This week's news includes:
Ancestry.com has renamed its self-publishing
tool from AncestryPress to MyCanvas, and has also doubled its
yearbook collection; ItsOurTree.com announced that its site
(
http://www.itsourtree.com/) can help predict male
baldness through members' postings of family photographs;
FamilyRelatives.com (
http://familyrelatives.com/), a subscription website,
has one of the largest collections of Irish records on the
Internet, and they announced that they plan to add more than 10
million new records by the end of the year; Footnote.com (
http://www.footnote.com) has begun to publish
digitized and indexed Civil War Widows' Pension Files; the
University of Michigan has announced that it has digitized and
indexed 428 titles in its Michigan County Histories and Atlases
Digitization Project, and the search template is available at
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micounty/; and Geni.com
(
http://www.geni.com/) has announced enhanced search
facilities and improved privacy at its website. Finally, the
Wall Street Journal
published an article on 22 October 2008 about University of Texas
El Paso, librarian Claudia Rivers, who has formed an aggressive
program to identify 50,000 photographs taken bythe closed Cassola
photography studio. Check the WSJ site for an article published on
that date titled, "In Old El Paso, This Detective Story Is Written
in Pictures."
George announces that Ancestry.com has just received copies of his
new book, the new second edition of
The Official Guide to Ancestry.com in
its warehouse the end of this past week. Ancestry.com's online
store will be listing the book and advertising it for sale very
soon.
George interviews Gary M. Smith and Diana Crissman Smith, two of
his fellow speakers on the recent RootsMagic Cruise.
Listener email this week includes: a thank you and report from Pat
(Ms. DNA Manners) about communicating with people with potential
genetic genealogy matches; a question from Pattie concerning
obtaining SS-5 applications for deceased relatives whose deaths
predate the SSDI database; Drew responds to Ann about the Harvey
Girls, and provides a link to the Harvey Girl Historical Society
(
http://www.oerm.org/pages/Harveygirls.html); Robert
Reeve of VideoJug has contacted us to say that their website has
more than 43,000 free videos, including a number concerning
genealogy (located at
http://www.videojug.com/tag/genealogy); Michael tells
us about his Dutch genealogical research, and asks about the
benefits of seeking genealogical certification; and Sandra asked
for advice about how to organize the many family letters and other
documents she has in her possession.