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Imagine winning the lottery without buying a ticket. It was much like that for Glenn Pore when the Fayette County retiree accepted an energy company's offer to pay him and 10 relatives thousands of dollars to lease mineral rights beneath farmland his ancestors plowed a century ago. Pore does not own the land although his ancestors did. When sold, the family retained mineral rights which later became valuable.
In Pennsylvania, property owners can sell surface property but retain control of minerals. That includes natural gas trapped in the mile-deep Marcellus shale formation that was out of reach until the technology behind hydraulic fracturing evolved enough to extract it.
Every American has a Social Security number, right? Well, there are at least two exceptions in Kentucky. In fact, sisters Raechel and Stephanie Schultz are both trying to obtain Social Security numbers but the federal government is refusing to issue them. The government says they need more proof the sisters were born in the U.S. In order to obtain such documentation in today's world, one needs to first have a Social Security number.
Catch-22.
"I'm proud to be American but they don't want me," 23-year-old Stephanie Schultz told The Associated Press in an interview at their lawyer's office in southeastern Kentucky.
The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
I wrote some time ago (at http://goo.gl/suyT2) about my efforts to digitize my personal library and then to throw away the physical books I have collected. Several people wrote to suggest that I not throw away the books. They suggested that I donate the books to a library or to some other person who could use them after I created digital copies. For most of these books, I don't think I can legally do that.
A presidential historian charged with stealing millions of dollars in documents from the Maryland Historical Society has had his bail set at $500,000. Hearings for 63-year-old Barry Landau and his assistant, 24-year-old Jason Savedoff, both of New York City, were held Tuesday in Baltimore Circuit Court. Savedoff's bail was set at $750,000.
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is sorting through its massive collection after a frequent visitor to its archives was charged with stealing dozens of valuable documents in Baltimore.
Barry H. Landau, 63, an author and television commentator on presidential history, visited the society, at 13th and Locust Streets, 17 times between December and June. On July 9, Baltimore police arrested Landau and an accomplice, charging them in the theft of 60 rare documents from the Maryland Historical Society. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is suspicious that similar thefts may have occurred at its headquarters Philadelphia.
Detectives in Portland, Oregon, finally have an idea of what a suspect in the death of a woman nearly 50 years ago looks like – at least around the time of the murder – thanks to the work of some volunteer genealogists. However, more help is still needed.
On April 8, 1963, Mary Francis Reid – known as Francis to her family – was found dead in her apartment. Police were never able to find a suspect until this past February when Portland police identified Johnny Lawrence as a suspect in the case. However, police had very little information about him. It wasn't until genealogy hobbyists got involved and dug up more information that detectives were able to find a photograph of Lawrence. Tami Murphy, a genealogist, was drawn to Reid's story.
Our digital belongings are something the laws never envisioned, until recently. Obviously, everything you own in the online world is yours while you are alive, but what happens after you die? Does your present will protect your digital assets? Much of our online content consists of our writings – email, text, tweets, blogs, wikis and more – and our loved ones would surely cherish some of it just as surely as we cherish special old cards and letters. The same goes for our online photos, videos, artwork and other things we’ve created.
Closer to traditional matters of inheritance, do you have money in a PayPal account? Or perhaps you have a thriving online business on eBay? Do you own BitCoins or Second Life Linden dollars, which have a real-world currency exchange value? If so, do your heirs know about these assets and can the executor of your estate retrieve the funds?
How accurate is the Social Security Death Index? Apparently not accurate at all, according to Thomas Hargrove of the Scripps Howard News Service. He writes, "The Social Security Administration each month falsely reports that nearly 1,200 living Americans have died. These clerical errors, found in a federal database ominously titled the "Death Master File," might be darkly humorous - evoking Mark Twain's famous quip that death reports can be greatly exaggerated - were not the consequences so severe."
I have written a couple of times recently about various problems at Arlington National Cemetery. See http://goo.gl/ij9sL and http://goo.gl/5pxrc for those articles. Now Army criminal investigators are investigating a new discovery: 69 boxes of burial records from Arlington National Cemetery found in a commercial storage facility. The boxes include grave cards used to record burials that appear to have been given to a contractor who was supposed to help create a database of burials.
Founded in 1689 as the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, the National Library of Scotland (NLS) holds almost 400 years' worth of Scotland's written history and culture. In November 2007, consultancy firm GlassHouse Technologies was hired to help NLS make its entire collection available across the Internet. Such a web site would be valuable to genealogists, historians, and many others.
David Dinham, 33, a senior manager at NLS who had control over the historic institution's huge budgets, apparently decided he wanted a piece of the action. Dinham is now facing prison after library staff spotted financial irregularities and called in the police. He reportedly embezzled £500,000 (roughly $820,000 US) from NLS in a "sophisticated and complex" swindle lasting four years.
The Historic Mobile Preservation Society operates a museum and works to promote historic preservation in Mobile, Alabama. Marilyn Culpepper, the former director of the society, has now pleaded guilty to stealing more than $25,000 from the society. Mobile County Circuit Judge Rick Stout accepted the former director's plea Thursday and set sentencing for June 2, according to court documents.
Culpepper had led the group since 2001 but resigned from her post in May, 2009 amid questions about how the society spent grant money.
It’s so easy to get certified copies of birth certificates in Vermont that the state no longer will accept them as identification for fear of identity theft. In fact, I have personal experience with that.
I lived in Vermont for several years and my daughter was born there. A few years ago, she lost her birth certificate during a burglary in which an entire box of jewelry and papers, including her passport and birth certificate, were stolen and never recovered. A few months later, she and I were in Vermont together on vacation. We visited the town clerk's office in the town where she was born and my daughter asked for a copy of her birth certificate.
The 2011 Canadian Census questionnaire to be filled out in May contains a question that permits you to be part of the history of Canada. If you check "yes" to this permission question, your descendants will be able to do family and genealogical research on you and your family in the future.
The amended Statistics Act permits the release of historical census records from 1911 to 2001 after 92 years. Equally important, beginning with the 2006 Census, Canadians will have the choice to decide if they want their census records released to the public after 92 years.
Speaking at the 75th anniversary of the Irish Genealogical Research Society, Minister for Heritage Jimmy Deenihan has stated that the government intends to press ahead with the publication of the 1926 census although it would be in breach of the 100-year rule which governs all such information. He said publishing the census would need a change of legislation but he had received “widespread approval” for this.
The following was written by Pam Eagleson, CG and is used here with permission:
On 2 Mar, 2011 Helen Shaw,CG, Pam Eagleson,CG, and Melinde Lutz Sanborn,CG were among those who testified in favor of LD 258 at the public hearing in front of the [Maine] Committee on Health and Human Services. Dr. Steven Sears, acting Director of ME CDC spoke against it, and Kathy Montejo, Lewiston City Clerk, spoke neither in favor of it or against it. At the Committee's request, the stakeholders met afterwards to come to a compromise so the Committee could consider it during their work session on it the following day.
On 3 Mar, 2011 the Committee on Health and Human Services voted unanimously that LD 258 "ought to pass as amended."
The following announcement was written by the Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations (CIGO):
Following the recent Irish general election Fine Gael has become the largest party in the Dáil, and has agreed to form a coalition government with the Labour Party, which will take office on Wednesday 9 th March. CIGO is delighted to announce that the new ‘Programme for Government' negotiated between the two parties includes a commitment to release the Irish 1926 census.
Debra Schafer decided to research the family tree of her new son-in-law. She got a surprise when she found him, including his date of birth and his Social Security Number, on Ancestry.com's Social Security Death Index. Apparently, Ross died in a motorcycle accident in 1982. Yet the man calling himself William Jodee Ross was very much alive. It seems that the her new son-in-law wasn't the person he claimed to be.
When arrested, the man claiming to be William Jodee Ross of Bakersfield, California refused to give his real name. However, police took a DNA sample and soon identified him as Timothy Rodger O'Neil, age 47. Family members of the actual William Ross confirmed he was dead and that O'Neil, whose picture they were given, was not Ross.
Are you planning to purchase a new car? Are you also planning to grab all your tape cassettes and listen to them in your new wheels? If so, there's bad news for you. Cassette tapes are now history.
Remember when nearly every car in America had a cassette player? It wasn't all that long ago, but now it is history. The New York Times reports (at http://goo.gl/FpjRK) the 2010 Lexus SC 430 was the last model to offer a cassette deck as an option.
OK, I gave in. After writing my earlier Say Good-bye to Paper article about AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson's experiences with a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner, I decided it was time for me to do the same. This morning I ordered a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. The "M" stands for "Macintosh" although a Windows version is also available. The two scanners reportedly are identical, only with different software bundled with each.
The new scanner should arrive in a week or so. I'll probably use it for a few days, then write here about my experiences. I am looking forward to scanning BOTH sides of a piece of paper in three seconds. The same scanner also has a sheet feeder. I should be able to insert a stack of papers, press a button, and then walk away while the scanner does all the work. I have thousands of pages to scan so speed and convenience are important to me.
Two former Utah residents who were living in a travel trailer in Durham, Maine, have been arrested and charged with aggravated forgery. Frank Terhaar and Michelle Hank, formerly of Salt Lake City, concocted a scheme in which they used the birth certificates of dead people and information from genealogical Web sites to obtain Maine identification credentials with the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
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