Awhile ago, in a fit of technologically self-righteous pique, I vented my spleen over the process to access Caddo Parish, Louisiana, records online. Perhaps I was too harsh.
Less than a week ago, I sent to Caddo Parish by snail mail a request for some certified copies of certain records. Today, I have the records in my hands and have commenced analysis of them. Amazingly excellent service! Hats off to the folks in the Marriage Unit of the Caddo Clerk’s office! Thank you!
Among the newly released records at FamilySearch’s Record Search are death records for Louisiana. This thrilled me, of course, for two reasons. First, we’ve been doing the brickwall series focused on the Gines family in Louisiana. Ironically, when the FamilySearch records were posted, I had just sent off to the Louisiana Secretary of State a request for copies of certified records. Second, I had worked on indexing nearly a thousand of those records. What is unfortunate for the time being is that our indexing was done from images of the actual death certificates, yet the release is only a searchable database without images.
When I was indexing the records, I came across no actual or suspected family members. But in the released database there are a lot of them! The database is much more extensive than either Ancestry.com’s Louisiana death records or the Louisiana Archives database upon which the Ancestry.com records are based.
There were some unusual things I found with respect to the Gines family in the database, and I’ll be writing about that soon.
The 40th Annual Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree commences Friday, June 26, 2009 at the airport Marriott in Burbank. This is the largest genealogical convention on the west coast. And this year’s event will be great! The are 55 speakers, nearly 100 lectures and lots of special events. For example, on Friday, Tukufu Zuberi, Ph.D, of the acclaimed PBS series, The History Dectectives, will keynote the Friday dinner. Maureen Taylor of The Photo Detective (seems like a lot of “detecting” going on here!) is offering a workshop on old photographs–AND–individual consultations for attendees on the photographs they bring with them!
Another special event is the second genea-blogger summit set for Saturday morning. That panel discussion features moderator George G. Morgan of The Genealogy Guys podcast and a number of bloggers:
*DearMYRTLE
* Juliana Smith
* Leland Meitzler
*Dick Eastman
* Stephen Danko, Ph.D.
* Lisa Louise Cooke
* Schelly Talalay Dardasht
* The Ancestry Insider.
Isn’t that–wait a minute, we forgot one member of the panel:
* Craig Manson !
I’m quite honored to have been include in this august group.
In connection with this event, the Genea-Bloggers group on Facebook is having an in-person hookup on Saturday evening. Should be a great time!
You can join us here at GeneaBlogie for information on the Jamboree. We’ll be live-blogging from early through late Sunday. I’m more confident that it will succeed this year (last year was a live-blogging fiasco) because free Wi-Fi has been made available throughout the convention area in the hotel!
Additionally there may be special GeneaBlogie side trips and surprise hookups. It’s just four days away!
GeneaBlogie