Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

(+) RAW Files for Digital Pictures

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

I have written several times about the method of creating and preserving digital images. I have also written about scanning old photographs as well as scanning various printed or hand-written documents. Today I thought I would discuss the various file formats available and briefly describe the advantages and disadvantages of several of the more popular formats.

Today's technology allows for a selection of image file formats, including JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PSD, RAW, PNG, EPS, PDF, and others in a seemingly endless alphabet soup of abbreviations and acronyms.

You can find several good reasons and bad reasons for selecting any of these file formats. However, from a genealogist's point of view, there are two significant issues to deal with: image size and image compression.

2012 in Review

Where did the time go? It seems like only yesterday that we welcomed the New Year. Now we are at the end of the year and looking back. Indeed, it seems like a whirlwind but 2012 was generally a good year for genealogists. More and more records became available online, some new software appeared (especially for handheld devices), the use of DNA in genealogy research continued to expand, and the resources available at our fingertips continues to mushroom. I will also point out there were several companies were acquired by or merged with other companies. These acquisitions and mergers can be seen as either good news or bad news but I suspect that, in most cases, the result will be stronger companies that are better positioned to serve the genealogy community.

All in all, I think it was a good year. Here are some of the highlights, along with one or two lowlights, of the past twelve months:

The Origins of Auld Lang Syne

The song that millions of people sing on New Years Eve is a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song. However, Burns never claimed that he was the original author. Instead, he once wrote, "I took it down from an old man." In fact, the ballad "Old Long Syne" printed in 1711 by James Watson shows considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns' later poem and it is assumed that even Watson's version was not the original.

The song's Scots title may be translated into English literally as "old long since", or more idiomatically, "long long ago", "days gone by" or "old times". "For auld lang syne", as it appears in the first line of the chorus, is loosely translated as "for (the sake of) old times".

Genealogist Helps Army Identify Remains of Airman Killed in 1946

The Philly.com web site has a great news article about one of Megan Smolenyak's latest efforts. Staff Sgt. Zoltan Dobovich's family knew he died in the crash of a B-17 in the Alps on the Italian-French border on Nov. 1, 1946. The family also knew remains found at the crash site the following summer were buried in a common grave at Arlington Cemetery under a tombstone listing the names of all eight Army Air Force officers and airmen killed. However, they did not know whether any of the body parts recovered then or in subsequent decades as the glaciers on the Mont Blanc range retreated belonged to the radioman from Bucks County - until now.

Thanks in part to some detective work by genealogist Megan Smolenyak, the military was able to conduct DNA testing that identified some of the remains as those of Dobovich.

You can read more about this wonderful story in an article by Joseph A. Gambardello at http://goo.gl/vC53T.

Genealogist Pauline Litton Awarded M.B.E

The New Year Honours is a part of the British honours system, where New Year's Day, 1 January, is marked by naming new members of orders of chivalry and recipients of other official honours.  This year, Pauline Litton was awarded the MBE for services to Family History and Genealogy in the New Year's Honours List for 2013.

Pauline is President of Harrogate and District Family History Society and is currently one four life Vice Presidents of the Federation of Family History Societies. She is known as the Doyenne of Yorkshire Family History and has written several books.

Google Calling to Be Free Through 2013

This has nothing to do with genealogy, but I am a big fan of Google's free telephone service and have written about it several times. See http://goo.gl/Qxg0K for a list of my past articles about Google Voice. Now Google has announced that the service will continue to be free through all of 2013. The official, although brief, announcement is available on the Official Gmail Blog at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/free-calling-within-us-and-canada.html.

GoogleVoice is available to all U.S. residents. It provides FREE telephone calls to any telephones in the United States and Canada and calls to other countries are available at very, very low prices, much lower than what most telephone companies charge.  Google Voice does NOT replace your present telephone. You keep your present phone or else replace it with a lower-cost service obtained elsewhere. Google Voice simply adds extra functionality to your present phone, regardless if it is a standard, old-fashioned phone, a cell phone, or a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) computer phone. There is no need to use a headset on your computer or anything similar. You also (optionally) can use a new telephone number for use on incoming calls, again at no charge.

Cyndi's List Files Lawsuit Against Another Genealogy Web Site

In the November 2, 2012 newsletter, I posted an article entitled Cyndi's List versus the Rip-off Artist. The article is still available at http://goo.gl/iHtti. I quoted Cyndi Howells as stating, "I've spent the last two days documenting and laying the foundation for a lawsuit because my entire web site was copied and put on another person's for-profit site. This has been gut-wrenching and heart-breaking. I'm exhausted and upset. And in the end it hurts all of you too because I didn't get any other work done on Cyndi's List during this time."

The two sides apparently have not been able to reach an agreement. On December 21, 2012, Cyndi Howells filed a lawsuit against Barry J Ewell, owner of Mygenshare.com, in Washington Western District Court, Tacoma, Washington, for violation of copyrights.

British Soldiers, American Revolution

Anyone interested in American history might enjoy Don N. Hagist's online blog, entitled British Soldiers, American Revolution. It details the experiences of many of the enlisted men who were part of the British government’s effort to hold onto those thirteen rebellious North American colonies.

The British military record keeping of the eighteenth century often captured the reports and stories of officers but rarely did so for enlisted men. Hagist searches for records wherever he can find them.

Many of the men described in this blog eventually became Americans. Some deserted, others were captured as prisoners of war and then escaped, eventually disappearing into the American countryside where they were assimilated into American society. Some remained in British garrisons and continued serving as soldiers of the King.

Revealing a Dead Man's Secrets in an Australian Shipwreck

A new web site details the search for the living male descendants of the 35 men who died on the Great Barrier Reef in 1791 during the wrecking of the Pandora. The intention is to find matching DNA (Y) signatures to sequences recently obtained from 3 skeletons recovered from the Pandora wreck in the 1990s.


The marine archaeologists who recovered the bones more than 200 years later had not expected to find human remains in the wreck. The skeletons were studied by medical scientists and affectionately nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry and subsequently kept in secure, climate-controlled storage at the Queensland Museum, pending developments in DNA research which would one day perhaps present a way to identify the three unknown sailors.

Another Cemetery Lost: Grant County, Minnesota

Minnesota Public Radio recently described the destruction of another family cemetery in that state. The Boerner family cemetery located east of Herman, in Grant County, was last used as a burial ground in 1892. Recently, a farmer who owns the surrounding land bulldozed the cemetery, destroying all the tombstones. He then plowed the land to be used as part of his farm.

The county attorney said it could be several weeks before he decides on charges in the case. Damaging a cemetery can be a felony under Minnesota law even if it's abandoned. Even though the farmer owns the land, the cemetery is protected.

2013 Legacy Family Tree Webinar Schedule Announced

One of the "growth industries" of the past year has been in online "webinars." Almost unheard of a year ago, webinars have now  become very popular for providing genealogy instruction, demonstration of software, and for a large variety of other topics. In short, a webinar is an excellent method of providing instructional material of all sorts.

Millennia Corporation, producers of Legacy Family Tree software, has been one of the leaders in webinar presentations. Now the company is announcing its schedule for the next year and it is a long schedule indeed. You can choose from more than 40 classes from genealogy's leading educators (over 60 hours of free genealogy education) on topics ranging from genealogy technology to DNA to in-depth research methodologies and evidence analysis.

The complete list is available at http://goo.gl/xjTFC.

Headstone Collections for 18 Fife Burial Sites Added to Deceased Online

The following announcement was written by Deceased Online:

• Records for 18 more burial grounds, cemeteries and churchyards in Fife have been added to the Deceased Online headstone collection from Scottish Monumental Inscriptions (SMI)
• The records available date back to 1753, feature 39,000 names and comprise photos of headstones together with carefully transcribed digitized inscriptions for easy reading
• There are now 51 burial sites in the Fife headstone collection available to search; click here to view the full list
• In total, there are now headstone collections from nearly 250 cemeteries, burial grounds and churchyards across Scotland featuring over 300,000 names
• The SMI records are included in the main search indexes on the website so that names and dates can be searched for in the usual way
• With the main collection of burial records, there are now nearly 1.1 million burial records in Scotland available on Deceased Online

A very happy Hogmanay to all our Scottish history hunters

Ancestry.com Shareholders Approve Permira Deal

Ancestry.com announced that its stockholders have approved the company’s $1.6 billion buyout by Permira. Qatalyst Partners LP is acting as financial advisor and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is acting as legal counsel to Ancestry.com. The deal was first announced in October.

The following is the official announcement, written by Ancestry.com:

Dublin Moravian Memorial Inscriptions Online

A new e-booklet listing memorial inscriptions from the Moravian Cemetery, Whitechurch, County Dublin, Ireland, can be freely downloaded from http://homepage.eircom.net/~seanjmurphy/epubs/. The Moravian Church, the Unitas Fratrum or United Brethren, is a pre-Reformation Protestant Church which today has about 900,000 adherents worldwide. The Moravians established congregations in Ireland in the 1740s and in 1764 they opened a burial ground at Whitechurch, County Dublin. There are over 700 stones in the graveyard, each about 12 by 18 inches, with men buried on one side and women on the other. Inscriptions from 629 memorials dated from 1764-1900 are included in the online booklet. The principal family names include Alley, Binns, Black, Carey, Clarke, Cooney, Dezouche, Egan, Elliott, Gordon, Jones, Keville, Lemmon, Linfoot, Mann, Moller, Osborne, Price, Smith, Taylor, Warren, Williams. The records of the Dublin Moravian Congregation are held at Gracehill, County Antrim, and while they have not yet been digitised, microfilm copies are available in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast.

My thanks to newsletter reader Sean Murphy for telling me about this new resource.

Vast Database of Italian Church’s Art and Artefacts goes Live

This has little to do with genealogy but is a significant addition for historical research.  The Vatican has published a vast online catalogue of the Italian Catholic Church’s artistic heritage. The project, which began 16 years ago, is ongoing but in the meantime the Church hopes the database will help in the recovery of works if they are stolen.

The website contains almost 3.5 million objects, from paintings and sculptures to ornaments, crucifixes, altarpieces and other items belonging to some of Italy’s 63,773 churches in 216 dioceses. The database will be regularly updated. Thousands of works held in the churches of certain dioceses, such as those of Florence and Naples, are still to be catalogued.

Rare 1849 image of Corpus Christi Discovered

A previously-unknown drawing emerged in a New York auction, purportedly from descendants of Caleb Loy, a former New York congressman, according to research by James Graham Baker, the retired Texas A&M University educator and historian who purchased it. The drawing is believed to be the oldest known surviving picture of Corpus Christi. The drawing is an 1849 image of the backside of Kinney's Trading Post and Kinney's Tank, a freshwater pond next to it that was Corpus Christi's first water supply.

(Click on the image to the right to see a larger version.)

300 Million Records FREE at Ancestry.com for the Next 4 Days

I think the folks at Ancestry.com went home for the holidays but left the office unlocked. The following was written by Ancestry.com:

Below are the 30 collections that have been opened up for free between December 26-29th. This represents more than 300 million select records from collections added or updated in 2012. This has been a great year for content, and we want to give everyone an opportunity to search these records for free. The 1940 U.S. Census represents 134 million records that were indexed and are now searchable on Ancestry.com (These records will be free on Ancestry.com through 2013). Almost 9 out of 10 Americans have a relative in the 1940 Census, making this a great resource to start your family history journey.
 
To access these records, visit Ancestry.com/2012.

Happy Holidays

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you and your family the best of holiday wishes. I hope you have found peace and joy this holiday time of year.

I will take the next few days off from the newsletter in order to spend time with family and friends. I'll be back soon.

(+) Perform Focused Searches on Google

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Google is a wonderful invention for genealogists and all other Internet users. The world's most popular search engine is capable of finding specialized information about most anything imaginable. However, many users do not know how to use Google's most powerful search tools.

Many of us only know how to enter a query into Google's Search Box.


Such a search can find all sorts of information, often overwhelming you with too many "hits."

Better Searches on the Internet with Soovle

Which search engine is better, Google or Bing or Yahoo? While not search engines, I also often find myself looking for information about consumer products on Amazon, reference information on Wikipedia, and video "how to" information on YouTube. Now one web service searches all those site and more simultaneously.

Soovle is one simple-to-use search vehicle that will utilize the power of the following websites at once:

• Google
• Wikipedia
• Amazon
• Answers.com
• Yahoo!
• YouTube
• Bing
• Netflix
• Buy.com
• eBay
• The Weather Channel