Happy New Year!! 2011 ended at midnight and 2012 began and there are plenty of discoveries for us genealogists to find in the coming 12 months. Most importantly is the release of the 1940 US census which comes out April 1st, just 4 months away. Several websites are offering the indexes for FREE once it is released and I for one am looking forward to finding relatives and where they were living (or weren't) in 1940. It will be the first census that my mother was counted in as well as the first for my father.
But today I'm helping other researchers by breaking down the list of Ohio birth record images by county. The index at FamilySearch isn't helpful to genealogists at this point because no hits come up when you put a name in, however, you can go through the images page by page IF you know what county you are looking for. But in order to make this a little bit easier I and another researcher are literally clicking on each set of images to see what county they are for. Unfortunately I haven't found Stark, Columbiana or Carroll counties yet, but I hope to find them soon. I never like it when FamilySearch puts out new records and they say 'Search Images', because you have to do what my paternal grandfather did when he looked through census records in the 1970s, page by page till you find what you are looking for. But deciphering which numbers represent which counties and having the list of them say on a Facebook genealogy group page, should help those researchers who don't want to play hit and miss.
I did find two counties that I will go back to and take a look at just because though I doubt I'll find anything significant. The other breakthrough I had at the close of 2011 was that my cousin in Norway, Nils, emailed a cousin of his father's who solved a mystery for us in which he had information regarding the parents of my 5th great grandmother Kari (or Karen) Andersdatter. Nils then sent me what he had in his database and I'm going to be adding that information sometime today.
Everyone talks about making 'New Year's' resolutions to lose weight, exercise more, be nicer to people etc. And then most people don't hold up to them and are back to eating more, exercising less and being their normal selves within a couple weeks of January 1st. But the kind of resolutions I like to make are ones in the genealogical sense and they aren't really resolutions but goals I hope to accomplish. I hope that I can find the parents of John Daniel Fry and actually find that connection to Heinrich Frey and Catherine Levering so that I can extend the Fry line back a couple more generations. I also hope that the 1940 census unlocks some mysteries that have stayed hidden by the 1930 census. And one thing I would love to be able to do, find a connection to Clark Gable's stepmother, Jennie Dunlap Gable, since I have some Dunlaps on my father's side of the family. I think it would be neat to find even a collateral connection to Gram's 'boyfriend'.
Happy 2012, may the next 12 months bring plenty of surprises and new discoveries in your family tree.
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