James Tanner's Blog – September 2010 Archive (7)

When I was young I was often fascinated with the visual effect of

staring through a window screen. If you focused your eyes just right,

the screen could appear to be a solid surface. But if you looked beyond

the screen, the outside world became visible. Sometimes in research,

especially in genealogy, we need to see through the screen to the larger

world outside of our family. Once we have seen the world, we can then

refocus on the screen (our family) with renewed… Continue

I tend to look at an awful lot of genealogy and some of it is really

awful. Here is a compilation of a few of the most obvious and easily

rectified errors:



1. Failing to look for and record the correct full name of an ancestor.

One of the side benefits of looking at a large collection of user

submitted family trees is that it is fairly easy to compare the

submissions of any one individual and see the variations. In this case, I

have used… Continue

People's lives are inherently messy, no matter how short or how long and

trying to completely quantify a life is probably unattainable. Even

huge biographies, like Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln do not do justice

to a life. So what can we hope to accomplish as genealogists? How much

information is enough? Where do we stop? Or do we ever stop in

collecting information? If you are like me, you will always believe that

there is one more document and one more place to… Continue

Interlibrary Loan is one of the most underused resources for

genealogists. As I teach classes at the Mesa Arizona Regional Family

History Center I frequently ask the class participants if they are aware

of the interlibrary loan process. Usually, only one or two out of

twenty or more have even heard of borrowing books from remote libraries.

In our own Mesa Public Library, the Interlibrary Loan selection appears

on the individual login screen for registered users… Continue

In a recent post, DearMyrtle asked the question "Being Politically Correct: What should we do as historians?"

I think this question falls into the category of the inclusion of

controversial information into our genealogies. Should we "edit" history

to take out all the undesirable and difficult subjects? What about the

criminals, the illegitimate children and the poor and… Continue

Indications are that FamilySearch must be getting closer to releasing the new version of their FamilySearch.org

website. This last week or so, a banner appeared on the original site

inviting users to try the new beta version. There is also an invitation

on the FamilyHistory Library startup page to try the beta version of the

Family History Library Catalog which is incorporated in the beta site.



The beta site for… Continue

A while back, I wrote a post about connecting the genealogist to the

research. Now, I am going to turn that around and talk about another

side of the issue, connecting the research to the genealogist. In other

words, how do we get the information we find out to the genealogical

community without being lost in the background noise of the Internet?



A article from Ancestry Magazine from November/December 2000 called

"Share and Beware -- Sharing Genealogy in the… Continue