Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Follow-Up: Why You Need a Second (and Better) E-mail Address

On February 6 of this year, I posted an article telling why you don't want to use the e-mail service from your Internet provider. Instead, you should be using an e-mail service provided by an independent e-mail provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Fastmail, etc.).

I described a recent nightmare for 234,000 former Verizon customers in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont who suddenly found their Internet service was being changed to a smaller company, FairPoint Communications. The former Verizon customers all had assigned e-mail addresses ending in "@verizon.net" and were suddenly told that their e-mail addresses had been changed.

Now the problem is getting worse.

The Millennial Disk

You've spent years compiling your family history, scanning old photographs, copying ancestral journals and writing biographies of your parents. Completing each project, you store the information on a CD or DVD disk. Mission accomplished. The data will be there for generations to come.

Or will it?

Today's CD-ROM and DVD-ROM disks have an average life expectancy of anywhere from 3 to 12 years.

Why Cloud Computing Makes Sense for Genealogy

One of the newer buzzwords in the online world is "cloud computing." You can probably find dozens of definitions of this new technology, but I think the simplest is that cloud computing refers to a computer application running on a distant computer. Your local desktop or laptop works as a "remote terminal," with your local video screen showing what is happening on the distant computer and your local keyboard and mouse being used as input devices for the same distant computer. All the computing power and disk storage is being provided by a powerful computer or perhaps a bank of powerful computers in some distant data center. Your local desktop or laptop simply provides your "view" of that distant application. You can use the application program running in the distant computer in the same manner that you run applications in your own computer. However, you benefit from the power and storage capabilities of those distant, powerful computers.

Note: For simplicity's sake, I will often state “a distant computer.” However, it might not be a single computer, and it might not be in one single location. Many cloud computing applications operate on banks of distant computers that may be located in different data centers around the world. Those details will be invisible to you and will remain unimportant for this discussion.

The word “cloud” refers to the Internet. I am sure you have seen various drawings over the years depicting home computers connecting to distant web servers via the Internet. The Internet is almost always drawn as a cloud to indicate there is a massive collection of routers, switches, and cabling connecting the computers. However, all the complexity of the Internet is hidden from the user. Therefore, it is a cloud. The phrase “cloud computing” really means “running programs on distant computers via the Internet.”

Scan 3,000 Pages Per Hour!

In the July 07, 2009 newsletter, I posted an article entitled, Kirtas Offers Digitized Books. I described the thousands of e-books now available online from Kirtas Technologies. I also briefly mentioned the company's book scanner, which can scan up to 2400 pages per hour.

Todd Whiting, Manager or Marketing Operations at Kirtas Technologies has now posted a comment at the end of that earlier article stating that my figures are out of date. Todd writes:

California To Move To Online Textbooks

I have written several times about the need to switch from printed books to electronic publishing, often referred to as "e-books." Many people, myself included, believe the future of printed books is doomed as the cost of paper, inventory storage, shipping expenses, and the associated labor costs continue to escalate. Contrast that with the ever-decreasing costs of electronic publishing and online storage, ease of distribution via high-speed "always on" networks, improving video displays, and reduced labor requirements, and the future soon becomes obvious: electronic publishing makes economic sense.

Now one more person has gone on record as favoring electronic publishing: California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Google's Wave

Google has unveiled a distributed, peer-to-peer collaboration and conversation platform called Wave. Several newsletter readers have written to suggest that the Wave may offer tremendous potential for genealogy projects, especially for group efforts when multiple people are working towards a common goal. This could be as informal as two cousins cooperating with their research efforts or as formal as a one-name society or a family society of 50 people or more working to document everyone of a particular surname or documenting all the descendants of a common ancestor.

Click on the thumbnail image to the left to see a larger image of a typical (non-genealogy) Wave.

Du Bois Collection Goes Digital

Fifty years ago there were few people who did not know who W.E.B. Du Bois was. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced Doo Boys) was a founding member of the Niagara Movement, a group that evolved into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A prolific and confrontational writer, he expounded on the necessity of racial, economical and gender equality, demilitarization and the destructive nature of colonialism, among other social justice topics. Du Bois wrote many novels, plays and poems, but may be best remembered for his 1903 book, "The Souls of Black Folk."

GeoCities to Shut Down. Now What?

Thousands of private individuals host their genealogy sites on the free GeoCities service. Some of the sites have been there for years with little or no updates from the owners. Now parent company Yahoo is ending the free service.

Yahoo has posted the following notice at http://www.geocities.com:

Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.

Current GeoCities customers:

After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information.

Yahoo is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo's paid Web Hosting service.

Ancestors Magazine Offers Past Articles For Download

Produced by The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Ancestors is a monthly magazine full of tips and guidance for family and other historians. Now the publishers are offering selected past articles for a modest fee. Most articles are four to five pages in length, and have been scanned in colour from the original magazine. Downloads are supplied in PDF format.

The National Archives’ Documents Online service has a selection available from recent issues, with more to be added shortly. Subjects covered include parish magazines, convicts in Bermuda and an introduction to the Archives and its work.

Storage Breakthrough Puts 100 DVDs on a Single Disc

According to a report in the New York Times, GE has made a storage breakthrough that allows a density on a single disc high enough to store 100 DVD movies. If it can store that many movies, how many genealogy books can it store? I don't have a precise answer but obviously the answer has to be in the tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of books. Can you imagine an entire library of genealogy books shipping on one disk? There would probably be enough room left over for all the U.S. census records images and lots of other material as well.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

Flight 1549

Here is another story about computer backups:

Paul Jorgensen had just come from a meeting at Goldman Sachs when he boarded US Airways Flight 1549. He sat down in seat 1A next to the window, pulled out his notebook computer to capture of few thoughts, then put it away and prepared for takeoff.

Seated one row behind Jorgensen was Bill Wiley, also traveling for business with a computer onboard the plane. In fact, he brought a couple of notebook computers with him. But he, like Jorgensen and all passengers, abandoned his personal belongings and focused on saving his life when the plane crash-landed into the Hudson River.

Magic: Faded Census Records to Re-Appear

This is about as close to magic as I can imagine. Picture in your mind original census pages that have faded so badly that the enumerators' handwriting is no longer visible. I am not talking about ink that has faded a bit. In this case, the ink is gone, not even visible on the page. All you can see is the page as it was printed and given to the enumerators (census takers) with the pre-printed text and boxes. These pages look as if they were never filled out, and yet you know they were.

Now, add in a mix of digital photography and different lights. Shake well with some computer enhancements. The result? Readable images!

If this isn't magic, I don't know what is.

Skype for iPhone and iPod Touch

NOTE: This article has nothing to do with genealogy, other than perhaps providing a cheap method for you to call your distant relatives. However, I have written before about Skype and thought I would offer one more article describing its uses.

Skype is the free service that allows you to talk from computer to computer, anywhere in the world. While the basic service is free, low-cost options also are available to place calls to and from normal telephone systems at ridiculously low prices. You can see my earlier articles about Skype at: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=003715150024579880844%3Aulyzue1ivzu&ie=UTF-8&q=Skype&sa=Search.

Even better, you do not need to use a computer, nor do you need to use headphones. At home, I typically use a cordless phone to make and receive Skype calls all over the world. I recently planned my trips to New Zealand and to England, paying two or three cents per minute for Skype calls to make reservations at hotels and rental car companies in those countries. I wrote about using Skype without a computer and without a headset at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/08/use-skype-witho.html.

Today Skype released its newest offering: Skype for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. If you have one of those devices, you can save significant money on long-distance calls by downloading the free Skype application.

A Video Interview with Nick Francis of Ancestral Atlas

A fascinating new online service, called Ancestral Atlas, has appeared within the past few weeks. It is an online community environment that allows people to create and share ancestry-based maps. It is great for displaying locations of births, marriages, and burials of your ancestors as well as the locations of other important places in their lives. For instance, you can use Ancestral Atlas to display the location of family farms or the locations of a battle in which your ancestor was a participant.

I was very impressed with the service the first time I saw it. Others apparently agree with me.  Many genealogists are using the service but so are historical groups, tourist agencies, and many more.

Data Preservation and How Ancient Egypt Got It Right

Subtitle: Rocks Don't Need to Be Backed Up

Henry Newman has written an interesting article for the Enterprise Storage Forum web site that describes the decline in data lifetime:

"In some ways, the Egyptians with their simpler approach were far better off than we are at recording and saving information. Just look at the well preserved [Egyptian] obelisk as you consider all the formats you probably have lying around that can no longer be accessed, from 5.25-inch floppy disks to 8-track tapes and old home movies. What would it take to preserve those for 3,500 years?

Computing in the Clouds

The newest technology these days in computers is called “cloud computing.” Indeed, we already see several examples of this in today's genealogy software and I am certain we will see even more within the next two or three years.

Cloud computing refers to Internet-based software and databases. The Internet itself is “the cloud.” In almost all drawings of Internet applications, the Internet is shown as a “cloud” into which various computers are connected. The cloud is used as a graphic to represent all sorts of servers, routers, and high-speed connections that are invisible to the user. In short, the user does not need to know where the equipment is located nor what kind of equipment is used. All the user needs to know is how to connect to “the cloud” and access the resources available. “Cloud computing” is simply the next evolution of remote computing.

Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology

Writing in LOST Magazine, Alexander Stille says that we are running out of time at the National Archives. Information stored in mechanical and electronic format is in danger of being lost forever.

The National Archives' Department of Special Media Preservation is a kind of museum of obsolete technology where Archives technicians try to tease information out of modern media that have long vanished from circulation. But the laboratory is more than a curious rag-and-bone shop of technologies past; in many ways, it offers a cautionary vision of the future. The problem of technological obsolescence — of fading words and images locked in odd-looking, out-of-date gizmos — is an even bigger problem for the computer age than for the new media produced in the first half of the 20th century.

Follow-up: Why You Need a Second (and Better) E-mail Address

On February 06, 2009, I posted an article entitled, "Why You Need a Second (and Better) E-mail Address." I was pleasantly surprised by the number of comments posted at the end of the article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/02/why-you-need-a-second-and-better-email-address-by-dick-eastman.html. Obviously, I struck a chord. Lots of people seem to have concerns about the future of their e-mail accounts – and with good reason. With the advent of fiber optic services and the added costs of implementing them, even some of the large Internet service providers are redefining their customer territories. Some major shifts in geographic coverage across the country could be around the corner, and we can only guess how prepared anyone's incoming and outgoing providers will be for transferring customers. How prepared a customer is for such a change is the subject of the article mentioned above and now, this one, too.

In the first article, I described several scenarios for making sure that your e-mail will still be available to you in the future. I deliberately left out my favorite option, however, with the belief that it would be too complicated for most non-technical readers. However,  the number of comments posted by people who have already used this more complicated option leads me to a different view. Therefore, I decided to write this article to describe what might be the best option of all. I will admit that this solution requires a bit of technical expertise, however.

Use of Digital Camera for Genealogy

You can read an interesting "thread" of messages in the EOGN Forum right now concerning the use of digital cameras for genealogy purposes. I was especially interested in A. R. Wilson's detailed description on how to obtain high quality pictures and also with JGR's and John R.'s comments about how they take photographs of documents and then process them with a free OCR program, converting them to text.

Family Tree Builder 3

The following announcement was written by MyHeritage:

MyHeritage Makes Family History Research Easier With Launch Of Family Tree Builder 3

New software makes it easier to automatically find long lost relatives, publish content to MyHeritage.com, and print your family tree on one page

Tel Aviv, Israel – January 2, 2009 – MyHeritage, one of the world’s most popular family Web sites, today announced the launch of Family Tree Builder 3, a powerful software program that MyHeritage members can download and use to build family trees, research family history and add content like photos and videos.