Saturday, February 14, 2009

Leo van de Pas

"Leo's Genealogics Website

"Comments, additions and corrections to these works in progress are welcomed. LEO database biographical notes copyright © Leo van de Pas 1990-2009.
This site powered by
The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding Copyright © Version 5.1.1 created by Darrin Lythgoe 2001-2009, Sandy, Utah. All rights reserved. Adapted by Ian Fettes

seems to be very interested in the nobility

Valentines

Sandusky History: Laura Schaub's Valentines: "The Valentine below was given to Laura Schaub by Esther Sutts, sometime between 1908 and 1919. Laura Schaub was the daughter of William and August Schaub, who were both born in Germany, and came to the United States around 1891. Laura had four older sisters, Alma, Minnie, Elsie and Florence. Esther Sutts was the youngest child of William and Mary Sutts. The Sutts family resided in Sandusky in 1910, but William and Mary had both been born in Pennsylvania."

Geotagging your data?

Geotagging - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.

Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For instance, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a Geotagging-enabled image search engine. Geotagging-enabled information services can also potentially be used to find location-based news, websites, or other resources"

Friday, February 13, 2009

FTM 2009

FTM 2009: "the tests reported on are only dependant upon the speed of the CPU, memory, and disk speed and not upon any external connection to the internet. System Specifications: Operating System, Windows XP Home SP3; CPU is a 2.53(Pentium 4) GHz HP Pavilion 763N, with 2 GB of memory and a hard-disk with 392 GB of free space, rotational speed of 7200 rpm (Seagate ST3500630A)."



. . . .

A GED file was exported from FTM 2006/16 and this file became the standard to test the import capabilities of FTM 2006/16, Legacy 7.0, FTM 2008, and FTM 2009. By using this standard file and the four programs then one can determine the speed of import for each program as shown in the following table.

Program

Time to import GED file Time to export GED file CPU utilized by pgm.
FTM 2006/16 21 min 4 min 50 sec Low
Legacy 7.0(7.0.0.55) 62 mim 17 min 15 sec Low
FTM 2008 (17.0.0.965) 342 min 13 min 30 sec Very High 100%
FTM 2009(18.0.0.95) 312 min 14 min 30 sec Low

Not much improvement in the import speed for large files. The time taken to do the individuals is only about 6 min but the time to do the marriages is where all of the time is spent and this shows that a very inefficient process is being used to locate the persons in the database. Much improvement needs to be done on this!!!!

I believe the basic problem is the use of the Microsoft "new" technology instead of traditional code


FTM 2009 tests

The report presently used in FTM-2009 is the first one in the list while the second one(shown in bold) is not present. I use the second one as all persons who are descendants are numbered while the first report only those that have descendants are numbered making it impossible to determine the total number of descendants unless you manually count them.

  1. Reports not previously present in FTM are:
    1.1 Male Y-DNA Chart. Two types are available called Standard and the other is Carriers Only. I have to use Legacy Charting Companion for these charts which makes it difficult to include them in any book
    1.2 Female mt-DNA Chart. Two types are available called Standard and the other is Carriers Only. I have to use Legacy Charting Companion for these charts which makes it difficult to include them in any book

FTM needs to address the inclusion of the DNA charts as this is a very important and new tool for the genealogist.


Thursday, February 12, 2009

Oxford Ephemera

Electronic Ephemera: digitized selections from the John Johnson Collection

The project

By their very nature, many of the items contained in the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera were intended to be short-lived and disposable, and it was only because of the vision and dedication of John de Monins Johnson and his supporters that so many have been preserved to provide the unique record that survives today. Funded through the JISC Digitisation Programme, this innovative joint enterprise between the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford and ProQuest CSA will result in the digitisation of more than 65,000 complete items (well in excess of 150,000 images) from the John Johnson Collection and so provide a unique insight into our nation’s past. The Collection offers direct access to rare primary source materials and evidence of our cultural, social, industrial, and technological histories. It is particularly valuable to anyone interested in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.

These lost treasures of everyday life will be digitised to the highest standards and made freely available to all teachers and researchers working in the UK’s HE and FE sectors, and to the general population via the 32,000 supported terminals in the UK’s 4,200 public libraries. Moreover, the rigorous and extensive metadata that will be specially created to accompany these digital objects will be searchable by anyone with access to the Internet. Until now, it has only been possible to make these materials available to a relatively small number of scholars owing to both geographical and physical constraints, and the fragility of many of the materials themselves which makes browsing the material a slow and often unwieldy process. The creation of expertly described, high-quality digital surrogates will expose these hidden resources to a far wider audience than could ever be achieved via any other means, and enable readers to find what they are looking for much more quickly and to work simultaneously on the same items.

The Electronic Ephemera project will take place between 2007 and 2009, and it is anticipated that images and associated metadata will start to become available through ProQuest's delivery platform by the end of the first year. Meanwhile, core documentation, including the working plan, progress summaries and the final report, will be posted on this page during the course of the project.

The content

In excess of 65,000 items will be expertly digitised in their entirety as a result of this project, which will result in more than 150,000 images and associated OCR data. Five major areas of the Collection will become freely available to the UK HE and FE sectors, namely:

19th century entertainment material: falls into two distinct groups: theatre material and non-theatrical entertainment material. Both categories of material provide a wealth of insights into 19th century leisure activities, popular and high culture (especially the performing arts) and the development of different types of entertainment.

Booktrade material: examples include publishing material (e.g. prospectuses of books and journals) and bookplates. The former items will be of interest to anyone studying the history of the publishing industry; the latter will prove invaluable to those interested in the provenance of books, or in design history.

Noteheadings and Popular prints: these items provide a record of locations and landscapes, architecture, and popular tastes for artistic works and humour.

Crime, Murders, and Executions: these resources give insights into the judicial system and its punishments, notably the application of the death penalty and of transportation. The Murders and Executions broadsides are currently much used for a variety of research.

Advertising: social and economic historians, historians of popular culture, trades and industries, students of typographic design and many others will find that these items provide an invaluable insight into the past.

The process

Digitisation will be carried out by a dedicated production company, Capita Total Document Solutions, in collaboration with ProQuest CSA, who have extensive experience of delivering scholarly historical resources over the web. Cataloguing of the digital surrogates will be undertaken by the specialist staff based at the Bodleian Library. They can draw on the extensive network of expertise, training, and systems support that forms a fundamental component of the library’s role as both a Library of Legal Deposit, and the UK HE sector’s largest and most sophisticated library service. Metadata will initially be captured in a dedicated bibliographic database that has been specifically configured to support the complex requirements of the John Johnson Collection, while offering full support for the extensive and detailed description of digital objects. The web-based application that will allow users full access to the metadata and enable the display and download of the images will be developed and hosted by ProQuest CSA.

University of Oxford’s Electronic Ephemera - Google Search

Sun EduConnection Newsletter: November 2007, Oxford Preserves Rich History with Sun-Powered Digital Library: "As the oldest university in the English-speaking world, the University of Oxford is a rich blend of old and new. Its main library, the Bodleian Library, was established by Sir Thomas Bodley over 400 years ago and serves as the United Kingdom's library of record, similar to the U.S. Library of Congress. Oxford's permanent collection includes some of the oldest and most valuable manuscripts in existence.

At the same time, Oxford is at the forefront of digital technology. The library maintains an extensive collection of digital media such as electronic journals and e-books. Much of its historical collection is made available to scholars as electronic 'surrogates' to improve access and to prevent wear and tear on priceless original manuscripts. Oxford collaborates with Google and other Web 2.0 enterprises to incorporate technologies such as search and digital archiving."

eWEEK's Top 10 Storage Stories of 2008: "eWEEK Senior Writer Chris Preimesberger ranks the top 10 storage stories of the year. Online backup, private cloud systems and vastly improved overall capacity for disks, flash memory, and even tape all make the list for 2008."

Find A Grave

Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records: "Find Graves
Find the graves of ancestors, create virtual memorials, add 'virtual flowers' and a note to a loved one's grave, etc."
Who is behind Find A Grave?
Who is behind Find A Grave? Well, first of all, you are. Thousands of contributors submit new listings, updates, corrections, photographs and virtual flowers every hour. The site simply wouldn't exist without the 500,000+ contributors. When it comes to administrating, building and maintaining the site, Find A Grave is largely operated by its founder, Jim Tipton. In addition to Jim, there are a handful of folks who work behind the scenes, helping out with Find A Grave on a daily basis:

Jim Tipton
Find A Grave Founder
Jim was born in Michigan but spent most of his youth in Denver, Colorado. As a kid, when he wasn't solving the Rubik's cube with his feet or juggling fire, Jim was figuring out how anything electronic worked. The arrival of the personal computer brought a whole new outlet for Jim's nerdy tendencies. Jim attended Grinnell College in Iowa and earned a degree in music. He now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah (non-Mormon) with his wife, children and three cats.

Jim created the Find A Grave website in 1995 because he could not find an existing site that catered to his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people. He found that there are many thousands of folks around the world who share his interests. What began as an odd hobby became a livelihood and a passion. Building and seeing Find A Grave grow beyond his wildest expectations has been immensely satisfying for Jim. Every day, contributors from around the world enter new records, thousands use the site as an educational reference tool, long-lost loved ones are located and millions of lives are fondly remembered. In what other line of work would Jim have met one of the last living munchkins, spoken to a gathering of grave enthusiasts in a Hollywood mausoleum and acquired treasures like his antique coffin screwdriver (it only screws in)?

Favorite Graves: Al Capone (my first)...Karl Marx (a frequent visit while living in London)...Richard Feynman (one of my all time favorites)...Al Jolson (for its unsubtle grandeur)...Lucille Ball (for its modesty). . .
Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records and Online Memorials -the team


Wednesday, February 11, 2009

MacBook Pro and FTM 16

My own MacBook Pro: July 2006: "and now I have a brilliant PC as well as a Mac"

split sideways over the two screens - from July 2006 with no insurmountable problems

myth of cuckolded fathers

Study kills '1 in 10' myth of cuckolded fathers - Science, News - The Independent: "For certain, uncommon surnames there was a clear association between the unique genetic markers carried on the Y chromosome with the surname, suggesting that many of the men sharing the same surname had a common male ancestor many centuries ago.

This also enabled the scientists to estimate the probability of illegitimacy among the men carrying the same surname and found that it came out at between 1 and 4 per cent.

'People often quote a figure of one in 10 for the number of people born illegitimately. Our study shows that this is likely to be an exaggeration. The real figure is more likely to be less than one in 25,' said Professor Mark Jobling of Leicester University, who carried out the study with colleague Turi King. Common surnames, such as Smith and Brown, do not show any significant link with the genetics of the Y chromosome, but some less common names, such as Attenborough, Haythornthwaite, Herrick, Stribling and Swindlehurst, showed a definite association with the male chromosome, indicating that as many as 80 or 90 per cent of the men with these less familiar names shared a common ancestor.

'Surnames such as Smith come from a person's trade and would have been adopted many times by unrelated people. Less common names were more geographically specific and possibly adopted by only one or two men, so we would expect people with these surnames to be more closely related," Dr King said. "Attenboroughs, for example, essentially form one big family of distant relatives. The Y chromosome type was the same even across spelling variants, which confirms that the spelling of names were formalised only relatively recently," she said.

Surnames were introduced into the British Isles with the Norman invasion and had become widely used by about 1500. Previous research demonstrated a link between Y chromosomes and surnames, especially in Ireland where scientists had found that more than one in five men in north-west Ireland were descended from a single medieval ancestor.

"

wiki for genealogy

A discussion of the FamilySearch Wiki FamilySearch.org - Family History and Genealogy Records ... FamilySearch Wiki is a large, on-line library where you can find thousands of articles

began when an appeal for help was posted to GenBrit list
AKA sgb
FamilySearch Wiki 'Barn Raising' for England
soc.genealogy.britain

some more background:-

25 Biggest Blunders in Wikipedia History | Best Colleges Online:

EG
"An anonymous Wikipedia contributor who edited thousands of entries and claimed to be a professor of religion turned out to be a 24-year-old college dropout, according to MSNBC. The hoax was discovered after The New Yorker 'published an editor’s note stating that a 2006 Wikipedia profile in the magazine had erroneously described Essjay’s purported academic resume.'

He was so respected in the Wikipedia community that he had even been made an arbitrator by Wikipedia and was hired by Wikia Inc."

wiki genealogy - Google Search

Cyndi's List - Wikis for Genealogy


ARRSEpedia: " is a Wiki, just like wikipedia, but for the British Army / ARRSE and not quite 100% serious. The ARRSEPedia is a mass of articles that anyone can create or Edit. The idea is that if everyone contributes a little of his knowledge, opinions, sense of humour and experience then something really impressive... the ARRSEPedia.. is created."

"Login required to edit"

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

What are News feeds?

BBC NEWS | Help | RSS | News feeds from the BBC: "News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for 'Really Simple Syndication'. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people."

Monday, February 09, 2009

church books in Germany - parish registers

Kirchenbuch – DE - Wikipedia

Kirchenbücher (auch Kirchenmatrikel, in Österreich Kirchen-Matriken) sind Verzeichnisse über Taufen, Trauungen, Einsegnungen, die von Pfarrern meist in chronologischer Reihenfolge angelegt werden.

Die Kirchenbücher sind nicht zu verwechseln mit den Messbüchern, auch Missale genannt, die liturgischen Zwecken dienen.

Man unterscheidet:

Ages on Canadian Census

Ages on Canadian Census Reports | Luxegen Genealogy and Family History:

"Jean Lawson, a Genealogist on the Quebec Eastern Township Rootsweb forum brought us the following very helpful list of the ‘official enumeration dates’ for each Canadian census. It is possible these dates were ignored in some cases or ages incorrectly calculated but for the most part these would be the dates that were used to calculate ages on the Canadian Census Reports.

‘The dates traditionally given below for each census is the “official
enumeration date”. The actual enumeration could have taken weeks or months
to complete . . . . ."


1851 to 1881 Census
The age given is the age on their last birthday.

1891 Census
The age given is the age on their last birthday.

1901 Census
The 1901 Census was taken March 31, 1901.

The age given is the age on their last birthday.

This is the only census that contains actual dates of birth,
which may or may not be correct. It contains the year of immigration.

Ask Olive Tree Genealogy a Question

Ask Olive Tree Genealogy a Question: "Do you need help finding an ancestor? Do you have a genealogy question you would like to ask me? Do you want to know where to find certain genealogy records? Let Lorine help! Every day I will choose one question to answer. Send your query about your ancestors to me then check back here to see if it has been answered. Please take a few minutes to read other queries that I've responded to so you get an idea of the kind of query most apt to be chosen."

some events in USA

Lots To Love On Saturday

9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday: If you love the Internet and want to learn more about researching there, it's worth the drive to Port Charlotte to hear Stephen P. Morse.

Although he calls himself an amateur genealogist, he has received worldwide acclaim for his Web-based search aids. The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies tapped him for its Outstanding Contribution and Lifetime Achievement awards. The National Genealogical Society gave him its Award of Merit and the Association of Professional Genealogists presented him with its Excellence Award.

Before all that, Morse was best known as the architect of the Intel 8086, great-great-granddaddy of the Pentium microprocessor.

His lectures will include "A Potpourri of Genealogical Search Tools," "One-Step Webpages: A Hodgepodge of Lesser-Known Gems," "Playing Hide and Seek in the U.S. Census," and "What Color Ellis Island Search Form Should I Use."

The event is presented by the Charlotte County Genealogical Society at the Lutheran Church of the Cross, 2300 Luther Road. Cost is $30 for society members, $35 for nonmembers. Materials and lunch will be provided only to those who registered before Feb. 6, but you still can attend and brown-bag it. For a registration form, call (941) 629-2344 or email bepowell 2001@yahoo.com.

SHARON TATE MOODY at Tampa Bay Online: "2 p.m. Wednesday: My two-hour presentation, 'Counting Ancestors: The Federal Census,' will be at SouthShore Regional Library, 15816 Beth Shields Way, Ruskin. There's no preregistration but you should arrive an hour early and get a no-charge ticket at the front desk. The program is sponsored by the Friends of the Library."

WDYTYA in UK

Pick Of The Day | | What's on TV - Top TV listings guide, plus soaps, news, prizes and previews: "Who Do You Think You Are?

BBC1, 9:00 PM 9 February 2009

Genealogy series which follows TV presenter Fiona Bruce as she traces her family history.

Although she's the female face of the BBC, Fiona Bruce, as regular readers of TVeasy will know, is a keen truck driver and mechanic. We're not sure where she gets her interest in changing tyres from, though, as it doesn't seem to run in her family. Indeed, tonight's episode of this gripping geneology series follows Fi as she discovers that her great-great-grandad was a highly roguish Victorian photographer..."

always read Paul Allen

MyFamily.com in the spotlight; genealogy industry validated | Paul Allen

". . . . The genealogy industry is in need of a serious #2 player in the space. While I co-founded Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com with Dan Taggart and our small launched the first site back in June 1996, the original founding team hasn’t been involved at MyFamily.com for many years now.

Several of us have gotten back together to work on an international genealogy company called WorldVitalRecords.com (we may eventually change the name to something else, but it’s a domain that works for now). We have partnered with Everton Publishers in Logan, Small Town Papers, and are in discussions with many other partners.

It is fun to be back in the genealogy business. Like Ancestry.com, World Vital Records publishes new databases to our web site every business day. Our email database is approaching 100,000 names and we are going to be launching some significant user generated content features soon.

It may take some time to become the #2 genealogy site on the web; but we think we have the team that can do it. And we think the industry is large enough so that there is room for us, and many others.

Only 5% of the world population is in the United States; so there will likely be dozens of successful genealogy companies around the world. We certainly hope to be one of them.

Contact me if you are interested in getting involved with WorldVitalRecords. We expect to grow next year and we are interested in genealogical expertise as well as international marketing experience.

(Note: MyFamily.com has asked me to mention when I blog about the company that I am no longer involved in the company, as a director, officer or employee. I am a small stakeholder in the company.)"