To celebrate Memorial Day and honor all who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, Ancestry.com is offering free public access to its U.S. Military Collection beginning tomorrow May 20 through May 31, 2008.

The announcement of free access to historical military records at Ancestry.com was part of a much bigger announcement of a partnership between the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Ancestry.com - one first proposed back in March of this year. The nonexclusive agreement is similar to one that NARA already has in place with Footnote.com and FamilySearch.org. The terms of each individual agreement between NARA and its partners vary, but essentially the partner (in this case Ancestry.com) digitizes and hosts certain NARA holdings at its expense. Each partner negotiates its own agreement with respect to fees that may be charged for access to the records on its Web site, but free access to the digitized records is always available in NARA's research rooms.

Ancestry.com already has millions of historical records from the National Archives in its online collection, including passenger lists from 1820-1960 and WWI and WWII draft registration cards. The new agreement means increased online access to the vast holdings of NARA at a rate much faster than NARA could offer on its own. A win-win for genealogists as far as I'm concerned!

The popular UK family history site Findmypast.com unveiled its brand new version of the 1901 census today with a retranscribed index to offer "more accurate transcriptions" than other sites offering the 1901 census online. The new census index includes all of the great search fields offered at other online 1901 census sites, such as occupation and place and year of birth. You can also narrow your search with the name of another occupant of the same household. An additional search feature added for the 1901 census, as well as all other censuses available at FindMyPast.com, is the option to order search results by name or birth year.

Wonder of wonders, they've kicked off the launch with the two counties where the bulk of my research takes place - Somersetshire and Gloucestershire. How often does that happen? Records for additional counties will be added soon, with Cornwall, Durham, Glamorganshire, Norfolk, Northumberland, Middlesex and Yorkshire next in line.

The 1901 British census is also online at the UK National Archives and Ancestry.co.uk, so if you've already found your ancestors in the 1901 census on one of those sites, you probably won't learn anything new from FindMyPast's version (although their image quality is excellent). But if you've had trouble locating an individual in the past, the new index might just make the difference.

The 1860 U.S. Census made an appearance at historical records subscription site Footnote.com this past week. Some researchers might wonder why ... the 1860 census is already available from numerous other genealogy subscription sites, and portions of it can be found for free all over the Web. Yet, Footnote's version does bring something a bit different to the table - the ability to turn those names in the census enumerations into people by allowing users to enhance the listings by adding photos, stories, comments and related documents. It also brings the digitized census documents to Footnote's enhanced image viewer - my favorite of all the document viewers I've used online. It makes it easy to adjust the contrast and brightness of digitized images, as well as invert the images so that they appear white on black, or black on white. A handy film strip at the bottom makes it easy to move from page to page.

Footnote.com has included the 1860 U.S. Census to its Civil War collection which also includes service records of Confederate soldiers, a pension index for Union soldiers, and Southern Claims Commission files. Footnote is also working with FamilySearch and the National Archives to digitize the actual pension applications for Union widows.

The new 1860 U.S. Census database is available online to paid subscribers at Footnote.com, and is also available for free to users at local Family History Centers and the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. An annual subscription to Footnote.com is $59.95, or you can check it out with a 7-day free trial. If you're unable to locate someone you expect to find, don't panic. As of today the 1860 census database is only 66% complete, with the rest to come.

Several new groups of genealogy records have made their debut on FamilySearch Labs this past week, including Civil War Pension Index Cards, Philadelphia Death Records (1803-1915) with digitized images, and an index to the 1860 U.S Census (no images). The free Records Search at FamilySearch Labs also no longer requires registration to access. I've blogged about FamilySearch Labs before, but if you haven't checked it out for a while, you're in for a pleasant surprise.

The archives at the International Tracing Service formally opened to the public on April 30 and genealogists are already beginning to take note. An organized group of 42 genealogists from the USA, Australia, Israel and Great Britain made the trip last week to the ITS archives in Bad Arolsen to research in the rich collection of records relating to victims of the holocaust -- including more than 6 million Jewish individuals who disappeared without a trace. In total, over 47 million records relating to the Holocaust have been amassed at the ITS over the past 60 years in an effort to reunite families torn apart by WWII, totaling about approximately 17.5 million victims of Nazism, both Jew and non-Jew. Until now the ITS archives, administered by the Red Cross, were open exclusively by its staff to answer queries about missing persons or to search for records to support compensation payments for Holocaust victims. Survivors, relatives and historical researchers had no direct access to the records.

As part of the official opening of these records, approved in November 2007, the archived material is being digitized and sent to the 11 states of the International Commission for the International Tracing Service (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, United States). Last August, ITS began the process of copying files from its 16 miles of filing cabinets housed in six buildings; organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem and the National Institute of Remembrance in Warsaw have received the first installment of about 18 million digital images of arrest, camp, prison, ghetto and transport records, and expect to ultimately receive more than 100 million digital images of archived material over the next two years.

The International Tracing Service in Germany and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are both accepting inquiries, via their respective Web sites, for research of archival documents. These research services are only available to survivors and their families. All other researchers must visit in person to examine the records.

More: Holocaust Research Links

A neat article by travel writer Jan Burak Schwert appeared in the Seattle Times earlier this week recounting her husband's unusual meeting with his third cousin Franz - a man who looked so much like him, he could have been his brother. The article had already caught my attention when she described her husband as "grinning from ear to ear" upon finding several Schwert graves after 30 minutes of searching a cemetery in the tiny ancestral German village of Binningen in the pouring rain. How many of you can't help but smile when you read that? Just about any genealogist knows exactly how he must have felt at that moment...but I digress. The story gets even better when Jan and her husband Ron stop in a small pub (gaustaus) before leaving Binningen, only to have the locals immediately recognize the resemblance that Ron shared with Schwert's living in the area. A more complete version of the story, entitled Finding Franz, shares a little more of the magic behind that special genealogy encounter, and her conversion from a "genealogy widow" to a believer...

My guess is that most of us self-professed genealogy "junkies" get a thrill from just about every discovery, whether an online census record or a tombstone laying among the weeds on the old family farm. I'm to the point where I'm equally thrilled to find the ancestors of others, or to find a neat old cemetery that I didn't know about before (I don't need to know anyone buried there to be thrilled by it...just ask my husband!). But for most of us there is still a genealogy encounter that stands out - perhaps one of your early genealogy discoveries, an unusual "find," or a very special person you've met along the way. If such an encounter comes to mind when you read this, then please share it with the rest of us - we'd love to hear it! Just click on "comments" below to share your "magic of genealogy" moment. Or, if you have a family history blog, then please feel free to blog your story there and then send me the link or add it to the comments below. I'll highlight them in a future blog post.

A recent letter issued by the Vatican Congregation for Clergy directs Roman Catholic dioceses worldwide to keep The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from "microfilming and digitizing information" contained in Catholic sacramental registers, according to a report in the Catholic News Service. The reason give for the move is to prevent LDS Church members from using the records to posthumously baptize Catholic ancestors by proxy.

The Vatican directive says the purpose of the policy is to:

"ensure that such a detrimental practice is not permitted in [each bishop's] territory, due to the confidentiality of the faithful and so as not to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

One of the core tenets of Mormon faith is that the dead can be baptized into the Church to offer them the opportunity to accept the faith in an afterlife and achieve salvation. Read more...

Genealogist Claire Bettag recently learned that the LSU library has a digital microfilm reader that offers remote access over the Internet and graciously shared her discovery on the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG-L) mail list. I'm big on keeping up on the latest technology, but this cool option was new to me!

These ST200 digital microfilm readers not only allow patrons to burn images to a CD or save them to a flash drive, but they can also email an image to themselves or, best of all, log on remotely to gain access from home. Staff at the library or repository using these machines still has to physically load the microfilm for you, but once that's done you can view, scan, zoom, email and print from the microfilm remotely. This makes it easier for library staff to serve more patrons as scanning through microfilm can be a time-consuming process, as I'm sure most of you know.

I've used similar machines without the remote access at several different libraries, including the Family History Library, and they are very nice! It looks like the remote access technology is fairly new, but at least a few libraries have already jumped on the bandwagon. A digital microfilm with remote access is also available at the Sedalia Public Library in Missouri, and the Wayne County Public Library in Goldsboro, North Carolina, is hoping to add the remote access option to their new ST200 digital microfilm reader next year. There are questions about how well this will work, of course. Can the film accidentally run off the roll (think how frustrating that would be from 500 miles away)? What about the needs of the patrons in the library? (that's why LSU offers the remote sessions from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m. while the library is closed). Hopefully, more libraries and other repositories with large microfilm collections consider adding remote access microfilm readers - especially those which already have the ST200 and would only need to purchase the optional add-on remote access component. How cool would that be?

Have you ever heard the story that your family's name was changed at Ellis Island? The United States' most famous port of immigration is also, unfortunately, the source of one of the many popular myths of genealogy - one that is still perpetuated with regularity in the media. In actuality, inspection agents and Ellis Island rarely changed immigrants' names. That's not to say that mistakes weren't made, but there is no known documented case of a name change occurring at Ellis Island, according to Marion Smith, senior historian for the immigration service.

The truth is, to be admitted to the United States, immigrants had to provide documentation from their country of origin. This information was used to compile passenger lists at the point abroad where the immigrant purchased his ticket. Once the immigrant arrived in the U.S., Ellis Island clerks were given these previously compiled passenger manifests, and checked off the names against the arriving immigrants. There was no need for them to write down names based on what the immigrant told them. Many Ellis Island immigration officials were themselves foreign-born, and were assigned to inspect immigrant groups based on the languages with which they were familiar. Ellis Island also employed dozens of full-time interpreters to help translate for immigrants speaking in more obscure tongues.

That's not to say, of course, that your ancestors never changed their names. They just probably didn't do it at Ellis Island. Many immigrants personally chose to change their names at some point - often to "fit in" - something done by my Toman ancestors soon after their arrival from Poland (even though I'm still not sure why Thomas is all that much easier of a name than Toman). But if your family name was changed at some point, it can probably be attributed to something other than a lazy or callous immigration official.

The first name on the Monument aux Morts (monument to the dead) located outside the town hall in Crespières, France is Ernest Ollivon, my maternal great, great grandfather. Sadly, he was the first of many brave young men from Crespieres to die in World War One. Ernest was only shot in the shoulder, but the disorganization and lack of field hospitals rampant during the first few months of the war resulted in him being transferred hundreds of miles by train from the front to a hospital in Toulouse without treatment. That, combined with the lack of yet-to-be-discovered antibiotics, is the reason that Ernest, a 33-year-old father of four, died a useless death due to infection on 8 October 1914. But back to Crespieres, the small commune (town) from which Ernest Theodore Ollivon, and many of my other French ancestors originated...

According to my grandmother, who emigrated from France to the United States following World War II, farmhouses in France are often grouped together to form villages, with the fields generally lying many miles outside of town. Crespieres is one such village, located in the department of Yvelines in northern France, about an hour south of Paris. Read more...