Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

On the Road Still Longer - Minnesota and New York

Greetings from Honolulu. I left home a couple of weeks ago and will not be back for some time. I'll be in Honolulu most of this week, "working" as a tourist and doing non-genealogy things. However, next Saturday I'll be at the 32nd Annual Family History Workshop in Moorhead, Minnesota. The workshop theme is "Old Trails, New Highways." If you can be in Moorhead on October 6, I suspect you will enjoy this workshop. I'd also enjoy meeting newsletter readers.

(+) Reduce Online Access Charges When Traveling

I have been traveling on a cruise ship for more than a week. Internet access is available for all passengers, but at very high prices. The price varies from 40 cents per minute up to 75 cents per minute, depending on the usage plan selected. Paying in advance for online time results in lower charges per minute.

Even worse, the connection speeds on cruise ships are normally very slow. The ship I am on at this minute has a 768-kbyte connection speed - if the satellite is overhead and the signal is strong. If the satellite is near the horizon, connection speeds are even slower. Worse yet, this one connection might be shared by twenty or more simultaneous users during busy times of the day.

I have been amazed to watch other passengers pay these high charges while reading e-mail messages and writing replies online. Even for touch typists, this is a very expensive method of reading and writing e-mail messages. I know one passenger I talked with spent more than $20.00 in online charges the first day at sea, simply by reading four e-mail messages and writing four replies. I'd consider that to be an outrageous charge when calculated on a per-message basis!

With just a bit of advance planning, it is possible to cut those charges by 50% to perhaps as much as 90%.

Changes at Footnote.com

The folks at Footnote.com have been busy. Several new changes were added to the site earlier today, including:

Connections:  In the gallery, you can now drag one image on top of another and then describe how the two images are connected. Connections might be images from the same document, two documents describing the same person, place or thing, etc. This is the first step of some more changes planned for Connections in the future.

Upload: The upload process has several improvements. First, you can multi-select when you choose images. You browse to your folder and, by holding down the shift key, you can select a number of images in a list; or by holding down the ctrl key (command for a Mac), you can select multiple individual images. This should make upload a lot faster and easier. In addition, you can now upload more than five files at once.

The Mother of All Genealogy Databases

Mike Elgan recently wrote an article in Computerworld with some interesting predictions. Among other things, he believes that Google will someday unveil "Google Maps" of genealogy, which will result in a massive, interactive, mashable, public, and free online Human Family Tree. In short, he believes that Google will someday be able to list information about all humans who ever lived and left records behind. Not only that, but he also predicts that the records of most of these people will be linked together to point to similar records of their parents, children, siblings, and other relatives.

Is combining all genealogy data too scary?

The Generations Network Selects Interevco to Sell its Online Advertising

It looks like The Generations Network, Inc., parent company of Ancestry.com, is changing its online advertising focus. The following announcement was written by Interevco Ltd.:

NEW YORK and PROVO, Utah, Sept. 26 -- The Generations Network, Inc., parent company of Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history resource, announced today that it has named Interevco as its online advertising sales representative. Interevco will also consult with the organization in developing online advertising sales strategies for their leading genealogy and family history database sites, including the Ancestry.com network of sites, Genealogy.com, Myfamily.com and RootsWeb.com.

TreeX.com, a Newly Launched Web Site

The following announcement was written by TreeX.com:

Arlington, VA, September 25, 2007 -- Keeping track of family history and genealogy has never been easier.

Announcing the launch of TreeX.com, a new Web site where relatives, friends or professional genealogists can work together or alone to help grow their family trees. Through this innovative Web-based building interface they easily construct family trees, keep track of family ancestry and post photographs and historical text.

The owner of the family tree can invite as many people as he wants to assist him in this effort. Trees are grown by inputting data directly to the site or by accessing computer files saved in the required GEDCOM format. Other information, photos and videos can also be inserted into the tree generically or for each member, improving quality and scope of the tree. Furthermore, a family tree can be kept confidential, set to public view or set to allow specified persons or relatives to access it -- and forums and user message boards have also been made available to make the exchange of information easier.

Free Google Presentation Software Now Available

I have written several times in the past about Google Documents and Spreadsheets. It is an excellent free online word processor and spreadsheet. You can find my previous articles at http://tinyurl.com/yolm7r. Now Google has added PowerPoint-compatible presentation to the free office suite. Since the title of "Google Documents and Spreadsheets and Presentations" is a bit of a mouthful, the company has also changed the name of the service. From now on, these free tools will simply be known as "Google Docs."

(+) What is a Wiki and Why Should I Care?

A funny-sounding new word is being found more and more on the Internet: wiki. It is not a creature from Star Wars, and it is not a strange animal from Australia. In fact, wiki is a bit of software that gets its name from the Hawaiian or Polynesian word for "quickly." In fact, the shuttle buses at the Honolulu airport are called "wiki wiki," meaning to go quickly and easily. Now the word is creeping into genealogy vocabularies.

In the words of wiki inventor Ward Cunningham:

A wiki is the simplest online database that could possibly work.

Hello from the Carnival Spirit

This week's newsletter is being sent from a cruise ship, presently located about 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii. The Carnival Spirit departed Vancouver, British Columbia last Wednesday with more than 2,500 passengers, including 100+ enthusiastic genealogists. Luckily for me, I am one of those genealogists.

Millennia Software, producers of Legacy Family Tree software for Windows, is sponsoring their annual genealogy cruise for their customers and other interested genealogists. We are now in our fifth day of the 13-day cruise.

Technology on Board Cruise Ships

Advances in technology always fascinate me. We are now able to communicate with friends, relatives and business associates from almost anyplace in the world. Specifically, passengers on cruise ships are no longer isolated from the outside world.

Satellite Internet access has been available on cruise ships for a few years but a new advance is available this year. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Carnival Spirit even has a cell phone "tower" someplace on board. GSM cell phones work perfectly every place on the ship. I receive "five bars" signal strength everywhere I walk on board. I can place calls easily. If anyone back home dials my cell phone number, the iPhone on my hip rings a second or two later. I simply say "hello" and start conversing in exactly the same manner as I do when I am at home.