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Premium Episode 93 – Quick Technology Gems
Date Published: November 18, 2012
[display_podcast]Click here to download the Show Notes pdf
NEWS:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – Genealogy Requests Service
Government genealogy service reveals family history
Hear my story: Rootstech Interview: Lisa Louise Cooke
February 2011
By Joan Miller, Luxegen Genealogy and Family History Blog
USCIS – Genealogy – http://www.uscis.gov
Click here to go directly to the Genealogy Requests page
Quick Technology Gems
GEM: Scrapbook Pages on Facebook
http://www.wollage.com
A lot of us post our favorite photos on Facebook but sometimes it would be fun to be a little more creative with them. Maybe crop out the bad parts of some pictures, layer some related shots together in a collage, and even add a title. Like a scrapbook page on Facebook.
That’s where Wollage <wollage.com> comes in. Wollage syncs with your Facebook account to let you create online scrapbook pages. You can create an account in about 30 seconds. The program will find your Facebook account for you and import all your pictures. You can also upload images from your computer.
If you’re used to the fancy fonts and options of real scrapbooking software, you’ll find Wollage really primitive. But if you’re looking for a quick, easy way to make a simple photo collage and share it on Facebook or Twitter, give it a try. I could see myself posting a celebration collage for my grandbaby’s first birthday, or maybe a memorial collage on my grandparents’ anniversary. You could post a quick visual synopsis of a family reunion, or a collage of current snapshots for an online holiday greeting….There’s a lot you could do with this in a little bit of time.
Here’s a sample:
GEM: Convert Your Genealogy Files
http://www.online-convert.com
More and more, people are turning to the latest technologies to preserve and share their family history: oral history interviews, photographs, documents, even digitized family history books. But we have to keep up with changes in file formats so we’ll always be able to read our files. And sometimes the great sharing apps we want to use require a specific file format—not the one we are using.
Here’s a gem of a website that can help: Online-Convert.com <www.online-convert.com>. They make it simple and free to convert your files to new and different formats. For example, you can turn a sound file recorded by your computer or recording device into the popular MP3 format, so much easier to share with everyone! You can turn your word-processing document into the nearly-universally readable PDF format, or even into an e-book format readable on Kindle or other e-readers!
The site will recommend tools you can download to do conversions yourself, or they will do them for you. Basic use of the site is free; you can subscribe to premium features for a fee. On the site’s blog, which hasn’t been updated in a while, there’s some great information on how to capture audio material from a video, like if you want to grab grandma’s voice from her oral history interview to voice over in a PowerPoint slide show.
GEM: TimeHop Your Own Story
http://www.timehop.com
If you’re into personal history as much as family history, there’s a website that makes it easy to look back in time. TimeHop <timehop.com> will send you a daily email of your activities on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram from exactly a year ago. Of course, you can look back through your own histories, but think how much time it would take on each site to find your posts or tweets from a year ago today.
For some of us, this might be TMI: too much information. But for others—especially those who use social media as kind of a diary—this is a great way to get a little nostalgic, put the past into perspective, or simply catch up with your past self.
GEM: Manage Your To-Do Lists
https://workflowy.com/
There’s a site out there for those of us who want to put our to-do lists in a simple digital format. Workflowy.com <workflowy.com> lets us manage our to-dos by category—like work, errands, social life and of course genealogy—and assign priorities to each task. You can collaborate with others who use Workflowy, which is great for planning family reunions or doing research together…anything you need to share responsibility for.
It just takes a minute to create a free account. Once you do, you’ll automatically see a simple tutorial screen pop up. It walks you through the steps of creating your to-do lists, tagging them, sharing them with other, etc. My favorite step? Marking a task complete! When you do, a very satisfying line appears drawn through that task, and you can move on to the next thing.
Workflowy has been available for use on your computer or laptop for a while, and a lot of users just love the way it helps them manage their time. They just announced (October 1) the availability of Workflowy for iPhone and iPad (there’s not an Android version) for free at the iTunes store.
The iTunes store says it’s compatible with iPhone (3GS, 4, 4S, 5), iPod touch (3rd, 4th and 5th generation) and iPad, and requires iOS 4.3 or later.
Gem: AccountKiller Cleans Your Web Presence
http://www.accountkiller.com
If you’re like many of us, you’ve had accounts at websites you’ve left behind. But sometimes we leave a trail we don’t mean to. And sometimes deleting our accounts isn’t as easy as it should be. That’s when you log onto AccountKiller.com
Follow the instructions there to delete an old WordPress account, for example, or Hypster or Skype, all of which are listed on AccountKiller’s Blacklist page as sites that make it difficult to drop your presence there.
AccountKiller is also a great reference to use before deciding whether to create a presence on a site, too. Check both the Blacklist page and the Whitelist page of sites that make it easy to delete your account. (Good news: Facebook and Google are both on the Whitelist page!) These aren’t comprehensive lists of every subscription site out there, mostly just the more popular ones. Still, it’s worth checking before you click “join” at the next site you visit.
From the historical perspective: think twice about deleting an old blog, especially if you used it as a diary or family history record. If you don’t keep it up any more, that’s fine. Just create one final post saying your blog is retired, and point to any new blog or site you’re using. If you really want to delete the content, consider downloading it first to a book format with a service like Blog2Print <www.blog2print.com >, where you can print a 20-page softcover book for about $15.
Take a funny look at forgotten password
VIDEO: Don Friesen: Forgot Password
GEM: Grab Digitized Data with Free OCR App
http://www.free-ocr.com
Genealogists rely more and more on digitized data these days, whether in a census record we pull from Ancestry, a pension file from Fold3 or a passage from a county history book we’ve found on Internet Archive. Here’s the question: have you ever tried to copy and paste the data you’ve found in a digitized record?
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and here’s the reason why. Think about a photograph of a tombstone. You don’t expect to be able to copy and paste the tombstone inscription off the image, right? A photograph doesn’t recognize or store text it captures as text—just as a picture. The same is true with the average scanned document. It’s just a picture.
In order to pull recognizable text from a digitized image, it needs to have been scanned with OCR technology, or “optical character recognition,” which means just what it says—it recognizes the characters it sees. A lot of digitized data these days is scanned with OCR technology. But there’s still some out there that isn’t.
That’s where Free OCR <www.free-ocr.com> comes in. Go to this site and upload your digital image up to 2 MB (JPG, GIF, TIF, BMPs and even PDFs, though it only scans the first page). The site will extract the text from it and put it into an editable plain text format.
There are limitations. This site requires images have a resolution of at least 150 dpi. A lot of web images (including screen shots) are only 72 dpi, so these don’t work as well. Don’t count on this software to decode old handwritten script you can hardly read yourself. It works best with type, especially type written in serif fonts, or fonts with those little decorative flourishes on the tails of characters (a lot of web design fonts are san serif fonts).
Here’s example of fonts with and without serifs:
Free OCR is a free, easy-to-use site. I love that you don’t have to create an account or even provide your email address. A fantastic bonus for family historians is that the capture tool recognizes a lot of languages. Go ahead and download that passage in Czech, Finnish, Indonesian, Latvian, Portuguese, Slovak or Vietnamese (see site for full list of languages). Then use an online translator like Google Translate to see what it says.
Fr
ee OCR supports Windows XP and Vista and OS X.
Book Resource: The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox
GEM: Rag Linen
http://www.raglinen.com
Rag Linen www.raglinen.com is your go-to source for newspaper coverage of the Revolutionary War. You might not think of newspapers as a resource for that era. After all, that was a long time ago, and newspapers are fragile.Well, some newspapers are less fragile than others. As luck would have it, pre-1870s newspapers were printed on linen rag, a durable material made from the pulp of real linen. Hence the name of the blog: Linen Rag.
Andrlik has amassed a huge collection of Revolutionary War-era newspapers, which will be featured in his upcoming book (Nov 2012) Reporting the Revolutionary War: Before It was History, It Was News.
We can certainly use his website as a resource. He describes it as “an educational archive of rare and historic newspapers that serve as the first drafts of history and the critical primary source material for historians, authors and educators.” And, we might add, genealogists! I’ve talked before about gathering information on battles from newspapers. This is where you find contemporary accounts of what happened and what the feelings about it were in the local area. While this isn’t a digital newspaper archive like we might find elsewhere, this is a fantastic resource for learning more about the role newspapers have played in American history: perfect fodder for a family historian looking to understand the sources we use. Take a look at his great blog post on February 18, 2012.
Book Resource: How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers
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Episode 144 – Digitize, Organize, and Archive
Today’s gem focuses on a challenge that we all face as family historians – getting organized, archiving all of our stuff, and digitizing materials an d photos. I know that’s biting off a big chunk, but it’s such an important one. And in this episode I’m going to start to break it down for your with the help of the Family Curator, Denise Levenick who has written a book called How to Archive Family Keepsakes. She’s got lots of practical advice to share.
NEWS:
FamilySearch recently announced that their U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Community Project is Half-way to its 2012 Goal of 30 Million Records
In August of this year, FamilySearch announced its next major U.S. community project-U.S. Immigration and Naturalization. The project will create an extensive, free, online collection of U.S. passenger lists, border crossing records, naturalization records, and more-invaluable to genealogy researchers. See what U.S. Immigration and Naturalization projects are currently underway, or check on their status at FamilySearch.org/immigration.
You can join the community of online indexers and arbitrators helping to make passenger lists and naturalization records freely searchable on familysearch.org.
Current and Completed Projects
To view a list of currently available indexing projects, along with their record language and completion percentage, visit the FamilySearch indexing updates page. To learn more about individual projects, view the FamilySearch projects page.
Canadian Military Records
Ancestry.ca has also announced that they have launched some New Canadian Military Records Collections
Read about it on my Blog: Limited Time Free Access to Canadian Military Records, and New Records Online
Google recently announced that Google Maps just got the biggest Street View update ever, doubling the number of special collections and updating over 250,000 miles of roads around the world. Google has increased Street View coverage in Macau, Singapore, Sweden, the U.S., Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Canada. And they are launching special collections in South Africa, Japan, Spain, France, Brazil and Mexico, among others. .
They’ve also recently updated the Google Earth satellite imagery database. This refresh to the imagery has now been updated for 17 cities and 112 countries/regions. So Google Earth has never been better for genealogy research. And of course if you would like to learn more about what Google Earth can do for you as a genealogist, check out my free YouTube videos which show you what you can learn in Google Earth for Genealogy Video Tutorial Series.
Genealogy Gems Premium Membership Update
I’m happy to let all of you Premium members know that I’ve put together a quick little video that will walk you through the process of setting up your Premium podcast feed in iTunes.You’ll find a link on the premium episodes page once you’ve signed in that will take you to the video and instructions for setting up your Premium iTunes subscription.
I have also added a video recording of one my most popular classes to the Premium Videos collection. It’s called How the Genealogist Can Remember Everything with Evernote.
From Premium Member Kelly: “Thank you so much for your podcast on Evernote. I’ve been on YouTube watching videos about it but they were hard to follow and more advanced or to techie. Your podcast was easy to follow and went over the basics and I really appreciate that. I think I finally ready to try it.”
If you would like to be able to watch the Evernote class from the comfort of your own home please join us as a Genealogy Gems Premium Member which you can do at www.genealogygems.com
MAILBOX:
From Patience: “I have noticed in your podcast, other’s podcasts, blogs, and at workshops I have attended that there is a concern about the next generation. I do understand, but I wanted to share with you my experience in hopes of easing everyone’s worries. I am 23 years old, and let me tell you I stick out like a sore thumb at workshops as I usually am the youngest by at least 30 years. That being said when I started researching I met one of my cousins on ancestry.com, and we really hit it off we have all the same interests and are like long lost twins. For a while, I assumed that she was retired, and much much older than I, but after several emails, I found out she is only two years older than me!!!
I too worry about my generation, but I think after some maturing, most will at least have an appreciation for the past, and everything it has to offer, or at least I hope…But all I know is that there are two very pretty twenty-something girls thousands of miles apart that would rather research and learn that go to parties…so that seems pretty hopeful I think.”
Jennifer Takes the iPad on the Road
“Kudos for turning me on to a nifty iPad shortcut. Your latest book has some tips in the back, which is where, of course, I skipped to after dutifully reading the first three chapters or so. The tips about swiping the comma/exclamation point to create an apostrophe, and the other shortcut for quotation marks, are so great! I will no doubt find many other useful items when I return to reading. Honestly, your books are so full of wonderful information, I have to take a break before my head explodes (not pretty).”
Pat Oxley, a Genealogist on Facebook posted her review of my new book on Facebook last week. “Despite another day of coughing and basically feeling yuk, I bought and downloaded Lisa Louise Cooke‘s new book “Turn your iPad into a Genealogy Powerhouse.” It is FABULOUS! I worked my way through the book, taking notes and then downloaded and played with some of the apps she suggested! Thank you Lisa Louise! I will say it’s a terrific book even if you’re NOT a genealogist. Many of her suggested apps could be applied to many different hobbies and interests. You can buy it through Lulu.com.”
GEM: Interview with author Denise Levenick, The Family Curator
Archiving, organizing and digitizing family treasures is one of the greatest challenges for genealogists. In her book How to Archive Family Keepsakes: Learn How to Preserve Family Photos, Memorabilia and Genealogy Records, Denise Levenick presents a game plan that breaks down the steps and provides a clear picture of the end goal. The worksheets and checklists provide the kind of practical advice I look for in “how to” books. No fluff, just common sense, and usable information that lead to success.
Get your copy of Denise’s book How to Archive Family Keepsakes: Learn How to Preserve Family Photos, Memorabilia and Genealogy Records and start getting organized now!
Denise May Levenick is a writer, researcher, and speaker with a passion for preserving and sharing family treasures of all kinds. She is the author of How to Archive Family Keepsakes and creator of The Family Curator blog http://www.TheFamilyCurator.com, voted one of the 40 Best Genealogy Blogs in 2010 and 2011.
Gem: One More Thing
From Tina in the UK: “Your recent blog post about items found when clearing out a house reminded me of my most significant find in my stepfather’s attic. He died in July 2009 and my mother wanted to clear out and sell their big house and move to a retirement flat to be near the family in Bristol. I should explain that my mother and father divorced when I was a baby and my stepfather was like a father to me. We threw out masses of stuff – he never did, EVER! – but this was mostly correspondence, company reports for all his shares etc which we sifted through without much of note being found. Then, in the attic there were two extraordinary finds:
(1) a box full of the small notebooks he kept from his schooldays till a few years before he died…early ones and especially the ones of his years in the Army in India and Burma…The later notebooks are a record of his expenses – with dates, items and expenses which brought back many memories (eg doll for Tina – bought in New York on holiday in 1958 – I remember it well, it was a sort of pre-Barbie!). Every ice-cream he ever bought us – there was a LOT of ice-cream (he loved it)!
(2) my grandfather’s old attache case – full of letters from my stepfather’s mother between about 1978 and her death in 1993. There were hundreds of them – and yes, I read every single one and they have formed the basis of the story of her life (yes, she also left a small diary, a collection of her own recipes of family favourites, and a very simple family tree), which I am now writing…what VERY little there was seemed to be in answer to some of his questions…It just shows how the smallest things can provide clues.”
Thank you Tina for sharing this – it certainly does remind us that clues can come from anywhere. But it also reminds us of something else – that while it’s wonderful to have our history recorded so it can be remembered, sometimes it’s the smallest things that are remembered most: Like ice cream. I think I’m going to sign off now and take my grandson Davy out for a cone. I hope he remembers it, because I know I will. Who will you invite out for a an ice cream and spend your precious time with today?
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