Year End Report and One in A Million

Stake Year End Report

323,586

 Names Indexed and Arbitrated for the year 2015

One in A Million

Sun Rise taken by Bob Woolley in PA

One Million Names

A news release from Gympie, Australia on Feb 9, 2016 tells the story of  Irene Deans, 92 years old, who recently indexed one million names into FamilySearch. org. 

Irene is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and  stated that indexing, "is what gets her up in the morning and keeps her going." Irene gets up at 5:30 am every morning to sit at her computer and indexes for many hours. She is truly a remarkable example of someone who regularly devotes her time to service to the Lord. She is an inspiration to all.

Reaching Out

taken by Lee Schuler - PA 2015

Stake Indexers Help Black Community

Thanks to the promotion of the Freedmen's Bureau Project in the Oklahoma City Black Community, by the Church's Public Relations folks, about 25 Indexers from our Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Stake had a wonderful opportunity to reach out and help people learn how to index.

On Saturday, February 6, 2016, our group of indexers were invited to attend a 4 hour program at St. John's Missionary Baptist Church on North Kelley. There were approximately 50 people, not of our faith, who attended and they were so enthusiastic and excited about learning how to index and search their family trees. What a wonderful opportunity for all of us indexers to let our lights shine!

I was set up to help with indexing questions, but the two ladies I had the privilege to work with, Helen and Betty, were more interested in seeing if The Church had any records on their families. The result of this was that not only did I get them set up to index, but I was able to take them into FamilySearch.org so that they could look for those records. 

Betty was particularly excited, her eyes lite up and she just couldn't believe that we could find her grandma in the US Census records. What a wonderful experience that was for both of us. While she could not stay long to explore more records that day, she did accept my invitation to come to the Family History Center the next Wednesday morning, when I work, to do more searching. 

Sure enough, on Wednesday morning about 10:05 am Betty came to the FHC and I worked with her for 3 1/2 hours, on creating her own family tree and researching records to add as sources. She is so happy and said she would be back next week to do some more. What an interesting background and wonderful stories she had to tell about her family. She is even more excited to be able to start indexing those post Civil War Records from the Freedmen's Bureau Project. I was very touched by the spirit, to be able to help Betty and to learn of her family struggles and life histories. 

January 2016 News

Libraries - the places where memories are saved!

Judy Russell, posted to her blog,The Legal Genealogist,  on Jan 7th, 2016 that the New York Public Library  is offering free images of 180,000 digitized items found in the Library's holdings. These items are from material that is out of copyright protection. They are now Free, no permission required, no hoops to jump through, just use them however you might want. Ms. Russell  quoted from: 

1. Shana Kimball, “Free for All: NYPL Enhances Public Domain Collections For Sharing and Reuse,” NYPL Blogs, posted 5 Jan 2016 (http://www.nypl.org/blog/ : accessed 6 Jan 2016). ↩

To go to the  hot link to the NYPL Blog, just click above.

I am excited to go and look at their photos and public domain materials of historical documents that they have acquired over the years. Some of them may show up on this blog page.

If you have never read Judy Russell's blog pages you should check it out at this link: http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/

Ms Russell is an attorney/genealogist and highly sort after as a public speaker. Last summer she was in Oklahoma City giving a day long seminar for the Oklahoma Historical Society and I was able to attend. She is a wonderful, funny, and highly intelligent genealogist.

                          OKC Stake Indexing 2015

 The total number of names indexed and arbitrated for the whole Stake, this past year, 2015

323,586

Good Job !! 

FamilySearch Partnership Offers 

You may have heard people talking about the FS Partnership offers to get free accounts with: Ancestry.com, My Heritage, Find My Past or  American Ancestors. These are made available to you through your Church membership.   This is a fantastic value as some of these subscriptions can cost you $200.00 a year or more. 

One of the great values I have just learned about with Ancestry.com is that they offer three features to LDS accounts that are not available to the general, or paid subscription, Ancestry.com users. These are as follows: 

1. You can either continue any Ancestry.com family tree you may have started as a paid subscription user,  or you can import 4 generations from your FS Tree. You don't have to start from scratch.
2. You can connect any individual in your Ancestry tree with your Family Search tree, and exchange details. Look for the small FS Tree icon on your person's profile page that says "Connect person to FamilySearch".
3. Submit Names for Temple Ordinances from your person's profile page in Ancestry.com. Look for the FS Tree Icon in Ancestry.com and click "Request" to view ordinance details. You should compare their details and update any changes first.

My Heritage contains billions of historical records and is available in 42 languages. They search for records and matching family trees while you sleep. Then they send you an email when they have found matches. My Heritage started in 2008 in Israel and have many European family trees already in their database. If you are looking for your family lines in foreign countries this is a great way to link up with fellow researchers.

Find My Past deals mainly with records from the United Kingdom back to AD 875. I don't know much about this site.

American Ancestors is a data base of family trees that deal with 17th century colonial New England through 21st century immigration. It is a product of the New England Historical  Genealogical Society.