DATA / IMAGES button on our website

Perhaps some of the readers of our Newsletter do not realize that the complete scanned book of the 1846 Town of Vernon Tax Assessors List is now available on our website.

Go to “DATA / IMAGES” – “Oneida County” – “Oneida County Data” and then you will see the actual handwritten pages of the Tax List. These should be able to be printed out if you want to take them with you to a library or for further study.

We have had one exciting success story so far. One lady wrote that she found her ancestor located in Vernon in 1846 when she thought he had been in the Town of Litchfield, Herkimer County from previous research. She was going to do further land record research and give us a report, which I will publish.

A note about the “DATA / IMAGES” button on our home page, is that we intend to be bringing you many types of photos, prints, postcards, documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, maps, etc., etc., in the future. They will be available as soon as posted on the website and will be arranged by first the “County” and then the “Location”.

Keep checking back.

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I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people

die of natural causes.

Rootsweb woes - Thanks to Newsletter responders

Gee, and I thought we had it bad when we inadvertently sent out some
test mailings and our confirm link did not always work just exactly
right. 

Here is a partial extract of what some of Rootsweb’s problems are
today.

“On Tuesday evening we launched a survey to collect feedback from
some of our RootsWeb members.  When the survey was launched, there
was a field that offered respondents the opportunity to provide us
with their contact information, to be used by us for limited
purposes as described in the survey…  

We subsequently discovered that this feature also inadvertently
allowed those who clicked on this link to view as well the contact
information provided by those survey respondents that had
volunteered it…   

If you have any concerns or questions, please respond to this
email and we will do our best to address them.  We would also
be happy to follow up with you by phone, if desired…”

I would hate to be the switchboard operator there!  

Can you spell a-t-t-o-r-n-e-y? 

Yikes!

Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?  

(unknown – email source.)

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The Newsletter has created quite a stir, to say the least.
We have heard from old friends, family members, acquaintances,
class mates, researchers digging for their roots, and lots of
very nice people. 

Thank you all!

GENEALOGAHOLIC - Newsletter mailing issues

GENEALOGAHOLIC – A person addicted to researching their family tree. There is a twelve step program however no one has ever wanted to take it yet.

(I think I just invented a word. - Dick Hillenbrand - 12/13/05.)

Here is an explanation of what is going on with the Newsletter.
This is the very first issue of what we hope will be many more to come.

Our website was built with a very sophisticated software program named JOOMLA! Well, JOOMLA! has some very nice Newsletter components that record the subscriptions and sends out an automated “Welcome” message that should have a link in it to click on in order to confirm your subscription. This “confirm” detail does some good things. It makes sure you typed in the correct e-mail address, and it makes sure the subscriber does indeed want to receive the Newsletter. We can not get around that confirm link situation, it is part of JOOMLA!
(Update, we "might" be able to get around it and are still looking into it.)

Now our first problem occurred when I did not use the “Editor” Component that comes with JOOMLA! to build the Newsletter. I used WORD and then tried to copy and paste it all over into JOOMLA!’s editor. Everything worked fine until we got to the formatted table “Index of the 1846 Town of Vernon Tax List.” We just could not get it to format properly in HTML. So in an effort to get the Newsletter out on the promised date, I said, No Problem, I’ll send it in WORD and copy and paste the subscriber’s addresses into my email program. Do a batch mail and figure out how to use JOOMLA!’s editor for the next issue. What the hey, there are only going to be about 40 or 50 subscribers, possibly a couple of hundred at the most!

Well here is the current situation; we now have several THOUSAND subscribers! Who knew? Over one thousand more signed up in one day this past week-end. So what we have to do is figure out the best way to get an issue of our First Edition out to the many new subscribers and it might not be pretty. We are going to ask all of you nice people to bear with us, as we may have to do another total mailing list bulk mail in order to get a clear starting point from which to manage the subscriber data base better.

Many of you reported that you never received the Welcome letter, or that there was no link to click, so we did a lot of manual confirmation. It seems likely that if all of that is true then the only reason that seems credible is that the traffic on the website which has been enormous in the past few days just caused a server overload. Our web-host provides us with “unlimited” server space, but there are certainly events that might exceed the maximum usage at any one given point in time. I noticed that at 5:45 pm last Saturday there were 680 visitors on the site at the same time!

None of this will be an issue on the Second Issue of the Newsletter, because we will build the whole thing with JOOMLA! and let the automated mailing feature be our fingers that do the walking.

These are little growing pains that develop when doing a project such as this and it causes some discussion, to say the least, but there is really no problem. We do not have to any more “programming” as some suggested. We know exactly what to do for the future, but it is the current mailing that might get a little confusing.

All we can hope for is if you do get a multiple mailing this time, please bear with us. Just delete it and it will not happen again.

Hey, the price is right!

I wrote all of the above before we just did this last mass mailing, and all in all things went pretty smooth. We did have a few unusual occurrences but nothing major. See, things will work out!

Town Clerk Returns 1865 - Bill Hecht - Cayuga Co. GenWeb (the best) - CUSHMAN family (OCD)

I have written before in a previous blog, and also on the website, about the “Return of the Town Clerks – 1865" – which are registers of information on Civil War men from each town that were required by law to be filled in by the Town Clerks.

They do not all survive, unfortunately, and more unfortunately of those that do exist, many of the details are not all filled in properly.

However!!!

If you are lucky enough to locate the one for your town of interest, and if the clerk did fill in all of the details, (most did not,) then you might be rewarded with many unknown facts, such as date and place of birth, the parent’s names including the mother’s maiden name if known!

As I have said before the New York State Archives in Albany has collected as many of these that they can locate and have put them on microfilm arranged first by county and then by town.

Our friend Bill Hecht, who is one of the most prolific posters of data, photos, maps, documents, etc., etc. on the Internet, has advised me that he scanned one of these registers for the Town of Springport, Cayuga Co., NY., several years ago and the complete scanned book is available on a website at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~springport/pictures49/4948.html .

Take a look at it and you will see the wonderful amount of detailed information you “might” be able to locate on your ancestor!

Bill also posts hundreds and hundreds of his excellent scans on the NYFingerLakes mailing list, which you can subscribe to by sending an email to:

NYFingerLakes-L-request@rootsweb.com , and put the single word “subscribe” (without the quotes,) in both the subject line and the body of the message. It is very important to have no other text in the message, such as an automatic signature or advertising line.

He also posts a lot on the Central New York Mailing list as well. Subscribe using the same methods as described above. ny-centra-l-request@rootsweb.com .

A warning, these files are very large. If you have a dial-up ISP it would take forever to open them. Bill believes in scanning at very high resolution and also posting very high quality images. He does this stuff all on his own buck folks, so we all owe him a big thank you!

You can see many other things that he has posted on the Cayuga County GenWeb site at http://www.rootsweb.com/~nycayuga/ . (My vote for the very “BEST” GenWeb site in the U.S.)

Bill has been posting a huge amount of modern day aerial photographs of Central New York locations. These will give you a very nice picture of the lands of your ancestors. Incidentally, I’m sure he pays for all of the flight time as well as the excellent photography.

One of our newest subscribers to the Newsletter is Charles Wadhams of California who I remember meeting back in 1992 at the Syracuse Library. We shared some CUSHMAN family information from the Old Cambridge District (OCD) and he has since published an article in the NEHGR straightening out a couple of previously published CUSHMAN genealogies.

Cities, Towns, Villages, Hamlets and Postal Zones

Here is some basic information on the physical and political
divisions of New York State.  This is crucial information for
researchers in order to determine where one might find certain
records.

This is from Walter Greenspan - Soyamaven@aol.com –
Used with permission.

NYS Geographic Glossary

Cities, Towns, Villages, Hamlets and Postal Zones in
New York State

New York State is divided into counties.

County

A county is a municipal corporation, a subdivision of the state,
created to perform state functions; a "regional" government. 
All counties are divided into cities, towns and Indian
reservations.

City

A city is a unique governmental entity with its own special
charter.  Cities are not sub-divided, except into neighborhoods,
which are informal geographic areas.

Town

A town is a municipal corporation and encompasses all territory
within the state except that within cities or Indian reservations. 
Towns can be sub-divided into villages and hamlets.

Village

A village is a general purpose municipal corporation formed
voluntarily by the residents of an area in one or more towns
to provide themselves with municipal services.  The pattern of
village organization is similar to those of a city.  A village
is divided into neighborhoods, which are informal geographic
areas.

Hamlet

A hamlet is an unincorporated area in one or more towns that
is governed at-large by the town(s) it is in.  A hamlet is
divided into neighborhoods, which are informal geographic areas.

Postal Zone "City" and "Town"

A postal zone "City" and "Town" is an administrative district
established by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the mail. 
Postal zone "City" and "Town" may not (but are encouraged to)
conform to municipal or community borders.  Thus, postal zone
location does not always determine city, village or hamlet location.

Please be aware:  In many areas of New York State, the problem
of non-conforming postal zones leads to a situation where the
majority of places have a different community name in their
mailing address than the community where that place is actually
located.

We have several hundred more subscribers today. Very busy with email and confirmations. Keep them coming, there will be a synergy developed with a huge readership. We already have many new people contributing thoughts, data and ideas.

Bless you all.

Ps: I did snow-blow the driveway today so we are no longer snow bound.

Dick