Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks - November 21 - 28

Bill West of West In New England shares the submissions for his Great American Local Poem Genealogy Challenge.

Attorney, James Tanner of Genealogy's Star reminds us that Indexes are Hearsay

For Thanksgiving, Schelly Talalay Dardashti of Tracing the Tribe shares a humorous family story she calls the Tehran Turkey Story

Thomas MacEntee of Destination: Austin Family asks his readers whether, in researching for a client, he should include the source where he found a relative's birth date, when the location was a sex offender registry.

Cynthia at ChicagoGenealogy discusses what she calls the Chicago Burial Permit Index

Thomas Fiske has a thought-provoking entry on GenealogyBlog - The End to File Cabinet Genealogy. The world is running out of room to store information - so we're storing it on CDs or DVDs. What happens when the new storage medium comes along?

Miriam Robbins Midkiff at AnceStories continues her series on Getting More Traffic to your Blog with advice on which I wholeheartedly concur: Proofread.

Liz Haigney Lynch at The Ancestral Archaeologist shares some advice on Cemetery Trips: What Not to Do.

Since many genealogists will someday likely put together a family history book, and then turn to self-publishing to distribute it to families, I thought I would share this advice from science fiction author, John Scalzi of Whatever - Don't Pay for It!

News Stories

Jim Fallon, a neuro-scientist and descendant of a convicted murderer, Thomas Cornell, and distant cousin to Lizzie Borden, analyzed the DNA of himself and several members of his family to look for "the warrior gene." (hat/tip: The Genealogue)

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, discovered on a Wales BBC genealogy program that his great grandfather was probably the son of his second great grandmother and his third great grandfather. (BBC link has video of the program)