Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks -- November 29 to December 5
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings shares how he found a family home on Google. Randy also reminds us that online databases are not free from error -- this includes the Social Security Death Index.

DearMyrtle in a continuing case-study orders a death certificate and shares that some places to order it from are less expensive than other.

Katrina McQuarrie at Kick-Ass Genealogy has an entry on how to batch genealogy tasks. As a former mainframe computer programmer, I wish that meant: execution of a series of programs on a computer without manual intervention. Alas, it doesn't. But it's still good advice.

Taneya's Genealogy Blog has an entry on creating your own Home Microfilm Digitization.

The MoSGA Messenger reminds us that The St. Louis Globe Demcrat 'returns' Tuesday with an online version. As I stated back in October I'm not entirely convinced the new online newspaper deserves to be credited with the 134 year history of the former Globe, which ceased publication in 1986. For one thing, they don't have the news clippings from the old Globe. The St. Louis Mercantile Library has that. (see previous post.)

The National Archives has a countdown clock for the release of the 1940 census records. It's now at 847 days. (hat/tip: MoSGA Messenger)

Heather Wilkinson Rojo has an entry on poet, Robert Frost, including some of his ancestry.

The St. Louis Beacon reports on the US Census Bureau Dirctor's visit to a St. Louis elementary school

The House Sub-Committe on Information Policy has oversight of the census. The chair of that sub-committee is Representative Lacy Clay from St. Louis (St. Louis Post Dispatch blog entry).

The History Man (an employee at Footnote.com) has a fun post entitled Dancing in the Rain.

For history buffs, BBC News has an article on The Man Who Smuggled Himself Into Auschwitz.

Ancestry.com shares a Behind the Scenes video (hat/tip: Granite in my Blood)


Tech News

Craig Newmark believes Wikipedia is at a turning point. (Disclaimer: We share a surname, but any additional relationship is uncertain.)

Google is introducing Google Public DNS. If you use their DNS instead of your ISP's, it is possible that new websites will be reachable quicker. What's really interesting about this is that Google will have access to the data of what sites people visit. Not that they are less trustworthy than your ISP with that data, but they could include that information in their formula for search results. (A website that gets visited a lot, but with less links to it from other websites, could move up in the rankings.) This is just speculation.

St. Louisan, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, has a new idea he's calling 'Square.' The St. Louis Riverfront Times has an explanation of the device. The St. Louis Beacon interviewed several St. Louis entrepreneurs for their reaction.