← The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection
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Foreign.
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Welcome to episode 436 of the Genealogy Guys Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet, now celebrating 20 years. 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 RootsMagic, MyHeritage, the Jewish Board, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy center, In cooperation with Vividpix and FamilySearch, we share listener email about newspaper research, the Stories behind the Stars project, and an unusual mention of County Leash, Ireland. George and I discuss FamilySearch's new full text search facility, and I list some of the places I'll be speaking in September and October. The Genealogy Guys Podcast is sponsored by MyHeritage and RootsMagic. And now on with the show.
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Happy anniversary, Drew.
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Happy anniversary, George. And welcome to this special. I think it's very special episode of the Genealogy Guys podcast because the anniversary is for our podcast. And George, how many years have we been doing this now?
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20 years.
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20 years.
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Do you believe it?
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Yep. We started September 4th of 2005. I think that is the right date. And so 20 years have zipped by and we aren't done yet. So we just wanted to help celebrate. Hoping as you're listening, you're celebrating with us. And so, yep, a lot's gone on in genealogy and with us in 20 years.
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That's right. And so this is our. Our 436th episode of the Genealogy Guys podcast. Right now. We've certainly done. We. We did the Genealogy Connection, and that's. That's additional episodes.
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B
Yes, we. We've done 86 of those, so. So we could add the 86 to the 436 with this. Can see we're well over 500 podcast episodes which were very. Okay, wait a minute. I didn't think you did the math in the family here, but. Okay, well, I'll take your word for it.
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So. So my comment on that is if you want to be one of our superstars and listen to every episode, you better get busy.
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Yeah, it's. It's a few hundred hours. It is, yeah. Definitely a few hundred hours or more. All right.
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And I would like to pay tribute to our first marathon man who listened to all of the episodes while he and his lovely wife were traveling. This is our friend in Caledonia, Michigan, Roger Moffatt.
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Yep. Hey, Roger, if you're out there. Hello. For being one of our basically first marathon listeners.
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That's right.
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Although we've had others, they've told us and People listen to us on again when they walk and exercise and do chores and swim. Yes. And win marathons and of course, at work or wherever they're allowed to do it. So. Yeah.
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Or can sneak it in.
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Yep. So greetings to all of you, and if you're brand new to our podcast, welcome to the Genealogy Guys Podcast, where George and I talk about whatever we're interested in. We start with the news, and there's some exciting news, and it's purely coincidental that it came out in time for our anniversary, but it's exciting for us. And George, what is that news about a certain piece of software?
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We just received notification this past week of RootsMagic 11. It's a new version of the. The famous Root Magic Software. And version 11 is out. It's simpler. They've moved things around. They've made it easier to navigate, it's more powerful, and it has a tool built into it that if you're not familiar with it yet, you need to get busy with artificial intelligence or AI. So you can use your RootsMagic software to create prompts for yourself, and those prompts can be saved. You can create them, then copy and paste them into your favorite AI engine that might be ChatGPT or something else, and your prompts can be saved so you can go back and. And copy and paste them and run them again. And I certainly do that for some of my favorite ancestors that I research. My great grandfather, Greenberry Holder. I've been using AI to look for him, and we'll talk more about him a little later.
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Well, we will. And a couple of things I want to say, George. First of all, as you can hear in a commercial a little bit later, RootsMagic is one of our sponsors. But George and I have been using the RootsMagic software for many, many, many years. We are very happy users. One thing I will just kind of heads up, because RootsMagic is available for both Windows and Mac. And specifically, I want to say, though, if you download it, you get the option to indicate do you want to download Windows or. Or a Mac OS version. However, now there are two Mac OS versions because there's. Well, technically, there's two types of Macs out there. There are the somewhat older ones that, like George and I run, which use the old intel chips, and Apple has moved to their own Apple Silicon chips. So you can download the correct version of RootsMagic depending on which type of chip your Mac uses. So you're going to want to do that, too.
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I goofed it. I downloaded the Wrong one.
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Well, yeah.
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And then had to. Had to open a ticket with their. Their tremendous support staff. And I got corrected very quickly.
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Well, I got. I'm the one who corrected you because I saw what you had done and I said, oh, you didn't. You didn't get the right version. So I'm George's tech support. You have to understand, really, we're going to buy new imacs next year. They'll have the new chip, so we'll do that.
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Okay. One thing that you should keep in mind, though, as you're listening to this podcast, hopefully you'll catch this. But they have a special introductory offer.
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Good.
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Through the end of this month, the end of September 2025. And the discount is new users can get the software for $29.95 rather than $39.95. And if you're an existing user, like we are, you can get an upgrade for 1995 rather than the $29.95. And if you are a user in the UK, you. You certainly should know that you can also get rootsmagic11 there.
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Yeah.
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So, but you've got better searching, you've got AI, You've got some new reporting facilities, a new way to mark whether something is proven unproven or. Or whatever.
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Don't give it all away, George. I'll talk about some of this on the commercial. Okay.
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Well, I'm excited because I downloaded it, I've installed it correctly, and I'm using it already.
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So he's a happy camper.
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I'm a very happy camper. And I'd like to congratulate Bruce Busby and all of his wizard team out there in Utah for who continue to provide what I believe is the best genealogy software out there.
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Absolutely. All right, so Again, congratulations to RootsMagic for a new version. And let's move on. In fact, some news from our other sponsor, which is MyHeritage.
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Oh, yeah.
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Yes. But a couple things. Just. First of all, let's just focus on the fact that in the last two months, they have added. Oh, let's see, I'll do the math. Like, 229 million records. Yeah, you heard me correctly, of 94 million in July, 135 million in August. I'm going to touch on a few highlights, that's all. Again, some of the biggie ones.
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They're all highlights.
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Well, they are, but it depends where your ancestors are from, because there are new Finnish records from 1920, population tax list. There are new Germany records and newspapers. You know, MyHeritage has OldNews.com so there's more German newspapers added into old news. There are records Of World War I, prisoners of war and internees. So again, I'm only going to hit a few because there's just too many to name. But a lot of Nordic stuff. And so all the Nordic countries, there's stuff from Spain. There is certainly a Swedish census from 1940. Oh, yeah, so that's kind of nice. And stuff from Switzerland and some stories and newspaper records from the uk, from the United Kingdom. So that was just in July and then in August when, as I said, they added over 100 million records. They have added, oh my, let's see again, many more Finland records.
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Tax lists from 1870 and 1880.
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Correct. So this other years from the Finnish tax list, population tax list. There are French newspapers in old news now. Quite a few that were not there before. Huh. There are Irish newspapers, or at least records of names, events and stories in newspapers. Sometimes they're not necessarily the full article, but they're indexed that way. Slovakia and Spain. And George, did you notice they've got even millions of records, names, events and stories found in newspapers from other than the District of Columbia. How about North Carolina and South Carolina?
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Oh, we need to get into those.
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We do.
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You know, one of our, one of our problems in South Carolina is that nowhere, anywhere online are there South Carolina marriage records.
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Right.
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So those could be very valuable for us.
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Right. And there's just so much more. Lots of newspapers from other parts of the United States are now in Old news particularly. Yeah, a lot of stuff there. So again, if you have not looked at MyHeritage lately, or maybe your public library subscribes to MyHeritage Library Edition, find out, and you may find that there's some really good stuff there. George, I think you're up with Live Memory.
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Live Memory, if. If you have used it at MyHeritage, is a really neat way to turn your family photos into short animated video clips. And that. That could be just, just about anything. So if you want to kind of do what I love to do, which is bring my ancestors back to life so I can understand them better, Live Memory is really great. But myheritage hasn't just stopped with adding that facility. You'll know that it's been around for a little while, but they've added 11 creative new effects to the feature. And you should know, of course, that Live Memory uses AI technology, but it's been upgraded so the animated images now look more lifelike and stay truer to facial features. So take a look at that. Try that out for yourself. I think you'll be hooked pretty fast.
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A news item we got in the last couple weeks from the Jewish Board. And the Jewish Board provides health and human services for all New Yorkers. They are located, I believe, in New York City. And so they've got some records, some databases, free genealogy databases. One is the National Desertion Bureau card catalog from 1911 to 1935. That's at 150yearsofcare.org both of these are at 150yearsofcare.rog, so you can probably find them when you go to that main site.
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I'll put the URL for that into the show now.
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Sure. But that one is just an index to cases that were pursued by the National Desertion Bureau, which helped women track down husbands who had abandoned their families. Often has both the husband's and wife's name, the date the case was open, the referring agency, the recorded cause of desertion, the case disposition, and a case file number. And then you can request the corresponding case file from the. Yes, from the. If I'm saying that right, the YIVO Archives. Y I V O Archives. So anyway, that's one. And another one is the United Hebrew Charities of New York, Recipients and donors from 1869 to 1877. Also located at 150yearsofcare.org it's a data set of 1231 recipients and 368 donors from New York City's United Hebrew Charities, which has names, street addresses, the amount of the aid, some quoteworthiness in quotes, notations, and they're on an interactive map so you can find the blocks of the map and visualize some neighborhood patterns in the 1870s. And this is in recognition of the Jewish Board's 150th anniversary. That's why the website is 150yearsofcare.org so again, lots of stuff that if you have in particular Jewish ancestors from some of these places, you may want to check those. Anyway, very useful information and thank you for having sent us that information. George.
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Yeah, I have another special announcement here and this is a terrific, terrific conference here. On Friday, October 3, 2025 from 9:00am to 4:00pm the Allen County Public Library Genealogy center and Vividpix are doing a full day experience designed for activity directors in senior living communities, professionals working in the aging services field, and family caregivers supporting their loved ones at home. This is, this is just amazing. The president of Vivid Pigs, Rick Voight, has been deeply involved in aging issues and life enriching programs for seniors and people who are suffering from memory issues. And so he is just one of the speakers we have. Dr. Josh Freitas will be speaking on brain health and photo reminiscence. Kurt Witcher, who's the manager of the Genealogy center, will be talking about family history and community services. Following lunch, Dr. Charlotte Yehudis will be talking about aging and thriving and talking about how important it is to learn just to enhance the lives of, of the people suffering these memory issues. And then Rick Voight will top off the day talking about life enriching programs from vivid pics, his memory station and all kinds of different topics there. I think if you're interested, show up at the main library theater at the Allen County Public Library for this excellent event. And I wish we could be there. Drew.
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I know. Okay, so the latest out of Family search in terms of records, they sent us a briefer report, which is fine because we often find we have way too much stuff to cover. And we're just going to talk about what they sent us for the September 2025 update. And that update, they've added 5 million new records from 12 countries. But the three largest collections that they have added, or there may be additions to existing collections or they may have just added a new collection. They are 3.6 million civil registrations. That's birth, marriage and death from Italy. That's 300,000 cemetery records from Chile and almost 300,000 Catholic Church records from Portugal. So, you know, if you've got ancestors from there and you haven't been searching FamilySearch lately, you may want to go do that. We usually get these about once a month, so we expect we'll see another one in a few weeks.
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I just want to make a comment here. We, we talk on the podcast every time about new records and enhanced records that, that are added to these, these databases. And just here between FamilySearch and MyHeritage, look, we've got millions of new records. So the family, for those of you who are active researchers, if you think you've done all your research at any of these online sites and you figure you've milked the site dry, please be aware that you probably have not. They're adding new records at a tremendous clip. And the fact that lots of these facilities are adding records, they are indexing records and making them searchable using AI indexing technology. So that's it's, it's very exciting.
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Okay. With the end of the news, we're going to stop and take our commercial break where again you get to hear about our wonderful sponsors. And after the commercial break, we will get to a few pieces of listener email and a few other odds and ends that George and I are keeping up with, so stay with us. How do you describe a product that offers so many choices? A place to keep your family tree that can be made accessible to your relatives, billions of historical records, DNA matching features, millions of pages from historical newspapers, a massive collaborative tree@genie.com Thousands of genealogy webinars on family tree webinars, the ability to create live memory animated videos from your family photos, all from MyHeritage. Pick and choose the features you want or get all of them with an Omni plan. Learn more@myheritage.com In a 1984 mockumentary, a guitarist claims he can turn his amplifier up to 11 to make it even louder. Well, that might have been fictional, but RootsMagic just did crank it up to 11 with the release of RootsMagic 11. What can you add to an excellent piece of genealogy desktop software to make it better than it was? How about a new Life summary that lets you see all the details about one of your ancestors and and edit them as needed? A search that can be turned into an ancestral group, a template that can turn into an AI prompt to be used in your favorite AI tool, and an update to what we said earlier in the podcast. Not only a Windows version, but now a single Mac OS version that can run on any Mac OS device. Want to Learn more? Visit rootsmagic.com welcome back. You're listening to the Genealogy Guys podcast, the special 20th anniversary episode. And so George, I think I'm going to start talking about things relating to newspapers. This is from Laura and this is a follow on. We had discussed some issues relating to Newspapers.com in a previous episode, so you can find that one, I'm sure. And she Laura thanks us and says thanks for the thoughtful discussion about the Newspapers.com issue on the podcast. I do always love the thoroughness and expertise y' all bring to a variety of topics to close the loop. The problem lasted for about a week and then everything was fine. I have noticed since then I have to clear cookies more frequently to ensure continued performance, but that's certainly not a huge issue. This whole discussion and George's exhortation for folks to conduct research in newspapers inspired me to share my most meaningful newspaper success story. Apologies for the length, but I hope you find it interesting. I first learned about my great granduncle Henry Fowler decades ago When I was just starting my genealogy journey, my dad and I visited my dad's hometown, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and visited the cemetery where his grandmother and great grandparents were buried. In the same plot as his great grandparents was a cenotaph for Henry Fowler. This is F A L L E R stating that he died in 1918 and was buried in France. Dad remembered that his grandmother had a brother who was killed in World War I, but I didn't know much about more or didn't know much more because nobody really talked about it. Armed with the information on the headstone, which included his regiment and company, I crossed my fingers and wrote to the nprc, which is National Personnel Record center, to get his service record to see if I could learn more about his service or his death. As might be expected, they replied that his record was destroyed in the fire. Because the NPRC had a fire and they didn't have any information to share, I was able to get a photograph of his headstone. This was before Find a Grave from the American Battle Monuments Commission, but I despaired of finding any more information.
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Fast forward.
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Until about five years ago, I had just gotten a subscription to Newspapers.com because they had added some Pennsylvania newspapers that I thought might be helpful. I was sort of playing around, you know, how you're not supposed to do research, and I entered Henry Fowler's name into the search box without even any date or location parameters. I was actually mostly looking for his father, and a newspaper article from Tucson, Arizona, of all places, appeared. It was an AP story, and I eventually found many others, but I learned a fascinating and tragic story about Henry Fowler's death. He was killed in the Battle of meuse Argonne in September 1918, along with six others on land that was almost immediately taken by the enemy. His company was unable to retrieve their bodies, and after the armistice, their bodies could not be found. It wasn't until nearly a decade later, in 1927, that their bodies, presumably buried by the Germans, were recovered by the Graves Registration Service. That discovery is what made national news, and the Graves Registration Service is a fascinating subject on its own, as I discovered later in an extensive article in the June 1929 issue of American Legion Monthly magazine that shares the discovery in more detail. I now had something more substantive to request from the nprc, as I presume that such an event would have generated a great deal of paperwork beyond just a service record. I wrote them with a request wherein I described the situation briefly and asked for information relating to the recovery and burial. They responded in relatively Short order with a packet of information that included an investigation report, documents recording his reinterment at Meuse Argonne American Cemetery, and drafts and copies of the letter that was sent to his mother, notifying her of the recovery of his body and even mentioning that he was recovered with a handful of French, Italian and American coins. It was a wealth of information that brought this whole incident to tragic life. Perhaps the most valuable document, at least to me, was a copy of a 1929 handwritten letter from Henry's sister, Annie, my great grandmother, requesting permission to visit Henry's grave in France as part of the Gold Star Mothers and Widows Pilgrimages. Their mother had died the year before and Henry wasn't married, so she wanted to go instead. Unfortunately, I also have the copy of the military's reply. They were sorry, but no, sisters and other family members weren't covered in the act. I never knew my great grandmother. She died before I was born. So having this letter, even with its sad outcome, is priceless. Fast forward once more to 2018. This had been on my mind for a while, and as the centenary of the end of the war approached, I was more and more haunted by the thought that no one from our family had ever been to his grave to pay their respects. So I made plans with friends to combine a vacation in Paris with a trip to Verdun. I'm not a terribly sentimental person, but I stood at that grave with my friends and godchildren and wept. To think that finally, nearly 100 years after his death, someone from Henry's family was able to stand and remember his sacrifice. That I was able to make the journey my great grandmother couldn't. Still chokes me up years later. Thanks as ever, for the great work you do. Laura. Laura, I want to say first, and I believe I said some of this in my emails to you, I know how you felt. I know that because I went to England just a few years ago, right before the pandemic, when I was attending the RootsTech in London and my good buddy Graham was nice enough to give me a ride after the con, after the conference, to go a ride up to Cambridge, to the Cambridge American Cemetery, because that is where my uncle, my father's brother, is buried. He died during World War II and I don't know that anybody, I don't think had been. I don't even think my brother had been there when he visited England some many years ago. But the fact that I got to be there, and of course there's a picture of that on my Facebook page, so showing me next to the cross. But again, yes, I was terribly choked up to be there and to be someone from the family. And I remember the story that when my uncle died, my grandfather was given the option to bring the body back for burial and chose not to. My uncle was not married. And, and so, so that's what happened. But Laura, that's a. The, the whole story from start to finish is, is a, is a wonderful tribute to, to him. And so I'm glad you shared that, George.
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As you were reading that, I did a quick search for Graves Reg. The GRS. It was a military unit established in 1917 and it later evolved into the modern Mortuary Affairs Program. And that's responsible for the professional and respectful handling of deceased military personnel, which includes identifying, recovering and ensuring the proper burial or return repatriation of remained to their next of kin. And it operated under the Quartermaster Corps. And so it began, as I said, in 1917. And you can do a, do a search in Google for Graves Registration Service and you'll get an AI overview there. And so you may want to take it. Take a look at that. She also mentioned in there the American Battle Monuments Commission.
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Yes, correct.
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And I've used that site so many times over the years, there is a website for that. And that organization was founded during World War I. And it's its idea, its focus was to be responsible for the grave sites of Americans who were. Who were killed overseas, American service personnel. And you'll find a lot of information there. And if they have created some miniature biographical information that tells you the name of the individual, their rank, the organization in which they served, that can add some more information to you. Unfortunately, in this case the military, the personnel records were not available from the National Personnel Records center because they were casualties of the fire in the early 70s. But again, it's another way to help flesh out the information about your ancestors and family members who served and sacrificed in the world wars.
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And yeah, as I said, you can search the American Battle Monuments Commission website by names. You can look by cemeteries, because there are a number of cemeteries. And I was just looking just now to see what I could find.
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You also can arrange through them for the placement of flowers on graves and that there's an expense obviously involved in that service, but it's something you might want to consider.
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Sure. So anyway, thank you again, Laura. We appreciate that email. And George, I think you're gonna. Did you have something else on? Okay, go right ahead.
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Our friend Tom has written us again and he says just a note that you might pass on in your podcast. The Stories behind the Stars project for which I volunteer has been writing memorials for World War II veterans killed in the war and posting these memorials to Fold three and to Together We Serve websites. So if any of your listeners have ancestors lost during the war, they may find some very detailed information on one of these two sites. Boy, talk about timing. Tom in conjunction with Laura's email, he goes on to say, in my research, I typically request the Veterans Complete Official Military Personnel File OMPF from the National Personnel Records center and use that information to verify the person's service. I focus on Navy personnel because I'm retired Navy, so most often the individual's OMPF is available and not lost in the fire of 1978. I also add a ship's history from the Dictionary of American Navy Fighting Ships written by the Navy Heritage and History Command. I try to give a story of the person's civilian life before entering the military, their military history, and the history of their ship. If they were married, I also had information about their wife and children after the war. Sometimes I even get lucky and find a living relative. Sadly, many times that relative knew little about the life of their lost ancestor. It's a very rewarding and educational experience. If any of your listeners want to help, they can contact the SBTS moderators on the Stories behind the Stars Facebook page page and I will try to add that to the show. Notes thank you Tom for for sharing that that I have been to fold three, obviously hundreds of times and I've seen some of the biographical information that's been added. So I'm glad to know more about the volunteer efforts that are underway.
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Yeah, I think our last listener email is from Christine in Wadsworth, Ohio, and she says hi guys. Drew, I was listening to a podcast the other day as I was driving with my husband and I was shocked to hear them mention County Leash. I honestly hadn't heard of that county before hearing you talk about your trip to Ireland with Donna Moody, so I was a little stunned when I heard the mention. It's the Podcast Lore by Aaron Menke, episode 68, the Tainted well, it's an episode about Irish lore, but the beginning of the podcast episode is where he mentions County Leash and enjoy that, Christine. Thank you. And in fact, I'm although I'm a regular listener to Aaron Menke's Lore, it's one of the first podcasts I actually started listening to regularly. I have I'm not I'm behind on the episodes and I probably have not had a chance to hear that one. Or maybe at the time I wasn't paying close attention. I will go Back to episode 68 and listen to the beginning of the Tainted. Well, I recommend Aaron Menke's lore. It's, you know, it. Sometimes there's things you don't take 100% seriously, but some we all can enjoy a good ghost story. And so that's what Aaron Min often talks about are the ghost stories from around the world. That's very common. Every culture seems to have them and things like ghost stories, but things from the, you know, supernatural lore. That's where it's fun. So. So I do listen to it for entertainment and I will have to go back to that one. And so thank you, Christine. I appreciate that. I'm glad. Yeah. If you'd never heard of County Leash. That's spelled LA O I S then. Yeah, that's. That's a great little part of Ireland and I recommend it. So, George, what else do we want to talk about now that we're done with our listener email for today? What else we got?
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Well, one thing I'd like to talk about is a facility at FamilySearch that I've used and I got you involved in using it as well in the last couple of weeks here. And that is FamilySearch has something called full text search. Now, we all know that that FamilySearch has had a prolific collection of microfilm over the. Over the decades, and they have now converted everything from microfilm to digital format. Unfortunately, though, that that has been done so quickly and the stuff placed online. But the volunteer indexers just, it was. It's impossible to keep up. They were having a hard time even before that process began, of digitizing the microfilm. But FamilySearch has been using artificial intelligence for indexing lots of things. So have all the other services who were digitizing and indexing things like the 1950 census or some of the other great collections that we've come to rely on. But in this case, if you go to familysearch.org and you go to the top to the menu bar across there, you can click on the dropdown for search and click and click on the second item down, which is full text. And what full text does is goes through using artificial intelligence, and it looks at both typewritten and handwritten documents and pulls these things into an indexed list of search results. And drew. We all remember when optical character recognition was first used for newspapers that there were problems. Of course, there were accuracy problems because things were difficult to read. However, when we're Looking at full text search with handwritten documents, you find some of that as well. But what I'm here to tell you is I have found some incredible things in my research and I just want to mention one example and then I know you've got a couple that you've amazed me with. The example I have is for those of you who listen to the podcast on a regular basis, know that my great grandfather on my maternal line was a gentleman by the name of Greenberry Holder. That's three words. And he was born in Gwinnett County, Georgia and he died in Floyd County, Georgia in 1914. And in my first research trip to Rome, Georgia and to the courthouse I was looking for, I was interested in finding. Well, when did he first purchase the piece of property that became the family home there in Rome? Well, I quickly learned in the courthouse that they literally had hundreds of entries for Greenberry Holder and for his wife, A.P. holder. That's Ansible. Penelope Swords Holder. And that they were very active in buying and selling real estate property that was part of their investment strategy. Well, to this day I probably will never know when that piece of property where they built their house was, was purchased because obviously in, in land and property records, it doesn't give the street address. It gives a description of the property itself and the boundaries. But what I did find is that in using FamilySearch and the full text search, I was able to go go into their database and do some searching and I found literally hundreds of these transactions that were listed in the, in the documents in the land and property records. Now I'll tell you that went on the search template, you can add the person's name. I added Green Barry Holder and didn't come up with much. And then I went back and did it again under GB Holder, which he used and was referred to in many ways. Also on the full text search box, you can start. You can use keywords or names you can use indicate the place and the year range from and to and if you know what the image group number is, which few of us do without some, some other research, but you can add those as well. I'll tell you, I used GB Holder in both the keywords and put that in quotes to make that an exact phrase. No punctuation marks. And I also used it in the name and I got different mixes on, on both my search results. But I'll tell you, I am so excited and tickled pink on this. And I'm using full text search on many other documents that, that I thought, oh, they'll never be indexed now. Full text search gives us that tool. Drew, tell our listeners about the couple of things that you found that were noteworthy.
- [44:13]
B
Yeah. So I decided since, you know, if you're searching the full text of everything that FamilySearch has, you usually try to pick an uncommon name so you won't have any. So many hits to go through. I mean, you can limit it by a place and by a year. But I wanted to see what they had. And I put in the name Lewis Wineglass. Lewis Wineglass was my greatest grandfather, my paternal grandmother's father. And spell it. Spell E, I, N, G, L, A, S, S, W, E, I, E. I'm.
- [44:46]
A
Also going to ask you if you've learned to misspell it.
- [44:49]
B
Oh, yes. Not in some records, sure, but. But most of them have it spelled as it should be, at least the way the family typically did. Lewis was a, as it was, from Poland, as was his wife, Sarah. They married after they got to New York. And they. He was, he worked for the. Well, he was originally a tailor, as was his brother and his father, but he became a, an agent for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. So he was a salesman. And so I knew that much from some of the records I had. I also knew or had reason to believe that he traveled in places like near Little Rock, Arkansas, Memphis, Tennessee, because some of the children, there were eight children in the family were born not in New York City, but were born in places like Arkansas or Tennessee. Even my own grandmother thought she was born in Arkansas. She was not because I have her Manhattan birth certificate. But clearly the family had gone with him on these trips. So he, the whole family went to, you know, near Little Rock. They went to Memphis. They went to other places. But I don't know if I had any documentation on that. Typically they were showing up in. Well, I remember there is no 1890s census to really cover that. That's a problem. And they are in the 1900 census, although by that time they're back, I believe, in New York. So I did the full text search saying what could show up. And among other things that came up, one was a was for Memphis, Tennessee, for Shelby County. That's where Memphis is. And it was a, an 1897 census.
- [46:39]
A
Wow.
- [46:40]
B
And so here we are, the right time frame. This is typed, so it's been transcribed from some records. And it is the. Again, 1897. I'm looking at it on the screen and it's been alphabetized. That's how you also know it's been transcribed at least The W's are all together here. Yep. And there's Lewis living with his family at 662 Main Street. I think I looked up on a map, and if it hasn't changed, it may be North Main, I don't know, with his wife Sarah, and four of his children, Annie, who's eight, Rachel, my grandmother, who's six, Meyer, who's my. Also went by Mike, who's five, and Abby, who would have been like Abe was two. And it's.
- [47:33]
A
Does that census tell you where they were born?
- [47:37]
B
Yes, that's what I was going to say next. And actually for Annie, Rachel, Meyer and Abby, or Abby, it says New York City because that's, you know, you don't just put a state. If it's New York City, you say New York City. But. And it says Lewis and Sarah were born in Russia, which is probably true in 1897, even though at other times it was Poland and other times it was something else. So keep that in mind. But again, the point is this is documentation showing that he took the family when he went on his sales trips to Arkansas and Tennessee, he went with the family. And some of the kids, later kids, I think are, as I say, born either in Tennessee or Arkansas.
- [48:25]
A
And if you, if you know that, then you should be doing some research into, in familysearch, into collections for by place and maybe go to Tennessee and look for birth records to see if you can find their birth certificates, if they have them.
- [48:45]
B
That's right. If they've got those. One more thing. But again, the things you can find out, some of you also heard me talk about my famous great, great grandmother, Marianne Riley Smith, who was a wealthy woman in Newark, New Jersey, owning a glass bending business. And when she died, she was very wealthy. The thing that was interesting was there was newspaper coverage of her death and newspaper coverage of what happened with her will because some of it said that the sons, other than the two of the sons that she put in charge of the business, were not happy. And they went to an attorney to contest the will. And the attorney warned them that if they went forward with this, her will was designed, that they would be completely cut out if they pursued what they were doing. So they said that, oh, it was all a misunderstanding, but they said that they thought their mother was under undue influence. That's what the newspaper said. And it went on from there. And of course, the sons who were the recipients, the ones she wanted to be put in charge of business, said, you know, anybody who knew our mother knew that that was not possible. For her to be under undue influence. She knew her mind well. I thought that was the end of the story, that there was this legal battle that didn't go very far. But when I did this full text searching for Maryanne Smith In Newark, New Jersey in the 1890s, 90 again, 97 seems to be about the right time. When she died, there was actually stuff filed by her oldest son, Philip, who basically did say that they contested some of the will and said their mother was under undue influence and was not of sound mind and so forth. So this looks like it got filed, not pulled as the newspaper story would have you believe, but although it's possible they filed it and then they withdrew, I suppose afterwards. And maybe that's not in the papers I'm looking at. But again, there is a lot more details there about the trials and tribulations and trials might be the right word here. Yes, I know. Involving my great, great grandmother's estate. So you don't know what you're going to get when you open up this this box of records that full text searching will unleash for you. Just be prepared. There could be a lot of stuff there.
- [51:25]
A
George and again, you may have to use different parameters in the search by limiting it to a location or a year, beginning year, ending year or beginning and ending year. But certainly if you thought that there were records that would never be indexed, that you'd never see, but that probably FamilySearch had had microfilmed at one point. Now this opens up a whole range of possibilities for you.
- [52:01]
B
Right, right, right.
- [52:03]
A
I'm excited.
- [52:05]
B
So what else, Georgia? I'm going to be doing a little bit of speaking upcoming.
- [52:10]
A
Yeah, you're gonna, you're gon some things.
- [52:12]
B
Yeah. For example, I'm going to be traveling to Cleveland for the first weekend in October. That's the, that's the family, their, their annual family day. And so they got they're bringing in a bunch of people to speak at the Cleveland Public Library. So it's an all day event on Saturday, October 4th. I'm flying up on Friday, flying home on Sunday, and I'm looking forward to that and getting to see some friends that will also be speaking there. So if you're anywhere near Cleveland, this would be a really good time to check out the library's website, see if you need to register for anything and so forth, because you could be enjoying quite a lot of what's going on at the Cleveland Public Library on Saturday, October 4th. George, what else? You wrote down some notes, I think.
- [53:05]
A
Yeah, I did before that date. You're going to be speaking virtually for the APG chapter of the Puget Sound.
- [53:18]
B
Right.
- [53:19]
A
And that's on September 22nd. So that's something coming up pretty soon. Check out. And on October 11th, you're going to be in Lakeland, Florida, at the Lakeland Public Library.
- [53:34]
B
That's right. So go over to the Lakeland Public Library's calendar to give you the details of that event. And I'll be driving over there because that's Lakeland's not more than about an hour. An hour from here, so it's easy to get to. So I've been doing that for them for quite a few years, so I'm looking forward to that one. Okay.
- [53:56]
A
I think we've covered a lot here.
- [53:59]
B
In this episode and in the past 20 years. Oh, yeah, we've covered a lot, but we.
- [54:05]
A
So get. Get your running shoes on and your headset.
- [54:08]
B
That's right.
- [54:12]
A
And get rolling.
- [54:15]
B
I. I just want to end with saying thank you to all of our longtime listeners from going way back for 20 years. Thank you for your support. Oh, and speaking of support, and we also have a Patreon channel, so you can look for us on Patreon and see if you can and help us out there if you like. Another thing, and if you're a new listener, thank you for becoming a new listener. And whether you're an old listener or a new listener, you can contact us@genealogyguysmail.com that's where we get our ideas from, our listener emails that we can respond to. And so we hope that you will, you know, take advantage of that because we want to hear from you. That's how we know you're out there. And so please, please, please do. I was, the last time I was out of town, I was. I was at Fort Wayne, Indiana, for the International association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. And at least three different people came up to me and said they were podcast listeners. So again, if you happen to come to Cleveland or Lakeland and you are a podcast listener, please let me know. I always enjoy meeting our listeners. George and I have good imaginations. We have to imagine you listening to us, but it's nice when we actually can meet you in reality. So.
- [55:37]
A
And when we can hear from you.
- [55:38]
B
By email and we hear from you. Yep, we know you're out there. So with that note, thanks for listening. And we, I certainly hope you enjoy all the new tech technology and the new ways of doing research, and I hope you make many successes.
- [55:53]
A
So, George, happy anniversary to you, Drew. Happy anniversary to all of our listeners. And I wish you happy hunting in your genealogical research.