Honoring those memorialized in family trees everywhere...and the ones yet to be discovered. Sharing inspiration, information & opinions for the journey finding family.
Using maps isn't the first resource to jump to mind when I'm researching my ancestors. Sure, I often pop over to Google to see how far apart a couple of cities may be, but I don't really enjoy using maps as a whole. I also frequently plug in a zip code and ask Google to tell me the county it's located in. But this only tells me where the cities or zip codes are now. Often, it's more helpful to know where they were in the past. There's no denying boundaries have shifted over time and having a research tool to assist when questions arise is important. One site I've visited, with easy to use features for the United States, is the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries from The Newberry Library (Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture). This site is totally FREE.
From the website:
The Atlas of Historical County Boundaries is meant to be a resource for people seeking records of past events, and people trying to analyze, interpret and display county-based historical data like returns of elections and censuses, and for people working on state and local history projects.
The core of the site is the interactive map (conveniently located on the homepage). You can easily explore historical boundary changes over time, as well as find much more detailed information on these changes. There are detailed instructions (along with videos) on using and navigating the maps. And there's a FAQ section for additional information. They also provide downloadable GIS, KMZ, and PDF files with explanations on the uses of these files.
Searching is simple and straightforward. Just click on a state from the map on the main page or use the search box to select one. You'll be presented with maps, indexes, chronology, sources, commentary and downloads. Each section is clearly indicated and they're all displayed on one page for easy access. Within the maps, you can further select a time period for the historical borders you want to learn about (one of the best parts of the site!) Using my home state of Maryland as an example, I could see boundary changes ranging from 1638-1997. I can't fit all the date changes into a single image because there are so many it needs a slider, but this gives you an idea of how it appears. (For such a small state, we sure had a lot of boundary changes.) Having all this information in a single, easy to use place is just the kind of tool I need!
The county chronologies include dates of creation, name changes, and boundary adjustments. This helps genealogists and family historians identify where records may be located over differing time periods. This can be helpful when searching for censuses, land deeds, probate records and much more. Each state has a historical commentary section providing context and further explanation for boundary changes. Understanding why boundaries changed may offer further insight into historical events impacting your ancestors lives (including why they may have migrated to other areas).
Maps will probably never be my favorite research tool. But as with all tools, it's important to know they exist and the times we may want to use them. One could search for ages for records in a given area, but if the particular location wasn't the same in the past, all those search efforts may be in vain. Finding a city shifted counties in the past could potentially be a brick wall buster! By utilizing the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (linked in my Genealogy Toolbox under Mapping) you can enhance your family history research, gaining a clearer picture of where to find historical records and understanding the geographic context of your ancestors’ lives.
I've read posts by others about comparing text from two different sources to identify the differences. I certainly saw the benefit of doing this, but never had a big reason to do it myself - until now.
The other day, I was working with an ancestor who had several different obituaries published (in different newspapers and online). Obits can be substantially the same or they can be vastly different. Since they take a long time to mine details from, I wanted a way to see the differences. It they were identical (without having to read a few words at at time to compare), I'd know I didn't need to "re-mine" a particular version of the obit. And if the copy I worked from contained all the pertinent details also shown in another version, linking it would be much faster as I wouldn't need to create additional new facts (though I'd still need to link all the matching ones).
I set off to find some free online tools for making the comparison:
Diffchecker.com - Compare text, images, Word, PDF, Excel to a like file. Differences are highlighted for easy recognition. While additions and deletions are highlighted, it takes looking at both to spot all the differences.
GoTranscript - Easy to use, offers option to ignore capitalization and punctuation. Additions and deletions are clearly identified by color in one spot, making it easier to see the differences.
SEO Magnifier - Allows comparison of text via copy/paste, URL or documents. Accurate, and easy to spot deletions, but additions are slightly less pronounces.
All three free options get the job done without much fuss. For the task at hand, straight up text comparison, I actually preferred GoTranscript for the visual simplicity. The results were the most natural for the way my brain processes. It happens to be the site with the least bells and whistles, but it's my top pick.
Diffchecker offers other comparison options beyond just text. It includes comparison of images, documents (Word and PDF) and Excel. This could be helpful for a number of different tasks. It also has a desktop version available (but I did not install or test it). SEO Magnifier offers a considerable number of additional online SEO tools content creators may find helpful. The average genealogist may not be interested in SEO, but those who create for others may very well find SEO Magnifier offers additional benefits.
Of course, I've included links to these sites in my Online Tools section of my Genealogy Toolbox. So, next time you encounter the need to compare two sets of text for differences, hop on over and give one of these sites (or all of these sites!) a try!.
Newspaper articles and obituaries can provide a lot of information. You're likely to find names of relatives and friends, possibly birth/death dates and places, residence, occupation/retirement or even cause of death. I personally like to transcribe newspaper clippings so I can easily work with the details...but transcribing can be a time consuming process depending on where you find the image. Enter optical character recognition (OCR). It's not perfect, but it can make the job a lot easier.
The majority of newspaper clippings are .jpg images (photos) so it's not as easy as copy/paste. If you're finding the image on a newspaper archive site, there's a reasonable chance an OCR transcription is already provided. Those are typically able to be copied and pasted (but you can't edit out errors directly on the webpages).Be sure to read both the source document and the transcription. Computers aren't infallible, and sometimes they have trouble with certain characters, old/faded images or when column borders exist. If you accidentally "transcribe" the column border, or catch some random characters from the next column, you'll have a lot of i's and l's and other gobbledygook where it doesn't belong. Articles spanning multiple columns may need to be transcribed in separate steps for each column. No matter how you cut it, OCR speeds up the process...just don't expect it to be perfect. Once copied/pasted, you can feel free to make any necessary edits before saving in your tree or using to mine the details.
If you don't have a "built in" transcription with the image, there are tools to make the job easier. My new favorite is the build in Windows Snipping Tool. Windows users can search for the app on their computer, and I highly suggest pinning it to your taskbar for easy access. OCR was added in the last few months. Open the image you want to transcribe, and select the area with the text. Then, click the OCR button as shown in the image. All the text will be highlighted and you'll see an option to Copy All Text. This will put the text on your clipboard and you can paste it into the program of your choice (notepad, Word, Google Docs, etc.). For additional information on using Windows Snipping tool for OCR please watch the video linked at the end of this post. The biggest caveat is all the text needs to appear on your screen before snipping. Snipping Tool won't let you scroll to capture text. This can be problematic with longer articles/obits when the text becomes too small for the computer to "read" it. If you have a longer article, where the text is too small for Snipping Tool to work well, try using Google Docs! (Yup, it works! I use it all the time.) Simply upload the .jpg from your computer to Google Docs. Right click it, select Open With and choose Google Docs. You'll see the image at the top, and when you scroll down, the OCR transcription will be below. You can edit the transcription as needed right in Google Docs. More detail on using Google Docs for OCR can be found here.
If you happen to be lucky enough to have a PDF of the document you're working with, but can't just copy/paste the info (thank you Adobe and other PDF editors for locking down some documents), you can use the same Google Docs trick. You can also open PDFs in Word (though I've had mixed success) or you can use the PDFCandy.com OCR tool for free (though you are limited to how frequently you can use it at no charge. See my previous post here for the limitations.)
We all use transcriptions a little differently. There's no right or wrong way to go about it. If you like to do it old school and enjoy reading, then typing, then reading, then typing, then....well, you get the idea...that's fine! I personally prefer to let the computer do the heavy lifting, then I'll just do a little housekeeping to tidy up the text. Please keep copyright in mind if you're planning on posting/sharing any transcriptions, and always credit the newspaper, poster, etc. appropriately. If you have another suggestion for OCR transcription, connect with me on my socials. I'd love to hear how you handle transcribing from images and PDFs.
PDFs have been around since 1993. It's a format we all know. You may find you occasionally need to edit these files and sorting through the hundreds (if not thousands) of websites and programs to find a decent one may feel overwhelming. I've found PDFCandy.com (offering an amazing 47 online PDF tools) is a great free option!
I prefer the PDF Candy Chrome Extension but you can also go directly to the website at PDFCandy.com. This site allows you to convert 20+ file formats to and from PDF, compress, edit in numerous ways, merge, split, even extract text and/or images. The only drawback is the tools are all individual and not in any particular order, so you may have to scroll to find the one you need, but the site interface is simple and straightforward. Resulting files in the free version are available to download for 120 minutes with no login/signup required. The one caveat is you can only perform 1 task per hour for free. If you need to do more than one task, to keep it free, you'll have to return to the site a few times or use multiple browsers to get around the limit. But if you're like me, the need is occasional (such as combining multiple PDFs into a single file, or converting a PDF to JPG) and one task may be all you need to accomplish your goal.
If you're a power user, there are pricing plans as low as $6/month cancel anytime, $4/month if you sign up for a full year, or $99 for a lifetime license. If you find you need to do a lot of editing at once, but only for a limited time, $6 is a bargain and then you can cancel. If you work with files on the regular, the lifetime price is less than just a few months at other sites.
Next time you need to work with PDF files, give PDFCandy.com a try!
Linkclump is a browser extension for Chrome. (Firefox users can download it here). It's one of the handiest tools in my Genealogy Toolbox, Developed by Benjamin Black, it's a free extension with over 300,000 users. The developer does not collect or use your data. It makes opening, copying or bookmarking multiple links at once a snap! For genealogists it's a huge time saver.
When you open a record on Ancestry.com, you've undoubtedly noticed the additional Suggested Records on the right hand side of the page. Sometimes it's just a few, and sometimes the list is quite lengthy. How many times have you wanted to look thru them all to see what might be new, check for what's not included in your New Hints (not all of them are!) or find out if you've already saved a particular record, but the thought of all that clicking is just plain annoying? Enter Linkclump!
Simply drag and draw a box (shown in red in the image) using the left mouse key + Z around the links you want to open and Linkclump does all the clicky work, opening them all at once in new windows or tabs (depending on how you set it up). I changed my action key to be "Ctrl" instead of "Z" because I can remember it easier. Customizing is super simple.
I use it to open all the Ancestry.com Suggested Records (and I haven't encountered any issues no matter how many links I've selected), then I click thru them and close the ones I already have saved. Anything remaining I either review on the spot or copy the URL for future research. I've learned from experience, just because something shows in your new hints today doesn't mean it will be there tomorrow. It's best to save any URLs you may want to research later using whatever system works best for you. I use iDailyDiary by Splinterware as detailed in my previous post.
I personally haven't used the copying or bookmarking features, but they're easy enough to set up right in the extension if you want to give them a try. Once you use Linkclump, you'll wonder how you ever survived without it! Because this is a free extension, there is no support per se, but there is extensive information on GitHub if you encounter any issues. I know not everyone is a fan of browser extensions, but this is one you should definitely give a time saving try. It truly makes opening bunches of links at once a breeze!
