 |
 |
Member Login | My Account | Guest Registry |
 |
 |
| Getting Started | Learning Center | Reference | Publications | Articles & Columns |
| Learn > Articles & Columns > Daily News > Current Article | |
Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
| IN THIS ISSUE: |
|
Online Genealogy Talk Shows |
|
Click Here for Dick Eastman's Archive |
| March 30, 1999 |
Sierra Home is having success with their Web-Interactive Family History Talk Show. I wrote about the new talk show in the February 27, 1999 edition of this newsletter, available at: http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/eastmar02-99.htm. Sierra Home is sponsoring the programs, in partnership with the TalkSpot Newsroom. The new online talk show has been running on Saturdays with a number of different guests. Sierra Home and the TalkSpot newsroom are having a "special broadcast" on Monday, March 29. This particular broadcast will be about genealogy libraries. The show’s announcement says that a panel of genealogy experts will tell you how to access thousands of databases. The panel experts will include: Elon Gasper, Senior Designer of Generations Remember that this is a fully interactive talk show. You can listen online via your computer’s SoundBlaster board and simultaneously use your keyboard to ask questions of the panelists and to participate in a chat room. The program starts this Monday, March 29, at 12:00 noon Pacific Time, 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 8:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time. That’s a very convenient time for Europeans, so I suspect there will be many interactive "listener/participants" from Europe. Full details are available at: http://www.talkspot.com/newsroom.html The following Saturday the regularly-scheduled interactive broadcast will feature some guy named Dick Eastman talking about genealogy software as well as research "do’s and don’ts." Perhaps that broadcast should be named, "Mistakes I Have Made." That broadcast will be on April 3, 1999 at 4:00 PM Pacific Time, 7:00 PM Eastern Time and Midnight Greenwich Mean Time. To participate in the genealogy talk shows, you need to have the RealPlayer (version 3.0 or higher) installed on your computer system. RealPlayer is a "plug-in" software for Netscape and Internet Explorer that enables an Internet user to hear streaming audio programming and see streaming video from a website. RealPlayer is available for Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, Linux, Solaris, SCO UNIX, Irix and FreeBSD. If you don't have the RealPlayer, you can download the free version from RealNetworks by going to: http://www.real.com/products/player/index.html?src=hp_butn&hp=yes. RealPlayer also is available in a higher-powered version for $29.99, but you will not need that version to participate in the online genealogy broadcasts. The free version is sufficient. - Holocaust Group Seeks LDS Data According to the Deseret News, the LDS Church has been asked to provide genealogical records that could help identify between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish Holocaust victims who may have established bank accounts in Switzerland. Church spokesman Dale Bills confirmed that the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand asked for copies of records to further their work with the Volcker Commission. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is heading up an audit of Swiss bank accounts, hoping to identify Holocaust victims who had untold millions deposited that were never retrieved. For years, the descendants of those victims have said they can't get enough information from Swiss banks to determine whether assets still remain that are rightfully theirs. In response to the request, Bills echoed comments by Michael Otterson, director of media relations for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who told Reuters news agency that "our intent is to respond to it as a goodwill gesture, but we are still waiting to see if there are any objections." In 1995, the church signed an agreement with the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors to stop doing proxy baptisms in its temples for Jewish Holocaust victims. The agreement came after that organization strongly objected to the posthumous baptisms, which Latter-day Saints perform not only for their own ancestors but for millions of others who have died. The agreement also stipulated that the church would "remove from the next issue of the International Genealogical Index (IGI) the names of all known posthumously baptized Jewish Holocaust victims who are not direct ancestors of living members of the church." Bills said those names have been removed from the IGI, which is a database that is available to the public for research on family history. The database is also one source of names for which Latter-day Saints perform proxy baptisms and other ordinances in their temples. The complete story is available at: http://www.desnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,75001152,00.html - Gibson County, Indiana Cemetery Indexes Online Chawn E. Caniff, with assistance from a number of other people, has developed a valuable website for anyone with Gibson County, Indiana ancestors. The site lists all the cemeteries in the county. In addition, volunteers are transcribing the tombstones of the cemeteries and placing that information on the website. Not all of the cemeteries have been completed yet. However, when I looked at the site, I found a lot of listings. The website’s main page has links to the individual pages for each cemetery. Each individual page will eventually contain a transcribed listing of the graves in that cemetery. One of the neat functions of the site is the availability of an on-line mapping capability showing the location of the cemetery. The GPS coordinates are passed to Tiger Mapping to allow this function. A view is then displayed, showing the location of the cemetery along with other cemeteries in close proximity. Not all the cemeteries have the GPs coordinates listed, but the coordinates are being added frequently. I wrote an article in Genealogical Computing last year about the use of a GPs receiver to find cemeteries. I suspect that GPs receivers will become standard equipment for genealogy research in the near future. I keep a GPs receiver mounted on the dashboard of my car at all times and have found many uses for it. For instance, I record not only cemetery locations but also the precise location of land purchased by my ancestors or towns where they lived. With data from Chawn E. Caniff’s website, I can easily drive to cemeteries in Gibson County, Indiana, even if they are on back roads and overgrown with weeds and underbrush. To look at the Gibson County, Indiana Cemetery Indexes, set your Web browser to: http://www.usroots.com/~jmurphy/gibson/gibcem/gibcem.htm. - Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie Online The Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in The Hague was founded in 1945. Since then it has become the largest center for family history and genealogy in the Netherlands. The Bureau presently has: an extensive library (100,000 bindings) with, amongst others, publications on genealogy, heraldry and both regional and local history, in Dutch as well as foreign languages. The foreign publications mainly refer to countries of importance for Dutch emigration and immigration. About 60,000 files with genealogical manuscripts, biographical data, etc. originating from the work of hundreds of amateur and professional genealogists. millions of newspaper cuttings and family announcements about birth, marriage and death (from circa 1795 up till the present) 'primary' genealogical data in the form of microfilm-copies of thousands of registers of births, baptisms, marriages and burials in the Netherlands, the former Dutch East- and West-Indies and the Dutch border areas. As well, there are copies of municipal registers up to circa 1910 and personal record cards used in the municipal registers from 1939 till 1994. However, the Bureau has cards only of deceased persons of that period. Large parts of these collections have been catalogued in the automated CBG-Catalogue (CBG-Catalogus). Here you can find information mainly on books and journals, files ('dossiers'), newspaper cuttings ('familieadvertenties') and family announcements ('familiedrukwerk'). The catalog is computerized and is available online now. However, remember that this is an online catalog, not the details themselves. I went to the website and did a search for my own surname. I guess there weren’t any Dutch EASTMANs as there were no occurrences in the database. That’s no surprise. Then I did a search for VISER and found a number of "hits." By clicking on each listing, I could look at the details of that catalog entry, including full title, library call number, author and alt the other items one expects to find in a library catalog. Of course, the catalog is in Dutch. For full information, including some explanatory text written in English, look at: http://www.cbg.nl My thanks to Marco Visser for telling me about the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie Online. - African-American Genealogy Group The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an interesting genealogy story in their March 25, 1999 edition. It describes a Philadelphia-based genealogy group with 130 members called the African American Genealogy Group. The society holds workshops, hosts guest speakers, and offers field trips to libraries and archives. The entire article is available online at: http://www.newsindex.com/cgi-bin/result.cgi?http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Mar/25/pa_west/WROOT25.htm - Another Method Of Presenting Genealogy Data On The Web Do you want to display your genealogy information on your website? Most modern genealogy programs will automatically generate HTML pages, which you can upload directly to your site. The problem with them is that they are often quite "robotic." That is, the machine-generated text can be a bit repetitious if you read quite a few pages of the data. Another method of creating Web pages is to have your genealogy program output to a text file and upload that. However, such files generally do not look very attractive. Of course, you could generate your own HTML files by hand, but that’s a lot of work. I recently heard about a different approach. L. D. Pierce wanted the appearance of a published book that would appear as an image on the viewer’s screen. Luckily, the tools are available to do that. He generated the documents with a standard word processor, selecting data from whatever sources he wanted. He could vary the formatting, use different fonts or even embed pictures or maps or whatever graphics he wanted. He then used Adobe Acrobat to create an "image" of a printed manual. The image was then uploaded to his website. To view the online publications, the viewer must first obtain the free Adobe Acrobat viewer. You can download it online from http://www.adobe.com. Versions are available for Windows, Macintosh and for some versions of UNIX. The Adobe Acrobat viewer installs quickly and easily. Keep in mind that the free viewer only allows users to read Acrobat files; creation of these files requires the full Adobe Acrobat program which can be purchased from most software outlets. I looked at L. D. Pierce’s website this week and found it quite interesting. The Pierce genealogy book was easy to use. This is a full-length genealogy publication. I was able to click on a page in the Table of Contents and see that page almost instantly on my screen. I could move from page to page sequentially or jump from section to section. The one picture that I found looked excellent on the screen, probably better than it would have on a normal printed page. Some of the surnames in the book were Pierce, Abercrombie, Wilbanks, Scott, Finley, Faus and Hibbs. In creating an online book with Adobe Acrobat, several options are available for formatting and for controlling what the reader can do. The author can control whether or not the reader can print pages locally. The text is not editable and cannot be copied or duplicated using cut and paste. Nobody can easily cut and paste your data into their own documents. However, the documents can be downloaded to someone's computer and read later. To view some of L. D. Pierce’s genealogy publications in Adobe Acrobat format, go to: http://members.xoom.com/ldpierce For more information about creating documents with Adobe Acrobat, look at: http://www.adobe.com - More On NGS Convention Accommodations In last week’s newsletter I mentioned the shortage of available hotel rooms at this year’s National Genealogical Society annual conference. Then I wrote, "By the way, is anyone interested in going to the NASCAR race Saturday evening after the convention is finished?" The joke is on me: The race is sold out. I don’t think any of us will be able to obtain last-minute tickets. - Genealogy Programmer’s Nightmare I always enjoy challenges. Here’s a test for your favorite software. Can your current genealogy program properly track this man’s many spouses and descendants? Several of today’s programs can, but I bet a few cannot: Ancentus Akuku Oguela of Aora Chuodho, Kenya was born in 1918 and has had over 117 wives. He presently is separated from over 80 of them. He is no longer able to recall all the names of these wives. Ancentus now is husband to only 37 women. He claims to have 172 children, the first born in 1948 and the latest born 4 months ago to his youngest wife who was born in 1979. A fascinating new website claims: Seeking your personal connections with fame and wealth, or membership in a prestigious American Revolution society, or just want to fill in those blank spaces in your family tree? Have you spent years in frustrating searches and paying so-called "professional genealogists" - only to discover that your family tree is riddled with obscure debtors, unheroic toads and missing information? Here and now, at prices less than you ever imagined - you can buy an ancestor - complete with copies of authenticating documents. In the list of "specials" the site says that they have sold out of one well-known ancestor. To take a look for yourself, point your Web browser to: http://wavecom.net/~fulker/special.html (And check your calendar to see what date next Thursday is.) The following is a list of some of the genealogy-related World Wide Web home pages that have been listed recently on http://www.rootscomputing.com. Some of these sites may charge a fee for their services: Mulnix family website: http://mulnix.family.webjump.com Guild of One Name Studies for the surname of WEBB(E): Sikes/Sykes Families Association: Tower/Wheelock family from Massachusetts and pictures from Hingham, Massachusetts relating to Tower: Garner/Gardener family research: Information on Downing Family Historical Society of America. Also genealogy t-shirts: The Treadway Web - lineages of Nathaniel Treadway of New England, Thomas Treadway of Baltimore and Harford Co., Maryland, and Richard Treadway of Baltimore Co., Maryland: Reynolds and over 100 other surnames: A site about Middleton Manchester, UK as it was before 1964 with links to former Middletonians or "Moonrakers" as they are known locally: Burchett families in Johnson and Morgan counties, Kentucky: To submit your home page to this newsletter, enter the necessary information at: http://www.rootscomputing.com/register.htm. Due to the volume of new Web pages submitted, I am not able to list all of them in the newsletter.
Click Here for Dick Eastman's Archive
If you would like to submit news, information or press releases for possible inclusion in future newsletters, send them to roots@compuserve.com. The author does reserve the right to accept or reject any articles submitted.
DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is being written and sent via e-mail at no charge. I expect to write one new issue on a more or less weekly basis. However, life sometimes interferes, and the need to earn a living may create an occasional delay.
COPYRIGHTS: While the contents of this newsletter are copyright by Richard W. Eastman and by Ancestry Publishing and by others so designated, you are hereby granted rights, unless otherwise specified, to redistribute articles from this newsletter to other parties provided you do so strictly for noncommercial purposes. Please limit your redistribution to one or two articles per newsletter; do not redistribute the newsletter in its entirety. Also, please include the following words with any articles you redistribute:
Thank you for your cooperation.
Subscription information: To subscribe to this free newsletter, send an e-mail message to the following address: The message title is unimportant. The first line of text in the message must have the words SUBSCRIBE ROOTSCOMPUTING followed by your first and last names. For instance, if your name is Jane Doe, you would write a message of: subscribe rootscomputing Jane Doe That is the entire message; nothing else should be in the message text. To cancel an existing subscription, send an e-mail to: The message title is unimportant. The text of the message must be exactly: signoff rootscomputing Please note that the address of listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com is an "e-mail robot" and messages sent to that address are only read by a computer. If you send any more text in the message, it will be ignored. If you want to see the current issue as well as back issues of the newsletter, look on the World Wide Web at: Please feel free to copy this subscription information and pass it on to anyone else who you think might be interested in obtaining a free subscription.
|
Terms and Conditions | Privacy Statement |