The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
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the vendors like it or not!
The names and Cincinnati-area burial locations of soldiers who served in conflicts from the Revolutionary War to World War I are being made available online thanks to two genealogists who rescued records that were bound for the trash. Mary Remler and Jim Dempsey saved five priceless books from the Hamilton County Recorder’s dumpster.
A Works Progress Administration project in the 1930s cataloged that information from Hamilton County cemeteries in five books. The books had been microfilmed years ago but the microfilm was fading and a bit out of focus. The newly-discovered books can now be digitized and preserved online for everyone's use.
In a late afternoon conference call today, Ancestry CEO Tim Sullivan and Archives.com Director of Product, Joe Godfrey, offered some additional details of the merger beyond what was mentioned in today's earlier announcement about the acquisition. Both seemed to be very candid and answered all questions that were posed.
Ancestry.com's primary goal for this acquisition is to increase its investment in the genealogy community. Since Archives.com's launch in January 2010, the site has rapidly grown to more than 380,000 paying subscribers who pay about $39.95 a year. Archives.com offers access to over 2.1 billion historical records, including birth records, obituaries, immigration and passenger lists, historical newspapers, and U.S. Censuses.
Tim Sullivan emphasized that Archives.com is a fast-growing business that has successfully put together family history profiles in a simple and affordable manner. Archives.com attracts a different customer base that should complement the existing Ancestry.com operation. The Archives.com business will continue to operate in much the same manner as before and will continue to serve its present customer base. Archives.com will also retain its own brand and website.
Major news for genealogists was released this afternoon. The following announcement was written by Ancestry.com:
"Simple and Affordable" Fast-Growing Start-up Adds Complementary Offering to Ancestry.com
PROVO, Utah, April 25, 2012 -- Ancestry.com Inc. (Nasdaq:ACOM) announced today it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Archives.com, a family history website, for approximately $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities.
This transaction will enable Ancestry.com to add a differentiated service targeted to a complementary segment of the growing family history category. In addition, Ancestry.com will welcome a team of talented engineers, digital marketers, and family history innovators into the Ancestry.com fold and also gain access to a proprietary technology platform that has supported Archives.com's rapid growth.
Rumors of a free online drive storage service from Google have been around for some time. (See my article about the new service that was published on February 9, 2012 at http://goo.gl/pshkB.) Google finally made the announcement today. Of course, dozens of other companies already offer similar services, but the Google name should attract even more customers. In fact, the new Google Drive service appears to be a very appealing offer with huge storage space available for much lower prices than that of established competitors.
Drive offers 5 gigabytes of free storage — more than twice the 2 gigabytes of free storage offered by the very popular competitor, Dropbox. However, the biggest eye opener is the price for those who wish to store more data. While Dropbox charges $10 a month for 50 gigabytes of storage space, Google intends to sell a whopping 100 gigabytes for only $4.99 a month. That price should attract a lot of customers! I find it interesting that documents stored in Google Docs don’t count against your storage quota.
The following announcement was written by the National Genealogical Society
The National Genealogical Society (NGS) announces the appointment of Robert Raymond to the Board of Directors. Robert, a resident of Utah, was selected to serve as an NGS Director at Large by President Ann Christnacht Hilke. Ms. Hilke stated, “We are pleased that Robert Raymond has agreed to join the board of NGS as he adds to the breadth of excellent business, technology, and genealogical skills our organization has set as goals for our future board development.”
Robert Raymond is a deputy to FamilySearch Chief Genealogical Officer, David Rencher, helping to increase genealogical soundness of FamilySearch products and improving relationships with the genealogical community. Additionally, Robert helps set the record acquisition and publication strategy.
The Who Do You Think You Are LIVE! event attracts 14,000+ genealogists each year to the Olympia Centre in London. Now there is a possibility of a show being held in Scotland in 2014. However, your help is needed.
The following was written by Dr. Bruce Durie:
2014 will be an important year on the Genealogy and Family History calendar It will be the next Year of Homecoming in Scotland, with a year-long series of celebrations, from Hogmanay to Hogmanay, bigger and even better than the Year of Homecoming 2009.
The shape of HS2014 is starting to emerge (www.ancestralscotland.com/newsarticles/2010_04-06/3305677). As part of this, there will be a number of large Signature Events. One of these, we hope, will be a Who Do You Think You Are LIVE! at the SECC in Glasgow.
This is short notice but I only learned of this a few minutes ago.
Judy Russell is a certified professional genealogist with a law degree and also is a professor at a prestigious law school. That makes her an ideal person to educate genealogists about copyright issues in genealogy. Luckily, she is willing to do just that in a free online "webinar" on Wednesday, April 25, 2012.
Heredis is a popular genealogy program for Macintosh. It is developed in France and is very popular in many countries around the world. I have written about Heredis a number of times and you can find my past articles if you start at http://goo.gl/K2p9G. Now the developers of Heredis are creating a new version for both Windows and Macintosh and are looking for some beta testers for the Windows version. English-speaking Windows users are especially invited to apply.
The following was written by the Heredis developers:
The following announcement was written by the Family History Information Standards Organisation, Inc.:
Gilbert, AZ USA—April 18, 2012—Family History Information Standards Organisation, Inc. (FHISO) today announced that it has received a grant from Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak’s Honoring Our Ancestors Genealogical Grants. The funding will be used to help with the expense of incorporation and start-up.
I had a fun time Saturday, making four presentations at the annual Bend Genealogical Society Spring Seminar in Bend, Oregon. It was a good-sized crowd, which surprised me since it was a beautiful spring day. I would have thought everyone would have been enjoying the weather outdoors. This group was very receptive to the presentations I offered on a variety of technical topics.
Yesterday, I published an article entitled Hundreds of Thousands May Lose Internet Access in July that warned of a malware (malevolent software) attack that is attacking Windows computers. Several newsletter readers questioned the accuracy of the warning. For those who want further information, I suggest you read the following:
The FBI web site also has a lot of other news and information articles about the same problem. You can find those articles if you start at http://goo.gl/ZO6Sy
Is your computer running slower and slower? Has your antivirus software been disabled? If so, your system is probably infected with an online advertising scam called DNS Changer and may lose its ability to connect to the Internet on July 9.
Luckily, there is an easy way to determine if your system has been infected: the FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether their computer is infected and explain how to fix the problem.
I have written a number of times about OpenOffice and the new version of it, now called LibreOffice. This free suite of office programs (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and more) competes favorably with Microsoft Office in every way but price. LibreOffice is free while Microsoft Office (consisting of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and more) costs $120 to $500 or more, depending upon which version you purchase. LibreOffice can read and write standard Word files as well as other formats. You can create files with LibreOffice and then later read them with Microsoft Office and vice-versa.
I have always preferred LibreOffice's word processor although I am not quite as impressed with the spreadsheet or presentation programs. I have both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice installed on the computer I am using at this moment. I normally use LibreOffice to write articles for this newsletter as I find it to be easier to use than Word for most everyday tasks.
Technology on a tombstone? The Allen Monument Company in Crawfordsville, Indiana, is one company making changes. The company is now adding QR codes to tombstones.
QR Code (abbreviated from Quick Response Code) is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. You can see a typical QR Code to the right. You probably have seen similar QR Codes on all sorts of products and advertisements. To use a QR Code, use a smartphone (typically an Apple iPhone or an Android phone) with appropriate software installed to take a close-up picture of the QR Code. The software reads the QR Code and then opens a web browser that displays the web page address that is embedded within the dots of the QR Code.
I have written a number of times about GeneaBloggers Radio in the past year or so (see http://goo.gl/fcFTM). This weekly "Internet radio show" focused on events in the genealogy world. Most "broadcasts" were made on Friday evenings and were available as live broadcasts as well as archived audio files that could be played later. Host Thomas MacEntee provided information himself and also interviewed many guests.
Now Thomas has announced that GeneaBloggers Radio is going on an “irregular” schedule for the time being. This doesn’t mean that GeneaBloggers Radio is ending or going away. However, the show will no longer be broadcast on its regular Friday evening schedule.
Lake County Recorder Michelle Fajman and the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society have announced a partnership to index the records from 5,840 books stored in the county recorder's office.
By law, the books must remain in the county recorder's office. But Fajman wants to back up the records and keep a copy off site in the event of a natural disaster, such as a tornado or flood. A digitized backup will also make it quicker to find records.
The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
Downloading files using any of the traditional file transfer protocols can be costly for companies and frustrating for users. It places a big load on the file server that hosts the file(s). Whenever a company releases new software on its file servers, thousands of people may try to simultaneously download the files. If the files are large, such as an entire CD or DVD disk, the load is overpowering. For instance, you might remember the recent release of the 1940 U.S. census. The servers slowed to a crawl as they could not handle the load created by thousands of genealogists who wanted to download and view the census images.
Many companies have had to spend tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of dollars for hardware and bandwidth to handle the load. In the case of Microsoft's servers used for issuing software patches, the company has spent millions of dollars for the necessary hardware and bandwidth to handle software updates alone.
Those companies that didn't make the investment in hardware and bandwidth ended up with crippled servers groaning under the load, along with thousands of disgruntled customers who could not obtain the files they seek.
All 210,000 records for one of London's biggest and busiest crematoria are now available on www.deceasedonline.com
As one of the Capital's largest cremation facilities, it services a large part of South East London including two London Borough areas, Bexley and Greenwich, together with the Dartford area in North West Kent
The following announcement was written by Millennia Corporation:
Surprise, Arizona, April 16, 2012 -- Millennia Corporation, a leader in family history software, today announced that its software, Legacy Family Tree, is now available in the Afrikaans language.
The software, used by beginners and professionals to record, plan, and share their family trees, is now the premier choice for Afrikaans researchers. Legacy is also available in Czech, Danish, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and English languages.
"Making genealogy software available to researchers in their native language is a big step in helping the world trace their family trees," said Dave Berdan, president of Millennia Corporation. "This is a big day for Afrikaans researchers."
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