The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
The following is an announcement from ProQuest, Inc.:
The ever-expanding ProQuest is growing further: the publisher announced November 8 that it is digitizing the complete run of The Atlanta Constitution from its beginnings in 1861 to 1925 as part of its ongoing Historical Newspapers project, which already sports The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times.
Two historical documents earlier pulled from a Sotheby's auction because of questions over their ownership are returning to the auction block. The two printed handbills, or broadsides, that helped spread news of the Texas Revolution were among four items pulled by the auction house this summer after concerns that they may have been stolen from Texas state archives years earlier.
Thanks to the Maine Acadian Culture Preservation Act, a 92-page report on the history and culture of Maine's upper St. John Valley is now available to everyone. Acadian Culture in Maine, a 1994 publication of the National Park Service can now be viewed on the Internet because of the efforts of the University of Maine at Fort Kent Acadian Archives.
The Long Island Forum, the area's oldest historical periodical, may not get a chance to write its own final chapter. Instead of receiving the quarterly magazine in October, about 1,500 subscribers got a letter saying the 66-year-old Forum suspended distribution because its publisher, Friends for Long Island's Heritage, plans to file for bankruptcy.
There are discussions with potential new publishers. Full details are available on Newsday.com.
You've likely heard it said, "Back in the good old days, people were much shorter. They were old at thirty-nine and dead at forty."
Maybe not. Such claims have circulated for years, but Carolyn Freeman Travers, Research Manager at Plimoth Plantation, disagrees. She also has evidence to back up her claims.
Karen Pallarito has a suggestion: after you and your family have finished your second helping of mashed potatoes and gravy this Thanksgiving, you might want to take Grandpa aside and ask him about his cholesterol.
The 25th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will be held 10 - 15 July 2005 in Las Vegas, Nevada. You might want to mark those dates now on your calendar.
Lloyd Bockstruck is a well-know genealogy expert who writes and lectures frequently. Lloyd is one of the leading genealogy experts of our time. He heads the genealogy division at the Dallas Public Library and also writes a weekly genealogy column in the Dallas Morning News. I was saddened to receive the following e-mail from Sammie Lee, Library Associate in the Genealogy Section of the Dallas Public Library:
Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, Mass., Nov. 8 - Plimoth Plantation is proud to announce that it has been awarded two grants totaling $314,000 from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The first of the IMLS grants awarded to Plimoth Plantation will be used to create a new visitor orientation film. The other will be used to create a program called The Plymouth Ancestors Project, in partnership with the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), which is designed to encourage visitors to become personally involved in historical investigation. Both grants require the museum to raise additional funds from corporate and private donors.
Writing in the Spectrum, an online newspaper in St. George, Utah, Jennifer Weaver describes a number of the ways in which present-day scam artists operate. Several of the scams have been mentioned in this newsletter in times past, but one was new to me. Even worse, it involves the use of the FamilySearch.org online genealogy database operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
RootsMagic was introduced early last year. Since then, it has become one of the most popular Windows genealogy programs of today. The program is written and supported by Bruce Buzbee. Bruce also has written a book on the finer points of the program's use. Who better to write about a program than the programmer who created it? I decided to find out this week.
In 1663 Samuel Morse and his family built a house on land he inherited from his grandfather, who settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1635. It's hard to believe that the thriving town of Medfield in Boston's "metrowest" area was once a thickly wooded wilderness, let alone that the site of Samuel's house would remain undisturbed for over 300 years! Samuel's house and many others were burned during King Philip's Indian War (1675-1676), and the land he had worked so hard to clear was abandoned and gradually became woodland again. The property was left undisturbed until Samuel's descendants visited it this week, along with a professional archaeologist.
Women in ancient Rome were expected to suffer for beauty. They suffered even more than they realized because of the lead content found in their beauty creams. The lead was part of the tin oxide from Cornwall, England, that was used in face cream to give Roman women a ghostly complexion. Unfortunately, lead in the face cream affected the brain, slowly driving these women mad.
A wind-blown fire gutted the nearly 300-year-old Prince George's County, Maryland courthouse Wednesday, but was beat back before reaching a modern wing where records are kept and trials are held. The old courthouse had been undergoing a $27 million renovation; hose taps and sprinklers in the old building had been disconnected by workers.
Finally, the courts are doing something about all the junk mail promoting various schemes and scams. This week Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison and Jessica DeGroot was fined $7,500.
Christopher Andrew Phillips was arrested this week and charged on four counts of fraud. Federal prosecutors have accused him of hacking into a University of Texas database in spring 2003 and downloading 55,200 names, along with Social Security numbers and other private information. One official had characterized it as the University's worst online information theft to date.
Jeff Bowen has recently released two new volumes: Eastern Cherokee Census, Cherokee, North Carolina, 1915-1922, Taken by Agent James E. Henderson. Volume I of the census transcriptions covers the years 1915 and 1916 while Volume II covers 1917 and 1918.
Michael Canning William John Keith, the 13th Earl of Kintore, recently passed away at the age of 65. He and his father James, the 12th earl, whom he succeeded in 1989, were instrumental in promoting Clan Keith internationally, appointing a hereditary sennachie to preserve Keith genealogy.
According to the current edition of Circulation, deaths caused by cardiac valve diseases seem to run in families. The study found that first-degree relatives of people who died of mitral valve disease -- siblings, parents, or children -- were 2.5 times more likely to die of it as well. Meanwhile, second-degree relatives of people who died of mitral valve disease were 67 percent more likely to die of the same cause.
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