The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
Google created a big stir two years ago when the company announced that it would start scanning books and making the full text of millions of out-of-copyright books online. Books within copyright are also available although limited in the amount of information that may be retrieved. You can read several articles that I have written about this in the past two years here. Google has since been working diligently at making millions of books available, and the effort is now beginning to pay off for genealogists.
More than 10,000 genealogists recently "signed" an electronic petition that was sent to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) concerning budget cuts being made by the agency. (You can read about that by clicking here.)
Writing to the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), Sandy Clunies, President of the National Capital Area Chapter, APG, reports on a recent presentation by David McMillen, NARA's External Affairs Liaison. Mr. McMillen reports that the petition recognized for its major impact by the Senior Staff at NARA, including Archivist Allen Weinstein.
Here is Sandy's report, republished here with her permission:
The following announcement was written by the National Archives and Records Administration:
Washington, D.C. and Mountain View, Calif. – Feb. 24, 2006 – Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin today announced the launch of a pilot program to make holdings of the National Archives available for free online. This non-exclusive agreement will enable researchers and the general public to access a diverse collection of historic movies, documentaries and other films from the National Archives via Google Video (video.google.com/nara.html) as well as the National Archives website (www.archives.gov).
This week I had a chance to read an advance copy of a new book by Bryan Sykes:, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland. The book describes a systematic, ten-year DNA study of more than 10,000 volunteers. Through this study, Bryan Sykes was able to determine the genetic makeup of the British Islanders and their descendants.
The following announcement was written by Roots Television™:
When Roots Television™ debuted on September 29, 2006, it was a quiet launch in beta mode intended to draw enough traffic to test the site and work through the inevitable technical bugs that accompany new ventures into cyberspace. That “quiet” launch quickly became an international roar, as word spread lightening-fast and Roots Television™ drew viewers from five continents in the first 24 hours! Not surprising really, since family history commands one of the largest and fast-growing markets in the world.
First there were CD-ROM discs, then DVD discs. Now a new technology hit the stores this year: Blu-ray discs. These discs are the same size as CD and DVD discs but store more data. A lot more. The Blu-ray discs for sale in computer stores now will store about 25 gigabytes of data. Several manufacturers claim they will soon be shipping Blu-ray disc drives capable of storing 100 gigabytes. That's approximately the same storage capacity as 167 CD-ROM discs or 71,428 floppy disks.
The following is an announcement written by Walter Fuller, President and Publisher of Everton's Genealogical Helper:
Dear Family History Researcher,
It is with great pride and joy that I can make two very important announcements in this issue of The Helper - announcements that will not only mean additional benefits for you, our loyal readers, but for all who are involved in genealogy or family history research.
A new web site features online Irish Townland Maps. The site proclaims, "For those involved with Irish genealogy this is the most important map collection ever published. Surveyed between 1829 and 1843, our Irish Townland Maps are packed with detail and are of superb quality and craftsmanship. They are both an excellent gift for anyone with an interest in Ireland and a wonderful source of information for researchers."
Microsoft will release Internet Explorer version 7 on November 1st. All Windows XP users who have automatic updates turned on (which includes most XP users) will receive the update automatically. This will be somewhat of a mixed blessing.
Writing in a Dow Jones Newswires article, Mark Boslet suggests several web-based companies that are ripe for being bought out by other companies with "deep pockets." Boslet speculates about a number of companies. The one that caught my eye is MyFamily.com, the parent company of Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, RootsWeb, and several other genealogy-oriented web sites.
The first complete index for the 1851 Census for all of Canada will be available for searching on October 24, 2006. This database will enable genealogists to search the 1851 Census of Canada by name, in addition to searching by location, with superior searching and viewing capabilities. This is the first time a comprehensive index has been made available, making it possible to track down ancestors who have been impossible to find until now without searching through reels of microfilm.
As predicted in the March 19, 2006, newsletter, Genealogy Bank has gone online with millions of documents of genealogical interest. In fact, the site just "went live" this morning.
The new online database will contain images of millions of documents of genealogical interest. Ninety-nine percent of these documents have never been available before in electronic format, and perhaps 50% of the documents have not even been available on microfilm. Many have never been available in any format other than the original paper documents, if you could find them. Now these millions of documents will be available to everyone in a new online database that will contain the equivalent of 100,000 books, fully indexed and searchable by every word. You will be able to see images of the original documents on your computer screen.
Many people are aware of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and its many uses. I wrote about Wikipedia a few weeks ago in an article entitled, "Free Online Encyclopedia May Be the World's Best." My article is available at http://tinyurl.com/fxg3y. In fact, Wikipedia has become one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Its success has spawned many other "wikis," including the Encyclopedia of Genealogy at http://www.eogen.com.
Wikipedia and other wikis have numerous shortcomings, however. The sites are very democratic, encouraging input from everyone. Democracy is often a good thing, but it occasionally produces somewhat less than professional results. Now one of Wikipedia's creators has announced a new project to keep the strengths of Wikipedia while correcting some of its deficiencies. It seems to me that the genealogy community could adopt this new approach to improve the validity of contributed information - and hence, the user experience.
This newsletter sponsored a 3-hour worldwide genealogy conference call about a month ago. The topic was "U.K. Genealogy." We had participants from England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In fact, I think there were more New Zealanders in the conversation than any other nationality.
Those who participated seemed to enjoy the conference call. We all decided to hold a follow-up session on the third Saturday of each month at 19:00 GMT. Translating that to some other time zones, the next Skypecast will start at:
There is a huge amount of genealogy information available on the Internet. Some of it is even accurate. I was reminded of that today when I saw the bLaugh cartoon:
The above cartoon is published here with the permission of bLaugh.
A few weeks ago I created a new online genealogy bookstore: RootsBooks.com. This site provides one-stop shopping for almost all the popular genealogy books. It also sells genealogy CD-ROM disks, software, magazines, and even memberships to many genealogy societies. I also added some non-genealogy items that are related to various newsletter articles I have written in recent months. This online bookstore primarily serves genealogists in North America.
Reception to this new online bookstore has been great but I did receive a few e-mail messages from readers in the U.K., asking, "How can we order these materials?" In response I have now added that capability. RootsBooks.co.uk is now online. It is similar to its sister site of RootsBooks.com but is much more focused on genealogy research in the British Isles. Almost all the books listed are about U.K. or Irish genealogy research. In addition, the prices are listed in pounds and almost all products will ship from U.K. warehouses.
The following announcement was written by Family Tree DNA:
HOUSTON, Oct. 12 -- Family Tree DNA, whose growing array of DNA tests for genealogical purposes has established them as the world leader in genetic genealogy, will introduce ground-breaking new X chromosome tests (X-STR) in early October. The X-STR tests are the first ever available for genealogy applications by focusing on linked "haplotype blocks" which are inherited intact over several generations. This test will be processed locally at the company's recently established Genomic Research Center. Headed by Thomas Krahn, whose German-based DNA-Fingerprint company was recently merged into Family Tree DNA, the state of the art Genomic Research Center is located at Family Tree DNA's Houston, Texas headquarters.
After two years of discussions, negotiations and hard work, the Everton Genealogy Collection is now open to the public in Logan, Utah. All the books are now neatly shelved and catalogued in a spare courtroom in the Logan Justice Center at 290 N. 100 West, Logan.
On Thursday, October 28, 1886, U.S. President Grover Cleveland was on hand in New York Harbor for an afternoon ceremony to unveil the new Statue of Liberty. In the following 120 years, "Lady Liberty" has seen a lot changes in America. She has seen the arrival of millions of immigrants on their way to a new life in America. During the generations since, those same immigrants have shared stories of their arrival (and of the great statue) with their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. These personal stories have given the Statue of Liberty a special place in the family stories of millions of Americans.
In celebration of her 120th birthday, the Status of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation is sponsoring a picture contest for elementary school children.
There are many different reasons for copying all or part of a web site. First of all, if it is your site, you need a backup! More than once I have talked with people who lost their entire site when their hosting service had a hardware problem or even went out of business.
In fact, the hardware problem hit me a couple of years ago; this newsletter's web site at www.eogn.com was lost when my hosting provider's disk drive crashed. When I called the hosting company's tech support department on the phone and asked them to go to their backups, there was a long silence on the other end of the phone line. The tech rep I was talking to finally admitted that they never made any backups of their customers' web sites. They expected their customers to do that!
Recent Comments