The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection

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The Genealogy Guys Podcast #170 - 2009 April 26 Apr 27, 2009

Show notes

This week's news includes: NBC has temporarily shelved the U.S. edition of the popular show, "Who Do You Think You Are?"; and Ancestry.ca, the Canadian version of Ancestry.com, has released a new database, Border Crossings from the U.S. to Canada, 1908-1935, which contains more than 1.6 million names. Drew eulogizes genealogist Donna Dinberg, the noted librarian from the Library and Archives Canada and an expert in Jewish genealogy, who died of cancer on 11 April 2009. George's new book, the second edition of How to Do Everything: Genealogy, has just been published by McGraw-Hill, and the book is available from Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/HTDE2-GGM.George and Drew discuss upcoming seminar appearances. George will be hosting a Webinar for Ancestry.com titled, Planning a Perfect Family Reunion, 14 May 2009 at 9:00 PM (Eastern). You can register at http://tinyurl.com/ReunionWebinar. Listener email this week includes: Sharon reports that My Yahoo! is not updating the podcasts listings, and The Guys ask for any suggestions from other listeners; Melanie discusses contacting other researchers who have errors in their online family trees; Jill suggests having DNA testing done for your oldest relatives before it is too late; Timothy, a Mac user, asks for advice about how to use Windows-based CDs from his genealogy society that are DRM protected; Stella reports that she followed George's suggestions in his "The Genealogist as CSI" seminar, went back to reread everything on one ancestor, and was able to verify his participation in the War of 1812; Rollin reports on a free Windows-based program, Winsplit Revolution, available at http://www.winsplit-revolution.com, that "allows you to easily organize your open windows by tiling, resizing and positioning them to make the best use of your desktop real estate"; Matt Combs has developed a new piece of Windows-based software called Surname Findit, available for download at http://mattcombs.webs.com/sfmain.html, that helps decipher possible surnames from fragments you may have discovered in hard to read documents; Beth in Ontario, Canada, found an old cookbook from New York and wonders whether people would be interested in her digitized images of the pages (and Drew responds with his expert research method used to locate the book and digitized images); Rich forwarded the text of a 1984 death notice of a man whose wife's maiden name is Weinglass (one of Drew's ancestral lines); George asks for suggestions about how to cite alternate spellings of a surname in his database and source citations; The Guys thank Gus for his extensive research into articles in the Wall Street Journal concerning services that digitize photos, and these include:- ShoeboxReprints.com/ScanMyPhotos.com (http://www.scanmyphotos.com)- Blosser's Camera and Portrait Studio (http://www.blossers.com) Call for pricing scale- Chris' Camera Center (http://www.chriscamera.com)Drew discusses anonymity in posting to professional mailing lists.Drew is maintaining a blog to accompany his new book, Social Networking for Genealogists, at http://snfg.blogspot.com.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #169 - 2009 April 12 Apr 14, 2009

Show notes

Topics this week include:

Loretto "Lou" Dennis Szucs receives the Silver Tray Award from the Utah Genealogical Association.
Ancestry.com includes new London-related content, including Births, Baptisms, Deaths, Burials, and Poor Law Records.
Leland Meitzler includes a calendar on his blog at genealogyblog.com.
The National Archives (UK) adds new information about Henry VIII.
The National Archives (US) at Kansas City, Missouri relocates to the Union Station Complex.
Readex, a division of NewsBank, adds a new product line : American Newspaper Archives.
WorldVitalRecords.com reveals an improved search and browse function.
The Ontario Genealogical Society will be holding its OGS Conference 2009 on May 29-31 at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.
The Purcell Family of America has a new website at www.pfaroots.org and a Purcell surname DNA project (contact Doug Purcell at dpurcell@eufaula.rr.com)
A podcast listener asks for a medal after listening to all Genealogy Guys Podcast episodes between January 13, 2009 and now (but he's not happy with the newer music).
George meets someone at the front door with information about Census 2010.
A listener describes using Google's Picasa Web Albums to store and share photo albums.
A listener asks about the availability of New FamilySearch (because RootsMagic 4 provides a way to access it when it becomes available).
The CEO of Sampa Corporation contacts the Genealogy Guys to describe a free service to share life events with family and friends.
A listener asks whether or not everyone with the same surname (or a spelling variant) should be included in a genealogy database even if the relationship hasn't been established yet.
Melissa Shimkus of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana announces that new military content has been added to their site www.genealogycenter.info.
Joel Weintraub, associate of Steve Morse, responds to the idea of a one-step search for "everything", but one of his provided links is not quite the error message you may think it is.
Ian Pereira lets us know about his company's free book publishing site at HowTo.co.uk.
A listener asks for advice for a first-time visit to a national genealogy conference.
A listener asks about how to proceed with a DNA test that may confirm a family story.
A listener asks about pension files and NARA.
Drew talks about Dropbox, an online service that synchronizes working files across computers.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #168 - 2009 March 31 Apr 01, 2009

Show notes

This week's news includes: The Generations Network announced the launching at its Ancestry UK site (http://www.ancestry.co.uk) of more than 400 years of London history, derived from records at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) and the Guildhall Library; and Footnote.com (http://www.footnote.com) has launched its new Great Depression Collection, including the Interactive 1930 U.S. Census, and additional records are coming soon. George interviews Drew about his brand new book, Social Networking for Genealogists, published by Genealogical Publishing Company (http://www.genealogical.com).This week's listener email includes: Steve discusses the new RootsMagic version 4 and the RootsMagic To-Go; Rich suggests another way of telling someone that there's a mistake in their research; he wonders if Stephen Morse would consider a single-search step at his One Step website; and he asks if George has more information about Brisco Holder (and George shares some surprising information); Drew responds to a question about copyright for Nancy; Jimmy shares information about great YouTube videos of "Depression Cooking with Clara" at http://www.youtube.com/user/DepressionCooking, and suggests that video interviews with family members doing something they're comfortable doing is a great way to capture information; Clive in the U.K. shares details of his research concerning U.K. criminal records and the online catalogue of The National Archives in Kew (outside London) and some surprising results about James Derrick; Sue shares information about WeRelate.org (http://www.werelate.org), a free public-service wiki for genealogy sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy in partnership with the Allen County Public Library, that allows the uploading of genealogy data and photos; Jack asks for suggestions about where to upload scanned Bible records; and Roxanne asks for help from listeners in order to locate companies that can scan large quantities of family photographs.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #167 - 2009 March 25 Mar 26, 2009

Show notes

This week's news includes: RootsMagic releases Version 4 of its great genealogical database software; NBC will begin broadcasting the American version of the popular British television show Who Do You Think You Are? on Monday, April 20th, at 7 PM; Ancestry.com has updated its 1940 census substitute and will soon be adding to the U.S. Public Records Index (USPRI); and the 1911 England and Wales census has been released online at http://www.1911census.co.uk. Drew discusses Twitter, the social networking service being used for messaging. This week's listener email includes: Joshua asks about adding multiple sources for multiple marriages at Ancestry.com; Craig asks a question about ways to access obituaries; he also asks about family tree-oriented websites at which family trees and family photographs; Claire informs us that Reunion (genealogical database for Macintosh from Leister Productions, Inc.) has just released their iPhone app to take your genealogy with you; James is looking for his great-grandparents in Smith Township, Robeson County, North Carolina; Michael shares information for locating naturalization records for immigrant ancestors - they may have received land under the various U.S. Homestead Acts, and the Bureau of Land Management General Land Office (http://www.glorecords.blm.gov) may have information in the case files about naturalization; Kirsten asks how to receive the podcast on her TiVo; Jerry asks about additional sources for locating his Irish ancestors who received a land grant in 1790 in Pendleton District, South Carolina; Joel Weintraub shares more information about the 1940 U.S. census, which will not be released on microfilm, and he is already transcribing information from the 1940 census enumeration district maps; he also talks more about the 72-year rule for release of U.S. census information.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #166 - 2009 March 17 EXTRA Mar 24, 2009

Show notes

We published episode #166 from 17 March 2009, but our podcast hosting service experienced an outage of its primary server. As a result, this episode was published through all of its various feeds without the MP3 sound file.Please reacquire this podcast episode from The Genealogy Guys Podcast website at http://genealogyguys.com through the iTunes Store. We're also attaching the MP3 file with this posting.Thanks for your patience and understanding. We're compiling information for episode #167 and will have that published later this week too.George & Drew

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #166 - 2009 March 17 Mar 18, 2009

Show notes

This week's news includes: Ancestry.com has added new content; MyHeritage.com has added more than 150 new databases in the last week of February; NewspaperARCHIVE continues to add new digitized and indexed newspaper content, and has added blogs, social networking interfaces, and Twitter; the Library of Michigan has just added Michigan death certificates spanning 1897 to 1920 at Seeking Michigan at http://www.seekingmichigan.org; Dick Eastman welcomes new English writer and genetic genealogy expert Chris Pomery to Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter (http://blog.eogn.com); Steve Danko has just returned from the Family Tree DNA 5th International Conference on Genetic Genealogy for Project Administrators, and he has a great report at his blog at http://stephendanko.com; and Maureen A. Taylor, the leading expert on evaluating and dating photographs, author, and lecturer, has an excellent blog on the subject at http://photodetective.blogspot.com.This week's email includes: Henry asked about digital camera reviews, and George responded that he had written an article for the 22 February issue of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter on that subject; Steve shouts out some positive kudos for the new RootsMagic Version 4 beta edition of its great genealogical database software package; and Lisa asks for tactful ways to tell someone that they probably have wrong information.George reviews two new books: Genealogical Publishing Company has just published a new 5th edition of Thomas Jay Kemp's book, The International Vital Records Handbook; and Ancestry Publishing has just published a new book, Finding Granddad's War, by Jeffrey Badger, which details his search for information about his father's experiences and colleagues in the 978th Engineer Maintenance Company during World War II.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #165 - 2009 March 4 Mar 06, 2009

Show notes

This week's news includes: RootsMagic releases the public beta of Version 4 of the RootsMagic software; Ancestry.com released five new databases in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday; Ancestry has replaced the Ancestry Weekly Journal with a new newsletter, The Weekly Discovery; Sonja Nishimoto, Family History Library Consultant, has invited genealogical and historical societies and their members to contribute content to the FamilySearch Research Wiki at wiki.familysearch.org; the Southern California Genealogical Society's 40th annual Jamboree will be held in Burbank, CA, on 26-28 June 2009, and its blog is online at www.genealogyjamboree.blogspot.com -- and a special guest speaker, Tukufu Zuberi of the PBS show, "History Detectives," will address the Friday evening banquet; the MyHeritage Genealogy Search Engine (www.MyHeritage.com) announces some newly released improvements; and Lisa Louise Cook of "The Genealogy Gens Podcast" (www.genealogygems.tv/Pages/Podcast/PodcastList.htm) announces the guest of the most recent episode of the podcast, Darby Hinton, who starred as Israel on the 1960s TV hit, "Daniel Boone." The episode also celebrates the podcast's second anniversary.This week's listener email includes: Nancy in Ontario reported that she had a problem with the podcast loading in her Firefox Live Bookmark feed; Doug reminds us that the St. Albans Border Crossings immigration records reflect immigrations from Canada (and that St. Albans is in VT and not NH); Elliot asks for advice about what name to record when the surname changed over the centuries; Jane asked George for the name of his publish-on-demand resources, which is Lulu.com; Drew provided a resource for comparison of print-on-demand resources at http://mashable.com/2009/03/01/publish-book/; Joel Weintraub provides information about the origins of the 72-year privacy policy for U.S. federal censuses and his article on the subject at http://members.cox.net/census1940/; Bill discusses the fact that census images in the Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest Online databases are not the same; TC discusses the backups of genealogy files on Mozy.com; Gus recounts his experience of getting locked in a cemetery; Judy shares a follow-up story about storing photos on an external hard drive; Scott asks about the protocol for thanking helpful cemetery workers; Cheryl tells us that the 1935 and 1945 Florida census records are also available at the LDS pilot site at http://search.labs.familysearch.org, and that many records still need volunteers to help index them; Mary tells us that The Master Genealogist database software allows for the entry of GPS latitude and longitude coordinates on every event; Mac shares a service at http://www.mailstore.com/en that allows you to backup email from multiple email accounts and tools in one place; and Rollin asks for help with the definition of "freeman" as applied to Caucasians in 1600s New England colonial records.George reviews two new products: Elizabeth Shown Mills has a new QuickSheet out. It is titled, "Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images," and it is the perfect quick reference for your source citations for Ancestry.com data. It is available from Genealogical Publishing Company (http://www.genealogical.com). Suzanne Russo Adams, AG, has written a brilliant new book, Finding Your Italian Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide, published by Ancestry Publishing and available through the Ancestry.com Store. The book is filled with well-written explanations and discussions, and includes a wide variety of document and Internet site illustrations. Listen to the podcast and find out more about these two excellent new products!

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #164 - 2009 February 15 Feb 18, 2009

Show notes

This week's news includes: Ancestry.com adds Abraham Lincoln Papers, New Orleans Slave manifests (1807-1860), Confederate Pension Applications from Georgia, Confederate Applications for Presidential Pardons, and U.S. Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles; Ancestry.com also has reduced the prices of its DNA tests; FamilySearch is partnering with the Houston Public Library to digitize a vast collection of Gulf Coast records; NewspaperARCHIVE.com has announced a new column by Phyllis Matthews Ziller; a new, free online genealogy magazine has just been announced -- Genealogy In Time at http://www.genealogyintime.com; The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) has just announced the program for the 2009 Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas (2-5 September 2009) and has made the program and registration available at http://www.fgs.org/2009conference/; registration is also now open for the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference, to be held on 2 September 2009 in conjunction with the FGS Conference, and registration is also available at http://www.fgs.org/2009conference/; Wholly Genes, maker of The Master Genealogist software program, has announced its 5th annual conference, a "land cruise," to be held 26-30 August 2009 in Orkney Springs, Virginia, and information and registration is available at http://www.whollygenes.com/confregister.htm; George will appear at the Oregon Genealogical Society Conference in Eugene, Oregon, on 7 March 2009, and more information is available by calling the OGS Library at (541) 345-0399; NBC has announced that it will begin televising the U.S. version of the popular British program, "Who Do You Think You Are?"; the annual "Who Do You Think You Are?" genealogy conference will be held at Olympia, London, England, on 27 February to 1 March 2009; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has created a site at http://www.familyhistory.hhs.gov at which you can enter your medical genealogy for your family; the U.S. War Department papers (1784-1800) have been reconstituted and digitized, and can be found at http://www.wardepartmentpapers.org; and David Rumsey, active collector of historical maps and owner of the site, http://www.davidrumsey.com, has announced that he will be donating his collection of maps to Stanford University. In the meantime, there are more than 18,500 map images online at present, and plans are to add 3,000 to 5,000 images per year.This week's listener email includes: Linda discusses Mozy indicators on files; Gus shares another back up resource -- Click Free at http://goclickfree.com/; Roger discusses New York state censuses (and using his iPod at the gym!); Paul discusses the problems he has working with Ancestry.com search results, and wishes that his own data and data without any source citations wouldn't show in searches; Pete discusses backups with Windows Home Server; HP's equivalent, and Acer's new product; Victoria provides an excellent idea for adding identifying information to your flash drive, in case it gets lost or forgotten in a library or archive; Valerie asked about what to expect at a local LDS Family History Center; Tom discovered a subsidiary collection of information at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library website titled "Boys in Blue," at http://www.alplm.org/library/boys_intro.html, and the site as a searchable database that references the library's photographs of soldiers; and Rich shares a source for "the world's most secure flash drive" at https://www.ironkey.com/.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #163 - 2009 January 24 Feb 05, 2009

Show notes

The Genealogy Guys broadcast "LIVE" from the Volusia-Flagler County Genealogical Society Conference in Daytona Beach, Florida. They take and respond to questions from the audience.

The Genealogy Guys Podcast #162 - 2009 January 21 Jan 22, 2009

Show notes

The podcast begins with The Guys talking about upcoming speaking engagements.Drew discusses his recent trip to Salt Lake City, and describes Blogger's Day at Ancestry.com. Eight bloggers paid a visit to The Generations Network's data center, which houses the computer equipment for Ancestry.com, RootsWeb.com, and Genealogy.com. They then went to Provo to the company's offices and met with a number of the employees, and learned more about Ancestry.com's operations and plans.Drew began the next segment by reading an email from John with his tips for visiting Salt Lake City and the Family History Library. Drew then describes the nearby Plaza Hotel accommodations and the FHL itself. He offers tips for people traveling to SLC for a library research visit. He stresses advance preparation, and offers information about the area.This week's listener email includes: Chanda discusses cousin marriages; Sherry comments on her recent experience with Mozy, and Drew adds more -- about the need to specify uncommon file types to insure that they are backed up; Barbara reminds George that RootsMagic 3 does support the input of latitude and longitude coordinates in the database; Bill got our RSS feed for his WiFi radio working, and can now tune to our station on his radio to listen to the podcast; Marilyn was lookoing for the RSS feed URL on our website, and Drew told our listeners to look for the little RSS 2.0 box under Syndication on the right side of our webpage; Karen wrote to discuss the question, "What do I do with the 'stuff'?"; and Kay says, "I can't believe I listened to the whole thing!"

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