Thursday, February 26, 2009

Who Do You Think You Are? Live

Who Do You Think You Are? Live

off to the smoke

LONDON
until late on Sunday

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Who Do You Think You Are live - Google Search

Who Do You Think You Are live - Google Search

I am going to be there for three days
mobile phone 07984 534 808

RootsWeb Newsroom

RootsWeb Newsroom: "Graphics Update
February 24th, 2009 by Anna

Recently we updated all of the RootsWeb graphics – these graphics are mainly used by site owners whose pages are hosted on RootsWeb.

The graphics can indicate that your family tree has been posted on WorldConnect, that your site is hosted on RootsWeb or they can link to mailing lists and message boards. Each graphic has instructions for how to add it to your site and in some cases there are also instructions for how to customize the graphic. If you currently have an old graphic on your site we encourage you to update it."

RootsWeb.ancestry.com Graphics

RootsWeb.ancestry.com users are welcome to use any of the graphics on these pages. Please do not download these graphics to your server, or alter them other than shown in the instructions provided.

Still waiting to start your homepage, or a site for your organization?
Click here to request a web account.

RootsWeb Newsroom Blog

RootsWeb Newsroom » Blog Archive » Who is RootsWeb?: "David Coleman has taken on the Message Board and Mailing List responsibilities creating a one stop connection for Board and List administrators. We hope that this makes life a little easier for our volunteers.


And who else is there behind the scenes? Along with David, Mike and Gerhard respond to help tickets, manage the features of the site, keep the RootsWeb Review on time and do many other things that we don’t see. Randy and Bill manage the servers, fix the bugs, develop new features and keep the site going. Lastly David (yes, we now have 2 David’s on the team) and I work to fill in the cracks and coordinate the management of the site." ANNA

2009 Conferences

February 24th, 2009 by Anna

This year we will be attending a handful of conferences across the US - the first is this weekend! If you happen to be in the area we would love to see you at the Ancestry booth, and even more in a Community class.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Digital Preservation

Digital Preservation: How to Preserve Digital Assets - Infopeople.org:

OCLC Western to me

"Who Should Attend?
Anyone from the California library community who is responsible for developing and managing digital collection resources. This course is appropriate for public, academic, special library staff with planning or implementation responsibilities for digital collections, including library business managers, technical support staff, web development, systems staff, and program managers. May also be of interest to trustees and commissioners."

Digital Preservation: How to Preserve Digital Assets - Google Search - OCLC Western - Google Search

WORLD ARCHIVES PROJECT - Ancestry.com:
"The World Archives Project lets anyone from the genealogy community help bring FREE historical record collections to the public. Contributors become the first to see new collections as they type in information that creates searchable record indexes."

more from my email:-

(Toronto, ON – February 23, 2009) Ancestry.ca, Canada’s leading online family history website, today launched the Canadian arm of the World Archives Project, which will give individuals the opportunity to help preserve historical Canadian records from the comfort of their own homes.

New software designed and available for free download on all Ancestry websites enables participants to take images of original records and create indexes containing key information such as name, age, date, gender and location. Ancestry websites will host those indexes, which will be free to access.

The first Canadian collection that will be available for World Archives Project participants is Ontario, Canada Marriage Registers by Clergy 1896 – 1948. These important records include approximately 24,000 names captured in marriage registrations compiled by members of the clergy under the Registration Act of 1896.

The World Archives Project is launching through Ancestry websites in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France and Italy to their six million site users and anyone with a general interest in preserving historical records.

In the past decade, the Internet has resulted in an explosion of interest in family history, which has in turn highlighted the poor state of many historical records around the world, many of which are deteriorating faster than they can be saved. The World Archives Project aims both to raise awareness of this fact and also to inspire people to help preserve these precious records.

Preserving historical records is both costly and time consuming. In recent years, governments, libraries, archives, the family history community and websites have worked hard to preserve historical records: Ancestry.ca aims to accelerate the rate at which Canadian records are being preserved by providing the community with the tools it needs to assist with this significant task.

Anyone can participate, and in the process get a ‘sneak preview’ of collections not yet publicly available.

Indexes transcribed through the World Archives Project will be free on Ancestry.ca and participants can spend as much or as little time as they want assisting.

Karen Patterson, Marketing Director, Ancestry.ca comments: “Historical record preservation and access go hand-in-hand so it is important that institutions, businesses and individuals all play an active role to ensure that as many Canadian records are preserved for future generations as possible.

“Due to their age and condition, many Canadian records are in urgent need of preservation and so we are encouraging people to log on, download the free software and start to do their bit to preserve our country’s history.

The Ancestry Insider

The Ancestry Insider: "Among other performance issues, what really jumped off the page at me was how slow GEDCOM file operations were using the new, 32-bit code versions of Family Tree Maker (FTM). The old FTM 2006/16, the last 16-bit code version of FTM, read a test GEDCOM in 21 minutes. Yes, it was a big file. The new FTM 2008 and 2009 releases, which use the new 32-bit code, took a whoping 342 minutes and 312 minutes, respectively. That's between 5 and 6 hours!

Programmers usually approach file import in straightforword, easy-to-program ways. A GEDCOM file is a text file; open it with Notepad and you can read the contents. It may make little or no sense to you, but you can read it. But I digress. Since it is a text file, the programmers are reading it one line at a time. How can I say so with such confidence? Read my lips: 'that's between 5 and 6 hours!'

Read, then process. Read a little more, then process. Read a little, then process. Easy to program; killer on performance. The same sector of data is redundantly read over-and-over from the disk.

Somebody at Ancjestry.com/The Generations Network needs to tell the developers that that kind of inefficient programming isn't going to hack it with consumers. Windows is a modern operating system with features like memory-mapped files. The test system had 2 GB of RAM, if I recall correctly. They could read the entire file in under 10 minutes"

and so " Run applications in a RAM disk drive - 340 times faster! Virtual Hard Drive Pro reduces the access times of large files." I remember playing with these about 10 years ago - on a Macintosh SE
virtual hard disk in ram - Google Search

PAF Users and Ancestral Quest Demonstration

Washington County PAF Users Group: Ancestral Quest Demonstration March 29 2009: "Ancestral Quest is one of the several products that work directly with New FamilySearch (Family Tree) to synchronize your personal genealogy with the Church's files. It has the advantage of both reading and writing PAF-5 databases directly without loss of data. Therefore, you can use both PAF and Ancestral Quest interchangeably and have the advantage of additional features that PAF does not provide, including direct access to New FamilySearch"

Monday, February 23, 2009

Beginnings weblog

Empty Nest Full Heart: Beginnings: "Genealogy is like tracing a thread through a tapestry - you think you can follow it all the way back to the beginning, but lo and behold, it ends somewhere in the middle. It is like the ultimate unsolvable mystery; one clue leads to another and for every answer you find, there are ten questions on its heel. It's time consuming, it requires an extreme amount of patience, and it's addictive."

subscription - Ancestry on the boards

Re: Rethinking subscription - Ancestry Site Comments - Family History & Genealogy Message Board - Ancestry.com: "I have been a full subscriber to ancestry.com,since 1998.
It's been one of the best investments I have ever made.

===
Rethinking subscription - Ancestry Site Comments - Family History & Genealogy Message Board - Ancestry.com

"what you need to rethink is your hobby - "advanced" genealogy is about transcription or indexing. or a one-place or a one-name study (I do Lapham Surname Facts
Lapham Surname Board

turn off links

','Related Resources',null,null,200,750,300);" onmouseout="TGN.Util.HoverTip.startHideHoverTipTimer();" id="kwl74150026">LAPHAM)

My own tree is on WorldConnect at a stage where my descendants may wish to continue but to sort out the details or go further back needs weeks in the archives

I get just as much fun out of helping other people with their trees and searches.

lots to explore http://www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/alldblist.aspx more than 27000 databases

"Ancestry.com is excited to announce the completion of the first record collection indexed through the World Archives Project, its new community indexing program. Community contributors participating in the project indexed the nearly 60,000 records within the Wisconsin State Board


http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2008/12/05/first-world-ar...

see http://community.ancestry.com/wap/download.aspx and get a discount on your subscription

"We add your index to Ancestry.com FREE to everyone."

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Cemeteries & Funeral Homes