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You can view a short sneak preview of the second episode of the Find My Past the TV show: Titanic. The episode airs on the Yesterday channel (Freeview channel 12, Sky 537, Virgin Media 203) on Thursday 27 October at 9:00 GMT.
The second episode of Find My Past TV series is focused on the Titanic disaster and three ordinary folks whose ancestors were involved in one way or another with the Titanic on that tragic day. Here is a link to a sneak peek of this week's episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjjlx-PKQY8&feature=player_embedded or click on the image below.
The television commercial for a local mobile phone company in the small island nation of Iceland wouldn't work in other countries. It portrays a curly-haired couple who just woke up next to each other after what appears to be a one-night stand. (That isn't the scandalous part in Iceland's famously liberal society.) The two are pictured lingering in bed, on their smart phones, checking out a genealogical website called Islendingabok. Their smiles freeze when they find out they are related. Closely.
Icelanders can relate on levels unimaginable in larger countries. The commercial works in Iceland because, in this isolated island country of 300,000 people, these situations actually happen. Regularly. Most Icelanders have heard a story of somebody, who knew somebody, who found out a bit late in the game that the subject of their romance is actually an estranged cousin.
While most genealogists in North America understand there's no such thing as a family coat of arms, many of us are not as aware of the traditions involving coats of arms for governments, various government agencies, and even corporations. That would be especially true for coats of arms issued 500 years ago and still in use today.
Puerto Rico's Coat of Arms was granted by the Spanish Crown in 1511, which makes it the oldest currently used in the Americas.
This is a follow-up to last week's article of Who Wants to Live to be 150? at http://goo.gl/bPpmW. The Associated Press has an article about a study being conducted by Dr. Thomas Perls, a geriatrics expert at Boston University. He is trying to find secrets to long life in the DNA of centenarians, people who are more than 100 years old.
The entire article is interesting but what caught my eye was a brief mention of another study by Dr. Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. His own study of how centenarians live found that "as a group, they haven't done the right things."
If you have an interest in old books, especially in the restoration of really old books, you will be interested in the story of an 800-year-old book that originally contained many of the writings of Archimedes. Many years later, the Archimedes text was scraped off and overwritten with text of prayers. However, the book still held a legible echo of the original text.
Thanks to extreme archival efforts, multi-spectral imaging techniques and computer algorithms, digital images have been produced that help the original Archimedes and ancient texts stand out from the visual clutter around them. The result is major changes in how we will think about Archimedes.
If you can be in or anywhere near Bristol, Indiana on November 5, I'd like to invite you to the annual Fall Workshop of the Elkhart County Genealogical Society on that day. I have the honor of being the guest speaker at the workshop and I'd love to meet newsletter readers there.
The meeting will be held at the Rush Memorial Center, 304 West Vistula Street, Bristol, Indiana. I will be giving four presentations that day. All of the presentations will be about the use of technology to improve and/or simplify your genealogy research efforts.
Millions of Tennessee historical records will be readily available, throughout the country, as a result of the State Library and Archives' new partnership agreement with Ancestry.com. The State Library and Archives is sharing Tennessee death records from 1908 through 1959. This database includes 1.2 million digital images and indexes 3.4 million names that appear in those records.
The records are available free to Tennesseans by visiting the Tennessee Electronic Library main web page at http://tntel.tnsos.org/, then clicking on the "genealogy" tab and then the "Tennessee Death Records" tab.
I am always amazed at the prices of hardware. Most hardware prices drop and drop until you thing they won't drop any more, then they drop again. The latest jaw-dropping price to cross my desk is a 64 gigabyte memory stick (also called a flash drive or jump drive or thumb drive or USB drive) for $59.99, including free shipping. That's less than a dollar per gigabyte!
The first flash drives to appear in the marketplace had storage capacities of a few megabytes (not gigabytes) and typically cost $20 or $25 each. Many of us marveled that "these things store more data than a floppy disk and they are smaller and more rugged besides." Of course, as the years went by, prices dropped and storage capacities increased. The latest 64 gigabyte flash drive stores the equivalent of 44,000+ floppy disks. It will also store ten or fifteen full-length movies, all in a device that weighs about two ounces. This should be great for backing up all of your genealogy data, including family photographs, and a lot more besides.
This article is for anyone who has listened to one of my talks on Google for Genealogists:
Last week Google changed the way one of their most useful search operators works, one that I have always mentioned in my talks: The + (plus) operator. What's that mean for you? Next time you want to make sure any single word or phrase appears in your search results, wrap it in quotation marks.
To explicitly specify that you want the results to include a word, you used to be able to add the + (plus) operator to the front of a term, such as:
In February, Shane Robison, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer, and Chief Technology Officer of Hewlett Packard, delivered a keynote address to the 3,000 attendees at RootsTech, the largest genealogy conference ever held in North America. I was in the audience for his talk and was very impressed with his visions for the future of computing. I wrote about Robison's talk in this newsletter at http://goo.gl/rNPY5.
Genealogists Tom and Nancy Corey of McCook, Nebraska told those attending a dowsing or "witching" workshop Saturday that they don't know how or why dowsing or "witching" works to locate unmarked graves or to identify the sex of the person in the grave.
"We can't say how or why it works," Nancy said, "but it does work."
About 28 attended the workshop sponsored by the Southwest Nebraska Genealogy Society of McCook. Workshop participants "dowsed" the grave site marked for First Lt. Corvin Alstot, a B24 bombardier who was killed July 30, 1945, over Okinawa. Newspaper stories indicated that Alstot was buried with full military honors on Okinawa, and later moved to Memorial Cemetery.
The first Plenary Session of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) was hosted at the National Archives and Records Administration on Friday. The intent was to work toward the creation of “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”
This sounds like a great future resource for genealogists. You can read a report written by David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, in his blog at http://blogs.archives.gov/aotus/?p=3719/
I'd like to thank the Genealogical Society of Bergen County for inviting me to speak at their Technologies for Genealogists seminar on Saturday. We met at an excellent facility at a community college in Paramus, New Jersey and about 150 genealogists attended. They even laughed at the appropriate times at my jokes. I enjoyed it and I hope they did also.
I also learned that the Genealogical Society of Bergen County is a very active group that is involved in a number of activities. The society maintains a number of databases of local historical information on its web site, maintains an ever expanding library collection which is located in the Local History and Genealogical Center on the 2nd floor of the Ridgewood Public Library, and holds frequent meetings and seminars. Besides all that, they are quite friendly!
This project is different from anything else I ever remember publishing. I have no experience with this group and cannot vouch for their operation. However, it certainly looks interesting. The following announcement was written by the Genealogists for Families Project:
Genealogists worldwide are working as a team to help families and small businesses in low income areas. Our motto is, We care about families (past, present and future). Through Kiva, a nonprofit organization, we make $25 loans that enable borrowers to expand their businesses, support their families and raise themselves out of poverty. When the $25 is repaid, the lender can choose to withdraw the money or make another loan.
Everyone is welcome on the team - genealogists, their family and friends, and anyone else who believes that our small loans can make a big difference to those who are less fortunate.
If you have an interest in preserving photographs (and who doesn't?), you might want to read the article by Butch Lazorchak in the Library of Congress' digital preservation section at http://goo.gl/EeVZU. It is a short article but has good advice.
At latest count at http://www.geneabloggers.com/genealogy-blogs/, more than 2,000 genealogy blogs are now online. Yet, some people are too lazy to write their own articles. Instead, they steal from others. The derogatory term for these low-life characters is "splogger," a contraction of "spam blogger."
Sploggers typically copy articles from other blogs and post them on their own web sites, often surrounded by Google Ads or other commission-based advertisements. Sploggers hope that the unwary reader will be attracted by the articles and then, while on the site, will click on the ad. The splogger then earns a commission from the ads.
One such splogger is now creating an uproar in the genealogy blogging community. I won't even mention his name or web site, as I don't want to elevate his ratings in Google. However, you can read an interesting article about the legal issues of splogging written by James Tanner at http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2011/10/splogging-clear-violation-of-copyright.html
The following was written by the Alabama Genealogical Society:
From eleven microfilm reels AGS member Caroline Horton has finished transcribing a twenty-five page index of 556 Walker County Probate Court estate case files. The addition of these records brings a total of 57,322 searchable names in the index culled from loose court papers of twenty-three Alabama counties.
Genealogy appears to be more popular than ever before, probably because of all the television shows devoted to various aspects of family history. Now the 1000memories.com web site has a collection of articles by guest bloggers that "demonstrates that the genealogy community has lots of energy and enthusiasm to share."
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