We have all come up against a brick wall or two in our research, I am sure. Well, now you can come up against some brick walls and actually enjoy them.
Genealogy Today has provided us with over 20 images of different brick walls. You can just enjoy looking at them or you can use them as your computer screen wallpaper if you wish.
Stare at the brick walls at Free Brick Wall Images
This is a great site if you are interested in historic newspapers. The Library of Congress site on the Chronicling of America can give you a fairly comprehensive list of newspapers that were published, when, where, and by whom.
You can search for the paper by name, state, or year of publication. You can also search for and view on line digitized images of a very large collection.
You can find the site at Search U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present - Chronicling America (The Library of Congress)
If you missed RootsTech 2012, some of the presentations have now been made available on the Internet for your viewing. You could have watched them earlier, but in the earlier offering, an entire day’s videos were strung together in about six continuous hours of video. Now the presentations have been isolate into their own separate videos.
A few of the titles are “Do I Trust the Cloud,” “Effective Data Base Search Tactics,” and “Genealogy Podcasts and Blogs.” In all there are 17 titles.
View them at RootsTech 2012 Videos
If you are a cook, this article by Diane Haddad in the “Genealogy Insider” may be of interest to you. This is more than just following a recipe, however.
Diane gives you ideas of how you can tap into your creativity to create dishes of old without the benefit of having the recipe…as is often the case.
Check out the article at Genealogy Insider - A Peck and A Pottle: Re-creating Family Recipes
If you have ties to the University of Iowa, you will get excited that their year books from 1892 to 1992 are now online.
You can see the collection at University of Iowa Yearbooks Digital Collection - The University of Iowa Libraries
Henry Gates, Jr. has a new show starting on PBS on 25 March. This show will deal with the genealogies of well-known people, much like the popular “Who Do You Think You Are?”
You can read about the show and Gates at Finding Your Roots | PBS
It’s nice to have multiple shows about genealogy on the air. At some level this is probably going to become a competition for ratings and viewer-ship, but to most of us, it will simply represent welcome opportunities to see different approaches to research and their results.
James Tanners recently wrote an article on genealogy Apps for smartphones in the TechTips Blog of FamilySearch. If you have a smartphone, this article may give you a lead on some Apps that you will find useful. If you don’t have a smartphone but are curious about that world, you will also find the article valuable.
Read James’ article at Smartphone Apps for Genealogy
If you enjoyed the last post, you will also love this one. This time we get a view of how genetic genealogists are viewed by relatives, traditional genealogists, mothers, geneticists, and society.
Enjoy it at http://www.owston.com/image/genetic_genealogists.jpg
Time for a light-hearted break. Here is an idea of how our relatives, friends, mothers, Ancestry, and society view us genealogists.
It is both clever and true. Check it out at http://www.owston.com/image/genealogists.jpg
Ancestry is rolling out an interactive image viewer, and it is currently in Beta test in a limited number of records sets.
Some of it’s features are color coding the searched individual and his family, mouse-over explanations of record content, the ability to control image orientation and contrast, and more.
You can read all about the viewer at Interactive Image Viewer (Beta)
Kimberly Powell entered a post at “About.com Genealogy” pointing us to some cool family tree charts…which are free.
Here is an excerpt that explains a bit about what you can get:
“View, download, save and print a variety of free family tree charts and forms. These include traditional family tree charts, fan and pedigree charts.
“Some of the free family tree charts are even interactive - meaning that you can type in the fields online before saving locally to your computer or printing for family members.”
Give it a look at Free Family Tree Charts & Forms - Free Genealogy Charts
If you were unable to attend RootsTech last month, as most of us were unable to do, this article by Diane Haddad found in her blog "genealogy insider" was meant for you.
She gives a summary of the highlights from her point of view. During the conference she wrote and posted articles about what was going on, and this article links to those items.
You can find it at Genealogy Insider - RootsTech News Wrap-up
If you are interested in Dutch genealogy, this article by Miriam Klaassen is certainly for you. And if you are not, you can still pick up some interesting information about surname origins by reading it.
Did you know that Napoleon mandated surnames in the Netherlands in 1811? This is just one of the many interesting things you will find by reading this article.
Check it out at Dutch Genealogy - Surnames in the Netherlands
We have all used Google in our genealogy research, I am sure. And we have all picked up hints and tips about how to get the most out of using that search engine.
But the "genealogy in time magazine" officer five new Google search tricks for us to play with. One involves an encrypted search, and another shows us how to search simultaneously in two different languages.
Read about those two and others at Five New Google Search Tricks
James Tanner gives us a thoughtful piece in his blog “Genealogy’s Star.” He differentiates the task of searching for a name and the task of searching for a record. The bottom line is that we spend a lot of time searching by our ancestor's name, not knowing whether the type of record we are searching for even exists. Becoming knowledgeable about what records exist in what timeframes will save us time and frustration when we get to the point of the name search.
James has a lot more to say on this topic. Read it all at Genealogy's Star: Realistic Record Availability
The Genealogy Tip of the Day by Michael John Neill gives an important piece of information to consider when doing immigration records research.
Check it out at Genealogy Tip of the Day: Not Before 1820
