Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Nearly 300 Years of Early Canadian Historical Documents to go Online

The following is a press release written by The Generations Network, Inc., the parent company of Ancestry.com:

PROVO, Utah, March 29 -- Ancestry.ca, the largest Canadian family history website, and Canadiana.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving access to early Canadian publications, today announced a partnership to digitize and bring online nearly 300 years of Canadiana.org's early historical records spanning from the 1600s to the 1900s.  The new collection includes more than 6,200 publication titles and 1.6 million pages of family histories, local histories, biographies, civil service records and other early historical documents.

Yahoo to Offer Unlimited Email Storage

I have often praised Google's Gmail, an excellent free e-mail service. One of the major advantages of Gmail is that it offers more than two gigabytes of online storage space. That allows anyone to keep tens of thousands of old messages at no charge. The search company also provides a great method of quickly finding a particular stored message that you want within seconds.

Now Gmail's primary competitor, Yahoo Mail, is one-upping Gmail. Yahoo has just announced that its free Yahoo Mail service will soon offer unlimited storage space. That's right: unlimited.

Family Roots Radio Interview

I am delighted to announce that I will be the guest on Kory Meyerink's genealogy program on Family Roots Radio today. This is an "Internet radio station" heard all around the word. All you need is a Windows or Macintosh OS X computer with speakers or headphones.

The live program starts at 4:00 PM Eastern U.S. time, 1:00 PM Pacific. If you do miss that time slot, you will be able to listen to the recorded version at your convenience starting soon after that. You can click on the thumbnail image to the right to see the announcement.

MacMozy

I have written before about Mozy, an online backup service for Windows XP. I use this service daily and love it. Now Mozy has a new client for Macintosh users.

Ancestry.com Adds the United States-Canadian Border Crossings Collection

The following announcement was written by The Generations Network, owners of Ancestry.com:

PROVO, Utah, March 28 -- Ancestry.com, the world's largest online resource for family history, today announced the addition of the first and only online collection of more than 4 million names of individuals who crossed the U.S.-Canadian border between 1895 and 1956.  These historical records are the latest addition to Ancestry.com's Immigration Records Collection, which also includes more than 100 million names from the largest online collection of U.S. passenger lists, spanning 1820 to 1960.

Improve Your Passwords

I had a recent conversation with a newsletter reader about passwords. The reader was asking about identity theft and the security of passwords. The person worried that a hacker could crack a password that consists of a family name or a pet's name or some similar word. I agree with her. Never use a single word or name to protect something you value.

Security experts will tell you to always use passwords that are non-words. Instead, all passwords should be lengthy and should also be a jumble of letters and numbers, such as:

iltstwan7daw

Allen County Public Library and WeRelate.org Announce Partnership

I wrote about WeRelate.org last year. It is a great online service that has the potential to provide a lot of genealogy information at no charge. You can read my article here . Now WeRelate.org has announced a partnership with the second-largest genealogy library in the country. Here is the announcement:

World's Largest Genealogy Database is in... Shanghai?

This announcement really amazes me. You see, I used to live in Shanghai in the early 1980s, when China was first being opened up to foreign businesses. This was only a few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution that caused great upheavals within the country. At that time, the Communist government actively discouraged the study of one's ancestry, labeling it a bourgeois activity.

The same Communist government is still governing China, but there have been some major changes. With government approval, the Shanghai Library has now announced that it expects to complete the world's largest genealogical database, containing about 50,000 Chinese family trees, by the end of this year.

PedigreeSoft.com

It only took four years but I finally found the answer! In the June 30, 2003 edition of this newsletter, I published the following query from a reader:

I am 81. My wife died recently and I have sold my house. I will spend my remaining days visiting family and friends.... So I will have no PC. I will rely on library facilities and friend's PCs. I will carry my GEDCOM database on CD. But most will not have a genealogy application on their PC. Many public facilities will not allow you to install applications because of the complications involved in making entries to their Windows Registry. For the same reason I cannot install the genealogy application on web storage such as Yahoo Briefcase. Is there a way around this, or perhaps a site which has a genealogy application available for all to use?

In fact, the gentleman was well ahead of his time.  In the past few months, two or three possible solutions have appeared. Indeed, his last sentence is the one that seems the most prophetic: "…or perhaps a site which has a genealogy application available for all to use?"

Still More Problems with Google Books

I have written before about Google Books. (See http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2006/10/full_text_genea.html.) This is a great online resource for genealogists. Thousands of old genealogy and local history books are available to you free of charge. You can download and save them on your hard drive, then re-use them time and again as you wish.

Some readers have found problems with the online books, however.