Weeks in Review

It's been a few weeks since I had a "Week in Review." Below are some highlights from news stories and blog posts I have read in the past few weeks that deal with my overlapping interests in Genealogy, History, Heritage, and Technology.


Petition to Save the SSDI

The Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC) has created a petition on Whitehouse.gov to protect the SSDI from elimination.  The SSDI is the Social Security Death Index, and is under attack from politicians who claim it is to blame for identity theft.  However, the Death Index was created to prevent identity theft.  If the Social Security numbers in the index are being used for fraudulent purposes, the fault isn't the index, but that the index isn't being used by the IRS and others to check.  Read the Press Release.  Several bloggers have written about this, including: Dear Myrtle, Genea-Musings, and Geneabloggers.

Genealogy
 
C. Michael Eliasz-Solomon at Stanczyk - Internet Muse asks the question: Is GEDCOM dead? (Warning: You may need a degree in computer science to completely understand the entry.) 

Diane Haddad at The Genealogy Insider discusses a project by several genealogy websites to compile a database of surname and given name variations.  The hope is that this will be a significant improvement over the current Soundex system developed over 90 years ago.

The Ancestry Insider discusses FamilySearch's new product, Family Tree. While the intent is similar to Ancestry.com's OneWorldTree, it appears to allow for people to make corrections, so there may be some promise.

Technology

Bill LeFurgy at The Signal asks, Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die, or Is It?  An excerpt: "Email collections from famous people are arriving in libraries and archives.  The Salman Rushdie “papers” at Emory University include the author’s email, and the British Library acquired Wendy Cope’s email as part of the poet’s archive...We can chose for our email to live on rather than die through neglect, error or mindless deletion.  Given all the time and effort we put into our messaging, and the wealth of information it contains, it makes sense to think about what should be saved." 

Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter writes on An End of an Era: Kodak to Stop Making Cameras.

Poetry

Judith Richards Shubert at Genealogy Traces has been posting some wonderful poems over the past few weeks.  For example, Hardscrabble Fields.

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Other Weekly Link Lists

• Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs at Genea-Musings
• Ruth Blair's Ruth's Recommendations at The Passionate Genealogist
• Julie Cahill Tarr's Friday Finds at GenBlog
• Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak's Genealogy Round Up at MSS's Roots World
• Diane Haddad's Genealogy News Corral Catch-up at Genealogy Insider