 Hello, the National Archives and Records Administration is pleased to present a new genealogy series, a set of educational lectures on how to do family research. My name is Andrea Matney, the program's coordinator, and I welcome you. These lectures will demonstrate how to use federal records and other resources for genealogical research for beginning to experience family historians. Our presenters include experts from the National Archives nationwide. During the broadcast on May 12th, we invite you to join the conversation. Please participate by using YouTube, chat, and Twitter. So this is the second of six sessions being broadcast over two months. Here is our May schedule and here is our June schedule. I am moving quickly through the welcome slides because the entire set is available as a handout and this video will remain available as a recording for later viewing. Here's how to find the event's chat, handout, live captioning, and evaluation. The chat is available as the video plays. To participate, first log into YouTube. The speaker will answer your questions during the broadcast within the chat. You don't have to wait until the end. Please type your questions in at any time. Under the video box, you'll find the live captioning, handout, and evaluation. Click on the word show more to see their links. Lastly, today's presentation is approximately an hour and 20 minutes. Now on to our session, finding genealogy resources and tools on archives.gov with Sarah Swanson. Sarah Swanson is a website liaison and has worked for the National Archives for over 18 years as a member of the web team. I'm now turning the broadcast over to Sarah. Hello. What I hope to do this afternoon is to help orient you to some of the tools and resources on the National Archives website, which you'll find at archives.gov. Here are some emails that Sarah has recently received. One said, where can I find the genealogy section of the website? And another wrote, I'm trying to locate baptism records for deceased family members who were born on the Virgin Islands. And another wrote in, the search bar on your webpage returns a large number of hits. My third great grandfather's name is white. Quotation marks do not seem to work. So this lets us know that some people are not finding what they need, or they don't know how to use the site, or don't know what kinds of records NARA has. So my goal here today is to help you learn what is available on archives.gov for genealogy, and to show you how to navigate the site. My hopes are that you'll then feel confident the next time you approach archives.gov. So archives.gov has some great resources and information for genealogy. For example, you can learn how to start your research at NARA. And if you're planning a visit, learn what you can do to prepare ahead of time to make better use of your time while you're here. You can learn about federal records that exist that you may not have known about, and get new ideas on records to search in. You can gain in-depth knowledge about the records you're already using, learn why they were created and who the records pertained to. You can also gain historical context to better understand your ancestors' lives and the events that they lived through. And you may be able to actually find digitized copies of records relating to your ancestors on the website. Currently, the National Archives catalog has about 130 million digitized images in it, and up to 500 million are expected by the end of 2024. So your chances are greatly improving that you will be able to find records relating to your ancestors in the catalog, if not now, then soon. So NARA's holdings are limited in scope to records created by and for the federal government. That means NARA does not have records created at the state, county, or local levels. So you won't find birth, marriage, or death records here, although there are some exceptions. For instance, in the State Department records for U.S. citizens living abroad. You also won't find church records, including baptisms, or probate, or state militia records here. Just records created by or for the federal government. And as you probably know, the five most popular records types at NARA used for family history are federal census records, passenger lists of ship arrivals, naturalization records that were filed at federal offices, some land records, and military service records and pensions. Okay, so let's go into the website. This is what you'll see currently when you come to archives.gov. You'll see the search box which I've circled in red on all of the archives.gov webpages. It's just for general topic searches to get you quickly to certain webpages. For instance, you could type in land records, or civil war, or census, and quickly get to those related webpages. A search in this box won't work for names of individuals unless you're looking up a really famous person that NARA may have exhibits, or articles, or lesson plans about. Using this search box will not pull up any records for you, so you should just use this for navigating the site. I'll show you the tools later where you can actually search on names and get results. So today we're going to focus on the genealogy section of the website. It's just two clicks away. To get there from this main archives.gov page, or any page on archives.gov, click on the research our records tab, and once you click on this it brings you to the main research our records page. From here, click on research your ancestry, and it brings you here to the main genealogy page. So many different offices at NARA have created helpful content for genealogists. That content is sprinkled throughout various sections of the website. This portal page attempts to make all of it accessible to you by linking out to all the various sections where that content is found. There's not enough time to look at everything, but I am going to show you some highlights as we go around and look at the different sections on this page. Okay, let's start with the start your family research section at the top. Click on the top link. Start your genealogy research. I want to first point out the PowerPoint presentation called beginning your genealogy research at the National Archives. It's a little outdated, but if you're just starting out, this is a really good overview on introduction to the main record types at NARA that are used for family history research. Beneath that are links to several introductory videos on NARA's YouTube channel. These are short introductions to census, military, immigration, and naturalization records at the National Archives. Then if you go further down on the page, you'll see a link for the Know Your Records series. When you click on that, you'll find more than a hundred video presentations created by the research services staff on NARA records. You can see in the upper right that the YouTube channel is filtered now on the Know Your Records series. You may want to start with the 30 videos listed under Know Your Records genealogy, the second entry here. If we click on the view full playlist, you'll find presentations on topics such as 19th century tax records, homestead records, researching in the US congressional serial set, using the catalog, and much more. The Know Your Records series also includes many of the talks given at our previous genealogy fairs. The fairs have been recorded since 2013, so that's seven years of presentations available online here. Even if you see an older date in the presentation titles, they are still relevant. If you have a specific topic you want to find presentations on within NARA's YouTube channel, you can type that into the YouTube search box to filter it further. For example, when I type in Civil War and Genealogy, I find all the presentations that have been tagged with those terms. So you'll see presentations on Civil War death records, Army service and pension records, and also presentations on records of artificial limbs, on records that help identify former slaves and slave owners, and on the Civil War widows pension files. If you just type in Civil War without genealogy, you'll get links to videos on general Civil War subjects as well, with lectures by Civil War historians and discussions with authors. So you can either just browse or use the search filter to focus your results on certain topics. These are great for learning about records at the National Archives, as well as for gaining historical context for understanding your ancestors' lives. Okay, I want to show you one more thing on the Start Your Genealogy Research page before we move on. If you plan to visit NARA for in-person research, the video linked in the lower right will be very helpful for you. It goes through the whole process of what you'll need to do when you arrive and explain some of the research remerals. Okay, now I'm going to show you three different ways you can get back to the main genealogy page from here. Right above the title in the green bar are what we call breadcrumbs, which shows the path to get to this page. So if you click on Resources for Genealogists, it will take you back one level to the main genealogy page. This method works for this page because it's in the genealogy section. But from any page on the site, in the upper right search box, you could just type in genealogy to get there. Or the way I usually get back to the main genealogy page is to click on the Research Our Records tab and then Research Your Ancestry link, as we did before. So back at the main genealogy page now, also under Start Your Family Research, there's a link to charts and forms. When we click on this, you'll see a link to an ancestral chart, family group sheet, and links to family tree charts. They're all PDFs, so you can easily print them out. Here's the ancestral chart in the family group sheet. And if we go to the family tree charts, this is on the Family Tree Charts for Kids page. There's even a tree for blended families available here. And further down on the charts and forms page, you'll see links to blank templates that you can fill in for each of the census years, including the special schedules and non-population schedules. For example, here's the template form for the 1840 census. Transcribing the records into these forms can be really helpful. Sometimes when copying over, you'll see things that you missed when just reading the microfilmed images. Also, since printing out images may not be so clear, this can be a great way to reference what you found online when you were when you were able to zoom in. You can also clearly view the column headings in the blank forms. There are also blank forms here for passenger arrival lists and military draft registrations for World War I and the fourth registration for World War II. Okay, now let's go back to the main genealogy page and look at the topics section. The most popular topics are linked from this main page, but if you click on the bottom link for more topics, you'll see the full list. This is actually one long column on the page, but I've put them side-by-side here. These include records commonly used for genealogy. In the past year during the pandemic, archivists have had more time to work on these pages, so a lot of updates have been made lately and new content added. So I'm going to highlight a few of the new pages as well as show you some that have been recently enhanced. So typically on these topic pages, you'll learn about the records available. There will be some background information about the records. You can learn how to access them and increasingly, you'll also find links to the digitized records in the catalog or on our partner websites. So we'll start with the census records page and as you can see, there are links here to background information, how to order copies, and how to access the records, but let's just click on the first button to search the censuses. As you're probably aware, census records are restricted for 72 years after the census is taken, so the 1950 census will be the next one available. It should be released in just under a year from now on April 1st, 2022. So here you can click on the year that you're looking for. As a strategy, when you're just beginning, it's always best to start with the most recent census year and work backwards. If you click on 1910 as an example, the panel opens up and you'll first see links to the census images in the National Archives catalog if available and also on our partner websites, Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and Fold3. There's a link to the blank template form and some articles and other resources related to this census year. Okay, now let's take a quick look at the immigration records page. So here are links to a range of immigration-related topics for you to explore. Besides immigration records, there are links to pages on naturalization, alien files, visa, and passport records. Today, I just want to highlight the Alien Files page. So these are files that were created by the Immigration and Naturalization Service starting in 1944, and over one million of these files are for people born prior to 1918. So the Alien Files have now been consolidated at NARA, primarily in Kansas City, with a portion as well at the National Archives in San Francisco, and they continue to be sent to NARA on an annual basis. In these files, you can find unique information about an individual that you may not find anywhere else, such as copies of foreign birth certificates or marriage licenses, photographs, information about their employer, and more. There is a name index in the catalog for all of the Alien Files that the National Archives has received up to this point. The files themselves have not been digitized, but you can search the name index in the National Archives catalog. Okay, now if we go to the Land Records page, you'll see answers to commonly asked questions, such as, what states are public land states, and how do I find my ancestors' homestead records? Lower down on this page, you'll see information on tract books and land patents, with links to the Bureau of Land Management website for the Eastern State tract books, and back up again towards the top if you click on Learn how to access these records. You'll learn about what information you'll need to access the records, depending upon what type of land entry file it is. Let's take a look at another topics page, the income tax records of the Civil War years. Here you'll find links to the records on NARA's partner websites, as well as links to some good articles that provide background on tax records. These records can help you find out the degree of an individual's wealth, and you can find out what articles they owned that were being taxed, such as gold watches, or a piano forte, or a carriage. Some people who don't show up in the census records, such as itinerant peddlers, may be found in the tax records, since they were required to obtain retail licenses. Now if you click on the State Department records of genealogical interest link, you can see in the table of contents on the right that this page covers passport and visa applications, and records of Americans who were born, married, or who died abroad, as well as records of officials and government service. Okay, another topics page I want to point out is the military records page, which has been recently redesigned. You'll see the page has three main sections, research by branch, research by war, and research by topic. So first let's look under branches, and if you click on Army, you come to this page. So let's click on pre-1917 Army records. At the top is a description of what NARA has, including military service records, pensions, information about military departments and commands, and Freedmen's Bureau records. And lower down on the page are links to the most common types of records requested. And if we click on compiled military service records, you'll see a description of what the files consist of and how to access them. And then further down, you'll see catalog links that may even include images of records. Now back on the military main page, if you scroll down below the branches section, you'll come to the research by war or conflict section. If we click on Civil War, for example, you'll find links to information on African Americans in the Civil War, compiled service records, draft records, pension records, Southern Claims Commission records, and more. If we were to click on compiled service records here, we would be taken to the very same compiled service records page that we arrived at from the Army records link. If we click on Southern Claims Commission records, first is a brief explanation of what the records are. Then you'll see a description of what you'll typically find in the files. These were claims to the government by Southern Unionist citizens who were seeking compensation for supplies taken from them by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. You'll see that some files may include affidavits and even marriage and death records. Then lower down, there's information about how the files were arranged, and then you'll learn how to access those files. You'll also find links to the files on Ancestry and Fold 3. And for the allowed claims, there are links to the digitized records in the National Archives catalog. Now, from the main military records page, if you scroll down to the research by topics section and you click on historical military records, you'll come to this page that focuses on genealogy research in military records. Back on the main topics page, I just want to mention that the African American and Native American records section are quite extensive, and using this topics page is a quick way to get to those sections. You'll see there's also a publication here on Citing Records in the National Archives. So I hope this gives you a general idea about what you'll find on the topics pages and how they might help you. Before I move on to the online tools, I want to show you how to get to content created by NARA's Regional Archives. As you probably know, the National Archives has locations around the United States. Each of these facilities holds unique records, mostly created by federal offices in their regional areas. Many of their pages are linked from the relevant topic pages that we just looked at, but you'll find even more content in their individual sections. To get to their specific pages from any page on archives.gov, click on the Visit Us tab at the top. When you come to the Visit Us main page, you'll see a list that includes the Regional Archives, Federal Records Centers, and the Presidential Libraries. You'll want to click on Research Facilities to filter out the others. So on the website, this appears as one long list, but I've put them side by side here. They're an alphabetical order by city name, except for Washington DC at the top. You'll notice a little link on the bottom line under each facility that says Visit Website. Clicking on this will get you quickly to their web pages. So let's look at Fort Worth's web page as an example. Click on Visit Website. So the main web pages for each facility all have the same basic layout. On the main page, you'll find a list of states that their facility holds records for. There's hours and location information, and in some cases they list the times when records are pulled from the stacks. Then lower down, there's a link to frequently requested records, visiting information, contact information. And you'll also see a link to Genealogy and Historical Research, or it may just say Research Our Records. If you click on the Genealogy and Historical Research link here, you'll find a page with links to their most popular records, a link to their online finding aids, and a catalog link that is filtered just to records at that facility. And by the way, if you're looking at the archives.gov website from a cell phone, the content you see in the right hand columns on pages, where what's new is on this page, that will be all pushed down to the bottom of the screen when you view the site on mobile. Okay, now I'm going to show you a sampling of the range of content you can find on the Regional Archives web pages for Genealogy. So Fort Worth has a research guide to the criminal case files of Fort Smith, Arkansas. You can get to this from a link in their most requested records area or from the finding aids page. New York City has a naturalization records page. You'll see they've provided links to the online records at FamilySearch. And Denver has a last name index to naturalization records for New Mexico. The National Archives at San Francisco has a list of former Alcatraz inmates. Philadelphia's Family History page has links to passenger arrival records online. If you go to Boston's section, they have content on customs, Coast Guard and maritime records, and a page on Navy and Marine Court records. Atlanta's section of the site has an index to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary case files that links to the records in the catalog. And if you click on the Atlanta Finding Aids page and then click on African American History, they have an index to Tuskegee Patient Medical files here and slave manifest indexes with links to records in the catalog. Okay, now I want to bring up Kansas City's main page. If you look under Frequently Requested, you'll see bankruptcy files listed. Kansas City is now the repository for all the bankruptcy records at NARA nationwide. If you click on it, you'll see at the top is information about how to request copies. And then lower down, there are some helpful FAQs, including a blurb on why these files can be useful for genealogists. And then under helpful links at the bottom of the page, there's a link to an article on using bankruptcy files for genealogy. NARA has bankruptcy records dating from the early 1800s. They have been very underutilized by genealogists. Through these files, you can learn what someone owned and through their debts, you can find out where they shopped, what doctors they saw, how they spent their leisure time, and generally what they did day to day. And by the way, you can also get to this page from the genealogy topics page, as well as through this Kansas City section. And if you have ancestors from the Midwest in the states that are circled here, NARA at Kansas City has lots of name indexes online for records in these states. Click on their genealogy and historical research page, and then click on finding it. And on the right, you'll see a list of their name indexes. You can also find a link in a bullet point at the top of the page. So we'll click on that. And here is the name indexes and subject list page. So under land records, you'll see these indexes listed. So I'm going to click on the one for Lincoln, Nebraska, as an example. And you'll see that besides the person's name and a date, there may also be comments about the file. The Kansas City pages also include lots of naturalization name indexes. If we click on the top link for the Southern District in Iowa, you can see the names of individuals, their countries of origin, dates, and what records NARA has for each. So the point here is that the web pages for each of NARA's regional archives offer a lot of great content in their sections. Once you figure out which NARA facility holds records for the states that you are researching in, you may want to explore their unique resources. So while we're looking at the individual facility pages, I also want to mention the Washington DC section at archives.gov. slash DC. So click on genealogy and historical research from here. And then if you click on textual records, you'll come to an overview of their records. You'll see links to Army, Navy Maritime, and civilian records. We already looked at the Army page as it's the same one that links from the military topics page on pre-1917 Army records. So if you click on Navy, similar to the Army page, you'll also see links to commonly requested records and lists of relevant record groups. And if you click on civilian from the textual records page, you'll also see links to commonly requested records, lists of record groups, and lists by subject area. So we've already looked at the pages for land entry and Southern Claims and Commission cases when we were in the topics area. Another new page here is the WRA case files page on Japanese Americans. Like the other topics pages, this page describes the contents of the case files and how to access them. These files pertain to people of Japanese ancestry primarily on the West Coast who were forcibly removed to camps during World War II. The records provide basic information about the individuals, including physical descriptions and may include school records, medical records, camp employment information, and possibly information about other family members as well. Links to this page can be found on pages in the topics area for Japanese Americans in World War II, as well as through this DC textual records section. Now we're going back to the main genealogy page by either typing in genealogy in the search bar or we can click on the research our records tab and then research your ancestry. Okay, now let's look at the tools for genealogists section. We're going to first look at the National Archives catalog. This is a huge topic, so we can really only just scratch the surface. Okay, first I want to point out the catalog guide for genealogists. On this page you'll find tips on how to search in the catalog by name, topic, or keyword. There's also a helpful short video on the page called Anatomy of a Description. Also on this page where the red arrow is is a link to a page with more in-depth search tips. The search tips page discusses wildcard searches and using the advanced search features in the catalog and more. You can see on the right it also includes examples of ways you can form your searches to get more precise results. To learn how to use the catalog, you may also want to watch the videos on their YouTube channel on searching in the catalog. There's a great presentation from the 2018 Genealogy Fair there. And as I mentioned before, the National Archives catalog currently has over 130 million digitized images in it and that number will be rising dramatically over the next several years. Many of the images come from microfilm that were digitized by NARA's partners at ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and Fold3. So as part of the National Archives partnership agreements with these companies, the partners get exclusive use of the images that they have digitized for three to five years depending on the agreement. And after that time has passed, they're then required to provide the digitized images to NARA. And then the National Archives will provide the images free of charge through the National Archives catalog. So what's in the catalog now for genealogists? A few of the items include Revolutionary War Compound Service Records, the 1940 census, Southern Claims Commission Records, and 1798 Direct Tax List for Pennsylvania. Those are just a few examples. And partially available in the catalog now includes some census schedules from 1850 to 1930, pension records for the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, some Civil War widows pension files, compiled service records for Union soldiers serving in certain states, and some petitions for naturalizations for various states and much more. So shortly I will be showing you the digitized by partners page where you can easily check and see whether certain records are available in the catalog yet. Okay, so let's go into the catalog now and do a few sample searches. Now the catalog is the main place where you'll be able to find images of records. So click on the Search the Catalog link to get there. So I'm going to search on someone I know of who was in the Revolutionary War and see if we can find a pension record for him. The soldier's name is a Husserous Wendell. So I type in Revolutionary War and a Husserous Wendell in the search box. So two pension files come up if I spell his name this way. One for him and one for John Van Epps. So we'll look at both of them to see what we find. So first let's click on the top link. Now I want to first point out a couple features in the catalog. Just below the image on the left side you'll see a slider bar. To enlarge the image you can move the bar along the slider. And on the right you'll see that it says that this is page one of 48 yet only a portion of the thumbnail images are showing up here. So you'll want to click on Load More or Load All in order to see all 48 images. So if you haven't explored pension records before they can be full of great details about the family. Here in this file for instance they've included the marriage date for the soldier and the birth dates for all of his children from the Family Bible and a record certifying his baptism along with his parents' names. So let's check out the second file that comes up under a search for a Husserous Wendell. The pension application for John Van Epps. The first image of in the file appears first so we click on the right arrow to start scrolling through. And as you start scrolling through the images you'll see other names appear next to additional names. Fold three digitized these images and they transcribed other names found in the images as well. And fortunately when these images were loaded into their catalog these other names were included as well. So now any name listed on the pension file should come up in a name search. So searching on a name in the catalog seems to work for military service and pension records since the individual's name is usually in the title. But for most records in the catalog this is not the case and the names of people have not been indexed or named in the metadata. So most records will not be findable through name searches in the search bar and you'll need to search by series and file titles and then scroll through the images to find people. Anyway as we scroll through looking at the additional names we see mention of a Husserous Wendell on this page. Here you can see he's providing testimony as to John Van Epps's service. He explains how he knows Van Epps and where and when they serve together. And then you get his signature at the end. So this is pretty cool. So even if you had a Revolutionary War ancestor without a pension you could do a search and see if perhaps they're mentioned or signed affidavits and other people's applications. Many of the Civil War widows pensions are also now in nearest catalog. Here's an example in this case for the mother of a soldier named Felinda Day. Her file is interesting because it describes how her husband died of typhoid fever a few years earlier leaving her dependent upon her teenage son the soldier. Since she had a unique first name her file is the only one that comes up when I type in her name. If the soldier's name is common however you want to include the state and put quotation marks around the name. For instance if I type in George W. Day and pension many files come up as you can see here. But once I add in the state name of New York as well it narrows it down. So depending on how common the name is that you're looking for you may need to try a variety of searches. So that's a very brief look at the catalog. I will be referring back to it again later though. If you've signed up for the National Genealogical Society Conference that starts next week Claire Kluskens who is a narrow staff member will be giving a whole presentation on using the catalog. So that's a great opportunity to learn more. So how can you find out what records have been added to the catalog? Well for narrow records that have been digitized by ancestry.com family search and fold three under the partner agreements you can use the digitized by partners page. To get to the digitized by partners page click on the link under tools for genealogists on the main genealogy page. So this is what you'll see when you get to the page. So let's scroll down a bit and as the name implies this table lists the titles of records that have been digitized by narrow's partners under their agreements. You can sort all the columns either numerically or alphabetically if you click on the column heading. First I want you to notice the column on the far right narrow completion status. This refers to whether images for that title are in the National Archives catalog yet or not. There are three options not started partial or complete. The first column has the the catalog ID number. NAID stands for National Archives Identifier. It used to be called the ARC ID. ARC was the name of the previous archives catalog. So if you see a reference to an ARC identifier in the catalog it's the same number as the NAID. So the second column has the microphone publication number. The third column has the title and if it's in blue that means it links to the catalog and the images that are available there either partially or wholly. The next columns provide links to the images on their partner websites and by the way access to ancestry and fold three are free from any National Archives research room at our locations nationwide. Now say you specifically want to see what census records may be available in the catalog so you can put in the term census in this search box. Then sort on the last column narrow completion status so you can easily see what censuses are completely in the catalog. You can see that the nonpopulation schedules for Kentucky and Virginia from 1850 to 1880 are in there. Now they're not searchable by name however so you may have to scroll a bit to find your person in the catalog and then you can scroll down further to see which census records have been partially put into the catalog. You'll see that there are some from 1910, 1920 and 1930 as well as nonpopulation schedules for Ohio. Now I believe this page is being kept up to date and lots of records are continually being added to the catalog so check here regularly if you want to see whether the records you want are available online yet in the catalog. You'll be searching by title as a name search won't work for most of the records so you'll need to do some scrolling or clicking once you're there. Now at the top of this page if you click on the spreadsheet link you'll get a downloadable Excel spreadsheet of all the digitized records listed in the table. If you prefer working with the information this way. Okay back to the main genealogy page. Let's look at another online tool. This one is to get into NARA's electronic records. It's called AAD which stands for Access to Archival Databases. It's another place besides the catalog where you can search for individuals by name. These are records that came into NARA in electronic format so it consists primarily of databases. This means that the records have mostly been transcribed from other sources and put into a database. Before we go into AAD I want to show you a helpful web page called Electronic Records for Genealogy. So this page gives you a description of the databases in AAD where you can find individuals. You might want to review this page before you go into AAD to see what's available there and what may be of interest. As you can see from the table of contents at the top there are records relating to World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War and there's another category. And by the way if you are searching for an individual and you see that a dataset has a download and a search option you'll want to click on search. The download link will take you into the catalog to download the whole dataset. That could be thousands of names. So just click on search if you're looking for an individual. At the bottom of this page under the heading other digital records that identify individuals you'll see that social security records are the first item in the list. It says that the series includes social security records for people who would have been 110 by the end of 2007, which means it contains people who were born by 1897. And further down you'll find databases that have been extracted from passenger lists for Germans and Italians and for Russians and for people arriving during the time of the Irish famine. Okay now let's go in and do a sample search in AAD. So from the Genealogy main page under tools click on search AAD. And here's the main AAD screen and as you can see on the left side there's a genealogy and personal history heading. And if you don't find what you're looking for here you can click on browse by subjects which is circled on the right. Here's the top half of the list of subjects and here's the bottom section. So let's start by clicking on social security and you get to this screen. So I'm going to search on a person with the last name of day. So I'm going to click on the second link for last names starting with C through D. And first off the FAQs can be very helpful to view on these pages. They may explain exclusions or gaps in the records and they may also explain some workarounds to find someone in case there were typos in the database. Okay let's look at a sample search. I put in Josiah Day in the name fields. So we get a result and based on his place of birth we know this is the person we're looking for. So click on view record and the results come up. We find his date of birth, his parents names listed, all based on what he wrote in his social security application. Now let's click on World War II and click on search next to the top database for enlistment records. I just want to point out another feature. When you see sample values next to a space you should click on it to see how the database expects to see your search entry written. So in this case you can see from the little box that popped up on the left you should put in last name and then a pound sign and then first name. So the pound sign separates the names here. This is quite different from the social security data set that we just looked at that had separate lines for first and last names. And you should also scroll down to view the series description in particular the scope and content note. It explains what the database consists of and it may explain if there are gaps or exclusions in the records. So if you can't find an individual you'd expect to find this can explain why. And I want to show you one more thing in AAD before we move on. If you go back to the main AAD screen and click on passenger lists you'll see the four immigration series that I mentioned earlier. So let's click on the view records under the immigration of Germans. Here if you click on the FAQ's link you'll learn that these four passenger list series were all extracted and transcribed from the original passenger list. You'll learn that the one for the Irish famine era is only for the port of New York. While the databases here for Germans, Russians and Italians include several other ports as well. And if you find an ancestor through one of these searches you may then want to go back to the microfilm and look at the original passenger list. It's always best to look for the original source when you find transcriptions or extracts. So these passenger lists in AAD are not comprehensive but it is another resource you can use. And you can find out more about using AAD through viewing the AAD presentations on their YouTube channel. Okay back to the main genealogy page. Under tools let's take a look now at the microfilm catalog. When you go into this you'll see some tabs at the top. Ordering reproductions is one of the options. As you may know orders have been suspended for most of the last year during the pandemic but I understand that staff are starting to work on the backlog now and are accepting orders for some types of records. Anyway if you click on the microfilm tab you'll come to the microfilm catalog. This tool allows you to find information about specific microfilm publications. It doesn't have the images themselves from the microfilm but shows you what's available and where you can find the microfilm. And in many cases provides great background information about the records. If you hit the browse button you'll get a comprehensive listing of all the 3000 plus microfilm with 100 showing up per page here. You can also use the search box to filter the list by either putting in a keyword or a publication number. In the advanced search you can also browse by location. So I'll show you a quick example. Let's put in widow's pension in the search box and hit search. And lots of microfilm come up. You'll notice the far right column lets you know whether the microfilm has been digitized or not. I'm not sure this is completely up to date though. So let's choose the top link paste files of disapproved pension applications of widow's. So here I just want you to notice two things on the right side. Where the arrow is you'll see the locations where the microfilm is available. In this case only in Washington DC. And above that is a link that says view important publication details. These PDFs are called descriptive pamphlets. And not all the microfilm have these linked. But if you see one you really should take a look. Once you open this PDF you can find some great background information. This one for instance provides a brief history of military pension records in the U.S. You'll learn the requirements for receiving an Army or Navy pension for a mother, a widow or a sister of a deceased soldier after the act of 1862. It says quote the mother's or widow's pension terminated if she remarried and an unmarried sister's pension ceased when she reached the age of 16. And you'll learn the types of documentation that was used to prove a marriage. It says to submit the date and place of the marriage along with quote supporting papers such as property schedules, marriage records, affidavits of witnesses. And you'll learn that there were separate requirements for proving a marriage for widows of Black and Indian soldiers quote in some ceremony deemed by them obligatory. And that they just needed to quote be recognized by their neighbors as man and wife. So it's definitely worth coming into the microfilm catalog and seeing if the microfilm you're using has a descriptive pamphlet available to help you understand the records. And these descriptive pamphlets also often have an index that lists each microfilm roll number in that publication along with the date range or geographic or alphabetical range that's included on the roll. This image is from a descriptive pamphlet for the 1880 census. Anyway, knowing the roll number can be helpful if you're writing a citation. Sometimes the images available on other websites only provide a microfilm publication number and not the specific roll. So this publication can often help you find the roll number. Okay, back to the main genealogy page. Let's click on reference reports. So these reports provide research strategies for the most popular records used by genealogists at the National Archives in Washington DC. They primarily discuss the microfilm available as well as finding aids. Let's look at a couple examples. Here's the citizenship related reports page. If you click on records of U.S. Congress related to private claims, you'll see this report includes a description of the records, information on what you'll need to know in order to search, and a finding aid section. And let's look at another. Here's the page on military reference reports. If we click on service between the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 report, you'll see the relevant microfilm listed. Now some of the microfilm listed in the reference reports may have been digitized and made available on our partner websites or in the catalog. But these reports have not yet been updated to include those links. But you can go to the digitized by partners page and look for the associated microfilm there to see the status of it. You should also be able to find these reference reports linked from the relevant topics pages. There's also a link to the reference reports in the Washington DC section of the website as well. Before I move on to the 1940 census, I did want to mention that there is a link to more online research tools at the bottom of the tools for genealogist box that you may want to explore. Okay, let's move on now to look at the 1940 census. So NARA has a separate website for the 1940 census. It's a free site and you can search by location but not by name. And just to let you know, NARA will also be developing a free site for the 1950 census that will be coming out next April 1st. Now you may have no need for this site now that there are other sites out there that have indexed the census by name. However, if you have trouble finding someone or you want to see the enumeration district maps, this site could be quite helpful. I'll give you a quick look. When you select a state, county, and city from the drop-down menus on the left, it pulls up the records by enumeration district, also known as the ED. If you get a result of several EDs, you may first want to figure out which one you need rather than scrolling through several, which could be hundreds of pages. You'll see along the top are tabs to maps and descriptions in addition to the census schedules. So the ED maps and descriptions here may be able to help you figure out which enumeration district your person lived in. You could click on descriptions to find which ED covers the part of town you're looking in. If you don't know what part of town the person or family lived in, you could look in the city directories to give you an address first. You can also use the ED maps to help you find what ED they're in. Click on the maps tab. Here's a section of a map. You can see the ED number printed on it. And to look at the census schedules, just click on census schedules and then click on the ED that you want to view. So when you go into the census, you can then click through the images to find the person or family you're looking for. Now we occasionally hear that people have problems viewing the images on this site. If this happens to you, you can then go into the National Archives catalog and view the 1940 census there. Just copy down the EDs from here that you want to see. In this case, I would copy ED 32-160 and then go over to the National Archives catalog and search for it there. I've had the most luck if I search this way. I type in 1940 census population schedules and then put in the city name in our county, state and ED. So in this case, I put 1940 census population schedules Wilson Niagara County, New York, ED 32-160. Now the ED maps are also in the catalog. So if you don't type in population schedules in your search, you may end up with a link to the ED map instead. So click on the top link here and when you get your results, you can click on each image as if scrolling through the microphone. Okay, back to the main genealogy page. I want to quickly point out the link to genealogy-related articles. Clicking on this takes you to the Prolog Magazine section of the website. Prolog was the National Archives magazine that ran for nearly 50 years, up to 2017. They had a regular feature called Genealogy Notes. Many issues are available here online and you can find them by topic. Although NARA no longer produces Prolog, they still are producing articles about NARA's records through their blogs, which I'll show you shortly. Anyway, here are some of the topics you can find articles about. If we click on African American history, as you can see, there are lots of articles on topics such as marriage records of freedmen and one on ancestors from the West Indies, researching African American soldiers in the U.S. Army from 1866 to 1890 and more. Here are some census related articles. There's one about a forgotten census of 1885, one describing the enumeration districts for the 1930 census and one about the fate of the 1890 census. If you want to learn more about Civil War records at NARA, you'll find a lot of content here as well. Here's an article on enhancing your family tree with Civil War maps and one on Union Court Marshall case files and using NARA records to identify a Confederate soldier. And here are some articles on immigration. Here's an interesting one on Ireland's famine children born at sea. And under the local history topic, here's an article called discovering your neighborhood on using census and maps to understand an ancestor's neighborhood. And here's an article called Where'd They Go? Finding Ancestral Migrations in Federal Records. There are also articles on pre-Civil War records and on the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. There's one here on French Spoilation Claims. If you had an ancestor who had cargo taken by privateers from France, Spain, or Holland before 1800, perhaps they made a claim. So there are lots of interesting articles to learn from. Now back on the main genealogy page, let's move on now to the link that says Genealogy Questions on History Hub. History Hub is where you can ask your research questions and interact with both NARA staff, archivists and other researchers. When you first come into History Hub, this is what you'll see. You can type in your question here and it will try to channel your question to the correct area. Or if you scroll down on the main page to the section that says Connect with a Community, you'll see a link that says Genealogy. You'll notice there's a separate section for military records and sections for specialized research in African American and Native American records. So when you go into the genealogy community, you'll see the top questions listed up and the most recent questions below that. Once you register and sign in in the upper right, you'll be able to post questions as well. Under Search Questions and Answers at the very top, if you first put your question in here, it will pull up all similar questions and responses. So you can first see if your question has already been asked and answered before you post anything. On the right, where the images are, you'll see two brand new genealogy sub-communities, one area specifically to discuss census records and the other for questions on immigration and naturalization. Here's an example of an inquiry and response. This person's trying to understand naturalization records. He writes, Hello, I'm trying to find out if my great-grandfather was naturalized. Based on these documents, I can't figure out if his application was successful or not. And here's the response, helping him interpret the records. Yes, he was naturalized. Look at the petition page that you have a link to. So History Hub can be a helpful resource for you to get your questions answered, learn and to learn what records exist, where to find them, and to understand them. Now, moving on on our tour of the main genealogy page is the Scan Records in the Hub link. So the Innovation Hub is at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and it's a large room on the first floor with lots of scanners. Once the archives opens again, if you have pre-World War I old military records that you want to scan that are not yet digitized, you can come directly here and order the records. Instead of going up to the research room to view them. And after you're done scanning them, your files will then be put into the National Archives catalog within a couple weeks, so you'll always be able to access them. And if you bring a memory stick with you, they will copy all the scanned images for you to take home with you as well. Here's an example of a Civil War pension file that I scanned in the Hub a few years ago. As you can see, the scanned records from the Hub will all be in color, which can really make a difference. And if you don't have personal projects you want to scan, but you want to help out, there are always ongoing projects in the Hub that you can assist with. These are some scanning projects of military and pension records that were underway before the pandemic hit, and will hopefully pick up again in the near future. Okay, back again at the main genealogy page. Now I want to bring your attention to the what's new heading on the right side, and specifically the top link to maps and NARA of interest to genealogists. So the cartographic research room is at NARA's College Park, Maryland location. And here they have listed their most popular map series that are used by genealogists. Some of these maps are online in the catalog, and there are links to them on this page too. And so they have census enumeration district maps, and here's one for the 1950 census. There are also maps from the general land office. Let's click here on the link to maps of captured and abandoned property. So when we click on the link and go into the catalog, we don't see the images. And that's because this link is going to the series level. So you'll need to click on the blue button that says search within series. Then the items appear. So let's click on one of them. Here's a map of plantations from Louisiana and Mississippi, and you can see there are names of individuals on it. If your ancestor is listed here, you would see who his neighbors were, how large his land holdings were in comparison to others, and exactly where the property was located. So the cartographic research room also has military maps of campaigns and forts from the late 1700s to the 20th century. So if we click on this link to the Civil Works map file, among the maps that appear are Civil War battlefields, including for Gettysburg and Antietam, which could really add interest to your family stories if you have someone who fought there. Now at the bottom of the maps page, if you want to explore maps further, click on learn more about cartographic records at the National Archives. And this will take you to the cartographic unit's main page. This is a brand new section of the website. If you scroll down, you'll see cartographic topics listed with the most popular records. So you may want to look here as well. For example, here's their Civil War page. So there's a lot more to explore. Now back on the main genealogy page, also under what's new is the pictures in there of interest to genealogist link. So let's click on that. At the top are links to some of their popular series in the catalog, primarily military related. Then further down are links to the select list. While you're not likely to find a photo of your ancestor here, there are pictures here that can add interesting context to your family stories. You can find old photos of the American West and pictures depicting scenes from the Revolutionary War and pictures of Navy ships. There are also well over 100 19th century pictures of various cities. For example, here's a drawing of Sacramento in 1855, Louisville in 1846 and New London Connecticut in 1813. These could be interesting for your family stories if you have ancestors who lived in these towns in these years. And on this photos page under related links is a link to the main page for the still pictures branch. This is also a new area of the website. Over on the right, you'll see links to lots of blog posts with articles on theirs photographs. And if you scroll down a bit, you'll see there are links to some of the most popular topics for photos. There's Civil War Native Americans in American landscape, which could all be helpful in providing depth to your research. And lastly on the pictures page for genealogists, I want to point out the link on the right to photos from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is a new finding aid that pulls images from the National Archives catalog and you can search by tribe, by topic or by state name to filter the images. Okay, now we're going back to the main genealogy page and also under what's new, there is a link to subscribe to NARA's email newsletters. When you click on it, you'll see numerous newsletters that are offered. I recommend that you sign up for the National Archives catalog newsletter. You'll learn about newly added records to the catalog and learn more about search tips and new functionality. The newsletter also shares information for citizen archivists who are tagging and transcribing historical records in the catalog. To subscribe, you'll just need to add your email address and hit subscribe. The newsletters come out about every two weeks. You can also read the most recent issues linked online here. And if your ancestors lived in states with records held at NARA's New York City or Kansas City facilities or if you live nearby one of these, you may want to receive their newsletter too to learn about events they're having and about records unique to their locations. And the last item under what's new that I want to mention is the link to connect with us on social media. So let's click on that. I believe that all of NARA's research facilities have Facebook pages and some have Twitter accounts and more. You might want to follow or connect online with the NARA facilities that holds records from your ancestors' locations. Now, if you click on the blogs link on the left, you'll see a listing of all NARA's blogs. You can sign up for any of them. If we look at the text message blog, for instance, you can see that if you just enter in your email address, you'll be notified every time there's a new posting. The text message blog is written by NARA's research services department. And as the name implies, it covers textual records. They often publish articles of interest to genealogy. You might also be interested in the unwritten record blog by the special media department covering photos, maps, and film at NARA. The rediscovering Black History Blog is another one that could be of interest for your research. Okay, now back to the main genealogy page. One of the last items I want to show you is where it says help us transcribe. This will lead you to an area of the website called the Citizen Archivist. The Citizen Archivist section gives you an opportunity to interact with the catalog by tagging and transcribing documents. Before you start, you'll have to create a free account and register. By tagging records with key words, you'll be helping the records become more findable in searches. You can also add comments to records. You might want to tell other users about related records or what you can expect to find in these particular records. And transcribing documents in the catalog also helps people find the records in the search. And it's a great opportunity to get practice reading old handwriting. So if you'd like to work on transcribing old documents, click on the Citizen Archivist missions link either from the main Citizen Archivist page or in the left hand menu here. These are some of the transcription projects that are currently available to work on. The records cover a wide range of topics and time periods. If this interests you, just sign up for a catalog account here. You can find out more about the Citizen Archivist program through the catalog newsletter, as well as through several how-to videos on the National Archives YouTube channel. So lastly, I want to point out the contact us link that's available in the upper right hand corner on all the pages on archives.gov. You can easily reach NARA with suggestions on improvements or to ask questions or to report issues that you find online. We welcome your feedback. Okay, so that's a quick whirlwind tour of some of the features you'll find for genealogy on archives.gov. Again, everything I have shown you is available starting from this genealogy main page. I know it was a lot to cover in a short time, but I hope you will now feel empowered the next time you visit the site and you'll feel able to take full advantage of all it has to offer. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sarah. We so appreciate your sharing all of these resources that are available online, so anybody in the world at any time can access the records of the National Archives. So, although we are wrapping up the video portion of the broadcast, we will continue to take your questions for another 10 minutes. Please stay if you are watching online during the premiere broadcast after May 12, submit questions to inquire at NARA.gov. As a reminder, the presentation's video recording and handout will remain available on this YouTube page. We value your opinion, so please take a minute to complete a short evaluation. Find the link under Show More. Please note that this event is part of the Know Your Records program. Before ending, we want to share our gratitude for the behind the scenes staff, including Amber Forrester, one of our YouTube chat moderators, Jamie Atkinson, Brian Sipperly, Julie Reed, Jason Winston, and Alexis Van Dyke make up our audio-visual staff. And Teres Dromburg is today's captioning writer. Thank you all. And on behalf of the National Archives, thank you for joining us. Please stay if you have questions. Submit them in the chat.