Newer News

Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups are going away or changing in such a way that I no longer feel they will be useful.  Much of the data is already gone, file, photos, etc.  It's already impossible to post messages there.

It might be better to migrate to a Facebook group and I'll think about reforming all the Yahoo groups I formed for family history of various specific families there.

In any case, I just downloaded all the member lists of my Yahoo family history groups and will, as I have time, move the email addresses of those members into my email address book.  Many of you are already in there.

Just in case, especially if you recently requested to join one of those groups, my family history email address is:  familytracker@yahoo.com.

New Resources

I just discovered, today, a bunch of cemetery and headstone web sites that, when I have the time, I will add to the Links page.  But here's some of what I found:

The first is the New York Gravestone Photo Project which aims to collect photographs of headstones all over New York State.  It nicely indexes the photographs by county and surname.  I hope to contribute to the site as I take cemetery photos.

Next is the New York Cemetery Project that is looking for volunteers although I don't know when that request was posted to their web site.  It is similar to the Gravestone Photo Project but also includes obits, etc.  You'll see that volunteer photographer are needed for many of the counties.

That's it for this time.  I hope you're all well.

News

As of today:

I received, from the Town Clerk of Delaware, NY, an official death certificate for Peter J. Wormuth, son of Peter Wormuth and, maybe, Harriet Barecolt.

Unhappily, the death certificate has no information about his parents and doesn't even have the place of death, although I also have an obituary, from the collection of the Town Historian of Tusten, NY.

I updated my index of documents and I've posted, in the Wormuth tab above, a list of Wormuth family documents that are available as copies.  See the instructions on that page.  I will update the list as I get more documents.

I will be posting lists of available documents for other families as I get them updated.

That's it for now.

The 1950 U.S. Census Release Date

The 1950 US Census images will be released April 2022.  It's not that far off.  I will appear on that census, having been born in 1948, as will many of my cousins.  For me it will mean family lines I have been following will be brought up to the point of my generation and some hole will be filled in the family tree.

Still, going backwards, I am pretty much stuck at brick walls in most of my family lines.  There are many gaps in family lines, many mysteries.

However, I just last week, found an ancestor in somebody's online family tree who I had no information about after 1860 when she was 14.  I had assumed she had died but, in this tree and after contact with the tree's owner, I found she had married the brother of one of her sister's husbands.

It's that kind of surprise that makes the hunt interesting.  So now another branch of that family has spread out through my database and there are more relatives out there to find.

It's great fun.

I'm still hoping to find a relative who has a photo of Uncle Marcus Wormuth.  My mother had one but it was destroyed in a roof leak.  😢

Photographs help me keep individual people straight in my mind; who was who.  So, I appreciate it when people share their family photos with me and I'm always happy to share family photos with those who are related.  I have quite a few that have been given to me over the years.  I'm trying to organize and index them so I can give people lists of what I have.  There are still a lot that haven't been digitized yet.

Back to it.