Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Book Review: Plantagenet Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

Plantagenet Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families

Douglas Richardson, author, and Kimball G. Everingham, editor. (Salt Lake City; 2nd ed., 2011). Three volumes, more than 2200 pages, indices of people and events.

These volumes document the lines of descent for over 200 seventeenth-century North American colonists from the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England from 1154 to 1485. The first family described is that of Geoffrey Plantagent himself, offering forty-six pages of his royal descendants families. Thereafter, the chapters are alphabetized by surname. Each volume contains its own index of people and events. 

Follow-up: Allegedly Stolen Historical Artifacts Worth $500,000 Found in a Canadian Home

I wrote about items stolen from museums and elsewhere last week at http://goo.gl/r93Fl. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police originally estimated that about 800 items had been recovered with a value of perhaps a half million dollars. The police are now becoming archivists via on-the-job training. As they catalog more and more items found in the alleged thief's home, they have now found 1,300 items and the value is unknown, although obviously still climbing.

Items catalogued so far include  hundreds of antiques, rare books, pieces of art carefully displayed, part of a trove that included a suit of armour, a large oil painting of a seascape, old marriage certificates and papers associated with the historic schooner, the Bluenose.

(+) Update: Why You Want to Use a VPN

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

This is an update to Plus Edition article published about a year ago. The information in that article was accurate when published, but the available technology and services have changed since then. Prices have also decreased by nearly 50% in the past year. This new article should bring the reader up to date.

I am a fan of virtual private networks, or VPNs. By definition, according to Dictionary.com, a VPN is "a network that uses the internet to transfer information using secure methods." A longer and more detailed explanation can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vpn.

Why should you or I want to use a VPN? There are several reasons.

News from the SSDI Front

There’s news on the Social Security Death Index front — some bad, some worse, and some that just might possibly end up being at least neutral if not actually good. Judy Russell provides the latest updates in an article in The Legal Genealogist at http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2013/01/30/news-from-the-ssdi-front/.

Reunion for iPhone 2.0.1

Reunion for iPhone version 2.0.1, a major upgrade, was released today. Version 2.0.1 is a free upgrade for all users of Reunion for iPhone. New users can purchase it on the iPad/iPhone App Store.

Changes in version 2.0.1 include optimized graphics for Retina displays, an improved design that takes advantage of the 4-inch screen on the iPhone 5 and the latest iPod Touch, a search for places and the display of a list of people whose records include an event with a place, use your device's camera to take pictures and link them to people in your family file, link pictures from your device's photo library to people in your family file, and pictures of people can be emailed for sharing and printing.

The Story of the 219-Year-Old Man

John Murphy lived to be 219-years-old. At least, that's what it says on his tombstone. Tombstones never lie, right?  Yeah, right.

The cemetery at St John’s Church in Knockainey, Limerick, Ireland contains a tombstone that defies belief. The lettering on the stone lists the name of the deceased, his death date of 1784, and then states, "died aged 219 years."

Zap The Grandma Gap Book

The following announcement was written by Family ChartMasters:

Are the youth in your family more attached to their iPod or laptop screen than they are to you?  How do you connect to your family members and form the kind of close relationships that will support and strengthen them as they grow into successful and grounded adults?  Teaching your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and even your brothers and sisters about their family history can create strong bonds in your family and become a framework that protects and empowers your relationships.  Family history connects family members in a way that is personal and unique to your family.  It especially gives children the power to identify with personal heroes, learn life lessons and gain a broad, wise perspective on life.

Scottish Property Records for 1905 Go Online

The following announcement was written by brightsolid, the company that manages ScotlandsPeople for the National Records of Scotland:

From tenements to palaces - these records offer a fascinating snapshot of Scotland during the Edwardian era and are a major new genealogy resource

Over 2 million names of Scots included in the property records for 1905 are being released today online for the first time via ScotlandsPeople, the official government family history website. The new records, known as the Valuation Rolls and comprising over 2.4 million indexed names and over 74,000 digital images, cover every kind of building, structure or property in Scotland which were assessed as having a rateable value.

Installing a Do-It-Yourself Home Security System

NOTE: This article contains no information about genealogy. If you are looking for genealogy-related articles, I suggest you skip this article.

This article was written in response to some comments at the end of an earlier article published in the Plus edition newsletter at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=23353. In a comment, I answered a question about the security system I use that doesn't require conventional telephone lines to call the monitoring service. A newsletter reader responded, “An article about your setup would be great!” I agreed to write such an article.

This is the article I promised to write.

I recently installed a web-enabled security system in my home. It monitors doors and windows for intruders. It also has a motion detector in the living room, the center of the house. Any would-be burglar has to walk through the living room to reach any other part of the house, so the motion detector provides a lot of security. The system also has two moisture detectors: one installed on the floor near the washing machine and another on the floor near the hot water heater. It also has a very loud klaxon horn mounted on the outside of the house that is sure to wake the neighbors at any time of the day or night.

You Are Invited to Major Leon Dyer's Dedication Ceremony in Galveston

Members of the Texas Star Chapter of The Daughters of the Republic of Texas cordially invite you to attend the Historical Marker Dedication Ceremony for Major Leon Dyer, Army of the Republic of Texas, on Sunday, 28 April 2013 at 2 p.m. to be held at the Hebrew Benevolent Society Cemetery, Broadway & 43rd Street at Avenue K, Galveston, Texas.

You can read the invitation at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/551652/Dyer-Leon-Invitation.pdf

You can learn more about Major Leon Dyer at http://www.lksfriday.com/DRT/Dyer-Leon-Narrative.pdf

How to Find Information on a Specific Site

Here is a simple trick I have used dozens of times and yet I discovered recently that several of my friends didn't know about it. Google searches are great at finding information on the Web but Google also frequently floods you with too many hits. Finding what you want is difficult if Google found 10,000 occurrences of the words you want to find.

If you happen to know the exact web site that has the information you seek, you can tell Google to search only that one web site. For instance, let's say that you think you saw an article on paperless genealogy in a past edition of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and you wish to read the article again. Go to http://www.google.com and enter the following into the search box:

(+) How to Stop Auto-Renewal Subscriptions

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

Don't you just hate it when you sign up for some web site's offer for a 10-day free trial" or a "30-day free trial" or something similar, and then they charge your credit card – without warning – on the 11th day or the 31st day? To be sure, this is totally legal, assuming the sign-up process included information about the terms and conditions that stated your credit card would automatically be charged when the free trial was over. Of course, you ALWAYS read all the legal boilerplate that is published in a small font, right? 

After all, you clicked on I AGREE or some similar words to indicate that you read and understood the terms and conditions. If you skipped the terms and conditions. or only did a "speed read," or if you simply forgot that the end of the free trial was approaching, you have no one to blame other than yourself.

Book Review: Our Daily Bread

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

Our Daily Bread
German Village Life, 1500-1850

by Teva J. Scheer
Published by Adventis Press, North Saanich, BC

Paperbound, 221 pages with illustrations, photographs, drawings, images, glossary, bibliography, and index.

We genealogists are always longing to reach back. We travel long distances to see our ancestors’ home places, we amble along the streets where they shopped, we drive out into the rural countryside to see the farms where they lived and worked, and we peer into the churches where they married and baptized their children.

How to Go Completely Paperless in Two Days

I have written several times about the advantages of being paperless. I did so several years ago and love the idea of not wasting paper and not having to file all sorts of things in binders or filing cabinets. However, it required months for me to get used to the idea. Now Adam Dachis describes how he made the change in two days.

You can read Adam's article at http://goo.gl/enQNk.

Disclaimer: I don't use the same methods that Adam uses. Since my different system already works well for me, I won't be switching to his methods. However, his methods obviously work well for him and I suspect they will work for others as well.

How to Find French Coats of Arms

I have written often about fake "family coats of arms" that are sold by shady vendors. In fact, there is no such thing as a "family coat of arms" in the English speaking world. I believe the same is true in most European countries although I have focused my articles mostly on the English-speaking countries for one simple reason: I can read their rules and regulations. I have a tougher time with other languages so I am reluctant to write about the procedures in other countries.

Now Anne Morddel has written an interesting article (in English) about coats of arms in France. What I really like is that she tells how to check the validity of French coats of arms, using a number of resources available in the Cabinet des Titres that has been microfilmed and can be viewed at the Richelieu building at Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

Scanning: Do It Yourself or Outsource?

The Library of Congress Digital Preservation newsletter has an article that will probably interest anyone thinking of scanning family photos, slides, negatives or film. Quoting from the article:

"At our personal digital archiving events, we get various questions about scanning family photos, slides, negatives and film. Questions like:  What type of scanner should I use? What resolution should I use? How can I scan negatives? While we’ve focused on developing tips and resources for saving personal digital materials created with software and hardware, we recognize that individuals have the both analog and digital materials and are looking for guidance on how to deal with both.

BitTorrent Launches Syncing Service to Compete with Dropbox

Dropbox is a wildly popular service that automatically makes backup copies of your files and copies them to other computers, such as from your desktop computer to the laptop or from the office computer to your home PC. However, some people are nervous about using Dropbox because it also keeps a copy of your files on Dropbox's servers. Actually, I think that is a good thing but I also know that many people disagree with me; they don't want their personal files stored on anyone else's servers.

Now BitTorrent Inc. has launched BitTorrent Sync, a pre-Alpha service for syncing files between devices. The new service is very much like Dropbox but with one major difference: it doesn't store any files on anyone else's servers. In fact, it doesn't store any files anywhere in the cloud. It only copies files directly from one computer you own to another computer you own (or to a friend's computer that you explicitly allow into your personal "network") without intermediate storage anywhere else. This is accomplished by using peer-to-peer technology: all files are copied directly from one of your computers to another of your computers with no intermediate servers involved.

Allegedly Stolen Historical Artifacts Worth $500,000 Found in a Canadian Home

It seems someone else has been stealing historic documents, antiques, and other valuable items. This time, the 800 or more antiques, rare books, historical documents and paintings allegedly pilfered over two decades were put on display in a suburban Halifax, Nova Scotia home. Homeowner John Mark Tillmann is charged with possession of stolen property.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are still cataloging the items but believe the total will be more than 800 historical artifacts, all of them apparently stolen, including a letter that British general James Wolfe wrote in 1758 and now belongs to Dalhousie University. The letter was written 10 days before the British fleet sailed from Halifax to Louisbourg.

BillionGraves.com Now Searchable on Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com and BillionGraves.com have a new agreement in which BillionGraves is now searchable on Ancestry.com. In the past, the only way to search BillionGraves.com was to go directly to the BillionGraves.com web site. The new search adds "one stop searching" from the popular Ancestry.com web site. You also can directly search only the BillionGraves.com database by going to http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=70734.

The records are freely searchable and accessible without any registration or sign-in required.

Book Review: Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families
Douglas Richardson, author, and Kimball G. Everingham, editor.
Published by Douglas Richardson. (Salt Lake City: 2nd ed., 2011).
Paperbound, 4 volumes; more than 2500 pages; bibliography; indices of people and events.

The Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) is the charter of liberties granted by King John of England, first issued in 1215. The Charter was forced upon the King by a rebellion of his feudal lords, and the charter led to way to the establishment of English civil law. It influenced New England settlers’ customs of governance, and inspired the ideas contained with the Constitution of the United States. The text of the Charter is transcribed in the introductory pages of Volume 1 (“23. No village or individual shall be forced to make bridges over the rivers, with the exception of those who from of old, and of right ought to do it.”)