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| EOGN Note: The information in this archived copy was accurate on the date of publication. Since then, Web sites have appeared and disappeared, companies have been merged and many other facts have changed. You may find references in this archived copy that are no loner accurate. Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter A Weekly Summary of Events and Vol. 4 No. 44 – Oct. 30, 1999 This newsletter is sponsored by Ancestry Publishing, To learn about Ancestry's Past issues of this Newsletter Copyright© 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. All rights reserved. If you do contact any of the companies or societies mentioned in this newsletter, please tell them that you read about their services in this newsletter. IN THIS ISSUE: - On The Road Again - On The Road Again This edition is late. I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I have been writing this newsletter for almost four years and also have been traveling a lot during that time. I have used my palmtop PC to send newsletters from cities all over the U.S. as well as from Montreal, Toronto, London, Rotterdam and Hong Kong. This week I took a trip to Orlando and, for the first time, found that I could not send the newsletter. Actually, I could have sent it if I had had the newsletter with me. But I didn’t. I wrote most of the newsletter last week on my PC at home and then copied it to a floppy diskette before heading to the airport. Once on my way, I decided to finish writing the newsletter. I inserted the floppy diskette into the palmtop’s diskette drive, went to open the document in Microsoft Word, and got the dreaded error message: "Unable to read from Drive A." It seems that the diskette had an unrecoverable read error on it. I spent several days in Orlando enjoying the sights and the sunshine, but the newsletter wasn’t quite complete. I returned home today where the original copy still resided on my desktop’s hard drive. I spent a bit of time finishing up the writing and here is the newsletter, a bit later than usual. Next time I will load it to the palmtop before leaving home. Oh yes, Orlando was great! - Internet Helps Restore 18th Century Gravestone to its Rightful Place Ashford Connecticut Town Clerk Barbara Metsack turned to the Internet to answer an 18th-century question: Where was Jonathan King buried in 1774? How the gravestone of the Northampton, Mass., native who was buried in Vernon's Bamforth Cemetery turned up in the basement of Metsack's new Ashford home remains a mystery. But navigating her way through the Mormon genealogy Web site, http://www.FamilySearch.org, Metsack discovered that King died in Bolton at age 93. King's name also appears on a list created in 1926 to identify all the stones in the old cemetery, which was part of Bolton until Vernon formed in 1808 and saw its last burial in 1896. Records indicate that he is the son of John King of Boyle, County Roscomon, Ireland. ''Everyone was excited that I knew about it,'' Metsack said. ''We couldn't believe we were able to do something with this stone.'' Vernon town administrator Laurence Shaffer noted Metsack’s diligence, stating, ''We've got to tip our hat to the town clerk in the town of Ashford. She went above and beyond duty to find where the tombstone belonged.'' Now Alan West, Vernon's cemetery superintendent, is helping search for the exact location of the grave. Meanwhile, the barely legible, 225-year-old stone is propped up in an office basement. West has found the graves of two of King's sons, both Revolutionary War soldiers, during a walk-through of the tiny cemetery. Deacon Seth King died in 1780 and Charles King was buried in 1790. There is a small cluster of King graves in the area, but West said he is not sure if they are relatives of Jonathan King. If he does not locate the exact burial spot, West said he will erect the stone near those of King's sons. - American Civil War Photographs Online Catalog The Special Collections Branch of U.S. Army Military History Institute now has an online catalog of thousands of Civil War photographs. You can search the catalog by any word to find listings. You can search by name or by town, state, regiment or almost anything else you can think of. If a photograph has been catalogued with that word, you will find a listing for it. This collection includes photographs of thousands of soldiers, enlisted men and officers alike. As usual, I searched the database for any occurrences of my own surname and I was pleasantly surprised to find several. For instance, here are a few of the ones I found:
Then I searched by locations. First, I searched for any photographs with the word MAINE in the catalog. I was rewarded with more than 300 such listings, so I decided to narrow the search down by specifying PENOBSCOT, one of the counties in Maine. I found one occurrence that had both words, although it referred to an Indian tribe, not to the county named after the tribe:
Please note also that this is only an online catalog. At this time, the actual photographs are not available online. However, you can easily order photographs by any of several means:
In the message, provide your postal address and the catalog number of the photograph you desire (the Photo ID or "RG" number). The Military History Institute will then mail a lower-quality photocopy of the photograph to you for your examination and approval; along with more detailed instructions, including charges for the duplication of photos. Assuming that you want a copy of the photograph(s), you then mail a check for the appropriate amount, payable to "MHI Fund." A few weeks later a photographic-quality copy will arrive in your mailbox. All in all, this is a great service to the genealogist or the history buff. For more information, and to search the online catalog, go to: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usamhi/PhotoDB.htmlMy thanks to Norman Scofield for letting me know about this resource. Norman found pictures of both of his great-great-uncles who fought in the Civil War, pictures that he was unaware of until he searched the catalog. - New England Historic Genealogical Society Awarded IMLS Grant This announcement is from the New England Historic Genealogical Society:
- GENTECH: Help Wanted As GENTECH continues to grow, the organization needs more people to help with the growing projects. This week GENTECH posted "help wanted" ads for the following volunteer positions:
I have been associated with GENTECH for some time now and can report that it is a great organization. If you would like to help promote the use of technology in genealogy research, please consider volunteering for one of the above positions. - Ancestry.com is Among Leading Subscription-Based Internet Services Ancestry.com reached a new milestone this week. Here is the announcement:
- Copernic 2000 Just over a year ago, I wrote about a utility program called Copernic. The program can be used for all sorts of online searches, including genealogy-related topics. Last year I wrote about the 1998 version:
Copernic is one program that has remained on my hard drive since I tested and wrote about it. I have used it almost every day for the past year. The program has been available in two versions: the free version does all the basic tasks, while Copernic Plus costs money but adds more "bells and whistles." Now the producers of Copernic have released a newer version, called Copernic 2000. To make matters a bit more complex, it is now available in three versions: Free, Plus and Pro. Copernic 2000 provides simultaneous access to some 55 information sources such as AltaVista, Deja.com, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan, WebCrawler and Yahoo! Results returned by engines are stored and organized on disk for better search management and faster browsing. Copernic 2000 features a search wizard, a category bar, a detailed search history, and a number of other useful search management tools. It shows a relevancy score for each result and removes duplicates automatically. It can also automatically remove dead links and download documents for off-line browsing. Search results can be viewed off-line, updated, and refined using logical operators (and, or, except, near, etc). You may export and save search results in various file formats (HTML, XML, CSV, text and DBF). The free version of Copernic 2000 adds two new main features. It:
Moving up a notch, Copernic 2000 Plus costs $39.95 (U.S. funds). It has all the features found in the free version, plus:
The new, high-end version, called Copernic 2000 Pro, costs $79.95 (U.S. funds). It has all of the above features, plus:
I still like the program. I now use Copernic 2000 Pro. I just learned how to have the program search the Web repeatedly and e-mail new findings to me. I now have Copernic conduct the same search every Wednesday morning at 3:00 AM. It keeps the findings from week to week. After each week’s new search, the program sends an e-mail to me of any new pages it found that meet my specifications. When I awake later, I have an e-mail in my In-Basket of possible new genealogy leads. To read my review of Copernic’s earlier version, look at the October 26, 1998 edition of my newsletter at: http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/eastOct26-98.htm. To read more about the new Copernic 2000 program and to download the free version, go to: http://www.copernic.com - Britannica.Com Tries Again Last week I wrote about the difficulties that the Encyclopaedia Britannica had with their Web site. It was taken offline on October 19, barely 24 hours after its initial launch, due to a site overload. Now the company plans to re-launch on Monday, November 1. "The good news is we have wonderful demand," said Kent Devereaux, senior vice president of product development for Britannica.com. "The bad news is we need to ramp up our hardware much quicker than we ever anticipated." Devereaux said the decision to take down the newly launched site was made because "the level of service was not acceptable." Since then, Britannica.com has brought on about 24 experts from Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to help prepare the site for higher traffic levels. On Monday, the site will be prepared to handle millions of unique users, about three to four times more than at its initial launch. Despite the higher capacity, Devereaux said he actually hopes usage will be down and receive less media attention so the company will be able to ramp up more gradually. Britannica.com offers the contents of Encyclopaedia Britannica's massive database of information, free of charge. It also provides links to articles from 75 magazines, including Time, Sports Illustrated and The Economist. Visitors can purchase books on their field of interest through a partnership with Barnesandnoble.com or use the online Britannica Store to make purchases from a number of online partners like The Smithsonian Institute and Art.com. Britannica.com also features continuously updated news through a partnership with The Washington Post and Newsweek. Britannica.com will roll out a version of its site specifically for residents of the United Kingdom in February.- More on Junk E-mail You know the problem: obnoxious, unsolicited e-mail messages in your in-basket, advertising everything from music CDs to Viagra to "work at home get-rich-quick" scams. These unwanted intrusions into your e-mail are common, and the number of such messages is increasing. Why are you getting them? What can you do about them? The first question is easy to answer: You are receiving these messages because it is profitable for the companies sending them. These so-called "spam" messages cost almost nothing to send. Many spammers can send a million e-mails in one day at a cost of a very few pennies. If only 1/10 of 1% of the messages result in a sale, the person sending the message can make hundreds or even thousands of dollars per day! Many one-person operations use spam mail as an effective form of advertising. Reputable companies do not use these methods. Correct etiquette dictates that companies only send e-mails to a pre-qualified list of individuals who have an interest in the products or services of that company. Reputable companies only send e-mails to individuals who have communicated with that company in the past. Those companies also provide methods for the recipients to choose to not receive future e-mails. This is called a subscriber-based list. Of course, a reputable company never sells its mailing list to anyone else. Unfortunately, the spam mailers do not have such scruples. The second question is a bit tougher to answer: What can you do about them? In the early days of spam mail, all you had to do was send an e-mail to the sender’s Internet service provider, and the account would be shut down for inappropriate use. However, the sleazy characters who send these messages quickly learned to hide their identities. Unfortunately, it is very easy to forge e-mail return addresses. If you received a spam message from john1234@aol.com or from make-money-fast@hotmail.com, chances are that there is no such account at either AOL or at HotMail. The person sending the spam message has forged the return address. Most spam mail is sent by one of the bulk mail programs. These programs are similar to your e-mail program (Eudora, Outlook, Microsoft Mail, etc.) except for three things: (1.) they only send e-mail; they do not receive, (2.) they are optimized to send thousands of messages in as short a time as possible, and (3.) they are designed to hide the e-mail identity of the sender. I occasionally receive spam mail showing a return address of "@". That’s right, just an "at" sign. Nothing else. If the recipient cannot figure out who sent it or what Internet service provider was used, then it is impossible to send a complaint to the provider that was used. Until recently you could still determine the originator’s Internet service provider by simply looking at the e-mail headers and decoding all the extra lines you find there. The routing information normally shows where the message originated as well as all relay points along the way. However, a number of bulk mailing programs now feature "cloaking." This means that the origin of the message is hidden in such a way as to be difficult or impossible to detect. These cloaking programs do more than simply forge the return address; they may forge network information as well. Next, some Internet service providers simply don’t care. A few advertise their services to those who want to send spam mail, proudly proclaiming that "your account will not be shut down because of complaints." While there are very few such "rogue" Internet service providers, they do account for a high percentage of the spam mail that you may receive.
Where did they get your address? Gathering e-mail addresses is easy to do. A number of programs are available that will "harvest" addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, forums and even online e-mail directories. These "address finders" will search for valid e-mail addresses. You don’t even have to post a message in order to have your e-mail address "harvested." If someone else ever mentioned your e-mail address in the text of a message, you may receive bulk e-mails. For instance, let’s say that a distant cousin of yours posts a reply in a genealogy newsgroup that says "For more information on that, you should contact John Smith at jsmith@xyz.com." You can believe that jsmith@xyz.com will receive spam mail in the near future even though he never posted a message on any newsgroup. The same is true for an e-mail address that appears on a Web page. The programs that "harvest" e-mail addresses look on Web pages too. Spammers are experts at buying and selling e-mail lists. Anyone can now buy CD-ROM disks containing one million or more e-mail addresses for a very few dollars. With these disks spam mailers send unwanted e-mails to everyone listed. Once your e-mail address appears on one such disk, it is doomed to appear again and again on others.
What can you do to stop spam mail? First, you can decode the e-mail message's header information, which shows all the stops it made on the way to your in-box. Then you can complain to the Internet service provider used to send the message. If cloaking is not being used and if the Internet service provider has a responsible no-spam policy, this can be very effective. To view the e-mail header, you usually have to turn on an option in your e-mail program. For example, in Netscape Messenger, open the message and click on View, Page Source. In Eudora Pro, click on the "blah blah blah" icon to see all the details. The best way to make sense of a header is to use a free decoding utility like Sam Spade (available at http://www.samspade.org). I used SamSpade to trace the origin of some unwanted messages that I have been receiving. Even though the e-mails show a funny return address outside the U.S., SamSpade shows that the messages really came from Alter.net, an Internet service provider in Texas. If I wish, I can send a complaint to abuse@alter.net. NOTE: The e-mail address of "abuse@…" is a de facto standard these days for reporting any abuse by a customer of an Internet service provider. For instance, to report problems caused by an AOL member, you send an e-mail to abuse@aol.com. To report problems caused by a customer of xyz.com, you send an e-mail to abuse@xyz.com, etc. You are doing these companies a favor by letting them know about the inappropriate behavior by one of their customers. Most Internet service providers are responsible citizens of the online world and do care about the use of their systems. Only a few rogue Internet service providers will tolerate spam mail. There are a number of organizations that promote "removal lists." In theory, you tell one of these companies that you don’t want to receive such junk, and they, in turn, will notify the spam mailers to remove your e-mail address from their lists. However, experience has shown that these removal lists are not very effective. Many spam mailers pay no attention to them. Adding your name to a removal list may reduce the amount of such mail you receive by a bit; it certainly doesn’t hurt to try. But don’t get your hopes up. I bet you will still receive a lot of spam mail, even after listing yourself on the removal list. You should never, ever reply to a spam message. If you send a reply, you are simply confirming that your e-mail address is valid and that someone reads messages at that address. The spammers will then send more advertisements to you, not less! The advertisements for the CD-ROM disks containing e-mail addresses often claim to be "verified addresses." By replying to a spam message, you are verifying that your e-mail address is a good one, thus insuring that you will receive future junk mailings. Finally, the best cure is the simplest: press the delete button in your e-mail program and then move on. Advise all your friends to do the same. The only reason that spam mail exists is because it is profitable. If an educated population stops buying products from these sleazy outfits, the spam mailers will eventually slither away. A lack of orders will translate into no profits for the spammers. Without profits, they will go away and find other avenues for their advertising. Never, ever buy anything from a spam e-mail message! Even if it is a product that interests you, find a more reputable merchant to do business with. There are lots of merchants available, so why do business with one who uses such poor taste in advertising techniques? The biggest threat that spam mailers face is an educated population. Think about it. Then tell your friends. - Keeping Up with the Joneses It should be easy to keep up with the Joneses in Wales next year. It seems that Wales wants to throw a party for tens of thousands of stars and ordinary people who share the surname. With Jones the most popular surname in Britain after Smith, Welsh tourism authorities are hoping to set a record for the largest gathering of people with the same moniker. "It's still in the ideas stage," a Wales Tourist Board spokeswoman said on Wednesday. "This is something that will hopefully take place during the year 2000." Big names being considered include crooner Tom Jones, actress Catherine Zeta Jones, disco diva Grace Jones, soccer hardman turned actor Vinnie Jones and public relations executive Sophie Rhys-Jones, now the Countess of Wessex after she married Britain's Prince Edward. Two musicians who changed their names from Jones -- David Bowie and Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers -- would also qualify. Organizers reportedly are looking at the 72,000-capacity Millennium Stadium in Cardiff as the venue for the event. - From the Mailbox In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about two books published in England: "FamilySearch on the Internet" and "Web Publishing for Genealogy". I listed mailing addresses to order the books. Jeanne Bunting wrote on CompuServe’s Genealogy Techniques Forum that both books are also available from the Society of Genealogists' on-line bookshop at: http://www.sog.org.uk. The advantage of the SoG Web site is that you can order on line and pay by the secure credit card method. Several people wrote in response to my article on "Everton's Genealogical Helper Is Now Available Online." They said, "I went to the site and it said it was for subscribers only." That’s true. As I wrote last week, "Now Everton’s is making the entire magazine available online to subscribers." The idea of an online magazine for paying subscribers certainly isn’t new. Other publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and probably many others do the same thing. - Home Pages Highlighted The following is a list of some of the genealogy-related World Wide Web home pages that have been listed recently on http://www.rootscomputing.com:
To submit your home page to this newsletter, enter the necessary information at: http://www.rootscomputing.com/register.htm. Due to the volume of new Web pages submitted, I am not able to list all of them in the newsletter. Are you interested in the articles in this newsletter? Would you like to learn more or ask questions or make comments about these articles? Join this newsletter’s online discussion group on CompuServe’s Genealogy Techniques Forum. CompuServe members using Netscape, Internet Explorer or CompuServe 2000 can go to http://go.compuserve.com/GenealogyForum. If you are using Classic CompuServe, you can GO ROOTS. If you would like to submit news, information or press releases for possible inclusion in future newsletters, send them to richard@eastman.net. The author does reserve the right to accept or reject any articles submitted. DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is being written and sent via e-mail at no charge. I expect to write one new issue on a more or less weekly basis. However, life sometimes interferes, and the need to earn a living may create an occasional delay. COPYRIGHTS: The contents of this newsletter are copyright by Richard W. Eastman. You are hereby granted rights, unless otherwise specified, to re-distribute articles from this newsletter to other parties provided you do so strictly for non-commercial purposes. Please limit your re-distribution to one or two articles per newsletter; do not re-distribute the newsletter in its entirety. Also, please include the following words with any articles you re-distribute:
Thank you for your cooperation. Subscription information: To subscribe to this free newsletter, to cancel an existing subscription or to modify an existing subscription in any way, go to: If you want to see the current issue as well as back issues of the newsletter, look on the World Wide Web at: Please feel free to copy this subscription information and pass it on to anyone else who you think might be interested in obtaining a free subscription. About the author: Dick Eastman is the forum manager of the four Genealogy Forums on CompuServe. He also is the author of "YOUR ROOTS: Total Genealogy Planning On Your Computer" published by Ziff-Davis Press. He can be reached at: richard@eastman.net | |||||||||||||||||||||
