Brazil Civil Records Day 3

I am  now 1 more day in it, and about 2000 images deep with nothing to show for it just yet.  I was able to move from my initial searching of the 1970's to 1990ish.  From talking with a family member I was able to get a rough estimate of the death date for both of the people I am searching for.

The first one the believe passed around 1990.  I have searched so far from Oct 89 - Mar 91 with no luck.  I will now move back wards from 89, and continue upwards from 91 to see if I can find a match.

The second one passed around 2002 they think, once again I will start with everything in the 2002 range and then go back and forth 1 year at a time in hopes of finding a match.

Hopefully they will be able to get a more accurate timeline, but right now this is better then what I started with, now I am just hoping that they actually passed away where they said they did or I am looking in the wrong place all together.

FamilySearch Update for 10 Nov

Only ten days into the month of November and FamilySearch has been hitting the index's hard.   They have added or updated 41 titles since the 1st of November.  If you remember there were 113 updates for October, 127 for September, and 47 in August.

I know its not even halfway through the month but I would guess that we will see the same consistency as the last two month with about 100 updates for November.  We may see less as there are two holidays during the month of November, but we will see.

The most recent update that I am happy about is the Slovakia Church Records while it is not yet complete at 8 million indexed (only showing about 6 KONDRC out of what should be about 100), but its a good start and something for me to watch.

I keep looking out for the records for Brazil, and Portugal for my current project but till then I can look through the images myself in hopes of finding matches.

Below are the current updates since the 1st of November.

Searching Brazil Civil Records Day 2

I am now on Day 2 or Day 3 of searching through the Death Record images for Brazil Civil Registration in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.   As of right now I have gone through 4 image sets and about 1200 images for the years 1970-1972.  I still have plenty more to go through as there are over 11 million images of which only 30K have been indexed.

I am still hopeful that I will find the needle in the haystack of images (2 in particular).  I may find more along the way, but I am mostly focusing on just the two names, as I can scan an image real quick focusing on looking for a Maria or a Francisco.

Now that I found that great little app that I talked about yesterday FastFilm, I have been able to triple the amount of images that I can look at in a day.  I think the first day I was at about 100 images and I thought that was a good number.   After using the app I was able to scan through about 300-500 images in one day. And this is only doing it about 1 to 2 hours a night.  I bet I could knock out more images if spent more time, but I think that 1-2 hours is good enough in this search.

Review: FastFilm

For the past few days I have been searching record by record of the Brazil Civil Registration Death records in search of matches.  From what I can tell this have not been indexed yet, but there are plenty of images online to go through.

Searching each image online takes time, from loading the images, zooming in, moving to the next ect.  I started to Google ways to either reduce the image size so I can do quick looks at the images (I knew where on the image I needed to look), and current image loading time was taking a minute or so.  The other option was a way to have them loaded locally.

It was easy to find the Java app called FastFilm which is used to download image sets from FamilySearch.  I was able to download a batch of the record and search through about 100 of them in 2 minutes.  

I am not sure how FamilySearch feels about a program like this, but this could help tremendously in my searching by moving the files offline.  I have deleted the current image set that was downloaded earlier, and starting to look through the next batch.

It also creates a text file that you can use for your source citation, which at the moment for me I don't need unless I actually find a valid match in this.  Only about 1 million more images to view, we can hope to find a match.

I would recommend this program if you are doing image searching through batch's on FamilySearch as it is a lot quick offline then online, and its a very simple program to use.

Brazil Civil Registrations: Death Records

Continuing with my Brazil tree I am searching for death records for two people that I know that passed away in Nova Iguaçu, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.  The issue is that I don't know when they passed, and as I am learning to read the documents this should be interesting.

The documents for Nova Iguaçu, Rio de janeiro, Brazil have not been indexed but it shows that about 11 Million records are online for Civil Registration, not sure how many that leaves to Nova Iguaçu but its a starting point.

The items I do know are that he was born in 1907, she was born in 1916.  He came to Brazil in 1954, and she came in 1958.  They were married before the came to Brazil, and all their children were also born before arriving in Brazil.  Trying to get a better window of when they may have passed but currently I would put it at anywhere from 1970 to close to present day (which if it was anywhere in  the last 10 years I think I would have gotten a little bit better info).

So I am currently going image by image starting with 1970, first batch is 300 images and I am currently at image 100, should not take took long to go all the way to present day.  Hopefully soon I will get an update to narrow the search down better.

If anyone has any idea's on what to do to try and narrow the search, or other things I maybe able to find online to narrow it down that would be appreciated.  As this is not my family, I am waiting on information from them to be able to do some more searching.

Finding a needle in a haystack of Immigration Records.

After cracking the wall yesterday with my Portuguese and Brazilian Tree's I decided I needed to keep at it today.  My first idea was to start slowly and go image by image in the Brazilian Immigration index, as only about 900K out of 2M have been indexed.

It didn't take to long before I was getting tired of going through them.  Yes I don't have patients some times, so I decided my next course of action was to use the index and filter by first name.  This brought it down to about 340K names (not a good start).

I have her full name and birth date but up until today I was getting no where looking for her.  With the two surnames with her name it was hard to find her, so next added her birth year which dropped it down to 1,800 names.

I then added one of her last names (the one with out the DA in front of it), figured that might be the best bet, and from my current accounts it was her final last name.  Well this narrowed it down to 33 names, but none of them were her.

So I was thinking what to do next and decided to do it by birth years again.   Just maybe the information I got wrong was off by a year or so I decided to go up and down in 1 year increments to see if I could find anything.  The first one I used was 1918 which had 41 results all of which were wrong.

My next year I used was 1916 which resulted in 47 names, with the fourth one being the correct one.  What was interesting was that the format of the surnames was backwards to what was listed on the page, and her birthday was 1 year off from what I had listed (not a big deal).

This lead to her parents, and from there her two brothers.  So three new names added to the database, that is a total of seven new ancestors added to this users tree in two days, not a bad weekend.  

Next will be trying to narrow down their death, I have the place, and can roughly narrow it down from 1960 to almost present day.  I am sure with a little more information I can filter it even more.

Brazil Immigration found

I wanted to give FamilySearch another go today with my searching for Portuguese and Brazilian genealogy.  Since I have started researching Brazil/Portugal there have been no updates to the databases, (or at least they have not advertised any).

On the first try I found a match, one possible reason was that we had finally figured out the last name for him.  At first we had the last names backwards.  Once I found him (x2) in the immigration to Brazil from Portugal for 1950, and 1954 I was able to get his parents names.

Once I found his parents names I found out his brother's name also.  The one problem that I am having at the moment is that I know that he was married, and I have what I believe is his wife's name, but I have been unable to find her at the moment.  

Most of the information is just word of mouth so any or all parts of the names could be wrong. The immigration card only states that he was married, not the name of the spouse.  Additionally his children I believe were all over 18 when he traveled (or they are listed with the mother, because they are not on his card).

So currently I can go through 2 million pictures in a row or try and figure out some way to narrow down were to look.  One issue is that the Brazil Immigration is not broken down by years on the website, it looks like its just broken down in groups with random names (there is has to be a reason they are grouped just have not figured it out yet).  

So its a good night for research, just need to hit it a little harder.

Obituary Hunter on Ancestry.com

I was playing around with my Ancestry.com settings and noticed something called Obituary Hunter.  I have never heard of this or seen any other posts in reference to this.

It is located under My Alerts under the username tab on the top right of the page.   Once you click My Alerts its at the bottom of the page.

Currently I have only setup 1 Obituary Hunter as a test since I have never used it before.
Below is how you setup you Obituary Hunter, I chose to only use a last name for my initial one.