Learn How to Find Vital Records for Your Italian Ancestors: Wednesday, January 12 7:00p.m.

Come to Hagaman Library's Genealogy Club on Wednesday, January 12 at 7:00p.m. and learn how to find Italian vital records. Professional Genealogist Kim Formica will explain the best places to search for your Italian ancestor's birth, marriage and death records. This workshop is free and open to everyone!

Ethnic Heritage Day: Saturday, August 28 2010 from 9:00a.m. to 2:00p.m. Pittsfield, Mass

The Friends of the National Archives - Pittsfield and the National Archives Northeast Region at Pittsfield present Ethnic Heritage Day on Saturday, August 28, 2010 from 9am-2pm. We will have 5 of our ethnic experts on-hand for 15-minute consultations to help with that difficult to trace ancestor. The experts and ethnicities are: Michelle LeClair: French-Canadian; Peter Sisario: Italian; Lisa Dougherty: Irish; Elsie Saar: German and Alan Horbal: Polish. The Microfilm Reading Room will also be available for researchers' use during the day and volunteers will be available for assistance. Please visit our website http://www.narafriends-pittsfield.org/ to download the registration form and more information.

Some New Websites for research

You may be interested in the following websites to help in your research. Genealogy Forum.com lists new sites that are added to the Internet Center of the Genealogy Forum for a one month period. This is a quick way to see what's new on the Internet for Genealogy research.

The next site of interest is Ancestor Hunt.com. Ancestor Hunt.com has an obituary search portal to search old obituaries on the web. There is also a state index that will take you to newspaper obituary links for each state where you will find recent newspaper obituaries. There are some archives included.

Also check out Webpages by Steve P. Morse. Lots and Lots of databases!

Enjoy!

Do you want to laugh? Check out this "I'm My Own Grandpa" YouTube Video : )

How to Join the Genealogy Club

If you are new to this blog and you are interested in joining our monthly Genealogy Club, please contact Cynthia at 203-468-3891 or You can register to join our club by visiting the library's website at http://www.hagamanlibrary.info/ and click on the "events" tab located on the horizontal menu at the top of the page.

Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness

Check out the website below: It's called Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. There are volunteers who will, on a limited basis, do look-ups for you from all over the Country. I am looking into getting someone to come and talk to the club about this particular site for next month. Some of you may already be aware of it but it's definetely a site to check out for us poor genealogists! http://www.raogk.org.

England & Wales Genealogy - the GRO

If you are searching for vital records in England & Wales in Ancestry.com, you can purchase your record of interest from the General Register Office (GRO) for only 7 lbs. ($11.34 US$) as compared to the $23 that Ancestry.com charges! I have ordered many records using the following website and they deliver usually within 2 weeks - it's a wonderful service. The website is: http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/

You will still benefit by searching the BMD indexes within Ancestry.com and recording the Vol and Page numbers found there on the GRO order form.

Let me know if you need any help with this process.