I have been working on preserving a researcher's notes that were donated to the genealogy society that I belong to. I was scanning the files, page by page and trying to put them into some sort of order.
Well on Monday I came across a letter from the researchers niece and decided to see if I could find her online. I typed in her name and the last state she was living in, which is Wisconsin. Based on the letter, she was working with her aunt doing research. Therefore when I found a link to her name as a submitter to find-a-grave, and the graves were in Wisconsin, I decided to send her an email.
I asked if she was the niece of the researcher I was working on. I explained how we received these three large boxes of files and what I was doing. Since I am originally from Wisconsin and plan on driving back this summer, I offered to give her these files, if she was the niece and still lives in Wisconsin.
The next morning there was an email waiting waiting for me and she was very excited. She was the niece and this was her favorite aunt who happened to help spark her interest in genealogy. She was very excited to get pictures. All she knew about her aunts work was that it was donated to a library and she didn't know where. She even called her mother who was brought to tears. Her mother is the youngest of the large family and did not have many pictures. I am hoping there are pictures of her family. I know there are pictures of the researchers husband's side.
I am excited that I can stop my scanning, and make a copy of what I scanned and give her the copy.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Monday, February 25, 2013
Ancestry Guest Account
Last week as I was teaching my beginning genealogy classes, I always tell my
students that they should exhaust their free options before paying for subscriptions
to paid sites.
One of my students asked, how do I do that without putting in my credit card information? A very good question. Ancestry.com like any other business wants to make money, so on their home page they offer a 14 day free trial or a subscribe button. But what if you don't have a credit card and thus can't sign up for the 14 day free trial because of this.
I decided to explore Ancestry's help and see if I could find any information on free guest account. I first had to sign out of my subscription. Then I click the link “Get Help”. Here I was greeted with a nicely laid out screen with a spot on the top to type in my question and below several boxes with suggested Help Topics. I decided to click on the boxed for Accounts and Billing. This was followed by being presented with topic choices and I clicked Subscription Help. The box to the right of the topics displayed many related articles. The first being Ancestry Guest Registration seemed to be just what I was looking for. After selecting that option and entire article came up with several hot links within the text. It explained that Guest Accounts are necessary to view the free databases and all that a guest has to submit is their name and email.
So I proceeded to enter a valid name and email (for my daughter) and it instantly created an account and displayed the user name and password on the screen. Plus I was already signed as said user. The username and password were not exactly choices I would have selected, so I decided to see if I could change one or both. I clicked the down arrow next to my username that was displayed on the right top of the screen and selected “My Account”. Here I was given the option to upgrade my account as an Annual, semi-annual or monthly membership for either just the US or World Membership. However on the right hand side of the screen was an option to “Update your username and password”. I followed that link and it give me suggestions on usernames on the top of the screen and a place to key in a new password on the bottom of the screen. After saving the change I was on my way to using Ancestry as a guest with an easy to remember login and password.
As I always say to my students, use your free options fully before paying for subscriptions to paid sites. Plus, just because you can’t see the results fully of your hits to paid sites, if you find enough hits, you could always visit a public library that might have Ancestry’s Library Edition. Again, this isn’t everything, but after you exhaust many of those options then you may want to subscribe to one of Ancestry’s paid subscriptions. I have decided to trace as many branches of my tree as I can in the US first and then I will subscribe to the World Subscription at that time and try to take my tree back to the native countries.
One of my students asked, how do I do that without putting in my credit card information? A very good question. Ancestry.com like any other business wants to make money, so on their home page they offer a 14 day free trial or a subscribe button. But what if you don't have a credit card and thus can't sign up for the 14 day free trial because of this.
I decided to explore Ancestry's help and see if I could find any information on free guest account. I first had to sign out of my subscription. Then I click the link “Get Help”. Here I was greeted with a nicely laid out screen with a spot on the top to type in my question and below several boxes with suggested Help Topics. I decided to click on the boxed for Accounts and Billing. This was followed by being presented with topic choices and I clicked Subscription Help. The box to the right of the topics displayed many related articles. The first being Ancestry Guest Registration seemed to be just what I was looking for. After selecting that option and entire article came up with several hot links within the text. It explained that Guest Accounts are necessary to view the free databases and all that a guest has to submit is their name and email.
So I proceeded to enter a valid name and email (for my daughter) and it instantly created an account and displayed the user name and password on the screen. Plus I was already signed as said user. The username and password were not exactly choices I would have selected, so I decided to see if I could change one or both. I clicked the down arrow next to my username that was displayed on the right top of the screen and selected “My Account”. Here I was given the option to upgrade my account as an Annual, semi-annual or monthly membership for either just the US or World Membership. However on the right hand side of the screen was an option to “Update your username and password”. I followed that link and it give me suggestions on usernames on the top of the screen and a place to key in a new password on the bottom of the screen. After saving the change I was on my way to using Ancestry as a guest with an easy to remember login and password.
As I always say to my students, use your free options fully before paying for subscriptions to paid sites. Plus, just because you can’t see the results fully of your hits to paid sites, if you find enough hits, you could always visit a public library that might have Ancestry’s Library Edition. Again, this isn’t everything, but after you exhaust many of those options then you may want to subscribe to one of Ancestry’s paid subscriptions. I have decided to trace as many branches of my tree as I can in the US first and then I will subscribe to the World Subscription at that time and try to take my tree back to the native countries.
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