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The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
Would you like to have your genealogy book or your society's newsletter available as an ebook? There is a large reading audience that is taking advantage of the many convenient mobile reading devices on the market now. The popularity of these devices for reading books, newspapers, and magazines continues to explode. The reading public seems to love them, and the people who publish the ebooks definitely love the low cost of publishing this way. You could be one of these.
Put into the right format, your genealogy book or your society's newsletter can be read on any of the many available ebook readers, including iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story. The "secret" is to publish the document in EPUB format. With the tools described in this article, that is easy to do.
EPUB is a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and is designed for “re-flowable” content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. Both large publishers and individuals use EPUB for distribution and sale of electronic books. There are also conversion houses that create EPUB files as a service to their customers. In all cases, the resulting EPUB files have the extension .epub.
Wherever you go in the world, if you meet another Welsh person, someone’s sure to ask, "Where are you from?" or "Are you related to anyone I know?" Quizzing someone about their family history is almost a national obsession – and that’s the idea at the heart of new S4C television series Perthyn.
Presenter Heledd Cynwal and a group of experts from the National Library of Wales will burrow into the past of eight families in different areas of Wales in the programme, starting on Wednesday.
A recent U.K. television program called The Gene Code provided a great deal of information about DNA. Dr. Adam Rutherford explored the consequences of one of the biggest scientific projects of all time - the decoding of the entire human genome in 2000. Every human carries the entire story of life on earth hidden in his or her DNA and Dr. Rutherford explains how we are all linked directly to the origins of life and to the first creatures with backbones. He also investigated the implications of the fact that for much of its existence, the human race was an endangered species.
Quiring Monuments, Inc. has introduced a new twist in cemetery memorials: a code affixed to gravestones that can be scanned with a smartphone to give more information about the deceased. Company President Dave Quiring said he’s been exploring interactive gravestone technologies for years, but prior attempts were too expensive and the technologies were too temperamental and limited. Now he thinks he has found the right combination.
Quiring has now developed its own way of incorporating a QR code — a squarish-lookingbarcode that smartphones can read — into a grave marker through a small plastic-metal composite tag affixed to the gravestone, no batteries required. A QR-operated website provides the information. Scan the code with a smartphone and a web browser wil open, taking the vistor directly to the web page associated with that tombstone.
Anyone can scan a grave maker with their smartphone and learn more about the person buried there, Quiring said. Only friends and family members who have log-in access will be able to leave comments.
Howard Metcalf has released a new version of his popular free genealogy program for Macintosh computers, called Personal Ancestry Writer II, often abbreviated as PAWriter. Here is the message I received from Howard:
What caught my eye, however, is the description of the company at the bottom of the ad: "Youwho is a new kind of genealogy company where the focus is on making it faster, easier, and more enjoyable to connect to your roots. Youwho recently closed a round of $5 Million in funding based on existing technology, direction, and experience of the current team. Youwho is now preparing for an initial website launch."
Can another genealogy company make it in today's market? This should be interesting to watch.
Nobel Prize-winning US economist Robert Fogel and his colleagues have found that the height of the average man has increased by four inches in the last century due to improvements in diet and public health. In 1900, a typical male was 5ft 6in tall, but by 2000 that had gone up to 5ft 10in. Over the same time women have grown by one-and-a-half inches, from just under 5ft 3in to just over 5ft 4in, according to their data.
African Origins contains information about the migration histories of Africans forcibly carried on slave ships into the Atlantic. Using detailed information on 9,453 Africans liberated by Courts of Mixed Commission, this resource presents geographic, ethnic, and linguistic data on peoples captured in Africa and pulled into the slave trade. Through contributions to the website by Africans, members of the African Diaspora, and others, the hope is to realize the history of the millions of Africans captured and sold into slavery during suppression of transatlantic slave trading in the 19th century.
Historical information in the African-Origins database comes from Havana, Cuba, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, Courts of Mixed Commission registers, created between 1819 and 1845. The data describes individual Africans who were liberated from slaving vessels in the era of the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. Such information as name, age, and in some cases place of origin was provided by the Africans themselves, with the help of a translator, to a Spanish- or English-speaking Court registrar who recorded these descriptions as a way of helping to prevent these Africans from being re-enslaved.
Ancestry.com Inc reported quarterly results above market expectations today and raised its full-year revenue outlook. The growth was fueled by strong subscriber additions.
The company said that subscribers grew 33 percent to 1.6 million at the end of the first quarter. Its mobile application for Apple Inc's mobile devices reached a total of one million downloads last week, boosted by over 400,000 downloads in the first quarter alone.
A web site blog has been set up to share information and facilitate communication amongst families and friends of members of the Alabama Genealogical Society affected by the tornadoes of April 27. It can be reached at http://tornado-info.blogspot.com/
The Kindle Lending Library will soon be available to approximately 11,000 libraries across the United States. Barnes and Noble already has had a similar program for some time for its popular Nook e-book reader and Sony also participates in the same program for its popular Sony Reader device. Similar capabilities are also already available for Blackberry, Apple iPhone and iPad, and other digital devices. All these programs are administered by Overdrive, a company that specializes in lending ebooks, audio books, and more.
The new Kindle Lending Library allows Kindle users to not only borrow ebooks through the designated libraries, but also to include annotations and bookmarks. These customizations won't be visible to other borrowers of the same ebook, but will re-appear should one decide to borrow the book a second time. Most books have a loaning period of 7 to 14 days
Using only a a clunky camera and the Motorola Xoom he got for his 17th birthday, Ricky Gilleland has succeeded where the Army failed: He has created the only digitized record of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. His website, preserveandhonor.com, is a reverent catalog of the fallen, and one young man's response to a scandal of Army mismanagement, mismarked graves and unmarked remains that has rocked this hallowed place for two years.
An investigation by the Army inspector general concluded in June that at least 211 graves were mislabeled. Top brass were fired. And the management of the 147-year-old American landmark, where about 300,000 fallen troops rest, suddenly seemed as chaotic as its uniform lines of unadorned white markers are orderly.
I wrote about BRANCHES nearly a year ago and was impressed with the program. I wrote, "To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. This program has the best user interface I have ever seen in any genealogy program on any operating system. It looks like Google Earth for genealogy." You can read the article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/05/branches-a-major-new-windows-genealogy-program.html
Now BRANCHES has received a major update and a lower price. The following announcement was written by Sherwood Electronics Laboratories, Inc.:
Sherwood Electronics Laboratories, Inc. announces a new release of BRANCHES, an innovative new Windows™ program that uses advanced mapping concepts, similar to Google Earth,™ to visualize relationships and manage family history records.
Are you reading this article on a desktop or laptop computer? If so, your method of using the web is slowly disappearing. The World Wide Web is being re-invented and is moving to handheld devices. I am not speaking of the future. The change is happening NOW.
Keith Rabois didn’t mince words when he talked recently about the potential of mobile startups. He said that “the web as you know it” is “dead, dying, will be dying,” and that the future lies in reinventing Web experiences on the mobile phone.
Rabois is obviously biased as he is the Chief Operating Officer at Square, a company that provides credit card processing hardware and software for the iPhone, iPad and Android handheld devices. However, I think he is on to something. The importance of the mobile experience is growing fast.
Bob Vornlocker recently published an article in the German Genealogy Group newsletter that describes problems and a potential solution when searching for surnames in the various online databases. Bob kindly gave me permission to re-publish the article here.
The following is written by and copyright by Bob Vornlocker. Please do not republish elsewhere without the author's permission:
Until two years ago, I spent many years searching for my Vornlocker roots. My paternal family tree ended with my father's grandfather, Johann Vornlocker, who emigrated to the USA in the 1880's. As for his his wife, a Pfister(er) who emigrated to the USA from from Herbolzheim, I successfully traced her back to the early 1600's with not much variation in surname - Pfister, Pfisterer and Pfisters, not including female names ending in "in". My father's maternal grandfather, a Skidmore, I traced back to the 1500's, with the surname variation of Skidmore, Scidmore and Scudamore and his wife, a Ryder/ Rider whose ancestors I traced to the 1600's in the Netherlands.
Many genealogists and historians believe the only method of storing records for long-term preservation is to do so on paper because "it lasts forever." However, the employees at the archives of Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas probably will disagree. Some irreplaceable books, photographs, and documents in the archive have recently been damaged by a serious problem: mold.
The Genealogy Friends of Plano (Texas) Libraries, Inc. recently presented a $10,000 check to David Allan Hardin, MSLIS, Head of Genealogy, Local History, Texana and Archives Division (GLHTA Division) of the Plano Public Library System. The check is to be used to purchase 200 rolls of microfilm on Collin County Court Records that include birth records and certificates; divorce records; scholastic census; civil case papers and minutes; and addendums to civil case records.
According to the announcement, Genealogy Friends has now donated all available microfilm of the county.
Last January, I published an article entitled Store Your Digital Data Forever that described the photo archival services of Chronicle of Life. The non-profit provides archival quality storage of your digital photographs by devoting the will preserve digital photographs, audio, video, text, blogs, status updates, or anything else kept in a digital format, forever.
The Chronicle of Life Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission to save personal memories forever. Today, Chronicle of Life CEO Kai Pommerenke said, "we made it free for users to store their autobiography in our trustworthy digital repository, to remove any excuse for not preserving their memories."
Yesterday, I wrote about a Plus Edition article about a new handheld computer I purchased. I mentioned that it uses version 2.2 of the Android operating system, not the latest version 3.0 "Honeycomb" version. I also mentioned that version 3.0 reportedly has a few bugs and I guessed that is why this tablet computer uses the older version of Android.
Jason Perlow, columnist for ZDnet, agrees. In today's column, Perlow writes:
It’s so easy to get certified copies of birth certificates in Vermont that the state no longer will accept them as identification for fear of identity theft. In fact, I have personal experience with that.
I lived in Vermont for several years and my daughter was born there. A few years ago, she lost her birth certificate during a burglary in which an entire box of jewelry and papers, including her passport and birth certificate, were stolen and never recovered. A few months later, she and I were in Vermont together on vacation. We visited the town clerk's office in the town where she was born and my daughter asked for a copy of her birth certificate.
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