Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks for October 18-24

• Carolyn Barkley, at GenealogyAndFamilyHistory says Okotberfest is a good time to begin your German research, and she provides several resources.
• Jasia at CreativeGene has been sharing legends of Wojnicz, Poland. The War Waged against Naughty Wives, The Stingy Heir, and The White Horse
• Denise Olson at the Graveyard Rabbit Online Journal shares several photos of cemeteries she found on Flickr, and she discusses Flickr Groups.
• Elizabeth Powell Crowe at Crowe's Nest suggests we read Symantec's article on Caution is Key at Hotspots, which is good advice for anyone with a laptop.
• Thomas MacEntee at Destination:Austin Family across several articles has shared a case history on his Search for the Living. He was trying to reunite a baby book with a family, but his tips can be applied to similar searches.
• FamHist asks Good Morning! Who Died? - an entry on his daily reading of the obituary page. (There's also an amazingly fun video at the end of the post. Not completely related to the entry, but it could suggest one method of keeping your name off the page longer.)
• Randy Seaver at GeneaMusings found several patents for Family Tree Charts using Google's Patent Search
• Midge Frazel at Granite in My Blood asks what Perpetual Care means. Through the comments she receives, we learn it usually pertains only to the landscaping around the grave, though some cemeteries have actually removed a gravestone due to non-payment of perpetual care fees.
• Good Morning Silicon Valley discusses Hewlett Packard's new service BookPrep which "undigitizes" books, allowing OnDemand printing of a large selection of out-of-print works. Meanwhile Google announced an agreement with OnDemand Books providing OnDemand's Espresso Book Machine access to the Public Domain titles in Google Books. [The future promise of the Espresso Book Machine, as these devices become more common, is very intriguing. You tell the machine the book you want, and it prints it out on demand on the spot. Current locations. The nearest one to me is at the University of Missouri bookstore in Columbia.]
• NARAtions, the blog of The National Archives, has announced they will have a weekly Friday post, starting October 30, on Family History and Genealogy Research. They're calling it Family Tree Fridays.
• NARAtions announced earlier in the week that they began uploading their collection of Matthew Brady's Civil War photos to their Flickr account.
• Ancestry provides a glimpse at their 73-page case file on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, part of their Report of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad (1960,1963-1974) database. (While Earhart disappeared in the 1930s, the investigation continued in the 1960s.)

News

• Blood from a leech was used to identify an armed robber eight years after the crime.
• Missouri family adopts 22 children.

Transcriptions

• Apple at Apple's Tree provides several transcriptions of letters.
• TK at Before my Time transcribes a section from Wonder-working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England, which may reference her 9th great grandfather.

And while it has nothing to do with genealogy, I thought this XKCD webcomic was humorous.

(XKCD is my inspiration for adding the mouseover text to my Wordless Wednesday posts.)