The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
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There's a plethora of web hosting services willing to host personal web pages that you create. You can post your genealogy pages on the web as well as other pages about most anything else that you wish to share with others, be it your bowling league's scores, your son's Cub Scout Den home page, or pictures of your grandchildren or family gatherings. Prices range from free to about $10.00 a month for personal Web sites.
However, you might not want to use a commercial hosting service. Many people are surprised to learn that they can create their own web server on any Windows 95 or later computer as well as on Macintosh OS X or on Linux. Your present computer can serve as a web server, even while you simultaneously use the word processor, read and write e-mail, surf the Web, or use other programs.
In fact, you will find it easy to install a Web server on your system.
The following announcement was written by the U.K. National Archives:
The National Archives is delighted to announce that ScotlandOnline will partner the UK government´s official archive in the forthcoming project to put the 1911 census for England and Wales online.
The 1911 census (document references RG 14 and RG 78) is huge - it currently occupies 2 kilometres of shelving at The National Archives. Comprising over eight million householder schedules and a further 38,000 enumerators´ summary books, it details information relating to approximately 35 million people then living in England and Wales.
About four years ago, St. Charles County (Missouri) Executive Steve Ehlmann, then a judge, was poking through the county courthouse basement when he discovered a stash of court documents from the early 1800s. Now, after two years of preserving and indexing by the Missouri State Archives, historians are ready to tell the public exactly what they've found. Genealogists with ancestors in St. Charles County should pay close attention.
The following is an announcement written by Daryl Lytton, Assistant Editor of the USGenWeb Newsletter:
For the first time in the 10-year history of The USGenWeb Project, a project-wide search is being enabled on a State-by-State basis at http://www.USGenWeb-Search.Us with a great deal of success. The free-access USGenWeb, along with many of the state and county sites and Special Projects, are hosted by RootsWeb.com.
All 15 Jackson County (Oregon) Library branches closed down on Saturday, April 7, due to a lack of funding. This is exactly the opposite of the trend in the U.S.: most communities are investing to improve and expand libraries. The 15 libraries serving this rural area of Oregon lost $7 million in federal funding this year, nearly 80 percent of the system's budget. Library experts are calling the action the largest library shutdown ever in the United States.
Last fall, Congress failed to reauthorize a $400 million annual subsidy to 41 states to help rural counties prop up their local economies. Oregon took the biggest hit -- $150 million. Jackson County lost $23 million and had to slash everywhere, from reducing jail beds to cutting search and rescue teams.
Not everyone can make it to New York City to attend this week's National Tartan Week. However, you can still enjoy many things Scottish without leaving home. Haggis is one of those "delights."
The following article was first published in the February 24, 2003 edition of this newsletter. It seems appropriate to republish it this week for all of us of Scottish descent.
Do you have Scottish ancestry? If so, you may want to learn about the ethnic foods of your heritage. No discussion of Scottish cooking is complete without mention of haggis. Haggis seems to be popular in America only on St. Andrews Day, at Scottish Clan Society functions and at Scottish Festivals. It also is the featured dish on Robert Burns Night, a celebration held in honor of the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, which takes place on his birthday, January 25th. Burns wrote "Address to a Haggis," probably the best-known homage to this unusual food. I have a wee bit of Scottish ancestry but had my first taste of haggis this past January 25th. It is an experience to… uh… be "remembered."
NOTE: This article contains no genealogy information, other than a minor reference to saving money when talking with your relatives in distant places. If you are looking for true genealogy articles, I suggest that you skip this one. However, this article does describe a high-tech method of saving money.
If you have family in another state or in another country, you can call them at relatively low rates using any of a number of methods. Low-cost VoIP providers abound; telephone companies often offer flat-rate unlimited calls; and some cellular companies also offer very low prices for calls. However, wouldn't it be nice to offer those relatives the opportunity to call you at no charge or for a very low charge, too?
Or is it "Dressed to the Kilt?" Either way, you can celebrate your Scottish heritage this week in New York City as Scots at heart or by descent gather to celebrate New York Tartan Week.
Indeed, many of us can celebrate. The Scots have always had a major presence in North America. Almost half of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were of Scottish descent, as were at least five presidents. Millions of Americans can claim Scottish ancestry. Canada's Scottish heritage is probably even higher than that of the U.S. when measured as a percentage of the population.
In recent years, attendance at the national genealogy conferences has eroded; yet, during the same time, the number of genealogy cruises has expanded greatly. I find it fascinating to compare the traditional conferences versus the "conferences at sea" sponsored by several genealogy software companies. Thousands of genealogists now spend their leisure time attending seminars at sea. Indeed, most of the cruises are quite similar to genealogy conferences with a few minor differences.
This week I'll compare the two leading four-day U.S. national conferences versus a twelve-day genealogy cruise to Hawaii.
The largest regional genealogy conference in the northeastern U.S. will be held in a few days. The Ninth New England Regional Genealogical Conference, often called "NERGC," is scheduled for April 26-29 in Hartford, Connecticut.
NERGC is a consortium of many genealogy and historical organizations, including the following:
The standard "rules of thumb" concerning U.S. copyright laws goes something like this:
Works published before 1923 have generally fallen into the public domain.
Works published after January 1, 1964, are almost always protected by copyright because the 1976 Copyright Act automatically renewed them.
The copyright status of any work published between 1923 and 1963 is very difficult to determine. Between those dates, a renewal registration was required to prevent the expiration of copyright. However, determining whether a work's registration was renewed is a challenge. Renewals received between 1950 and 1977 were announced and distributed only in a semi-annual print publication. The Copyright Office does not have a machine-searchable source for this renewal information, and the only public access is through the card catalog in their DC offices.
As a result, thousands of valuable genealogy books as well as many other works have never been republished because of concerns about copyrights. Now a new online database makes it much easier to determine whether a book's copyright has been renewed or not.
On March 27, I published a press release written by WeRelate.org and the Allen County Public Library. The two announced a new relationship to place genealogical information online. Now an editor's article in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel adds comments from what appears to be an insider's viewpoint. The author describes the updated WeRelate.org web site as "likely to become the best site available."
If you have American Indian ancestry in northern New England or northern New York, you may be interested in Ne-Do-Ba, an organization dedicated to the Abenaki of Western Maine. Ne-Do-Ba, which means friends, is a nonprofit organization that focuses on "history, culture, community, family and self." While the web site's home page specifies that it covers "topics relating to the Abenaki Indian and their Euroamerican relationships in Western Maine," I found a lot of information about Abenaki Indians in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York as well.
According to a Vanderbilt University endocrinologist who is treating one of the descendants, the most infamous feud in American folklore may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.
The feud in question is the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys. Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline as well as other "fight or flight" stress hormones.
No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior.
Attention U.K. readers: I now have a London telephone number: +44 208 133 8002. That is in addition to my USA telephone number and my worldwide Skype number. I obtained the London number as a convenience for the U.K. readers of this newsletter: You can also make a toll-free telephone call to me from anywhere in the world if you use Skype.
All newsletter readers anywhere in the world can always contact me by going to most any page on the newsletter's web site at http://www.eogn.com and clicking on "Contact Us" in the Navigation menu in the upper right part of the page. Once on the "Contact Us" page, you can send me an e-mail and you will also see my USA telephone number, my London telephone number, my Skype contact information and my FAX number.
A French Web site has recently surfaced with a database of 439,770 records including 225,700 baptisms, 69,799 marriages, and 144,271 burials from the parish records in the French department of Haute-Saone, a part of the Franche-Comte region. Haute-Saone is located in the northeast of France and was created in 1789 during the French Revolution. The Web site contains records ("actes") from 113 communities and parishes. These records are from the years 1637-1932, but the majority are from the 1700s and 1800s.
In the January 5, 2007 edition of this newsletter, I posted an article about a photo of a man sitting on what appeared to be a dead horse. The photo came from the Sheboygan County (Wisconsin) Historical Research Center. The picture was widely circulated on the Internet and caused much speculation. You can click here to read the article. Click on the thumbnail image to the right to see a larger picture.
Using some tricks of the trade, Colleen Fitzpatrick of the Forensic Genealogy Photo Response Team, Andrew Yeiser, and Sharon Sergeant of Ancestral Manor have now determined that the picture was taken September 24, 1871, at 4:30 P.M. Incredible? All it took was an analysis by a rocket scientist (that would be Colleen Fitzpatrick) and a couple of other experts.
The Library of Congress stores thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America's history - documents that are slowly decaying. Now the library of the U.S. citizenry is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents and publish the results online in multiple formats. The project is built on free open source software (OSS), including a Linux operating system cluster of over 1,000 machines. The documents will be made available to the public at no charge.
“Our goal in integrating ProQuest and CSA is to seize every opportunity to move the industry forward, creating new products that take research to the next level. The breadth of content is already breathtaking: more than 125 billion pages, with an exponential number of links out to more data. But rest assured, this is just the start. We're committed to identifying every bit of material that serious researchers need access to and delivering it into the flow of their work. And, with the talent and technology resident in Serials Solutions and [Community of Science], we'll support the researcher and the librarian with sophisticated tools that will allow them to use and manage content in new ways. We're now poised for this new company to fulfill even the wildest dreams of ProQuest's and CSA's founders.”
—Marty Kahn, CEO of ProQuest CSA, the company that recently obtained the HeritageQuest Online genealogy databases and other products from ProQuest.
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