NoteWorthy Reads #5

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

For me, Noteworthy Reads are articles, websites, or blogposts 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 & blogposts 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 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.

For week-ending 3/7/15. (Again, if I haven't gone to bed yet, it's still today.)

[Apologies on the godawful editing job on this post when it went up - I've been sick. I just re-read it and am embarrassed. Will try to catch and fix all. If I missed any please let me know in a comment; I want to fix it.]

A GOOD THING!

Introducing The Slave Name Roll Project from the Tangled Roots and Trees blog  – To help those of African-American descent find their ancestor (so difficult before 1870), the blogger has resolved to go through her ancestors wills and property records and post any information about a named slave she found so that names of slaves and their owners will be posted on the Internet and available through search engines to researchers. She encourages others who wish to participate in the project to submit a comment to the post I’ve linked to which includes link to their posts and she will include it on the Slave Name Roll Project page on her blog website. If you do not blog or have a website, just list your information in a comment on the blog, and she will put it on the Slave Name Roll page.  

CANADA

Canadian Census Enumerator Instructions from the Family Tree Knots blog, with links to the manuals for the various years (might help figure out what some of those entries actually mean)

COPYRIGHT

Copyright and the Photo Negatives  from the Legal Genealogist’s blog 

EDUCATION

Randy Seaver's Top 10 Genealogy Education Resources  from his Genea-Musings blog 

GREAT STORIES

Woman Creates Touching Animated Portrait of Her Grandmother Using Her Old Possessions  – I love thisiscolossal.com for interesting art. This is the first time I’ve seen family history as art there. This is a lovely video tribute to the artist’s grandmother using the stuff she left behind. It’s less 3 minutes of your time. Go watch it, now.

HISTORY – USA

Understanding Civil War Pensions – Contains text of  the  various pension acts (it liberalized over the years), example of petitions and supporting documents, etc.

TIPS

Tips for Using the Free David Rumsey Historical Maps Website from the Genealogy Insider blog for your family history - old maps can help you learn about the places your ancestors lived. 

Courthouse Research From Home from the My Kith and Kin blog – good blog post explaining how to search courthouse record books via Familysearch.org, with screenshots. She uses Ohio as an example. I’ve used it for New York to find Francis Henn’s will. It’s very useful.

Digital Preservation, or why I worry about Evernote from the Worldwide Genealogy blog – interesting commentary on some concerns about digital storage

TOOLS

Three Free Tools for Genealogists and Family Historians  from the Christina George Genealogy Researcher website -1) Ages & Year; 2) Genealogical Terminology in 8 Languages (English, German, Polish, Hungarian, Latin, Czech, Slovak, & Ukranian); and 3) Common Names in Various Languages (central or eastern European)

  

Over 40,000 Digital Genealogy Books Searchable & Downloadable for Free at GeneanlogyGophers.com   – Post is great explanation of new site where genealogy-relevant books can be searched and read. Better than I could do so I’ll link to the GenealogyBlog  & you can get to the new site from there.

Historical Atlases and Maps of U.S. and States – “Each State page contains rotating animated maps showing all of the county boundary changes & all of the county boundaries for each census year for each year. Past and present maps of US are overlaid so that you can see the changes in county boundaries, downloadable County D.O.T. Maps, and state atlas maps.”

USA

ILLINOIS

Boys in Blue in Illinois  – Have ancestors who served in the Civil War  in an Illinois regiment? It’s possible that the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library has their picture, in a searchable online database. (It figures; most of my Illinois Civil War union veterans joined Missouri regiments for some reason.)

NORTH CAROLINA

North Carolina Genealogy on Twitter from the Are You My Cousin? blog-   It really looks like the next step in one of my family branches is North Carolina so I’m putting this here for when I need it. There’s a lot of Genea-people on Twitter; you can learn a bunch just by lurking if you follow them. Yep, I’m there too; I mostly lurk. My twitter name is in the bio to the right (-- you can tell I didn't know much about Twitter when I joined or I’d have chosen a shorter name!).

OHIO

First Families of Ohio Roster  – “First Families of Ohio is a lineage society open to OGS members who prove their descent from an ancestor who lived in Ohio by the end of 1820. This database of over 17,000 names contains the FFO roster through December 2007.”

OFF TOPIC BUT WORTH IT

Safety Tips for Travel Photographers (Particularly Women)  – Read the comments too.

This Is Everything I have to Say about GP  – Not everyone needs this one; but those who do, really need it. If you have Gastroparesis and haven’t discovered Crystal Saltrelli’s website , books, YouTube videos, Pinterest pages, & classes yet, any of those will vastly improve your standard of living. With this post she has released her most popular class on Living (Well!) with Gastroparesis as a self-guided, on demand program, at a reduced rate. The cost is $199. It’s worth it to improve your life substantially. [To those without GP, this is NOT for you. But anyone might know someone who gets this diagnosis, so I’m putting this here.] {I don't know Crystal personally, I get nothing from this. I did donate to the crowd funding page for one of her books. Her stuff helped me. I think it will help anyone with gastroparesis.}