Tip Page for December 2003
We're all thinking about the approaching holidays and planning our celebration of them. How we do it is different not only from how our neighbors around the world celebrate, but also how people used to celebrate them. Here are a few sites that provide a glimpse into the past, as well as the present.
Colonial Christmas Customs is an essay written about Christmas in colonial Virginia that was published by The Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter. A Victorian Christmas offers a variety of articles from 19th century publications on topics such as gifts, entertaining, and decorations. A search for "Christmas Trivia" will bring up several sites of humor, odd facts, games, and quizzes. History of Christmas Cards presents a detailed history of Christmas cards with some fascinating links to explore. And finally the History Channel's The History of the Holidays: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa is a beautifully done presentation of the three major holidays celebrated during this season.
May you all have a holiday season that incorporates the best of the past and the present.
A number of spreadsheet-based forms for recording census information are available at Census Tools. Gary Minder, the creator of the forms, used Excel 97 and says the forms should be compatible with most full-featured spreadsheets. He has not only forms for all the federal censuses, but also for many state censuses (including Iowa censuses), pensioners schedules, mortality schedules, and some Canadian, Irish, English, and Scottish censuses. If you haven't found the "right" forms for you, you might want to explore these. Speaking of organizing your information, two other resources are worth mentioning. One is the software program Clooz, which sells for about $40, and organizes your research by document type. You will want to use it in conjunction with a people-based program (Family Tree Maker, Legacy, PAF, etc.), but it offers some different and valuable ways of organizing and analyzing information. The Clooz website is at http://www.clooz.com/. Another useful resource is the book Organizing Your Family History Search by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack. It includes some detailed advice on packing for a genealogical research trip, as well as methods of organizing your files at home.
As you undoubtedly know, a gazetteer is one of the important books for a genealogist, providing a quick way to locate geographical sites. The Probert Encyclopaedia includes an online gazetteer listing "over 70,000 countries, states, counties, departments, provinces, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, rivers, seas and other places of the world." When I first discovered this gazetteer, I was dismayed to find that Marion County, Iowa was not one of the 70,000 and I took advantage of the "contact us" link. Mr. Probert sent me a courteous reply and has now added Marion County, Iowa to his listing. :) It's important to remember that this is not a historical gazetteer, so places that no longer exist will not usually be included.
I hope you've added your family group sheets to the Iowa Family Group Sheet Special Project and to the appropriate FGS sites in other states. We have more than 1000 family group sheets on the Iowa site now, and if that number doesn't include yours, it's time to add them! I hope you can contribute more photos to the Gravestone Photo Project too. There are more than 50,000 photos online now, but less than 60 from Marion County. Could we get to 100, at least, by the end of the year? I sure hope so!
