The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
Heredis is the only software to offer a complete application for genealogy on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. This application allows you to share files easily from your iPhone / iPad to your Windows PC or Macintosh and vice-versa, through synchronization via a Wi-Fi connection. BSD Concepts, the company that produces Heredis, has now announced an updated version.
Heredis for iOS is not a just simple GEDCOM file viewer for tree charts. It also allows you to add ancestors, to enter missing information, to take photos, as well as managing sources, building tree charts, and sending the tree charts by email to one’s family, and then print them. You can even add info about your ancestors by dictating to Siri and that data can later be synchronized with your Windows or Macintosh computer.
Life on the RV road should be about simplicity. However, for many of us, it isn't always so simple. We need to keep receipts for income tax purposes, keep copies of insurance policies, owners' manuals, genealogy documents, and much more. Where do you put all the paperwork? Since I spend much of my time in a motor home, I don't have room for filing cabinets or even an extra box for storing papers in a bedroom closet.
Russ and Tiña De Maris live full-time in a recreational vehicle and have written about a solution: they digitize everything and throw the paper away. Actually, I have been doing the same for several years now and recommend it to everyone, whether you live on the road or in a normal home. It simplifies your life and helps immensely in becoming organized. Having everything available at your fingertips within seconds, wherever you are, is a great convenience. I no longer have a need for filing cabinets or even boxes of papers. Yet I can find any scanned document within seconds, wherever I am.
Do you have home movies, audio and video tapes, printed photos, negatives or slides that are gathering dust in a closet? Would you like to have them converted to more modern media? PeggyBank.com is offering a service where you send in all your old media to the company (it will even provide the boxes) and the company will convert all of these items, for a fee, into digital formats and upload them to a free online "vault," usable from any computer with Web access. You can leave the items in the vault for viewing or you can download them to your own computer (or both). When the conversion is done, PeggyBank.com ships your original materials back to you.
Family Tree DNA is offering a 72-hour sale and it has already started. The discounts are significant.
According to the announcement, "We are gearing this sale for newcomers and upgrades by promoting the Family Finder and the Full Mitochondria Sequence (FMS).This sale starts Friday, September 28, at 12:00am and ends Sunday, September 30, at 11:59PM.
I have written about PogoPlug before at http://goo.gl/nF6SN and at http://goo.gl/WzTCa). It is an excellent device for making backups of your important computer files or even ALL your files. The PogoPlug device is typically installed in the home, close to the computers being backed up. This provides an excellent LOCAL backup but still offers no protection for disasters in your home that might destroy both your computer(s) and your local backups, such as burst water pipes, fires, hurricanes, tornados, and such things. Now PogoPlug has added a new option: off-site backups.
Radio4 in the UK has an interesting report about placing QR Codes on tombstones. (See the picture to the right for a typical QR code.) Edward Stourton of the Sunday morning religious news and current affairs programme, recently interviewed Steven Nimmo, a funeral director from Dorset, to find out how digital 'quick response' codes are being placed on gravestones. Scanning the code with a smart phone directs people to a webpage where they can find a wealth of information about the deceased.
The following announcement was written by the U.S. National Genealogical Society:
Arlington, VA, 28 September 2012: The National Genealogical Society is pleased to announce the September video release honoring the 100th anniversary of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ): Ronald Ames Hill’s recollections of “Research Adventures in England.”
Dr. Hill was a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he inherited a collection of early nineteenth-century letters from the collection of his great-aunt. Already a highly skilled scientific researcher, he went to work learning the stories of his ancestors with the same determination and thoroughness he brought to his profession. He undertook his first journey to Cornwall, to the parishes of his ancestors, in 1971 and by now has made sixteen such trips for fourteen months of on-site research. Since his retirement from Sandia in 1994, ancestral research and publishing have become a full-time occupation. He has published thirty-one articles in national genealogical journals (over twenty in the NGSQ) and four books based on his ancestral research.
The following announcement was written by Tourism Ireland and Ancestry.ca:
Toronto, ON (September 28, 2012) – Tourism Ireland is delighted to announce an upcoming collaboration with Ancestry.ca to promote The Gathering Ireland 2013. The Gathering is an open invitation to the world to come and visit Ireland in 2013 for a unique celebration of all things Irish. Ireland may be a small country, but the Irish have put down their roots all over the world. More than 70 million people worldwide now claim Irish ancestry; quite something considering the total population of the island of Ireland is just over 6 million.
Canada’s connections with the island of Ireland go back at least 200 years and today nearly 5 million Canadians claim Irish ancestry. Tourism Ireland and Ancestry.ca will work together to reach these Canadians, helping them trace their Irish roots and inviting them to be a part of this unique celebration.
Writing in the Bedford (New Hampshire) Journal, Teresa Santoski describes a "cold case" that is still actively being investigated. Former Police Chief David C. Bailey, now retired, is working with genealogist Melinde Byrne to identify a body found in 1971 but never identified.
Byrne began working on the case in November 2008, when she was asked to teach a class on forensic genealogy at Boston University. Forensic genealogy, she said, is “the study of kinship and identity as it pertains to the law.” Byrne selected three cases to present to her students, one of which she wanted to be an unresolved case. She chose the Bedford Jane Doe because, living a few miles away from where the body was discovered, it literally hit close to home.
Roy Stockdill is a well-known English genealogist, recently known for his "Famous Family Trees" series at Findmypast.com. Roy's latest article shows that even the pros can be fooled, at least for a short time. Perhaps there is a lesson here for all of us.
The subject is author Colin Dexter, an English crime writer, known for his Inspector Morse novels which were written between 1975 and 1999 and adapted as a television series from 1987 to 2000. Roy described the experience:
The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. If you have a Plus Edition user ID and password, you can read Part #1 of this article right now at no additional charge in this web site's Plus Edition at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=22388 while Part #2 is available at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=22420.
Both articles will remain online for several weeks.
Last week's article introduced the concept of Boolean search terms for use on Google. That article is still available to Plus Edition subscribers at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=22388. You might want to read that article again now to refresh it in your mind before proceeding with new topics. This week I will describe several advanced topics.
The following announcement was written by Scott Phillips:
Unique Czech Genealogy Resource Available in English for the first time ever at Onward To Our Past
Writing for Huffington Post United Kingdom, GenealogyBank.com, and
others in addition to releasing first ever translation of rare 1895
look at early Czech immigrants.
Genealogist, Scott Phillips, owner of Onward To Our Past® Genealogy
Services, located in Michigan City, Indiana, now writes for Huffington
Post United Kingdom and the e-publications of GenealogyBank, a division
of Readex, on a regular basis on genealogy topics of all varieties.
Additionally, his firm has just recently completed an extraordinary
project that will be available to historians and genealogists free of
charge on the Internet.
The following announcement was written by the organizers of RootsTech:
Registration is now live for the 3rd annual RootsTech conference on March 21-23, 2013 in Salt Lake City, UT. With several thousand attendees each of the first two years, the 2013 conference is shaping up to be the biggest and best yet!
RootsTech, hosted by FamilySearch, offers an opportunity unlike any other to discover the lastest family history tools and techniques, connect with experts to help you in your research, and be inspired in the pursuit of your ancestors. You will learn to use the latest technology to get started or accelerate your efforts to find, organize, preserve, and share your family's connections and history.
I received an email questioning why a particular web site is publicizing Social Security Numbers of deceased individuals. The person who wrote suggested that such publicity would contribute to possible identity theft. Sorry, but experience shows the exact opposite to be true. Publishing Social security numbers of the deceased actually DECREASES identity theft.
One of the major purposes of the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is to prevent fraud so that no one can steal the identity of a dead person, and take out a credit card or a bank loan in a dead person's name.
This should solve the problem of disks, tapes, paper, and microfilm becoming unreadable over time. Hitachi has announced a new storage medium that uses a laser to imprint dots on a piece of quartz glass that correspond to binary code. The dots can be read with an optical microscope and appropriate software. The company says this medium is resistant to extreme heat, radiation, radio waves and should still be readable after a few hundred million years. It's intended as an archival format with data density similar to a music CD (40 megabytes per square inch with 4 layers and more layers can easily added, if needed).
The following was written by the Southern California Genealogical Society:
The Southern California Genealogical Society announces a Call for Proposals for the 44th Annual Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, to be held at the Los Angeles Marriott Burbank Airport Hotel, Burbank, California, Thursday through Sunday, June 6 through 9, 2013. Thursday will be a day of hands-on workshops.
This is a follow-up to the earlier article, "Genealogy is the Second-most Popular Topic on the Web?" at http://goo.gl/737Ui: According to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek:
Today, genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online. According to a January 2012 report by market research firm Global Industry Analysts, an estimated 84 million people around the world spend anywhere from $1,000 to $18,000 a year in search of their ancestors. Visitors to online genealogy sites are mostly white women, 55 and older, who browse the Internet from home—or, says [Ancestry.com PR Director Sean] Pate, “your Aunt Betsy, who’s got a real rabid appetite for digging into family roots.” It’s a demographic projected to grow 36 percent by 2020, three times as fast as any other group.
The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
NOTE #1: This is part #1 of a 2-part article.
Probably all genealogists have used Google for genealogy searches. For many of us, we go to http://www.google.com, enter the name of an ancestor, click on GOOGLE SEARCH and hope that a reference appears that points to the person we wish to find. Sometimes the name search works well, and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, many genealogists give up and move on to something else. This is especially true with common names when a standard Google search may find hundreds of people with the same name. However, with just a little bit of effort, you may be able to quickly narrow the search to a single person or at least to a manageably small group of people. The trick here is to use some search terms defined more than 150 years ago.
I had to laugh. This morning I received an email message from a company asking me to review their new iPhone app for "Irish Family History." Normally, I would be glad to do so; but, as I read the remainder of the email message, I changed my mind. It appears this app displays so-called family information that contains fairy tales.
The press release states "... users can read about the history of their family, the meaning behind their name, their original and translated family mottos, locate their family’s origin on the map and view their family’s coat of arms."
Excuse me? Family coat of arms? Where did you get that rubbish?
Coats of arms are part of heraldry, the study of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol. In the Republic of Ireland, all heraldry, including the use and display of coats of arms, is defined by the Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland. The College of Arms performs the same function in Northern Ireland (see http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/). It was founded by King Richard III in 1484.
I must say I had a great time on Saturday at the Bucks County Ancestry Fair, sponsored by the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. I gave several presentations at the event. I am told that Karen Higgins also gave a great presentation on "Beginning Genealogy" while staff members of the Doylestown, Morrisville and Philadelphia Metro Family History Centers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also offered a presentation about using FamilySearch online and using a local Family History Center. I admit I didn't see the other presentations as they were held at the same time that I was presenting. However, the second-hand info that I heard after the event indicated that all the attendees were quite happy with the day's presentations.
I know it must have been successful as I was exhausted. I returned to my hotel about 6 PM, thinking I would drop my things there and go out for dinner. Instead, I made the "mistake" of sitting in a comfortable chair for a minute. The next thing I knew, it was 11:30 PM! I got up and then went to bed, sleeping until 7 AM. Thirteen hours of sleep? I KNOW that I must have had a good time!
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