Follow Friday: Genealogy’s Star

I was not going to do a featured blog this week. That is, until I found out that I was featuring more or less every single post by James Tanner at Genealogy’s Star over the course of the busy and productive preceding week:

(1) He provides a useful list of online genealogy education materials and courses in “No excuse for not learning how to do genealogy.”

(2) He has introduced a virally popular expression for the lazy, sloppy genealogy habits that take the place of learning how to actually do genealogy in “The genealogy video game” (and expands on it using the expression introduced in a comment by Karen at Genealogy Frame of Mind in “Click and Claim – the genealogy video game”).

(3) He warns us to “Think twice about CDs and DVDs as storage medium.”

(4) He asks “Are there limits to genealogical research?” This was inspired by the common claim to have one’s genealogy “back to Adam.” This post includes some interesting points on recognizing limits and allocating our research efforts wisely.

And this is just a representative sample of what Genealogy's Star has to offer; Tanner posts a comparable volume of highly informative “must read” material week after week on the top issues of concern to genealogists and family historians.

This week

Lynn Palermo of The Armchair Genealogist sounds off on on Public Member Trees this week in "Monday Madness: Is There Chaos Online?" and "Tuesday's Tip - Online Family Trees, Public vs. Private" (an outstanding outline of the pros and cons).

Also on the subject of public vs. private trees is Julie Cahill Tarr’s article “The Online Family Tree Conundrum & A Lesson in Genealogy Research: A Two-for-One Special” at GenBlog.

My solution? For the lines on three of my grandparents, I am doing Public Trees. I will include some of the original research I have done on these trees and will include as many sources as I can. For my paternal grandfather’s line, however, I will do a private tree; this is the line where I have done a lot of original research. And I’m not being stingy with this information – it’s all over this blog, for one place, and quite a bit is on messages boards, for another.

Read about the chaotic start of Astrid’s trip to Spain and Norway in “Genealogy Trip – Day 1 and 2” and about the next leg of the trip in "Genealogy Trip - Day 3 and 4" at Of Trolls and Lemons.

The latest Saturday Night Genealogy Fun from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings was about “your ideal genealogy trip.” Well, for a lot of people it would be to Hawaii. Oh, wait, you don’t have any ancestors in Hawaii. That’s OK, at least you can do it vicariously: Heather Rojo of Nutfield Genealogy wrote about her “Genealogy Trip to Hawaii, Day One.” There is also "Genealogy Trip to Hawaii, Day Two" and "Genealogy Trip to Hawaii - Day Three." And, oh yes, Happy Blogoversary, Heather!

At Clue Wagon, it’s coincidence time when Kerry relates “How I Found An Ancestor On eBay.”

At Photo Sleuth, Brett Payne has written about “walking photos,” in particular, pinpointing the locations featured in those photos, in “Spotlight Photos Ltd. – ‘Walking Pictures’ in Derby.”

At Moultrie Creek Gazette, Denise Olson describes how to “Establish Provenance with Metadata.”

LindaRe’s post “Allie’s Education – Getting the Shipskin” at Between the Gate Posts is a touching portrait of an inspiring woman and the story of how she overcame obstacles to get an education is good medicine for one of those days when we might be tempted to feel sorry for ourselves.

Kim at Ancestors of mine from Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky & Beyond gives us some insight on how her research process is organized, including for trips to repositories, in “Organizing My World – Part III” (I took notes on stuff to bring on one of those trips).

Happy Second Blogoversary to Julie at GenBlog!

This week I started following Calling All Cousins.