Info - April 2009 Meeting

The next meeting is scheduled for Monday on April 27, 2009 at 7:30 PM, we will meet in the upstairs meeting room.

No special topics planned. Bring a friend!!
--Brian Lingard

Info - Free Genealogy Conference

The Massachusetts Society of Genealogists will be holding a free two-day genealogy conference on May 15 & 16, 2009 at the Worcester Public Library, Worcester MA.

For more information go to, www.worcpublib.org or call 508-799-1670

Also see http://www.massachusettssocietyofgenealogists.org/index.html

-- Brian Lingard

MA - Deed and Land Records Online

Deed searching is one of the cornerstone methods for genealogical research and in Massachusetts you can begin your search at the Massachusetts Land Records website. The site presents a map of the state divided into counties. Simply click on the county of interest and you will be taken to search page for the Registry of Deeds for that county. The counties of Plymouth and Barnstable are not accessible from this map.

The range of available dates for searching will vary from county to county, depending on how far back each county has been able to scan in the deeds. The dates available on most sites go back to about the 1960's, where the oldest dates available appear to be for northern Worcester County which go back to at least 1900.

Plymouth County has its own website for the Plymouth County Registry of Deeds, which provides access to records dating back into the 1600's.

Barnstable County (Cape Cod region) has its own website for the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds, which contains searchable indexes and images from 1704 to present.

-- Brian Lingard

Tip - Cemetery Research

The club's March meeting featured a guest speaker, Marian Pierre-Louis, who presented her talk on "Finding the Gems in New England Cemeteries". Marian was a dynamic and engaging speaker who routinely presents various talks at area genealogy conferences.

She talked at some length about the details and differences between conducting traditional and non-traditional cemetery research. Traditional cemetery research involves physically visiting the cemetery site and photographing and/or transcribing the headstones yourself. Non-traditional research is using the Internet to locate a cemetery and/or headstone information and photographs. The two best Internet resources for cemetery specific data to know about is www.findagrave.com and www.interment.net. Of special interest for New England cemeteries is www.gravematter.com which features only cemeteries in New England, but note that site does not appear to have been updated in the past couple of years.

The site www.findagrave.com includes some 23 million records worldwide, with over 1200 just for Massachusetts. The site is entirely volunteer driven. You can enter data for an ancestor, then once entered, you can click on the "request photo" button to send a photo request to a volunteer who will take the photo of the headstone and then upload it to the site. Of course you can post your own photos of headstones.

The site www.interment.net does not include photos of headstones but does include lots of transcriptions. You can lookup potential ancestors via their surname. Note that the transcriptions appear to be for the entire cemetery and do not appear to be literals transcriptions of the headstones in all case.

Marion concluded her talk by discussing some of the latest trends in cemetery research including using GPS to locate the cemetery and even headstones themselves, and two different methods of attaching a device to a headstone that contains family tree information for the deceased person's family (the device is read using a special handheld unit).

--Brian Lingard