Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Yahoo to Start Scanning Books

Last December, Google created quite a stir when the company announced it would start scanning millions of books and make them available on the Internet. You can read about that in my article here. Now Yahoo says that it will also scan millions of books and already has several universities and two European archives lined up as partners.

Seventh-day Adventist Obituary Index

If your ancestors were members of the Seventh-day Adventist church, you will want to use a powerful database of obituaries. The Seventh-day Adventist Obituary Index is a subset of the Seventh-day Adventist Periodical Index, sponsored by the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Librarians.

BBC2 Renews "Who Do You Think You Are?"

BBC2 in the UK announced that a second series of Wall to Wall's factual personal genealogical format Who Do You Think You Are? will arrive on the network next year. New celebrities who will explore their ancestry on the TV series include: Stephen Fry, Jane Horrocks, Jeremy Paxman, Julian Clary, Gurinder Chadha (Director of Bend it Like Beckham), and Sheila Hancock.

MacPAF

MacPAF is a "work in progress." Not yet complete, MacPAF will be a family history and genealogy program for Macintosh OS X. Best of all, MacPAF will be free of charge.

Genealogy Tragedy in Erath, Louisiana

Hurricane Rita's winds did little damage in Vermilion Parish, but the surging water that the storm pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico and Vermilion Bay was a different story.  Flooding destroyed scores of homes on the edge of the marsh and pushed north of the coast up to Erath, where the air smelled of marsh muck and bleach days after the storm.

At the Acadian Museum, founder Warren Perrin pulled out stacks of Cajun genealogy books, history books, maps, and stacks of files with names like Truman Visits Abbeville Photographs, Vermilion Parish Railroads and Thibodeaux Family Genealogy.

Locating Colorado Cemeteries by GPS

The following article was written by newsletter reader Bobbi King:

There is an ambitious effort taking place in Colorado by a corps of volunteers who are using Global Positional Satellite (GPS) receivers to locate Colorado cemeteries. 

The Colorado Council of Genealogical Societies published a directory of Colorado cemeteries in 1985. A committee led by Duane Kniebes is now updating the publication by adding latitude and longitude coordinates to the location information for each cemetery.