The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
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the vendors like it or not!
The Vigo County Public Library's web site now offers an index to all Vigo County marriages recorded between 1818 and 1951. The index will be a great help to anyone doing genealogy or family research, said Nancy Dowell, director of the library.
There are nearly 35,000 marriages in the index. Many marriage records include digital images of documents beyond a simple marriage license.
Would you like to try Linux but you don't want to reformat your PC's hard drive? There's an easy way to take Linux for a "test drive" without affecting your PC. It's called a Live CD.
A Live CD, (or DVD, or USB external disc) is a CD containing a bootable computer operating system. With most Live CDs, that operating system is a version of Linux.
A Live CD contains a complete version of the operating system and (usually) a number of applications. You insert the CD into any standard Windows PC and reboot the system, and then your computer will boot from the CD, not from your hard disk. (You may have to change the settings in your computer's BIOS to change your computer's boot order.) The operating system on the Live CD (normally Linux) will load and become operational without touching any information stored on your hard drive. It is a great way of taking a new operating system for a "test drive."
Researchers can now access the entire catalogue at the Shetland archives from anywhere in the world. The archives' staff have spent the past five years recording details of the huge collection of material onto the Internet, amounting to 75,000 records containing more than 100,000 documents.
The archives contain information about life in Shetland dating back as far as the 15th century. The archives' contents include council papers, court records, books, oral history recordings and the contents of journals such as the New Shetlander, Shetland Life and Shetland Fishing News.
I wish all communities would do this! Information about who’s buried in Chatham’s municipal cemeteries, including date of death, grave site location, and military service, will be available via the village website at www.chathamil.net. The web site even includes information compiled by the village’s geographic information system (GIS) software.
The village sees the new online database as a method of saving money, specifically, employee labor costs. Municipal employees previously used handwritten information on 3-by-5 index cards. That required a lot of time to find information. The new system will be much faster to search. A side benefit is that information will also be available to the general public, most of whom previously had to call the town's offices to request information, adding still more labor expense. Using the new "self-service" web site will reduce labor expenses significantly.
The following announcement was written by Arphax Publishing:
Norman, Oklahoma, July 19, 2010 -- The nation's largest publisher of original landowner maps, Arphax Publishing Co., announces today that its two primary book series are now available in soft-cover editions. In its first five years, Arphax has published books for over 500 U.S. counties which display maps of original landowners. Before today, these volumes were available only with a spiral-bound or library-bound cover option. But beginning right now, every current title is also available in a high-quality paperback edition.
The following announcement was written by Footnote.com And Lowcountry Africana:
-Newly Digitized Records Preserve the Names of More Than 30,000 Slaves -
SALT LAKE CITY - July 19, 2010 – Today Footnote.com (www.footnote.com) and Lowcountry Africana (www.lowcountryafricana.net) announced the launch of a new free collection of historical records from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History containing estate inventories and bills of sale for Colonial and Charleston South Carolina from 1732 to 1872. FamilySearch International donated the copies of the microfilm of the original historical documents.
Charleston’s role as a port of entry during the Atlantic Slave Trade means many thousands of African Americans may have ancestors who came from, or through, South Carolina. This new collection on Footnote.com will assist African American genealogy research by forming, in many cases, a seamless paper trail from Emancipation to the 1700s.
A brand new series of Who Do You Think You Are? will start on BBC1 at 9pm tomorrow (Monday 19 July). The first celebrity to have his tree researched by the programme’s experts is Bruce Forsyth. The research centres around Bruce’s great-grandfather, a prominent 19th century landscape gardener, who may have been a bigamist. Watch the programme to find out more.
Ancestry.com Tree to Go has uploaded a new version of its popular iPhone genealogy program to the iTunes App Store. Tree to Go for the iPhone (and iPod touch) reportedly now has improved performance and can also "handle trees of all sizes, including trees with over 2,000 people," according to information posted in iTunes.
According to Dick Carlson, president of the Marblehead (Massachusetts) Museum board, "At the end of the war, Marblehead had 500 widows and 1,000 fatherless children." A metal plaque erected at Marblehead's Old Burial Hill in the 1920s celebrates the fact that "Six Hundred Revolutionary heroes" are buried there. Now the museum and the Marblehead Historical Society are trying to identify all the veterans.
Complicating matters, many of the stones on Old Burial Hill have become illegible; some are lost, and others, nothing more than wooden crosses to start with, have disappeared entirely.
Plans to start an Archbald historical society will proceed after more than 40 people brought ideas to its organizational meeting. The group will next seek advice from other historical and genealogical societies in the county to decide the best way to form the group, organizer Ed Casey said.
Suggestions made at the meeting ranged from involving high school students looking for senior projects to digitally archiving photographs and finding a location for the society to keep materials, Mr. Casey said.
This should interest a lot of genealogists with Vermont ancestors. The following announcement was written by the University of Vermont:
The University of Vermont Libraries has been awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the amount $391,552 to support the Vermont Digital Newspaper Project.
The UVM Libraries will work collaboratively with partners in the Vermont Department of Libraries, the Ilsley Public Library of Middlebury, and the Vermont Historical Society to select, digitize, and make available up to 100,000 pages of Vermont newspapers, published between 1836 and 1922, from the collections of the Vermont Department of Libraries and the University of Vermont. The digitized newspapers will be made freely available to the public via the Library of Congress' Chronicling America database.
The Civil War left its mark on Tennessee, and a large part of that legacy has been tucked away and forgotten in countless attics across the state.
Now, with the 150th anniversary of the conflict less than a year away, state historians are asking Tennesseans to dig into their family heirlooms and share the Civil War mementos in a unique online archive.
Two separate, but related, efforts are now underway by genealogists, according to Roger Lewry of the Federation of Family History Societies:
1921 Census, England and Wales Guy Etchells, who campaigned for the early release of the 1911 census, is now calling for the early release of the 1921 census.
When I started researching my family tree more than thirty years ago, I purchased a reprint of a genealogy book first published in 1920: The Harmon Genealogy, comprising all branches in New England written by Artemas C. Harmon. The book mentions my great-grandmother, Lucy Harmon, and documents her Harmon ancestry back to 1667. It is a wonderful resource, and I have referred to this book often over the years.
I paid more than $100 for this reprinted book many years ago. Today I found the same book online. The cost is ZERO. I can download the entire book to my hard drive or to a jump drive or save it to an online storage service. I can print one page, multiple pages, or even the entire book. Even better, I can electronically search the entire book within seconds for any word or phrase. Not only can I search for names, but I can also search for towns, dates, occupations, or any other words of interest. Try doing that with a printed book!
Genealogists are "micro-historians." We record the everyday lives of our ancestors and often contrast their lives against our own. Who is documenting the changes in OUR lives?
One big difference in our lives is the rate at which changes are coming at us and how positively explosive it is. We have all heard numbers concerning the rate of changes in our lives, but one YouTube video brings these changes into focus. A few of these statistics concern me, but I believe they are mostly positive. These are exciting times in which to live.
Here’s some not-so-sobering news for party people, barhoppers and clubgoers. Individuals who inherit a particular gene variant that tweaks the brain’s reward system are especially likely to drink a lot of alcohol in the company of heavy-boozing peers.
That’s the preliminary indication of a new study directed by psychology graduate student Helle Larsen of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Adults carrying at least one copy of a long version of the dopamine D4 receptor gene, dubbed DRD4, imbibed substantially more alcohol around a heavy-drinking peer than did others who lacked that gene variant, Larsen’s group reports in a paper published online July 7 in Psychological Science.
Historical documents continue to be made easily available to the public. One of the latest additions is the original documents from an event known as "The Gunfight at the OK Corral."
While most Americans have heard of the incident that occurred in Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881, most of us don't know the details. In fact, a detailed Coroner's Inquest of the event was made shortly after. Typewritten versions were created in the 1960s by deputy clerks, then apparently mis-filed and lost.
On March 31, 2010, while reorganizing a records storage area in the old county jail, two deputy clerks of the Cochise County Clerk of the Superior Court office discovered these long-missing documents.
LONDON and PROVO, Utah, July 15, 2010 -- Ancestry.com Inc. (Nasdaq: ACOM) today announced the closing of its acquisition of Genline.se, the leading Swedish family history Web site.
Genline currently has more than 17,000 paying members with access to 26 million pages of digitized Swedish church records spanning more than 400 years from the 17th to the 20th century.
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