The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
I have written several times about OpenOffice.org, the free replacement for the $400+ Microsoft Office suite of programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more). I am very impressed with OpenOffice.org and am now using it more often than I use the Microsoft products. This article is being written in OpenOffice.org's word processor program. You can read my review of OpenOffice.org version 1.1, written two years ago here.
Now the prestigious PC Magazine has reviewed the beta version of OpenOffice.org 2.0. They like it so much that they awarded it four stars (out of a maximum of five) in their rating system. That's high praise indeed.
Heredis is the most popular Macintosh genealogy program in France and a number of other countries. It combines an excellent user interface along with a powerful database, excellent printed reports and a "3D Family Tree" that is unlike anything else I have ever seen in a genealogy program. You can read my review of Heredis for Macintosh OS X here.
This newsletter has carried several articles over the years about the life expectancy of CD-ROM disks created on home computers. In short, the news is not good for genealogists who wish to record data once and then store it for many years.
John Cardinal keeps updating his outstanding program, Second Site. This program provides an excellent method of publishing your data on the web in HTML format. Second Site has more features and provides more control than any GEDCOM-based method of web publication. It works in conjunction with The Master Genealogist, one of the leading Windows genealogy programs.
Wouldn't it be nice to be born with an inherited title, a gift from your ancestors? You could live a life of luxury, be recognized as someone special everywhere you went and have a seat in the House of Lords. Right? Well, maybe not.
I attended the annual Family History Fair in New York City last year and had a great time. It was a high-energy affair: crowded and with something going on almost all the time. Today I received the announcement for this year's edition:
Family History Fair to be Held October 16 During 17th Annual New York Archives Week
The following is an announcement from Willow Bend Books / Heritage Books:
New Position Announcements at Heritage Books
Craig R. Scott, CGRS, President and CEO of Heritage Books, Inc. (dba Willow Bend Books), has announced the addition of a marketing division to support the company's publishing business. Heritage Books sells books and CDs through two online stores, www.WillowBendBooks.com and www.HeritageBooks.com, and a catalog mail-order business.
A few months ago, I created a free online service for genealogists, called the Encyclopedia of Genealogy. While I'm the person who created the "shell" of this new service, newsletter readers like you write much of the information within it. If you missed the announcement, you can read it here.
The Maryland Genealogical Society and the Virginia Genealogical Society are co-sponsoring a conference in Frederick, Maryland that sounds like it will be a good one. The October 7 and 8 session features some interesting presentations by a number of well-known genealogy experts:
Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist is in the news a lot these days. His latest problems involve the sale of stock in a company founded by his ancestors. The latest details of his problems can be found here.
Senator Frist certainly should know something about his family: he wrote the definitive Frist genealogy book.
The following is an announcement from Six Generations Publishing:
The monarchic structure of standard playing cards with King, Queen and Jack is now breaking apart by an Alaskan game designer who invented a new "democratic" deck with a 64-person family in six generations. When Ted Soloview, a graphic designer from Alaska was searching his genealogy with the roots of Russian, German, and Ukrainian ancestors, he caught an idea that anybody's triangle-looking family tree could be used to create a new card game.
A San Antonio genealogy buff who "just had to do something to help," used her computer to track down the family of Ada Roppolo, a New Orleans nursing home resident evacuated to San Antonio last weekend with no medical records or history. New Orleans medical evacuee Ada Roppolo's background is no longer a mystery. The 88-year-old Alzheimer's patient had been in a Kenner, La., nursing home that was crippled by Hurricane Katrina.
The following is from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Archives' web site:
Massachusetts officials started recording the names of immigrants who arrived by ship in January of 1848, a procedure which continued until July of 1891, when federal records-keeping programs superseded those of the state. Although immigrants arrived at numerous Massachusetts ports, the Archives holds manifests for BOSTON ONLY. These are arranged chronologically according to the date when the ship arrived in port. The Archives holds the original manifests as well as the only microfilm copy available of these Passenger manifests. This collection has been cataloged as HS3.02/1990X (Registers of passengers arriving in Massachusetts ports) in the finding aids of the Massachusetts Archives.
I have mentioned Bob Quintin several times in this newsletter. I first met him about fifteen years ago when he had a small business reprinting old French-Canadian genealogy books. He later became the first person that I know of who entered the business of republishing old books on CD-ROM disks. His catalog expanded far beyond French-Canadian works and now contains more than 10,000 titles.
The following sad words were written by Sharon Sergeant of ancestralmanor.com:
Genealogy too often is practiced by simply collecting names and dates. To be blunt, that is not family history. By only collecting names and dates, many so-called genealogists are ignoring the wealth of information available about their ancestors. In fact, we all should study the lives of our ancestors in order to understand the times in which they lived and the factors that shaped their lives.
Scholarly genealogy journals have published true family histories for years. Examples include the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, The American Genealogist, the National Genealogical Society Quarterly and many others. These academic-quality publications typically contain compiled genealogies, case studies, essays on new methodology and little-known resources, critical reviews of current books, and previously unpublished source materials. Each such journal is full of citations to the sources of the data published.
I wonder what our Celtic ancestors would say about Utilikilts.
The Utilikilt is a rugged modern take on the Celtic kilt. The garment - made in Seattle by the company of the same name - adds a twist of practicality to the traditional kilt. Made with tough fabric and accessories such as cargo pockets and a hammer loop, the garment has attracted customers ranging from marine biologists to construction workers, who often point to the comfort factor as their reason for donning the pleats. About 12,000 kilts are sold each year, said Steven Villegas, the company's founder and owner.
The following is an announcement from MyFamily.com:
PROVO, Utah, Sept. 21 -- MyFamily.com, Inc., the leading online network connecting families, present and past, announced today that it has acquired substantially all of the assets of Heritage Makers, L.L.C., a Springville, Utah, company that helps people discover, preserve, and celebrate their family heritage. Founded in 2004, Heritage Makers is a direct selling organization with more than 1,200 independent "Heritage Consultants" that markets custom published products through in-home presentations called "Heritage Celebrations." Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Anyone involved in placing census records online can tell you that scanning the records is the easy part. The labor-intensive part of the job is the creation of indexes - databases of names, dates, and locations of the original data. The only practical method of making the indexes is to have humans spend thousands of hours in front of their computers, reading hand-written records and transcribing the records into a database.
In most cases, only commercial companies can afford to pay the expenses for this sort of labor. Those companies then charge fees to genealogists viewing the transcribed records in an attempt to recover expenses, hopefully even making a profit. Now a group of volunteers is undertaking the huge task of extracting U.K. census records and placing them online on a free web site, available to genealogists all over the world.
Aiming to avoid the "identity loss" of the Gulf Coast, the National Archives and Records Administration authorized the release of up to $25,000 in emergency grants to state archives in the hurricane-battered region for disaster assessment and recovery activities.
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, Italy, when he noticed a prominent oval, shaded form more than 500 meters long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.
I have written several times about OpenOffice.org, the free replacement for the $400+ Microsoft Office suite of programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more). I am very impressed with OpenOffice.org and am now using it more often than I use the Microsoft products. This article is being written in OpenOffice.org's word processor program. You can read my review of OpenOffice.org version 1.1, written two years ago here. 
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