Kindo Family Blog

In my book,Genealogy Online 8th Edition, the first chapter is about how to begin your genealogy project. For a detailed description, read my book ;D. But here is a short version of how to get started.

To begin your genealogy, begin with yourself.  Collect the information that you know for certain about yourself, your spouse, and your children. The data you want are birth, marriage, graduation, and other major life milestones. The documentation would ideally be the original certificates; such documents are considered primary sources. A primary source is an original piece of information that documents an event: a death certificate, an adoption order, a birth certificate, a military record, a marriage license,  a divorce decree, etc. Photographs, with the people in them identified and the date on back, can also be valuable. Such documents are considered primary sources because they reflect data recorded close to the time and place of an event.

If possible, scan in your sources of information on your immediate family.

Now, you’re ready to begin gathering data on one surname. A good place to begin is interviewing family members—parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws. Ask them for stories, names, dates, and places of the people  and events in the family.  It’s a good idea, and lots of fun, to record these interviews. You’ll cherish the audio or video later, I promise.

You can also gather secondary sources to expand your information: A secondary source is a source that may cite an original source but is not the source itself: an obituary, wedding story, or birth notice in a newspaper; a printed genealogy; a Web site genealogy, etc.  When possible, get documents to back up what you’re told. Family Bibles, newspapers, diaries, wills, and letters can help here. A good question to ask at this point is whether any genealogy of the family has been published. Understand that such a work is still a secondary source, not a primary source. However, if such a genealogy has good documentation included, citing primary sources, you might find it a great help.

Now you’ve got a good start on your genealogy!

Eight years ago I was touring France  with a group of 30 students (including my two children), three teachers and about 5 other adults. We learned so much about records and history in France! If you have some French genealogy, you might want to check out these sites:

• Footnote has some documents related to the Bastille
• This site has a list of all those executed by the guillotine. It’s in French, so you may need to translate it.
• Alliance Genealogie is another French site
• Notre Temps.com is a French portal aimed at seniors, with a Genealogy Beginners Guide. It has searches of several French databases and articles highlighting genealogy. This site is exclusively in French.
• The French president’s site has a page (in English) on the history of 14 July.
• Cyndi’s List has a whole page of links related to France.
• This clip from Casablanca c’est formidable!
• And this site has the French National Anthem’s history and lyrics.

Happy First Day of Summer!

I’ll start off this week’s blog with an announcement: I have wrestled with the Internet (or at least my ISP’s portion) and won. My daily blog is now at Blog.EPCrowe.com! If you subscribed before this, you need to update your links. Go to the blog, scroll down on the left and click Entries (RSS).

Now to this week’s tip for beginners. In my book, Genealogy Online 8th Edition, I discuss many useful web sites. One of the best for genealogists of any level is the all-volunteer effort of WorldGenWeb.Org.

Here is a screen capture of the European WorldGenWeb page, which leads you to  British IslesGenWeb, CenEuroGenWeb, EastEuroGenWeb and the MediterraneanGenWeb regions.

The goal of the WorldGenWeb Project is to have every country in the world represented by an online website and hosted by researchers who either live the country represented or who are familiar with that country’s resources. The WorldGenWeb Project is a not-for-profit volunteer genealogical organization dedicated to the free access of genealogical information by anyone in the world. Each of the hosted countries maintains a system for submitting queries, for uploading transcribed or scanned documents, and help desks.  (NOTE: Once you are up and running with your genealogy, you can become a volunteer with the project!)

Use the WorldGenWeb to search for the information you need on your ancestors!

Have you voted already about how often you are in touch with your mum? If not, do so now, it will only take a second. You scroll down a bit, you’ll stumble upon the poll in the right sidebar (looking like that pic here), tick on the right radio button and click vote. And don’t cheat

By the way: You can see the results as well, by clicking on the small results button below the vote field. Any you can start comparing it to the results in other languages, like Russian for example where the preliminary results are very different already.

We are looking forward to the final analysis in the next weeks!

Image via WikipediaA recent study by researchers at Oxford University and the Institute of Education, London, has revealed that young kids are more happy if they’re taken care of by their grand-parents. According to the research, grandparents are increasingly looked upon as problem resolvers.

The study which was conducted amongst 1500 kids also showed that involvement with grandparents helps them to maintain cool during critical situations such as divorce. The statistics of the research say that out of every three grandmothers one looks after a grandchild.

According to the university, it is time for the government to take initiative in this direction and ensure that necessary steps are implemented for taking care of grandchildren.

According to Prof Ann Buchanan, the director of the Centre for Research into Parenting and Children in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at Oxford University, “What was especially interesting was the link between involved grandparents and adolescent well-being. Closeness was not enough: only grandparents who got stuck in had this positive impact on their grandchildren”.

Hello all!

I am Elizabeth Powell Crowe, known to my friends as “Libbi”.  I have a blog with news, hints and musings on genealogy.  And, I’m a writer as well as a genealogist, so of course I have a book, Genealogy Online 8th Edition. Just so you know a little about me, I live in Florida, USA. My family is scattered throughout Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Texas, California, Florida, and North Carolina. Oh, and I probably have a ton of Powell relations in Missouri, as well, but I haven’t tracked them down yet.

So the reason I’m typing all this here is that I’ve been asked to do a weekly Genealogy Basics tip for this blog, and I’m happy to oblige. Now sometimes, I tend to talk about how the watch is made instead of what time it is, so if my entry leads to more questions than answers, just leave a comment and I’ll try to clear it all up!

So here is this week’s tip: Learn to search for genealogy in your pajamas. Use services from your local library, from sites such as Kindo, and other resources from your computer at home! For example, the British Library owns the world’s largest collection of research materials on many subjects, including genealogy. Using your computer you can access the BL by:

* British Library Direct: search 20,000 journals for free and order full text with your credit card.
* British Library Direct Plus: subscription based service containing   over 67,000 titles with full text ordered via a credit card or   account.

For information on all of their services, visit: http://www.bl.uk/articles.

Until Next Week!

Libbi

In ancient times no such thing existed and since we lived in tiny, closely knitted communities and we believe such information was passed on by word of mouth. Early scrolls provide scant information and as soon as they started showing up, we depended on the census records here. Once we learnt to write, we started recording everything!

Information was very difficult to find during the middle ages and it is only quite a while after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 that accurate records start appearing because systems improved and because there were more Bibles printed – even though these were very few and far between. Remember that books were a rarity. The Catholic Church, that ruled Europe at the time with the assistance of the Canon Law, had their hands full with persecutions, stimulation of wars and a fervent need to cleanse everyone and everything. There was little time to educate the masses – much less a need for it and they had no time to have Bibles printed for the people. It must be remembered how prominently the Catholic Church featured in the lives of our ancestors living in Europe.

Now for today and our need to record our own family trees! To start, you will need birth records or death certificates. Usually the latter records the date of birth, the cause, exact date and time of death. However, death certificates may not always have been issued in the more recently developed nations. In Australia, America and South Africa where pioneers were responsible for the birth and development of a modern nation, the Family Bibles are the most important source because very often these were the only records ever kept. Life in a wagon on a wagon trail was hard and once the pioneers arrived at their destinations, they still had to develop communities and only then built towns. The Family Bible was the only viable vehicle in which to record such vital information.

In most families, the family Bibles will contain extremely accurate information of a family tree – as well as information about where that first relative came from – and researching then becomes much easier. In Europe reasonable records were kept, often without the aid of the Family Bible – with the exception of countries where natural disasters occurred, of course – like in Holland where some of my own family records were lost when an entire town was flooded!

Nowadays we have the web and a massive amount of information can be found online. Online information does save time and endless trips to libraries, archives and government departments but more often than not one will be unable to find the detailed information contained in a Family Bible. There are millions of family Bibles all over the world and numerous American websites devoted entirely to them – but even those cannot function without the Bibles themselves.

Most Family Bibles contain more than one surname because when marriages were recorded, the full names of both bride and groom were entered, thus introducing completely new families to the family tree. In this way, one finds long forgotten links to maiden names, names of Godparents and all the baptismal records for that family. Here the birth dates will be recorded very accurately. I have even found Bibles where someone recorded the census records – a good tip for trying to locate that elusive relative is to search through census records. But to save yourself a lot of frustration, do try and find your old Family Bibles.

Researchers from the New England Historic Genealogical Society found out that there are family ties between Barack Obama and Bratt Pitt, as well as between Hillary Clinton and Pitt’s partner Angelina Jolie. The Guardian was only one of the several newspaper reporting on this today.

Kindo’s graphical version of Barack Obama’s family tree is still one of the most comprehensive way’s of showing this family data. We will obviously update the Kindo family tree according to the new data asap, but you can go and browse there already now!

If you’re an English speaker, refrech Kindo - there’s a little surprise waiting for you… And more still to come while we translate it…

Any feedback would be most appreciated of course!!!

kindo, family, photos

We’re busy working on photos as we type (so to blog ;-)) and have some questions we’d like to throw out to the Kindo family…

So without further ado, here they are:

• What online photo services do you use?
• How many photos do you expect to upload to Kindo?
• What kindo of video media are you using?

Please feel free to leave comments on this post, or to post your thoughts and ideas in the forum…

Thanks in advance!!
gareth

photo credit: tommyotago

photo credit: majorvols

photo credit: ediepeters

kindo, photos, family