Sunday, March 16, 2008

Best of the Genea-Blogs - March 9-15, 2008

Here are my picks for great reads from the genealogy blogs for this past week.

My criteria are pretty simple - I pick posts that advance knowledge about genealogy, address current genealogy issues, personal family history, are funny or are poignant.

I don't list posts destined for the Carnival of Genealogy, or other meme submissions (but I do include summaries of them), or my own posts.

* "Billions of People in Over 100 Databases On-line for only $50 per Year!" by dick Hillenbrand on the Upstate New York Genealogy blog. Dick covers the New York State Library online holdings and says that it is a really good place to research for New York ancestry. Sounds like it to me!

* "Article in March/April 2008 Digital Genealogist" by Mark Tucker on the ThinkGenealogy blog. Mark is published! Congratulations! I can't wait to read the article "The Future of Genealogy Software is Not Hard to See." Judging from the list of software and web sites listed in his post, I can only guess what Mark sees.

* "New eBook: I Have The Results of My Genetic Genealogy Test, Now What?" by Blaine Bettinger on The Genetic Genealogist blog. Blaine has written a FREE 28 page book about interpreting genetic tests especially for non-geneticists. He offers it for download - just click on the book image to obtain the PDF file asnd save it to your computer or print it out. Excellent work, and very generous too!

* "Working with Images in AncestryPress" by Stefanie Condie on the Ancestry.com Blog. Stefanie has been steadily improving the capabilities of ancestryPress to produce coffee table quality family history books - this describes some of the recent changes to the process of working with photos and images.

* "More Hispanic Resources" by Pat Richley on the DearMYRTLE blog. Pat provides links to books, blogs and web sites for Hispanic genealogy resources. This is especially useful to me being involved with the "southwesternmost genealogy society in the USA."

* "Family Search Developers Conference Reports" by Renee Zamora on the Renee's Genealogy Blog. Renee summarizes some of the talks at the recent developers conference, and links to longer summaries blogged live by several bloggers. I don't understand all of this, but I appreciate Renee providing the links.

* "Baby Name Meme" by Lori Thornton on the Smoky Mountain Family Historian blog. Lori answers my question about baby names you would give to your children, even though she doesn't have any. It's a nice list. Thanks, Lori, for participating in one of the shortest meme themes ever!

* "Regrets and Actions to be Proud Of ..." by Jessica Oswalt on the Jessica's GeneJournal blog. Jessica responded to my meme theme about regrets and successes with excellent ideas. She also responded to the Baby Name meme with "Baby Names ..." Well done.

* "The Art of Painting Pictures" by Terry Snyder on the Desktop Genealogist blog. This is a really beautiful tribute to Terry's mother bursting out of a scary story from Terry's life. I loved it - Terry is a gifted writer. [I know, I broke my rule about Carnival entries...too bad - I loved it!]

* "Finding Charlie Stone" by Lee Drew on the FamHist blog. Lee tells a wonderful story of finding long-sought records in a distant place and a long-lost cousin in this post. There's wisdom here for all researchers - finding a Charlie Stone can be a God-send.

* "Resolving Conflicting Evidence in the Spelling of Names" by Steve Danko on Steve's Genealogy Blog. Steve answers Jasia's question about which name spelling(s) to use in her genealogy database, and provides sound reasons for doing so - by applying the Genealogical Proof Standard.

* "Raise Your Pint to St. Patrick ..." by Janice Brown on the Cow Hampshire blog. Janice is the dance-mistress of JibJab videos starring genea-bloggers - view Terry, Jasia, Janice, Charlotte and footnoteMaven doing Irish dancing. Excellent work.

I encourage you to go to the blogs listed above and read their articles, and add their blog to your Favorites, Bloglines, reader, feed or email if you like what you read.

Please make a comment to them also - we all appreciate feedback on what we write.

Did I miss a great genealogy blog post? Tell me!

1 comment:

Janice said...

Randy,

Thank you much for the mention! And also for the link to the article about Over 100 Databases. Did you ever wonder why no one writes out "Downstate New York"? :D

Janice