ResearchBuzz

London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital has launched a Web site containing more than 50 years’ worth of patient records. The new site covers over 84,000 child patients who were treated between 1852 and 1914. You can search it at http://www.smallandspecial.org/ .

From the front page you can search by first name, surname, and approximate year of birth. (There is a far more extensive search available at http://www.smallandspecial.org/search but you’ll have to register to use it.) I did a search for Dickens and got 18 results, including Dickenson as well as Dickens.

The results are in a table that shows date of admission, sex, name, diseases, and registration district. There are no hyperlinks on the table but you can choose a name and click on it for more details. Additional information includes admitting doctor, ward, and length of stay. If you register on the site (registration is free) you’ll get even more information including case notes, residence of the patient, and outcome of the disease. (Not all data is available for all records.)

This is a very interesting set of data for historical or genealogical research. Definitely worth a look!

Genealogical record site FamilySearch is looking for 10,000 volunteers who can read both English and Spanish for a massive indexing project of Mexican, Argentine, and other Latin American records.

The first project will be the Mexican census of 1930. When completed (the current estimate is a year), the index of the census will be freely available online and linked to the original census images at FamilySearch.org. The census contains a variety of information including birth year, religion, birthplace, and occupation.

Volunteering does not take up a huge amount of time — volunteers can spend as little as 30 minutes a week doing indexing. To get more information about volunteering, visit http://www.familysearchindexing.org/. In addition to registering to volunteer you can also check out a list of upcoming projects which includes US census states as well as Latin American projects.

Family tree searchers out there? I heard about a site this week that lets you check for information on ancestors you’re searching.

Genealogy Agent, at http://www.genealogyagent.com , allows you to monitor genealogy sites for ancestors who might be proving a bit difficult to find. After you register (registration is free) you can enter details about your ancestor including nicknames and birth and death year (or range if you don’t know exactly).

Genealogy Agent will monitor several genealogy sites using different combinations of the information you’ve given, and send you e-mail reports when there’s new data to be had. Monitoring two ancestors for one year is free; additional ancestors cost $14.60 a year.

I’m going to have to test drive this to see what kind of results I get. But I did want to point out two good things about this site. First is the excellent FAQ that points to resources outside Genealogy Agent for certain types of searches. Second is the Network Sites listing, which is a category index of genealogy site recommended by registered users. Nice descriptions.

The person who put this site together, Doug Barry, has done several other potentially interesting genealogy sites, including Genealogy Search Help, Family Tree Searcher, and Genealogy Search Advice.