Friday's Finds and Fun: 13 January 2012

This week’s theme is from resolutions into reality - where the rubber meets the road (i.e., some good tools to help us out):

Using Maps

Here is an interesting new site (which I found thanks to the Genealogy Insider): HistoryGeo.com (www.historygeo.com/) by Arphax - tools for using maps in your research: marker tools, search tools, etc. I haven’t given it a try, yet, but I am thinking of it since I have three of their books and find them to be excellent research aids.

Arphax books I have: Family Maps of Jersey County, Illinois; Family Maps of Greene County, Illinois; and Texas Land Survey Maps for Collin County, Texas

Here is the blurb:

“HistoryGeo.com is a subscription service available to PC and Mac users who need only a good internet connection and a common web-browser to access it. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome have all been approved for use.

HistoryGeo.com opens its doors with the immediate inclusion of all the maps in both the Family Maps and Texas Land Survey Maps series of books. These represent nearly 40,000 maps among twenty-three states, all of which display original land-ownership in the context of modern roads, waterways, and other features.

In addition to Arphax's proprietary map library, over 2,000 historical land-ownership maps from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, and Kansas, have also been added. Plans are to increase the breadth of the HistoryGeo.com library to include all of the U.S. and eventually, the world.”

Subscription prices are $44 quarterly, $66 semiannually, $99 yearly. Hmmm....


A Great Organizational List

Michelle Goodrum at The Turning of Generations has written one of those blog posts that I felt I need to copy in its entirety into a new document: “21 COFH - 21 Resources for Organizing the Family Archive.”


Contacts from My Website!

This week I got my first two contact reports from my website, Greta’s Genealogy! There has already been a big “data exchange” between me and the author of one of the e-mails.


The Inevitable Off-Topic

Here is another language blog that I have subscribed to (the first is Lingua Franca, which is where I found the link to this one; the subject was “word rage” - oops, that hits a little too close to home....):

Language Log

The original article in Lingua Franca where I found the reference was “The Year of Occupy” - an article which in itself deserves reading, since it invites you to consider newly minted words such as “humblebrag” and “Kardash” (hint - it’s a unit of measurement).