Vermont Vital Records coming to Ancestry

In my last post when I was discussing the New Hampshire vital records project (which the births are now indexed and online on Family Search), I mentioned that I was hoping for Vermont to be next.

Well, although it's not free for all on Family Search, I did receive a promotional email from Ancestry.com stating that Vermont vital records were coming soon. I'm excited that this great resource will soon be available. Horray!

In the meantime, did you know that the Vermont State Archives are willing to look up a record for you for free? Click here and then chose the Informational Copies link on the right to download a form to fill out and email back.

They've often emailed the record back within a week of my requesting it. Kudos to Vermont! I wish more states were as kind to genealogists as you are.

Genealogy Rip-Offs!

Dick Eastman posted a great article today on Genealogy Rip-offs. He actually lists some of them to stay clear of. It's worth your time to read. It's shameful what some people will do to get money.

You can read the article here on Dick's blog.

Druin collection now indexed! Hooray!

Ancestry announced yesterday that their Druin collection in their World subscription is now INDEX! I am so excited. I sat down last night and found baptism and burial dates for a number of my husband's ancestors.

The Druin collection is Canadian church records from 1850 to 1967. I had mentioned a while back that I had been browsing through parishes to find all the children and such. The problem with browsing that if they moved, you don't always know what parish to look through. Now with the index, that is greatly simplified.

It's a great day for Canadian researchers!

Ancestry Drouin collection

Ancestry putting Rootsweb under it's domain

There has been lots of buzz in the genealogy community in the past few weeks about Rootsweb. Ancestry, who is the provider of Rootsweb, has decided to move all the Rootsweb services under their Ancestry domain name. A lot of it looked like increasing their rank by increasing their page views. Many, however, took the view that Ancestry was trying to steal the free resources on Rootsweb and moved their USGenWeb pages elsewhere (although Ancestry denied this would happen).

There is a neat article on Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings blog that shows the trends of visits to the various genealogy sites that I found quite interesting. Check it out:

Genea-Musings: 5-year statistics for Ancestry.com traffic

Free Online Sample of Discovering Family History Magazine

There's a new magazine from the publishers of Family Chronicle, History Magazine and Internet Genealogy. It's called Discovering Family History.

It's more designed to help get people started with the basics of research, but even more advanced genealogists may find some useful ideas.

You can download a free issue at their website at http://www.discoveringfamilyhistory.com/freepreview.htm.

NY State employee arrested for stealing historical documents

A New York State employee has been charged with stealing documents and selling them on E-Bay. This person, although he has pleaded innocent, has apparently admitted to stealing documents since 2002 and they recovered about 400 items. That's a long time and a lot of items before getting caught!

Boy, it seems like there have been a lot of these stories in the past year. I understand that people need money and tempations are hard to resist, but it's such a shame. Has this always gone and we're just suddenly catching people or were people "in the old days" more moral? Maybe the places that hold these documents should wake up and update their security policies for their employees. Most already have strict policies in place for visitors who want to look at the records.

Full article here on Reuters.