The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
The following announcement was written by the New England Historic Genealogical Society:
AmericanAncestors.org reflects organization's expanding national collection and resources
Boston, MA - August 19, 2010 - D. Brenton Simons, President and CEO of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), today announced the launch of AmericanAncestors.org, the organization's new website that will serve as the home of its growing regional and national genealogical resources. AmericanAncestors.org will contain all of the Society's New England and New York content, features, articles, and resources, as well as weekly updates and databases in a variety of regional and ethnic specialties, such as sources for mid-Atlantic, Irish, and African American research.
Leading family history website findmypast.co.uk has added 22,000 baptism, marriage and burial records to its Dorset parish record collection as follows:
12,325 baptism records covering the years 1549 – 1812
8,368 marriage records covering the years 1560 – 1839
1,307 burial records covering the years 1651 – 1795
These records, which have been provided by the Dorset Family History Society, bring the total number of Dorset parish records available at findmypast.co.uk up to almost 450,000.
On August 18, 1775, British general Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.
The Federation of Genealogical Societies, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas, announces the re-launch today of the popular Society Hall at its website at www.fgs.org.
Society Hall is an informational database accessible on the Internet that can be used to locate FGS member organizations in the U.S. and abroad. This includes genealogical societies, historical societies, family associations, libraries, archives, and genealogical vendors serving the genealogical community. Thousands of people searching for information about these organizations visit Society Hall each month.
Are you ready for a radical change in your lifestyle? Some people are advocating just that and are doing it themselves. They are selling or giving away nearly all of their physical possessions and changing to an almost all digital life. These are minimalists: people who prefer to live with an absolute minimum of personal possessions. I suspect we will see more and more minimalists within the next few years. As genealogists, we need to record the lifestyle changes of our relatives and perhaps of ourselves.
Chris Yurista is a Washington, DC, resident who lives out of a backpack while earning a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent. He claims digital technology has replaced the need for his home and his possessions.
The Footnote Blog mentions a CNN article about what some folks have called, “one of the most significant Civil War discoveries in decades.” Some students from Georgia Southern have found what may be “the exact location of a stockade and dozens of personal artifacts belonging to” Union Prisoners at Camp Lawton, a Confederate prison that housed about 10,000 men. Camp Lawton was built to replace the notorious Andersonville Prison, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.
At 8 p.m. Eastern time, an encore telecast of "Who Do You Think You Are" averaged a 0.9/4 in 18-49, 3.7 million viewers overall. "Who Do You Think You Are" is currently reporting NBC's biggest overall audience in the time period in 10 weeks (since June 4). In the time period, "Who Do You Think You Are" is tied for #1 among the major networks in men 25-54 (pending updates).
A newsletter reader recently contacted me about an email message a relative received. She wrote:
I wanted to ask you about this Probate email my sister in law received, she is not into genealogy at all so questioned me about it.
They gave my step father's name and totally different or wrong parents for him, but knew his date of birth, death and that my mother remarried and had the correct name of that husband. It worried her that they knew some of the correct material (no secrets anymore on the internet these days) they wanted her to contact them because she might inherit some money..........I think it all sounds very fishy and wanted your experienced comment or if you had heard of them?
The message then went on for a bit, giving the name of the company involved, the company's web site, and more.
Researching African American ancestry prior to 1870 is always difficult. However, ProQuest has added new online tools to the genealogist's toolbox. The following announcement was written by ProQuest:
ProQuest Expands Content in Ground-Breaking African American Genealogy Resource
African American Heritage takes genealogists back beyond 1870 with marriage records, slave registers and more
August 16, 2010 (ANN ARBOR, Mich.) -- New content in a ground-breaking ProQuest genealogy product enables African Americans to more easily trace their ancestry and break through a boundary that has hindered research in the past. ProQuest African American Heritage has added marriage, cohabitation, and registers of slaves and free persons of color that date from the early 1800’s, making digitally accessible some of the earliest official records of Africans in the U.S. ProQuest African American Heritage is a digital resource exclusively devoted to African American family history research.
The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:
The Tennessee page on the FamilySearch Research Wiki has recently been updated and now includes a wealth of new information and resources to help people find their ancestors in the Volunteer State. The link for this revised page is: http://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Tennessee
Chinese historians are trying to piece together the story of the Liaoyuan POW camp, near Changchun, China. I once spent two weeks in Changchun and became very aware of the importance of the city although unaware of the former POW camp. Changchun is in northeastern China in the area formerly known as Manchuria. It is north of North Korea and just south of Russian Siberia.
During World War II the entire area was occupied by the Japanese Army and Changchun served as the capital of the Japanese-controlled puppet state in Manchuria. China's last emperor Pu Yi was installed as the head of the Manchukuo government by the Japanese. He resided in the Imperial Palace in Changchun, which is now the Museum of the Manchu State Imperial Palace. I visited that museum in the early 1980s.
58-year-old Laura Smith of Richmond, Indiana died Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010, at Reid Hospital. She was born in Richmond, April 29, 1952, to Elmer Eugene and Marilyn Baldwin Pohlenz. Laura was very active in the Wayne County Genealogical Society.
The Paik Inje Memorial Library of Inje University has introduced Inje's Digital Genealogy Library, after three years of dedicated preparation. The genealogical materials have been collected by the library since 2007 in an effort to preserve Korea’s ethnic history.
In association with the Utah-based organization Family Search, the library has digitalized hundreds of records and created the Digital Genealogy Library to allow users to search for their genealogical records.
Yes, I do remember Grandma's lye soap. It was heavy-duty, although it didn't suds and it didn't foam. Back in 1952, Johnny Standley even had a hit record about it, called "It's in the Book!" Side A was "Little Bo Peep" (a parody of the popular Bible meetings of the day) and Side B was "Grandma's Lye Soap."
This #1 hit was the first million selling comedy record.
The music was corny then and seems even more so today. Nonetheless, this is what your parents (and a few of us older folks) listened to for amusement.
I tend to travel often but have been at home for the past two months. All that is about to change. This week I am leaving for the annual conference of the Federation of Genealogical Societies in Knoxville, Tennessee. That is but the first of several trips that should keep me on the road most of the time for the next two months.
I'll be traveling with an assortment of laptop computers, an iPad, various wi-fi and 3G wireless devices, and more. I should remain connected and be able to post new articles to this newsletter. However, time may be an issue. Don't be surprised if I don't post anything for an extended period of time.
I am also carrying a digital camera and a camcorder and hope to post images of the various events to this newsletter.
The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
How many times has this happened to you? You enter a courthouse, library, or other repository of genealogy information with the intent of finding information about your ancestors. You don't really know what is available in that library or archive. After all, that is the purpose of your trip, right? You want to find out. Next thing you know, your head is spinning amidst a profusion of information and a confusion of objectives.
You may be wondering how this happens. While at the library/archive/repository, you start to look at the available information, but you also notice a book, microfilm, or other set of documents about some related topic. You spend some time looking at that book, even though it was not a part of your original plan. You find some interesting material about things that are not directly related to your ancestors. The end of the day arrives all too soon, and you find yourself leaving the facility, feeling a bit frustrated that you didn't accomplish what you had planned to do that day.
I know this has happened to me all too many times. Time and again I have traveled across town or across the country, only to not find the information that I wanted to discover. Over the years I have developed some techniques that help me become more organized and more effective once I am “on site.” I thought I would share some of those techniques this week.
Last year I wrote about geotagging photographs. Geotagging can be a major addition to digital photographs. In short, geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification to digital photographs, video, websites, or even RSS feeds. The information added typically consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, but it can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names. However, the New York Times reports that security experts and privacy advocates have begun warning consumers about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras.
Franklin County, Pennsylvania's officials, including the county's archivist Stu Veinotte, say the county is better off without all the old papers that constitute more than 200 years of local history. Paper copies of old estate records, marriage licenses, tax and court records and book after book of deed records, some of which date to the late 1700s, will be gone, existing only in digital files and in some cases on microfilm.
Veinotte is managing a team that is digitizing the old records, many of which are stored in two rooms in the basement of the courthouse annex, converting them to digital format to be stored in the county's computer system and in some cases microfilming them. So far, he has overseen the digitization of boxes full of old records, and book after book of records from the 19th and 20th centuries, including notary records from the 1970s and 1980s, road notices from 1881, a list of jurors from 1876, as well as things like 20th century voter records and annual and triennial assessments for the county's townships and boroughs.
The computer world is full of nasties these days: viruses, Trojan horse programs, keyloggers, and all sorts of other programs designed to steal your personal information and to do harm to your computer. Ninety-nine percent of the problems affect Windows computers, but even Macintosh and Linux systems are not completely immune. You can install anti-malware programs on your computer in an attempt to keep your data safe from malware (malevolent software), but that still does not entirely secure your data. The people who write anti-virus software are always behind their counterparts who write viruses. Yesterday's anti-virus software does not protect you from today's viruses.
Luckily, there is an easy solution: move your computer to the cloud we call the Internet.
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