This has been a tough week! I have traveled more than 12,000 miles and the eogn.com web site has been up and down like a yo-yo during much of that time. It seems to fail immediately after I board an airplane for a long flight. Actually, there wasn't much I could do even if I had been on the ground.

On Thursday and into Friday, several routers in the data center where the eogn.com home page is hosted failed. The hosting provider reports that there was a firmware bug in the routers and their techs had to go back to the router manufacturer to get the probem resolved. That required hours.

The site came back up Friday but a different problem occurred some hours later. The TypePad hosting site started receiving a DDOS attack. (The free Standard Edition site at http://blog.eogn.com is hosted at TypePad.) The blog.eogn.com pages went went up and down repeatedly for more than 36 hours. The other pages on eogn.com remained in operation but most site visitors had no way of learning that.

The problem appears to be resolved at this moment but I know that DDOS attacks don't disappear immediately. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few lingering problems for several more hours. (You can read more about DDOS attacks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddos.)

I apologize for the problems. However, the problems were beyond my control. I depend upon the hosting services to handle these problems and must admit their techs are better qualified to handle these problems than I am anyway.

I am typing these words on an iPad Mini with a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard while waiting at the Denver airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Orlando. I should be back home about midnight tonight, after being on the road for almost two weeks.

Many people own and love their tablet computers. I have an Pad Mini and it has become my primary traveling computer. I hear similar statements from owners of various Android tablets as well. As useful as these tiny powerhouses may be, they are still seriously hampered by the lack of a keyboard. The solution? Add a keyboard!

That suggestion is obvious. Adding an external high quality keyboard converts a tablet computer into a reasonably-priced laptop computer. Perhaps it should be called a netbook.

The pictures in this article show my iPad Mini in action with a Logitech keyboard. You can click on any image to view a larger picture.

NOTE: Beware! You can find a number of poorly built external keyboards for tablets. Some of them have rubbery, "chicklet" style keys. Avoid them! A junky keyboard is as bad as, or worse than, no keyboard at all.

Why bother adding a keyboard? Because it makes typing much easier and therefore opens up a huge range of uses for this super-compact computer. I have known some people who previously used TWO computers when traveling: a tablet for convenience and a regular laptop for more serious use, such as for writing newsletter articles. Today you can combine the two and carry one lightweight device for both purposes.

A few years ago I wouldn't recommend a tablet for heavy duty writing or for image editing or other applications that required significant processor power or storage space. However, the technology of tablet computers has improved radically in the past two or three years. Prices have dropped, the tablets' processors are much more powerful than they were just a few years ago, the display screens are as good as, or better than, laptop computers of only a few years ago.

Today's storage space is essentially unlimited by using the various cloud-based storage services. Today, you can choose from Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and a plethora of other online services will provide more storage space than you will ever need. With most of the cloud-based file storage services, a few gigabytes of storage space is available free of charge while even larger amounts are available for modest fees, usually much cheaper than purchasing your own disk drive.

If you have seen the display screen of the Retina display screen on an Apple iPad, you already know that the display is sharper and easier to read than that of the typical laptop computer.

Today's software for tablets still is not as powerful as that available on desktop and laptop computers but does have most of the capabilities that 99% of us want. Indeed, email apps, web browsers, Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of games work as well on tablets as they do on higher-powered computers. The processing power in most of today's tablet computers is usually sufficient for the majority of computing tasks that consumers run although not enough for intensive engineering computers or for sophisticated graphics editing. However, NASA sent men to the moon in 1969 by calculating the route and using computers that provided far less computing power than today's low-cost tablet computers!

While you can purchase inexpensive keyboards from many sources, my experience with cheap keyboards has been disappointing. You probably don't want to use a cheap keyboard on your desktop computer and I suspect you don't want one on your tablet either. I use a Logitech keyboard and am happy with it. I have also talked with tablet owners who use Zagg keyboards and they all report satisfaction with those. You may find still another brand that also is a pleasure to use. However, I would avoid the cheapest keyboards as they don't have the "feel" of a higher-quality device.

The pictures in this article show my Logitech keyboard in operation. The keyboard is about the same size as the iPad Mini. In other words, it is too small for true touch typing. The larger iPad and most of the Android tablets with larger screens will support nearly full-sized keyboards. The larger Logitech and Zagg keyboards made for larger tablets will please even touch typists. Since I am not a touch typist, I don't have many concerns about typing on a smaller than normal keyboard.

I didn't want to carry additional gadgets with me. Having the iPad is enough, I don't want to carry keyboards, speakers, chargers, and other add-on devices. I like the fact the Logitech keyboard attaches to the iPad by magnets so it never gets separated. Even though there are two pieces, the keyboard and iPad remain firmly attached to one another and function as one piece. Even better, both slip into the InCase carrying case that I use. It makes for one compact thing to carry. When removed from the carrying case, the iPad slips into a depressed slot in the keyboard, holding the iPad's screen at the optimum angle for viewing in different lighting conditions.

I used a telephone and a MacBook Air in the above photograph to provide a reference showing the compact size of the iPad Mini and keyboard that is between the other two devices. I guess my next photograph is a "selfie." That's my hand holding the case with the iPad Mini and the Logitech keyboard inside. I left my hand in the picture to show how compact the entire package is.

As you can see by the above photograph, there are no wires attaching the keyboard to the iPad Mini.The connection is wireless, using Bluetooth technology. In fact, the keyboard and the iPad Mini can be ten or twenty feet apart and everything will still work. Admittedly, I don't know why anyone would want to do that.

The keyboard and the carrying case are available from any number of vendors. I purchased the Logitech keyboard from Amazon. I see the price on Amazon today is $59.99. That price is a bit cheaper than I what I paid last year. The case made by InCase costs $23.95 at Amazon although I suspect you can find many other cases that will work at least as well as the one I use.

If you use a full sized iPad or a larger Android tablet, you will want to use a larger keyboard and a larger carrying case. Whatever you choose, I suspect you will be happy with the ease and convenience of using a nearly full powered computer that slips into an overcoat or a lady's purse.

Thanks to the high-quality Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad has become my favorite computer for writing while traveling.

The FamilySearch method of creating indexes of old records has been described many times in this newsletter and many other genealogy publications. FamilySearch is now planning to introduce a new process to maintain indexing quality. In this new model, a single volunteer will index and submit a batch, and a second volunteer will review the completed work. The person reviewing the batch will have the ability to add corrections to the values entered by the first indexer, and both values can be included in the searchable index on FamilySearch.org.

If the person reviewing the batch makes a small number of changes, the program considers that both volunteers mostly agree, and the batch is finished. If the person reviewing the batch suggests a large number of corrections, the program may route the batch to another volunteer for additional review.

In this new model, it is anticipated that all volunteers will split their time between indexing and reviewing.

What are your thoughts about this new process? You can read more in an article by Katie Gale in the FamilySearch Blog at https://familysearch.org/blog/en/attention-indexers-feedback-needed.

I won't offer any opinion about the accuracy of this article but I certainly would like to see the source citations.

A Pennsylvania woman claims she is the 64th great-granddaughter of Saint Joseph Ben Matthat Arimathaea, who was the paternal uncle to the Virgin Mary. Ashlie Hardway of WTAE Television reports that Mary Beth Webb, of Murrysville, Pennsylvania, said she began searching her ancestry in 2010 after years of "communicating" with her deceased mother, father and brother. While doing the research on ancestry.com over a two-year period, Webb discovered the connection to Saint Joseph.

You can decide for yourself after reading the article and watching the video at http://goo.gl/rXQbdr.

The following announcement was written by the Federation of Genealogical Societies:

2015 FGS NATIONAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

Submissions will be accepted between May 1, 2014 and May 31, 2014

April 17, 2014 – Austin, TX. - The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) announces a Call for Presentations for the FGS 2015 Conference, “Connect. Explore. Refresh.” to be held February 11-14, 2015, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 2015 Conference will be held at the same time as the RootsTech 2015 Conference. Submissions will be accepted online between May 1, 2014 and May 31, 2014.

This innovative blending of the established tradition of FGS’s stellar conferences, focused on genealogical society management, records, and methodology, with RootsTech’s famed conferences, centered on family history, technology, and storytelling, will provide speakers the opportunity to participate in an exciting, once in a lifetime event. A separate Call for Presentations will be announced soon for the RootsTech 2015 Conference.

The conference theme “Connect. Explore. Refresh.” defines the elements FGS conference attendees will see and experience in 2015. The FGS program committee seeks original, relevant, and engaging lecture proposals that will impact, inspire, and motivate genealogists of all experience levels and skill-sets to form connections with other family historians, the larger genealogical community, and within their own personal research.

Categories for submissions include, but are not limited to:

• Back to Basics
• Tried and True Methods
• Answering Difficult Questions with Leading Questions
• The 21st Century Genealogical Society for Today and Tomorrow
• Genealogical Society Leaders and Visionaries
• Modern Access to Vintage Resources
• A Retro Look at Organization and Planning
• The Most Useful Hidden Records in Plain Sight
• Connecting to the Past with Military Commemorations – i.e., War of 1812, Civil War
• 20th Century Migration – i.e., Dust Bowl, WW2 movements, etc.
• Wagon Trains, Railroads, and Modern Transportation
• Ethnic Groups in the West – i.e., African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Greek
• Missionaries and Settlers
• Compiling Singular Records into Lively Stories

The FGS 2015 Conference schedule will commence with a Focus on Societies Day on Wednesday, February, 11, 2015, followed by the three-day annual conference event. The FGS Program Committee seeks proposals for the Focus on Societies Day and the annual conference. Submissions for sponsored talks from societies, businesses, and organizations within the family history community are greatly encouraged.

Submissions

Speaker submissions and deadlines for the FGS 2015 Conference will be very different from previous years, as FGS now utilizes an online submission system. Interested speakers must submit all lecture proposals using the online forms. The Call for Presentations opens May 1, 2014 and will close on May 31, 2014.

Camera-ready handout materials are due for all lecture presentations on October 1, 2014.

Questions concerning the Call for Presentations should be sent to program2015@fgs.org.

Compensation

Selected speakers receive an honorarium, travel compensation, and conference registration as well as per diem and hotel nights based on the number of lectures presented. Speakers receive compensation according to the FGS Conference Speaker Policy at http://www.fgs.org/cpage.php?pt=44.

Sponsored speakers’ costs are compensated by the sponsoring organization. Sponsored speakers will abide by all speaker deadlines and syllabus requirements. Sponsored speakers will receive complimentary FGS conference registration and electronic syllabus materials.

For more information, to download a PDF copy of the Call for Presentations, or to submit lecture proposals, please visit https://www.fgsconference.org/proposals/.

About the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS)

The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) was founded in 1976 and represents the members of hundreds of genealogical societies. FGS links the genealogical community by helping genealogical societies strengthen and grow through resources available online, FGS Forum magazine (filled with articles pertaining to society management and genealogical news), and Society Strategy Series papers, covering topics about effectively operating a genealogical society. FGS also links the genealogical community through its annual conference -- four days of excellent lectures, including one full day devoted to society management topics. To learn more visit http://www.fgs.org.

Follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/FGSgenealogy), Twitter (http://www.facebook.com/FGSgenealogy) and on our blog at (http://voice.fgs.org).

Several articles have been posted here about humorous obituaries, many of them written by the deceased in advance of the "final event." Now Stig Kernell, a Swedish resident, gave his funeral home instructions before he died on April 6, and the funeral home followed through, publishing the 3-word obituary in two newspapers on Saturday.

Stig Kernell's obituary, published in newspaper Dagens Nyheter, states "I Am Dead."

Well, that DOES sum it up.

Radio Sweden reports that Lars-Åke Kernell, Stig’s son, told the Expressen, “He felt that not much else needed to be said, just 'I am dead.'” The nonagenarian died on April 6 and just didn’t want to make a big deal of his own passing.

Some newsletter readers may find the www.EOGN.com web site is running slowly today. The hosting company is having networking problems in their Provo, Utah, data center, one of several data centers the company operates. The problem appears to be impacting some newsletter readers, although not all of them.

I know the problem is impacting me as I sit in this hotel room in London, England. I am receiving frequent time-out error messages when attempting to display pages on eogn.com. Even worse, I am checking out of the hotel shortly to board a plane to Seattle, Washington. I will be incommunicado for nine hours or so while my web site is having difficulties. Grrrr!

The HostGator technical support folks report, "Our Networks Operation team uncovered a bug in firmware utilized in our vendor’s hardware that caused the network issues, which impacted some of our customers." If you have an interest, you can read the company's periodic updates at http://forums.hostgator.com/network-outage-provo-t316804.html?p=517996#post517996.

I switched to HostGator several years ago after having huge problems with one of the larger and better-known hosting services and have been happy with the better level of service until today. Oh well...

I do apologize for the inconvenience. I suspect the problem will be resolved within a few hours. In the meantime, there's not much I can do while riding over the polar cap at 40,000 feet.

UPDATE: The problem now appears to be resolved. After a nine-hour-flight, I am now in a hotel in Tacoma, Washington. Everything appears to be running normlly. If you see anything unusual, please let me know.

David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, has written in his own blog about a goal to provide U.S. citizens with easier and faster access to materials held at the National Archives and Records Administration. He writes:

"The first of our new strategic goals is to 'Make Access Happen.' Increasingly, access means digital, online access. Our first goal has one objective, to make our records available to the public in digital form to ensure that anyone can explore, discover and learn from our records."

You can read his full article at http://blogs.archives.gov/aotus/?p=5417.

I wrote earlier (at http://goo.gl/MttkJE and at http://goo.gl/qhG8Oe) about a 7-day genealogy cruise on board the Celebrity Silhouette in the Eastern Caribbean that starts on December 7, 2014. I will be one of the speakers on that cruise. Now the cruise organizers have extended an Early Booking Special for those who sign up before April 30, 2014.

Book on or before April 30 and receive one of the following:

• Free Classic Beverage Package for 2 people (includes gratuities):
• Beer, up to $5/serving
• Spirits, Cocktails & Wine; up to $8/serving
• All Soda, Premium Coffee, Teas, Juices, Bottled Water

NOTE: Upgrade to Premium Beverage Package available for nominal charge

• Onboard Credit - $200 per stateroom

Some restrictions apply and will be explained at time of booking.

Leaving from Fort Lauderdale, the ports of call include: San Juan, Puerto Rico; Basseterre, St. Kitts; St. Maarten; plus three days at sea (with genealogy presentations all thee days), returning to Fort Lauderdale on December 14. That strikes me as a good balance between genealogy and sightseeing.

For details, look at http://www.cecruisegroups.com/genealogy-cruise-2014.html. To book now, contact Herb at CruiseEverything at 800-959-7447. 

The Heartbleed bug is a new security problem that theoretically could be used to expose users' passwords when connecting to many web sites. The problem only arises when using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to web sites that run OpenSSL software. Indeed, SSL is supposed to PREVENT security issues but the new Heartbleed bug does the opposite: it could create security problems. The Heartbleed bug is a serious issue, and as such, there's a lot of confusion about the bug and its implications as you use the Internet.

A couple of newsletter readers have written to ask if there is any security problem with the Heartbleed bug on this newsletter's web site at http://www.EOGN.com so I thought I would address the issue here.

Short Answer:

There is no problem with the Heartbleed bug on www.eogn.com. In fact, the www.eogn.com server never uses SSL connections.

Longer Answer:

The Heartbleed bug exploits a security shortcoming in the OpenSSL software used by many web servers to handle secure connections. This newsletter's web server at www.eogn.com never uses SSL and does not have OpenSSL software or any other SSL software in use. Therefore, the potential problem is a non-issue on www.eogn.com. Your data has never been at risk when using eogn.com.

The only time the eogn.com web site has a need for a secure connection is when a reader creates a new Plus Edition subscription or renews an existing subscription. The reader will be asked for a credit card number. However, when subscribing, you will note that the subscriber is first transferred from eogn.com to PayPal's secure web site before being asked for the credit card number or any other sensitive information. All financially-sensitive information is entered on PayPal's secure web site, not on eogn.com.

PayPal's servers use industrial-grade security, far more secure than that of most smaller web sites and certainly better than what I could offer by myself on www.eogn.com. I would trust PayPal's team of security professionals far more than I would ever trust any web site owned and operated by a single individual or by a small corporation. I use PayPal daily without hesitation. You can read more about PayPal's security at https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/OpenSSL-Heartbleed-Bug-PayPal-Account-Holders-are-Secure/ba-p/797568.

Not all secure web servers use the OpenSSL software. Other SSL products have been created by various organizations and are used on many secure web servers. Only 17 percent (around half a million) of the Internet's secure web servers certified by trusted authorities were believed to be vulnerable to the attack, allowing theft of the servers' private keys and users' session cookies and passwords. The other 83 percent of secure web servers and 100% of the web servers that do not use SSL (including eogn.com) are believed to be immune.

On March 21, 2014 Bodo Moeller and Adam Langley of Google wrote a patch that fixed the bug. Most web sites that use SSL now have the patch installed but there may be some exceptions. Several services are available to test whether the Heartbleed bug is present on a given site. One such list may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed#Vulnerability_testing_services.

For More Information

C|Net has published an excellent article by Richard Nieva describing the Heartbleed bug and its implications. You can find the article at http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/heartbleed-bug-what-you-need-to-know-faq. Wikipedia also has an excellent description of the problem and its fix at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed.

Kenneth C. Thomson Jr. has dedicated the majority of his life to studying and preserving local history. He received the Citizen of the Year award from Sumner County Publications on Friday in Gallatin, Tennessee.

As a freelance historian and genealogist, Thomson has been the go-to source for everything and everybody related to Sumner County history with the ability to answer off the top of his head specific questions, citing names and dates. Late state historian Walter Durham once said that Thomson knows more about “Sumner County people than anybody.”

You can read more about Kenneth Thomson and his award in The Tennessean at http://goo.gl/1MVjus.

The following was written by the folks at the Texas State Genealogical Society:

In partnership with the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) and findmypast.com, the Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) announces a Call for Exhibit Hall Presentations to be held during the FGS 2014 Conference, 28-30 August 2014, in San Antonio, Texas.

As part of the educational and outreach missions of both FGS and TSGS, the exhibit hall will be free and open to the public. During that time, approximately twenty half-hour presentations will be offered on the exhibit hall education stage. These 30-minute presentations will be geared towards educating and motivating all attendees, but with a special focus on beginners or the casually curious. The challenge for presenters will be to excite and convert participants in a short period of time.

The deadline for submission of exhibit hall proposals is Sunday, 18 May 2014.

The categories of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Basic and introductory genealogical instruction
• Storytelling and interviewing
• Preserving for future generations
• DNA and family medical history
• Technology, software and social media
• Benefits of joining a local genealogy society
• Online pitfalls

As there will also be a separate vendor presentation stage, vendor specific topics or sponsors are outside the scope of this call for presentations.

Submission Requirements

Presentations will be 30 minutes long. Send proposals in Microsoft Word, RTF or similar format. File names should include your last name, first initial, and proposal topic. (Example: SmithR - TechStrategies). Please submit one file per proposed topic. Each proposal document should include:

• Speaker(s) name.
• Speaker(s) contact information, including mailing address, phone, email and website, if applicable.
• Prior speaking experience.
• Speaker(s) biography.
• Presentation outline/summary (1 page or less)

Send proposals, as an email attachment, with “FGS 2014 Call for Exhibit Hall Presentations” in the subject line, to 2014program@fgs.org no later than Sunday, 18 May 2014.

Invitations to speak will be extended by 1 July 2014. The deadline for acceptance and submission of signed speaker contracts is 15 July 2014.

Compensation

Due to the structure and location of the presentations, speakers will be compensated for their time only at a rate of $75 per 30-minute presentation.

Society Sponsored Presentations

Societies are encouraged to submit proposals for sponsored talks. The sponsoring organization will cover its speaker's compensation. Sponsored speakers will abide by all speaker deadlines.

Additional Information

Handouts and other reference material will not be compiled in the printed syllabus distributed to conference participants. However, syllabus materials will be made available online and via the FGS mobile app. These materials will be limited to two pages per session. Syllabus format guidelines will be sent to all speakers upon receipt of their signed contract. The deadline for submissions of syllabus materials is 25 July 2014.

About the Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS)

The Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) was founded in 1960, in Fort Worth, Texas, and is incorporated under the laws of the State of Texas as an educational and literary corporation. The purpose of TSGS is to promote, assist, develop, and conserve the genealogical and historical resources of Texas and to cooperate with local, regional, and state wide groups in promoting an awareness of the need to preserve family heritage. To learn more, visit http://www.txsgs.org/.

About the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS)

The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) was founded in 1976 and represents the members of hundreds of genealogical societies. FGS links the genealogical community by helping genealogical societies strengthen and grow through resources available online, FGS Forum magazine (filled with articles pertaining to society management and genealogical news), and Society Strategy Series papers, covering topics about effectively operating a genealogical society. FGS also links the genealogical community through its annual conference -- four days of excellent lectures, including one full day devoted to society management topics. To learn more visit http://www.fgs.org.

About the findmypast.com

Findmypast.com is a leading global family history website, offering more than 1.8 billion records from 875 AD to the present day. Findmypast offers family historians comprehensive collections of newspapers, periodicals, military, census, migration, parish, work and education records, as well as the original comprehensive birth, marriage and death records from the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland.

I created the Calendar of Genealogy Events at www.eogn.com/calendar on May 26, 2013, then moved it to a more powerful web publishing platform on September 21 of the same year. I am pleased with the growth and input from newsletter readers. The Calendar continues to grow and is now becoming a significant resource.

The purpose of the calendar is to provide information about future genealogy conferences, seminars, conventions, cruises, trips, and even online "webinars." All information is to be provided by you and other readers of this newsletter.

Changes made in the past month include genealogy events being held in: 

British Columbia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ireland, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Online Webinars, Ontario, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, United Kingdom, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

A few of those changes may have simply been someone deleting past events. However, the majority are additions of new, upcoming genealogy events.

I would like to invite everyone to contribute future events in your area. You can do so by directly entering them into the EOGN Calendar of Genealogy Events, there is no need to submit them to someone else and then wait and wait and wait. If anyone does add inappropriate entries, you or anyone else can delete them within seconds. All entries are published immediately, free of charge. If you do see a listing for a past event, please feel free to delete it from the Calendar.

You can enter information about the next meeting of your local genealogy society, a statewide or national conference, or most anything else that will be a meeting of genealogists. There's even a page for online webinars to be held in the future and another page for genealogy cruises.

If you are going to be a speaker at a future meeting, you are especially invited to add information about the event.

Feel free to check out the Calendar of Genealogy Events at http://www.eogn.com/calendar.

Library and Archives Canada has seen a lot of internal turmoil in the past year or two. Some of the problems were described in my earlier articles. You can find those articles by starting at http://goo.gl/B469KJ. New leadership has now been announced and the new Librarian and Archivist of Canada will (hopefully) bring stability to the agency.

The following was written by the Office of the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages:

Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages Shelly Glover today announced the appointment of Guy Berthiaume as Librarian and Archivist of Canada for a term of five years, effective June 23, 2014.

Quick Facts

• Dr. Berthiaume has been President and Chief Executive Officer of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec since 2009. Before this, he spent thirty years as a senior university administrator.
• He has published a number of articles and has served on the boards and committees of numerous organizations.
• A recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, Dr. Berthiaume holds a doctorate in history from the École pratique des hautes études and the Université de Paris VIII, a Master of Arts degree from the Université Laval in Québec City and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Library and Archives Canada is an innovative knowledge institution responsible for acquiring and preserving Canada's documentary heritage in all its forms and for providing all Canadians with easy, one-stop access to the texts, photographs, and other documents that reflect their cultural, social, and political development.

Quotes

"Having a person of Dr. Berthiaume's calibre leading Library and Archives Canada will be a solid asset to the organization. His extensive experience in the management of large cultural organizations and his strong leadership are important qualifications for this position."

This isn't about genealogy but I found it interesting. I don't like snooping by a government or by identity thieves or by rip-off artists. All are equally evil, in my opinion. Several websites, mobile apps, and desktop programs offer encrypted services that keep your communications safe from prying eyes. One that impressed me recently is Unseen.is.

The ".is" in the address stands for Iceland. Unseen.is based in Iceland and all its servers are located there as well. Iceland is a country that has very strict data privacy laws to help protect your information. Historically, Iceland has always refused to cooperate with any other governments when asked to supply intercepts of private information from anyone, individuals and organizations alike. It is also a neutral country. Reagan and Gorbachev had their famous meetings in Iceland because it is one of the few, perhaps the only, country that both Russia and the U.S. trusted. Iceland also is a very developed country with state of the art data centers where your data is safe and under the protection of Icelandic laws.

All information stored on Unseen.is' servers is encrypted with powerful proprietary 4096 bit encryption combined with secure network infrastructure. Not even the Unseen.is employees can read your information. I feel my privacy is never perfectly protected but probably is safer in Iceland than anywhere else. However, when transferring information to and from Unseen.is' servers (or anyone else's servers), there is a possibility that a third party might intercept your data while it is being transferred. To minimize the risk, Unseen.is requires encrypted connections. No plain text information is ever sent over the Internet to or from Unseen.is' servers. The Unseen Privacy Policy may be found at https://unseen.is/privacy.html.

Unseen.is provides secure email (see note below), chat sessions, one-on-one audio and video calls, as well as group audio and video conferences. All this works on Windows and Macintosh systems with iPhone, iPod, Android and Linux versions promised for "real soon now." Prices vary from free to $20 per year for individuals. A higher-priced version is also available that probably will appeal only to businesses.

You can learn more at https://unseen.is.

Note: Normal email is always insecure. In order to exchange messages in a secure manner with Unseen.is, both the sender and the recipient(s) must use Unseen.is' email service. The secure email messages exchanged between Unseen.is customers are encrypted in the sender's computer before being sent over the Internet, making it almost impossible for any third party to intercept the message. Those messages then are converted back to readable text only after arrival in the recipient(s) computer. Unseen.is' services are required on both ends.

You can read a detailed article about email security at https://blog.unseen.is/2014/03/26/email-cant-be-completely-private-or-secure/.

1,400 employees, a 10 petabyte (10 quadrillion bytes) database with 13 billion structured and unstructured records going back to the 1300s, a number that grew by 1.2 billion documents in 2013. That's impressive but then add in a paying subscriber base of 2.7 million people around the world who generate an average of 75 million searches a day on the company's various Websites, including Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, FamilyTreeMaker.com and Genealogy.com.

In addition, the AncestryDNA database currently has DNA from more than 300,000 people, who get information on which of the 26 regions of the world their ancestors came from. To determine someone's ethnicity, AncestryDNA has to analyze 700,000 markers—clearly a big data analytics initiative.

These statistics were extracted from an article by Eileen Feretic in an article in Baseline, a trade journal about the use of technology in businesses. The full article is available at http://goo.gl/ZpdgjB.

Here is an interesting article about the genealogy of Stephen Colbert who will replace David Letterman next year as host of CBS’s the Late Show: http://goo.gl/uWZVIJ.

Seven out of eight of Colbert’s great-grandparents are documented as being of Irish descent.

About a month ago, I wrote an article at http://goo.gl/vpRSYd describing Microsoft's new Free OneNote for Macintosh. I wrote, "For some time, [OneNote] was the best free-form note taking application available. However, in recent years, free programs, including Evernote and Google Keep, have become much more popular, especially amongst consumers. Also, OneNote did not have a Macintosh version until today."

Now MacWorld has published a comparison of OneNote for Macintosh and its biggest competitor: Evernote. You can read the review at http://goo.gl/vhWjmT.

Spoiler alert: the anonymous reviewer at MacWorld wasn't impressed with OneNote.

The following was written by the folks at Fold3:

In remembrance of the Civil War’s commencement in April 1861, Fold3 invites you to explore all records in its Civil War Collection for free April 14–30.

Explore Civil War documents featuring everything from military records to personal accounts and historic writings. Soldier records include service records, pension index cards, “Widows’ Pension” files, Navy survivors certificates, Army registers, and much more. Other record types include photographs, original war maps, court investigations, slave records, and beyond. Items such as the Lincoln Assassination Papers, Sultana Disaster documents, letters to the Adjutant General and Commission Branch, and the 1860 census are also contained in the Civil War Collection.

Confederate-specific records include Confederate service records, amnesty papers, casualty reports, and citizens files, as well as Confederate Navy subject files and Southern Claims Commission documents.

Join Fold3 in its commemoration of the Civil War. Discover information on famous participants as well as your own Civil War ancestors through documents, photos, and images that capture the experiences and vital information of those involved in America’s deadliest conflict. Then commemorate your ancestors by creating or expanding memorial pages for them on Fold3’s Honor Wall. Get started searching the Civil War Collection here.

To all Plus Edition subscribers:

The EOGN Plus Edition newsletter was sent to you a few hours ago. If your email provider blocked it, don't forget that the latest Plus Edition newsletter is ALWAYS available at: http://www.eogn.com/wp/thisweek.htm. Your email provider cannot block that address so the newsletter is always available to you.

Here are the articles in this week's Plus Edition newsletter:

(+) What Happens to your Online Accounts when You Die?

(+) CDs Are Not Forever

Knights in Shining Armor in the 1300s... in Massachusetts?

A Glimpse into the Thriving Business Of Family History

How to Preserve Cemeteries: First You Digitize Them

The Restoration and Preservation Mission Restores Abandoned or Neglected African-American Cemeteries

Want to Buy a Cemetery?

Dropbox Carousel

BillionGraves iOS App Now Available in 25 Languages

FamilySearch Adds More Than 6.6 Million Indexed Records and Images to Collections from Austria, Brazil, England, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and the United States

Images of The Great Parchment Book are now Available Online

My Genealogy Hound adds 1,257 Family Biographies for McLean County, Illinois

Here & Then: The British Newspaper Archive’s Brand New Mobile App

How to Search findmypast

Technology Saves Recordings of the Past from Eternal Silence

Federation of Genealogical Societies calls for Award Nominations

Historical Documents Sell at Auction for $1.3 Million

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Sometimes I think everyone has a Dropbox account and for good reasons. It is a useful application for many purposes. This week Dropbox launched Carousel, a new application designed for backing up and organizing photos. I have used Carousel a bit this week (I've been busy! I flew to England.) but am impressed with it after my limited use.

Dropbox has always backed up digital photographs and copied them to other computers you specify, along with all sorts of other files. The new Carousel application simply adds new functionality that is not included in the basic Dropbox product.

Carousel combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them. Carousel sorts all these memories by event so you can easily travel back in time to any photo from any date. And, unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone. You can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.

Another new feature in Carousel is called "private conversations." It is a method of sharing entire events with friends and family. You can share hundreds of photos in the same amount of time it’d take to send just one by text.

Carousel's beautiful design, lightning-fast navigation and seamless Dropbox integration make it stand out. Carousel is available free of charge and is available today in the Android and Apple iOS App stores.

An Associated Press article written by Savannah King describes a very worthwhile project: clearing and restoring an overgrown cemetery on Strickland Drive in Gainesville, Georgia.
It is the fourth cemetery the mission has cleared in its 14 years. Community volunteers are helping to research the genealogy of those buried in the cemetery and will try to contact any surviving relatives.

You can read this interesting story at http://goo.gl/cXHH2z.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Genealogists are well aware of the disposition of wills, diaries, letters, and other personal items when a person dies. Indeed, the legal processes make sure that a person's personal affairs are wrapped up properly. If a will exists, those same legal processes have always made sure the wishes of the deceased are considered and implemented as closely as possible. However, today's new technologies add new challenges that are not yet covered by probate law and also not well documented for the family members of the deceased nor for the corporations that have possession of the deceased person's digital assets.

Today, many people tend not to keep things on paper; instead, their most intimate thoughts are likely to be online – in emails, social media posts, and personal blogs. I count myself as one of those "online people," and I suspect you may do the same. What happens to your Facebook pages, blog, online bank accounts, online stock brokerage accounts, or personal email correspondence after you pass away? How about your photos on Flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket, or other photo sharing web sites?

Perhaps the most important questions are: "What happens to all these online accounts if you die abruptly? Will your information remain available to your heirs? Will your heirs be able to find this information, and will they know what to do with it?"

Another question concerns the opposite problem: deleting or updating your publicly visible information after your demise. You might not want to leave a Facebook page online forever that says, "Having a great time here in Cancun. I wish I could stay here forever!"

If a deceased person owned a safe deposit box at the bank, that box belongs to his estate, and whoever controls the estate gets to open the box. The same is true of the deceased person's other assets: bank accounts, automobiles, and even personal possessions. Unfortunately, digital assets are not yet well defined in probate laws. Even so, there are steps you can take today to ensure that possession and control of your digital assets will be implemented in whatever method you wish.

The remainder of this article is for Plus Edition subscribers only. SUBSCRIBE NOW to read this article.

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findmypast.co.uk recently made radical changes to the site's search software that has generated a lot of negative feedback from users. However, the site's managers believe that the new search software is better even though it is quite different from the previous versions. With some understanding of how the new software works, users supposedly can find all the records they used to find and more.

The findmypast.co.uk blog now states, "The new findmypast search means that you can search across more record sets in a much more flexible way. Here, we provide some guidance to using the new search for broad searches or specific enquiries." The blog article then provides step-by-step instructions for using the new search capabilities.

You can read the article at http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/2014/how-to-search-findmypast/.

Life is difficult when you are an impoverished collector! A sale of hundreds of historical documents collected by a New York-based archivist has fetched than $1.3 million, including a $257,000 winning bid for one of the earliest Boston newspaper printings of the Declaration of Independence.

Bonhams in Manhattan says Monday's auction of 300 items from the Caren Archive brought a total of $1.37 million during a sale that attracted nearly 200 bidders from a dozen nations. The lots included newspapers, photographs, books and manuscripts from the 16th century through the 1960s.

Details may be found in an article at http://online.wsj.com/article/APf525ebb532614884a197549a203686e1.html.

Trent Toone has published an article in the Deseret News that describes the genealogy business. The article caught my eye because (1.) It describes how genealogy has become big business and (2.) because it describes the rapid growth of MyHeritage, the exclusive sponsor of this newsletter. Toone writes:

"Gilad Japhet launched MyHeritage.com out of his garage in 2005. He mortgaged his home, poured all his money into the business, and was not afraid to take a few risks.

"Almost a decade later, the startup MyHeritage has revenues in the tens of millions of dollars, continues to see significant growth and has more than 160 employees. Its 75 million users have built 1.5 billion profiles and millions of family trees in 40 different languages."

Carl Haber has won wide recognition, and a MacArthur Fellowship, for a revolutionary image-scanning technology that has the power to pull sound from rare and fragile recordings without touching them, and in so doing, to help protect some of the most vulnerable corners of this country’s aural heritage. Haber and his colleagues named their technology Image Reconstruct Erase Noise Etcetera, but nobody calls it that. Instead they use the acronym that was coined in tribute to that first 78: IRENE.

Over the last decade, scientists, audio historians, and museum curators around the country have together harnessed IRENE to make a slew of sensational discoveries. Among them was the first playback of one of the world’s earliest recordings of a human voice: a Frenchman singing “Au Claire de la Lune” in 1860, almost two decades before Edison invented the phonograph. Another discovery was the only known example of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice, recorded in 1885, stating with clarity and audible pride: “Hear my voice: Alexander Graham Bell.”

You can read the full story in an article by Jeremy Eichler in the Boston Globe at: http://goo.gl/L5AYuz.

My thanks to newsletter reader Pierre Clouthier for telling me about this story.

The following announcement was written by the folks at My Genealogy Hound:

The addition to the My Genealogy Hound website of 1,257 Family Biographies for McLean County, Illinois from the 1879 History of McLean County, Illinois has now been completed.

This brings the total number of family biographies available on the My Genealogy Hound website to more than 22,500 biographies from across 143 counties in 10 states. All of the biographies were extracted from a variety of county history and biographical volumes published between the 1870s and the early 1900s. In addition, a growing collection of more than 450 vintage county maps are also featured.

All of the resources on My Genealogy Hound are available completely free to all without any subscription, membership or password.

The My Genealogy Hound website home page is located at: www.MyGenealogyHound.com.

I seem to post a lot of articles like this one: I will be traveling for the next two weeks. This time I am going to attend the annual conference of the Guild of One-Name Studies in Ashford, Kent, England. You can read about the Guild's conference at http://www.one-name.org/conf2014_ashford.html.

I will then spend a few days enjoying a "mini-vacation" as an American tourist in England and then will fly from London to Seattle, Washington, apparently flying over the polar ice cap. I will attend an all-day session with the Tacoma-Pierce County Genealogical Society in Tacoma, Washington on April 19. You can read about the Tacoma-Pierce County Genealogical Society's Spring Seminar at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~watpcgs/seminar.html.

While I will be carrying an assortment of laptop computers, wi-fi and cellular networking equipment, plus a cell phone that also acts as a wireless modem, there is a chance that hardware malfunctions could stop the posting of new articles to this newsletter.

Since I will be busy 12 hours a day or more while at the conferences plus traveling the other days while in England, there may be some impact on the number of new articles published in this newsletter in the next two weeks. However, I hope to write about happenings at the conferences and probably will post a few pictures as well.

The Guild of One-Name Studies, affectionately known as GOONS, is the world's leading organisation for one-name studies. A one-name study is a project researching facts about a surname and all the people who have held it, as opposed to a particular pedigree (the ancestors of one person) or descendancy (the descendants of one person or couple). These folks are serious genealogists but typically concentrate on specific surnames rather than researching only their own ancestry. Of course, many GOONS members do both. While based in Britain, the Guild has members all over the world and is widely recognised as a centre of excellence in one-name studies.

You can read more about GOONS at http://www.one-name.org/ and you can view the conference schedule at http://www.one-name.org/conf2014_ashford.html.

As to next week's Plus Edition newsletter: I am not sure where I will be on Sunday evening nor what sort of Internet connectivity I will have, if any. Therefore, the scheduled Plus Edition mailing for April 13 might be delayed a bit.

So, I'm off. Cheerio!

Rutherford County, Tennessee, historians plan to use new technology to solve a big mystery: Whatever happened to the old cemeteries and family burial plots that once dotted the landscape across Rutherford County?

In the 1970s, Rutherford County historian Ernie Johns and others from the Historical Society of Rutherford County took pains to document nearly 800 cemeteries in the county, most of them plots on old family farms. Historians now want to use new technology to digitally map all the old cemeteries and family burial grounds in the county. The digital map of the burial sites will be shared with local planning commissions so historic cemeteries won't be destroyed by future development.

You can read the full story in an article by Michelle Willard in the Daily News Journal at http://goo.gl/73HI8O.

The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable The Irish Society is a major survey, compiled in 1639 by a Commission instituted under the Great Seal by Charles I, of all those estates in Derry managed by the City of London through the Irish Society and the City of London livery companies. It represents a hugely important source for the City of London’s role in the Protestant colonisation and administration of Ulster.

Damaged as the result of a fire at Guildhall in 1786, it has been unavailable to researchers for over 200 years. However, the manuscript has remained part of the City of London’s collections held at London Metropolitan Archives.’ 165 folios survived the fire, but the uneven shrinkage and distortion caused by the fire had rendered much of the text illegible. The parchment sheets have now been flattened as far as possible. Following this, digital imaging has been used to gain legibility and to enable digital access to the volume.

You can read more at http://goo.gl/SK98AL. The images of The Great Parchment Book may be found at http://www.greatparchmentbook.org.

My thanks to newsletter reader Richard Heaton for telling me about this online resource.

Here is a chance to purchase some land that is useful for genealogists: a cemetery. It even includes computerized records of all the "residents," an aid for people seeking genealogical information. Hopefully, the new owners will continues to keep such records.

The Trinity United Church of Christ owns the 9.5-acre Trinity Cemetery on East Broad Street in Telford, Pennsylvania. The property includes a pavilion and some woods in addition to the cemetery. The part that’s already laid out for cemetery use included 1,194 burials, 846 grave sites that are sold but unoccupied and 435 available grave sites that are not yet sold, according to information prepared for potential buyers. Another 5,000 grave sites could be added in the grove portion.

“Really, how many cemeteries do you ever hear about being for sale?” said Lester Freed, a member of the church’s cemetery committee. “We have an opportunity here for someone.”

You can read the full story in an article by Bob Keeler in the MontgomeryNews.com web site at http://goo.gl/Ki8Y1c.

My thanks to newsletter reader Roger Barnes for telling me about this story.

Please post any comments, questions, or corrections at the end of this article in the Standard Edition newsletter's web site.

The following announcement was written by the folks at FamilySearch:
April 3, 2014

FamilySearch has added more than 6.6 million indexed records and images to collections from Austria, Brazil, Dominican Republic, England, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Notable collection updates include the 1,631,210 indexed records from the Mexico, Hidalgo, Catholic Church Records, 1546–1971, collection; the 411,508 images from the U.S., Minnesota, County Marriages, 1860–1949, collection; and the 1,117,286 images from the Austria, Seigniorial Records, 1537–1920, collection. See the table below for the full list of updates. Search these diverse collections and more than 3.5 billion other records for free at FamilySearch.org.

Searchable historic records are made available on FamilySearch.org through the help of thousands of volunteers from around the world. These volunteers transcribe (index) information from digital copies of handwritten records to make them easily searchable online. More volunteers are needed (particularly those who can read foreign languages) to keep pace with the large number of digital images being published online at FamilySearch.org. Learn more about volunteering to help provide free access to the worldís historic genealogical records online at FamilySearch.org.

FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. FamilySearch is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Millions of people use FamilySearch records, resources, and services to learn more about their family history. To help in this great pursuit, FamilySearch and its predecessors have been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years. Patrons may access FamilySearch services and resources for free at FamilySearch.org or through more than 4,600 family history centers in 132 countries, including the main Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Collection	Indexed Records	Digital Images	Comments
Austria, Seigniorial Records, 1537–1920	0	1,117,286	Added images to an existing collection.
Brazil, Piauí, Civil Registration, 1875–2013	0	187,787	Added images to an existing collection.
Brazil, São Paulo, Immigration Cards, 1902–1980	0	751,108	Added images to an existing collection.
Dominican Republic, Civil Registration, 1801–2010	0	181,862	Added images to an existing collection.
England, Norfolk Register of Electors, 1844–1952	67,098	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
England, Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, Miscellaneous Records, 969–2007	0	107,121	Added images to an existing collection.
Mexico, Coahuila, Catholic Church Records, 1627–1978	44,393	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
Mexico, Hidalgo, Catholic Church Records, 1546–1971	1,631,210	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
Mexico, Puebla, Catholic Church Records, 1545–1977	76,270	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
Mexico, Sonora, Catholic Church Records, 1657–1994	16,594	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
Mexico, Zacatecas, Catholic Church Records, 1605–1980	32,331	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
Nicaragua, Civil Registration, 1809–2013	183,723	117,825	Added indexed records and images to an existing collection.
Portugal, Coimbra, Passport Registers and Application Files, 1835–1938	0	190,710	Added images to an existing collection.
Portugal, Viana do Castelo, Catholic Church Records, 1537–1911	0	616	Added images to an existing collection.
Spain, Province of Gerona, Municipal Records, 1566–1956	0	10,682	Added images to an existing collection.
Spain, Records of Widows and Orphans of Spanish Officers, 1833–1960	0	187,704	Added images to an existing collection.
Switzerland, Fribourg, Census, 1834	35,826	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
U.S., District of Columbia Marriages, 1811–1950	5,287	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
U.S., Idaho, Bonneville County Records, 1867–2012	0	3,160	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., Illinois, Lee County Records, 1830–1954	0	9,521	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., Minnesota, County Marriages, 1860–1949	0	411,508	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., New York, Orange County Probate Records, 1787–1938	0	153,000	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., New York, Queens County Probate Records, 1785–1950	0	156,679	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., North Carolina, Civil Action Court Papers, 1712–1970	0	114,332	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., North Carolina, County Marriages, 1762–1979	198,482	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.
U.S., Oregon, Douglas County Records, 1850–1983	0	192,530	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., Oregon, Grant County Records, 1851–1992	0	35,132	Added images to an existing collection.
U.S., South Carolina, Darlington County Records, 1798–1928	0	77,316	Added images to an existing collection.
United States Veterans Administration Pension Payment Cards, 1907–1933	357,892	0	Added indexed records to an existing collection.

Please post any comments, questions, or corrections at the end of this article in the Standard Edition newsletter's web site.

The following announcement was written by the folks at Billion Graves:

Last month we announced our international collaboration with MyHeritage to make BillionGraves available to every person in the world. Today we are happy to announce the release of our BillionGraves app in the iTunes markets in 25 languages!

That's right, the BillionGraves app is now available in 25 languages!! For those of you who have always wondered what the BG app looked like in Dutch, or Hebrew; well, now you'll be able to find out!

In this release there are also several bug fixes as well as enhancements to the on-device transcription features including handling of Hebrew dates.

The launch of the iOS app is only the first of many enhancements that will be coming very soon to BillionGraves. Some of these enhancement include the website and Android app available in 25 languages as well. Follow us on Facebook HERE to keep up to date with the latest news about new features!

Get the new BillionGraves app on iTunes NOW.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Most all paper manufactured in the past one hundred years or more contains acids. If left untreated, these acids will slowly decompose the paper itself. Old newspaper clippings or any other documents not printed on acid-free paper will eventually disintegrate. Today's newspapers usually contain more acids than other paper so newspapers are often the first to disintegrate. Luckily, modern science has created methods of slowing down or even stopping the decay of such paper.

The remainder of this article is for Plus Edition subscribers only. SUBSCRIBE NOW to read this article.

If you have a Plus Edition user ID and password, you can read the full article right now at no additional charge in this web site's Plus Edition at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=30120. This article will remain online for several weeks.

If you do not remember your Plus Edition user ID or password, you can retrieve them at http://www.eogn.com/wp/ and click on "Forgot password?"

If you decide to subscribe to the Plus Edition right now, you will be able to immediately read this article online. What sort of articles can you read in the Plus Edition? Click here to find out.

For more information about subscribing to the Plus Edition of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, visit http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/plusedition.html.

Everyone seems to have a Dropbox account. Hoping to build on top of the consumer-friendly service’s popularity, a new startup called Sitedrop allows you quickly turn any Dropbox folder into a website where you can visually showcase your work and collaborate with others. The collaboration capabilities strike me as an excellent method of working with siblings, cousins, and others in a group collaboration effort. The ability to publish your own private web site without advertisements or other control by a web hosting service also strikes me as an attractive offering.

Sitedrop is primarily a group sharing/collaboration tool as well as a personal web site publishing tool. Users are able to view, comment, favorite and even upload files to the online workspace just by dragging a file or link to a Dropbox folder.

After signing up for Sitedrop and authenticating with Dropbox, the files in your shared folder are visible online through a custom subdomain, where they can be displayed in lists or in a more visual format, such as slideshows. Just choose a folder in your computer's Dropbox folder to turn into a Sitedrop and manage it from your desktop.

Everything in Sitedrop is folder-based, so you can manage these workspaces the same way you manage your files on your desktop, and you can control whether or not others can upload files to your site, or only view those you’ve already shared. The creator of the shared Sitedrop service can easily password protect the contents to control who sees what. Once logged in, users can collaborate on the content via additional tools to share files and for commenting. The creator of the shared folder(s) can set folders to accept uploads from their invited guests. Users can even drag links to webpages into the appropriate Dropbox folder, which Sitedrop will then render online.

Sitedrop is free and offers users up to 5 online workspaces. Some time in the future, the company will begin to charge for additional sites, as well as for premium features, such as support for sharing video files, for example. However, today, there’s no limit on the workspace size, and there’s no other requirement for use beyond having a Dropbox account.

I don't see much in Sitedrop that a technically-savvy Dropbox user could not do on his or her own. Dropbox already has capabilities to share folders with only selected users and to publish a web site. That web site can even be passord protected. However, some technical skill is required to do all that in Dropbox alone. Sitedrop simplifies the process, allowing most anyone with modest technical skills to do the same. I can see Sitedrop being used by family societies, genealogy societies, and by informal groups of siblings and cousins.

You can learn more at http://sitedrop.com. The bottom of that page contains several links to publicly-available Sitedrop sites, showing some of the possibilities of this software.

My thanks to newsletter reader Everett Stonebraker for telling me about Sitedrop.

Iceland is a small island nation with approximately 320,000 citizens. With that many people, you would think you could find a date for Saturday night. However, most people don't want to date a close cousin. Iceland has a unique problem with cousins. In Iceland, most everyone is distantly related to everyone else.

The majority of people in Iceland are descended from a very small number of Norse settlers arrived in A.D. 874 and, as such, it’s not uncommon to meet a complete stranger who happens to be your third cousin or other distant relative. In fact, almost every Icelandic citizen since the 9th century has been documented and is listed in what is probably the most complete genealogy of any nation. The Icelandic sagas, written about 1,000 years ago, all begin with page after page of genealogy. It was the common man documenting his own history. That tradition of documenting your ancestors has been continued throughout the centuries.

The database Íslendingabók or, The Book of Icelanders, contains genealogical information about the inhabitants of Iceland, dating more than 1,200 years back. The project’s goal is to trace all known family connections between Icelanders from the time of the settlement of Iceland to present time. It presently contains the ancestry of 95% of Icelanders with many of those family trees going back to the 9th century.

To determine if a potential date is a possible cousin, Icelanders often check the Íslendingabók database. Now a smartphone app will do that for you quickly and easily. Three students from the University of Iceland created a smartphone app, The Islendiga-App, that allows you to bump your phone against another person’s phone, similar to how bump-to-push contact exchange features work, and immediately see your genealogical (if any) relation to the person in question. There is even an alarm feature that lets you know if you share a grandparent.

Although the students created the app more as a tool for genealogical inquiry, they were the first to admit that the racier application of figuring out if you were related to a potential date was far more interesting than showing your grandmother how to research genealogy on her tablet and included an alarm system that would immediately alert you if the person you entered into the application was too close to you on the family tree.

Íslendingabók is now available for Android and the developers reportedly are working on an iPhone and iPad version. It is only available in the Icelandic language.

Writing in The Jersey Journal, Daniel Klein describes his experiences with Ancestry.com's member-contributed family trees. He describes the problem caused by novice genealogists using information from a reasonably reputable source (The US Census) and applying it to the wrong person. Now other people have accepted this erroneous information as gospel and it perpetuates over and over. You can read Daniel Klein's article at http://blog.nj.com/tracing_your_roots/2014/04/post_6.html.

I will quickly add that Klein writes only about his experiences with Ancestry.com but those of us who have been looking at online genealogy sites for years know that the problem is more widespread. It is not a problem solely on Ancestry.com, but also on all genealogy web sites that accept and republish user-contributed family trees without question or verification. Indeed, no organization can verify the information contributed by users. That would be a Herculean task.

I do have to agree with the one positive statement in Klein's article: "...use them as a guide and not gospel. Take all information you find with a grain of salt, examine it closely, ask questions, check sources and then do all those things over again until it hits all of the Genealogical Proof Standard’s points."

We tend to treat this as a modern problem of the Internet. However, I will invite anyone to go to a genealogy library and look at the books published before the invention of the World Wide Web, especially the self-published books. Many of them contain huge errors and offer no source citations where the information was found. This is not a new problem.

I still use Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, FamilySearch.org, WeRelate.org, WikiTree.com, and any other genealogy web site that I think might be able to help. I expect to keep using them for many more years. However, unless there is an image of the original document included, I treat all genealogy information online and in books as CLUES ABOUT WHAT MIGHT BE FACTUAL.

I have to agree with the first part of Daniel Klein's title: Ancestry is an Excellent Genealogy Resource...

I still love online sites as they have saved me a lot of time by giving me clues. However, I always attempt to verify or disprove the claim by independent research.

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse still lives as if it is 1938. In her apartment on the second floor of a building in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, constructed in 1918, Teeuwisse lives with all the “modern” amenities of a 1930s woman. She describes her space as “a typical working-class house with a front room, back room, bedroom, ‘wet room’ (bathroom) and kitchen.”

The cozy apartment is filled with Dutch furniture from the 1920s and 30s, with a fireplace and radio and no television. “Making sure that everything is at least pre-1945 gives the home automatically the right atmosphere, and of course I’ve done a lot of research to see how I can recreate some of the details correctly,” Teeuwisse said. She runs a 1920s vacuum cleaner over the rugs, and washes the floors with vinegar, scrubbing on her hands and knees. She does all her laundry by hand using a washboard, a block of soap, bleach and a brush – “the smell is lovely,” she said.

“The only modern thing I have in my house is my computer; I need it for my work,” she said. “I also have a modern fridge, but only because I haven’t found a nice 1930s one yet and they no longer deliver ice for ice boxes.”

You can read the full story in an article by Ilyce R. Glink at http://goo.gl/iYvWoB.

How many of us would give up today's conveniences? Not me!

My grandfather owned a horse and a farm wagon, roughly the 1890s equivalent of the pickup truck of today. He traveled around the farming village where he lived at 3 or 4 miles per hour. When he needed to travel a longer distance, such as to the nearby city, he rode a train that reached speeds as high as 35 mph. Granddad never bought one of those new-fangled automobiles.

My father was of “the modern generation.” His first car was a well-used Model A Ford, and he went on to own an assortment of Fords, Plymouths, DeSotos, and Dodges over the years. Oh yes, one year when he worked a lot of overtime in the local factory, he bought a Cadillac. He drove most everywhere he wanted to go. He drove 50 or 60 miles an hour most everywhere. I don’t remember him ever taking a train.

Of course, I am of a still more “modern age,” and I love sports cars. I have owned a number of them, and I presently own a Corvette that is fast. Very fast. I am told it will travel 160 miles per hour although I cannot vouch for that from experience. Prior to that automobile, I owned others capable of similar speeds.

I used to commute to the city every day and sometimes drove a very powerful and very fast sports car to work every day, traveling down the local superhighway during the height of the rush hour. Many times I averaged 3 or 4 miles an hour for extended periods of time. The traffic into and out of the city often crawls at that speed for hours.

Driving a 6-speed manual transmission isn't much fun in stop-and-go traffic. I eventually gave up on driving the car to work. I started taking the train. The local commuter rail averages 35 mph on a daily commute.

I am more like my grandfather than I want to be.

Recently a researcher compared the travel times in the city of London through the years. He noticed that the amount of time it took to go from point A to point B in horse-and-buggy days was the same as it was after automobiles became common. Then he noticed that the time required today to travel the same routes is actually worse during rush hour than it was in horse-and-buggy days.

Newer and more efficient mechanisms attract throngs of people who then clog the system. The results nullify the improvements. The large amount of horse manure in the streets has been replaced by airborne hydrocarbons; both are unwanted byproducts of our transportation systems of the day.

Are we really better off?

The following was written by the folks at the Federation of Genealogical Societies:

April 3, 2014 – Austin, TX. The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) announces the successful launch of its 2014 Webinar Series with the engaging presentation given by Jen Baldwin on “Capturing the Community: Using Twitter to Connect, Engage and Educate in Genealogy.” Recorded on Monday, March 31, 2014, this informative webinar on the uses of Twitter for genealogy by both family history researchers and genealogical societies is now available to view at the FGS Webinars page.

And remember the War of 1812 Webinar Series is available for a limited time only. Do not miss your chance to learn from two leading experts in the field, J. Mark Lowe, CG, FUGA, and Craig Scott, MA, CG, as they discuss “Discovering Local & State Militia Records” and “Researching in the Post War Records of 1812,” respectively. This phenomenal series is only available at the FGS Webinars page until Sunday, April 27, 2014.

Melissa Shimkus, FGS Education Chair, states, "Jen Baldwin provides a superb explanation on the merits of Twitter and its ease of use for everyone, from those just starting their genealogical search to experts in the field, and for every genealogical society and organization."

Shimkus continues, "Mark Lowe and Craig Scott are both passionate supporters of the War of 1812 Preserve the Pensions Project. Their depth of knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject matter is unsurpassed and should not be missed."

About the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS)

The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) was founded in 1976 and represents the members of hundreds of genealogical societies. FGS links the genealogical community by helping genealogical societies strengthen and grow through resources available online, FGS Forum magazine (filled with articles pertaining to society management and genealogical news), and Society Strategy Series papers, covering topics about effectively operating a genealogical society. FGS also links the genealogical community through its annual conference -- four days of excellent lectures, including one full day devoted to society management topics. To learn more visit http://www.fgs.org.

Follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/FGSgenealogy), Twitter (http://www.facebook.com/FGSgenealogy) and on our blog at (http://voice.fgs.org).

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Today's lifestyles often mean that families are separated by hundreds of miles, if not thousands. Grandparents and grandchildren may live in different parts of the country or even different parts of the world. The U.S. Department of State estimates 6.3 million Americans live abroad, and more than 65 million travel overseas each year. Indeed, many people travel frequently for business or pleasure, resulting in them being separated for days at a time from family members. Yet today's technology allows distant parents and grandparents to read their children or grandchildren bedtime stories, to draw with them, and to be with them—virtually.

For instance, I spend winters about 1,200 miles from my grandchildren, and yet I video conference with them frequently. Doing so is easy and free. Well, you do have to have an Internet connection and some hardware that you probably already own. I guess that it is not free technically but is available "at no extra charge," using equipment that most of us already own. Add in a bit of free software and you, too, can be (virtually) with your loved ones daily.

The following is a list of applications that will allow you talk with, and even see, anyone else in the world who has a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Many of these services are hardware agnostic. That is, Windows and Macintosh computers and Android tablets and phones and Apple iPhones and iPads may all communicate with each other with no issues at all.

The remainder of this article is for Plus Edition subscribers only. SUBSCRIBE NOW to read this article.

If you have a Plus Edition user ID and password, you can read the full article right now at no additional charge in this web site's Plus Edition at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=30091. This article will remain online for several weeks.

If you do not remember your Plus Edition user ID or password, you can retrieve them at http://www.eogn.com/wp/ and click on "Forgot password?"

If you decide to subscribe to the Plus Edition right now, you will be able to immediately read this article online. What sort of articles can you read in the Plus Edition? Click here to find out.

For more information about subscribing to the Plus Edition of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, visit http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/plusedition.html.

The web site of the National Archives of the U.K. now contains a few pages that are previews of what the newly-redesigned site will look like. The pages are part of a beta test, meaning that not all pages will work perfectly. The web site's developers at The National Archives know there are minor bugs and are asking the public to help identify those gremlins so the problems can be corrected before the entire site goes live. The pages are optimized for viewing on both desktop and handheld systems.

Quoting from The National Archives Blog:

Please bear in mind this is a test run, and you may experience performance issues at times or encounter incomplete content. We will continue to make refinements throughout the beta phase.

You can read more at http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/beta-release-new-web-pages.