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Former SNL stars to appear at Mohegan Sun Pocono Nov. 29

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Police seek alleged crack cocaine trafficker

<p>There&#8217;s always more for genealogists to learn, and here&#8217;s a treasure trove of learning for you.</p><p>FamilySearch, the free online database, recently announced publication of its 90,000th self-help article. These articles, available online, are lists of sources and other helps for genealogy research in countries all over the world.</p><p>To access them, search for FamilySearch Research Wiki. Click on &#8220;Browse by Country,&#8221; and you&#8217;ll find a list running from Afghanistan to Zambia. Pick your country, click on it and you&#8217;re off to the races.</p><p>There you will see a map of the country, showing its provinces and regions (along with a flag), to help you particularize your search further. The site will include useful history and terminology as well as additional specialized articles to guide you through the particular kind of information you need &#8211; national census, church records and the like. Some of these collections of data go back many centuries. They are constantly being expanded and updated.</p><p>Basically, it&#8217;s an introduction to researching your ancestors in a particular country, courtesy of the site&#8217;s compilers and proprietors &#8211; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That church maintains a huge genealogical library in Salt Lake City and local family history centers all across the country. The church also maintains FamilySearch, making much of its material readily available online.</p><p>Not all the information is on the site itself. You&#8217;ll find many references to outside data bases, some of which have paywalls.</p><p>The breadth is amazing. Among items a researcher probably wouldn&#8217;t even expect to find are Swedish feast day calendars, lists of occupations and birth and death date calculators. The big site is far from Euro-centric, with lots of material for people tracing genealogies in Asia, Africa and the Hispanic countries. One title is &#8220;Mexico Guided Research.&#8221;</p><p>For those who want some expert training, there&#8217;s an archive of webinars and tutorials offered by FamilySearch, which you can take online.</p><p>The pages for countries and provinces are educational in themselves. Want to know when the census was taken and where census records are kept? How about an outline of immigration from a country or province and emigration into it? Need information on shifting boundaries? You&#8217;ll find good guidance on these and other topics for the areas you&#8217;re interested in.</p><p><strong>Resources:</strong> The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has announced a major expansion of its effort to put church records online &#8211; adding the years 1901 to 1920 to the previous era of 1789-1900, the &#8220;National Catholic Reporter&#8221; recently announced.</p><p>Why is this significant? The move by the archdiocese is just the latest advance in a wave of digitization of church records in American communities. The Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia archdioceses have comparable projects under way. Church records, as genealogists well know, can fill in gaps where civil records are lacking and can provide vital information on family relationships.</p><p>Also, these big cities were recipients of millions of immigrants in times past, many of whom were our ancestors, living there for a generation or more before moving to their later homes.</p><p><strong>News Notes: </strong>If you haven&#8217;t yet visited the Northeast Pennsylvania Genealogical Society&#8217;s new headquarters in downtown Wilkes-Barre, you could be missing out on some vital materials. Located on the second floor at 57 North Franklin St., it&#8217;s open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays. For holiday or weather-related closures, call 570-829-1765. Stop by to see what resources are available and to inquire about membership, which gives you unlimited use of the facility.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Tom Mooney Out on a Limb </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/web1_TOM_MOONEY-6.jpg</photo0><caption0>Tom Mooney Out on a Limb </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Tom Mooney</p><p>Out on a Limb</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader genealogy columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Out On a Limb: FamilySearch offers info from Afghanistan to Zambia