The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
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The following was written by the Irish Family History Foundation:
The Advanced Search facility is now available on All Ireland Searches on the main search page of www.rootsireland.ie.
Please note that counties Limerick and Sligo do not participate in the Advanced Search facility and will be excluded from the results of an Advanced Search on the All Ireland site.
The Advanced Search facility is also available for each county centres' data with the exception of Co. Limerick and Co. Sligo.
Note that Standard search will continue to work across all counties.
Barack Obama's announcement on St Patrick's Day that he will visit Ireland in May once again draws attention to the number of US Presidents with Irish roots. The rise of Irish-America is underscored by the progressive increase in the number of Presidents with Irish ancestry, latterly including even those of Catholic stock. Thus while only 11 out of 28 Presidents from the institution of the office in 1789 until 1921 possessed elements of Irish ancestry, since Kennedy took office in 1961 every President bar one, Gerald Ford, has had some Irish blood.
Last week, I published an article entitled "Genealogy Meeting in Virginia Beach" in which I described my trip this weekend to Virginia Beach, Virginia. I will be speaking at the Virginia Beach Genealogical Society and am looking forward to this trip.
Now Cindy Butler Focke of local the Virginian-Pilot newspaper has written an article about the seminar. If you are thinking of attending, you might want to read her article at http://goo.gl/Fey0w
The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
Would your genealogy or historical society like to accept payments on the web? Possible uses are to accept membership dues, to sell books or other materials, accept donations, or to accept registration fees for seminars and other events. Online payment processing may sound "high-tech" and complicated, but even the smallest nonprofit can easily implement procedures to receive payments through its website.
Online credit card payments are the most accepted method of payment these days. Years ago, many people were afraid to use credit cards online. However, those fears are long gone as millions of online credit card payments are now made every day. The number of lost or fraudulent online charges is now lower than that of old-fashioned "face-to-face" credit card payments in stores, gas stations, restaurants, and elsewhere. In addition, all online payments made by VISA, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover Card are now fully insured against fraud and errors, so purchasers will never lose a dime even in the worst situation imaginable.
The Halton Digital Newspaper Archive is a new online resource is all about preserving community memory by indexing newspaper articles from the north part of Halton County, Ontario. The Archive builds on the indexing already performed by Halton’s public libraries but now provides much more convenient online access to community newspapers, an index previously available only on microfilm.
The work began with Halton Hills volunteer Marshall Neilson who entered births, marriages and deaths from the back files of the Acton Free Press. He started that work in 1984 and over the next 10 years added over 150,000 names from the Acton, Georgetown and Milton papers. Volunteers, staff and summer students have now contributed hundreds of additional hours to this index. The new database contains the index only, not images of the newspapers. Photocopies of the original articles are available by contacting the library that contributed the information to the index.
If you have been following the stories recently in this newsletter, you will know that quite a few of them revolve around genealogy applications on handheld computers. These devices include cell phones (or so-called "smartphones), tablet computers (such as the iPad), and handheld computing devices, such as the iPod Touch. I have long felt these represent the wave of the future. Apparently, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agrees.
Speaking at a the Houston Technology Center luncheon in Union Square in Houston's Minute Maid Park, Ballmer told the audience, "Don't get too used to the way Windows looks." Ballmer says he figures the Windows operating system found on most PCs right now will look a whole lot different in just five years time.
Windows "will look a lot different and it will run different applications," he said.
Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, an article in the Irish Emigrant Online describes efforts in August 2010 by six students at UMass Lowell. The students took part in a week-long dig with archeological experts Dr. Colm Donnelly and Dr. Harry Welsh of Queen’s University, Belfast as part of an ongoing study of the Irish who found their way to Lowell, Massachusetts before and after Ireland’s Great Famine.
The findings of the dig, undertaken on the lawn in front of St. Patrick’s Church on Suffolk St. in Lowell, were displayed at the local UMass campus on Thursday evening. Amazingly, the dig unearthed some 1350 artifacts; a huge historical find for just two trenches in one churchyard.
The following St. Patrick's Day offer was received from Irish Origins:
Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day this year with Irish Origins!
Find your Irish roots this St. Patrick’s Day on www.origins.net, and save 20% on all subscriptions.
Irish Origins provides a wealth of genealogical information to help you track down that elusive ancestor. Search through records dating as far back as the 1200s up to the late 1800s, including Griffith’s Valuation (complete with images and town plans), Census records, Wills, Electoral Registers, Militia Attestations, Directories of Ireland and more!
Do you think that perhaps Ancestry.com might be planning to add a new web search engine to its list of services? The company has posted a "help wanted" ad for a contractor to "crawl relevant content for import into our web records collection" and to "help identify free online repositories of genealogical records, gather important information about these sources, and QA crawled data."
The following is an open letter from the Friends of the Georgia Archives and History Chair, Virginia Shadron, concerning legislation currently being debated in the Georgia Legislature. Please forward this to anyone you think would be interested in supporting the Archives.
The Fiscal Year 2012 budget that passed the Georgia House of Representatives on March 11 as HB 78 includes budget reductions that could result in the State Archives closing its doors to the public.
The budget contains two items that together would reduce the Archives’ budget by at least $300,000.
Industry breakthrough provides instant search results for billions of names, dates and places
Boulder, Colorado – March 16 2011 ––Mocavo.com ™ (www.mocavo.com) a free search engine geared toward genealogists and people interested in learning more about their family history, launches today. Mocavo.com enables the search of more than 50 billion words - including billions of names, dates and places, all within fractions of a second. Mocavo.com fills an important industry need by providing the first large-scale, free search engine for family history research. Coupled with the speed and accuracy by which search results are produced, Mocavo.com represents a major technological breakthrough within the genealogy world.
Mocavo.com has already been met with critical acclaim by several industry experts.
I suggest you remember this web site: Mocavo.com. I bet you are going to hear a lot about it in the next few weeks and months. In fact, I'd suggest you try it right now. I've been using the site for a while during its testing and have been very impressed. This thing actually works! Today, Mocavo.com went public and is now available to everyone.
Mocavo.com is a genealogy search engine that is available to you at no charge. It searches hundreds of thousands of genealogy web sites, looking for the words that you specify. Web sites searched include thousands of genealogy message boards, society web pages, genealogy pages uploaded by individuals, state historical societies, family societies, Find-A-Grave, the Internet Archive (mostly scanned genealogy books from the Allen County Public Library), the Library of Congress, several sites containing scanned images of old photographs, and tens of thousands of distinct sites sites that contain various transcribed records of genealogical interest.
FamilySearch continues to add millions of records every week. This week, I even noticed new records being added in Zimbabwe. The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:
9 Million Hungarian Records Added This Week
New Records for Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Philippines, Spain, U.S., and Zimbabwe Also Added
Can you believe that 11.5 million new international records were added this week? And 9 million of those were from Hungary! FamilySearch continued this week to strengthen its free online international collections by expanding 8 of its collections. It also added 2 million U.S. records. See the table below for more details. Search all of the record collections now for free at FamilySearch.org.
Late last night, Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 9 to the public. If you are a Windows Vista or Windows 7 user, you will want to obtain this new version immediately. Microsoft has updated the web browser with several security fixes, faster performance, and bug fixes. One of those bug fixes corrects a major problem for many web sites, including this newsletter's site at www.eogn.com.
The "Internet Explorer 8 display problem" resulted in many web pages being blank or mostly blank when displayed on-screen. Yet all the other web browsers of today (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and others) will display the same web pages perfectly. Microsoft did insert a work-around into version 8 called Compatibility Mode, that did fix the problem on a web-site-byweb-site basis. However, users had to know about the problem, understand it, then find the Compatibility Mode icon and click on it. In fact, many users never found it. The new version 9 of Internet explorer fixes the problem and reportedly displays almost all web pages correctly.
The organizers of the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) have announced an environmental effort. The item that caught my eye was the the fact that each attendee will receive a 2 gigabyte flash drive containing the conference syllabus. The flash drives will be supplied by conference sponsor FamilySearch. As stated in the announcement, "Not only will this eliminate the need for a printed syllabus or CD, it also provides attendees with a flash drive for saving and backing up genealogy research data!"
The following announcement was written by the Federation of Genealogical Societies:
When Texans say, "Remember the Alamo," they are serious. Texas State Representative Jerry Zerwas (R-Simonton) has introduced a bill calling on the state of Texas to open negotiations with representatives of the 'United Mexican States' to retrieve the New Orleans Greys flag which was seized by victorious Mexican troops at the Battle of the Alamo.
Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, the following announcement was written by Ancestry.com:
PROVO, UT -- 03/14/11 -- In recognition of St. Patrick's Day, Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history resource, today launched The Irish Collection -- the definitive 19th century collection of Irish historical records. The collection provides nearly 100 years of insight into life in Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Because few records exist from this time period, the collection is immensely valuable to people researching their Irish heritage and anyone seeking a more comprehensive view of Ireland before and after the Great Potato Famine, during which time many millions fled Ireland in search of a better life.
At the recent RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City, the busiest booth in the exhibits hall usually was at the company selling a one-and-a-half-pound battery-operated scanner called the Flip-Pal. This scans up to 4-inch-by-6-inch photographs or documents. In fact, you can scan larger photos and documents by making multiple scans. The included software for Windows and Macintosh will automatically "stitch" the images together into one.The scanner doesn't even need an attached computer when scanning. The images are stored on a tiny SecureDigital memory card which can then be later removed and inserted into or connected to your computer for processing. The included memory card stores hundreds of images. If you carry a pocket full of Secure Digital cards, you could scan thousands of images, then process them later.
I'd like to invite newsletter readers to join me in Virginia Beach, VA next Saturday. I will be making presentations at the Virginia Beach Genealogical Society. It looks like an interesting day and I am looking forward to it.
The seminar will be held at the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library at 4100 Virginia Beach Boulevard in Virginia Beach, Virginia. You can obtain directions at http://goo.gl/maps/zxI9. Everything starts at 8:30 AM on Saturday, 19 March 2011 when the registration desk opens and we will finish about 5 PM.
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