Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Facebook's Users Ask Who Owns Information

A lot of genealogists have been joining Facebook. However, an article by Brian Stelter published in the New York Times questions the recent changes in Facebook's terms of service. Those terms of service used to give users the authority to remove content they created at any time. The new terms of service state that Facebook owns everything the users create and post to the service. Further, it added new language that now says Facebook can retain users’ content and licenses after an account is terminated. No matter what you say or do, Facebook owns your content.

Microfilm Readers: To Buy or Not to Buy?

WARNING: This article contains personal opinions.

In another article in this newsletter, I quoted a recent decision by a county commission concerning the purchase of a new microfilm reader for that county's historical and genealogical library. The article focused on the decision of whether or not to pay $3,500 for the purchase of the new microfilm reader/printer.

$3,500 for a soon-to-be-obsolete piece of equipment? That is a lot of money!

UnclaimedPersons.org Has Success in Finding Families of Deceased Persons

Genealogists have a special knack for rummaging through old newspapers and being able to trace lineage through documents. Many genealogists trace their own families, but nearly 500 genealogists are providing a public service by helping county coroners find the families of those who died without known next of kin.

Coroners' investigators say they never stop searching for family members; but, if they haven't turned up within three months, the deceased's information usually gets added to the unclaimed database. Their names are listed in no particular order. Each entry includes the deceased person's age as well as place of death and birth location, if known. Some even have listings of tattoos, height and eye color.

South Dakota State Historical Society Seeks Written History

The South Dakota State Historical Society is seeking donations of written materials that convey state history. The State Archives, which is in the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre, collects such documents.

Three Australian Genealogists Die in Bushfires

Reading about disasters in another part of the world is always sad but it suddenly becomes much more personal when you recognize some of the names. The following is from the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies web site at http://www.aigs.org.au:

Errol Morgan
Harley Morgan
Laurel Lewis

On February 7th, these three loved members of the Institute perished in the disastrous bush fire at Marysville.

Kate Press, R.I.P.

The following is from the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies web site at http://www.aigs.org.au:

On February 12th, at Cabrini Hospital Kate Press passed away after a long illness .

Kate served the Institute for many years in a number of important roles. She was at various times the Editor of "The Genealogist" and a Senior Vice President of the Institute Council for 6 years.

(+) Along Those Lines... by George G. Morgan: Go Back to School!

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by George G. Morgan. Please do not forward it to others without the author's permission.

My father often admonished me for not making straight A’s in school. Don’t get me wrong; I was a pretty good student. Some subjects just didn’t get me excited. I was always more interested in English, history, and geography than I was in mathematics and the sciences. My father was a math genius, I always thought. He was an industrial engineer, and he had the ability to add long columns of figures in his head. It was unnerving to me. Whenever he needed a tool to assist his calculations, he relied on his pocket slide rule. In his office, though, a massive comptometer sat on the corner of his desk, complete with the largest moving carriage I’ve ever seen on any business machine. He eschewed electronic calculators that were just coming into their own by the time he died in 1980. My father swore that the comptometer was faster than a calculator, and his assessment is still correct.

New England Regional Genealogical Conference

A large regional genealogy conference will take place in Manchester, New Hampshire, in a few weeks. Past conferences have attracted as many as 800 genealogists, more than some of the national conferences. The 10th New England Regional Genealogical Conference, or NERGC, now looks as if it will be at least as large as the past conferences.

NOTE: This conference is abbreviated as NERGC; I usually hear attendees pronounce it as "nerk" although I have heard other pronunciations as well. NERGC is sponsored by a consortium of many genealogy societies from all over New England.

National Archives of Scotland Announces "Famous Scots"

The following was written by the National Archives of Scotland:

The National Archives of Scotland is pleased to be a major partner in a year-long exhibition Famous Scots which opened to the public in New Register House, part of the new ScotlandsPeople Centre, on Monday 26th January.

Starting with Billy Connolly, Famous Scots explores the family history of six well-known Scots throughout the Homecoming Scotland 2009 year. The spotlight falls on each Famous Scot in turn. The six exhibitions will show visitors how to trace their own Scottish family history in the ScotlandsPeople Centre, and how to take their research further.

The exhibition is being staged in the extraordinary dome of New Register House, the very centre of Scotland’s family history archive – surrounded by hundreds of thousands of registers in which the lives of Scots from the 16th are recorded.

As well as the family history aspect, the exhibition links the stories of the subject’s ancestors to important themes in Scotland’s history.  For example, the Billy Connolly exhibition looks at shipbuilding on the Clyde, the poorhouse and clearances from the Islands. Visitors will also have the opportunity to discover details of past occupations, changing places, and how the lives of the subject’s forebears were shaped by the changing communities to which they belonged.
 
An interactive resource offers a step-by-step guide to beginning a family history search. Visitors can follow this up in the ScotlandsPeople Centre when they leave the exhibition.

ScotlandsPeople is a partnership between the General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon. The organisers are very grateful for the help they have already received from other repositories, including Glasgow City Archives, Scottish Catholic Archives and the Scottish Mining Museum.

For more information on Famous Scots: www.scotlandspeoplehub.gov.uk/scotlands-people-centre/famous-scots.html.

MGC Protests Plan for Drastic Cut in Massachusetts Vital Records Research Hours Available

The following was written by the Massachusetts Genealogical Council:

To Massachusetts Genealogical Community:

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has announced a drastic cut in the research hours available to genealogists and the public at large. The notice reads:

DUE TO BUDGET RESTRICTIONS AND STAFFING REDUCTIONS, THE REGISTRY OF VITAL
RECORDS AND STATISTICS WILL BE REDUCING RESEARCH ROOM HOURS EFFECTIVE
FEBRUARY 23, 2009. NEW RESEARCH HOURS WILL BE:

MONDAY: 2:00pm - 4:30pm    TUESDAY: 9:00am - 12:00n
WEDNESDAY: NO RESEARCH HOURS
THURSDAY: 2:00pm - 4:30pm     FRIDAY: 9:00am - 12:00pm

We apologize for any inconvenience.

2009 Professional Management Conference

The following was written by the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG):

Registration is now open for the 2009 FGS 2009 Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, including APG's Professional Management Conference (PMC) to be held Wednesday, September 2, 2009. For PMC program details and schedule, go to http://www.apgen.org/conferences/index.html.

To register, go to http://www.fgsconference.org

1914 U.S. County Maps by State

Janie Edwards found, rescued, scanned and is now sharing this amazing book.  If you are like me, you want to see where your ancestors lived, on a map. In fact, while looking at this web site, I discovered that the village of Corinth, Maine is south of South Corinth. I thought I knew the area well but this was news to me. (My great-great-grandfather lived in Corinth.)

Archives CD Books USA Adds Digitized Virginia Law Reports

Archives CD Books USA, a division of Wholly Genes Software, has created a new project in cooperation with the Virginia Genealogical Society. This project includes digitized books of interest to many people researching Virginia ancestry.

The Master Genealogist version 7.04 and version 8

Wholly Genes Software has announced the release of The Master Genealogist version 7.04. This new release of the powerful genealogy program for Windows adds a few new features and fixes. You can read the entire list of changes at http://www.whollygenes.com/forums201/index.php?s=6b6d037a232afbbd43724361e4fb49fe&showtopic=11266.

World Vital Records Announces Ten New English Databases From Anguline Research Archives

The following announcement was written by World Vital Records:

This week's major collection [addition] includes ten new databases from Anguline Research Archives (ARA). The databases include court, land, and probate records, genealogy guides, census and voter lists, birth marriage and death records, religious records, and directories and lists. The content is from the United Kingdom, particularly from England.

A Day Late and a Thousand Dollars Short

The Greene County (Tennessee) Commission's Records Committee was told Thursday that because of a missed deadline, the T. Elmer Cox Historical and Genealogical Library will not get the city and county funding needed to purchase a new microfilm reader/printer for the library.

The Town of Greeneville had promised to allocate $1,000 for the purchase of the reader/printer, but the one company that bid on it in December missed the deadline the town had imposed to receive bids.

(+) From Lloyd’s Library: Irish Arrivals in North America by Lloyd Bockstruck

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Lloyd Bockstruck.

When I was compiling my list of denizations and naturalizations in the British colonies, I sought out the expertise of Dr. Terrence M. Punch for those British colonies which remained in the Empire after the American Revolution and in due course became Canada. Dr. Punch is one of the foremost authorities on the seaboard provinces of Canada and is conversant with the various colonists who settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland. Not only has he sought to identify the founders of the families in the New World, but he has also sought to determine their origins in Europe.

Whether these colonists were Palatines, Huguenots, or others from the British Isles, Punch has collected from the most diverse and obscure sources the names and origins of thousands of people who settled in these provinces. His most recent interest has been the Irish in Atlantic Canada.

Ancestry.com Marks Lincoln Bicentennial with Launch Of Five New Civil War Era Databases

The following was written by The Generations Network, the parent company of Ancestry.com. Notice that most of the newly-added records will be available only to Ancestry.com's 925,000 paying subscribers, but the Lincoln letters and speeches, provided by the Library of Congress, will be free:

World’s Leading Online Family History Resource Adds More Than 4 Million New Records to Its Civil War Collection, Including More Than 20,000 Letters Written to and from Lincoln

PROVO, UTAH – Feb. 12, 2009 – Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online resource for family history, announced today it will commemorate the 200th birthday of one of the nation’s greatest Presidents – Abraham Lincoln – with the addition of five new databases to its Civil War Collection. This historically significant collection includes unique content such as photographs, handwritten letters, slave manifests and pension applications, and spans the days of slavery to the Civil War and through Reconstruction. The new databases will make millions of important Civil War era records easily searchable alongside other records already available at Ancestry.com, creating the largest online collection of Civil War documents, containing more than 12 million names.

Follow-up: Why You Need a Second (and Better) E-mail Address

On February 06, 2009, I posted an article entitled, "Why You Need a Second (and Better) E-mail Address." I was pleasantly surprised by the number of comments posted at the end of the article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/02/why-you-need-a-second-and-better-email-address-by-dick-eastman.html. Obviously, I struck a chord. Lots of people seem to have concerns about the future of their e-mail accounts – and with good reason. With the advent of fiber optic services and the added costs of implementing them, even some of the large Internet service providers are redefining their customer territories. Some major shifts in geographic coverage across the country could be around the corner, and we can only guess how prepared anyone's incoming and outgoing providers will be for transferring customers. How prepared a customer is for such a change is the subject of the article mentioned above and now, this one, too.

In the first article, I described several scenarios for making sure that your e-mail will still be available to you in the future. I deliberately left out my favorite option, however, with the belief that it would be too complicated for most non-technical readers. However,  the number of comments posted by people who have already used this more complicated option leads me to a different view. Therefore, I decided to write this article to describe what might be the best option of all. I will admit that this solution requires a bit of technical expertise, however.

Video Interview: Brad Argent of Ancestry.com.au in Australia

At the recent AFFHO Congress held in Auckland, New Zealand, I had a chance to interview Brad Argent. Brad is the Partnership Development Manager at Ancestry.com.au, the Australian and New Zealand division of The Generations Network, the same company that owns ancestry.com, ancestry.co.uk, ancestry.ca, and numerous other genealogy web sites.

Brad spent some time explaining the services of Ancestry.com.au, especially how much easier it is to find census records online than on microfilm. Brad also describes the records of 168,000 convicts to Australia, including several from New Zealand that previous had not been discovered and several American citizens and French-Canadian citizens who were transported as convicts. Brad also announced a few projects that will appear online in the near future.