I recently decided to revive a family history blog that I had abandoned a couple of years ago. Google were busy revamping their Blogger software, and were taking a long time about it. Every week some or other feature didn't work because they had decided to replace it, but the old one stopped working before the replacement was ready, and after a few months of this flocks of bloggers migrated from Blogger to Wordpress.
I joined the flock, moved my family history blog to WordPress, and put the old Blogger one on ice, with a note saying where it had been moved to.
But eventually the improvements were made, the missing features returned, well sort of, and Blogger grew more stable. So I decided to revive my family history blog on Blogger. But there wouldn't be much point in having two blogs to do the same things, so I'm giving them a different emphasis. The WordPress one will concentrate on our own family history, and family news. That's because WordPress handles things like photos better.
The Blogger one I will use for more general things -- discussion of research techniques, general history, links to resources, discussion of the use of computers for genealogy, discussion of software and the like. Historiography, method, technique and theory will go in there.
That's because of the things that Blogger is good at -- grabbing things off the web, making links, displaying widgets and the like.
One of the things you can see is the widgets that display recent visitors from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Blogger displays them OK, but half the time WordPress displays the wrong pictures.
Some people might wonder what the point of such a thing is, and that was the subject of my very first post :Hayes & Greene family history: Why a family history journal?.
So if you're interested in family and local history, and related topics, have a look.
Showing posts with label genealogy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genealogy. Show all posts
09 September 2010
05 August 2010
US President Barack Obama related to all US presidents but one
7th-Grader: Obama, Most US Presidents Related - Central Coast News Story - KSBW The Central Coast:
Hat-tip to Father Milovan.
SALINAS, Calif. -- A seventh-grader and her 80-year-old grandfather are allegedly the first people to discover that President Barack Obama is related to all other U.S. presidents except one.
BridgeAnne d'Avignon, who attends Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, traced that Obama, and all other U.S. presidents except Martin Van Buren, are related to John 'Lackland' Plantagenet, a king of England and signer of the Magna Carta.
Hat-tip to Father Milovan.
26 September 2009
One month to pumpkin day
One month from today Yahoo!'s magic Geocities coach will turn into a pumpkin, and many terabyes of information on the web will be lost forever.
It's about 10 years since Yahoo! took over Geocities, one of the first social networking sites on the Internet. After destroying the social networking aspect of it (which is was one of the things that gave it its initial appeal) they will be closing it forever on 26 October.
Millions of people have created web pages on Geocities. Some of what they have posted there is good, some bad, some mediocre, and some is irreplaceable. Even if the information is moved to new sites, billions of links to it will be broken.
Some of the sites that will disappear have information on genealogy and family history. I've listed a few of them here, and anyone who wants to add more links to the list may do so, so that people can find them in the short time remaining.
But that is only a fraction of the information that will be lost.
Three years ago some of us had a synchroblog (the very first synchroblog ever), and my contribution was a journal article I wrote and posted on Geocities. Even if the article is moved to a new location, all the links in those synchroblog posts will be broken.
One of the other victims of this kind of Yahoo! destruction was WebRing. To quote them
WebRing too was a form of social networking on the Web, and Yahoo! bought it and destroyed it. Fortunately there was enough of the community spirit left that some people took it back and tried to revive it, and now they are offering to rescue Geocities sites by offering them an alternative hosting site, and an opportunity to try to rebuild the communities that Yahoo! shattered.
Well it's one way of saving the pages, and I hope they have the capacity to do so, but unless they take over the domain, there's little chance of saving the links.
I suspect that many of the people who lost interest in Geocities when the social networking and community aspect was destroyed have now established themselves in alternative places like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut, and won't be bothered to go back.
It's about 10 years since Yahoo! took over Geocities, one of the first social networking sites on the Internet. After destroying the social networking aspect of it (which is was one of the things that gave it its initial appeal) they will be closing it forever on 26 October.
Millions of people have created web pages on Geocities. Some of what they have posted there is good, some bad, some mediocre, and some is irreplaceable. Even if the information is moved to new sites, billions of links to it will be broken.
Some of the sites that will disappear have information on genealogy and family history. I've listed a few of them here, and anyone who wants to add more links to the list may do so, so that people can find them in the short time remaining.
But that is only a fraction of the information that will be lost.
Three years ago some of us had a synchroblog (the very first synchroblog ever), and my contribution was a journal article I wrote and posted on Geocities. Even if the article is moved to a new location, all the links in those synchroblog posts will be broken.
One of the other victims of this kind of Yahoo! destruction was WebRing. To quote them
It was 15 years ago that Ashland, Oregon, high school student Sage Weil created the piece of script that could link different sites into one ring, into one Web Ring.
Not long after sharing the technology, Sage formed WebRing and witnessed a meteoric rise in popularity. So popular, in fact, that WebRing soon came to be owned by GeoCities.
WebRing too was a form of social networking on the Web, and Yahoo! bought it and destroyed it. Fortunately there was enough of the community spirit left that some people took it back and tried to revive it, and now they are offering to rescue Geocities sites by offering them an alternative hosting site, and an opportunity to try to rebuild the communities that Yahoo! shattered.
Well it's one way of saving the pages, and I hope they have the capacity to do so, but unless they take over the domain, there's little chance of saving the links.
I suspect that many of the people who lost interest in Geocities when the social networking and community aspect was destroyed have now established themselves in alternative places like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut, and won't be bothered to go back.
18 May 2008
Search engines for genealogy and family history research
Over the last ten years or so Google has become the most popular web search engine — to much so that “to google” has become synonymous with searching the web. It’s become a generic term.
When Jackie Seaman announced her Growden reunion, I thought I’d do a web search for Growden, and started with Google because Firefox puts it so conveniently in the toolbar. Growden (or Growdon) is one of the less common surnames I’m researching, and we have a web page just for Growdon family researchers. But Google didn’t find it — at least not in the first 17 mages of results.
I tried another search engine, Altavista, and our Growdon page came up on the first page of results.
I tried another search engine, Dogpile, which is an aggregator of results from several different search engines, and our Growdon page was also on the first page of results, but further down.
It seems that Google is definitely not the best search engine for genealogical and family history research. Altavista (www.altavista.com) was better by a long way, and its first page of results was far more relevant to genealogy researchers.
The first page of results on Google produced a bunch of generic surname search sites, many of them commercial. This means that they show up on search results for anyone looking for any surname at all. If you try some of them you might find they have no information at all on Growdon (or whatever surname you are looking for), but then invite you to look for other surnames. And quite often, if they do have information, they ask you to pay upfront before you can see it.
Dogpile also came up with quite few of those generic surname sites, but did have more relevant sites on the first page of search results as well.
But Altavista came up with “real” Growdon/Growden sites first — people who were actually interested in Growden family history, and had information or were looking for information, rather than generic surname search sites.
So if you are looking for family history information on the web, don’t just “google” for it — try other search engines as well. You may be pleasantly surprised.
(Originally posted in my family history blog, but copied here as it may be of wider interest).
06 February 2008
Embryos created with DNA from 3 people - Yahoo! News
If this goes much further it could, among other things, require a complete redesign of genealogy software.
Embryos created with DNA from 3 people - Yahoo! News
Embryos created with DNA from 3 people - Yahoo! News
British scientists say they have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man in a procedure that researchers hope might be used one day to produce embryos free of inherited diseases.
Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.
28 December 2007
askSam 6.1
I've been using the askSam database software for 17 years, and this year my wife bought me an upgrade to the latest version for Christmas, and I've been playing with some of the new features.
If you are doing any kind of research, askSam is one of the best tools for keeping your notes and documents in order. It's a freeform text database that lets you find anything you put into it, and also allows you to have fixed fields for sorting.
I started using it when I persuaded the university departments I was working in to use it for journal abstracts and a terminology database. I'd read reviews of it in computer magazines, and it sounded as though it would be one of the best tools for the job. It was.
Back then it was the DOS version.
It was easy to get started using it -- you simply tossed information in and it would fish it out again. But to get the best out of it required quite a lot of learning, and to learn to use it I tried it out on different kinds of applications -- making notes from books, genealogical research, keeping track of correspondence, keeping a log of various activities. For all of these things, it worked very well.
Back then we also used the XyWrite word processor, and XyWrite's formatting was done using codes similar to HTML markup, so it was easy to produce askSam reports that were fully-formatted XyWrite documents. Reports could be imported into e-mail for sharing information. It worked just as well for exporting data to web pages.
For a long time I resisted the Windows version, but the new version has several features that older ones did not. One of them is the ability to import, link to and attach documents. So you can use it to keep track of word processor documents, PDF files and the like. It handles MS Word documents, pdf files (text only) and RTF files as well. It is somewhat limited in not handling Open Office files, for example, though those can be exported to rtf of pdf format.
If you do any kind of research, especially in the humanities, and want to keep your research notes in order, I definitely recommend askSam. I've found it useful for genealogy research, theological research and articles (keeping notes for my MTh dissertation and DTh thesis) and much more.
If this sounds like the sort of program you could use, you can read more about it (and download a 30-day trial version) at the askSam web site.
If you are doing any kind of research, askSam is one of the best tools for keeping your notes and documents in order. It's a freeform text database that lets you find anything you put into it, and also allows you to have fixed fields for sorting.
I started using it when I persuaded the university departments I was working in to use it for journal abstracts and a terminology database. I'd read reviews of it in computer magazines, and it sounded as though it would be one of the best tools for the job. It was.
Back then it was the DOS version.
It was easy to get started using it -- you simply tossed information in and it would fish it out again. But to get the best out of it required quite a lot of learning, and to learn to use it I tried it out on different kinds of applications -- making notes from books, genealogical research, keeping track of correspondence, keeping a log of various activities. For all of these things, it worked very well.
Back then we also used the XyWrite word processor, and XyWrite's formatting was done using codes similar to HTML markup, so it was easy to produce askSam reports that were fully-formatted XyWrite documents. Reports could be imported into e-mail for sharing information. It worked just as well for exporting data to web pages.
For a long time I resisted the Windows version, but the new version has several features that older ones did not. One of them is the ability to import, link to and attach documents. So you can use it to keep track of word processor documents, PDF files and the like. It handles MS Word documents, pdf files (text only) and RTF files as well. It is somewhat limited in not handling Open Office files, for example, though those can be exported to rtf of pdf format.
If you do any kind of research, especially in the humanities, and want to keep your research notes in order, I definitely recommend askSam. I've found it useful for genealogy research, theological research and articles (keeping notes for my MTh dissertation and DTh thesis) and much more.
If this sounds like the sort of program you could use, you can read more about it (and download a 30-day trial version) at the askSam web site.
16 October 2007
Genealogists await outcome of Manto health records case
If the Sunday Times is taken to court over the matter of the health minister's hospital records, genealogists will be watching the case with a keen interest in the outcome, since it may clarify questions about who owns documents generated by government departments, and who holds the copyright, if anyone.
Genealogists are up in arms over a ban on using digital cameras in the Cape Archives. No reason has been given for the ban, but there are rumours that the Department of Education, Arts and Culture, which controls the archives, is being sued over copies of divorce records that are said to have appeared on a web site. There are also rumours that otgher archives depots may also ban the use of digital cameras.
Divorce records are part of the records of the courts, and so are public documents, though there are restrictions on the media reporting of divorce cases. Until recently genealogical researchers used digital cameras to copy archival documents, and study them at their leisure when they got home, and there had been no objections to this practice.
The outcome of a court case about the publication of the contents of a person's medical recordfs could clarify some of the wider issues, even if it does not resolve them.
Genealogists are up in arms over a ban on using digital cameras in the Cape Archives. No reason has been given for the ban, but there are rumours that the Department of Education, Arts and Culture, which controls the archives, is being sued over copies of divorce records that are said to have appeared on a web site. There are also rumours that otgher archives depots may also ban the use of digital cameras.
Divorce records are part of the records of the courts, and so are public documents, though there are restrictions on the media reporting of divorce cases. Until recently genealogical researchers used digital cameras to copy archival documents, and study them at their leisure when they got home, and there had been no objections to this practice.
The outcome of a court case about the publication of the contents of a person's medical recordfs could clarify some of the wider issues, even if it does not resolve them.
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