Random Genealogy

Carmen Villa Prezelski has a good article in the Tuscon Citizen (AZ), Deeper genealogy dig may uncover Irish relatives, about getting into genealogy and family history research, as well as looking at Irish and Mexican/Spanish genealogy links. The Irish-Mexican links are particularly interesting – according to Prezelski, Thousands of Irish farmers, soldiers, miners and merchants resettled in Mexico in the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve heard this mentioned before, but never thought about it.

Somebody emailed me this, and I’m still not sure exactly what is is or involves – it looks like the New York Times and the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation have teamed up for some kind of promotional that involves access to the Foundation’s database of genealogy/historical records for free, but you are encouraged to spend almost $500 on a keepsake.

Jenny Barkley writes in the Paris Beacon News (Illinois) about Fred Delap’s efforts to put Illinois Civil War records online. Illinois has done a lot of work to put records online for genealogists and historians, and its because of people like Fred Delap. This covers almost 300,000 soldiers from Illinois, and their number of descendants could literally run into the millions. Before now, these records were only available in offline, in person at the archives where they were stored, and you had to look through ledgers (which probably didn’t help with preserving the ledgers from a historical perspective).