GenealogyMedia.com

The keynote address­es for the Root­sTech 2011 con­fer­ence are now avail­able for view­ing on the Root­sTech site:

http://rootstech.familysearch.org/video.php

These videos include:

• Jay Verkler — CEO of Fam­il­y­Search Inter­na­tion­al — Open­ing Keynote “Warm-Down” Address (34:18)
• Bar­ry Ewell — “Dig­i­tal­ly Pre­serv­ing Your Fam­i­ly Her­itage.” This one seems a lit­tle over-the-top, and not real­ly focused. Mr. Ewell knows a lot about dig­i­tal preser­va­tion, but after point­ing out that all of his slides and thoughts on the top­ic could not fit into a one-hour talk, pro­ceeds to lose his focus. How­ev­er, the abil­i­ty to pause and take notes makes this bet­ter on video. (58:00)
• Curt B. Witch­er — His­tor­i­cal Geneal­o­gy Depart­ment Man­ag­er, Allen Coun­ty Pub­lic Library. A talk on the chang­ing times in geneal­o­gy, with an intro­duc­tion by Tim Sul­li­van, CEO of Ancestry.com (1:09:33)
• Bri­an Pugh — “Cloud Com­put­ing: What it is and how we used it to build familysearch.org” (1:03:00)
• Thomas MacEn­tee — “Vir­tu­al Pre­sen­ta­tion Round Table” Fea­tur­ing Lisa Louise Cooke, Mar­i­an Pierre-Louis, Geoff Ras­mussen, Pat Rich­ley-Erick­son, Alli­son Stacey, and Mau­reen Tay­lor. A well-bal­anced, well-mod­er­at­ed dis­cus­sion of how pre­sen­ters can give vir­tu­al pre­sen­ta­tions, and how genealog­i­cal soci­eties can facil­i­tate this ser­vice. (1:03:57)
• Brew­ster Kahle — Founder of the Inter­net Archive — This is a pow­er­ful speech, and was one of the high­lights of the con­fer­ence for me. (51:17)

This is a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the con­fer­ence. It was what we call in high-tech “drink­ing from the fire hose.” At approx­i­mate­ly 5 1/2 hours, this will either take a good chunk of your day.

I don’t know about you, but I am drown­ing in e‑mail.

Most of my non-day job e‑mail goes into a cou­ple of Google G‑mail accounts. This is main­ly because G‑mail has so many fea­tures to help me sort, find, and respond to e‑mail.

First off, I get almost zero spam, because Google’s spam fil­ters use the pow­er of the user­base of G‑mail to iden­ti­fy spam. If tens of thou­sands of peo­ple flag some­thing as spam or phish­ing, it prob­a­bly is, so G‑mail whisks it away from your in box.

Next, G‑mail lets you cre­ate any num­ber of fil­ters for incom­ing mes­sages. You can have mes­sages that you want to store (receipts, say), but do not want in your inbox moved into a Receipts fold­er and removed from the inbox. Auto­mat­i­cal­ly. Every time.

Search­ing in G‑mail is just as intu­itive, quick and pow­er­ful as search­ing the web. (And, if you are in G‑mail and want to search the web, there’s a but­ton to quick­ly get search results from the web instead of from your e‑mail.)

But Google is going fur­ther than any oth­er e‑mail prod­uct with G‑mail. They are help­ing you auto­mat­i­cal­ly sort your mail with­out you hav­ing to set up fil­ters. Last year, Google released some­thing called Pri­or­i­ty Inbox, which does a fair­ly ser­vice­able job of pre­dict­ing what might be of more impor­tance to you, based on what you read and reply to. Over the last cou­ple of days, Google has released a new fea­ture for G‑mail into Google Labs. It’s called “Smart Labels.” As e‑mail comes in, Google looks to see if it is a Noti­fi­ca­tion (some­thing sent direct­ly to you, but not from some­one you have ever replied to, or per­haps with a no-reply set­ting in the head­er), Bulk Mail (an e‑mail mass mail­ing list), or Forums (from a group mail­ing list). If so, it tags your e‑mail with one of these labels, and, if you tell it so by sim­ply click­ing a check­box, it can remove that e‑mail from your inbox.

To set this up, log into G‑mail, go to Set­tings and then Labs, and scroll down until you see Smart Labels and mark that Enabled. For more infor­ma­tion, see Google’s G‑mail blog entry on this fea­ture.

This looks pow­er­ful to me, and already has giv­en me a small­er inbox where I will have most of my tasks and must-respond items.

In case you are won­der­ing, “How does this relate to geneal­o­gy?” the answer is that time spent wrestling with your e‑mail inbox is time not spent on your research. Google con­tin­ues to help stream­line the way e‑mail works so we can get back to some­thing we would rather be doing.

I work­ing to declut­ter my home and put valu­able and rare genealog­i­cal doc­u­ments in order. In this process, I have been going through some, until now, neglect­ed doc­u­ments that were passed down to me, and find­ing some sur­pris­es.

I had been think­ing about see­ing what I could do about get­ting my grand­moth­er Helen Har­ris’s divorce papers from the Wyoming State Archives. Divorce records are avail­able 50 years after the date of the event, if you can pro­vide enough detail to locate the records. Of course, I would have the names of both the par­ties (F. Ralph Har­ris and Helen Hill Har­ris), though I would not have known who the plain­tiff was and who the defen­dant was. I did know the rough time­frame (some time between 1941 and 1947).

How­ev­er, I know all of this infor­ma­tion now, as I may have more doc­u­men­ta­tion on the divorce than the state of Wyoming does. I cer­tain­ly have dif­fer­ent doc­u­men­ta­tion: In addi­tion to the signed divorce peti­tion and decree, and the prop­er­ty set­tle­ment and child cus­tody agree­ment, I have the let­ters sent to my grand­moth­er from her attor­ney.

Here is a tran­scrip­tion of the decree of divorce.

IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE FOURTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT
WITHIN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF SHERIDAN, STATE OF WYOMING

F. RALPH HARRIS,
Plain­tiff,

-vs-

HELEN HILL HARRIS,
Defen­dant.

DECREE

The above enti­tled mat­ter com­ing on reg­u­lar­ly to he heard upon the Peti­tion of F. Ralph Har­ris, the Plain­tiff above named, to which an Answer has been filed by Helen Hill Har­ris, the Defen­dant above named, and the said F. Ralph Har­ris being present in Court in per­son and by his attor­ney and said Helen Hill Har­ris, the Defen­dant above named, being rep­re­sent­ed by R. G. Diefend­er­fer, Esq., her attor­ney, and said Plain­tiff hav­ing been put to strict proof the Court finds that each and every alle­ga­tion in Plain­tiff’s peti­tion con­tained is true and that the prayer there­of should be allowed.

The Court fur­ther finds that on or about the 17th day of June, 1943, the par­ties here­to entered into a Prop­er­ty Set­tle­ment and Child Cus­tody Agree­ment and that said Prop­er­ty Set­tle­ment and Child Cus­tody Agree­ment should be made part of this Decree.

IT IS, THEREFORE, HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that F. Ralph Har­ris, the Plain­tiff above named, be and his is here­by grant­ed an absolute decree of divorce from Helen Hill Har­ris, the Defen­dant above named.

IT IS FURTHER HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that that cer­tain Prop­er­ty Set­tle­ment and Child Cus­tody Agree­ment made and entered into upon the 17th day of June, 1943, a copy there­of being attached to Plain­tiff’s Peti­tion, be and the same is here­by made a part of this Decree.

DONE IN OPEN COURT on this the 11th day of Feb­ru­ary, 1946.

James H. Burgess
DISTRICT JUDGE

Approved as to form
R. G. DIEFENDERFER

As I said, there is also the cor­re­spon­dence between R. G. Diefend­er­fer and my grand­moth­er, or at least his side of it. Addi­tion­al­ly, the doc­u­ments include a dual nota­rized copy of the Prop­er­ty Set­tle­ment and Child Cus­tody Agree­ment.

The let­ters from the attor­ney to my grand­moth­er con­tain some notable moments. They begin on August 9, 1945, with:

Dear Mrs. Har­ris:

Your let­ter of August 7th was at hand this morn­ing and I note that you will not accede to your hus­band’s desire that your ring be returned to him. I will gov­ern myself accord­ing­ly.

Lat­er in the let­ter we see ref­er­ences to the attor­ney hav­ing seen Mrs. Har­ris “when I last talked with you at your apart­ment.” She was claim­ing pay­ment was due per the agreed set­tle­ment. He not­ed that the due date was the 10th, and advised her thus: “you must keep your hus­band advised of your address and if you have not already done so, please inform him there­of at once.” She was now liv­ing at 312 7th Avenue, Spencer Park, Hast­ings, Nebras­ka, and the attor­ney and her hus­band remained in Sheri­dan, Wyoming.

On Sep­tem­ber 25, 1945, there is this:

Dear Mrs. Har­ris:

Your recent let­ters have remained unan­swered because I have been extreme­ly busy in the tri­al of cas­es. How­ev­er, I con­tact­ed Mr. Gar­butt yes­ter­day morn­ing and he will hand to me a copy of your hus­band’s Peti­tion and of the Sum­mons.

What I do not have in F. Ralph Har­ris’s peti­tion for divorce. This may or may not be with the divorce papers, but now that I have the exact date of the divorce, and know who the plain­tiff and defen­dant are, get­ting these doc­u­ments should be sim­ple.

Many geneal­o­gists are aware of his­tor­i­cal news­pa­pers, and search them out on NewspaperArchive.com, GenealogyBank.com, and the Library of Con­gress. But there are some impor­tant archival pub­li­ca­tions that are avail­able with the orig­i­nal pub­lish­ers.

Harper’s Mag­a­zine has been pub­lish­ing month­ly issues since July 1850. Cur­rent suscribers to the mag­a­zine have access to all of the con­tent of the mag­a­zine from its ini­tial run until the cur­rent month.

If you are lucky, you will find an arti­cle, as I have done, which talks about an event your ances­tor was involved in.

The arti­cle, “A Stage Ride to Col­orado” by Theodore R. Davis cov­ers the stage coach route through Kansas to Den­ver, which was guard­ed by the 1st US Vol­un­teers. My 3rd great grand­fa­ther, Thomas David Via, was a team­ster in the 1st US Vol­un­teers. This group of sol­diers, the first “Gal­va­nized Yan­kees,” joined the Fed­er­al army from Point Look­out Prison Camp for Con­fed­er­ates in order to avoid what was a prob­a­ble death in the prison. Because they had been Con­fed­er­ates, they end­ed up get­ting sent out to the West to fight the wars against the Indi­ans, who had been in rebel­lion because the Fed­er­al troops were pre­oc­cu­pied with com­bat­ting the Con­fed­er­ates.

But, even if your fam­i­ly and its expe­ri­ences are not cov­ered by Harper’s Mag­a­zine, it remains an impor­tant chron­i­cle of Amer­i­can life and cul­ture. Geneal­o­gists would be served well by read­ing con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous jour­nal­ism to under­stand the times, if not the life, of the sub­jects of their research.

You might also con­sid­er look­ing at the archives of the New York Times. The Times posts every arti­cle pub­lished since 1851. (There is a small fee for down­load­ing the con­tent.)

Tomor­row, I will write about what I found at the Times about an ances­tral cold case from 1854.

 

 

Fri­day night, NBC aired the fifth episode of the sec­ond sea­son of Who Do You Think You Are?, its flag­ship geneal­o­gy real­i­ty TV show.

The show is more com­pelling, with a quick­er pro­gres­sion of facts and dis­cov­er­ies, and a focus on the emo­tion­al and very human reac­tion the celebri­ties expe­ri­ence as they dis­cov­er, or are pre­sent­ed with genealog­i­cal facts. Lionel Richey is pre­sent­ed with a real­i­ty about his great grand­fa­ther, John Louis Brown. Brown appeared both to have aban­doned his fam­i­ly and been sued for divorce by his wife. In addi­tion to being appar­ent­ly about 35 years the senior of his wife, he was also a man who was born a slave, edu­cat­ed and freed, and who was the leader of a nation­al black fra­ter­nal orga­ni­za­tion, the Knights of Wise Men.

It’s quite an inter­est­ing and pow­er­ful show. Richey is con­front­ed with the lega­cy of slav­ery, but also with incred­i­ble strength of pur­pose to raise for­mer slaves to equal­i­ty of sta­tion. He may also have dis­cov­ered an ances­tral con­nec­tion with a white slave­hold­ing fam­i­ly.

Pro­fes­sion­al geneal­o­gists will con­tin­ue to quib­ble about the way doc­u­ments are han­dled (usu­al­ly with­out gloves, and with much more con­tact than is war­rant­ed), as well as how, every time we turn around a researcher says, “I have anoth­er doc­u­ment.” How­ev­er, real­is­ti­cal­ly, none of these doc­u­ments is being seri­ous­ly dam­aged, and as for the sud­de­ness of the dis­cov­er­ies, this is tele­vi­sion. In order to keep audi­ences inter­est­ed, there must be quick results. There are few­er than 45 min­utes avail­able to com­plete the show. But I still think that a sim­ple title card at the end could give a sense of the amount of research required to pro­duce the show.

I was glad to see J. Mark Lowe fea­tured as one of the researchers. He is a well-known pro­fes­sion­al geneal­o­gist and lec­tur­er, who lives in what we call “West­ern North Car­oli­na,” but which a lot of oth­er folks now call Ten­nessee.… He’s a friend of mine, a top-notch researcher, and an amaz­ing racon­teur. Hope­ful­ly, Mr. Richey got some time to chat with Mark with the cam­eras and time pres­sure off.

Until the 18th of Sep­tem­ber 2011, the show is avail­able in its entire­ty on the NBC web­site. I have also embed­ded it below.

Apple intro­duced the iPad 2 yes­ter­day.

This is about 9 months since the first iPad was released. The device has sold 15 mil­lion units. Accord­ing to some ana­lysts, this makes it the fastest sell­ing con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy prod­uct ever.

I have to admit that I did not think the iPad would catch on. It seemed a lit­tle heavy in the hand, and was rumored to run hot. I fig­ured that this prod­uct was over priced, at $499 for an 8GB WiFi mod­el and $829 for a 64GB WiFi / 3G mod­el. While the usabil­i­ty fea­tures, such as “instant on,” would make it easy to use it was real­ly just, as one com­men­ta­tor said, “An iPhone for Hagar the Hor­ri­ble.” It seems a device for con­tent con­sump­tion, not con­tent cre­ation. I’m also sim­ply a con­trar­i­an, and nev­er both­ered to get an iPhone. I have an Android, and pri­or to that had smart­phones from Palm and Hand­spring since, oh, about 2001.…

In the last nine months, tens of thou­sands of apps were deliv­ered. $2 bil­lion dol­lars has been paid out to the soft­ware devel­op­ers of those apps. While many of the apps are con­tent cre­ation apps, most are con­tent con­sump­tion apps. But of course, we do an awful lot of that on the web any­way.

The new iPad sports both front- and rear-fac­ing cam­eras, with the rear cam­era cap­tur­ing 720p video. It’s 1/3 lighter, 2x as fast, and with 9x the video pro­cess­ing pow­er. I look at those specs, and, see­ing a lighter unit, with this many apps, and this kind of per­for­mance, and I myself am tempt­ed. Not only could this be a light­weight way to trav­el, it looks like a lot of fun, and the apps keep com­ing.…

The iPad 2 is offi­cial­ly avail­able next Fri­day, 11 March 2011, at Apple Stores and on the web at Apple.com. The new iPad sup­ports Ver­i­zon as well as AT&T 3G net­works.

Here’s a com­par­i­son of the specs, with specs that are either iPad 1 spe­cif­ic or iPad 1‑only (as found on the Way­back Machine) with iPad 2 specs high­light­ed.

Height

9.56 inch­es (242.8 mm)
9.50 inch­es (241.2 mm)

Width

7.47 inch­es (189.7 mm)
7.31 inch­es (185.7 mm)

Depth

0.5 inch (13.4 mm)
0.34 inch (8.8 mm)

Weight

1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) Wi-Fi mod­el
1.33 pounds (601 g)

1.6 pounds (0.73 kg) Wi-Fi + 3G mod­el
1.35 pounds (607 g)

Dis­play

9.7‑inch (diag­o­nal) LED-back­lit glossy widescreen Mul­ti-Touch dis­play with IPS tech­nol­o­gy

1024-by-768-pix­el res­o­lu­tion at 132 pix­els per inch (ppi)

Fin­ger­print-resis­tant oleo­pho­bic coat­ing

Sup­port for dis­play of mul­ti­ple lan­guages and char­ac­ters simul­ta­ne­ous­ly

Capac­i­ty

16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash dri­ve

Proces­sor

1GHz Apple A4 cus­tom-designed, high-per­for­mance, low-pow­er sys­tem-on-a-chip
1GHz dual-core Apple A5 cus­tom-designed, high-per­for­mance, low-pow­er sys­tem-on-a-chip

Sen­sors

Three-axis gyro

Accelerom­e­ter

Ambi­ent light sen­sor

Audio play­back

Fre­quen­cy response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz

Audio for­mats sup­port­ed: HE-AAC (V1), AAC (16 [iPad 2: 8] to 320 Kbps), Pro­tect­ed AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audi­ble (for­mats 2, 3, and 4, [iPad 2: Audi­ble Enhanced Audio, AAX, and AAX+] Apple Loss­less, AIFF, and WAV

User-con­fig­urable max­i­mum vol­ume lim­it

Dol­by Dig­i­tal 5.1 sur­round sound pass-through with Apple Dig­i­tal AV Adapter (sold sep­a­rate­ly)

Cam­eras, Pho­tos, and Video Record­ing

Back cam­era: Video record­ing, HD (720p) up to 30 frames per sec­ond with audio; still cam­era with 5x dig­i­tal zoom

Front cam­era: Video record­ing, VGA up to 30 frames per sec­ond with audio; VGA-qual­i­ty still cam­era

Tap to con­trol expo­sure for video or stills

Pho­to and video geo­t­ag­ging over Wi-Fi

TV and video

Sup­port for 1024 by 768 pix­els with Dock Con­nec­tor to VGA Adapter; 576p and 480p with Apple Com­po­nent AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Com­pos­ite AV Cable

H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per sec­ond, Main Pro­file lev­el 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file for­mats; MPEG‑4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pix­els, 30 frames per sec­ond, Sim­ple Pro­file with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file for­mats; Motion JPEG (M‑JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pix­els, 30 frames per sec­ond, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file for­mat

Video mir­ror­ing and video out sup­port: Up to 1080p with Apple Dig­i­tal AV Adapter or Apple VGA Adapter (cables sold sep­a­rate­ly)
Video out sup­port at 576p and 480p with Apple Com­po­nent AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Com­pos­ite AV Cable
Video for­mats sup­port­ed: H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per sec­ond, Main Pro­file lev­el 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file for­mats; MPEG‑4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pix­els, 30 frames per sec­ond, Sim­ple Pro­file with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per chan­nel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file for­mats; Motion JPEG (M‑JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pix­els, 30 frames per sec­ond, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file for­mat

Bat­tery and pow­er

Built-in 25-watt-hour recharge­able lithi­um-poly­mer bat­tery

Up to 10 hours of surf­ing the web on Wi-Fi, watch­ing video, or lis­ten­ing to music

Up to 9 hours of surf­ing the web using 3G data net­work

Charg­ing via pow­er adapter or USB to com­put­er sys­tem

The fol­low­ing is a video of Curt Witcher’s keynote address from Root­sTech 2011: “The Chang­ing Face of Geneal­o­gy: Curt Witch­er, Allen Coun­ty Pub­lic Library.” Thanks to Geni­aus and Randy Seaver of Genea-Mus­ings for point­ing this out.

On a per­son­al note, it’s been a dif­fi­cult day, what with fail­ures at Net­work Solu­tions tak­ing down this blog, as well as my wife’s cro­chet blog (CrochetBug.com, and 6 oth­er web­sites I man­age. At first, the issue was a data­base sync-ing issue. When I called them to work on that, at about 1:00 a.m. last night, they oblig­ed by remov­ing all the files under /htdocs. The files, as well as the data­bas­es were up by about 4 p.m., mean­ing that it was only (!) about 15 hours of down­time, but I noticed that some of the more recent uploads to a cou­ple of the sites were not in evi­dence; I had to upload files again. So, they restored the site from back­ups.…

Ama­zon EC2, here I come!

I have been trav­el­ing, and only today got a chance to see the Kim Cat­trall episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, or at least the last 45 min­utes of it.

In this episode, Ms. Cat­trall, with the help of geneal­o­gists in the Unit­ed King­dom, runs down her miss­ing grand­fa­ther. He had aban­doned her grand­moth­er, moth­er, and two aunts some 70 years ago.

If any­thing the shows are get­ting more and more engag­ing. This episode was less about the doc­u­ments and more about what must have been going on in the star’s bigamist grand­fa­ther’s head.

You can see why the show has been renewed for anoth­er sea­son. This is engag­ing tele­vi­sion. While, as a geneal­o­gist, I could quib­ble that most sto­ries are not this heart-wrench­ing, nor do they involve this much decep­tion, I sim­ply can­not deny that this is pop­corn-munch­ing enter­tain­ment, designed to keep peo­ple com­ing back for more.

Now that Ancestry.com Inc. is a pub­lic com­pa­ny (ACOM: Google Finance), they are required to divulge more infor­ma­tion about their per­for­mance than they did as a pri­vate ven­ture.

For them, the news is good. Ear­li­er this week, they announced their year 2010 fig­ures, which includ­ed notably sub­scriber growth of 31% year-over-year and a 34% increase in rev­enue year-over-year. (At the end of Decem­ber there were 1,395,000 paid sub­scribers of Ancestry.com.) Total rev­enue for the year was $300.9 mil­lion. EBITDA (earn­ings before income tax, depre­ci­a­tion, and amor­ti­za­tion) was $101 mil­lion.

Month­ly churn (mem­ber­ship turnover) is 3.9%, which is basi­cal­ly equiv­a­lent to the 3.6% in the fourth quar­ter of 2009, and the 4.0% in the third quar­ter of 2010.

For 2011, Ances­try expects to have 1,700,000 t0 1,725,000 sub­scribers and bring in rev­enues of $370 — $375 mil­lion, lead­ing to an EBITDA of $125 — $130 mil­lion.

These are very healthy num­bers and bode well for the geneal­o­gy indus­try. While a lot of us have some qualms about the size of Ances­try, as well as some of its busi­ness prac­tices, it’s still impor­tant that this major play­er is healthy and con­tin­u­ing to invest in dig­i­ti­za­tion and tech­nol­o­gy.

 

Fam­il­y­Search made the fol­low­ing announce­ment on Mon­day:

Salt Lake City—This month, mil­lions of indi­vid­u­als of African descent are cel­e­brat­ing Black His­to­ry Month by explor­ing their fam­i­ly his­to­ry roots. In the U.S., Fam­il­y­Search vol­un­teers have been busy help­ing dig­i­tize his­toric doc­u­ments and cre­ate free, search­able index­es to them online. Through­out Africa, from Accra to Zim­bab­we, where irre­place­able fam­i­ly infor­ma­tion and tra­di­tions are at risk of being lost due to neglect, war, and dete­ri­o­ra­tion, Fam­il­y­Search vol­un­teers are also help­ing pre­serve this valu­able his­to­ry so Africans can con­nect with their roots. Researchers can search the mil­lions of African-relat­ed records as they are pub­lished online at FamilySearch.org.

They con­clude their announce­ment with the fol­low­ing:

Many of the records col­lect­ed by Fam­il­y­Search are now avail­able for free on FamilySearch.org. More African records will be post­ed on the site in the com­ing months. Fol­low­ing are a few sam­ples of some types of records at FamilySearch.org that may be of inter­est to those doing African or African-Amer­i­can research. Many of them are works in progress.

• Vir­ginia, Freed­men’s Bureau Let­ters, 1865–1872
• U.S. Arkansas Con­fed­er­ate Pen­sions, 1901 to 1929
• Ghana 1982–1984 Cen­sus
• South Africa, Orange Free State, Estate Files, 1951–1973
• U.S. South­ern States Births, Mar­riages, and Deaths
• U.S. Nat­u­ral­iza­tion Peti­tions

This is tremen­dous amount of mate­r­i­al being made avail­able. Their blog entry about this release says that the Vir­ginia Freed­men’s Bureau records total more than 1 mil­lion records. It’s an impor­tant deliv­ery of doc­u­ments, and will pro­vide a great deal of help for African-Amer­i­can researchers.