Google celebrated Earth Day by releasing Google Earth 7.1 and announcing some great new content! And there are three reasons you will want to make the upgrade:
1. New Hands-Free Navigation Technology
The big news with version 7.1 is Leap Motion support, a touch-free 3d technology that lets you “navigate Google earth with simple hand gestures.” The Leap Motion Controller ($79.99) will start shipping mid-July, so you’ve got some time to get to know Google Earth a little better before you start flying around in it like this:
You KNOW I have to get me some of that!
2. More 3D City Views There’s also exciting new 3D data in Google Earth, most notably for New York City. But there’s also more imagery for other cities around the world: Innsbruck, Austria; Dijon, France; Cagliari, Italy and the Spanish cities of San Sebastian, Santander, Pamplona, Manresa and Burgos. Other U.S. cities with 3D coverage include Miami, FL; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Encinitas, CA and Spokane, WA.
3. The Addition of the 50th Country to Google Maps’ popular Street View Feature
You can now view 50 countries buy lasix medication online with Google Maps’ popular Street View feature. The newest nations to be added are Hungary and Lesotho (a tiny country within South Africa), and there’s new or updated coverage for Poland, Romania, France, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Thailand and other locations worldwide. Google calls this “the largest single update of Street View imagery we’ve ever pushed, including new and updated imagery for nearly 350,000 miles of roads across 14 countries.”
Help for Using Google Earth for Genealogy
How can you access these fabulous features, both for fun virtual travel and for seriously fun genealogy research? Upload the latest version of Google Earth for free (for PC, Mac or Linux). Then check out my Google Earth for Genealogy 2-CD Bundle. There’s a reason is this one of my best-selling presentations: Google Earth is one of the best genealogy research tools around! In these CD presentations, I show you how to locate and map ancestral homesteads; use historical map overlays; identify where old photos were taken; create 3D models of ancestral locations; create custom family history tours and much more.
How you speak can reveal much about your heritage.
If you’ve ever lived in or visited the U.S. or Canada, you already know we don’t all speak English the same way. But did you know that we actually speak eight different major dialects in North America?
The website North American English Dialects has put those dialects on the map. In fact, it even traces their origins and spread: 2 dialects from the west and 6 from the east, reflecting the way the English language originally spread across the continent.
Creator Rick Aschmann notes how we say our “r’s”, the 19 vowel sounds we use, and all those other great tiny variations that go into our Southern drawl or “broad-A” Boston-speak. Aschmann is just doing this project for fun, but he takes his map pretty seriously. He even asks anyone with a “native accent” to upload a sound file of themselves speaking.
It’s fun to look at this map and think about how our American or Canadian buy pain medication uk ancestors may have pronounced things differently than we do (or the same, depending on how far we’ve wandered). If your families have migrated within the past 50 to 100 years, click on some of the sound samples from your old stomping grounds and see if you catch some familiar cadences or phrases.
A Huffington Post writer says he could look at this map for hours and not get bored, and I agree! It’s complicated–there are lots of color codes and lines and such–but our speech is complicated, too. Some cities or small regions need their own enlarged maps to show neighborhood-level differences.
You can learn more about how our speech reveals our heritage and family history by listening to my interview with Dr. Robert Leonard Ph.D., Forensic Linguist in Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 89. Dr. Leonard has been featured on the TV series Forensic Files and has a fascinating personal history as well.
Exactly one hundred years ago on April 22, a time capsule was buried in the basement of the First English Lutheran Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.A. During a ceremony this April 22, a crowd that included the governor oversaw the opening of the “Century Chest.”
The entire ceremony was captured on video. Skip ahead to the good part, where they start opening the packages in the enormous box, at about 1 hour and 10 minutes into the video. You’ll see a prize-winning plate from the state fair, an old desk telephone with its bright green cord still wrapped around it, an Edison phonograph machine, artwork, photos, newspaper articles, clothing, a pen used by U.S. President McKinley to sign the Free Homes Bill and more!
My question for you: what would YOU put in a 100-year time capsule? Leave your comments.
The Danish Broadcasting Corporation is filming its own version of “Who Do You Think You Are?”–which we’ve learned via two U.S. newspapers!
According to the Bureau County Republican and the NewsTribune (Illinois Valley), popular Danish actress Suzanne Bjerrehuus was in the area filming stories of her great-great-grandparents, who emigrated from Denmark to the American Midwest in 1869. (They apparently left behind one of their six children, from whom Bjerrehuus descends.)
As part of her whirlwind family history tour, Bjerrehuus reportedly visited the Danish Immigrant Museum in Elk Horn, Iowa. If you have Danish roots, you should probably check out their website. They have a Family History & Genealogy Center, which specializes in helping people find links to their Danish immigrant past. They provide research and translation services and they’ve helped people connect with long-lost relatives in both Denmark and the United States.
FamilySearch.org keeps adding records at a phenomenal pace, thanks in large part to the efforts of thousands of volunteer indexers around the world. In fact, they recently celebrated the billionth record indexed since they started community indexing in September 2006.
Here’s a list of online collections with records recently added or improved. Do you notice that this new list is “browsable only?” That means you can scroll through them online, but there’s not a searchable index yet. FamilySearch staff and volunteers are imaging record sets even faster than indexers can get them indexed!
Want to help? Join over 133,000 active indexers who index projects of their choice, from U.S. naturalizations to Brazilian church records. Join the effort here.
presentations: Google Earth is one of the best genealogy research tools around! In these CD presentations, I show you how to locate and map ancestral homesteads; use historical map overlays; identify where old photos were taken; create 3D models of ancestral locations; create custom family history tours and much more.
