The 1950 census will be released to the public on April 1, 2022. Are you ready? This free, members-only, one-hour Maryland Genealogical Society (MGS) webinar will tell you what you need to know about the 1950 federal census, which will be available on the special National Archives 1950 census website. We'll review the questions that were asked, the interesting innovations and changes the Census Bureau made during this census, the Indian Reservation Schedules, differences between the 1940 and 1950 censuses, and much more!

Our speaker Claire Kluskens, digital projects archivist and genealogy/census subject matter expert at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), blogs about the 1950 census at the History Hub.  She spearheaded the completion of over 330 NARA microfilm publications and currently works on projects that provide digital access to records in the online National Archives Catalog.

After the census presentation Q & A session, we'll also have a short overview of the benefits of MGS membership, including valuable tools and resources on the MGS web site.

 

 

Speaker:  Mike Noble

 

Description: I’m part of a group of 30 or so people with the same last name, Noble, who discovered that we were all related via DNA.  We began communicating with one another via e-mail and soon discovered that we were unable to identify a common ancestor.  Several of us knew our trees contained matches with one or more others, but most did not, so we decided to merge their resources and search for the elusive MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestor).  One project recently undertaken is family tree matching, whereby the ancestors named Noble in each person’s family tree are compared with everyone else’s family trees to identify commonalities, or matches.  This is being accomplished by using a family tree program called Reunion to merge GEDCOM files provided by each person in the group.  To date, we have completed comparing 12 family trees for a total of 2314 unique Nobles, with some showing as many as 5 matches and some none and, so far, 4 trees showing no matches with any of the other 8.  My presentation will cover how we are doing this matching process, what the results show, and how we are presenting the results.

 

Speaker Biography:  Mike has been an active member of HCGS since 2014 and is responsible for Society Communications.
 

Background:  My first exposure to family history was in 1976 when my grandmother Noble died and my father gave me the family bible.  It is vintage 1857 and over the years relatives had written in the names and birth, marriage and death dates for many family members.  The first entry records the wedding of my great-great grandfather, Alexander C. Noble, to Matilda Messner in 1862.  From that, I got interested in finding out more about the people listed in the bible and their descendants and how they all were related to me.  By this time (1980s), all but one of my grandparents had died, so I questioned my parents and aunts and uncles for what family information they could remember.  It was pretty slow progress until the early 2000s when the Internet became available and enabled access to many records. 

The most surprising (and exciting) discovery was our family’s Irish heritage.  I found that my great-great grandfather Alexander had emigrated from Ireland when he was 13 and the family had a long history there.  Since then, I’ve traced my Noble line back to 1654 in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, my Schneider line (grandmother) back to the early 1700s in Prussia (now Germany), my Tompkins line (maternal grandfather) back to 1227 in Cornwall, England, and my Strother line (grandmother) back to the mid-1600s in the Rappahannock River area in Virginia.  However, the research never stops!