Back on the Hunt!
I was recently contacted (via email) by Carl Matisse, a descendant of Albert Matisse who was mentioned by my grandmother (see first post in this blog).
To see what else we can dig up I joined Ancestry.com and have created two family trees. One tracing back from Daconta up to Matisse (hopefully) and one tracing up from Carl Matisse up to Matisse (hopefully).
Another mystery to solve is whether Eugene Matisse (Olimpia's father) was related to Albert and Carl as my grandmother suggest. One clue to that mystery is a 1913 NYC directory I found. See the image above:
You should notice that Eugenee (spelled wrong, plenty of other evidence supporting Eugene Matisse), Carl and Albert are all listed at E116th Street.
It would still be great to get Eugene's birth certificate. That would be the holy grail!
More soon...
- Mike
posted by Michael C. Daconta at
4/24/2010 02:39:00 PM
1 Comments:
Another resource that has just "opened up" in a big way is genealogy books in ebook format.
Amazon recently introduced its Kindle Unlimited program, which allows you to borrow and read as many Kindle ebooks as you like, for $9.95 a month. I wonder if genealogists have grasped what a godsend KU may be. Here's why:
In the genealogy section of the Kindle ebook store on Amazon, along with the how-to-climb-your-family-tree books, there's a huge number of reference and raw-data collections, from histories of specific families to ships' records, newspaper abstracts, etc. The problem with such books in the past has been that you didn't know until after you purchased one (whether a print or a digital copy) if it contained information relevant to your own research.
With Kindle Unlimited, this pig-in-a-poke problem vanishes.
Here's what you could do to further your research without gambling on books that may or may not have anything of use in them (to you). With a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you could borrow ten genealogy ebooks (the maximum allowed at one time). Then you could flip through them, or use your Kindle device's search feature, to find any information of use to you. If you don't find anything, then you can simply return them and borrow ten more.
I know that these days, there are tons of information for ancestor hunters available for free or for a subscription fee at the dedicated genealogy websites such as Ancestry.com.
But there's still a lot of data locked up in various small-press books and books by individuals writing their own family's story. Kindle Unlimited gives us genealogists a virtually cost-free way to unlock those books -- at least the ones that have been committed to ebook format (and you might be surprised how many there are).
By the way, you don't even need a Kindle device to read Kindle books. You can download a free Kindle reading app for your smartphone or laptop that will do the trick. (Also BTW, I do NOT work for Amazon.)
By
Steve, at 8/04/2014 04:23:00 PM
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