Sad News

We have lost another of our loyal members.

As reported in the Daily Herald today, "Funeral services for Raymond C. Mueller, 69, will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, March 31, in the Laird Funeral Home, Elgin, with visitation from 9:30 a.m. until the time of services. Burial will be private in Campton Cemetery, Lamont, Iowa."

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend but I know many EGS members will be there.

Ray will be greatly missed and our condolences go out to Ann and family.

GenBlog: Kane County, Illinois Deaths, Pre-1916 Index Now Available Online

GenBlog: Kane County, Illinois Deaths, Pre-1916 Index Now Available Online

Updates for Kane county deaths, pre-1916, at Illnois Archives. Check out the above blog post.

March 2011 Evening Meeting

Please join us March 17, 2011 at 7:00 pm at the Gail Borden Public Library, 270 N. Grove, Elgin, Illinois. We'll be discussing how and why to use the wonderful free site USGENWEB.

If you're a frequent user of this site, be sure to come and share with others. Your input is invaluable!

If you've never been to the site or aren't feeling sure about its use, come along with all your questions. We'll do our best set you on the right track.

We'll also briefly hear about some newer sites Becky's been playing with this week, :-)

Hope to see you there!

Irish Research - New Resources

For all you Irish researchers, here are some new sites, originally posted at Genealogy In Time for March 2011, for Irish resource.

Ireland – The Heritage Council of Ireland has just funded and launched a major new web portal called the Irish Archives Resource. It enables researchers to locate archival collections in Ireland that are relevant to their research. The intent of the site is to essentially act like a giant card catalogue for anyone doing ancestral work on Ireland. A search function allows users to pull up the relevant collections. A detailed listing is provided for each collection along with instructions on how to access the collection either online (if available) or physically at a public location in Ireland. Many of the major city and county archives in Ireland have already contributed to the website and much of it would be of interest to anyone with ancestors from Ireland. For example, try searching using terms such as ‘deeds’ ‘wills’, etc. This site looks like it will quickly become a must-stop for genealogists. Access is free. [Irish Archives Portal]

Northern Ireland – Belfast City Council has put online 360,000 burial records from three city cemeteries. The records are from Belfast City Cemetery (from 1869 onwards), Roselawn Cemetery (from 1954 onwards) and Dundonald Cemetery (from 1905 onwards). Each record contains the following information: full name, age, sex, last place of residence, date of death, date of burial, grave section and number and type of burial (in ground or cremation). Access is free. [Historic Belfast Cemetery Records] 

Ireland – The Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate in Dublin has put online historical employee records from the brewery spanning the period from 1759 to the present. Some 20,000 individual employee files have gone online, which represents about 80% of all employees who worked at the historic brewery. A typical file lists the employee’s name, date of birth, date of death, employee ID number, date joined the brewery, date left, occupation and department that the employee worked. Access is free. [Historic Guinness Brewery Employee Records]

Have fun! 

RootsTech - Video

RootsTech - Video

I've been watching some great presentations from the Roots Tech Conference that was held in February. Take some to and enjoy some yourself.

Don't miss the one by Curt Witcher; it's great! (It takes about 5 minutes to get to Curt but it's worth the wait.)

Many lessons for our genealogy societies to take to heart.

Girl Scouts Earn Heritage Badge

Friday afternoon, Judy Van Dusen and Becky Higgins represented EGS by helping the members of girl scout troop 4192 of South Elgin achieve their Heritage Badge.
The girls showed their aptitude towards genealogy from the very beginning. They began their meeting by sampling ethnic treats and we all know if there is a genealogy meeting there will most likely be treats. :-) These delectables came from Scandinavia, Greece, and India.

 Kara, the troops capable leader, got things started by discussing the home assignments the girls had worked on. Just one more display of how technology has changed the way things are done: the completed assignments had been previously emailed to Kara so she had time to combine everyone's work into a nice document. Family quotations and traditions were just a couple of the items the girls collected.

Then, the genealogists got down to business. We explained two of our most significant forms - the Family Group Sheet and the Pedigree or Generations Report. With information the girls had gleaned during the past week, they began to fill in the blanks.

There were some great questions and we soon learned, even at this young age, they like to talk about their families as much as the rest of us. We encouraged them to take the time to listen to stories and gather information now while they have the opportunity.

It was wonderful to see the interest in their faces and great fun to help out.

Newest Genealogy Records on the Internet

Newest Genealogy Records on the Internet

Too many and interesting new records for me to list reported by Genealogy In Time this week. Click on the link at the top of the post to see for yourself.

New Print Friendly Button

It took me longer than it should have but we now have a print friendly button. Now, if there is a post you'd like to keep, you can print it without all the sidebars and such or create a pdf file or even email it to yourself or someone else.
Note on the print friendly screen you can choose to include images or not.

Blogging Webinar

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon attending (virtually) the webinar More Blogging for Beginners with DearMYRTLE (Pat Richley). I had previously attending her original Blogging for Beginners session and found it very helpful. This one though was particularly useful for me.


I hadn't given much thought to backing up my/our blogs before. Pat made some excellent points in her talk and I realized the importance of periodically making a backup. It was the first thing I did this afternoon when I finally had the opportunity to log-on! (It's been a busy day!)


Another tip she gave was to add a print-friendly button to the blog. It allows the reader to print only the post without all the additional columns and things on the page. I'm still working on that one because I'm not quite getting the result I want. Hopefully, the support team at http://printfriendly.com will be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong. Then, we'll have the button on this blog.


All in all, it was 1 1/2 hours well spent. You might want to check out the webinars from the archives of Legacy Family Tree yourself. There are several excellent session free for the listening!