Archive for the ‘Genealogy’ Category

• Screenshot History for websites

• SSDI Death Records

• California agencies issuing business permits and licenses

• Online Searchable Death Indexes, Records and Obituaries

• LegiScan | Keyword search legislation in 50 states

• Federal Motor Carrier Safety Licensing – Out of Service Carrier

• Federal Tax ID Number Search

• Dept. of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration, Abandoned Plan Search

• Disaster Affected Employer Search

• Global Terrorism Database

• Manhattan NYC 1940 Telephone Directory

• Historical Searchable Online City Directories

• The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Disaster Affected Employer Search

• Online Dictionary and Thesaurus – The easiest to use

• Public record researchers and document retrieval specialists

• Social Security Death Index – The best!

• Indiana State Social Security Death Index

• Nevada State Social Security Death Index

• Idaho State Social Security Death Index

• State Statutes Addressing Access To Military Discharge Records (DD 214)

• West Virginia Birth and Marriage Index

• West Virginia Death Records Search

• Arizona Birth Certificates Search – 1955-1936

• Ohio Online Death Certificate Index – 1913 – 1944

• Minnesota Death Certificate Index – 1908-2001

• Forensic Database – National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology and the Law at Stetson University College of Law

• Online Daily Newspapers With Obituaries

• Obituary Search Engines and Indexes of Old Newspaper Obituaries

• Time For Memory: Obituaries

• Free Directory of Newspaper Obituaries and Obituary Resources by State

• Obituary Depot – WorldWide Obituary Locator and Newspaper Directory

• Obituary Daily Times (GEN-OBIT) Search

• Search Obituaries – GenealogyBank

• Obituaries | Death Notices | Newspaper Obituaries |

• Bing Advanced Operator Reference

• Open Site Explorer – Find links

• List of search engines – Wikipedia

• International Genealogy databases and research tools

• Heir Finders Investigator Handbook and Forms

• New York Attorney General Real Estate Finance Database

• State, Court, & County Law Libraries

• North Dakota Public Death Index

• Utah State Burials Database

• Utah Death Certificate Index – 1904-1958

• The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Create charts from data

• Browsys Search Engines

• Aviation Safety Network

• TweetsBetween – See recent tweets between twitter users!

• Montana State Death Index Registry – through 2002

• ChangeDetection – Know when any web page changes

• InfoMinder – Web page tracker

The rest of my favorite links are here.

• ChangeDetection – Know when any web page changes

• InfoMinder – Web page tracker

• Commonwealth War Dead and Cemetery Database

• Charity and Non Profit Organizations Status Database

• Latest tweets and twitter trends | Chirpcity

• Find local blogs – Placeblogger

• State and Local Government Search Engine

• Google search bookmarklet for social search across the web

• Find neighbors on a street

• California Newspaper Catalog

• International Soundex Reunion Registry

• Lawyer profiles and assessments – Avvo.com

• Greg Notess: Speaker and Presenter on Web Searching for Researchers

• California Genealogical Society and Library Catalog

• California Libraries Catalog – find materials and libraries

• The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & Body Language Cues

• NamUs – National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

• Missing Persons Database – California Dept. of Justice

• Google Plus Search, Google Plus Directory | Find People on Plus

• Access to Adoption Records – Summary of State Laws

• Information and Instructions to Verify Social Security Numbers Online

• UK Company Information

• Interstate Compact Offender Tracking System

• United States Online Historical City Directories

• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database of slaving voyages

The rest of my favorite links are here.

There are many substantial collections of genealogical materials — telephone and city directories, school alumni directories, newspapers, electronic subscription databases — in San Francisco Bay Area specialty libraries.

The California Genealogical Library and Society is located in downtown Oakland. I mentioned this resource at my Google+ site. See the list of their United States City Directories — available only to members, accessible to anyone for a small fee. One room of the library is dedicated to the extensive collection of California telephone books and city directories. A few college alumni directories are also here. The subscription databases available onsite include Newspaperarchive.com (see their California collection) and the state birth, marriage, divorce and death indexes from Vitalsearch covering 21 states, including California.

The most extensive collection of family history and genealogical resources west of Salt Lake City is in the Bay Area, housed at the Sutro Library, a branch of the California State Library and located in San Francisco. Their collection of 20,000 city directories and 10,000 telephone books is a gift of gold to those of us who are Bay Area private investigators — a professional field that prized these tools to locate people and businesses and reverse telephone numbers long before there were electronic databases.

The Family History Center in Oakland can order microfilmed copies of some California birth, death and marriage certificates from the repository in Salt Lake City. You pay a modest fee of $5.

My prior post on Genealogical Resources in U.S. Federal Depository Libraries is still current and I’ve updated the links in Find historical records – 50 state list. Future posts will address free 20th century genealogical databases on the Internet of interest to private investigators. Meanwhile, peruse these genealogy resources and links.

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[Update, 1/29/2012: The Subcommittee on Social Security of the House Ways & Means Committee is meeting (February 2, 2012) and will address legislation that would restrict access to the SSDI. Read more at: Sounding a call to action to save our access to the SSDI.]

A change in Social Security Administration policy that went into effect November 1 has lead to the removal of the free online Social Security Death Index, also known as SSDI, from Rootsweb and other genealogy sites. But that’s not all. The Social Security Administration is going to remove 4 million current name records and cease reporting other data in new records. One popular fee-based data provider is going to stop displaying the Social Security number for anyone who has died in the last 10 years. This is a profound blow to genealogists and fraud investigators.

The SSA Public Death Master File aka Social Security Death Index has come under political assault as a source of Social Security numbers used to craft false identities. As Dick Eastman rightly argues in “Genealogists are Losing Access to SSDI, Mostly Due to Misinformation,” this is another case of misplaced concerns about the dissemination of personal information. The fallacy of the identity theft argument is detailed in “Are We Going to Lose the Social Security Death Index (SSDI)?”.

The background on the SSA’s explanation is cited at Steve’s Genealogy Blog, “Changes to the Public Death Master File (DMF) and the Social Security Death Index (SSDI)”.

What will be removed from the Death Master File that the SSA sells to every provider is the state verified data — which comes from the death certificate. That includes the last residence (town, county and zip code) and the location where benefits were sent. (This was confirmed in an email exchange I had with the government agency that distributes the SSA data.) How many times have you made use of that information to find beneficiaries to estates and pensions, connected separated family members, verified identity, researched a genealogy or located where a client’s family lived when a relative died? All the time.

Here’s what the Social Security Administration announced upon the release of the DVD version of the SSDI (in 2005):

The SSA Death Master File is used by leading government, financial, investigative, credit reporting, medical research and other industries to verify identity as well as to prevent fraud and comply with the USA Patriot Act.

The excitement has worn off. Fear prevails.

And there’s more. The largest genealogy data provider, Ancestry.com, announced (after political pressure was applied) that “…we have recently made a purposeful decision to not display Social Security numbers of any person that has passed away in the last 10 years.”

And more extensive restrictions are now in place for the release of information in the Social Security application — which has the parents’ names and place of birth of the applicant. Again, serious researchers will loose out.

Some free sources of the SSDI are still online but they aren’t as flexible as the Rootsweb interface and may have less data. I have links to these, other vital records at my directory of public records resources.