Sat, 3 November 2007
The Guys will be featured presenters at the Texas State Genealogical Society Conference in Tyler, Texas, next weekend -- 9-10 November 2008. More information is available at http://www.rootsweb.com/~txsgs/conference.pdf and The Guys hope you can drop by and say hello! George will be autographing limited numbers of his latest book, The Official Guide to Ancestry.com. Mister Edd in Cape Coral, Florida, asked for advice for websites that help reunite people with old photos of their family members. George suggested Megan Smolenyak's "Honoring Our Ancestors" site at http://www.HonoringOurAncestors.com/orphanphotos.html and DeadFred at http://www.deadfred.com. Drew's "Society Tip of the Week" was a recommendation of the use of a Web site called SurveyMonkey.com at http://www.surveymonkey.com/. Basic surveys for less than 100 responses are free; other size responses are reasonably priced for a monthly or annual basis. SurveyMonkey may be an ideal way to allow electronic voting in society elections, conducting surveys of members for preferred meeting and seminar topics, and obtaining feedback on programs, projects, and other subjects. George's "Web Site of the Week" is a new Web site called GenDisasters at http://www.gendisasters.com which contains dates, descriptions, newspaper transcripts, drawings/photos of fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, train wrecks, bridge collapses, and more, with dates spanning from the 1800s to the 1950s. The site is searchable by state and county, and browseable. It is ideal for helping place your ancestors into historical context with these calamitous events and/or to determine which courthouses and other repositories may have been damaged and their records lost or destroyed. The Guys share a collection of entertaining epitaphs from gravestones around the world. Drew reviews a book by Andro Linklater titled Measuring America, and then The Guys discuss land measurement systems that have been used in the United States. Finally, Drew discusses how to deal with missing data, such as maiden surnames, or no data whatsoever in your genealogical recording systems. |







