Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

(+) Divided By The Pond: Why Genetic Drift Means US Results Can’t Pinpoint the Origin of a British Surname

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Chris Pomery.

Like so many great technological innovations, the use of Y-chromosome DNA testing to unravel the history of a surname was invented in Britain…and commercialised in the USA.

Since the very first published surname project, on the Sykes surname back in the year 2000, the number of Y-chromosome test results has risen to several hundreds of thousands worldwide. FTDNA alone has 165,000 in its database, many within the more than 5,500 surname-based projects registered on its site. In just over a decade we’ve gone from one surname project to a point where a significant percentage of surnames of Western European origin are included within a registered DNA project. And more are being created every day.

And the Prices Keep Dropping

I have been watching the computer business for more years than I care to mention. I have seen the prices for technology drop time and time again. You'd think that I would be used to this by now, but I am still amazed.

This morning I was asked to look at a PC that runs very slowly. It is an eight-year-old system and is rather typical of PCs built at that time: it runs Windows XP, has 256 megabytes of RAM memory, a rather slow Celeron CPU, and an 80-gigabyte hard drive. When I looked at it, the system booted slowly, and the anti-virus program popped up a message during the boot, stating that it was out of date. The owner reported that the computer "runs slow" and "locks up frequently."

Archives of Michigan Offers Digitized Ewing Collection of Civil War Letters

The following announcement was written by the Archives of Michigan:

Lansing – The Archives of Michigan today helped put history into the hands and on the computer screens of Michigan and Civil War enthusiasts everywhere. Today marked the launch of the digitized collection of Mack and Nan Ewing Civil War Letters, available on the Seeking Michigan Web site, www.SeekingMichigan.org. The collection – believed to be the largest set of Civil War letters ever given to a state archives – was donated by Grand Haven resident Dr. Wallace K. Ewing, the great-grandson of Mack and Nan Ewing.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) to Relocate

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) in Belfast is currently working on a project to relocate its business to new purpose built accommodation. The current premises are out-dated and no longer fit for the purpose intended. The new premises will be located at Titanic Boulevard, Titanic Quarter, Belfast. The site is close to the Odyssey and adjacent to the Gateway building.

Proposed Cemetery Oversight Act

U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush unveiled legislation Monday that would expand the powers of the federal government by creating a new level of oversight for cemeteries to prevent the kind of abuses seen at Burr Oak Cemetery and to others.

The Bereaved Consumers Protection Act would force cemetery directors to bolster their record keeping and make those records available to federal, state and local officials. It also creates a kind of consumer Bill of Rights for cemeteries, prohibiting directors from misleading customers about the prices of funeral goods and services, and clarifying contracts for burial plots, entombments and inurnments.

The Wayback Machine

Despite its name, the Wayback Machine is not a time travel machine from a science fiction movie or from a television cartoon. Instead, it is an archive of Internet pages.

Would you like to look at a Web page as it existed several years ago? Perhaps you want to look for information that was available on the Web at one time but has since disappeared. The Wayback Machine may be the tool you need. Now you can surf the Web as it was.

440 Years of London’s History Now Online

The following announcement was written by Ancestry.ca:

18 million parish records from over 1,000 London parishes now online – Ancestry.ca

September 22, 2009 -- Ancestry.ca, Canada’s leading family history website, today launched online for the first time the definitive collection of more than 18 million London parish records, which spans London’s history for almost half a millennium.

This collection will be of huge significance to the estimated 14.6 million Canadians[i] who have been able to trace ancestors back to the City of London.

Footnote.com Marks Family History Month with 60 Million Image Milestone

The following announcement was written by Footnote.com:

Adding more than 1 million new records per month, Footnote.com continues to expand valuable collection of digitized content-

Lindon, UT – September 22, 2009 – Adding more than 1 million new records per month, Footnote.com will mark the month of October, designated Family History Month, with the addition of its 60 millionth image. Since its launch in January 2007, Footnote.com has partnered with organizations including The National Archives and Gannett to digitize and index valued historical documents and photos and make them available online.

Help Wanted: A Few Beta Testers

I am creating a new service for genealogists as a supplement to this newsletter. I think it will be somewhat different from any other online genealogy service available today.

I need a few beta testers to try it out, find any bugs, give usability feedback, and also load some data into the new web site. The site is very empty right now, and I cannot load much data by myself.

Co-Workers Discover They Are Brothers

For weeks, Randy Joubert and Gary Nisbet laughed off customers’ comments that the two furniture deliverymen looked similar enough to be brothers.

It wouldn’t be long before fate would prove the old adage, the customer is always right.

Technology Helps FamilySearch Hit Major Milestone

The LDS web site has an interesting article that states:

FamilySearch volunteers expect to have transcribed more than 325 million names by the end of 2009, just three years since the organization began its online indexing program.

The milestone was a number once thought impossible to reach in such a short period of time. In 2006, a few thousand volunteers indexed only 11 million names. But thanks to continuing advances in technology and a growing number of volunteers---more than 100,000 across five continents---an estimated half million individual names are indexed each day.

This Day in History: Is There a Chiropractor in the House?

On September 18, 1895, the first chiropractic adjustment is performed, and a new field of medicine is born, along with a healthy number of skeptics. Daniel David Palmer was at various times a beekeeper, school teacher and grocery store owner. He was also a student of mysticism and was interested in physiology.

Palmer was born March 7, 1845 in Pickering, near Toronto, Canada to Katherine McVay and Thomas Palmer. At age twenty he moved to the United States with his family. While living in Davenport, Iowa in 1895, Palmer met a deaf janitor with a back problem. Upon examination, Palmer located a lump in Harvey Lillard’s back. Palmer had already advanced the theory that spinal abnormalities caused most, if not all, diseases and conditions by virtue of disrupting normal nerve flow. When he performed an adjustment on Lillard, which involved the manual manipulation of the spine and surrounding joints, the man’s deafness vanished. Palmer knew he was onto something big. (Lillard’s later account of the event is quite different from what Palmer claimed.)

Bachmann Publick House Could Be Sold to Genealogy Society for a Dollar

The 1753 Bachmann Publick House in Easton, Pennsylvania was once owned by Declaration of Independence signer George Taylor. It served as a meeting place for treaty talks during the French and Indian War and also hosted notables such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The building also served as Easton's first courtroom. Now the county finance committee has recommended selling the Bachmann Publick House to the Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society for a dollar.

Ancestry.com and the Drouin Genealogical Institute Reach Agreement

On August 30, 2009, I published an article about a disagreement between Ancestry.com and the Drouin Genealogical Institute concerning indexation of the Drouin Collection previously placed on-line by Ancestry.com. That article is available at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/08/ancestrycom-in-arbitration-over-the-drouin-collection.html. As a result, one of the more valuable French-Canadian genealogy databases was taken off-line.

Now the Drouin Genealogical Institute reports that the two sides have reached agreement.

Google Offering Print Versions of Online Books

I have written several times about all the genealogy books that are available free of charge on Google Books. Now Google is teaming up with On Demand Books to offer paperback versions (for a fee) of its collection of more than 2 million public domain books. The books will be printed using ODB's Espresso Book Machine, which is already in use at several book stores and libraries and can print and bind a complete, paperback copy of a 300-page book in less than 5 minutes.

The following is a press release written by On Demand Books:

GOOGLE SIGNS AGREEMENT WITH ON DEMAND BOOKS
Over Two Million Public Domain Titles Now Available Directly to Consumers

New York, NY, September 17, 2009.....Google has agreed to provide On Demand Books, LLC (ODB), the maker of the Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), with immediate access to over two million public-domain titles in the Google digital files. This unprecedented number of reading options is in addition to the current 1.6 million titles already available directly to consumers via the Espresso Book Machine®.

Update: Philadelphia will NOT Close All Free Libraries

Newsletter reader Sam Eneman just sent word that this afternoon the Pennsylvania State senate passed bill 1828 by a vote of 32 to 17. This is the legislation that was needed for the City of Philadelphia to avoid the "Doomsday" Plan C budget scenario, which would have resulted in the layoff of 3,000 city employees and forced the closing of all libraries.

You can read more at http://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/index.cfm?srch=3&postid=952.

Angus Council, Scotland Burial Records Published Online

Angus Council, Scotland is the first authority to put its burial records online. More than 200,000 burial records, dating from the 1800s, are being published online for the first time. Angus Council said the service would offer a portal to the county's past and give people the chance to discover more about their ancestry. Deceased Online has digitized the burial records of all the lairs in 71 cemeteries managed by the authority. Maps showing the exact locations of graves and digital photographs of headstones are also being provided.

The records will cover cemeteries in Forfar, Arbroath and Montrose and feature details about characters like Peter Pan author JM Barrie, who is buried in Kirriemuir.

One Woman with 1,400 Descendants

The commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" the Krishevsky family follows quite closely. Last Saturday, the great grandmother, Rachel Krishevsky passed away at the age of 99, leaving behind no less than 1,400 children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren.

Married at nineteen, Rachel raised eleven children. Those children obviously followed their parents' examples with large families, giving Rachel 150 grandchildren. As the generations increased, producing about 1,000 great-grandchildren. Now there are great-great-grandchildren as well.

Dedication of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives

The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth will hold a public dedication of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives at the Clare T. Carney University Library, on Friday, September 18, 2009 at 4 p.m.

The Archives are named after Affonso Gil Mendes Ferreira, a founder of Portuguese-American radio back in 1933, whose daughter, Otilia Ferreira, made the lead gift to the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives Endowment.

Preparing, Protecting, Preserving your Family Treasures

Many of us possess family heirlooms. They may be old family photographs or marriage certificate or a handmade quilt that is more than 100 years old. Whatever the object(s), they are handed down from generation to generation and are cherished by each new recipient.

What happens if your home is flooded or in a hurricane or tornado or other disaster? Even a simple burst water pipe or a few roof shingles blown off in a thunderstorm can result in damage to all sorts of things, including heirlooms.

No one likes to think about disasters, whether natural or man made, but thinking ahead and preparing, together with knowledge about first steps, can save those family treasures from ruin.