NoteWorthy Reads #4

Image from Pixabay.com used via Creative Commons License, photo by Webvilla

For week-ending 2/28/15

For me, Noteworthy Reads are articles, websites, or blog posts I found this week which are fascinating, interesting and/or helpful, and occasionally “wacky” or “wonderful” will likely sneak in as well. It’s not going to be a “best of” post because I don’t have the knowledge to make that determination. I don’t even promise that the articles & blog posts will be written that week – just that I found them that week. At the end of each quarter I’ll review the posts to determine which entries should be put in my Resource pages; the rest will still be available through the blog's search function.

Note: Just because I list an article does not necessarily mean I endorse its contents. It just means I want to be able to find it easily in the future when I may want to consider the issue in more depth.

COPYRIGHT 

How to Register Your Blog with the U.S. Copyright Office  from Helen Sedgewick’s blog  

Why You Should Go through the Trouble of Registering Your Copyright When Everyone Tells You That Your Work is Protected Automatically  from the Moz Blog, a marketing analytics blog.

DNA 

Three Questions From Spitland from the Sally’s Searches blog. Three things everyone needs to consider before taking a genetic DNA test. Which I haven’t done yet. 

ENGLAND

England’s Immigrants 1330-1550  – it describes itself as “a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.”

How To Search The British Newspaper Archive for A Person’s Name  - pretty much what it says

  

GREAT STORIES 

Amanuensis Monday: The Beurer’s First Year in Africa, 1946-1947 on the Chasing Hannah blog. It’s a great story (exciting, exotic, well-written). Go read it!

  

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS 

PERSI (PERiodical Source Index)   on Findmypast.com. While Findmypast is a fee-based site you can search and view PERSI results for free and if you find an image you want, you can make a one time payment for a detailed indexed entry and any digitized content, or subscribe for full access. (Or you can take your new found knowledge of the article and go to WorldCat.org or some such and try to find a copy elsewhere). Not all entries are digitized yet. They are working on that. [PERSI indexes articles in 11,000 periodical titles (including 3,000 defunct titles) published by thousands of local, state, national and international societies and organizations, arranging 2.25 million entries by surname or location and 22 basic subject headings; it was originally created by the Allen County Public Library in Indiana.]

TIPS 

Everything I Need to Know to be Successful in the Genealogy Community I Learned in Kindergarten from Scottish Genealogy Tips and Tidbits  

To GEDCOM or not to GEDCOM at Genealogy’s Star blog.  I did not know this. But then, I only found out about GEDCOM’s at all last week. Informative piece.

TOOLS

My Most Amazing Find Ever: Family History on YouTube!(No Kidding!) on Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems blog. I’ve got to try this! I’ve linked to YouTube in past blog posts to illustrate something in a blog post (what a tin smith does, an Amos and Andy show, etc.) but I’ve not yet used it to do research on a person or place.

Want To Preserve All Your Genealogy Blog Efforts?Better book it!  at the Fileopietism Prism blog  – discusses how he turned his blog into book form with a program that took directly from the blog. I’m going to look into this.

A Transcription Toolbox by Worldwide Genealogy blog  – fascinating blog post with links to resources to help us figure out medieval handwriting, Scottish handwriting, etc.; an online Latin dictionary, and other transcription tools

Tutorial: Searching Fulton History  – from You Are Where You Came From blog – Someone has done a tutorial on how to use the Fulton postcard history site (in my Resources: USA page under "new York" and cross-filed under "Newspapers". If you have New York Ancestors you want to know how to use this site! It is an excellent free resource run by one man  that contains hundreds (not dozens as this blog post says) of historic newspapers published in New York State between 1795 and 2007. Also includes a handful of U.S. newspapers outside of NYS & a few from Canada. I’ve not had problems searching it, though I’ll admit it’s quirky, but I know a lot do. So I’m putting this here so I can find it when someone asks how to search it.

A Genealogist’s Guide to using Pinterest  from the Worldwide Genealogy blog . I have a Pinterest account  (mine), which includes a Genealogy board, a board for my blog and one specifically for this series, plus about 33 other boards [By the way,  if you know anyone newly diagnosed with Gastropareis who can’t figure out what to eat, I’ve also got recipe boards and a general information board for that. In the beginning is a scary time – it gets better with knowledge.]

Meet My New Editor: Grammarly by The Armchair Genealogist blog. I think I probably need this.