I hope February is going well for everyone! The genealogy world is celebrating Black History month and the upcoming 1950 US Census release, so here are a few links to great webinars and collections.

Black History Month

It's Black History Month and for some eye-opening background information you can see Ric Murphy's brilliant presentation: The First Documented Africans and Hear Their Story at the RootsTech Video Archive.

I have a blogpost, African American Genealogy Research with some genealogy collections related to African Americans and slaves.

You can also search at OnGenealogy.com for historic African American records using the keyword "ethnicity african american" or "slave" and then typing a location in the "Near" window and choosing from an autosuggested location map. Here's an example of a listing that pulls up when I searched for "slave" in "Haiti": Marronnage in Saint-Dominigue (Haiti)

Nicka Smith has a webinar, The Trifecta: The Secret Sauce of Researching the Formerly Enslaved, today at 12:00 MST and it will be available online free for one week. After that, you'll need to be a subscribed member to view the video. (Legacy Family Tree Webinars is one of the few subscription sites I pay for year after year--well worth the $49 fee!)

The 1950 US Census

The 1950 US Census will be released in April 2022 by the US National Archives. The digital images should be released first, and you'll be able to find them online at FamilySearch and probably through private vendors, then different organizations and companies will work to create indexes so users won't have to search page by page for a name. Sign up to volunteer and help index the census. I helped with the 1940 census indexing effort and will help again with this one. It's easy. They have multiple people indexing the same page and an adjudicator examines any differences of opinion and solves the problem without either indexer ever knowing there was a transcription disagreement.

Need some inspiration for how the 1950 census might help your research? Check out this free webinar at Legacy Family Tree Webinars: CensusGenie: Down to the Wire 1950 Census Prep and be sure to select the Syllabus icon beneath the video if you want to download a copy of the handout.

My Personal Family History

I'm still working on organizing my digital files and this month I've added 'updating my online family trees' to the worklist. I was shocked to see my family tree at FamilySearch had lost some ancestral lines so I went in and made corrections and added notes to let other FamilySearch users know why I was making the changes. (At the fee sites, my tree is viewable but not editable by others, so I only have myself to blame when a family line is lost.)

The main drawback of the FamilySearch family tree is it's a universal tree we all share and so we negotiate for changes with other distant relatives. I love some of the Tree tools though, so I'll keep using this resource. I really love going to the Family Tree menu, then Tree, and then in a drop down menu, looking at my tree in the fan chart and filtering by Sources to see which lines need more research.

Here's an example of a fan chart tree view that is filtered by Birth Place and the light blue shows which ancestors were born in the United States. So this month I'll be tidying up the online family trees and working to upload some of my digital files/research to the online trees.

New and Updated listings

I'm continuing to curate collections of Birth, Marriage, and Death Records by locale and am also curating Substitute Birth, Marriage, and Death Records by locale (but have a long way to go).

Here's a list of US Birth, Marriage, and Death Records links and here's a New York Substitute Birth, Marriage, and Death Records online link to give you an idea of what I'm creating next.

Best with your family history!