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).

Friday's Finds and Fun: 6 January 2012

So, in the spirit of Amy Coffin’s (We Tree Genealogy Blog) “Abundant Genealogy” theme for 2012, here are some things, mostly genealogy-related, that I’m happy to have found this week:

The picture above was taken by me and altered using the iPad app called Snapseed. I found this app featured on the blog iPad Insight, which mentioned that it could be downloaded free for one day (it usually costs $4.99). (I now know why the phrase “free apps” makes some people’s hearts beat faster....) With Snapseed you can manipulate an image in various ways as well as apply various “effects” such as Drama, Vintage, and Grunge. I can’t remember, but I think I used one of the Drama settings on the picture above (you can see the unaltered image in “Greenville 1 - Swamp Rabbit Trail”).

What does this have to do with genealogy? Well, um, it’s a neat tool to use in digital scrapbooking!

BTW, iPad Insight is a useful blog for learning how to get the most out of your iPad. I learned about this blog on Midge Frazel’s technology blog, Beyond the Horizon (“Got a New iPad?”).

The next recommendation is for Cemetery Census, a website which has an impressive compilation of cemetery surveys for the counties of North Carolina and Virginia. Thanks to Ginger Smith of Genealogy by Ginger's Blog for highlighting this site in a comment on the post “When Even Vital Records Can’t Be Trusted” on Missy Corley’s Bayside Blog. Findagrave and Interment.net are great sites, but they don’t have everything, and for those who research in North Carolina and Virginia, this is an excellent addition.

And finally, this month’s Fairfax Genealogical Society Newsletter mentions that Linda MacLachlan (the dynamic leader of the Society’s New England SIG) has a new publication: New Copies of Old Records From New Hebron, Connecticut: 1708-1875 (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2011). According to the Newsletter, “Linda discovered original Connecticut township records that are not available in the Barbour Collection or on LDS microfilms. Working with town clerks, she found previously unpublished birth and marriage records.”

Hope these are helpful!