Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Phasing out Printed Books?

This may be a sign of the future: an Arizona high school is set to become one of the first ebook-only schools as it prepares to hand out laptops to 350 students this fall. The school will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles in place of printed textbooks.

PBS to feature "African American Lives"

PBS, the U.S. public television network, has announced the production of a four-hour documentary called "African-American Lives."

Family Maps

If you have ancestors who owned land in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Wisconsin, you will be interested in a new series of books from Arphax Publishing Company.

These are public land grant states where the federal government sold farmland to private individuals, primarily for their use to homestead and improve the land. That is, each purchaser obtained land at reasonable prices if he or she would inhabit and cultivate the property. The government's records of these land sales often can provide genealogical clues not found elsewhere.

Preserving Records in Cyberspace

The current edition of Federal Computer Week has an interesting article by Aliya Sternstein that describes the storage of records of great interest to future genealogists. Sternstein first describes the plans by the U.S. National Records and Archives Administration (NARA) to choose a design for the $500 million Electronic Records Archives project, which the agency hopes to have in place by 2011. That's a half billion dollars to store electronic records in a proper archive and it won't be fully operational for another six years.

(+) Protecting Your Genealogy Data for Years to Come

Genealogists have long relied on paper for storing their genealogy publications. While useful, paper does not last forever. Even the best acid-free paper will deteriorate someday. Even worse, today's printer inks and laser toners used to print on that paper will disappear many years earlier. Suppose, then, that you print out your records on the finest quality archival paper today and put it away in a safe deposit box for posterity. Within ten or twenty years, that data may become unreadable as the printed characters slowly fade away. The cruel irony is that high-quality, acid-free paper is worthless if it looks blank!

Technology Helps Illinois Cemetery's Role in History

Gone soon will be the typewritten and longhand directions to gravesites that's existed as the cemetery's database since it was founded in 1889. Thanks to a computer software purchase, Bluff City, Illinois will become a place where people can access genealogy information from anywhere in the world, without calling or stopping by the office.

2005 FGS Conference in Salt Lake City

A genealogy conference will be held in a few weeks in Salt Lake City. Of course, any national genealogy event held in that city will attract a large crowd. However, this event looks like it will be the largest genealogy meeting held anywhere in North America this year.

Lutheran Roots Genealogy Exchange

The new Lutherans Online Lutheran Roots Genealogy Exchange helps those who wish to trace their family roots, especially those with Lutheran ancestors. There are two features to this area of Lutherans Online:

Family Tree Legends version 5.0 Announced

Pearl Street Software has just announced the release of a major update to the company's flagship product, Family Tree Legends. I have reviewed this program in the past and was very impressed with its power and ease of use. Now the company has added several desirable features.

Create PDF and HTML Documents at No Charge

Some years ago, Adobe invented "Portable Document Format," or PDF, files. That format has since become the most popular method of representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents.

A PDF file can contain any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device-independent and resolution-independent format. These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, color, and images.

(+) Genealogy Software for Macintosh

Apple may own only about 5% of the personal computer marketplace, but its customers are very enthusiastic about the company's products. Macintosh users are among the most loyal and passionate customers that any computer producer could ever have. There are several good reasons for this: the Macintosh is very easy to use, very secure, and very reliable. I am sure there are many people at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond who are jealous of Apple's superior operating system, application programs, and hardware.

Newsletters, Spam, and RSS: Get the Baby Out of the Bath Water

What are the two biggest problems facing email users today? Ironically they are: 

1. spam
2. spam filters

 Unsolicited email, or spam, is flooding our in-boxes. Unfortunately, while trying to fix the spam problem, spam filters are often creating worse problems: frequently they are actually blocking some of the mail we want to receive, even (gasp!) this newsletter. It's a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Gene Hunters flock to Amish Country

Insular, inbred communities such as the Ashkenazi Jews and several Indian tribes can be a bonanza of genetic information for researchers. Now the Amish and Mennonite communities in the United States are proving to be fertile ground as well for scientists who want to better understand the nature of genetic diseases and how rare illnesses occur more frequently in such closed-off communities.

International (Surname) Family Yearbook from MORPHCORP

NOTE: This is an updated version of a story I first wrote in 2003. The company described apparently is still very active, according to recent reports. It seems appropriate to republish this information now.

A company in Colorado has been selling "family yearbooks" for years. They send advertisements for the "International [Surname] Family Yearbook" or similar titles. In this case, substitute your last name in place of "[Surname]." For instance, an advertisement sent to a person named Smith would be advertising "The Smith Family Yearbook" while someone named Clark would receive an advertisement for "The Clark Family Yearbook."

(+) Add a Search Engine to Your Web Site

I have read claims that there are more genealogy-related pages on the World Wide Web than for any other topic. Think about it: millions and millions of pages describe the lives of those who lived years ago. All this information is available at your fingertips right now, most of it at no cost. Of course, you do have the problem of finding the information you seek within those millions and millions of pages.

(+) Backing Up in Real-Time

Every computer owner needs to make frequent backups. Time and again I have received e-mails from newsletter readers stating, "My computer crashed and I lost all the genealogy information I have collected. What can I do?" Of course, the only correct answer is "Go to your backup." All too often the reply comes back, "I don't have a backup."

Missouri Law Could Chill Records Access

Writing in his blog called "GeneaBlogie," Sanford Gines Bowie III offers the following:

In May, the Missouri legislature passed SB 420. This complex bill does a number of things, but relevant here, it prohibits the posting of certain information about public officials on the Internet without the consent of the officials. Read more about SB 420 here [at http://archive.columbiatribune.com/2005/jun/20050609comm001.asp]. See what the St Louis Post-Dispatch had to say on the matter. Jackson County and other local governments in Missouri contend that the type of information in the Jackson County records site would have to be removed under SB 420. They also argue that the bill would impose tremendous management burdens on local records managers. Jackson County Executive Katheryn Shields has written this letter to Governor Matt Blunt, urging him to veto the bill.

There is much more to Bowie's article. You can read the entire article at http://geneablogie.blogspot.com.

AnyBirthday.com: R.I.P.?

AnyBirthday.com is (or was) a controversial web site that allowed anyone to search a free database of well over 135 million records for the names, birth dates, and zip codes of almost everyone born in the United States. The site was cited by many as being an invasion of privacy as well as a source of information for those who wish to commit identity theft. Now the web site appears to be dead.

Canadian Directories / Annuaires canadiens

The following is an announcement from Library and Archives Canada:

(le français suit)

Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce the launch of phase two of the Canadian Directories site (a project funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage through its Canadian Culture Online initiative). The addition of 80 new directories to our growing database brings a total of 95 searchable directories to the site.

UC Berkeley's Transportation Futuristics

It is always enjoyable to speculate about the future. Of course, our ancestors did the same. They made predictions about life in the twenty-first century. Some of the most interesting ones were about transportation.