The Oregon American History and Genealogy Project shares historical and genealogical information about the US state of Oregon, helping you to learn more about the history of the area and your family’s history within the area.

Highlights include:

• Multnomah County, Oregon (includes Portland)
• Baker County, Oregon
• Malheur County, Oregon
• Umatilla County, Oregon
• Oregon Biographies
• Oregon Cemeteries
• Eastern Oregon Photo Album
• Eastern Oregon Obituary Database
• Indian Tribes of Oregon
• Oregon Land/Maps
• Oregon Military
• Important Dates in Oregon History
• Oregon Firsts
• Oregon World War II Casualty List
• Vietnam War Casualty Database
• Oregon Trail & Native American Information
• Oregon Historical & Genealogical Resources

They are also looking for volunteers to help develop the many counties and resources available for those researching their family history in Oregon.

Tips from the Pros: Date Estimates-More Than a Good Guess from Ancestry.com offers some great information on how to estimate your ancestors’ dates.

Most online database websites provide a field for selecting the date range of a search, or the age range of an individual in a particular record. An age range is, in fact, a date range because you are estimating the period of years in which a birth took place. Regardless of the nature of the date estimate or the breadth of years you choose to search, careful analysis should go into the choice.

When searching for an individual take into account what date information you have and where it came from. Can it be considered accurate? What did a record state? Some individuals regularly lied about age, not necessarily with any consistency as to the error. Some records did not require an accurate age, perhaps just an indication the individual was over the age of twenty-one.

A successful search could also depend upon the date when the record was made. This is true of wills. The date of probate is more significant and may have been years after the date of death.

Many family history and genealogy programs will help you estimate the age and various events in the list of your ancestor, but a lot of the estimating comes from guessing. The more informed your guess, the closer to the truth you might be.

When you record a “guess” or “estimate” in the research information of your ancestor, make sure you label it as such. The next generation of family history researchers might think your guess is a fact and be led astray by the mistake. Be clear on what is a known and verified fact and what is a guess or estimate in your research records.

Footsteps Photos is an online collection and photography retailer for photographs from England and Wales

They produce fine quality prints from their library of several thousand photographs dating from about 1900 to 1930, depicting views of towns, villages, schools, churches etc. of England and Wales early negatives and prints. The photographs are digitally restored to remove unwanted marks, blemishes, and scratches etc., in a way as to not impact the photograph’s original quality.

The images are available for sale, which is great for adding to your print collection, displaying in gallery, museum, or educational exhibits, and for other displaying purposes.

The images are not for downloading, website use or hotlinking, though I can’t find any specific copyright or licensing explanations anywhere, an oversight on their part. Still, it’s a fascinating look back in time that may help you understand a little more about the lives of your ancestors.

What Was Under Those White Wigs asks the Boston 1775 blog. Written by historian and expert, J.L. Bell, Boston 1775 is dedicated to the 17th and 18th century in the United States.

As part of my exploration of the 1700s and 1800s, trying to learn more about the lifestyle of my family in the United States at that time, how they lived, why they moved around, and the news and politics of the time, I’m finding more wonderful websites and blogs like Bell’s which open up a new world for me.

Bell helps us not only understand how they lived and the news and politics of the time, but why. Here are some recent highlights:

• The Revolution in Boys’ Hair covers the issue of hair fashion trends among children and adults.
• George Washington Sat Here? about the chair in Washington’s headquarters for resting his hindquarters in going on the auction block.
• Shaving Heads and Faces for a Living is another hair piece on barbers and wig makers.
• What Wigs Said About Professions is another is his wonderful ongoing series on wigs and hair from the past.
• Dr. G’s Twelfth Night Plumb Cake shares stories and food from the Twelfth Night celebrations.
• Skimmington ride leads to death in 1764 about how justice was served, or not, in the early days of America.
• Farewell Ceremony features a description of General George Washington bidding farewell to his officer corp at the end of the Revolutionary War.
• Washington’s Asymmetric Generals is a wonderful look at some of our war heroes who came to their post disabled, disfigured, or physically impaired and imperfect, which would get them booted out of today’s military.

Enjoy the step back in time that Bell’s Boston 1775 offers and get a new perspective on what life was like during the early years of the United States.

In “What’s in an Address?” by Juliana Smith on 24/7 Family History Circle, Smith reminds us that addresses play a very important role in discovering magical links to our past.

The conversation was a reminder of how important it is to document our trail through addresses. If for some reason my personal history didn’t survive the years, for a future family historian researching my life, knowledge of my relatively brief stay in that house would be helpful in locating several important vital records, and in separating my Smith family from the countless other Smiths in the area. Because I didn’t live there during a census year, that knowledge would have to come from other sources.

Knowing your ancestor’s address can be an important key to locating other records. Let’s take a closer look at where to find addresses and how they can be used.

The article continues with great tips and resources for putting together a “chronology of addresses” for your ancestor’s lives, helping to fill in the blanks on your family’s history.

“Using Coroner’s Records,” by Mary Penner from 24/7 Family History Circle on Ancestry.com offers some great tips for working with Coroner Records, a historical reference I never thought about before:

If your ancestor had an untimely end, check for details in the local coroner’s records. Dating back some 900 years, the coroner’s system traces its beginnings to medieval England. Death was serious business in merry old England. Strict and complex rules governed death, its circumstances, and the handling of corpses. The coroner imposed hefty fines on community residents who side-stepped the rules regarding dead persons.

It was particularly bothersome when strangers to a community turned up dead in their midst. The responsibilities and potential financial consequences for those who discovered stray dead people could be so great that villagers sometimes dragged a dead body to a nearby village and left the unfortunate soul on someone else’s doorstep.

The coroner’s position evolved over the years from fine collector to its current primary responsibility, which is investigating suspicious, violent, sudden, or unattended deaths.

GenWeekly reports “Postcards may be a great way to enhance - and enlighten - your family history”, something I’ve been working on for a while.

Dedicated to helping researchers appreciate and explore the social history aspect of their own genealogy, Gena Philipbert-Ortega, in her article, Using Postcards to Illustrate your Family History, once again provides us with multiple links to great resources. With an emphasis on postcard collecting and enhancing your family’s story through postcards, Gena directs us toward those great photo postcards of family members so popular at one time, and historical postcards of the times, places, and events that may have figured into your family’s history.

I have an amazing collection of old post cards from different sides of my family. I’m scanning them and doing a little research into where they are and what they represent, as well as the story they tell.

It’s not an easy job. Some postcards clearly state where they were taken, but not when. Others are even less clear. Some are in photo albums pasted in tightly, so removal is potentially damaging. Others are lovely pictures with no clue as to what, where, when, and why this post card is even in the albums since I have nothing to go by.

The article also spotlights Using Postcards to Illustrate your Family History by Gena Philipbert-Ortega.

If you are using postcards to help tell the story of your family’s history, do you have some tips to help the rest of us?

Early Music is an amazing resource if you are interested in music from the past.

Created by Jon Sayles, a computer technologies expert, as a hobby, Early Music is dedicated to reproducing and sharing music from the Baroque and English Renaissance time period, specifically the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, featuring composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and others.

The music on the site is free to download and listen, and even distribute, for free.

The music is played on the guitar and recorded by Jon Sayles. Much of the flavor of Renaissance music is the magic of duets, trios, and small groups playing intersecting melodies and accompaniments. To create these, Jon Sayles may work with other guitarists, but he also records each part by himself and then digitally blends them together to create the different parts in a single song.

There are hundreds of Early Music songs to choose from, though some highlights include:

• From England: The Witches Dance, See my own sweet jewel, Browning, Ricercare
• From France: Allon Gay Gay, Se je perdu, Si ascendero
• From Spain: Ignacio, Recercada, Riu Riu, Chu
• From Germany: Ich weiss nit, Ballet, Die Katzenpfote
• From Italy: Saltarello, O’ Rosetta, Cantate Domino

Sayles loves this style of early music so much, he wants to spread the word as well as encourage more people to return to this fabulous music style. Sayles offers sheet music to those who ask, and encourages distributing and sharing of his music.

If you want to step back in time to music of your ancestors past, download some wonderful ancient tunes from Early Music into your portable MP3 player, and take a walk through a historical garden.

Godfrey’s Book-Shelf is an amazing collection of books reproduced digitally and freely available for download, representing books from the 15th - 19th century.

Read books popular during your ancestor’s life. Explore the ways of thinking, living, and politics from your family’s past.

Some of these books are technical, but many are fiction and lifestyle books, helping you learn more about fashion trends, political and popular notions, as well as what books motivated a country or two. There are music books, sheet music, culture guides, religious text, hobby books, and plenty of how to books, in addition to fiction.

The books are scanned copies of the originals and require Adobe Acrobat Reader or an equivalent for reading. The files range from just under 1 megabyte to 15 megabytes in size, though most hover around 3-6 MB. The quality of the images are fairly good, allowing you to see the actual pages and read them.

Some popular books include:

• Varietie of Lute-Lessons
• First Set of English Madrigals, The
• Book of the ordre of chyualry, The
• Book of Dravving, Limning, VVashing, A
• Handbook of Wood Engraving
• Introduction to the Skill of Musick
• Needles Excellency, The
• English Dictionarie, The
• XII. Wonders of the World
• Booke of Secrets, A
• Sea-Mans Grammar and Dictionary
• Feminine Monarchie, The
• Strange Histories
• Gentlemans Academie, The (Book Three)
• Cobler Turned Courtier, The
• Sea-Gunner, The (excerpts)

These are the originals, so do not expect them to be easily readable by today’s English standards. Old style words and phrasing are to be expected, and welcome by many historians.

To use and read these books, do not read them on the site. Download the file to your computer and then double click them to read them. This saves the host’s bandwidth and allows you to take the time you want and may need to read through the ancient pages.

I couldn’t find a search function on the site, which is sad, but the books are sortable by title, author, subject, date, most recent, and most popular.

So when I wanted to go looking for topics related to handiwork and handcrafts, as I know my ancestors worked with their hands a lot, I clicked the Sort by Subject tab and found books on art, beekeeping, calligraphy, dance, needlework, recipes, and wood engraving.

This is a passion of the author, who admits that the original intension was to convert these books into searchable text files, but explains:

The Bookshelf started as an attempt to reclaim some space, by scanning filing cabinets full of old books and broadsides to electronic format. Once upon a time, I had high hopes of converting them all to searchable plain text, but as the archaic letters and ligatures gave my OCR software fits, and the idea of typing them all in by hand was hardly worth entertaining, I gave up and simply scanned the images into PDF files.

While not the same as holding these ancient books in your hands, this is the next best thing.

CanGenealogy is a Canadian genealogy site to help you trace your family roots through this North American country.

Genealogy information is segregated by region, such as Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia; by category such as Maps, Immigration, and Loyalists; and offers a variety of other resources and tools to help you trace your family history in Canada.

Recently, they just added an Internet Radio Show with podcasts to listen to more about genealogy and family history in Canada.