Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Michelle Obama's Roots: "Colored Persons Cohabiting ... on 27th February, 1866"

Megan Smolenyak has written an interesting article that provides a lot of information about Michelle Obama's ancestry. Michelle, daughters Malia and Sasha, and her mother, Marian (Shields) Robinson, are the first descendants of slaves to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as members of the first family.

Megan tells of Michelle's great-great-grandfather, Dolphus Shields and his mother, Melvina McGruder. Dolphus was born into slavery, yet lived long enough to overlap the life of a White House-bound descendant.

Generation Maps Announces Release Date for Family ChArtist

The following announcement was written by Generation Maps:

Cedar Hills, Utah. — February 22, 2010 — Generation Maps today announced the release date for Family ChArtist, an exciting new genealogy chart creation tool.  Family ChArtist is a new web application that will make creating and designing beautiful genealogy charts easier and faster than ever before.  Family ChArtist is being showcased this weekend at the Family History Expo in St. George, Utah (www.familyhistoryexpos.com) and will be released to the general public with an all new Generation Maps website at 12 noon Mountain Standard Time on March 8th.

Surplus Used Microfilms Offered for Disposal at the National Archives of the UK

The following was written by The National Archives (of the UK):

05 February

Following the introduction of online access to digital images in the reading rooms at Kew, The National Archives is disposing of the batches of redundant microfilms listed in the following schedule (see PDF below).

The films are offered on an 'as seen' basis with no warranty or guarantee offered as to their quality or completeness. They may not be used for digitisation, publication or any commercial re-use. Any copyright restrictions on the films or their content will remain after disposal. Applications are invited in writing only: by email, webform or letter and only requests for whole batches will be accepted.

Genealogists Find Rightful Owners of Unclaimed Money

Many professional genealogists look for ancestors while others look for descendants. The latter effort is called "heir searching" when someone dies and leaves an estate but the heirs are not easily located. Professional "heir search" firms often find the heirs and then inform them of the (usually) unexpected money they have inherited. The heir search companies make income by taking a percentage of the money, often as much as 30%.

One company in Indiana has a slightly different twist on the "heir search" business: the company starts with unclaimed money from insurance benefits, bank accounts, pensions, and sometimes estates. Employees will then find the rightful recipients.

ScanCafe

Do you have some pictures that you want to digitize? Would you also like to restore the color or to fix "speckles" and scratches? The answer is simple: scan them. Well, that's a simple answer unless you have a few thousand old family photographs to convert. Sitting in front of a scanner and manually feeding in a thousand or more old photographs is not a chore that I envy. Now there is a new service that will do the hard work for you: ScanCafe.

ScanCafe is based in India, where labor charges are lower. Real humans do the scanning and analyze the results. This is not an automated service of "feed everything into the hopper of an automated scanner and hope that it all works." Each scan is made by hand and then reviewed by human eyes.

How to Save This Newsletter and Other Web Pages in PDF Format

The Plus Edition of this newsletter is available in PDF format at http://www.eogn.com/wp/thisweek.pdf. The PDF version seems to be a popular option as the "hit counter" on that page shows several hundred downloads every week. However, only the current week's version is available in PDF format.

Several people have asked if they can obtain PDF versions of previous editions, and the answer is, "Yes, if you do it yourself." That is super easy for Macintosh users and not too difficult on Windows.

APG Seeks Information Officer

The Association of Professional Genealogists is seeking a volunteer to serve as its Information Officer (IO). The APG IO prepares and sends press releases to genealogy columnists, bloggers, and other media outlets. The IO also serves as a general resource to the APG Board and Executive Committee on marketing/communication issues. Serving as IO can be a good way to become more active in APG administration as well as to exercise one’s communication skills. Interested parties should send their qualifications and contact information in an e-mail to Kathy Hinckley, APG’s Executive Director, at admin@apgen.org.

DEADLINE: 5 March 2010

Yitta Schwartz Leaves 2,000 Living Descendants

This might be an exercise for your genealogy program! When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz had no trouble remembering everyone’s name and face.  She may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.

She was born in 1916 into a family of seven children in the Hungarian village of Kalev, revered as the hometown of a founder of Hungarian Hasidism. During World War II, the Nazis sent Mrs. Schwartz, her husband, Joseph, and the six children they had at the time to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

(+) Convert Any Files to Different Formats

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

One of the major problems with computers is the plethora of file formats. Besides the variety of computer programs, we get different file types with our cameras, camcorders, and myriad other hi-tech toys. We can get lost in a long list of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that refer to file formats: DOC, RTF, JPG, MP3, XLS, GIF, PDF, PCX, and many more. Some of them have more than three letters, such as HTML, DOCX, XLSX, and more.

Of course, having all these formats means there will be occasional problems. You may have a file and not have the correct program to use it. For instance, a friend might send you a DOCX file attached to an email program, but your word processor only accepts DOC. Another problem might be that a picture you downloaded from the web is in GIF format, and you need TIFF; or a movie you downloaded might be in 3GP format, but you need it to be in .MP4, .MOV, or .M4V format so that you can save it and view it on your iPhone.

What to do? There are two possible solutions, one of which is both free and easy.

A Comprehensive Video Guide For Google Voice

Google Voice is one of my favorite applications. I use it several times a day. It has transformed the method I use for phone calls. Life is easier now.

Google has now posted a comprehensive list of videos explaining how Google Voice can be tapped to your advantage. The videos may be found at http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-voice-explained.html or you can watch the first one by clicking on the RUN icon in the middle of the image below.

Are You Ready for the Future?

Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, created a YouTube video that got me thinking. The video focuses on the rate of change of the technology we all use daily. Some of the facts that Fisch mentions include:

Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the past 25 years. However, in the last five years alone, 30 million more people have started reading newspapers online. Translation: more people read newspapers today than ever before, except for the fact that they are now reading electronic print, not print on paper.

Some Great CensusTools Spreadsheets

Did you ever try entering extracted census data into your genealogy program's text editor? The capabilities vary from one genealogy program to another, but most of them cannot handle columns of information very well. In many cases, you will find it easier to use a spreadsheet program for displaying such information. Gary Minder's CensusTools will help you do just that with most any Windows or Macintosh genealogy program.

Gary now offers more than forty genealogy spreadsheets, providing researchers with quality creations to help you electronically record, preserve and archive family history data.

Using a spreadsheet is a great way to record and analyze your genealogy data in a format similar to the original source. All of the CensusTools spreadsheets faithfully reproduce actual census document formatting, providing you with a professional appearing product suitable for printing or including in your published family history. The result won't be an exact copy of the original document. In fact, it should be far easier to read and analyze than the original.

Camino for Macintosh

I have been using the Camino web browser for a few days now and am impressed with it. Today I clicked on a few things to make Camino my default web browser. I am leaving Firefox behind.

I have been using Firefox for Macintosh as my standard web browser for more than two years and I was quite happy with it until recently. However, the latest versions of Firefox seem to abort occasionally when I have a lot of open Firefox windows, typically ten or more. I find that annoying. I don't know if that is a bug in Firefox or if something is wrong with my Mac, but I've now used Camino for many hours and haven't yet encountered any problems.

FamilySearch Indexing Update: Volunteers Needed for Italian and Portuguese Projects

19 February 2010

Volunteers who speak Portuguese or Italian are needed for new FamilySearch Indexing projects from Recife, Brazil, and Naples, Italy. In addition, new U.S. Census projects are now available for four additional states and three territories.

New Projects in the Past Two Weeks

Use Twitter, Please Rob Me

I have written before about privacy concerns with social networking services such as FaceBook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and others. Now a group by the name of Forthehack has launched a website called Please Rob Me that hunts out tweets from people who are also using location-based services to tell the world that they're out of town, and then directs the world to go rob their house.

Forthehack publishes a listing all the empty homes that are available to be robbed by publishing a live feed of those Foursquare players who automatically post location updates to Twitter.

A Tribute to Marsha Hoffman Rising CG, FASG

The Federation of Genealogical Societies (www.fgs.org), the National Archives, and the genealogical community have started a project to digitize the War of 1812 pension files--a fitting beginning to the bicentennial commemoration of this important war.

Marsha Hoffman Rising, CG, FASG, died 17 February 2010. A Certified Genealogist, Marsha was a Past President (2002-04) and Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists and a contributing editor to The American Genealogist. She was a Trustee of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (2001-03) and of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She was a charter member and the first President of the Genealogical Speakers Guild. Marsha was also a Vice-President of the National Genealogical Society and a Past President of the Federation of Genealogical Societies.

Longtime Friends Discover They're Cousins

Rachel Mallon and Suzanne Hadley met 10 years ago when their 4-year-old sons played T-ball together. The mothers instantly bonded and have remained close friends ever since.

Mallon later picked up an old genealogy project she had abandoned years ago and started researching her family tree once again. She decided to re-explore the ancestors of her mother, who had died when Mallon was 20. She dug out a letter sent to her 30 years ago by her great-aunt, which mentioned that woman's daughter, Nancy. After tracking down Nancy's Wisconsin phone number, Mallon made the call on Jan. 4. Nancy called back that night. "I can't believe you found me. We always wondered where you were," Nancy told her.

History Award Nominations Sought

The following announcement was written by the East Tennessee Historical Society:

The East Tennessee Historical Society (ETHS) is seeking nominations from across East Tennessee for awards of excellence in the field of history.  Each year, the society recognizes individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to the preservation, promotion, and interpretation of the region’s history.

Awards are in four categories:

Ancestry.com Reports First Earnings as a Public Company

Ancestry.com, which became a publicly traded company in November, said today it experienced a substantial increase in revenue growth in the fourth quarter and for all of 2009.

The company said revenue for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $60.1 million, up 14.6 percent over the same period of 2008. For the full year, revenue was $224.9 million, up 13.8 percent over 2008. The company said its revenue figures were helped by favorable exchange rates, without which revenues would have been about 3 percent higher.

Friends Reunited Sale Approved

UK competition authorities have given ITV the go-ahead for the £25m (US$39m) sale of its social networking site Friends Reunited to IT firm Brightsolid. The acquisition of Friends Reunited Group will create Britain's leading genealogy business by bringing together Genes Reunited and findmypast.com (which operate the official 1901 and 1911 Census websites respectively in association with The National Archives) and ScotlandsPeople in partnership with General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon.