2003 Meeting & Events Schedule
Plain History Genealogy Group Disks
Kraemer Library and Community Center Holdings
Miscellaneous tips, tricks, websites
Jan 11, 2003 Meeting Using the Computer to Research
Mar 8, 2003 Meeting

HOW DID MY ANCESTORS GET HERE? If you ever wondered how your ancestors got from Europe to the United States, this month's presentation will be of interest to you. This presentation will cover all parts of the journey in detail. There will be a discussion of Castle Garden, the Barge Office and Ellis Island. We will also discuss the paper trail that our ancestors left on their journey. The other half of the meeting will be "open" time that you can ask questions, ask for help on the PC, share your stuff and see other people's stuff.

As a general rule, meetings will be held at the Kraemer Library & Community Center on the 2^nd Saturday of the month at 9:30 am in "odd" months. An email and newsletter will come out before the meeting. Things can change so check the website and watch your mail.

It is my understanding that there will be visitors from the Waldmunchen, Bavaria area. I have heard that there will be a get together at the Kraemer Library on March 9^th. Check with the library to get more details and confirmation of the get together.

The Wisconsin State Genealogical Society will be holding a workshop called Gene-A-Rama 2003. It will be held at the Holiday Inn Convention Center, Eau Claire, WI starting Friday Apr 4^th and finishing Saturday Apr 5^th 2003. The featured speaker will be Patricia Law Hatcher, a well known researcher and speaker. http://www.rootsweb.com/~wsgs/

MCGS Workshop Milwaukee, WI Sat Apr 26,2003 http://my.execpc.com/~mcgs/programs.html

Every other year the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society has a day-long workshop. This year's workshop will be held Saturday, April 26, 2003 at Serb Memorial Hall, 5101 West Oklahoma Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. http://www.milwaukeegenealogy.org

There will be 4 1-hour sessions during the day, with two options for each session to choose from.

Registration before Apr 5, 2003 is $40 and includes a sandwich in a box lunch. You have a choice of turkey, beef, or ham. If my memory from their last workshop is right, the sandwiches were okay. At least you could tell what meat (or meat-byproduct) you were eating.

According to their brochure, there will be vendors' tables and a freebie table. If you have room on your credit card you can a lot of fun at theses.

I would recommend this seminar to anyone who lives in the Milwaukee area or wants to attend every possible genealogical seminar they can. For most of our members that live in Sauk County, I recommend the seminar in Whitewater on July 12^th.

Due to budget concerns, this meeting has been cancelled.

GIG Whitewater,WI Sat July 12 2003 M. Wolfert http://www.rootsweb.com/~wigig/workshop.html

Pathways to the German Homeland If you miss this annual workshop, you will miss a great workshop.Every year the German Interest Group - Wisconsin has a day-long workshop. This year's workshop is called "Pathways to the German Homeland." It will be held on the UW-Whitewater Campus in Whitewater, WI on Saturday, July 12, 2003. If you are researching German ancestors you don't want to miss this one. (I can't miss this one because the speaker has done fantastic translation and research in Germany for me.) http://rootsweb.com/~wigig/index.html The speaker will be Marion Wolfert. She is an internationally known genealogist and author. She knows lots of stuff.

9:15 am Records that offer clues to an ancestor's place of origin.
10:45 am Types of records found in different regions of Germany.
1:00 pm Border changes affect research.
2:30 pm Every day life from the middle ages to modern times.
Registration before June 28, 2003 if you are a member of GIG is $21.00. The annual membership is $7.50/$10.00 a year and includes a fantastic newsletter. I strongly recommend that you join the group just to get the newsletter. As usual there will be vendor tables to spend money at.

Currently, we have three CD disk "sets" 1) Nachreiner Funeral Book 2) Haas / Bauer 3) Utility Disk

You "start these" disks by opening the INDEX.html found on disks (except for the Haas/Bauer disks)

The utility disk contains a number of different things. First, it contains all the data found on the website. It is much quicker to use the CD disk instead of an Internet dial-up connection. Second, the disk contains genealogy guides from several sources, primary the LDS site. Third, the disk contains a number of different programs. Again, by providing these items on the disk, your download time is reduced. Some of the programs on the files are :

WINZIP - compression program
StarOffice 5.1 - a substitute for the Microsoft Office Suite (free)
PAF 5.x - genealogy program (free)
IRFAN - image/video viewer including plugins (free)
Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.05 - PDF reader (free)
PDF Writer - create PDF files (free)
Family Treemaker Archive - reads data CD files from FTM (free)
I am in the process of preparing 6 new disks containing new information for the Haas/Bauer disk set.

The library has a lot of nifty things. I have started organizing, digitizing and cataloging some of these holdings. Here are some of the interesting things that they have.

1) Hildegarde Thering did an extensive amount of research when she wrote her book about the history of Plain. A lot of her research are notes that she took while reading back issues of the Home News. I have digitized her research. The 2,500 pages fit onto five CD-ROMS. The really neat thing is that you can see lots of her research, which is not in her book. I estimate that only 20% to 40% of her research made it into her book.

2) The records of the Sunnyside School were also digitized. These records include, board minutes, correspondence and teacher's records. The teacher's records give a detail list of the students, their attendance, their grades, what they were taught and visitors to the school.

3) There is an excellent equipment catalog from International Harvester. This is an interesting read for people brought on farms using this equipment.

4) The library has held numerous programs for children. In 1972, a program was held dealing with family history. Each of the participating children turned in a 4-generation family tree. These contain lots of useful information, which has been digitized.

5) The is a 1981 atlas of Sauk County which has detailed lists of farmers, pictures of families and farms, and histories of families and churches in the area.

6) There are plat maps of Sauk County going back to 1947, including a 1922 Atlas of Sauk County.

The library has other neat stuff which we will discuss this in future newsletters and the website.

It can be frustrating to look for female ancestors in old newspapers and not see a first name. The Feb 2003 Smithsonian, page 28 stated that it was a convention of newspapers that a lady's name only appear in a newspaper to announce her marriage or death. This helps explain why you can only find spouses referred to as "the wife of Mr. John Smith" or "Mrs. John Smith.

The Wisconsin Historical Society Library in Madison, WI is one of the greatest research sites in the nation, maybe even the world. You don't have to truck down to the building to look at their stuff. They have a lot of stuff in digital format that can be accessed through the Internet.

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba

They have digitized over 50,000 Wisconsin Local History & Biography articles from "old time" newspapers. There is an excellent search engine, which helps you find articles that interest you. I like the "Advanced Search" tab. It lets you look for things by county, topic, newspaper, year, and names. Once you find an article, you can look at the digitized computer image from your home. If you ever wonder what your tax dollars go for, the Wisconsin Historical Society Library is worth every penny.

The Wisconsin Historical Society Library in Madison, WI will be closed between May 19, 2003 and Jun 14, 2003. They are closing down because they have too much stuff and they want to re-arrange things. It seems like the Archives Research Room and Archives reference services will be open. It is best to check first by calling 608-264-6477. The library will reopen on June 16, 2003. It will probably be a crowded place for a couple of months with all the pent-up research desires.

Before there was television and the Internet, "regular" people learned about the world through popular magazines like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. In addition to having well-written stories about places of interests, it also had illustrations. This newspaper was like the LOOK and LIFE magazines that were so popular. This can be a real nice break from looking at newspapers and census records when you are at the WHS library. You can find lots of stories of things that effected your ancestors' lives. WHS Library' s Microforms room has Vol 1 through Vol 45 P75-3188 through P75-3207 Vol 73 through Vol 78 P96-1709 Vol 1 through Vol 46 in the rare book AP2 L52 Vol 47 through Vol 73 in the oversize stacks AP2 L52.

The Family History Center in Hales Corners, WI (suburb of Milwaukee) is one of the better-equipped sites for doing family research. They have all the high-tech technology toys, Internet access, CD-ROMs, microfilm readers and printers that you could hope for. You don't want to forget their low-tech resources. They have got a great bulletin board that has a lot of interesting stuff. It has the names of researchers, ethic research groups, upcoming genealogy events, and handouts that tell you how to do stuff. They also have a section on helpful websites. Here are some things hanging on the wall.

1) http://www.publicrecordfinder.com/ This site gives you access to public records available from federal, state and local governments. In some cases you will get access to the actual information. In other cases you will get instructions on how to order the information. I found this site which gives you access to Spring Green town assessor information on individual homes/properties http://www.wendorffassessing.com/

2) http://www.glorecords.blm.gov If you want to see who owned a piece of property first, the Bureau of Land Management website lets you search their database and pull up a copy of the original document on your PC within minutes. A lot of the land in the Plain area was owned by the federal government and is covered by this database.

3) http://www.linkstothepast.com This is well-designed site that has lots of information about Waukesha and Milwaukee county. It also has a lot of stuff of general interest.

4) http://www.horlacher.org This is an online gazetteer about places in German areas. Gazetteers tell you neat stuff about towns and places that your ancestors came from.

5) http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/eidb/ellis.html One of the greatest genealogical breakthroughs, was the posting of Ellis Island records to the Internet. The "official" form can be difficult to use and doesn't let you do a real complex search. This site lets you search the records in some incredible ways. "Play with all the buttons" on this site, there is good stuff hiding.

6) http://www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/rs/sarl.htm This site links you to all state archives in the US. Again another site with really good stuff hiding.

7) http://www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/ This is one of the largest genealogical libraries in the US.

http://www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/Links/Arts_and_Humanities/Genealogy/Vital_Records/

I am a big fan of Yahoo's email service. I have been using their free version for years. What I really like about this email service is that I can access my email from anywhere that has Internet access. I also like the fact that I will never get a computer virus from my email. Yahoo has a virus scan that can be used on everything coming in and going out. You also don’t have to worry about the nasty viruses that can just start up on their own.I recently spent the $30 a year to upgrade my account. There were three benefits for me. Instead of only having 4 meg of storage I now have 25 meg of storage. Another benefit is that I can send or receive attachments up to 10 meg in size. One final benefit is that I can "dump" my Yahoo emails to my PC so I have them backed up in two places. If you have a few pieces of change hanging around, you might want to consider this upgrade

Everybody knows a "lucky" genealogist. These genealogists can trace their ancestors back to the 1300's and have photos of all ancestors since the 1850's. It is more a case of keeping their eyes opened than being lucky. The "lucky" ones will look at everything, even things that shouldn't have any information.

I recently came across a 1981 atlas of my home county, Sauk County. This atlas has the standard plat maps. It also has a detailed directory of every farmer including, their religion and organizations that they belonged to. If this wasn't enough, the book has pictures of families and farms. This will be great book for future researchers. It is amazing that a copy of this book was found in a Salvation Army store. Got to keep your eyes open everywhere.

Now the really good stuff. In the back of this book, there are numerous family and church group histories. I have been searching for the surname of a Hutter ancestor. She has always been referred to as "the wife" or at best Barbara. A "lucky" genealogist would have looked through the whole book and found this treasure hidden in the back of the book. I found that her maiden name was Bendel and the name of the person who submitted this history.

A truly "lucky" researcher would say to themselves, "If they have one of these for a small county like Sauk, maybe there is one for the county I am interested in. I am going to have to contact RURAL ATLAS SERVICE, 227 E. Water Street, Shullsburg, WI 53586 and see if they did one for my county."

You never know what you will find when you have your eyes open.

There are some excellent databases on the INTERNET that charge you for using them. Ancestory.com is one of the better ones. One thing on this site is the entire US Federal Census (some of it indexed). My annual subscription is close to $200 for Ancestory's databases.. Using my Milwaukee County Library Card I can access Ancestory.com and hundreds of other pay-per-use databases for free. Most of these don't even require that I go to the library. I can access them from home or anywhere with an Internet connection. Check with your local library (or their website) to see what resources are available. (I heard that the Reedsburg library has a subscription to Ancestory.com)

http://www.scls.lib.wi.us/sclslibs.htm)l

The Kramer Library and Community Center's Long Range Plan includes a goal to be a "COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGICAL CENTER". In addition to the "main" PCs that can be used for research, the library has 9 networked computers with access to the Internet. At our January 2003 meeting we made use of these computers to give training in how to use computers to research.I recommend that you print out the handout for the meeting since my article will follow it. http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/phgnews/phg0301.pdf

Our first stop is our webpage, which gives you access to what we have and our newsletters.

The homepage for our website is http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/index.html .

a) Clicking on Haas Bauer - Main Page on the homepage gives you access to information about the over 15,000 items on on the HAAS BAUER disk set http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/hbmain.htm . This page gives you access to PDF files that give you indices to what is on the disks.

b) At the bottom of Haas Bauer - Main Page is a bunch of numbers that can be confusing.

The first characters (the first 2 for now) give you the disk number. The rest of the stuff lets you know which folder contains the image on the disk. If you click on one of the "bunch of numbers" you can view thumbnails "small-size" images of the items on the disks. Some of these can take a while to load.

c) Back to the homepage for our website, clicking on Haas Bauer - Newsletters gets you to the newsletters for the HAAS BAUER families that I am researching. http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/hbnews.htm.

d) Back to the homepage for our website, clicking on Haas Bauer - Draft Version Dec 2002 gets you to the draft version of the HAAS BAUER family history that I gave out for Christmas. You will find detailed family information that will likely include your ancestors. If nothing else, it will give you some ideas on how you can "kill some trees".http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/hbv01/hbv01.htm

e) Back to the homepage for our website, clicking on Plain History Genealogy - Main Page gets you to some good stuff. http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/phgmain.htm. On this page you can an index to the J. Nachreiner's Funeral Book. We have digital images of the entire book.

f) This page also gives you access to SELECTED HISTORY / GENEALOGY - WEB SITES that can be helpful in your research.http://solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/phgmain/phgweb.htm.

2) FAMILYSEARCH.org - the MONSTER OF ALL WEB SITES http://www.familysearch.org/

If you haven't done research using this site, you haven't even started your research. There is so much on this site, we will only skim the surface in this article.

a) If you click on the SEARCH tab on the homepage of the site, you get to

the SEARCH FOR ANCESTORS - ALL RESOURCES page. http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp

This gives you free access to some of the databases created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. These freebie databases include

I can guarantee that you will find ancestors and relatives using this page. The trick is how do you fill on the form. There is no one right way to search for data. Be creative, try a combination of methods.

b) One thing to remember is that information in these databases had to be entered by humans. This means that stuff you are searching for might be entered "wrong."

c) Another thing to remember is that the search page lets you search by Country and States. If the person submitting the information didn't include Country and State information, you can't search by these terms. In short if it wasn't entered, you might need to search for ALL COUNTRIES or ALL STATES. The spelling of the STATE name is also something to be careful of. I have seen Bavaria entered under Bayern, Baiern and even Byron.

d) One more topic before we take a look at the actual databases. The key to using the FAMILYSEARCH.org databases is entering names into a search form. Here are a couple of tricks and tips.

-Do not use titles like Jr. Dr. Miss Captain Sir or III in your search.
-Try different variations of the name. My simple, single syllable name of Haas can be spelled at least 4
ways. Let's not get into the variations on the Maier surname.
-The submitter might have decided to convert the name from the original document to what they felt
was the "correct" format. Your John might be somebody's Johann.
- In the old German, several letters are interchangeable. Ds and Ts; Ps and Bs can be switched, even
for the same person.
-You also have to deal with true misspellings. And I have seen some beauties.
-For women, try both the maiden and married surname. Again you can never tell how some goofball
entered names. You are at the mercy of the person who submitted the data.

e) Okay lets talk about trying a search. There are four main sections on the SEARCH screen:

-Names - You don't have to fill in all the boxes. If you don't know a spouse's maiden name, you can leave her
last name blank. If you want to search for the children of a couple, just fill in the father's and mother's names.
Be creative. Try any combination or spelling that might work

- Events - You can search by births, marriages, deaths, etc if the person who put the information
into the computer, included it.

-Political -Your searches by COUNTRY and STATE will only work if the person who put the
information into the computer, included it.

-Exact spelling - Some of the problems that spelling can cause can be dealt with using some sort of soundex
method. Not checking this box uses a soundex method.

f) I put Hilda in the first name, Alt in the last name field and hit search for the ALL RESOURCES screen. You are given a screen with matching records found in each of the databases. On the right of the screen it tells you how many records it found in each of the databases. On the left of the screen it gives you the detail matching records by the database.

HERE IS SOMETHING TO REMEMBER, on the left side of the screen it will only display the first 20 or so of the matching records even it the search found hundreds. At the end of each database section, there is a line to click to see the rest of the records.

Lets click on one of the Hilda Alts in the PEDIGREE RESOURCE section of the results.

This screen gives you lots of information.

It gives you the COMPACT DISC #. You will need this if you want to get the really good stuff. The CD disks contain all the notes and sources

This screen gives you the name of the person who submitted the information who could be a source of more information.

At the bottom of the screen there is a SUBMISSION NUMBER. Every time family information is submitted, it is given a unique number. If you click on the SUBMISSION number, it will bring up a screen like the ALL RESOURCES screen. It will have the Submission Number already filled in. Clicking on the Search button will give you a list of all the names submitted by the person.

Many of the free databases on the LDS website can also be purchased on CD disks.You can only put so much information on the Internet. In many cases the CD disks have more information. Speed is another advantage of CD disks. It can be quicker to search on a disk in your home than using a slow Internet connection. A really big advantage of CD disks is that you can do "better" searches of the data.

For example, the Internet site only lets you search by COUNTRY and STATE on the Pedigree Resource File. The CD disk version lets you search for anything: names of towns, names of churches, cemeteries, county names, company names, organization names, and anything else you can think of.

Costs are another difference. True, the LDS church charges very little for their CD versions.

However, there is nothing cheaper than free.

3. FAMILYSEARCH.org - Catalog http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.asp

The LDS church has over 2 million rolls of microfilmed records that they have gathered from all over the world. You can get access to these films through a Family History Center near you. I have found numerous German documents from the 1800's. You can search the online catalog for records by family name, place name.

As an example, lets search for Waldmünchen.

A) Click on the PLACE SEARCH button. It can get tricky because of the umlat (the dots over the u). Normally, you can substitute a ue. ON THE ONLINE CATALOG YOU ONLY ENTER a U.

B) I enter waldmunchen and hit the SEARCH button.

C) This screen show PLACES found. Click on the underlined line.

D) This screen shows TOPICS . Click on one of the underlined line for public records.

E) This screen shows TITLES. Click one of the underlined line.

F) This screen describes the item. Click on VIEW FILM NOTES.

G) This screen gives you the information that you will need to order the film. This has been a quick

For about $5 you can get the catalog on a CD disk. You can find more things on the catalog. The Internet Catalog only searches "titles", the CD disk searches everything including the description.

(I found two additional listings for Waldmünchen on the CD disk that weren't on the online catalog.)

3. PAF genealogy program

At the meeting, we gave a quick introduction to the PERSONAL ANCESTRAL FILE 5.2, one of the most popular genealogy programs. We walked through the "confusing" buttons and options that you use to enter information and print reports. It would be too complicated to give a step by step description here. Here are two points

1. The program is free and can be downloaded from www.familysearch.org or it is on

the PLAIN HISTORY GENEALOGY GROUP UTILITY DISK

B) the program has an excellent user's manual / help system that you can print out.

KEEP IN CONTACT ----------------------------------------------------------------
We want to get your comments and suggestions. garylhaas@yahoo.com
Be sure to check the website occasionally. solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/