Questions? See the HELP paragraph near the end of this newsletter.

Please note that this message was sent to: %%nameemail%% at %%emailaddr%%.

Some of the articles in this Plus Edition newsletter are restricted to your personal use.

All opinions expressed in this document are those of Dick Eastman and his alone, unless otherwise attributed. None of his statements are to be interpreted as endorsements by his employer, by the other authors or by advertisers.

Copyright© 2004 by Richard W. Eastman. All rights reserved.

- New Ancestry.com and ProQuest.com Partnership
- World Place Advisor Version 1.2
- (+) Olive Software's ActivePaper Archive
- (+) Microsoft Word for $33.99
- The Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records
- Essex County, Massachusetts Wills Online
- Most Popular First Names
- Creating All New Surnames in a Nation
- Free Translations
- More Genealogy Blogs
- Free Google E-mail Account with One Gigabyte of Storage
- Anti-Spyware Bill Moves Closer To Passage
- Digital Bugle

Items marked with a Plus Sign (+) appear only in the Plus Edition newsletter.

I think my family tree is a few branches short of full bloom.

The online newsgroups have been buzzing all week, and on Friday it became official: one of the strongest rivalries in the genealogy business world has been between ProQuest and MyFamily.com, operators of Ancestry.com, but now the two are becoming business partners.

ProQuest is a major supplier of high-quality census images and digitized copies of thousands of genealogy books. The same company also provides the online version of the powerful PERSI genealogy database. ProQuest traditionally has sold services only to libraries. To access ProQuest's online databases of U.S. Census records, digitized books, and the PERSI database, most genealogists had to visit a library that paid two thousand dollars per year or more to subscribe to the service. A few libraries offer in-home access to ProQuest as well.

Ancestry.com has been offering a competitive service to libraries, called Ancestry Plus, which really was based upon the company reselling the services of Thomson Gale, one of ProQuest's biggest competitors. That partnership apparently soured in recent months. Ancestry.com is now dropping the Ancestry Plus product.

Reportedly, Ancestry.com and ProQuest now have signed a two-way agreement: ProQuest will market the Ancestry online products to the library market under a service named Ancestry Library Edition. In return, ProQuest will supply 20,000+ genealogy and local history books to Ancestry.com's genealogy customers. How Ancestry.com will price and position these new online books has not yet been announced.

It is interesting that these two companies are the only ones who supply all or most all of U.S. Census records online. Both have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in creating competitive online databases of census records. It is also interesting that ProQuest's census images are generally more readable than Ancestry.com's images of the same records. I had hoped that Ancestry.com would also resell ProQuests's census images; however, the announcement makes no mention of that, and I suspect that each will continue to sell its own version of census records separately.

[Return to Table of Contents]

Copyright 2004 by Mark Lang, BA (Computer Science)

A few weeks ago, Progeny Software Inc. of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, invited me to take a look at their updated product, World Place Advisor. Originally called Place Auditor, this became World Place Advisor 1.1 in an update, then in this version, is now a Universal Edition (WPA-ue).

Installation is via CD. Requirements for this program have been kept to a minimum, but it is advised that the minimum CPU is a Pentium 3 running at least at 300MHz with 64MB RAM (128MB recommended). If you are limited for space on your hard drive, you will need at least 75MB if accessing the database from the CD, or 182MB for a full installation. You will also need additional space for a geo-coded file from your genealogy data file.

This Universal Edition can read directly from nine different genealogy databases without the need to create a GEDCOM file. Those programs are (alphabetically), Ancestry Family Tree, Ancestral Quest, Family Historian, Family Tree Maker, Heritage Family Tree Deluxe, Legacy Family Tree, Personal Ancestral File, RootsMagic, and The Master Genealogist.

WPA-ue is just one tool to help aide family historians in their on-going projects. It can help determine geographic locations for further research, place name analysis, and a gazetteer of over 3.3 million locations in its database.

To begin the process is simply a matter of clicking the Open icon on the toolbar, or the "universal" Ctrl+O keyboard shortcut. The Open dialog filters for all the program files mentioned above, so it is easy to find your files. If you don't have any of the programs mentioned above, be thankful for the inclusion of Family Historian's data file structure, as it uses *.GED or GEDCOM. This will cover programs such as Brother's Keeper, Family Origins, Genbox, Generations, Heredis, Relatively Yours, and others amongst the many that are still available or in use.

WPA-ue opens with an empty Geo-Tree View. All this means is that the program opens to a blank screen, divided by roughly by a 60/40 real estate split. Once you import (Open) your file, WPA-ue then cross checks all the locations in your file against its database; this process is called geo-coding. Geo-Coding is the process of analysing your data to find the exact geographical location for each place name in your data file. When this process is finished, the results are displayed in the Geo-Tree View according to geographical location. This is like the structure found in Windows Explorer, where the top folder (or root directory) holds all the locations and is name appropriately "World". Below these are nodes for each specific country. Expanding these reveals states/territories, and expanding these reveals cities and towns.

Clicking on any one of the nodes then shows, on the right hand side of the screen, all individuals that partake in that location. As you move down the nodes, that list is re-written until you are on a town, where, under normal circumstances (unless there is a popular surname, or a large database), this list is somewhat smaller. You can sort the list by clicking the column header and then sort the names alphabetically (A-Z or Z-A), by event (A-Z or Z-A), and by Date (Increase and Decrease). Although it is possible to sort the Place field (A-Z or Z-A), this is most effective at the country or state level, where you are able to sort the various lower levels.

For each section/node in the Geo-Tree View, you will notice that there are some locations that are bolded to grab your attention. These places are identified as needing attention by you, the user, as they have been flagged (by preset conditions in the options) as possibly being an error. There are 8 errors types that WPA-ue will pick up: Misspelled, Ambiguous, Wrong Jurisdiction, Unknown Places, Incomplete, Non-Specific, Missing Commas, and Events Without A Place.

New to this version are several features: a spellcheck option; recognition of international Chapman Codes; long US county names are no longer truncated; an additional 20,000 townships have been added to the gazetteer of world place names; and place names in the UK can now be identified under England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Some of the US States do not have counties; therefore, the word 'county' is not longer appended to Alaskan census areas or boroughs, and Louisiana parishes are no longer reported as counties.

Probably the best function in this upgrade will be the map links. The geo-coded gazetteer is now quick-linked to current maps, using MapQuest.com. Using programs with these types of features usually leave me slightly apprehensive as I have tried other programs in the past, only to find my resulting target with a lot left to be desired; in other words, mapping features were not just one or two miles off base, but sometimes ten or twenty miles. So, I tried WPA-ue’s feature with a few, such as home city, even home suburb, and the results were 100% spot on target.

Overview

Whether I sort geographically or by error type, it makes you want to fix those errors in your database (don't we all). As I just mentioned, I enjoyed the accuracy of the map links in the gazetteer. World Place Advisor - Universal Edition is available on CD-ROM only and costs $34.95 plus $6 shipping and handling. (All prices are in U.S. dollars.) It can be ordered on the Progeny web site, using their on-line ordering over a secured server.

Resources

About the Author

Mark Lang has authored over 60 genealogical program reviews since April 2000, has traced his wife's ancestry back to late 18th century Scotland. He has been interested in family history since 1991, is a member of his local family history group since it began in 1996, and was their webmaster for four years. He has a degree in computer science and is currently writing a book involving a genealogical program.

[Return to Table of Contents]

One of the largest and most powerful of online newspaper archives is Olive Software's ActivePaper Archive, usually referred to simply as "Olive." The service scans microfilmed or hard-copy newspaper collections. The software then analyzes and indexes the "entities" (such as articles, graphics, and advertisements) to allow for powerful full-text searching within the original context of the newspaper's typeset and design. The results are available on the Web, including full images of every page in the original newspapers as well as the OCR (optical character recognition) texts.

The preceding is a "preview" of a Plus Edition article. You can subscribe at http://www.eogn.com/plus.

[Return to Table of Contents]

Let's face it. Microsoft Word is the standard word processor of today. Some people may love it, many more of us hate it, but we begrudgingly admit that Word is the dominant word processor of today. There is only one problem: Word normally sells for $200 or more. That is a lot of money if all you want to do is put some words onto paper or into a file. Heck, there are complete computer systems selling for not much more money!

The preceding is a "preview" of a Plus Edition article. You can subscribe at http://www.eogn.com/plus.

[Return to Table of Contents]

Anyone who is researching ancestors in the state of Connecticut soon finds references to "The Barbour Collection." In fact, this is one of the most extensive collections in genealogy and is the definitive source for early Connecticut records.

Lucius Barnes Barbour was the Connecticut Examiner of Public Records from 1911 to 1934. He directed a project in which all the known birth, marriage, and death records to about 1850 for 137 Connecticut towns were copied and abstracted. He hired several individuals who were experienced in copying old records and could read the old scripts. These individuals typed the newly-created abstracts onto preprinted forms.

The form sheets were then cut, each page producing twelve small slips. The slips were then alphabetized, and then all the information was typed a second time onto larger sheets of paper which were later bound into volumes, one volume per town. In the twenty-three year effort, Barbour and his assistants produced 14,333 typed pages of vital records. They could have saved many thousands of hours of labor if they only had computers back in 1911 when Barbour embarked on this project! Barbour's original hand-typed documents are now stored at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. They have also been microfilmed.

In recent years, under the general editorship of Lorraine Cook White, Genealogical Publishing Company has been publishing town-by-town transcriptions of Barbour's collection of vital records in books. Each book covers one or more towns. This week I had a chance to look at volume 55, the records of Windsor, Connecticut, from 1637 to 1850. As you can see, Windsor is near the end of the alphabet. In fact, it is the last entry on an alphabetical list of Connecticut towns. Thanks to Lorraine Cook White and Genealogical Publishing Company, all of Barbour's works are now available in book form at reasonable prices.

Each volume in the 55-volume series contains the birth, marriage, and death records of one or more Connecticut towns. Entries are listed in alphabetical order by town (also in alphabetical order) and typically give name, date of event, names of parents, names of children, names of both spouses, and sometimes such items as age, occupation, and place of residence.

For instance, here is a typical entry from Barbour's records for Windsor:

In the above record, "m." means "married" and "by" is followed by the name of the minister. "Volume 2, Page 475" is a source citation as to where the original information was found.

For many individuals, you can find more than just birth, marriage, and death records. For instance:

The above record indicates that Samuel Forward was admitted to the church in October of 1671, according to the Matthew Grant Record.

If you have Connecticut ancestry prior to 1850, you need to examine the Barbour Collection! It has more facts of interest to Connecticut genealogists than any other single source. If you already know the town(s) where the ancestors lived, you can find the references within seconds. At worst case, you may have to look through numerous books listing different towns. While that may be a tedious task, it is still faster than any other method available today.

[Return to Table of Contents]

If you have ancestors in the northeastern corner of Massachusetts, you will be interested in Wills of our Essex County Ancestors. This section of RootsWeb.com contains many wills filed before 1850 in Essex County. Each will was transcribed by a volunteer with coordination provided by David Colby Young. The service is open and free of charge to everyone.

Each will is published in standard ASCII text, using the spelling, punctuation, and grammar of the original. For instance, here is a brief excerpt from the will of Giles Corey, who was pressed to death for witchcraft in Salem:

The complete will goes on for several more paragraphs. You can read the complete will in Wills of our Essex County Ancestors. In this case, a reference states that the transcription came from New England Historical and Genealogical Register volume 10:32 as transcribed by Mariana Bean Ruggles.

[Return to Table of Contents]

When you start looking at large numbers of old records, you begin to see a pattern of first names. Many names are used again and again in a single family. Other names, such as Hezekiah, may have been popular at one time but not today. Many babies are named after popular figures of the time, such as George Washington Smith or Lorenzo Dow Jones.

Did you ever wonder what were the most popular names for baby boys and girls in the early 1900s? Or how about of modern times? The U.S. Social Security Administration provides table after table of popularity rankings by decade, by state, and (starting in 1990) by year. Data is based on a 5% sampling of social security card applications.

[Return to Table of Contents]

Are you aware that the entire nation of Mongolia has not used surnames (family names) for more than sixty years? Most people in that country have no concept of their genealogy.

In the July 11, 1998 edition of this newsletter, I wrote, "After getting by on a first-name basis for more than 60 years, Mongolians this week are supposed to start using surnames again. If only they can find out what they were… many changes instituted years ago when the Communists took over the country. Among other things, the Communists confiscated the centuries-old family trees that central Asian nomads had sewn into silk or written on parchment. Families were not allowed to use surnames, and children were raised without knowing the surnames of their parents or grandparents. But now the times have changed."

In the six years since those words were written, Mongolians were told to determine their surnames from records and interviews with elderly family members. (Sound familiar?) They were then supposed to register their family names with a government office so that all Mongolians again could start using two names and thereby qualify for new national identity card. Without this card, voters are disqualified from participating in the national election.

The deadline for registering was this past week. Two and a half million Mongolians have registered, with about 19 per cent of the population claiming to be members of Genghis Khan's clan, the Borjigid. The name comes from the clan totem, and it means "wolfmaster", after the blue-grey wolf from which all clan members claim descent. The name is one of the most prestigious within the country. Of course, it does sound suspicious that, with 1,300 recognized Mongolian surnames to choose from, 19 per cent claimed this one name.

[Return to Table of Contents]

One of the challenges in genealogy searches is deciphering documents written in the languages of your ancestors. While you may have inherited many physical characteristics from your forebears, language ability probably was not one of them. How can you read documents written in French or Dutch or Italian?

The answer is to hire a translator. Indeed, many thousands of genealogists have done that for years. However, a new Web service provides free translations from a handful of languages into English.

When you copy and paste a Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese or Russian word or phrase into one field on Freetranslation.com, the English translation appears almost instantly in another. It also works the other way: the site translates English into one of 10 different languages, including two forms of Chinese (though for this, you'd probably need to install what's called a "language pack" so that your PC can display the characters).

Of course, machine-generated translations are marginal at best. The service works well for a word or perhaps for a sentence or two; However, longer texts do not seem to work as well. For extensive works you might want to hire a human translator. Freetranslation.com will provide one, for a fee.

[Return to Table of Contents]

I introduced a new blog for the Standard Edition of this newsletter two weeks ago. The Plus Edition will probably be converted to a blog within the next few weeks.

It seems that blogs are appearing everywhere, including in genealogy Web sites. This week Nancy Hendrickson wrote an article in Family Tree Magazine entitled Blog Your Family. The brief article describes some of the genealogical uses for blogs and has links to several genealogy-related blogs.

[Return to Table of Contents]

This week I signed up for a free e-mail account on Google's new Gmail service. Of course, there are many free e-mail services, such as HotMail, Yahoo, MyWay.com, and others. However, Google's new free Gmail e-mail service has several features not found in the others, including:

That last item is one that has generated controversy. All free e-mail systems display paid advertising. After all, that's how the bills get paid: the e-mail provider sells advertising space. However, the one difference with Google's Gmail is that the ads are "context sensitive." These operate in a similar fashion to the ads you see when using Google's search engine.

That is, if you are reading an e-mail that has the word "genealogy" in it, you will probably see ads for genealogy-related products and Web sites. If the e-mail has a sentence of "you should see my new Ford pickup truck," Gmail may display an ad for Dodge or Nissan or Mazda or some other competitor. Of course, if the e-mail has a sentence that says, "Bob has developed a bad coke habit" (meaning cocaine), you may see an ad for Pepsi-Cola on your screen.

Some observers worry that such context-sensitive advertising may constitute an invasion of privacy. Google has assured everyone that the examination of words in the text of the message is for the sole purpose of displaying advertising; there is no data collection and no forwarding of your personal information to a third party. I do expect that Google will know how many times a particular advertisement was displayed although they will not know to whom it was displayed.

Personally, I couldn’t care less. First of all, e-mail does not have the legal rights to privacy that regular mail has. Second, this is a free service. If I am uncomfortable with Google's advertising policy, I can always go to a paid service. And I have. I don't like advertising of any sort on the screen. I have paid a few dollars each year for several years so that I can have a personal e-mail account on another service without advertising. I never liked the ads on Hotmail or Yahoo or even on AOL's for-pay service. I don't like them on Gmail either, but I know that many others will not complain.

I found the user interface of Gmail to be excellent. If you have used any modern e-mail program, you can learn to use Gmail in about a minute or so. The one exception might be the capability of searching through tens of thousands of stored e-mail messages: that might take two minutes to learn. There is no user’s manual, and none is needed. Even computer novices should be able to figure out the use of Gmail quickly.

Gmail uses labels to give you the functionality of folders, but with more flexibility. In Gmail, a single conversation can have several labels, so you're not forced to choose one particular folder for each message you receive. That way, if a conversation covers more than one topic, you can retrieve it with any of the labels that you've applied to it. And, of course, you can always search for it.

The user-defined filters for incoming mail are far better in Gmail than anything I can find in Hotmail or in Yahoo Mail. The use of filters is especially useful for very active newsgroups that you may subscribe to; Gmail will filter all messages received from a given newsgroup, labeled it appropriately, and moved out of your in-box. For instance, I subscribe to a newsgroup for Mazda Miata owners that typically produces more than 100 e-mail messages per day! With simpler e-mail programs, that is a lot of messages in the in-box to wade through. With Gmail or any of the other better e-mail programs, all those messages can be automatically filtered and placed into the "Miata newsgroup" section, which I can read at my leisure. My in-box only shows normal e-mail messages. Tens of thousands of Miata-specific messages are stored in the special Miata section. Of course, Gmail's advanced search capabilities allow me to search all those messages for specific words or phrases at any time, should I choose to do so. If I am later looking for information on Miata gear ratios, it shouldn't take more than a few seconds to find all the stored e-mail messages that contain information about that topic.

The most difficult thing about Gmail right now is obtaining an account. Google's managers apparently did not want to turn on the service and immediately have several million users sign up. Such a sudden increase in load would crash many servers. Instead, the Google management team devised a clever method of controlling the sign-up process to only allow a small but growing number of new subscribers every day.

The only means of obtaining a Gmail account during the test period is to be invited by an existing Gmail user. Once you accept the invitation and then obtain a Gmail account of your own, you are then allowed to invite two others. That is all you get: after you have sent two invitations, the system will not generate a third. This method restricts growth to a reasonable rate. This process is expected to last throughout the beta test period but will probably be lifted once the testing ends.

Sorry folks, I have already used my two invitations.

Gmail is in beta test right now. As might be expected with any beta effort, the service has had some problems. In recent days it has not always been available. I have seen outages lasting for a few seconds to several hours. It appears that the outages are not universal; when I am unable to log in, others can do so. When I am able to log in later, others may find themselves locked out. Availability problems are commonplace in beta test efforts and undoubtedly will be solved before Gmail goes into production.

All in all, I am very impressed by Gmail but not so impressed that I will switch to it. I normally use Eudora for e-mail, a program loaded in my computer that I like even better than Gmail's Web interface. However, Gmail is far better than the anemic e-mail packages available from AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo. Gmail has the extra advantage that I can easily access my mail when traveling or using a borrowed computer. Even the tens of thousands of old messages can be stored on Gmail, not on my local computer's hard drive.

While I am experimenting with Google's Gmail service so that I can write about it, I doubt if it will ever be my primary e-mail address. However, Gmail makes a great backup mail service, and I will probably keep it for that purpose. I may switch my 40 or 50 newsgroup subscriptions to Gmail as well. While I will not use Gmail as my primary mail service, I suspect that many people who do not already own a decent e-mail program will prefer Gmail over whatever they are presently using. It certainly is better than AOL's mail service! It is also free of charge.

[Return to Table of Contents]

- Anti-Spyware Bill Moves Closer To Passage

What Do You Think? Comments and discussion are available on this newsletter's Discussion Board at: http://blog.eogn.com.

[Return to Table of Contents]

The haunting sound of "Taps" is traditional at a military funeral. Typically, a bugler (or trumpet player) plays the 24 notes from a location that is a bit of a distance away from the grave site. There is only one problem: the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration are having a difficult time finding enough buglers for the 1,800 veterans who are dying each day.

Many military ceremonies in recent years have featured a portable music player, or boombox, that plays a prerecorded rendition. Relatives of deceased have commented often that a boombox is a poor substitute for the real thing.

Enter technology. A new "digital bugle" plays an authentic sounding version of taps at the push of a button. With the digital bugle -- known as a ceremonial bugle, you are guaranteed that the notes will be played perfectly every time.

Last year The Pentagon tested the method for six months before approving it for wider use, and they reported that most families were satisfied with the experience. It works using a small cone-shaped device inserted into the bugle's bell. A soldier, typically not a skilled bugler, places the digital bugle to the lips but secretly presses a button. An almost authentic bugle sound is heard without the "bugler" doing anything else. The device plays a high-quality recorded version of "Taps," taken from the 1999 Memorial Day service at Arlington National Cemetery.

The fake bugle has been used more often than the real one in the nearly 38,000 military funerals so far this year. Military services have purchased about 4,000 bugles, said Mark Ward, the Pentagon's senior policy adviser for military funeral honors.

As a former trumpet player back in high school, I can remember playing Taps at many funerals in the small town where I grew up. I guess I disapprove of this digital imitation. I doubt if a piece of silicon and associated circuitry can duplicate the emotion that a trained bugler can create. Note that the Pentagon claims that it plays an "almost authentic bugle sound." Is "almost authentic" good enough?

[Return to Table of Contents]

The PR Budget for this newsletter is $0.00. I rely upon "word of mouse" advertising in which you recommend this newsletter to your friends. This newsletter is a private project of mine, and I have a zero budget for a publicity campaign to get more readers.

Thanks.

COPYRIGHTS and Other Legal Things:

1. You do so strictly for non-commercial purposes
2. Articles marked with a Plus Sign (+) are not to be redistributed. Those articles are solely for the use of Plus Edition subscribers.
3. You may not republish any articles containing words attributed to another person or organization until you obtain permission from that person or organization. While you do have permission to republish words written by Richard W. Eastman, you do not have automatic authority to republish words written by others, even if their words appear in this newsletter.

ABOUT SPAM FILTERS:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION:

HELP:

[Return to Table of Contents]