Member Login | My Account | Guest Registry

Getting Started | Learning Center | Reference | Publications | Articles & Columns

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

IN THIS ISSUE:

A Personal Note NGS National Conference New Genealogy Products Introduced GenPageFinder ANIMAP Available on CD-ROM Genelines Now Compatible with Family Tree Maker 5 & 6 and GEDCOM Good News About Texas HB 836 Home Pages Not Highlighted

Click Here  for Dick Eastman's Archive

May 18, 1999

- A Personal Note This has been a very difficult week for me. I recently wrote about the ultralight airplane that I purchased last winter. I have been enjoying it immensely the past few weeks. This singe-seat, open cockpit airplane has been a joy to fly, and I have been polishing the flying skills that I learned many years ago. However, last Sunday morning’s flight took an unexpected direction. I strapped on the crash helmet as I always do, started the engine and took off into a bright sunny spring sky, perfect for open cockpit flying. I flew about three miles from the airport when the engine abruptly quit. There was no warning. The engine didn’t run rough, didn’t backfire or vibrate or give any other sign of a mechanical malfunction. It simply stopped working. It happened over a densely wooded area, but there was an open field about a half mile away. I swung around, aimed at the field, leveled the wings and proceeded to glide to the wide, almost flat field. The intent was to make a power-off landing in the open field. Everything looked good, and I felt that I was going to land the airplane properly. The field was more than big enough to land my tiny aircraft. However, the field proved to be just a bit too far away. Just about 100 feet short of the open space, I ran out of altitude. The aircraft hit the top of an 80-foot high tree, spun around, flipped inverted and then crashed down through the tree branches to the ground 80 feet below. I simply hung on as the airplane and I fell through the many branches en route to the forest floor. The aircraft finally reached the ground, landing upside-down in a swampy area. In an open-cockpit aircraft, landing upside-down is especially nasty. Still strapped into the cockpit, with my head driven into the swampy ground and my neck twisted around at an unusual angle, I managed to unfasten the seat belts. Then I crawled out of the wreckage, took inventory of fingers, toes, bones and other body parts, and was pleasantly surprised to find that everything worked properly. I used the aircraft two-way radio to call the airport and report my mishap and also to tell them I was in good condition. The fire department’s rescue team arrived about 15 minutes later, and I got a ride to the hospital for a checkup. The medical folks took x-rays but didn’t find anything wrong. I was given 3 Band-Aids for my scraped shins and then sent on my way. I was fortunate. The only injuries I suffered were a severely twisted neck, some large scrapes on my shins and a large collection of black-and-blue marks. My helmet has a big gash in it from some unknown object that obviously hit with a great deal of force. I am now a big believer in helmets. The result of this mishap is a newsletter that is a bit shorter than normal. I have been walking around all week with a cervical collar supporting my neck and have been popping pain pills, too. This will be a temporary handicap until the neck muscles get back to normal. Indeed, I have been wearing the cervical collar less in the past couple of days and stopped taking the pain pills entirely. However, the bruises and pain medication did slow down my writing this week. Unfortunately, my beautiful new airplane is a total loss. I feel much worse about that than I do about any temporary problems with my own body. - NGS National Conference 48 hours after the airplane accident I was back in the sky. However, this time I was on a large airliner flying to Washington, D.C. I then jumped into a rental car and drove to Richmond, Virginia to attend the annual conference of the National Genealogical Society. I am finishing this newsletter on the return flight back home. The NGS conference is the premier genealogy convention in the United States. This year’s "Conference in the States" was cosponsored by the Virginia Genealogical Society and was held in a modern convention center in Richmond. I didn’t hear the final attendance figures, but it looked like about 2,000 people were wandering the hallways, sitting in lecture halls and making purchases in a large vendors’ area. I wandered around for four days, trying to look inconspicuous in my cervical collar. I didn’t succeed at being inconspicuous, but I did see and talk with a lot of people. The conference was well planned and well executed. There were occasional glitches here and there, but almost everyone I talked with seemed to enjoy himself or herself. There had been warnings of hotel room shortages as a major automobile race was being held the same weekend in Richmond. I wrote earlier in this newsletter warning that everyone should make reservations quite early. In the hubbub of the events some reservations were lost. However, the hotels worked hard at placing their guests in equivalent facilities. I heard lots of stories about mix-ups, but all of the stories seemed to have happy endings. While there certainly was some inconvenience and some frayed nerves, everyone I talked with eventually ended up in a decent hotel. The conference had more than 100 presentations on a wide variety of genealogy-related topics. For four days attendees wandered up and down the hallways, program brochures in hand, looking for the next presentation of interest. There were presentations on Virginia ancestry, immigration, computer-oriented topics, product demonstrations and numerous seminars on how to research the records of different ethnic groups. Even the mealtimes were genealogy-oriented; there were three luncheons every day each with featured speakers. In the evenings there were a number of dinners at different locations, each with programs and presentations on still more genealogy-related topics. Most attendees were immersed in genealogy for at least 12 hours a day for the entire four days. I cannot possibly list all of the programs and presentations in this newsletter. However, you can find the complete list online at: http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/. Next year’s NGS annual conference will be held in Providence, Rhode Island from May 31 through June 3. You might want to mark those dates on your calendar right now. I suspect the folks at the National Genealogical Society will be working hard to provide an even better event next year. To Fran Shane, Shirley Wilcox and the many other members of the National Genealogical Society, the Virginia Genealogical Society, and the other organizations who labored so hard to insure the success of this conference, I would like to say "Thank you" for an excellent event. - New Genealogy Products Introduced The annual NGS conference is always a showcase for new genealogy products, and this year’s event was no exception. I do think the number of new products introduced this week was a bit less than in previous years, however. In the fast-paced world we all live in, companies that finalize new products in the winter or early spring now seem to announce them immediately rather than wait for a national convention. We seem to have more new products being announced these days than ever before, but not necessarily being announced at the NGS convention. Nonetheless, I did see the following new products: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was demonstrating their new 1881 British Census on CD-ROM disks. See last week’s newsletter for a description of this product. The Learning Company introduced a major new addition to their GenealogyLibrary.com Web pages: online scanned images of U.S. census records. Genealogists have longed dreamed of sitting in their homes and looking at images of original primary records on their computer screens. CD-ROM databases of such images have appeared in the past few years, but now the Learning Company is going online with these documents. This strikes me as being much more cost-effective than a CD-ROM. Instead of paying $20 to $50 for each CD-ROM and then hoping that the disks you purchased will contain the records you seek, you can pay about $8.00 or $10.00 per month to spend hours looking at literally thousands of documents. You can spend a year online searching the equivalent of hundreds of CD-ROM disks for the same price as buying only a few CD-ROM disks. For the active researcher, that’s a bargain. GenealogyLibrary.com is starting with scanned images of the 1850 U. S. census records for a number of states with high populations (New York, Pennsylvania, etc.) and then will be adding more images in future months. I hope to write more about these online images of original census records within the next few weeks. The Learning Company also demonstrated a new version of the Ultimate Family Tree for Windows. I hope to do a hands-on review of this updated program soon. Ancestry.com was demonstrating the beta test version of their newly-updated PERSI (Periodical Source Index) on CD-ROM. The 1999 version contains many new periodical references along with a new and faster user interface. Ancestry.com expects to be shipping the final product within a very few weeks. Ancestry.com also introduced GenPageFinder on the World Wide Web. I will describe that in a separate article. Wholly Genes Software was demonstrating The Master Genealogist version 4.0. This product was actually announced a few weeks ago, but this week was the first time it had been shown at a major conference. Wholly Genes Software brought along a large Hewlett-Packard color plotter, which seemed to run continuously for four days (except for a few times when Bob Velke was seen fixing paper jams or other hardware malfunctions). The walls near the Wholly Genes Software booth were soon covered with huge pedigree charts, descendant charts and other genealogy printouts. Some of these were more than 20 feet long and four feet high. Most of them contained color photographs of many of the listed individuals. Of course, you do not have to own a multi-thousand dollar plotter to use The Master Genealogist 4.0. It also produces high-quality charts on any normal black-and-white or color Windows printer. However, it is nice to know that you can send your output to a print file on a floppy disk and then take it to Kinko’s or some other commercial service to have the file printed on a large plotter for just a few dollars. GENREF, Inc. announced both online and CD-ROM products. The company has produced a number of genealogy-related CD-ROM disks in the past but is now adding online access. Their new ArchiveExplorer.com will contain graphic images of original records, which can be viewed on-screen or printed locally on a personal computer. The company focuses primarily on Kentucky vital records and Pennsylvania records. However, they also have products dealing with national military records and with Native American collections. The website is not operational yet but should soon appear at http://www.archiveexplorer.com. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture announced that back issues of the William and Mary Quarterly are now available online through the JSTOR electronic journal database. This subscription-based service now contains issues published between 1892 and 1993 and can be searched from any computer on the Web. Details are available at: http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/Jstor.html. Sky Software was demonstrating both the regular version and a new professional version 5.1 of SKY Index at the convention. SKY Index is an indexing program for the serious indexer. Anyone who has created back-of-book indexes will appreciate the power and flexibility of this program. Most genealogists will find that the regular version of SKY Index will fully meet their needs. However, the professional edition features a faster input screen and a few other features that the pros will appreciate. Information on both editions can be found at: http://www.sky-software.com. Compuology has released a new book: "Publishing Your Family History on the Internet" by Richard S. Wilson. The book was available in the company’s booth at the convention, and they also accept mail orders. Look at: http://www.compuology.com for the details. It was interesting to note that all the new software products were for Windows. I did not see a single Macintosh product in the vendors’ area this year. - GenPageFinder Ancestry.com has introduced a new search engine designed just for genealogy. I used it briefly this week and it looks great. Here is the announcement from Ancestry.com: The world of family history on the Internet can seem like an intimidating, incomprehensible mass because it is always growing and always changing. Many researchers wonder how to make sense or use of it all. GenPageFinder is a vital part of the solution. GenPageFinder is a search engine, which currently indexes the contents of over 200,000 genealogical Web pages and is updated every week. It offers search results surrounded by their immediate context and free from non-genealogical clutter. GenPageFinder is a free service and a proud addition to the Ancestry.com Online Genealogical Library . GenPageFinder is now available on Ancestry.com. GenPageFinder also appears as part of the Ancestry.com GlobalSearch results. Some of the pages GenPageFinder will find are quite large. If your keywords are not immediately visible on the page GenPageFinder finds for you, try pressing Ctrl F and entering your keywords again. This should take you to the spot on the page where your keywords appear. Whatever your research interests and whatever searching you’ve already done, chances are that a search on GenPageFinder will yield fruitful new sources. You can find the new service by going to http://www.ancestry.com and following the menus. However, a direct shortcut is available by going to: http://www.ancestry.com/genpagefinder/genpagefinder.htm - Good News About Texas HB 836 Last week I published a report by Mic Barnette on some pending legislation in the Texas State legislature. Mic was at the NGS conference this week, so John Miller stepped in to supply the good news. It seems that the many telephone calls, letters, and e-mails from genealogists had a great effect. Here are some excerpts from John’s message: On Wednesday morning, May 12th, the Senate Human Services Committee voted out favorably the substitute bill sponsored by Senator Judy Zaffirini. It clearly states that Summary Indexes (only name, date and event-place) are Open Records. Also, that the Bill is applicable to Local Registrars and Bureau of Vital Statistics. If a record would give any information about adoption, parental determination or adoption placement that record would be Closed. I went to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, talked to a supervisor and showed her the language in the draft bill. She told me that there is nothing in the Summary Index that would cause the record to be closed and she didn't have any problem with the wording. The General Index is closed except to "Qualified Applicants" for the 50/25 year periods. Qualified Applicants are defined in the statutes to include the registrant, a member of the immediate family, a guardian or legal representative. So, "we" headed off the bad guy at the pass and it should be easy sailing. Sen. Zaffirini commented that the Committee received about 40 calls and letters. That got their attention so she pulled the Bill last week and wrote a substitute Bill which answered our objections. A Committee staffer, Sophia, was extremely helpful with phone calls and faxes of drafts to me, requesting my comments. I appeared before the Committee this morning and thanked them for their efforts on our behalf. From the Committee, the Bill goes to the Senate's local and uncontested calendar and should be passed easily next week. Then it goes back to the House for their vote. Rep. King (the original author of the Bill) has been advised along the way and is expected to concur with the substitution. With his approval, it should be passed by the House. Then to Governor Bush for his signature. You can check the Legislative Web Page to track the status of H.B. 836. John Miller Austin Genealogical Society - Home Pages Not Highlighted There won’t be any listings of new home pages this week. Look for an expanded list to be published in the next newsletter. 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: The following article is from Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1997 by Richard W. Eastman and Ancestry, Inc. It is republished here with the permission of the author. Thank you for your cooperation. Subscription information: To subscribe to this free newsletter, send an e-mail message to the following address: listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com 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: listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com 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: http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/index.htm 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.

Copyright 1998, 1999, Ancestry.com Inc. and its subsidiaries. Terms and Conditions | Privacy Statement