Genealogy
and history researchers refused permission to church documents
in Vasa, Finland
"Finska
församlingen drog in tillstånd för forskare
och tog bort mikrofilmerna."... Vasabladet
24.11.2005
Kirkkoherran
avattava arkistonsa
"Vaasan suomalaisen seurakunnan kirkkoherra Krister Koskela
teki keväällä päätöksen, että
sataa vuotta nuorempia kirkon väestökirjatietoja
ei enää anneta tutkijoiden luettavaksi."...
Pohjalainen 24.11.2005
Diskutera
släktforskning i Österbotten
|
"...there
is no freedom without justice..."
Nazi
hunter Wiesenthal dead at 96
Holocaust
survivor dedicated his life to fighting prejudice
"...In
his book "Justice, Not Vengeance," Wiesenthal wrote:
"Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I
am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have
not survived.
"The answer I have found for myself (and which need not
necessarily be the answer for every survivor) is: I want to
be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to
make sure the dead live on in that memory."..."
CNN.com
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
|
The
following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
and is copyright 2005 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published
here with the permission of the author. Information about
the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com.
September 20, 2005 "Google Earth Used to Find Ancient
Roman Villa" »
Google
Earth Used to Find Ancient Roman Villa
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth,
an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains
of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region
around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, Italy, when he noticed
a prominent oval, shaded form more than 500 meters long. It
was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former
watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the
air than their surroundings do.
His eye was caught by unusual 'rectangular shadows' nearby.
Curious, he analyzed the image further, and concluded that
the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin.
Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards
of a villa.
You can read more at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050912/full/050912-6.html
(requires
subscription/ed.SS)
OK, if we can use Google Earth to find 2,000-year-old construction,
we can assume that it will also find newer construction. I
spent some time looking at the location of my great-grandfather's
farm but didn't find anything that I recognized as older construction.
Who will be first to make a genealogically-significant find
by using Google Earth or other satellite imaging services?
If you do, please post a message after this article at http://www.eogn.com
to let everyone know.
|
Leif
Mether is dead
The
Excecutive Director and the member of the Board of the Genealogical
Society of Finland, Leif Mether, died Friday evening
16 September after a few months' severe illness. He is known
to have been instrumental in the Genealogical Society's main
projects during the last two decades - to internet users the
HisKi
project and the web
site of the Society are the most wellknown ones. 19.09.2005/SS.
|
Castle
Garden Database is Online
New York
Bay, Castle Garden [Castle Clinton], and Statue of Liberty. Photo
attributed to W.H. Jackson created/published between 1880 and 1897.
Castle Garden
Database is Online
Ellis Island
seems to receive all the publicity for immigrants arriving in
New York City. Many people do not realize that Ellis Island did not
begin
operations until 1892. More than 73 million Americans can trace their
ancestry to immigrants who arrived in New York City prior to that
year.
From 1830 until 1890, these new arrivals first stepped ashore at Castle
Garden in lower Manhattan.
The site
of Castle Garden remains as one of the oldest public open spaces
in continuous use in New York City. American Indians fished from its
banks, and the first Dutch settlers built a low, stone wall with cannons,
a battery to protect the harbor and New Amsterdam. The stone wall
was later converted to a street that is now the well-known financial
center called Wall Street.
The Castle
Garden immigration processing center started operation in 1830.
By 1890, Castle Garden was overcrowded by the arriving throngs and
there
was no room to expand the facility as the ocean and the city surrounded
it.
After reviewing
several possible sites, the United States government selected
Ellis Island for the establishment of a new federal immigration center
for New York. On the island, it would be easier to screen and protect
the new immigrants before they proceeded out onto the streets of Manhattan.
Castle Garden processed its last immigrant in April 1890.
After the
closing of Castle Garden in 1890, immigrants were processed at an
old barge office in Manhattan until the opening of the Ellis Island
Immigration
Center on January 1, 1892. A huge fire at Ellis Island occurred
during the night of June 14, 1897. The fire burned the entire immigration
complex to the ground. Nobody was hurt, and nobody knows why
it happened or who started it. However, many state and federal records
were lost in that fire.
Immigration
processing was moved back to the old barge office in Manhattan
while Ellis Island was being rebuilt. In December of 1900, the new
Main Building on Ellis Island was opened and 2,251 immigrants were
received
that day. In a single day in 1907, 11,747 immigrants were processed
at Ellis Island. .
Castle
Garden was soon forgotten by almost everyone, with the exception of
those who processed through the facility and later generations of
family
genealogists. Castle Garden was soon converted to other uses. A theater
stood on the site for many years and was used by the likes of Phineas
T. Barnum. Today it is a city park, called Battery Park, and is the
departure point for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Today's Battery
Park is actually bigger now than it once was, because it has been
extended into the harbor over the years, by landfill.
While the
Ellis Island fire of 1897 did destroy some of the records of Castle
Garden, the ships' manifest records of those years survived.
Now the
Battery Conservancy has created an online database of information
about 10 million immigrants for the years 1830 through 1892, the
years before Ellis Island opened. All the records are extracted from
the
original ship manifests. If you are one of the more than 73 million
Americans
who are descended from those who entered at Castle Garden, you can
probably find your ancestors in this database.
This week
I went to the Castle Garden site and conducted several searches
with great success. I found that the site's free "Quick Search" allows
you to search by first name, last name, date range, place of origin,
occupation and name of ship. You can search by any combination of
those elements. Anything that is unknown can be left blank. The result
will be a display of all the "matches" to the parameters you supply.
As usual,
I started with my own surname. A few seconds later I was looking
at a list of 78 immigrants who share the same last name as my own.
I was a bit disappointed to find that one immigrant was listed with
a
first name of "Mr." while his wife's first name was listed as "Mrs."
Another's
first name was listed as "Professor" and a third seemed to have
the first name of "Unknown." However, the rest of the entries had
true
first names or initials listed, as expected.
By clicking
on menu items, I found that Professor Eastman was 34 years old
when he arrived from Liverpool, England, on the ship Abyssinia on
February
17, 1871. He was also a music professor. Perhaps that is enough information
for a descendant to make he connection, even without a listed
first name.
The following
is an example of a more typical entry:
THOMAS
EASTMAN
Occupation:
Farmer
Age: 35
Sex: M
Literacy:
U
Arrived:
1884-05-05
Origin:
England
Port: Liverpool
& Queenstown
Last Residence:
Destination:
USA
Plan: Unknown
Ship: Alaska
Passage:
Unknown
The Quick
Search that I used allows you to easily find an individual orfamily.
Quick Searches are free of charge.
The site
also offers Advanced Searches: the ability to search a cross reference
more fields within the database. An Advanced Search allows everything
that a Quick Search allows plus the ability to search by gender,
age upon arrival and destination. The site states that Advanced Searches
are "ideal for scholars and those interested in genealogical research."
An Advanced Search costs $45.
Unless
you are searching for a very common surname, I suspect that the free
Quick Searches will suffice for most genealogists.
CastleGarden.org
is a great resource for educators, scholars, students, family
historians, and the interested public. The site currently has 10 million
records in its database with another 2 million records yet to be entered.
Donations are solicited to help maintain this site for all.
For more
information about the online Castle Garden immigration database or
to search the records yourself, go to http://castlegarden.org
Posted
by Dick Eastman on August 02, 2005 | Permalink
"Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce
the launch of phase two of the Canadian Directories site. The addition
of 80 new directories to our growing database brings a total of 95
searchable directories to the site.
With this phase, we have focused upon the regions of
Ottawa, Halifax and environs; these regions were selected to complement
the digital initiatives of our colleagues across the nation, including
Bibliothèque nationale de Quèbec and Our Roots: Canada's
Local Histories Online.
In addition, we've introduced a new section entitled
CityScapes, which offers a brief historical overview of the cities
whose directories have been digitized.
Plans for future additions to our site include directories
for the Kingston and London, Ontario areas."
***
Canadian Bill Opens Census Records
The Canadian Bill S-18, which allows public access
to 20th-century census records, is finally about to become law. It
is reported that the Library and Archives of Canada has already scanned
images of the 1911 National Census of Canada and they should be available
online almost immediately. Canadian genealogists may be able to spend
the summer looking for ancestors in these 1911 records.
..."A
family tree researched by conventional methods can only go back so
far before patchy records stymie progress. Now amateur genealogists
are turning to DNA testing to trace their ancestry. But how much can
this tell us about where we come from?"...
..."This shows my maternal ancestor to be Ursula, the oldest
of the seven daughters of Eve, who lived 45,000 years ago in northern
Greece. Her people were cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers, tall and slender
by comparison to the Neanderthals with whom they shared the land for
another 20,000 years. The first European cave paintings date from
this period."... BBC News
European rock paintings
The cave paintings of Lascaux were done in the Upper Old Stone
Age
When Europeans first encountered the Magdalenian paintings of southwestern
France (Lascaux) and Cantabrian Spain (Altamira) some 150 years ago,
they were considered to be hoaxes by academics. The new Darwinian
thinking on evolution was interpreted as meaning that early humans
could not have been sufficiently advanced to create art. Emile Cartailhac,
one of the most respected prehistorians of the late nineteenth century
believed they had been thought up by Creationists to support their
ideas and ridicule Darwin's. Recent reappraisals and increasing numbers
of discoveries have illustrated their authenticity and indicated the
high levels of artistry of Upper Palaeolithic humans who used only
basic tools. Cave paintings can also give valuable clues as to the
culture and beliefs of that era.
The age of the paintings in many sites remains a contentious issue,
since methods like radiocarbon dating can be easily misled by contaminated
samples of older or newer material, and caves and rocky overhangs
are typically littered with debris from many time periods. The choice
of subject matter can indicate date such as the reindeer at the Spanish
cave of Cueva de las Monedas which imply the art is from the last
ice age. The oldest cave is that of Chauvet, and is 32,000 years old.
The commonest themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such
as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as
well as abstract patterns, called Maccaroni by Breuill. Drawings of
humans are rare and are usually schematic rather than the more naturalistic
animal subjects. Cave art may have begun in the Aurignacian period
(Hohle Fels, Germany), but reached its apogee in the late Magdalenian.
The paintings were drawn with red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese
oxide and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised
in the rock first. Stone lamps provided some light. Abb³ Breuill interpreted
the paintings as being hunting magic, meant to increase the number
of animals. As there are some clay sculptures that seem to have been
the targets of spears, this may partly be true, but does not explain
the pictures of beasts of prey such as the sabre-toothed lion or the
bear.
An alternative and more modern theory, based on studies of more modern
hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by Cro-Magnon
shamen. The shamen would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter
into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps
with some notion of drawing power out of the cave walls themselves.
This goes some way towards explaining the remoteness of some of the
paintings (which often occur in deep or small caves) and the variety
of subject matter (from prey animals to predators and human hand-prints).
However, as will all prehistory, it is impossible to be certain due
to the relative lack of material evidence and the many pitfalls associated
with trying to understand the prehistoric mindset with a modern mind.
In 2003, cave etchings also were discovered in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire,
England.
Well known cave paintings include those of:
- Lascaux, France
- La Marche, near Lussac-les-Chateaux, France
- Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France
- Altamira, near Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain
African rock paintings
At Ukhahlamba-Drakensberg, South Africa, now thought to be some 3,000
years old, the paintings by the San people who settled in the area
some 8,000 years ago depict animals and humans, and are thought to
represent religious beliefs.
Cave paintings are found in the Tassili n'Ajjer mountains in southeast
Algeria also in Mesak Settafet and Tadrart in Libya and other Sahara
region including: Ayr mountains, Niger and Tibesti, Chad.
Australian rock paintings
Significant early cave paintings have also been found in Australia.
The
Vinland Map Debate - fake or authentic
Emigrant tracking exemplified