Seattle Genealogical Society Tip of the Week

by Charles Hansen

TIP OF THE WEEK –NOW WITH CLOSED CAPTIONING
Legacy Family Tree Webinars has announced they will add the option of closed captioning to all their new webinars going forward. Also, the most popular 50 webinars on their platform, as well as the MyHeritage-specific webinars, have been captioned.

Geoff Rasmussen, founder and host of Legacy Family Tree Webinars says, “Captioning is an excellent way to make online education more accessible, and is also a benefit to non-native English speakers who struggle with spoken English, but have an easier time with written English”.

Beginning this year, they also have plans to host webinars in non-English languages, as well as translate English closed captions into select foreign languages.

Legacy Family Tree Webinars makes each new live webinar, and its recording, free to watch for the first 7 days. With a paid subscription, you get additional benefits, plus access to the library of past webinars, containing over 1,000 hours of quality genealogy education.  

To try out the newly implemented Closed Caption option, just click on the blue CC icon displayed in the right hand, bottom corner of the screen of the webinar.

Here is a link to some free webinars at Legacy Family Tree Webinars with the closed caption option:

https://familytreewebinars.com/mhlive2018

Followup to Closing Washington Vital Records

by Charles Hansen

First I want to thank everyone that had responded to the blog post last week that told of the proposed bill from the Washington State Health Department to close Washington state birth records for 100 years, and death, marriage and divorce records for 50 years. January 31st was the public hearing in the Washington State Senate Law and Justice Committee, here is the link to the bill number 5332 It also has a schedule for the next round which is the executive meeting for the committee where they can decide to amend the, kill the bill or pass it on to the full senate for a vote. The link above gives the times of the next hearing and a link to where you can watch the hearing either on TVW a on a Washington cable tv or the link to the live streaming of the hearing.

If you want to contact the members of the committee and let them know how crucial access to these records (and their indexes) are to us as genealogists, you can write them here:

Chairman: Pederson, Jamie (D) Jamie.Pedersen@leg.wa.gov
Vice chair: Dhingra, Manka (D) Manka.Dhingra@leg.wa.gov
Ranking member: Padden, Mike (R) Mike.Padden@leg.wa.gov
Holy, Jeff (R) Jeff.Holy@leg.wa.gov
Kuderer, Patty (D) Patty.Kuderer@leg.wa.gov
Salomon, Jesse (D) Jesse.Salomon@leg.wa.gov
Wilson, Lynda (R) Lynda.Wilson@leg.wa.gov
Staff Coordinator: Ford, Tim tim.ford@leg.wa.gov

The main reason the Health Department gave for locking up the records is identity theft, which has been proven does not happen from vital records being open. In the hearing five people spoke in favor of the bill since they would receive $3 more for each certified birth and death certificate they issued and all five said that they were loosing money issuing those certificates at $20 and so the extra $3 would be very welcome. Washington State Genealogical Society spoke on leaving the records open and if closed to make sure the informational copies of death certificates will have the cause of death. The health department said many people had asked that the cause of death not be shown on informational copies. The health department also said they were going to keep the indexes open and continue to send copies to the state archives to post online. Last person to testify was a lobbyist for the newspapers and he said that they usually did not use death certificates for cause of deaths that they would cover in a newspaper. If they covered a death they went right to the coroner or medical examiner for the cause of death. He also said if the cause of death was from cancer or some other hereditary disease that the cause of death should be on informational copies.

Notice not one person testifying said anything about how this proposed bill is needed to stop identity theft or how it is supposed to stop identity theft that comes from other sources.

The original blog post had 798 page views from I think every state in the United States, and 425 cities. One from Dublin Ireland and Melbourne Australia. We had 604 referrals from Facebook. On January 29th we had 313 page views on this one blog post. More than we usually get in a whole week on all our blog posts.

Friday Serendipity

by Charles Hansen

If you didn’t catch it last week, here it is again:

SUNNY JANE MORTON IS COMING TO SPOKANE
NEXT APRIL 6th for EWGS Spring Seminar

And who is Sunny Jane McClellan Morton, you rightfully ask?

Sunny Jane Morton is an internationally-known, award-winning writer, editor and speaker for the multibillion-dollar genealogy industry. She is a Contributing Editor at Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems Podcast, with more than 2.5 million downloads worldwide, and a Contributing Editor at Family Tree Magazine, the U.S.’ premiere publication for genealogy hobbyists. A popular speaker at events across the country (including RootsTech), Sunny is especially known for expertise in tracing U.S. ancestors, particularly in church records; her unique comparisons of the industry’s largest websites; and inspiring presentations on how to reconstruct and tell meaningful stories from the past. Sunny is the author of Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy, Genealogy Giants: Comparing the 4 Major Websites and the forthcoming How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records (working title), co-authored with Harold Henderson, CG. She is the Co-Editor of Ohio Genealogy News and winner of the prestigious NGS Newsletter Competition (2017) and writing awards from the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors. She holds degrees in history and humanities from Brigham Young University.

Stay tuned to www.EWGSI.org for more information. That’s the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society in Spokane. 

Wednesday Nostalgia

by Charles Hansen

Did you have an ancestor that helped take one of the U.S. censuses?

My grandfather, Henry Melville Potter, was an enumerator in his little town of Ashley, Illinois, for the 1910 census. This was his silver badge. I even had the little pocket notebook where he wrote down the census info for his neighbors in the town…… a clearly illegal thing to do but oh so fun to find today. And since the census was handwritten, I have several pages written in his handwriting which is also such fun.

If your (male) ancestor lived in a rural town, is it possible that he was a Census Taker for that town? Have you looked?

Seattle Genealogical Society Vital Records Closure

by Charles Hansen
 January 29, 2019

Members and Friends of Seattle Genealogical Society,

It has been brought to our attention by Virginia Majewski, President of Washington State Genealogical Society, as well as friends of SGS, Mary Kathryn Kozy, and Cyndi Ingle, that the Washington State Dept of Health is proposing changes to Vital Records access in our state that will adversely effect genealogists.  This bill is scheduled for a hearing before the Senate Law and Justice Committee on Thursday, Jan. 31, 2019 at 10 am. 

This proposal will : 
Place restrictions on release of records to the public
Place restrictions on who can request certified copies of documents
Place restrictions on information included on the documents 
WASGS has taken the position in bullet points below. It helps clarify what effect the proposed changes might have on you as a genealogist:
Vital Records are the backbone of our profession and hobby.
Access to these records is essential to our work and embargo periods to records are unnecessarily restrictive.
We support keeping all Vital Records open.
Access to vital records has not been demonstrated to increase the risk of identity theft.
We believe that keeping birth, marriage, divorce and death records open does more to prevent identity theft.
Keeping the cause of death on Informational Death Records is essential to genetic and forensic genealogists.
We support proposed changes to cover the cost for providing access to Vital Records.
Redaction of Social Security numbers on an Informational Copies of Vital Records is supported.
You may read the bill in its entirety here:  
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5332&year-2019&Initiative=False

You may read the WASGS blog on the subject here: 
http://wp.wasgs.org/2019/01/26/closing-access-to-washington-vital-records/
If you want to contact the members of the committee and let them know how crucial access to these records (and their indexes) are to us as genealogists, you can write them here:
Chairman: Pederson, Jamie (D) Jamie.Pedersen@leg.wa.gov
Vice chair: Dhingra, Manka (D) Manka.Dhingra@leg.wa.gov
Ranking member: Padden, Mike (R) Mike.Padden@leg.wa.gov
Holy, Jeff (R) Jeff.Holy@leg.wa.gov
Kuderer, Patty (D) Patty.Kuderer@leg.wa.gov
Salomon, Jesse (D) Jesse.Salomon@leg.wa.gov
Wilson, Lynda (R) Lynda.Wilson@leg.wa.gov
Staff Coordinator: Ford, Tim tim.ford@leg.wa.gov
Please submit your comments before Thursday!

Thank you for your time, 

Seattle Genealogical Society 

Monday Mystery

by Charles Hansen

Do we need an official Washington State CLAM? Why do we need an official Washington State Clam?

According to a recent bit in my paper (“Washington Legislature in Brief”) our Washington legislators “could declare the razor clam the official Washington state clam, if it can bet back an upstart challenge from the geoduck.”

This is a razor clam. I Googled images of both razor clam and geoduck and didn’t see a whole lot of difference in size or looks.

Yes, it’s a mystery to me why our paid-public-legislators, who have more vital work to do than they will ever have time for, are made to consider such interesting but non-essential stuff.

Tuesday Trivia

by Charles Hansen

Way, way back in 2004, The Spokesman Review (and likely newspapers all over the world) ran a story about Shrek the Sheep.

This was a sheep in New Zealand who avoided shearing roundup for five years and when finally found had a coat weighing nearly sixty pounds…… and as you see, his fleece was growing down over his eyes. The story alone was most interesting but the story was by our local religion editor and his point was that “nothing good happens to you in the long run when you stray from the flock.” 

Wenatchee Area Genealogical Society Meeting

by Charles Hansen

Monday, February 11Wenatchee Area Genealogical Society2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (Local society meetings)Douglas County PUD Auditorium1151 Valley Mall Parkway, East Wenatchee WAGS members and guests are invited to a round table discussion on”Your Research: from ‘the Pits’ to the Mountaintops!” where we will share, first, mistakes we have made; and second, things we did well in our research. Come and profit from others’ experiences!
For more information, call 509-782-4046, or visit the WAGS website (www.wags-web.org)