Family History Tracing

Brazil Civil Records Day 3

2012-11-10T10:19:00.002-08:00

I am now 1 more day in it, and about 2000 images deep with nothing to show for it just yet. I was able to move from my initial searching of the 1970's to 1990ish. From talking with a family member I was able to get a rough estimate of the death date for both of the people I am searching for.

The first one the believe passed around 1990. I have searched so far from Oct 89 - Mar 91 with no luck. I will now move back wards from 89, and continue upwards from 91 to see if I can find a match.

The second one passed around 2002 they think, once again I will start with everything in the 2002 range and then go back and forth 1 year at a time in hopes of finding a match.

Hopefully they will be able to get a more accurate timeline, but right now this is better then what I started with, now I am just hoping that they actually passed away where they said they did or I am looking in the wrong place all together.

FamilySearch Update for 10 Nov

2012-11-09T23:13:00.000-08:00

Only ten days into the month of November and FamilySearch has been hitting the index's hard. They have added or updated 41 titles since the 1st of November. If you remember there were 113 updates for October, 127 for September, and 47 in August.

I know its not even halfway through the month but I would guess that we will see the same consistency as the last two month with about 100 updates for November. We may see less as there are two holidays during the month of November, but we will see.

The most recent update that I am happy about is the Slovakia Church Records while it is not yet complete at 8 million indexed (only showing about 6 KONDRC out of what should be about 100), but its a good start and something for me to watch.

I keep looking out for the records for Brazil, and Portugal for my current project but till then I can look through the images myself in hopes of finding matches.

Below are the current updates since the 1st of November.

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Searching Brazil Civil Records Day 2

2012-11-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

I am now on Day 2 or Day 3 of searching through the Death Record images for Brazil Civil Registration in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As of right now I have gone through 4 image sets and about 1200 images for the years 1970-1972. I still have plenty more to go through as there are over 11 million images of which only 30K have been indexed.

I am still hopeful that I will find the needle in the haystack of images (2 in particular). I may find more along the way, but I am mostly focusing on just the two names, as I can scan an image real quick focusing on looking for a Maria or a Francisco.

Now that I found that great little app that I talked about yesterday FastFilm, I have been able to triple the amount of images that I can look at in a day. I think the first day I was at about 100 images and I thought that was a good number. After using the app I was able to scan through about 300-500 images in one day. And this is only doing it about 1 to 2 hours a night. I bet I could knock out more images if spent more time, but I think that 1-2 hours is good enough in this search.

Review: FastFilm

2012-11-06T18:53:00.002-08:00

For the past few days I have been searching record by record of the Brazil Civil Registration Death records in search of matches. From what I can tell this have not been indexed yet, but there are plenty of images online to go through.

Searching each image online takes time, from loading the images, zooming in, moving to the next ect. I started to Google ways to either reduce the image size so I can do quick looks at the images (I knew where on the image I needed to look), and current image loading time was taking a minute or so. The other option was a way to have them loaded locally.

It was easy to find the Java app called FastFilm which is used to download image sets from FamilySearch. I was able to download a batch of the record and search through about 100 of them in 2 minutes.

I am not sure how FamilySearch feels about a program like this, but this could help tremendously in my searching by moving the files offline. I have deleted the current image set that was downloaded earlier, and starting to look through the next batch.

It also creates a text file that you can use for your source citation, which at the moment for me I don't need unless I actually find a valid match in this. Only about 1 million more images to view, we can hope to find a match.

I would recommend this program if you are doing image searching through batch's on FamilySearch as it is a lot quick offline then online, and its a very simple program to use.

Brazil Civil Registrations: Death Records

2012-11-05T17:31:00.001-08:00

Continuing with my Brazil tree I am searching for death records for two people that I know that passed away in Nova Iguaçu, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. The issue is that I don't know when they passed, and as I am learning to read the documents this should be interesting.

The documents for Nova Iguaçu, Rio de janeiro, Brazil have not been indexed but it shows that about 11 Million records are online for Civil Registration, not sure how many that leaves to Nova Iguaçu but its a starting point.

The items I do know are that he was born in 1907, she was born in 1916. He came to Brazil in 1954, and she came in 1958. They were married before the came to Brazil, and all their children were also born before arriving in Brazil. Trying to get a better window of when they may have passed but currently I would put it at anywhere from 1970 to close to present day (which if it was anywhere in the last 10 years I think I would have gotten a little bit better info).

So I am currently going image by image starting with 1970, first batch is 300 images and I am currently at image 100, should not take took long to go all the way to present day. Hopefully soon I will get an update to narrow the search down better.

If anyone has any idea's on what to do to try and narrow the search, or other things I maybe able to find online to narrow it down that would be appreciated. As this is not my family, I am waiting on information from them to be able to do some more searching.

Finding a needle in a haystack of Immigration Records.

2012-11-04T21:38:00.001-08:00

After cracking the wall yesterday with my Portuguese and Brazilian Tree's I decided I needed to keep at it today. My first idea was to start slowly and go image by image in the Brazilian Immigration index, as only about 900K out of 2M have been indexed.

It didn't take to long before I was getting tired of going through them. Yes I don't have patients some times, so I decided my next course of action was to use the index and filter by first name. This brought it down to about 340K names (not a good start).

I have her full name and birth date but up until today I was getting no where looking for her. With the two surnames with her name it was hard to find her, so next added her birth year which dropped it down to 1,800 names.

I then added one of her last names (the one with out the DA in front of it), figured that might be the best bet, and from my current accounts it was her final last name. Well this narrowed it down to 33 names, but none of them were her.

So I was thinking what to do next and decided to do it by birth years again. Just maybe the information I got wrong was off by a year or so I decided to go up and down in 1 year increments to see if I could find anything. The first one I used was 1918 which had 41 results all of which were wrong.

My next year I used was 1916 which resulted in 47 names, with the fourth one being the correct one. What was interesting was that the format of the surnames was backwards to what was listed on the page, and her birthday was 1 year off from what I had listed (not a big deal).

This lead to her parents, and from there her two brothers. So three new names added to the database, that is a total of seven new ancestors added to this users tree in two days, not a bad weekend.

Next will be trying to narrow down their death, I have the place, and can roughly narrow it down from 1960 to almost present day. I am sure with a little more information I can filter it even more.

Brazil Immigration found

2012-11-03T22:56:00.002-07:00

I wanted to give FamilySearch another go today with my searching for Portuguese and Brazilian genealogy. Since I have started researching Brazil/Portugal there have been no updates to the databases, (or at least they have not advertised any).

On the first try I found a match, one possible reason was that we had finally figured out the last name for him. At first we had the last names backwards. Once I found him (x2) in the immigration to Brazil from Portugal for 1950, and 1954 I was able to get his parents names.

Once I found his parents names I found out his brother's name also. The one problem that I am having at the moment is that I know that he was married, and I have what I believe is his wife's name, but I have been unable to find her at the moment.

Most of the information is just word of mouth so any or all parts of the names could be wrong. The immigration card only states that he was married, not the name of the spouse. Additionally his children I believe were all over 18 when he traveled (or they are listed with the mother, because they are not on his card).

So currently I can go through 2 million pictures in a row or try and figure out some way to narrow down were to look. One issue is that the Brazil Immigration is not broken down by years on the website, it looks like its just broken down in groups with random names (there is has to be a reason they are grouped just have not figured it out yet).

So its a good night for research, just need to hit it a little harder.

Obituary Hunter on Ancestry.com

2012-11-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with my Ancestry.com settings and noticed something called Obituary Hunter. I have never heard of this or seen any other posts in reference to this.

It is located under My Alerts under the username tab on the top right of the page. Once you click My Alerts its at the bottom of the page.

Currently I have only setup 1 Obituary Hunter as a test since I have never used it before.
Below is how you setup you Obituary Hunter, I chose to only use a last name for my initial one.

Trying my luck at Forums posts again

2012-11-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

After some more searching with out getting anywhere I decided to start making some forum post initially at Ancestry.com in the area's I am searching, and the names of the families that I am searching for.

I made a post in the Portugal and Brazil forums hoping to get some help or at least a needle in the haystack to point me in a direction, I also posted in two of the surname forums with what little details I have of the families.

I am hoping that this pays off like the last time I put up a forum post requesting help in breaking down a brick wall.

As this is really uncharted water for me in searching Portuguese and Brazil Ancestry, and the fact that I can really only do online searching unless I can find microfilms that I can order at the local FHC I am hoping that someone somewhere can be of assistance.

Almost everything I have on this tree is second hand knowledge at the moment, word of mouth from one family member to another, and then told to me. So there could be, most likely there are errors in the little bit of information that I currently have. But this is all I have to go on at the moment (I was able to find 1 obituary that at least gave some of the names of one side of the family.)

Data Backup: November 1st.

2012-10-31T22:12:00.004-07:00

Time to take a look at my back-up solutions from 1 year ago and see where I stand on backups. Additionally see what changes I have made to increase my cloud storage, and other sources of backups.

The main things that I backup are my children's pictures and my genealogy data. I would say that my pictures are about 100GB right now (yes I know that is a lot), and I could probably trim that down a little by not having 300 pictures of the same pose, but that's not the point of this one.

As for my Genealogy data is now sitting at about almost 13GB which about 4GB of it is Camera uploads from my cell phone. (I need to also see what is in here, as it seems to have increased drastically since a year ago)

Overall I recommend Dropbox for cloud storage, but here is the list of all the ones that I use.

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App Review: 23andMe

2012-10-30T23:13:00.000-07:00

23andMe have fixed the login issue's with their new app and I am in it right now. As a reminder this is the Android app, not sure how the iOS app is.

I want to show everyone the layout of the app, so read on folks.

Updated: 23andMe Mobile App

2012-10-30T13:24:00.000-07:00

Everyone is into Genetic Genealogy these days even me. I have an account with 23andMe that I check occasionally (that's another story). But I wanted to review the new mobile app for 23andMe.

The app is for iOS and Android, and I just installed it on Android (Galaxy SIII) running stock Ice Cream Sandwich. Unfortunately I cannot get it to log in. I have verified the login and password of the site on my main computer so I know the username and password are correct.

Currently I get a
"Login attempt unsuccessful, please try again. (java.net.ConnectException).

As I said before I am running Android on a SGS III. I went over to the App website to see if there is anyone else having that issues and yes it seems everyone is having that issue currently. So I guess that we will be waiting for an update to try out the App.

Sorry folks, maybe next time. If anyone does get it up and running on Android please let me know. I have sent a email to 23andMe to let them know that the APP does not work for Android.

Update: So 23andMe responded to my email about the issue, and of course its a known issue. It is occurring with iOS and Android so it should be fixed soon. Just loading it up now, and I am in....will post review next.

FamilySearch Updates for October.

2012-10-29T18:15:00.003-07:00

I know that we are a few days away from the end of the month, but I wanted to show how many updates/new indexes have been put in FamilySearch this month.

As of today there have been 113 updates (given that there is still 2 more days left in the month they may have it up to 120 updates for the month of October which is impressive. I went back and checked for numbers for September and August. In the month of September there was 127 updates, and August had 47 updates.

If you are like me you probably check the updates on a daily basis. For me I keep waiting for Slovakia, Czech Republic, and now Brazil, and Portugal updates with the hope that it will get me one step closer to finding the next link.

If anyone wants to see the entire list of updates for October up to today:

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Accept Ancestry.com Hints (Non-Member)

2012-10-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

I currently don't have an Ancestry.com membership, but I do store my tree's on their site. I do this to use their Ancestry hints. Most of the time I will validate the hints with my AncestryLibrary account, but I would like to know if there is a way to "validate" or accept the hints that are show as Valid.

I know that you can ignore the hints, but it would be nice to also accept them even if you are not a member. This might be possible, but I have not found it just yet, so if anyone does know a way to do this please let me know.

The Deliverance of Sister Cecilia

2012-10-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

I know that I have made many posts about this story, but I like to bring it up every once in a while in the hopes that I might be able to find a copy on video.

The Deliverance of Sister Cecilia is the story of a nun in Slovakia (Bratislava) who helps priests and other nuns escape Slovakia that is under Communist control. What makes this so important to me is that Sister Cecilia is a relative of mine on my mother's side.

She was born Cecilia Kondrc in Bucany (most likely), I don't think I have any proof of the exact village, but 95% of the Kondrc's were born in Bucany. My great grandfather was Steve Kondrc who was also born in Slovakia and came to America.

Back to the story of Sister Cecilia, shortly after she arrived in America they wrote a LIFE article about her, and a book (written by William Brinkley). Currently I have the book, and the Magazine.

Last they made a made for TV movie called the Deliverance of Sister Cecilia in 1954. It was part of Climax Mystery Theater and Sister Cecilia was played by Claudette Colbert. I don't know if I will ever find a copy of the video, but I have to keep looking in the hopes that someone somewhere has it and is willing to make a copy for me.

If anyone has any idea's or knows how to get a copy please let me know. Thanks

Working with Portuguese Surnames.

2012-09-19T15:18:00.001-07:00

As I start my descent into Portuguese Genealogy I have acquired a few surnames as a beginning of my research. At least that is what I thought when I first started this, I made the mistake of thinking that like America it one surname used for the family, but from further reading about it I think I am mistaken.

My first issue that I uncovered was the use of "do" or "de" which I figured was like I found with the French-Quebec surnames I was researching used as a title for "from" or "of" so it could be the son/daughter of, or from a certain village/town.

I know Wikipedia is not the most reliable place for information but that was pretty much what was stated on the site:

Prepositions that can be used in Portuguese surnames are da, das, do, dos and de, such as in Luís de Sousa, Maria da Conceição, Osvaldo dos Santos, Luísa das Neves, etc. and mean "from" or "of". Da, dos,

Back to the surnames it also looks like they were forced to use, and further reading suggests that there was no one way to use the surname. So the wife might keep her surname and the add her husbands, and the children's names could have the surname of the mother first then father's or even switched around.

I am not sure how this will work in doing my research but at the moment I am pretty lost. This started when I was given what I thought was the middle name of the person with a surname. That surname was wrong so the added the De surname. I was still thinking that middle name was the middle name but that was verified that it was his last name.

If anyone has done any research in Portugal or Brazil I could really use the help to try and figure some of this stuff out.

I have some of the surnames for the families I am researching but at this time I will not post them. If anyone can help I can send them an email with the surnames to see what is possible.

Searching the Civil Registration: Brazil

2012-09-18T18:10:00.003-07:00

I have been on FamilySearch under the Civil Registration but was unable to find anything that matched with their names in the search. I know that they were not born in Brazil, but in Portugal, and that they immigrated probably in the 1960's time frame (based off information of when a daughter was born in Portugal).

I know that they passed away in Brazil, in Rio de Janerio in the town of Nova Iguaçu. I have gone to the images now to search each group of obituaries to see if maybe it was not correctly indexed as I wait for more information about time limes from the family.

Currently I probably have around a couple thousand images to look through, not the best option but its a way forward till I get more information.

If anyone know of immigration records that are available for around the 1960's let me know.

Next Stop Brazil

2012-09-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

Still doing research for a friend, I am moving some of my research towards Brazil as they had family that lived there for a few years, and some that passed away there. I am currently looking for genealogy research in the area of Rio De Janerio.

I found a blog post stating that some of Rio has been put online at FamilySearch but I was unable to locate the exact record collection. (most likely because I am not sure of how Brazil is broken down record wise for Rio.

I know the town that they passed away in, and I am sure there are other's that are still living there so I will continue on my search. If anyone has any idea's on where to narrow my search or knows of any sites or index's that will help. Additionally if there are any films that could be ordered to start looking through. (I live about 5 minutes from a FHC).

Where were you on 9/11

2012-09-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

Well all the Geneabloggers are writing about where they were on 9/11, so I figured I would add my part into this.

I was asleep when it happened just arrived in Pensacola, Florida via Newark Airport about 2 days prior to starting a Navy school. By this time I was already in the Navy for 5 year roughly. I was visiting my family on leave after living in Hawaii for the past 4 years. I flew out of Newark on September 9th, and had one day of class.

I was going to school for computer training, and the day before I found out I was going to be on nights. I was awoken by one of my friends who insisted I turn on the TV and flip through the channels without giving me much info. I was still in a sleepy state trying to go back to sleep, or at least figure out what was so important to wake me up when I had night classes.

After about a minute of flipping through the channels I got to the news channel just as one of the planes hit the towers. At first I did not understand what was going on, I thought it was a movie preview, but he had continue to watch it more.

Later I found out that my father was supposed to be working near the towers that morning but was late due to traffic.

Request for Help with new Project: Portuguese

2012-09-10T22:37:00.002-07:00

I have not put my family genealogy on hold but I have started to help a friend do some research on thier Portuguese genealogy. Currently they are gathering as much information about the family as the can from talking to their family.

I was able to find one document so far, and obituary that was very helpful in laying the ground work but I have not been able to find much else online (I am in San Diego, and pretty much bound here so no traveling to the location).

I am looking for whats available either online or through a FHC (microfiche) I can order. I know the basics that they came from Tras os montes, Portugal to the United States in the 1960's. Now research Tras os Montes does not help me to much, trying to see if they can narrow down the location, because Tras os Montes looks like an entire region not a village or town. I could be wrong as I am just learning all of this right now.

So I can rule out looking at any Census records in the US. I can possibly find them in City Directories in the US. But I want to find them entering the USA, and then back to their origins.

Currently I can go back to Great Grandparents only on father's line thanks to the well written obituary.

I found one site which might be of use but it charges a membership fee of 25$ and not sure if it would pan out to begin PortugueseAncestry.com

Any help would be appreciated.

FamilySearch Source Box

2012-09-06T00:15:00.001-07:00

I am a bit behind on FamilySearch, I have been watching the new images, but missed the who "Source Box" thing until the other day. I was doing some research on my German Heritage and putting my info in the database, when I noticed an option on the page called Source Box.

First you had to login to FamilySearch but then you just click "ADD". Considering at the time I was matching about 20 or so names to my family name it was a nice bonus to add the source so I can always go back to it and double check my information.

After finding out about it on my own I decided to see when it was added, which was May 25, 2012 so not to far behind. I did some more reading about Source Box and it looks like it has the ability to add the sources to you family tree on FamilySearch.

I do not have a tree on FamilySearch so I cannot verify how it works, and if it is a worthwhile thing to do while working on your tree at FamilySearch.

You can also create folders in your Source Box, so you can have it organized by country, or surname. It looks like its a bookmark back to the information you found. I think that I am going to be using this a lot more, wish I found it earlier.

Now I have to go back to all the other pages that I found on FamilySearch and add them to my SourceBox for future references.

Would you Pay Per View on Ancestry.com?

2012-09-05T19:11:00.004-07:00

As far as I know they are not planning anything like this but its just something that I have been thinking of while updating my hints in Family Tree Maker. Most of the hints I can get via AncestryLibrary (thanks to work), but some I cannot because they are only available on Ancestry.com.

Most of them right now are for the Public Family Tree's, and I already have a feeling that majority of the "matches" are not going to be worth anything, which leads me to the point of this post. I have already signed up for the free trial, and at the moment I would rather not sign up for a month just to view a few files.

As I was thinking about Ancestry.com I think it would be great if the had another pay model on there for say daily use, or even pay per view. I know that most folks don't like the Pay Per View idea of genealogy, but it makes you verify things more before you take the plunge into purchasing that "view".

As for what the costs per day or even per view could or should be I don't really know. I am going to base the pay scale off the World Access of 34.95 a month. Based off that it would be about a dollar a day, which I don't think they would really do, but say maybe 4$ a day or something in that area. I think I would be OK with that.

As Pay Per View, I would probably default to some of the other Pay Per View Genealogy sites and do something like that. Say you can buy a block of view say 100 for 10$ and its good for say a period of 3-6 months. These are just rough numbers that I am throwing out here. The site FindMyPast has Pay-as-you-Go for 100 views for 13.95

I am not to sure how much more work this would require Ancestry.com to put into their systems, its just me thinking out loud. I know that I could most likely go to the nearest library or even Family History Center, but sometimes it would be nice just to be able to do it from my own computer so I can update my local database. It is probably cheaper in the long run to take a 1 month subscription, but its also easier to justify to spend 5$-10$ then its is for 35$ at least for me.

Anybody else have any thoughts on this?

End of Ancestry.com Free Census Weekend

2012-09-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

As we hit the end of the free census weekend, I wanted to look back and see what I have accomplished with matching census records with known relatives. At the start of the weekend I had it at roughly 488 names that I need to validate.

Now it is Monday night, and the names list is about 510 (a few added based off of findings during the weekend period). After double checking my work I believe that I hit at least 50% of the names on my list, with majority based off the big surnames in my family.

I worked based off my report in Family Tree Maker, but started with my common surnames first (DECKER, GERRITY, JACKSON, TOOMEY, KONDRC) and then worked backwards from them to names like (CHURAY, STOLAR, STATION, MCKENNA, SWINGLE, SPRINGER, ALDRICH) and so on.

Overall it was a great success, and I will move back to searching AncestryLibrary for the rest of the missing census records (It won't be as easy though to incorporate them in my database but I can deal with that).

I did a quick search on Ancestry.com just to see how many "hints" that I have now:

2576 people in my Tree
3967 Hints in my tree

Not to bad it will be my work in progress as I continue to research my tree.

One Day Left on Ancestry.com Free Census Weekend.

2012-09-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

So we are one day away from the end of the free census records on Ancestry.com. I started with 488, and so far have gotten through the C's in my list. I have added about 20 new names to this database which need to be further vetted out, but are good starting points.

I have also added more "residence" locations for a good portion of my 488. On my last post I talked about how to verify if I had a user in a census year, and once again thanks to Russ I was able to add Residence into my report.

I have not used it to remove people who are fully census done, but at least at quick look I can see if I am missing anybody in a given census year which is a great help.

I hope to get at least my main lines of my families done before the end of the free period and then work my way outwards.

If I had to take an estimate I would say I am at about 420 names left, does not sound like I did a lot but over all I think it is good progress.

Data Backup Day

2012-09-02T00:07:00.003-07:00

Last weekend I decided to reload my machine because it started acting up. In preparation of the reload I wanted to make sure that my important files were backed up, or will continue to be backed up in the transition.

The reload was pretty strait forward, but I had a few files on my C: drive that I needed to move to the external drives. This consisted of my user profile (My Documents, My Photos, ect). Most of the files are already held of the D: drive which stayed in tact in the reload.

Because I have my most important files backed up in multiple places it was an easy reload (except for my Family Tree Maker issues) but that was fixed also. All in all I was back up and running with in an hour tops after starting the reload. That includes all the important programs that I use.

My favorite cloud storage is Dropbox were I have about 12 gigs of space used, which is about 5 gigs of Genealogy data, and the rest photo's. Next would be Google Drive, I have both of these program syncing the same folder in the cloud (twice the redundancy in the cloud).

Additionally I just setup a new account at Box.net(25G) and CX.net(10G) these will be used for family photo's they also sync a folder on my computer, so I don't have to worry about uploading or downloading to sync them.

Another great thing about cloud storage is the ability to have access to them anywhere, and all of the sites have Android apps (I believe they also have iPhone apps, but I don't have anything Apple so not positive). This way when I am out and about and need to look at something its at my fingertips on my S3, or Fire.

Lastly I also have a 3TB USB drive that I sync with my main folders for Genealogy and my family photo's. I have already come close too many times to loosing data, important data. It was about 95 gigs of family photos that were erased by accident but I was able to save them.