Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Lewis Zandbergen named as Editor for the Ontario Genealogical Society

Lewis Zandbergen of Stirling, Ontario has been named as the new Editor of Families/Newsleaf, the quarterly journal and newsletter of the Ontario Genealogical Society. Families/Newsleaf has one of the largest circulations of any genealogical journal in Canada.

The full announcement is available at http://announcements.eogn.com/2005/12/lewis_zandberge.html

Irish 1901 and 1911 Census Records to go Online

The following is an announcement from the Heritage Ministry of Ireland.

Details of two 100-year-old Irish censuses are to go online for an estimated 70 million people around the world who claim a connection with the country, Irish Heritage Minister John O'Donoghue has revealed.

Under a new cultural agreement between the Irish and Canadian archive offices, all the details of Ireland's census in 1901 and 1911 are to be indexed and made available for free on the Internet.

Family Secrets buried beneath the Kitchen Floor

Some of us cannot imagine the social pressures that our ancestors endured. A story in The Scotsman tells of bone-chilling murders of infants, all done for the sake of "the family." In 2001 near Harray in Orkney, workmen on a routine job of redesigning a kitchen made a gruesome discovery under the floor: tiny human bones. The police were called in and old rumors in the local village bubbled to the surface once again.

The full story can be found at Scotsman.com.

Eneclann Launches Three new Heritage Titles on CD-ROM

Eneclann, the well-known producer of Irish genealogy CD-ROM disks, has announced the release of three new titles: Brian J. Cantwell’s Memorials of the Dead, the Collected Works; The Irish Genealogist Volumes 1-8, the official organ of the Irish Genealogical Research Society and The 1798 Rebellion: Claimants and Surrenders, compiled by Ian Cantwell.

The full announcement is available at http://announcements.eogn.com/2005/12/eneclann_launch.html.

One More Story about Genealogy Backups

"Ontrack Data Recovery receives more than 100,000 requests for data recovery service every year so we come across some pretty strange data disasters," said Jim Reinert, senior director of Software and Services for Ontrack Data Recovery.

Reinert recently released the "Ontrack 2005 Top Ten List of Data Disasters and Remarkable Recoveries." Here is the one item on the list that I can identify with:

While rearranging her home office, a woman accidentally dropped a five pound piece of clay pottery on her laptop, directly onto the hard drive area that contained a book she'd been working on for five years and 150 year-old genealogy pictures that had not yet been printed.

Dr. Faser E.F. Dunford named Executive Director of the Ontario Genealogical Society

The President and Board of Directors of the Ontario Genealogical Society have announced the appointment of Dr. Fraser E.F. Dunford, P.Eng. as the Executive Director of the Society. Ken Bird, the current Executive Director, is retiring on December 16, 2005.

Friends Reunited & Genes Reunited Sold for £120m

The largest genealogy web site in the U.K. has been sold to the ITV television network.

Husband-and-wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst, along with their friend, Jason Porter, started Friends Reunited as a school reunion website business in 2000. They later added Genes Reunited which quickly grew to become the UK's biggest genealogy website. They also added an online dating service and a job listings site. Less than six years later, the trio have now sold the company for £120 million in cash (roughly $208 million in U.S. funds). Company employees are also to receive cash bonuses equal to three times their annual salaries.

Sharon Tate Moody Elected APG President

Sharon Tate Moody, a Certified Genealogist (CG) from Sun City Center, Fla., has been elected president of the board of directors of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), the world’s leading professional organization of family history and related professionals. She will succeed J. Mark Lowe, CG, of Springfield, Tenn.

The full text of the announcement is available at http://announcements.eogn.com/2005/12/sharon_tate_moo.html

How to Sell Online Subscriptions to (Very Old) Newspaper Archives

The Scotsman (Scotland's national print newspaper) had an idea about ten years ago: Let's put our nearly 200 years' of archives online and make lots of profits from them! The newspaper spent a lot of money digitizing old issues and placing into an online database. Results were less exciting than what the managers had hoped for. A few students, researchers and libraries bought subscriptions, but the rest of the world ignored them. The project floundered.

Canadian Ship Manifests to be Placed Online

National Archives Canada plans to have digitized images of passenger lists in a database online for almost every port of entry for the years 1865 to 1921. This work is part of a larger virtual exhibit entitled, "Moving Here, Staying Here: The Canadian Immigrant Experience." The first images should be online by year's end. Currently there are no plans for the Archives to include a name index to these records.

FGS 2007 Call for Papers

The Federation of Genealogical Societies and the Allen County Public Library are pleased to invite lecture proposals for the FGS/ACPL conference, "Meeting at the Crossroads of America: A Conference for the Nation's Genealogists," to be held August 15-18, 2007 at the newly expanded Grand Wayne Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The full announcement can be read at http://announcements.eogn.com/2005/12/fgs_2007_call_f.html

Copy an entire Web Site with HTTrack

There are a number of reasons for copying an entire web site to your own hard drive. Perhaps you want to save a copy of all the information available on the site. You can then disconnect from the Internet and peruse the site at your leisure while disconnected. In fact, you can read the pages of a web site while on a train or airplane.

Another reason that I use is for searching data: even though I have a broadband Internet connection, I find it much faster to search a copy of a web site on my own hard drive than to search the original pages online with Google or other search tools. A final reason is that you own the site and want to make a backup copy in case of disasters.