The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
Everywhere we look, we find articles about libraries and various archives that are cutting back, reducing the services they offer their patrons. It is refreshing to hear of a state library and a state archive that is actually EXPANDING its services.
The following was written by the New York State Library and New York State Archives:
The New York State Library and New York State Archives will institute new Saturday hours beginning on October 16th. Saturday hours of operation at the two facilities, located on the 7th and 11th floor of the Cultural Education Center (CEC) at the Empire State Plaza in Albany, will be from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free public parking will be available in the Madison Avenue parking lots adjacent to the CEC. Directions and parking information is available on the New York State Museum website at http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/information/general/muswhere.html.
I normally don't comment on these stories but there seems to be a flood of them in the past few days. Of course, everyone whose ancestors have been in the United States for at least two or three centuries is likely to be related to most everyone else with similar ancestry. Therefore, it isn't much of a surprise to find that any one of us is related to a few million other people.
Here are the latest claims about President Barack Obama's relatives:
He is distantly related to Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin (10th cousins)
He is distantly related to conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh (10th cousins)
He is distantly related to former President George W. Bush
Dave Velten sent a note after reading some earlier articles in this newsletter about various online collections of genealogy records. Dave writes:
Along the theme of accessing digitized records online, some of the French archives are scanning and placing civil and church records online, for free. Check out the Bas-Rhin archives at http://archives.bas-rhin.fr/ and the Haut-Rhin archives at http://www.archives.cg68.fr/Services_Actes_Civils.aspx. They each have different interfaces you have to learn to drive, but it's pretty cool and and no need to order and wait for a film at the FHC.
Now THIS is retro! Jack Zylkin has invented a Typewriter Convertor process that turns any manual typewriter into a keyboard for your computer! He sells ready to purchase typewriters or you can buy a kit and do it yourself! The kit is described at http://www.etsy.com/listing/58062120/diy-usb-typewriter-conversion-kit
The Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana has launched a new genealogy web site. The aim is to make it easier for people to find out about their family ancestry without actually visiting the library's Genealogy Center.
The new web site, located at www.genealogycenter.org, includes several free databases and portals including the African American Gateway, Family Bible Records and Our Military Heritage that have been developed by the Genealogy Center.
The Genealogy Center’s website includes other resources, including full-text books that have been digitized by Internet Archives, the Center’s Pathfinders to various areas of research, and the Community Album, a collection of historical photographs for the surrounding area.
I also noticed that the site has some excellent "how to get started in genealogy" tutorials, a calendar of future events being held at the Allen County Public Library, past issues of "Genealogy Gems," an e-zine which lists information about the department's collections and useful research tips, and more.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates is using both DNA and standard genealogical inquiries to research the ancestry of various celebrities. Now Gates has an article in The Root about New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s genealogy.
Gladwell has mixed ancestry: English on his father’s side, Northwest European, Jewish, and middle class mulatto on his Jamaican mother’s side. Growing up in Canada, Gladwell never experienced any significant racial issues. However, he always assumed that some of his Jamaican ancestors had been slaves at some time in history.
Gates discovered that Gladwell was wrong. He wrote in an article in The Root:
Last week I wrote about the need to carry emergency and perhaps not-so-emergency information with you at all times. You can read that article at http://goo.gl/49Wc.
I started doing this many years ago with a laminated card in my wallet. I have O-negative blood, not a rare blood type but also not so common. In case of a medical emergency, such as an accident, I wanted my medical rescuers to know my blood type. I added my home address and the names and telephone numbers of my next of kin.
As the years went by, I added more information and replaced the card with a new laminated card every few years. A few years ago I was diagnosed as a diabetic and the amount of information on the card increased. I added in the (many) prescription drugs that I now take and the dosages. Soon, there was too much information to fit on one wallet-sized card.
The following announcement was written by the Society of Australian Genealogists:
Adelaide, South Australia, 12 October 2010 - Unlock the Past with the support of the Society of Australian Genealogists announces the History & Genealogy Expo Sydney 2010. This will be a fascinating 2 day exhibition and conference on 22-23 October 2010 at Parramatta RSL, Corner Macquarie and O’Connell Streets, Parramatta, NSW.
The Expo is a unique opportunity to see many societies, libraries and commercial product and service suppliers in one place and to learn from many expert presenters.
Microsoft has released Windows Phone 7, not to be confused with Windows 7, which is something completely different. Windows Phone 7 is the operating system for handheld cell phones that have computing capability, often referred to as "smartphones."
Microsoft used to produce one of the two dominant operating systems for smartphones, competing with Palm. Since those days, Palm has almost disappeared, and Microsoft's smartphone operating system has also lost market share, now trailing far behind Apple and Android. Some writers claim that Nokia's Symbian operating system is the best selling smartphone operating system (see Wikipedia.org's claims at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone), but I doubt those claims. I don't see Symbian mentioned all that often in the ads that I see, although I do understand it is very popular in Europe and the Far East.
Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft's big effort to regain market share.
Talk about a good samaritan! The Jamestown Sun has an article about Herb Schwede of Donnybrook, North Dakota. Schwede has documented about 70,000 gravesites from tombstone data that he's collected from visits to about 360 cemeteries between Towner and Montana, and Lake Sakakawea and Canada. He has documented a few cemeteries in eastern Montana and Minnesota. He posts his information online for use by genealogical researchers.
"What I get out of it is e-mails from all over the world," he said. "A lot of times I get on the computer and there's 50 e-mails."
I got a big chuckle out of this. John Reid commented on his popular Anglo-Celtic Connections blog about the effect of having his blog mentioned in this newsletter. He even compared me to Oprah Winfrey!
Now you can copy ALL your family tree, including family photographs, and a lot more to one removable disk, similar to a CD or DVD disk.
First, there were CD disks with roughly 600 megabytes of storage. That was followed by DVD disks with roughly 4.7 gigabytes of storage. More recently, Blu-ray disks have become popular with up to 25 gigabytes of storage on one disk. All of those numbers can be doubled with the so-called double-layer disks.
Now, a new technology from TDK delivers disks that will store up to one terabyte of information. If my math is correct, that is the equivalent of 1,667 CD-ROM disks, all stored on one disk that looks a lot like a CD-ROM disk.
If all goes according to plan, the only space sibling team will be hooking up in orbit. And not only are astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly brothers, they're identical twins. Scott took off Friday on a Russian Soyuz rocket to begin a five and a half month mission as the next commander of the International Space Station. Mark is the next commander of the space shuttle Endeavour, scheduled to lift off in February and hook up with the space station March 1st.
They will become the first blood relatives to meet up in space. So how will they mark the historic occasion? "We're going to arm-wrestle," said Mark.
The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
I have been reading an interesting book. In fact, it is a book about my family. The original book was published in 1901, so it has long been out of copyright. I have seen it offered for sale as a reprinted book for $150 to $250. In fact, I purchased a printed copy of the book about 25 years ago, and it now sits in a box in my basement. I ran out of bookshelf space, and I don't open this book all that often. Therefore, it was banned to the basement years ago and, admittedly, I haven't opened it since.
The new book that I purchased this week is exactly the same book. It has exactly the same words, exactly the same images, everything. Well, not quite everything: there are two major differences.
A newsletter reader asked an interesting question. Here is an extract from a longer message:
As the economy continues to worsen and gas prices rise exponentially, I am curious to know how this will affect services such as Ancestry.com, 1837online, Scotland's People, Worldvitalrecords.com, and others.
Will these companies raise their prices in relation to other increases? Or will they maintain or possibly lower prices to keep subscribers? In tough times, leisure activities are among the first to suffer.
I am not sure that my crystal ball is any clearer than anyone else's. However, a few things do seem obvious to me.
Today is 10/10/10 and Canonical today has released Ubuntu Linux version 10.10. I'm a big fan of Linux and I run Ubuntu Linux on one of my computers at home. I upgraded to version 10.10 this morning.
While users have a variety of Linux versions, called "distributions," to choose from, Ubuntu Linux appears to be the most popular.
Linux used to be an operating system designed for techies but the versions released in recent years have become more and more user-friendly, to the point where several Linux versions are now easier to install and use than Windows. Installing new software is easier on Ubuntu Linux than on any other operating system I have used. Most Linux software is available free of charge and can be installed with only a few mouseclicks, no technical knowledge required. More than 2,000 free programs are available, all of them easily installed. Installing new peripherals is usually easier on Ubuntu Linux than on other operating systems, if the peripheral is known and is already in Ubuntu's list of thousands of drivers.
The Worcester Chapter of the Massachusetts Society of Genealogists, Inc. has released a new CD containing transcriptions of 1916-1920 birth, marriage and death records for 31 Massachusetts towns.
Over 9300 births, 4000 marriages and 8000 deaths have been compiled and published on the CD in Microsoft Excel format. Information included, but not limited to, includes first, middle and last names and, in some cases, maiden names. There are ages at time of death and sometimes at time of marriage.
Writing in the Monster and Critics web site, Jean-Baptiste Piggin describes a quandary that many libraries face: after digitizing their existing collections, do they throw the paper book away?
For private collections of 20th-century books, digitization may mean destruction, since the books have almost no market value. That is especially true of paperbacks. The question becomes more importtant, however, when discussing older books that do have some resale value.
A report in the US Chronicle of Higher Education last week described how a professor, Alexander Halavais, frees up space in his cramped Manhattan apartment: he slices the binding off each book and puts the loose stack of paper in a page-fed, automatic scanner.
The images are saved on his computer and undergo an optical character recognition process to make the files searchable. Halavais then destroys the printed pages.
Buried deep inside an article about a different topic is a reference to digitizing old books and placing them online. Dan Burnstone, from ProQuest, states that his company has launched a project that aims to get all early European books printed between 1475 and 1700 online.
"We don't know how many books we are ultimately dealing with, but we think it's something like one million," said Burnstone. "Our plan is to digitise the holdings of several European libraries over several years."
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