Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks --May 16 to May 22
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

The British Library and Brightsolid partner to digitize up to 40 million pages of newspapers

Carolyn L Barkley, at Genealogy and Family History discusses Understanding a Coat of Arms beginning with the all-important message, "there is no such thing as a family coat of arms."  She discusses the history behind coats of arms, and how individuals go about getting them.

Laurence Harris at MyHeritage Blog provides 10 tips for interviewing family members.

Kate at ArchivesNext celebrates real citizen archivists.

Julie Cahill Tarr at GenBlog writes of the information found on army dog tags.

MyHeritage has released several "top lists" for genealogy blogs, each list focusing on blogs written in a particular language. (But they aren't doing a great job on cross-promoting them.)  Thomas MacEntee at Geneabloggers provides links to seven of the lists.

ProGenealogists updated their 50 Most Popular Genealogy Sites (based on the rankings of four companies that measure the popularity of websites.)

Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee questions the need for the term 'derivative sources.'

Elizabeth O'Neal at Little Bytes of Life has photographs from the trip she and her daughter took to the national convention for the Nationasl Society of Children of the American Revolution (a youth version of the DAR and SAR) A great way to get children interested in their ancestry.

Ron James for Associated Content writes an article on The Perils of Online Genealogy attacking the idea that you don't need to know what you're looking for, all you need to do is look.

The 29th Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy has been released.

Tana Pedersen at The Ancesty Blog has a post on how to indicate unmarried or childless relatives on their FamilyTreeMaker software.  This led a few people (including myself) to comment how one sources a "fact" for something that didn't happen.  Pedersen appears to imply that the reason to note they are unmarried or childess is to save others research time, but if your source is just a family member who says something didn't happen you may be encouraging yourself and others not to research paths that actually should be researched.

"Lineage Keeper" at FamHist has an entry on William Guyselman, a county recorder with a flair for artistry.

On the technology front:

Google has added the option of an encrypted web search protecting the data from third-parties.  The search doesn't include results from Google Images or Google Maps, but does include Google Books, News, and Blogs.

Other Weekly Lists

• Best of the Genea-Blogs - from Randy Seaver at Genea-musings 

• Follow Friday - from Greta Koehl at Greta's Genealogy Bog

•  Genealogy News Corral - from Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider

•  Genealogical Round Up - from Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak at Megan's Roots World

• Monday's Link Roundup - from Dan Curtis

• New Genealogy Blogs and Upcoming Genealogy Blogging Events - from Thomas MacEntee at Geneabloggers

Amanuensis Monday: May 17th participants

Apple at Apple's Tree
Terri Buster at Southwest Arkie
Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee
Sherry Stocking Kline at FamilyTreeWriter
John Newmark at TransylvanianDutch
Heather Wikinson Rojo at Nutfield Genealogy
Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings
Kevin Walker at Who We Were, Are, & Will Be Our Family

If you participated, but don't appear on this list, please, let me know.

[I have been relying on a Google blogsearch for the word 'Amanuensis' to find all the entries.  This has worked well in the past.  But something weird is happening, and out of the 7 8 listed above, Google only finds 2 this week. I'm going to start flagging the ones I see in my RSS Reader, but if you are new to the meme, leave a comment on my Monday post, and I won't miss you.]

Monday's XKCD: