The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
One of the greatest genealogy resources available today is the huge collection of digitized genealogy and family history publications from the archives of some of the most important family history libraries in the world. When I travel to various genealogy conferences and societies, I am often amazed at how many genealogists are unaware of these free resources. Not only are the books and other publications available free of charge, you don't even have to pay for gas to visit these libraries!
The Family History Library staff have now completed a project to improve the Pennsylvania section of FamilySearch Wiki. Special emphasis has been placed on the county pages. Users will find lots of links to online church records, naturalizations, and wills.
In this guide, you will find a series of research articles packed with helpful ideas for tracing ancestors in big cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as 67 counties throughout the state. Pennsylvania Online Genealogy Records will help you quickly discover what is available online. In Pennsylvania, birth, marriage, and death records generally do not begin until the late 1800s and early 1900s. Church records are a valuable substitute for birth, marriage, and death records if you are searching in an earlier time period. In the county guides, such as Berks County, a great deal of effort has been made to determine which church records are available online at sites such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, and USGenWeb.
I write frequently about the need to make frequent backups of any computer information. After all, you don't want to lose what you worked so hard to create, do you? I guess I haven't written about it in a while as a newsletter reader sent a note today asking, "How about an update on what you use for backup now??"
This is my reply:
Well, I never backup to only ONE place! Having only one backup is almost as dangerous as having none. I always make at least three backups of my desktop system and store them in at least three different locations. I probably backup more than that on the two laptop computers I use (Windows and Macintosh).
It is the first day of the month. It's time to back up your genealogy files. Then test your backups!
Actually, you can make backups at any time. However, it is easier and safer if you have a specific schedule. The first day of the month is easy to remember, so I would suggest you back up your genealogy files at least on the first of every month, if not more often.
In January, Nathan W. Murphy, Senior Research Consultant, of the LDS Church's Genealogical Department, wrote an article in the FamilySearch blog at http://goo.gl/twYxq to clarify the misconceptions that many novice genealogists believe to be true. Murphy write, "...it is not even possible to verify historically a connected European pedigree earlier than the time of the Merovingian Kings (c. a.d. 450–a.d. 752)."
Elissa Scalise Powell is an expert genealogist, instructor and lecturer who exhibits the highest of professional standards. She is also President of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, or BCG.
The Board for Certification of Genealogists is an independent organization not affiliated with, or part of, any group. It functions as a certifying body, not a membership society. Its primary aim is to certify genealogists as meeting professional standards, somewhat similar to certifications as a CPA or other professional standards.
Today I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Genealogical Roundtable Workshop in Acton, Massachusetts. One conversation left me smiling. As I often do, I was talking about the need to make multiple backups and to store them in multiple locations. One person lamented that a web site he was involved with lost all the web pages. Everything was gone. Zero. Nothing. The reason was not known although he had a few guesses. This conversation arose because he had no backups of the web site. Actually, he THOUGHT he had no backups.
I opened a web browser and went to the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org. This site is also sometimes called the "Wayback Machine." It is an archive made over the years of many web sites. I entered the URL of his long-lost pages and Voila! All the pages appeared on the screen!
All he needs to do is copy the pages from http://www.archive.org and paste them into whatever HTML editor he uses for creating pages on the web site. I suspect that some reformatting will also be required.
Bob Vornlocker sent an article two years ago describing problems and a potential solution when searching for surnames in the various online databases. Bob kindly gave me permission to re-publish the article in this newsletter at http://goo.gl/JTzEr. Bob has now followed that with an update and again has offered his new article to newsletter readers here.
Bob writes that if you "Couple wildcards with Boolean searches, particularly the proximity or NEAR operand and I am a very happy Fachenlueger." (Translation of that last word is left to the reader.)
You might want to save this article someplace. I have no idea why, but many of the words used in researching your family tree are difficult to spell. I constantly see spelling errors in messages posted on various genealogy web sites. When someone misspells a word, it feels like they are shouting, "I don't know what I'm doing!"
Here are a few words to memorize:
Genealogy - No, it is not spelled “geneology” nor is it spelled in the manner I often see: “geneaology.” That last word looks to me as if someone thought, "Just throw all the letters in there and hope that something sticks." For some reason, many newspaper reporters and their editors do not know how to spell this word. Don't they have spell checkers?
Roxanne Moore Saucier has written a great article in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News describing how to find information about Acadian ancestors.
Generally, the term French Canadian describes those with Quebec ancestry, while Acadian refers to the French who occupied what is now Nova Scotia and parts of New Brunswick until the British deported them in Le Grand Derangement of 1755.
If you have Acadian ancestry, or even THINK you might, you will want to read Roxanne's article at http://goo.gl/TNPPc.
It is the first day of the month. It's time to back up your genealogy files. Then test your backups!
Actually, you can make backups at any time. However, it is easier and safer if you have a specific schedule. The first day of the month is easy to remember, so I would suggest you back up your genealogy files at least on the first of every month, if not more often.
NOTE: A newsletter reader wrote this week asking abut publishing the Social Security numbers of deceased people that she found on a web site. She wrote, "...which even lists social security numbers of deceased persons. How ... can this outfit secure and publish all this information?"
I referred her to an article I wrote five years ago explaining why the publishing of deceased individuals' Social Security numbers actually REDUCES identity theft, instead of what some politicians and bureaucrats would like you to believe. However, I noticed the article was a bit out of date. While accurate when it was written, several things have changed in the past five years and the article needs updating. I have now updated the original article and am re-publishing it again.
I have read comments from several people stating that the Social Security Administration should not release Social Security numbers of deceased people. The claim is that would-be thieves can obtain numbers from the list (called the Social Security Death Index, or SSDI) and therefore publishing these numbers contributes to identity theft. I have one comment:
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:
Pierre Clouthier of Progeny Genealogy has written an excellent article that I suggest should be required reading for all genealogists as well as many other computer users. The article describes how one person faithfully made frequent backups of his or her 140,000-person genealogy database but never tested those backups to see if the data was good. In fact, in this case, the data in the genealogy program's database was already corrupted on the user's hard drive but the corruption would not appear until a certain individual's record was accessed. The user kept backing up bad data over and over, probably for months and possibly even for years.
I received the following email message today. It's sad that anyone would be treated in such a manner. I felt so bad about this person's experience that I decided to republish the email message here although I have edited it slightly and also removed the sender's name and email address in order to protect privacy.
Are you guilty of treating newcomers to this sort of shoddy treatment? I am guessing the original message questioning the accuracy of data was probably well intentioned but certainly needed more diplomacy:
I am very new to genealogy. Not long ago I was contacted about a date error on my Mayflower ancestor's page at ancestry.com. I found it and changed it. It quickly escalated into other criticisms and I quit making the suggested corrections which came several emails a day. This person wanted me to delete everyone from my "list of people" if she didn't know who they were. Well, I wouldn't do that and this person got a bit huffy about it.
Tia Ghose has written an article in the LiveScience web site that quotes Beverly Strassmann, a University of Michigan anthropologist, and Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers University. The article tries to explain why the study of one's family tree has become so popular and personal.
Have you noticed all the news stories lately about various politicians and Hollywood personalities who are related to each other? I have one reaction: "Ho hum, so what else is new?"
Of course, most every person in North America whose ancestors have been here for several generations is related to most everyone else in North America whose ancestors have been here for several generations. In fact, you and I are probably related, and we are also probably related to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, and the local mailman.
Many of us have encountered the word "ye" in old documents. Of course, we have all seen tourists shops labeled as "ye olde" something-or-other. How many of us know how to pronounce that?
For years, I assumed it was pronounced as it was written. I would pronounce it as "Yee Old." I was a bit surprised later to learn that I had been wrong.
What looks like a "y" is a written character deriving from the old English letter, "thorn," representing the "th" sound. No, it is not the letter "y," it is the letter thorn. The thorn was commonly used in written English in the Middle Ages and for some time after. That explains why we see it on old documents and even in modern written sentences that imitate historical writing. Other than these cases, the thorn has now almost disappeared.
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:
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