The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
A couple of newsletter readers have written, asking about user names on the Member's Pages. Apparently, they believed that their user names and passwords had been copied from the Plus Edition subscribers' web pages to the Member's Pages. Not so.
The Member's Pages are available to everyone, Plus Edition subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Therefore, copying a database from one to another wouldn't give access to all. When first opened, the database of user names for the Member's Pages was empty.
If you would like to participate in the Member's Pages, you must create a new user ID.
Last week, I announced a new service from this newsletter: Members' Pages. I must say that I am delighted with the response in the first week. So far:
593 newsletter readers have registered, allowing them to post new information. (Everybody can read but you must register in order to post any information.)
Throughout most of her 86 years, Florence Hand had been haunted by "floating dreams" that always revealed "somebody in the room besides me," she said. The mystery had taken on legendary status in the family when Hand's granddaughter, Trisha Hand, confronted it. She dove into the millions of U.S. Census documents widely available at Ancestry.com and other genealogical research websites.
In turns out Hand did, indeed, have a brother: Albert Taber, who was raised by their grandfather. When Hand found him, he was 87 and living in Florida. Last summer, for the first time in 85 years, brother and sister reunited during an emotional meeting at a Chicago airport.
Megan Smolenyak spent some time researching the ancestry of Steven Tyler, Aerosmith member and new judge on American Idol. She found that Steven probably inherited his musical talents and perhaps some of his personality. You can read Megan's article, I’ve Got a Crush on Steven Tyler’s Grandfather, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-smolenyak-smolenyak/ive-got-a-crush-on-steven_b_797988.html
The following announcement was written by Pinchas Aloni of Jewish Genealogy News:
Jewish Genealogy News is a new free news service for topics related to Jewish Genealogy. Announcements are welcome for upcoming events, new books and articles, new web resources, new blogs and more.
Jewish Genealogy News has gotten off to a good start in the past week with several genealogical societies starting to announce upcoming events on the mailing list.
I need this! I am slowly converting a few hundred books and magazines at home to scanned documents and storing them on my computer. However, I find the process of cutting off the bindings and feeding the pages through a scanner's sheet feeder one at a time, to be really tedious. The newly-announced Book Saver Book Scanner claims to solve that problem: it will scan a 200-page book and convert it to e-Reader format in 15 minutes. Best of all, there is no need to cut the pages from the binding!
Ion Audio is a company well-known for producing record players with a USB cable that can be connected to a computer to convert old vinyl records to modern MP3 files. Now the company has moved into a new business: machines that scan books and magazines.
Not everyone has a need for this. However, if you do have such a need, TitanPad may be a great time saver for you. Pam and I have such a need.
I write articles for this newsletter, then send them to Pam for her editing. She improves the articles in many ways, then sends the results back to me. We are often many miles apart, but modern technology solves distance problems. We used to exchange the files by email, even though one or the other of us, or both, may be traveling. In one rather extreme case, I remember a few years ago when I was writing articles from a hotel room in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and she was editing them from a hotel room in California. (We both live in Massachusetts.)
It looks like this newsletter has a new competitor! I'm glad to see another genealogy newsletter available. I think there's room for several more.
My good friend, Leland Meitzler, is well known in the genealogy community as a frequent author, lecturer, and owner of Family Roots Publishing. In past years, Leland founded Heritage Quest in 1985. He was Managing Editor of Heritage Quest Magazine from 1985 through 2005, and later held the same position with Everton Publishers, editing The Genealogical Helper from 2006 until February of 2009. He is the now co-owner of Family Roots Publishing Company, LLC, and writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com. He has now launched the Genealogy Newsline.
Yesterday, I published an article describing Chronicle of Life, an online photo storage service that promises to store your photos more or less forever. A number of newsletter readers asked questions about the new service, questions that I could not answer. Kai Pommerenke, one of the founders of Chronicle of Life, has now kindly posted a number of answers to the questions in the Comments section at the end of the article.
Private security officers who guard the headquarters of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration are not properly trained to respond to threats to visitors, the staff or the holdings, a report by the agency's watchdog reveals. Without a more robust system of testing and drills for the guards, the Archives "has no assurance officers are proficient enough with their weapons" to respond to an attack, the agency's inspector general said in an emergency memo to top Archives officials.
"We lack the confidence the security officers would be able to respond appropriately during an incident," Inspector General Paul Brachfeld warned Archivist David S. Ferriero in a two-page letter last fall. The letter had not been made public, but a copy was recently obtained by The Washington Post.
Motorola calls it the “world’s most powerful smartphone.” Indeed, the specifications of the Motorola ATRIX 4G handheld computer and cell phone sound interesting: a Tegra dual-core processor with each core running at 1 gigahertz to deliver up to 2 gigahertz of processing power and 1 gigabyte of RAM memory. That sounds like a desktop computer. In fact, this new device is as powerful as desktop computers of only a few years ago. Motorola engineers suggest that it will suffice as your only computer. I'm not so sure but I still must admit that it is powerful.
Lyla Spelbring of Howell was recently awarded the prestigious Lucy Mary Kellogg Award by Cynthia Grostick of Lansing, president of the Michigan Genealogical Council.
The state-level award is presented annually by the council to a Michigan genealogist who has made a significant contribution to the genealogical benefit of her community and who has furthered the knowledge of genealogy to the community.
I will start accepting reservations at 9 PM Eastern time next Wednesday, January 12. That's 8 PM Central Time, 7 PM Mountain Time, and 6 PM Pacific Time. At that time, I will post a message here on http://www.eogn.com that contains a link to the reservation system. Read the message here, click on that link, and the next screen you see will be the reservation sign-up form.
I recently spent some time at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and mentioned it in this newsletter. I also wrote about using wireless Internet access and my laptop computer to verify information on various genealogy web sites while seated in the big genealogy library. A newsletter reader sent an e-mail questioning the wisdom of my using a laptop in the library.
The last sentence of his e-mail sums up his question: "I am against it as a matter of principle and security of a prize possession."
Indeed, his concern is real. Laptops frequently get stolen from libraries and other public places. A friend of mine lost his new (and expensive) laptop from a college law library not long ago. He left the table "for just a moment" to retrieve a book from the shelves. When he returned, the laptop and its power cube were gone. I have heard of many other, similar stories. In fact, I am told that laptops have been stolen from various genealogy libraries in Salt Lake City, Boston, and elsewhere. They also can be stolen easily at local libraries, courthouses, and almost any other place where genealogists congregate. Luckily, such thefts are easy to prevent.
Like every other dad with a digital camera, Kai Pommerenke started taking lots of photos after his daughter was born. But the more he researched, the less convinced he became that those pictures would still be around when she grew up. Hard drives crash. CDs and DVDs warp. Companies that store your photos online can go out of business. Pommerenke wanted a solution that would last forever.
"People definitely have a false sense of security," Pommerenke says. "Digital data is fragile. You have to do something active in order to preserve it." Pommerenke found a solution. His new non-profit organization reportedly will preserve digital photographs, audio, video, text, blogs, status updates, or anything else kept in a digital format, forever.
His service, Chronicle of Life, aims to ease he worries by devoting the same level of care to personal digital files that large institutions give to their own data.
The following is republished here, with permission of the author, from the Irishman's Diary:
On Monday, 3rd January, the high profile 'Irishman's Diary' column of The Irish Times carried an opinion piece by CIGO's Steven Smyrl about the 1926 census. Steven put forward the view that there is huge tourism potential currently locked away in the 1926 census and that the data cannot be described as sensitive in the context of data captured in modern census records. He went on to suggest that if the political will exists the returns could be made available as soon as 2012. A compromise with the Central Statistics Office could, if need be, involve redaction of data relating to living people. Various members of the public have been in contact with CIGO on foot of the piece noting the accuracy and compelling nature of the case Steven has set out. Steven's article represents a yet further advancement of CIGO's long-running campaign to gain public access to the 1926 census records.
This is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
I publish a lot of notices of future genealogy-related meetings, conferences, seminars, and such events. One thing that always amuses me is a statement in many of those notices similar to the following:
"You can download the registration form on our web site. Please fill it out, put it in an envelope, enclose a check, and mail it to us."
Such a statement is so 1980s! In today's day and age, it is easier to accept payment online than it is to manually handle checks. Handling orders online also allows you to receive the registration forms instantly and have the funds deposited to the society's bank account, all without a trip to the bank or even to the post office. The price for doing this is either free or a small percentage of the admission fees. It is also safer and more secure than sending checks in the mail and even safer than handling the checks after receipt.
The Charlotte County Genealogical Society is hosting a one-day conference on Saturday, February 5. The theme will be "Update Your Genealogy Toolbox." The society has invited me to be the guest speaker. I will be making presentations on:
Genealogy Searches on Google The Organized Genealogist The Latest Technology for Genealogists Where is Genealogy Software Headed?
The conference will be held at the Salvation Army Center at 2120 Loveland Boulevard, Port Charlotte. Doors open at 8 am with the first presentation starting at 9 am.
Someone interested in Wisconsin genealogy might love this item. I'd prefer to see it purchased by a Wisconsin genealogical society or historical society that would scan the cards and then place them online. The description of the item for sale states:
This is a card file started from obituaries or letters from local newspapers in Dodge County, Wisconsin of people who lived in this area . INFORMATION COULD BE TAKEN FROM THE 1930s THROUGH 1990s depending on what newspaper she obtained the information from and date back to early families depending what was written in the paper. They had passed away and cards were made for a file to use for genealogy. My mother had started this file before she passed away. I counted 100 index cards as you can see in the pictures, measured the rows of card in the file cabinet and tried to count them by doing this. About an inch and a quarter are 100 cards. So I'm guessing there are about 9000 index cards. All written in long hand. Not all cards are filled in fully because she wrote what information was found. Such as: Name, birth, death, marriages, where they lived or died, husband, and whatever she could find. Some of the newspapers are from : Hustisford, Beaver Dam, Columbus, Mayville and others. Also maybe even books. They are wrapped in 2 separate boxes and the index cards are heavy.
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