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All opinions expressed in this document are those of Dick Eastman and his alone, unless otherwise attributed. None of his statements are to be interpreted as endorsements by his employer or by advertisers.

Copyright© 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. All rights reserved.

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I think my family tree is a few branches short of full bloom.

In the course of writing this newsletter, I get to see a lot of genealogy information. Most of what I see is on the Web, although some information is in books or in e-mail. Some of what I see is high-quality research. However, much of it is much less than that. Even the shoddiest genealogy work could be so much more if the compiler had simply spent a bit of time thinking about what he or she was doing.

Creating a first-class genealogy work is not difficult. In fact, it is expected. It should be the norm. Please consider the following "rules." If you follow these guidelines, you, too, can produce high-quality genealogy reports that will be useful to others:

The preceding is a "preview" of a Plus Edition-only article. The full article is available only to Plus Edition subscribers. Click on Plus Edition for more information.

Last week's newsletter mentioned that I am seeking writers who would like to contribute to this newsletter. By adding more articles, along with the views of other genealogists, I believe this electronic newsletter can grow to become the premier publication of genealogy technology and other time-sensitive, genealogy-related topics.

Most of the articles written by others will be published in the Plus Edition of this newsletter.

Some days sitting in front of my computer, at a library, a probate office, a Town clerk’s office, or some local genealogical society, or perhaps just driving to or from one, a thought begins to dig its way out of my subconscious: "Wouldn't it be great to just hire someone to do all of this?" As a beginner in genealogy twenty-three years ago, first working with hand-drawn charts in pencil, and no concept that major societies existed dealing with family histories, I received a fine education into the laborious process of assembling a family history. I graduated to my first computer with a Digital Equipment Corporation DECMate, stand alone, and later with much trepidation coupled to the "web." In later years a MicroVax was relegated to my basement "office" and devoted almost exclusively to genealogy. As years passed, equipment changed dramatically, as anyone who subscribes to this newsletter so well knows, and computer companies have disappeared more effectively than your long lost uncle Doofus; Windows-based software became the name of the game. My first awareness of Dick Eastman was in a Roots™ software workgroup that wandered from place to place throughout Eastern Massachusetts and was attended by many of the names you now know as authorities in the field. Currently, I am a genealogy researcher in the process of obtaining certification and somewhat of a specialist in lineage and heritage society applications and documentation. I also volunteer as a researcher for one of the nation’s premier genealogical societies.

So much for background. The purpose of this article is to provide cost savings for those who decide to have a professional genealogist research the "sticky" parts of their family history, who need documentation for lineage and heritage societies, or who would just rather have someone else do the "grunt work" and obtain a running start on the way to a family history.

The preceding is a "preview" of a Plus Edition-only article. The full article is available only to Plus Edition subscribers. Click on Plus Edition for more information.

Great-great-grandfather Peter has been dead for 110 years now, but proving that he's dead, rather than just assuming it, employs a lot of the skills we acquire as family historians. Knowing what name to look for, appreciating how the mix of ethnic groups affects recordkeeping, and learning how events in the old country appear in records here all influence the success of our research.

The preceding is a "preview" of a Plus Edition-only article. The full article is available only to Plus Edition subscribers. Click on Plus Edition for more information.

The following is an announcement from the (U.S.) National Genealogical Society:

• GENTECH2004 Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, 22-24 January 2004

• Genealogy Seminar in Historic Places, Charleston, South Carolina, 29 February - 1 March 2004

• Annual Conference, Sacramento---A Golden Prospect, Sacramento, California,19-22 May 2004

The following is an announcement from Durham Records Online:

• transcriptions of the 1841, 1851, and 1861 census for a large swathe of eastern County Durham
• extracts from parish registers (christenings, confirmations, marriages, burials) for Easington district communities
• complete index searchable by given name, surname, age, and district
• instantly viewable order results (with online payment)

• searchable indexed transcriptions of the 1871 through 1891 (and some 1901) census for the communities listed

• Search the indexes for free. Decide whether you want to buy site credits or pay-as-you-go.

• Choose individual records you want to buy & add them to your shopping cart.
• Pay with a credit or debit card online through our secure payment system and instantly see the results, plus get a copy by email.
• Alternatively, mail us a cheque and we will e-mail you the results.

Or use site credits to view records

• Register your email & password, login, and buy site credits.
• Click the View button next to an individual record & instantly see the results.
• Each time you click View, one credit is deducted from your account.
• Records you have previously viewed (at any time) are highlighted so you don't buy the same record twice.
• Buy credits at a quantity discount and use them over many separate sessions.

Are you researching French-speaking ancestors from Quebec province? If so, you absolutely need to spend some time on the award-winning Web site of Programme de recherche en démographie historique. You don’t read French? No problem, as the information on this site is available in both French and English.

Programme de recherche en démographie historique, or PRDH, is a comprehensive site of Quebec French-Canadian genealogy before 1800. It contains biographical files on all individuals of European ancestry who lived in the St. Lawrence Valley of Canada prior to 1800. A grant from the Government of Quebec’s Fonds de l'autoroute de l’information made possible the creation of this Web site. Produced in collaboration with Gaëtan Morin Éditeur, the site is hosted at Université de Montréal’s Departement de Démographie and is run by Bertrand Desjardins, assisted by Denis Duval.

When researching my own French-Canadian ancestry, the relatively small number of immigrants has always fascinated me. Unlike the waves of immigrants that arrived in what is now the United States, or the later arrivals of thousands of immigrants in Canada, the early immigrants to New France consisted of only a few thousand individuals. Many of the immigrants married and raised large families. Even after the English acquisition of Canada, these French-speaking citizens remained a separate community; they rarely married English-speaking, Protestant neighbors. Their descendants intermarried time and again, resulting in a large population with intertwined relationships.

Actually, this is good news for genealogists. With a smaller "pool" of ancestors, previous researchers have documented almost all available facts and published their results time and again. However, access to these printed books, most of them published in French, has not been easy for researchers outside of Quebec province. The Web site of Programme de recherche en démographie historique provides a valuable service that is unavailable elsewhere online.

The PRDH Web site identifies the origin of each French-Canadian family name and provides original information on their descendants through the 1600s and 1700s. The PRDH database contains information from parish registers as well as other nominative documents. According to the database description found on the PRDH Web site, the information comes from more than 710,000 certificates, including all baptisms, marriages, and burials contained in Quebec Catholic parish registers up to the year 1800.

Go back and read that last sentence again. Yes, it really does say "ALL." The PRDH Web site contains information about ALL the surviving records of baptisms, marriages, and burials for those years in Quebec. If the record survived, it is listed in the PRDH database. Indeed, French-Canadian genealogists have found that most of the records of the 1600s and 1700s have survived and are available today. It is rare that a genealogist finds any source that holds all the available records for such a large number of people.

The information on PRDH is contained in three interrelated databases:

One point to note is that the information on the PRDH Web site is copyrighted and remains the intellectual property of the Programme de recherche en démographie historique.

The PRDH Web site has a mixture of free information and "for pay" information. However, the free information available is very limited. To properly utilize this site, you will have to pay for a subscription. The free access simply allows you to check whether or not the database contains information on the ancestor(s) you are interested in. Free access will not provide any details, not even locations. Paid subscribers will receive full information from the three separate sections listed earlier.

The fee structure is a bit complex. Canadians pay $14.95 plus tax for 150 hits and then have an equal number of options, up to and including $249.95 for 10,000 hits. Those outside of Canada pay $17.95 for 150 hits and $287.95 for 10,000 hits. All prices are in Canadian dollars. At today’s exchange rates, anyone outside of Canada would pay $11.45 U.S. dollars for 150 hits and then scale to $192 U.S. dollars for 10,000 hits.

Regardless of your location, you must register and make payment in advance. After your payment is validated, you will receive a notice (usually by e-mail), telling you that you can activate your subscription whenever you want. All you have to do is go to the site and enter your username and password when the identification window is displayed. The subscription ends when you have used up all your hits.

Programme de recherche en démographie historique received the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s "2002 Technology Excellence Award," presented at the GENTECH2002 conference held in Boston. Anyone who is researching Quebec ancestry on this site will soon discovery why this award was made: the PRDH online database contains high-quality information about tens of thousands of individuals. Perhaps this is what more genealogy Web sites will look like in the future.

MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com recently launched "My Ancestry," an online personal work area of information that can be customized and saved by each user. It works as a "personal robot" that searches Ancestry.com's databases for the people in your list. Not only does it do a one-time search, but it will search again and again in the future without any intervention by you. When it finds matches, the "My Ancestry" feature will notify you by e-mail.

Each person can establish a list of "People I am Looking For." The service perform as an immediate search, looking for similar records. If any are found, the information is displayed immediately. The real power is in the periodic searches. If a future automated search by the "My Ancestry" software finds a newly-added record that matches your search parameters, the information is sent to you by e-mail. You then go to the "My Ancestry" section and click on links found there to view the records referenced, such as census entries, Ancestry Family Tree information, and more.

Hamrick Software has created an interesting Web site that adds one more tool for genealogists. You can quickly see where your surnames of interest were found in several past U.S. censuses and recent telephone books. The sources of the surname data are the 1850 Census, 1880 Census, 1920 Census, and 1990s phone books.

Enter a surname (last name) into the form, and you'll get a map of the United States showing the distribution of people with this surname within the 50 United States. The color of each state indicates how frequently you will find someone with this surname in each state. For instance, if a state is colored red, then 1 in 100 people (or more) in that state have the surname. Similarly, yellow means approximately 1 in 300 have the surname, green means 1 in 1000, and blue means 1 in 10,000 (or less).

I tried it with my own surname and that of a number of my ancestors. The results certainly are not precision measurements, but they may give you clues as to where to look. The more rare the name, the better the focus.

Peter Christian has updated and expanded his excellent book, "The Genealogist's Internet." Any book that tries to describe the resources available online has to be an ambitious project. This British publication is one of the more complete books that I have seen on the topic. The book is aimed at anyone researching ancestors who lived in the British Isles.

"The Genealogist's Internet" starts by explaining how the Internet works for the beginner. It continues by detailing the major sources of primary data available to family historians online and highlights the most helpful directories and gateways. It focuses on resources available in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The book describes in detail various genealogy-related forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, and newsgroups. The book also explains how to publish your own family tree on the Internet.

The book is organized in the following manner:

The index itself is very detailed, seven pages in a small font. Almost all the information in this book can quickly be found by first turning to the index.

Peter Christian's writing style is very effective. The book is written in a conversational manner and is easily read by experienced and inexperienced genealogists alike. The book provides 292 pages of detailed information.

"The Genealogist's Internet" by Peter Christian is the most comprehensive guide to online genealogy resources for the British Isles that I have seen. If you are new to online genealogy and are looking for online resources available for the British Isles genealogy, you need this book! In addition, seasoned genealogy researchers will find the book to be an excellent reference guide.

I don't see many tourist guide books aimed at genealogists. However, this week I had a chance to read the "Family Tree Guide Book to Europe" published by Betterway Books. The book is a "group effort" with many authors, including some of the best writers in the genealogy field: Maureen Taylor, Sharon Carmack, Paul Milner, Linda Jonas, Rhonda McClure, Ernest Thode, Dwight Radford, S. Chris Anderson, Kyle Betit, David Fryxell, Melanie Rigney, Allison Stacy, Susan Jackson, Dena Eben, and the editors of Family Tree Magazine.

Of course, guide books to Europe and the British Isles can be found in any bookstore. This one is different in that it focuses on the in-country resources available for genealogy research. For instance, the chapter on Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, written by Rhonda McClure, starts with a few pages of geography. It then gives a very brief history of the region, after which it quickly switches to records available. McClure describes how to prepare for a research trip before leaving home, primarily by using online resources. She goes on to describe civil registration records available, church records, census records, notarial records, and the major repositories in each country. This is followed by three pages of resources available in the region: organizations, archives, books, periodicals, and Web sites.

The other chapters are loosely similar to the chapter on Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, but with some obvious differences, depending upon the history and resources available for each. The book's chapters include:

• Ireland
• England and Wales
• Scotland
• Scandinavia
• France
• Benelux (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands)
• Germanic Region (Austria, Germany, Lichtenstein and Switzerland)
• Poland
• Eastern Europe (including Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Carpathian Russia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Slovenia and Croatia.)
• Russia and the Baltic region
• Italy
• Greece and the Mediterranean (Cyprus and Malta)
• Spain and Portugal
• European Jewish Ancestors

If you are contemplating a trip back to "the old country," this book can help make your trip much more productive! The information contained will help you walk in the footsteps of your ancestors. I would suggest that you not wait until the last minute to purchase this publication. The information presented will help you prepare for the trip months in advance, thereby maximizing your experience in-county.

DNAPrint Genomics Inc. plans to expand its operations with up to $8 million it will get from a California investment group over the next two years. The Sarasota, Florida, research and development company announced on Wednesday that it had signed a financing agreement with La Jolla Cove Investors Inc. of La Jolla, California. The group will pay $400,000 a month for 20 months for DNAPrint common stock. DNAPrint will price the shares at an undisclosed discount, based on the then-current trading price.

Funding will begin after the shares to be issued to La Jolla Cove Investors are registered by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Richard Gabriel, DNAPrint's President and Chief Executive Officer, said the SEC registration process usually takes four to six months. "This is definitely a big step up," said Tony Frudakis, DNAPrint's founder and Chief Science Officer. "We will invest it in growing the company. The goal isn't to use this money to become profitable. It's to grow us so that we can become wildly profitable."

The company's sole product is a genetics test that analyzes bodily fluids to determine to what extent a person is of Native American, East Asian, Indo-European, and sub-Saharan African heritage. It's marketed under the name of ANCESTRYbyDNA2.0 to genealogy buffs and as DNAWitness to forensics experts.

The product generated $565,084 in revenues during the first nine months ending Sept. 30, compared with $132,201 during the same 2002 period.

For the first three quarters of this year, DNAPrint had a $5.47 million loss, compared with a $2.33 million loss during the same 2002 period.

Frudakis said DNAPrint will use the new capital to hire more workers, especially scientists who will continue the company's research in personalized medicine. DNAPrint will also seek a site to establish a second laboratory.

DNAPrint and La Jolla Cove Investors were brought together by Athena Capital Partners Inc., a private merchant bank in Tampa.

As part of the agreement, La Jolla Cove Investors will also provide $500,000 in cash. DNAPrint has received half that amount; the remainder will be paid after the SEC registration.

The PR Budget for this newsletter is $0.00. I rely upon "word of mouse" advertising in which you recommend this newsletter to your friends. This newsletter is a private project of mine, and I have a zero budget for a publicity campaign to get more readers.

Thanks.

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