Another article that caught my eye on Kevin's Virginia Family Tree - a genealogy resource blog was his announcement of the creation of his new web-site, USA Family Tree, a genealogy resource to connect researchers with record sources, family history products and research services. It is a genealogy search site partnered with eBay that lists and categorizes family history related products offered on E-Bay.

A quick peek at USA Family Tree reveals that it promises to be one of those sites where you are never sure what you are going to find and will want to visit early and often. Bookmark this site and check it out. You don't want to take the chance on someone else out-bidding you on your great-great grandmother's family bible.

The other day while surfing the web, I stumbled upon Kevin's Virginia Family Tree - a genealogy resource. His article, What's up with Rootsweb and Ancestry?, regarding the controversy of Ancestry.com's assimilation of RootsWeb is what caught my eye.

In the article Kevin made the following observation:

If you look at Google trends, genealogy searches are falling off more each year. You cannot fault Ancestry for trying to expand their market reach in these trying times.

At first glance, I thought that can't be right. It sort runs counter to what I would have thought was growing trend in web searches. So I decided to follow-up on this and see for myself what Kevin was talking about. I visited Google Trends which describes itself as a place where you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics and you can see a snapshot of what's on the public's collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. Here I did a query on the keyword "genealogy" and saw for myself that since 2004 there has been a steady drop in searches for the keyword "genealogy". Interesting! I did not know that.

What is also interesting to note from the chart provided by Google is that in the section of the chart that tracks "news references" to "genealogy" is that there has been a significant of amount activity in the past two years (2007-2008) compared to the previous three years recorded. What's up with that?

From the Catholic News Service (CNS) dated May 2:

In an effort to block posthumous rebaptisms by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Catholic dioceses throughout the world have been directed by the Vatican not to give information in parish registers to the Mormons' Genealogical Society of Utah.

An April 5 letter from the Vatican Congregation for Clergy, obtained by Catholic News Service in late April, asks episcopal conferences to direct all bishops to keep the Latter-day Saints from microfilming and digitizing information contained in those registers.

The reason for this decision is "to prevent the Latter-day Saints from using records -- such as baptismal documentation -- to posthumously baptize by proxy the ancestors of church members."

According to Wikipedia:

"Baptism for the dead, vicarious baptism or proxy baptism is a religious practice of baptizing a living person on behalf of an individual who is dead; the living person is acting as the deceased person's proxy. So it is with this practice, an individual is baptized to give those beyond the grave the opportunity of baptism by proxy. It has been practiced since 1840 in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where it is also called temple baptism because it is performed only in dedicated temples. Advocates of this practice believe it is referred to in The New Testament (1 Cor. 15:29); it was forbidden by the Orthodox Church in the 4th century as an aberrant practice of heretical groups, and is not practiced in modern mainstream Christianity. Baptism for the dead is also practiced by several other groups in the Latter Day Saint movement."

For those of us who are not Mormons (such as myself - I am a non-practicing Catholic) and have a passionate interest in genealogy and the study of our family history, we have benefited greatly by the LDS belief in baptism by proxy. It is this practice that forms the basis for the Mormon's interest in genealogy. Members of the LDS Church are encouraged to seek out their genealogy. This genealogy research is then used as the foundation for their research in the Church's efforts to perform temple ordinances for as many deceased persons as possible. If the LDS had not shown such generous openness in sharing the records that they have collected and cataloged and made available through their Family History Library (FHL), modern genealogy would not be what it is today - it would still be a pastime pursuit of the privileged.

Below is a link to a table listing all of the Dobbs of Georgia that I have found to have served during the Civil War. The table is a list of all Georgia DOBBS that I have found listed on Ancestry.com's American Civil War Soldiers database. I have attempted to identify the one's whom I have documented in my database. Some I am certain of; others I am not so certain of.
Dobbs in the Civil War