News & Announcements

Friends and fellow genies, at long last, the new Howard County Genealogical Society website has been turned on, implemented, put to work and made available for your use and enjoyment. Our venerable old site has been converted, our cache of genealogical files and information have been moved from old to new, your membership accounts have been transferred and we are ready.  Same location as the original – https://hcgsmd.org – but with a new face and presence.

Is it really that different?  Oh, yes!  You will see the differences right away.  More graphics, dropdown menus, login on the right side like most new websites, reorganized and rearranged materials, better help screen and directories, easier viewing on tablets and phones, modernized privacy, safety and security.   And maybe, just maybe, a few more surprises.  We think you’ll like the new site.  It should be easier to find things and easier to use.  All the coming events located in one place.   So, you’ve been to the new site and some features were missing?  Well, yes, that may be true.  We evaluated each component and either moved it, will delay it a little, have retired it, or it may have just changed shape and function a little with some new technology.  

Here are a couple things you should know:

1. Your HCGS account and logon account name have transferred intact.  Hopefully, you have remembered what that account name is, as well as the email addressed that you have on file, because …
2. The one BIG TASK you will have to complete, first thing, is to RESET YOUR PASSWORD.  To do the reset, select “Forgot your password” at the login, and very carefully follow the prompts to reset your password.  Enter the new password, make sure it matches the confirmation password exactly, then hit ENTER.  Now you’re ready to go!  Just remember: You have to use the email address and the username you have on file.  If you don’t, the password reset won’t work.
3. One note:  The payment system, PayPal, still needs to be reset.  When they rewrote that module, they retired some old PayPal functions that PayPal themselves had stopped using a while back.  That means that we have to re-create that connection.  There is a little voodoo involved, I think, but we will have that done shortly! Stand by!

Now, we THINK we’ve removed, corrected, and cleaned up the glitches, gremlins, snags and errors that were strewn about as we built this site, but we may have missed some.  If you encounter a mistake, or something that doesn't look right, please let us know  - send a note to your Web Admin at webmaster@hcgsmd.org.  We’ll look into it for you.  

The Library of Congress has recently set up a new website called Chronicling America" that makes millions of digitized newspaper pages freely available to the public.  The link is https://loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america. A product of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) and jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Chronicling America program archives and publishes digitized pages from historical U.S. newspapers, which currently date back to the 1730s. It is a vital resource as the Library seeks to reach more communities and constituencies than ever before.  As part of the upgrade, the team also migrated an existing directory of more than 150,000 descriptive newspaper title records into a separate, searchable collection available on loc.gov. Users can access this content on the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries site, which offers a searchable index of newspapers published in the U.S. since 1690, along with the names of libraries that may hold copies.