PicBite Lets You Annotate Photos Easily

Check out PicBite. You can annotate photos in less than 5 min. Picbite delivers 3 versions of your file along with different sizes.

I've used it so far to annotate census images and photos of family. Before this, I had to edit the photos in my graphics program. Here's a sample.

Only one problem: after annotating and clicking "Done", I sometimes get a "Page not found" error. But, I click re-load and my images are ready! Hopefully they'll fix that bug soon.

And it's free!

Genealogy 101: NARA Land Records

What is a land record and why would you want it?

The National Archives holds many types of land records, including bounty lands and lands purchased through the Homestead Act. For many African-Americans, those Homestead Land records hold valuable nuggets of information about our ancestors.

What might you find in a land record?

Each land record contains the application for the land, including the name of the applicant, possibly his current residence, and the price paid for the land. For Homestead files, the record will also contain the affadavits of neighbors and the applicant detailing how long the applicant lived there, what improvements were made to the land and the relationship of those neighbors to the applicant.

For example, I discovered that my ancestor, Rinaldi Reddick, had planted 3 acres of corn, peas, and garden. He also built a two-room "box house." There's also a witness affadavit from a James Brown who claims to be Rinaldi's nephew. Have to investigate that. I found similar information for Major Reddick.

Hidden Treasures

I also found something really neat in Rinaldi's file: a letter from his son, Alberta B. Reddick. Alberta wrote to the government after Rinaldi died to inquire about the legal status of the land. Here I have:

1. A letter in my great-great-grandfather's handwriting.
2. Confirmation of his given name, which has been listed as Alford, Albert, and Albertus in the census.
3. His address. This led me to two other census records for him and the discovery of his second wife.
4. Confirmation that Rinaldi Reddick did not leave a will. Now I have to search probate records to see what happened to Rinaldi's 120 acres.
5. Confirmation that the A.B. Reddick I have seen in records is likely Alberta B. Reddick.
6. Confirmation that Alberta was the sixth child of Rinaldi and that all his younger siblings had died by 1942, the date of the letter.
7. Further evidence that Nallie Reddick and Rinaldi Reddick are the same person.

All that in one letter!

If you'd like to order land records, first find the patent that describes the land. You can search land patents on Ancestry.com (you can soundex search there) or go to the source: http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/. Once you've got the description, head over to NARA's Order Online Area, register, and order. Happy hunting!

Reviewed: GenealogyBank.com

Previously, I posted a letter I'd written to the Genealogy Guys about how happy I was to find information on GenealogyBank.com. Now, for a review of the site.

Grade: B

Great resources, but some improvements would make for a better user experience and a more useful genealogical resource.

Pros:

• Nice interface. The scanned images are really clear and the site is fast.
• Varied selection. I like that it includes newspapers and documents that you can't find anywhere else. Seems like they add new stuff at least once a month.
• Relatively low cost. Take advantage of the 9.95 introductory month and then cancel if you aren't finding a lot of stuff.
• You can save the documents you find to your computer.

Cons:

• It's not free.
• There's no social aspect. I would love to take the features of Footnote.com and integrate them here. There's no annotating or correcting or connecting to others who found your document interesting.
• No soundex searching. Huh? It's a genealogy site without soundex, go figure...
• Search is based on optical character recognition (OCR), so you might miss some items and catch some items unrelated.
• Search is limited. You can't search for the exact name. If you put in a first and last name it really does a "near" search instead of an exact search.
• You can only save documents page by page. If I find a 50 page biography of my ancestor, I have to download each page individually, then re-combine the PDF's into a file with Adobe Acrobat 7.0.
• You can't save to the site. The weirdest thing about this site is that you can't save anything under your profile. You can't save searches, you can't save links to documents...nothing. So, once you find what you want, there's no need to come back to the site unless they add a collection you think you might be interested in. Ancestry keeps you coming back by letting you save and build a "self" on their site.

Slave Research: Drayton Family launches Lowcountry Africana Website

I'm excited because they cover states where I have ancestors. Maybe I'll get lucky?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 24, 2008
Contact: Toni Carrier, 813-246-2201

Results of Groundbreaking Slave Genealogy Research to be Released March 29, 2008 With Lowcountry Africana Website Launch

The results of groundbreaking genealogical research to reconstruct family lineages of enslaved communities on Drayton family plantations in the United States and Barbados will be released Saturday, March 29 with the launch of the Lowcountry Africana website (http://www.lowcountryafricana.com/).

The yearlong project, sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina, has focused on gathering, compiling and interpreting records from all known Drayton family plantations. The Draytons held plantations in Barbados, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas.

Researchers from the University of South Florida Africana Heritage Project and descendants of former Drayton family slaves worked together to rediscover the scattered document trail which may reveal the family and cultural heritage of many thousands of African Americans living today. Drayton Hall Plantation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who hold the Drayton family papers, were major partners in the research.

Because Charleston was a major port of entry and a hub for the international and domestic slave trade, African Americans throughout the United States may discover their families’ roots among the records to be released March 29.

No former slaveholding family has ever funded such research in their plantation records to rediscover the names and life stories of former slaves. “This is a wonderful example of enlightened stewardship,” said Toni Carrier, director of the USF Africana Heritage Project. “The Drayton family is taking an unflinching look at its history; a history shared by the hundreds of Africans and African Americans who lived and worked on Drayton family plantations. This research demonstrates, in a remarkable way, that we have nothing to fear from bringing this painful history out into the light.”

In addition to sponsoring this groundbreaking research, the Magnolia Plantation Foundation has also funded the development of the Lowcountry Africana website, which will be an enduring archive for those researching African American genealogy, history and culture in the Lowcountry Southeast. The project will continue to gather and interpret records for the former rice-growing areas of the coastal Southeast, which gave rise to the rich Gullah-Geechee cultural heritage.

Access to the entire content of the Lowcountry Africana website will always be free. The website will feature a searchable database of primary historical documents, book and multimedia excerpts, a research library with articles of interest to genealogists and scholars, information on key archives and websites with significant holdings pertaining to the Lowcountry Southeast, and a members area where readers can keep a research journal and bookmark links.

The Lowcountry Africana website development has been a collaborative effort of the USF Africana Heritage Project and WeRelate.org http://www.werelate.org/, a free public-service wiki for genealogy sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc. in partnership with the Allen County Public Library. WeRelate.org is the world’s largest genealogy wiki, with pages for more than 1,500,000 people and growing. “We are honored to be a part of this exciting effort to make records documenting the history of African Americans freely available to all,” said Dallan Quass, President of the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy.

WeRelate.org has customized its family tree software for African American genealogy by adding events and document categories that are relevant for research in plantation and other Antebellum records. Readers will be able to navigate seamlessly between Lowcountry Africana and WeRelate, where the lineages of known descendants of Drayton family freedmen will be posted. In addition, many of the original document images will be hosted at WeRelate.org.

The major Internet archives Footnote.com and GenealogyBank.com have contributed many document images to the Drayton family research presentation, and to the Lowcountry Africana website. The March 29 launch event at Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina will include a commemoration ceremony to honor those once enslaved on Drayton family plantations. The Lowcountry Africana website will be live at http://www.lowcountryafricana.com/ Saturday morning, March 29, 2008.

For more information about the Lowcountry Africana website, please contact Toni Carrier at 813-246-2201 or email to toni@africanaheritage.com.

For more information about Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, please contact Jane Taylor Knight at 843-571-1266, or visit the Magnolia Plantation website at http://www.magnoliaplantation.com/

All the Wrong (or Right?) Information

One of the problems we face doing genealogical research is getting the facts straight. It's one thing to have names, but it's another thing to use primary and secondary sources to determine facts like birthdate, death date, and place of birth.

As you find your ancestors in the census, you'll discover that they may have birthdates that vary within a range as large as 10 years!

For example, my ancestor, Nelson Reddick is listed with the following different birth years:

1853 (1870 Census)
1846 (1880 Census)
1847 (1900 Census)
1850 (1910 Census)
1852 (1920 Census)

And, your ancestors may name two or three different states as their birth location. This is typical for early African-American records for many reasons:

1. Slaves often didn't know their birth date or where they were born, just the season in which they were born.
2. Many families didn't keep baptism and christening records.
3. Birth certificates weren't required in many states until the early 1900's or later, so folks may not have been sure of their exact birthdate.
4. Sometimes, the family wasn't there to give the census taker information, so he gathered that information from neighbors. That information could be very wrong.

So, given all these dates and no birth certificates or church records available, how does you determine the date your ancestor was born? Answering this question was important to me because the dates I had on the census didn't mesh well with the oral history passed down through my family. I was wondering if the children's names had been mixed up in the passing down of the story.

My thought was to assume that the sources with earlier dates are most reliable. I asked Lisa over at Genealogy Gems for help (via Facebook). Here's her answer:

Hi Aisha, I'm finally getting caught up after being at the Family History Expo in Utah, and want to get back to you on your question.

I'm with you on this question. I would give more weight to the sources that are closest to the actual event. And the fact that the source was likely the mother is even more compelling. While I have found that the oral history stories in my family have all had a grain of truth to them, I've certainly come across children getting mixed up. I think that is likely your case.

That being said, you may never get a final answer on this question. Until you find a rock solid source, you will always want to note the discrepancies. And I am not an expert on African-American research, so there may very well be other avenues to pursue that I'm not aware of.

Drop me a line when your podcast and blog are up and running. I'd like to follow your work.

All the best,
Lisa Cooke
http://www.genealogygems.tv/

So, based on Lisa's advice, I will likely list Nelson's birthdate as 1853, with a footnote stating the discrepencies.

Wow, that was fast!

I ordered Land Records from the National Archives for my ancestors, Major Reddick and Rinaldi/Rinaldo/Nally/Nallie/Nelson Reddick (yeah, he goes by all those names) on Mar. 13. My ancestors purchased land through the Homestead Act in 1867, 1891, and 1918. My hope was that the applications and associated paperwork would give me some new information about my ancestors and confirm that Rinaldi Reddick was the same person as Nelson Reddick. NARA said it would take 6-8 weeks but it took less than two! They were $40 a piece, but at least NARA was fast. Was it worth $40? See my next post on Land Records.

Letter to the GenealogyGuys

Since the Genealogy Guys are the ones who told me about Genealogybank.com where I found some awesome info about my family, I figured I'd send them an e-mail. Here it is:

Hey Guys!

I've been listening to the show for about two months and I'm still catching up on old shows. I wanted to thank you for telling me about GenealogyBank.com because it helped me bust through a brick wall.

In August, my family (the African-American decendents of Major Reddick of Archer, Florida) will be having a family reunion. I've been doing genealogical research on various branches of my family since I was 15, but I never researched this branch. Major Reddick is my 4th great grandfather and I was excited to learn about this branch of my tree. After being handed a family tree and a summary of past research, I set about trying to find evidence to support our oral history. One brick wall was the identity of a man named Rinaldo or Rinaldi Reddick. No one had figured out who he was, but he seemed to be related to Major Reddick. He had purchased land near Major, and there weren't any other African-American Reddick families in Alachua County at that time. Was he Major's brother? Another slave from the same plantation? Or a son that we didn't know about? No one knew, but thanks to GenealogyBank.com, we now know!

I searched for Major Reddick on the site and discovered his name, so I took a chance and paid for the site. It turns out that Major, along with Nally/Nallie and Abraham/Abram Reddick (known sons of Major) and Rinaldo Reddick were all witnesses in the disputed elections for the US Senate in 1876 and 1880. Twice, Horatio Bisbee and Jesse Finley ran against each other and disputed the results of the elections. Colored and white voters in several counties were called to testify about voting day. The testimonies of the witnesses were collected and published in several documents. Going through the documents, I read Rinaldo Reddick's testimony. There, he was asked, "You are sometimes called Nallie Reddick, are you not." Rinaldo responded, "I am."

Finally! I had proof that Rinaldo Reddick and Nally Reddick (who had listed his middle initial as R in one census) were the same person. Not only did I bust through a brick wall, but I found the only documents that our family has ever seen where we have direct quotes of our ancestors. As additional proof, I received the land records from NARA that indicate that Nally and Rinaldi/Rinaldo are the same person, but that's another letter.Thanks Genealogy Guys.

Oh, if you can, please let listeners know that our family web page, the Reddick-Benbow-Means Family Reunion, is on Rootsweb:

http://genealogy.freepages.rootsweb.com/~aisha1978 or they can search Reddick on the freepages website and our site will come up. I'll be posting the documents that I discovered on GenealogyBank in the next few weeks, along with the other documents we have collected about our family. Maybe we'll find some cousins!

Aisha from Katy, TX

Genealogy Research Map

Mark Tucker at Think Genealogy has created a Genealogy Research Map that is being talked about all over the genealogy community in blogs and podcasts. It combines the concepts from the Genealogical Proof Standard and the work of Elizabeth Shown Mills on citations to help you ensure that your genealogical research is thorough and of high quality. He's even created a version that you can keep on your computer background as reference. I can't wait to start using this to verify and compile my family histories.

Enjoy!

Sorry for delays

Sorry I've been busy! Gonna try to catch up this weekend. Look forward to at least 5 posts, including some Genealogy 101, tips for finding slave ancestors, and the top 10 reasons you can't find your ancestors in the census!