonds in theaters and banks and different places. There were servicemen canteen, such as the Hollywood Canteen, and others set up to entertain servicemen. A lot of young ladies became part of the volunteer effort and some even fell in love and, and got married. But these whirlwind romances and courtships ending in, in fast marriages, if, if they fell hard in love, they didn't want to be separated and they saw marriage before the soldiers shipped off. That was a, that was a way to ensure permanency and to show faith in the future. Now, as far as literature, Tom, I'm not aware of anything. I, I would ask our listeners if, if you are aware of, of anything that's been written about the condition of these rapid marriages in World War II, please send us an email. We'd like to hear and we can let Tom know and share with the other listeners.
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Absolutely. So there might be some interesting books that have been written on the topic or certainly research articles too, but definitely the books would be of some interest, I think. So we'll share those once we learn about them in the next episode. I have a question from Nancy who she actually sent this right after our last podcast at the end of, or right around the time of end of February. So I apologize for just getting to it now, Nancy, but this is our first episode since she says hi guys. Love your podcast and all the great info and ideas. My genealogy files need a serious cleanup. What's the best way to title a file for a woman? I know I have some Smith Comma, Jane, and then Jones and Princes Years subject and some Jones comma Jane Smith, et cetera, where Jones is her married name and Smith her maiden name. I prefer to keep everything under her maiden name. But is there a better way to do it? Thanks for all the help you give us. And Nancy, it's a very common question. I see it online all the time and I have a way that I do it that works for me and has some advantages over other methods. And so I do put all records for a person, not just a woman. Because men change their names sometimes too. Yeah. And so it wouldn't matter. But I pick but for normally it is for women, the birth name. Sometimes we call maiden name I a file. I put it under that name underscore. I use underscores to separate the parts of the file name. So like yes, it would be if she was Smith a Smith who married a Jones. I would actually just say Smith Jane. I wouldn't even necessarily mention her married name in the record. That's, I mean not in the file name. It'll be in the record if it's appropriate. And then as you said, year, year is important. Next. And I'll tell you why. And this is why it's good to have this consistent beginning. And then subject, you said subject. I would call event. So is it a birth event, is it a marriage event, is it a death event, is it, you know, residence, is it military, whatever. And then I actually have one more piece and that's what kind of document it is. So if it's birth, is it a certificate, is it a baptism, is it something else that I'm talking about? Baptisms that were normally done right around the time of birth. Same thing with marriage. Is it the marriage certificate, is it a newspaper story about the marriage? Is it something else? And with death, is it the actual death certificate, is it certificate, is it an obituary, is it a newspaper, some other announcement and so forth? George, you have some feedback on that too.
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Yeah, I was going to say if you're. You mentioned birth certificates, I'd also like to add and remind people that occasionally births were not registered at the time that a person was born. But in order to collect Social Security benefits or some other things to prove their, their date of birth, a delayed birth certificate can be created. And that includes several, several primary sources are all right.
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Right. So I believe what I believe for these online records we're talking about here is what I'm talking about actually is all the records would go in a folder under her name, meaning her birth name, underscore, her first name that's where the folder would be. And then all the individual records that I've talked about which would have her birth name, underscore her first name, underscore her the year of the. Of the document, or the event, I should say event, but whatever the type of event. And then the thing. Because by doing it this way, Nancy, everything sorts in your folder chronologically according to the timeline of this person's life, and it keeps it all together. Now, it doesn't matter that the file name does not have her married name on it, because when you open the record, there it will be. You will see the married name in the record itself. But that doesn't matter because we're just talking about where you file it. And I'm saying you file it with, in the case you gave Smith Jane, because again, she might be married multiple times, of course, and you still want to keep all those records, you know, in chronological order. So no matter how many times she married or if not at all. But they will all start the same way. They will all have the year, they will all have whether it was a marriage or whatever happened to her, and they will all have the type of record, like certificate or whatever. So I think that's the better way to do it. Again, don't worry that the record, the file name that you're saving under does not include her married name, even if it was, you know, my mother married in 1943. I would file her residence in 1950 in the census under her birth name, not under her married name. As soon as you open up the record, you will see her married name, and that's fine. Of course, you'll also probably already see her marriage certificate in 1943 before that. So you'll already know who she married. But. So I would do that. And Nancy, that's my way of doing it. I know other people have other ways, but this way it's all kept neat and clean and everything for a person is filed the same way.
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That's right. That's really good. I have an email from Michael Fagan, and he says after my daughter was born, I wanted to print a large poster with pictures of everyone in our family to show her. I couldn't find anything that did what I wanted, so I created it myself. I've just made the tool free for others to use and would be happy for any feedback or to answer any questions for sharing on your podcast. You can try it out here and I'll add this URL to the show notes. That's HTTPs f a g-a n m.com diagram/ true.
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Okay. And then next. This is interesting. This is from Laura from Middletown, Connecticut. She's asking us, dear Drew and George, have you ever discussed the French spoliation claims on your podcast? And the answer right off the bat is no, we haven't. I think I'd remember this. So let's talk about this now and I'll let me continue Laura's question. I recently learned more about this because my second great grandfather, Robert H. Cowles, I am hope I pronounce that right. C O W L E s of Wallingford, Connecticut, received 1/8 of the claim money in 1905. I found the documentation when entering Robert's name into the full text, searching it familysearch. And if you haven't tried the full text searching and FamilySearch, you're missing out on a lot because that tends to index every name in the whole collection.
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That's right.
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So you will find things that you've never found before. So that's great. I never expected to find that Robert was one of 29 heirs to receive money from his great grandfather John Deming's estate, who had died in 1810. If you Google French spoliation claims and there is in fact a wonderful article here. Well, she says there's a very good article from National Archives explaining the complication claim situation. The probate records are a gold mine for genealogical research. In my case, the probate case lists 29 heirs of my fifth great grandfather that were alive in 1905. I think this is a fascinating topic that might be of interest to your listeners. Oh, yes, Laura, for sure. You know, I've talked frequently about the legal thing for my great great grandmother Marianne Riley Smith, where it listed all the grandchildren who were heirs to her estate from the 1890s, and they was not distributed till the 1950s, and some of them weren't alive. But this is a article written by Angie Spicer van der Reit, which appeared by the National Archives, Spring 1991, Volume 23, Number 1 in Genealogy Notes. And so you can find this online. They put all this stuff up. So I'm just going to cover kind of the highlights of Angie Spicer van der Riet's article. They are claims presented by US Citizens against France, Spain and Holland for vessels and cargo taken by privateers prior to September 30, 1800, and condemned at ports controlled by those countries. Most of these were captured during the Quasi War between the US And France, although the French spoliation claims can include all property captured by the French at any time. So there was. Yeah, this was. Yeah. Pill. That's what spoliation means, by the way. This. I had to look it up in the OED just to see. It's basically the seizure of goods or property by violent means, despoiling, pillaging, plundering. And so what happened is this is claims, when those things happen to people's property. So they tried to. American diplomats tried to get the French to revoke these decrees because they were allowing some privateers off the coasts of the Americas and other places to capture American merchant vessels. Some of this was back in 1794, where they started doing some stuff. So there were some disagreements here between the US And France, and Congress, as a result, revoked some treaties. There were some hostilities. They finally signed a convention in 1800, but that did not make provisions for the settlement of the claim. So that was for the future. So no one realized how far in the future we're talking. And in fact, it says the paper trail for some claims. Remember, the article I'm looking at is from 1991 continues well into the 20th century. Now, I'm not going to keep going on this because there's a lot to cover, but I think this is interesting. If you have ancestors who filed these claims, you might find that they are documented in these French spoliation claims records. And so you should go read the article, see what's at the National Archives to see if they actually have these records or whoever's got these records, because you may be able to. But the thing was, Familysearch may also have some of this stuff available. So, Laura, thanks for bringing this to our attention. It's an area of history I think very few of us knew about. I did not, George. I don't think knew. And so I think it's safe to say that you've opened up a whole nother opportunity for us to find records for early ancestors or ancestors from 1905. But, you know, George.
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Yeah. And if you're interested, go take a look at a dictionary or encyclopedia about the term spoliation. And that refers to the. The loss or destruction of evidence. And so that is. That is a very commonly used reference in. In legal matters. So. But take a look. It. It's a new word. It's a new kind of record you. You might never have considered.
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Yeah. In this case, I think we're talking about the. The privateers who were conducting spoliation and. And who were documented. Yep. All right, George, you're going to tell us a little bit about. Yeah, flip pal.
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A
Yeah, I have an, an email here from Julie who says, so I bought a used Flip PAL scanner and it didn't come with software. Can you use other photo software to edit the pictures or do you need this software? Any help would be appreciated. Well, I'll tell you, Julie, we have had Flip PAL scanners in the past. The company has gone out of business and the Flip Pal scanners were, were quite amazing. They would allow you to, to scan a particular area of a document or image or photograph, and especially a large one, and then capture the pieces as separate files and then use their software, which they referred to as Stitcher software, that would take those images and arrange them in the correct order so that you could, you could take different, almost like puzzle pieces and consolidate them into a single image and then you could arrange to save that and maybe go someplace to have it, have it printed. To my knowledge, any other photo software wouldn't use that wouldn't provide the service you want. The Flip PAL scanner also had an SD card inserted and that would allow you to save the scanned images either onto that card or to communicate directly with your computer. Drew, where do you suggest that Julie might post a query to see if someone else has the software?
- [49:37]
B
Well, I would actually first Google to see if there's some references to Flip PAL and the Stitcher software. There is a possibility, yeah, that someone has uploaded a copy of that software, saved it somewhere online, put it. I don't know where, but that would be the first thing I'd look. There are also some Facebook groups that focus on technology for genealogy and that's the name of the Facebook group as I recall. And you could post a question specifically there. There may be people that know if that Stitcher software is still out there somewhere. So I would kind of do that. George?
- [50:19]
A
Yeah, as we're sitting here, I just did a search for quote Flip PAL unquote software and I get a website here@flip-pal.com support and it says a 64 bit version of the Flip PAL toolbox software that is compatible with the Catalina and later releases of macOS is available for purchase from Origins Unveiled, an authorized Flip PAL reseller. And you can click on, on the link here. And also they have for the for Windows, click to download version 4.1 of the toolbox software for Windows with identical features as the Mac release. Extract it to your SD card after copying the scan files from Windows given folder. But I would point you toward, toward this as a resource and see what you might be able to find.
- [51:34]
B
That's A good idea.
- [51:35]
A
All right.
- [51:37]
B
Speaking of software, I got a question at the end of March from Karen who said, hoping to learn from Drew, I've been reading your book, organize your genealogy. Cannot wait to put all this amazing planning in action. However, was looking into Evernote and discovered it has fallen apart. What app do you suggest now? Thank you so much for any advice, by the way. I'm so pleased to discover this podcast. We'll look forward to exploring here. I'm drowning in all the facts I've gathered and don't know what to do with or what to do next. I bet you have answers. Well, we try to have an answer. We'll see. I wrote Karen back not too long after she sent that question because I was rather startled that the idea that she had found people saying it had fallen apart. And I said, I still use Evernote all the time. It hasn't fallen apart, that I can see. And I heard back from her and she said, great to know. When I went looking for the app, I encountered reviews that said it was no longer supported. But your book is so inspiring and Evernote seems like the solution to my total lack of organization. Thank you so much for responding to my inquiry and also thanks for writing the book. No, I mean. And I'm very sad to say that anybody would put out misinformation to claim it's not supported. Evernote is supported on Windows, it's supported on Mac OS. It is supported on iOS, it is supported in iPad OS, it is supported on Android. It is. And the Clipper is available in almost all the common browsers. So it is very well supported. Now, what people might have been upset about, and many people were, was they did Evernote changed its pricing structure rather dramatically so that the free version doesn't do very much at all. So you will have to look into the paid version. I'm willing to pay for it because for me, I just depend upon it so much. But the. But because if you don't pay for it, you're going to get pretty limited abilities like being able to synchronize it across multiple devices or even how many notebooks you can have and how many notes and some other stuff. So what I would. As I said, you just have to decide. I'll tell you really quick, I'm going to look at the actual. The free version, you can only create up to 50 notes with the free version, one notebook, one device and so forth. So yeah, that's really a free version to see if it kind of you like it. That's all it's for, it's not to actually run it personally, although you can still connect it to the web Clipper, which is free. Now, how much are you going to have to pay? If you pay for the lowest price, and that's the personal plan. And that is going to be basically $130 a year. So now that's going to let you do unlimited devices to synchronize across. So you can do it on your desktop, your laptop, your tablet, your smartphone, all your devices. You can create up to 2,000 notebooks. By the way, they used to have a limit of 250 notebooks. So they've dramatically increased the number of notebooks you can do, meaning you could have a notebook for each of your surnames if you really wanted to, and up to 150,000 notes, which is I think more than anybody would ever want to deal with.
- [55:12]
A
Oh, no.
- [55:14]
B
And yeah. And then 10 gigabytes of monthly uploads, meaning that's you do have a limit of how much new stuff that's new stuff, not total. The personal plan is for most all genealogists is going to be enough. You just don't need to spend more money than that. You know, you can obviously look and see, but I'm going to say that's going to do it, but it ain't free to do that. So, you know, let's, we, we, we love free, but sometimes free is really not reasonable. So Evernote is very well supported, very popular, still is. So, George, you're going to talk about one of your favorite topics, the Ag Census.
- [55:58]
A
Yeah, Drew, this is about the agricultural census location for North Carolina in 1880. Now, on a free previous podcast, in our last exciting episode, I talked about a project that I have that I'm working on. I'm working on creating a book based on my personal family history going back a bunch of generations into the late 1700s and the 1800s in North Carolina. But what I was trying to do is build atmosphere for this particular family that I'm, that I'm writing about. And what you'll, what you might remember is that I went looking. My grandmother, Morgan, my maternal grandmother, was born in January of 1873. So I wanted to know a little more about the environment that she was born into. I knew that her father and her grandfather were doctors. Her father did some service during the Civil War. He apparently survived quite well. But I wanted to see the agricultural census because that would give me context about, about their work on their substantial sized farm, and that included livestock crops and just a whole lot of. Of detailed statistics. So I've worked with the 1880 census before, but I was looking for one, one particular page for, for my family for the 1880 census in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which is where Charlotte is, and then a district within the county called Lemley's, which is. That was in the northwest corner of that county. So what I, what I did is I started looking and looking and looking and I couldn't find a digitized copy of that census and that agricultural schedule. So I started doing a little research and I made contact with the Charlotte Mecklenburg County Library in Charlotte, North Carolina and a librarian there just very graciously digitized the entire thing, sent me images and he even did a spreadsheet for me with statistics. So that was tremendous. The email I have here is from Ashley and says I'm a first time listener and really enjoyed your show. I wanted to give back. And so I researched your census issue and wanted to pass this along. It looks like some of the agricultural censuses for North Carolina and other southern states are found at the library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I don't think they are complete, but one entry implies that Mecklenburg county may exist for 1880. And she provides a catalog entry from the library and then from the description on the item, it does help possibly locate originals if they are still there. And Ashley has listed some text and reading through this, it. It looks as if these schedules might be. Might very well be at the UNC Library at Chapel Hill. However, she provides other information about holdings from the Duke University library. And so those are all important. She said she found a couple reels for North Carolina Digitized on Archives.org the University of Maryland does also digitize their collection on archive.org I found them using a different search. Hope this helps your research. And Ashley, this is really great because the first place I wanted to look, I was lucky enough to find that the 1880 agricultural schedule in Mecklenburg county was available at the library in Charlotte. I could also have gone to the state archive. I could have gone to the state library. But the question of going to university libraries at UNC and Duke, well, that would have been farther down on my list of going after those records. And certainly archives.org archive.org I had forgotten about and I will certainly go check that one out as well. Ashley, thank you for all your efforts here. I appreciate your help with this research. Drew, you got something about a GEMCOM file?
- [62:07]
B
I do. And this is from Gonzalo. Gonzalo says I've been looking for a long time for an old Family Tree Maker record, which is dot FTW and finally found it. I was told that you could help me convert it to a gedcom file. I'm getting older and fast and my parents and most folks with memories of my family heritage are fading away as well. And I would like to pass what information I can to my children and grandchildren. Can you help me? Thanks in advance. Now, I'm going to email more details to Gonzalo directly, but let me just discuss in general what's possible here. You can open a FTW file that's one of the older Family Tree Maker file formats. You can open it in the newest Family Tree maker software, the 2019. So you could download, buy a copy of FT Family Tree Maker 2019 and then use it to open that file and export a GEDCOM file. Now that's as I said, you'd have to buy the Family Tree Maker. But there's another option, RootsMagic, which has a free version called RootsMagic Essentials. It should be able to import a FTW format file and it can create a GEDCOM that you can then give to anybody. And Roots Magic Essentials, you can look at what you've got. So, I mean, you know, they are one of our sponsors. You probably heard their commercial during the sponsor break. But let's face it, George and I really, we, we have them as a sponsor because we love their product. And so, yep, if you don't want to spend the money on Family Tree Maker 2019, go to rootsmagic.com, download the Root, the free RootsMagic Essentials, and then look how to import a FTW file. And again, I'll try to provide at least some details on the RootsMagic option for that. So I hope, Gonzalo, that helps you. I hope that helps anybody that comes across these old Family Tree Maker files and doesn't have a current copy of Family Tree Maker and doesn't know what to do to open them. So that's what I would recommend. So, George, something about a missing twin. Yeah.
- [64:32]
A
I have an email here from Nancy and she says, love your show. It's very informative. Here's my question. Doing some research for a friend and I found her grandmother had a twin. No one ever heard of a twin. The date would have been 1909. The birth certificate of the child states that it is a single birth. And yet in the 1910 census it shows there are twin girls. No info on the one twin after 1910. My thoughts are that they had so many children. The one twin girl was taken by a relative to raise or the child died. Any ideas? And it says thanks from Pennsylvania. Well, my first thought is if the birth certificate was that you're looking at was the original that was created at the time of the birth, there would have been an indication that it was a multiple birth. My, my gut feel and jump in Drew here, but my gut feel is that when the 1910 census was was taken, the enumerator made some sort of an error and duplicated information. You don't indicate where and specifically when and the names of the census. But if you send that in, we'll be glad to take another look. But what confounds the situation is you say the birth certificate says it was a single birth and that's more official than the hearsay census information. What do you think?
- [66:35]
B
Taru I I think so. I mean, I think you've given the best advice there. So let's go with that. And yes, now we're going to talk about Tennessee. To end our listener email. This is from Donna who sent. This is actually quite an old email and I apologize that we're only getting to it now, Donna, so please forgive us. This is from actually the last day of this was like New Year's Eve. But Donna says and this is where we want this taken care of. So hopefully our listeners can help with this. Donna Sundays, I have two puzzles. I need help with a direction where I can look in order to solve these puzzles and hope you two can provide some direction or information. Tennessee seems to be a state that is hard to locate information. Any help you too can afford me would be wonderful and helpful. Thank you. Problem number one or puzzle number one. I'm trying to find the death date of Susan and Stephen. That's Stephen S T E P H E N Godfrey with no luck. The only thing I have is the last census. Susan in the 1900 U.S. federal Census and Stephen, the 1910 U.S. federal Census. We're in Tennessee. I know that they did not have a lot of money, so I do not believe there was an obituary and I have no clue as to where to look from here. Susan Godfrey in the 1900 census Civil District 4, Polk County, Tennessee. Susan was born February 1854. Married to Stephen Godfrey. Three sons, Cleveland, 13 years old Joseph, 11 years old John, 7 years old and a daughter, Elizabeth, 6 years old. Stephen Godfrey in 1910 census Cleveland Ward 3, Bradley County, Tennessee. Widowed, born 1846, was married to Susan Godfrey and two daughters, Julia, 38 years old Stephen's daughter from a previous marriage, Elizabeth, 15 years old. And one son, Houston, who was listed as John in 1900. Sixteen years old. Now, that's Puzzle 1. So the question is, when did Stephen die? When did Susan Godfrey. Susan married Stephen Godfrey. She died sometime, apparently between 1900 and 1910. But when and where? Puzzle number two, we go back a little earlier in time. 1880 Census District, Polk County. So that's the same county that we've already dealt with. In 1900, Stephen Godfrey was married to Mary James Godfrey, and they had five children, two boys and three girls. Confused as to what happened to this marriage. Their fifth child was born in 1882, and then Stephen married Susan in 1886. I'm not sure if divorce was a thing in the late 1800s. I cannot locate a 1900 census with Mary James Godfrey with any of her children. And Stephen, the father, was married to Susan Kitchens Godfrey with their children and none of Stephen's children from a previous marriage. Thank you again for any help. Well, Donna, you're asking about divorce, but the thing that's even more likely, to be perfectly frank, is that the first wife died after the 1880 census, which is why that. Well, actually. Well, you talk about their fifth child being born in 1882. I don't know if that's who that was. Oh, I guess that's Julia, who you mentioned is in the census in 1910. Okay, so that's. Yeah. So that's 18 and. Yeah. All right. But I mean, it's very likely that the first wife died after 1882. After the. Maybe she even died in childbirth. We don't know. And then she married, and then he married. And this is where men often did this. They certainly remarried so they could have someone to help take care of the kids. And in 1886. So I wouldn't consider divorce the most likely thing to consider at this point. I'd consider that the first wife. Mary. Mary, you say? Oh, Mary James. I'm sorry, I may have said Mary Jane, but it's Mary James that she died now. And then you said you can't find a 1900 census with her, which is likely if she, you know, if she died with any of her children, and then he's, you know. And then the only. I'm getting a little confused because then you talk about Julia later. See, here's where it starts getting. Okay, first of all, keep in mind that if these children were born other than Julia, well, Even in Julia, 1882, they're adults by the time of the 1900 census, meaning the daughters, some of the daughters could already be married and the boys could be out of the home also, because they're, you know, they're, they're already adults, too, so they're not going to be with their father very likely. And you mentioned that in fact, Julia wasn't, but then shows up in, you know, in 1910 at the age of 38. So when she's 28, if she's not married, I mean, she could be with another relative of. And that's why I'd look for her. I look for Julia Godfrey in 1900, because you don't show that. And that's what I would look for. I would look in Polk county and surrounding counties. That's what I would look for. Julia, I would also look for. You mentioned Mary James Godfrey. I would look for other James families, if that's her maiden name, James. I would look for them in Polk county and then look for those families later. Again, some of those kids may have ended up with the James family, I don't know. But that's most likely. Now, finding death dates, and this is not an area I haven't done much research in Tennessee, neither is George, that I know of. But I would go to the first. I would start with the FamilySearch research wiki, go to the FamilySearch research wiki, go to the Tennessee Vital Records subpart and see what it says about death records to just give suggestions as to where you might look. I would also not assume that just because they didn't have a lot of money that there wouldn't be an obituary. They weren't charging all that much, if anything, for obituaries in that time frame. That was something that happened much later. But back in the 19, early 1900s, maybe not. They would probably have a. There could be a news article about the death. So I would look for newspapers in Polk County, Tennessee, nearby, the nearest town or city of any size. I would look for those in Bradley County, Tennessee, particularly for Stephen. But maybe that's. Maybe also that's where Susan died. We don't know. And I would look for. And then in that timeframe between 1882 and 1886, I would look for an obituary for Mary James Godfrey or Mary Godfrey and see what you can find again in, in or near Polk County. So those are some options. I'm going to hold this open to our listeners to say, what do you recommend for Tennessee? Are there certain records we're overlooking here? George, did you want to throw in anything at this point?
- [74:29]
A
No, I Think you've. You've given some really good advice there.
- [74:34]
B
Okay, so good luck again. Donna, sorry about the delay in even dealing with it, but hopefully you will find that useful. We're going to end our session talking about RootsTech, the, the, the non disease parts. Again, my apologies for the plague in Salt LA City. A lot of people do pick up various bugs when they go to conferences. Not everybody. And that was certainly a shock. But, but anyway, I. Which meant I didn't get to do as much as I wanted. I was particularly not feeling great Friday and Saturday, so those were the last days. But I did go to things on Thursday and I, I had and I spoke at some sessions and I went to the expo hall and everything was really cool. There were a lot of fun things to see there. There were a lot of good sessions on everything you can imagine. My favorite session, the one that I did have time to go to, was a timeline of things relating to artificial intelligence, and I was able to attend that, and that was a really good session there. But, you know, again, a lot of great announcements, but the point here, folks, is that it's not. You can still look at all the recorded sessions now. I was, I was on site giving talks. I was. My sessions were not recorded. But you can go to the RootsTech site for 2025 and you can listen to the keynotes. You can do all those things and you can listen to a lot of the recorded and streamed sessions. So there are some really good speakers there. I would recommend that you go take a look at that. It was a good conference and a lot of events I got to go to at least early in the week before I came down with an illness. Okay. And then coming up real soon, not to about a week from the time I actually we released this particular episode, is ogs, Ohio Genealogical Society.
- [76:41]
A
Oh, hi.
- [76:42]
B
Yep, the third and final year they will be in Sandusky. So if you haven't registered yet, you can still probably do a registration or register on site. And that's at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky. And I'm giving a lot of talks, so I think I've got six, but one is a workshop on AI. I'm doing an introductory thing on AI, and I've got five other topics, some of which are new, some are ones I've done elsewhere. And so I would encourage you all to take a look at OGs. If you're anywhere nearby in Ohio or neighboring states, you might want to take a look at that. George, any other things coming up that we haven't talked about.
- [77:33]
A
I don't think so. We've covered a lot of ground here. And I know this is a long podcast, which is fine.
- [77:39]
B
We've had short.
- [77:40]
A
Really appreciate your patience waiting for us to come back from the grave. So we're working hard to do a better job. And we appreciate your listening. And we'd love to hear from you@genealogyguysmail.com.
- [78:02]
B
And we're going to keep putting out podcasts. We're in good health now, so there's no reason to believe we won't. So after Ohio, we'll have some more.
- [78:12]
A
Episodes and we have something to celebrate in September.
- [78:16]
B
Oh, yeah. We'll talk about more of that next episode. But yes, we are so. Okay. Take care, everybody, and keep listening.
- [78:24]
A
Thank you.
- [78:25]
B
Bye. Bye.
- [78:34]
A
Sam, It.