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James Tanner's Blog (321)

FamilySearch Record Search more than doubles the number of collections

In a little heralded and unannounced move, FamilySearch

has added more than double the number o records to its Record

Search
Database. The number of collections went from 163 to 341

today, 27 April 2010. The list is incredible. Some of the countries that

have new records have never had an online presence previously, such as

Uruguay,… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 27, 2010 at 6:20pm — No Comments

Record Search adds almost 4 million Non-conformist records

FamilySearch's

Record Search
has added a huge index of 3,920,183 records of

English Non-conformists held at the National Archives in London. These

records are known as RG4 through 8. For example, RG4 are

registers… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 27, 2010 at 7:24am — No Comments

What do I need to know and do to restore damaged photos -- Part Three

In thinking about my last post, I realized that I had mentioned that all digital editing is destructive. That issue needs to be explained further especially to anyone involved in restoring scanned

images of old photographs.


Before taking even the first step in restoring old photos, you should understand what happens when an image is scanned or otherwise digitized. The

digitization process involves creating a numerical representation of the

information…
Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 26, 2010 at 9:46pm — No Comments

What do I need to know and do to restore damaged photographs? Part Two

Restoring old photographs





The photo above was scanned from small, 3 x 5 inch photo. As you can see the

original is badly creased and torn. After spending some time with Adobe

Photoshop, here is the first pass at removing some of the most obvious

defects: (Click on the images to get a full size view).…

Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 25, 2010 at 7:19pm — No Comments

What do I need to restore damaged photographs? Part One



In the recent episode of Who Do

You Think You Are
, Susan Sarandon carried around a old laminated

photo of her grandmother. With today's technology, she could have had

the old photo scanned and restored, however, that was never mentioned in

the episode. Neither did they mention, later on in the… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 25, 2010 at 8:54am — No Comments

Please read the interview with David E. Rencher on NFS

Randy Seaver,

of Genea-Musings

has a multi-part

interview with David E. Rencher
, Chief Genealogical Officer for…

Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 23, 2010 at 8:35am — No Comments

Who was Ralph Carum Tanner? And why do I care?

In my last post, I related some of the problems found in an Ancestry.com

Family Tree containing information supposedly about my

Great-grandfather, Henry Martin Tanner. Primary in those problems was

the addition of three extra children to the Henry Martin/Eliza Ellen

Tanner Family including one "Ralph Carum Tanner." In searching the Web and in

New… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 21, 2010 at 9:41pm — No Comments

Contradictions in genealogical research

Here is an interesting observation. I did a search for my

Great-grandfather, Henry Martin Tanner, on Ancestry.com. This is not an

observation about Ancestry.com as such, but more about the legions of

people who post their family records online. When I look at the entries

for Henry Tanner, I find what I already know, that he had two wives (and

at the same time also). But that is not the issue, one of the

contributors to Ancestry.com has Henry Tanner listed with his… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 21, 2010 at 9:30am — 1 Comment

RootsMagic 4 Releases Update with FamilySearch AutoMatch

With the newest update to RootsMagic 4,

the program becomes the first software program to automatically match

people with their counterparts on New FamilySearch. In an announcement dated

March 26, 2009, the company;s news release stated:



As… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 20, 2010 at 9:17am — No Comments

Clicking on green arrows

My Great-grandmother, Mary Ann Linton Morgan, spent most of her adult

life completely involved in genealogy. Back in the early to mid 1900s

she used the limited resources she had available in Salt Lake City, Utah

combined with the U.S. Mail, to research thousands of individuals.

After inheriting her huge files, I spent another ten years or so

digitizing and entering all of the information into computer files.

Grandmother Morgan had three children before her husband… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 19, 2010 at 8:07pm — No Comments

Impressions of the iPad

Let's just say that I spend most of my waking hours working on a

computer and good number of hours each week in genealogy related tasks. I

am always interested at anything that might make my life a little

faster or easier, although I would debate whether or not computers

really make life any easier. Since I have been working on a hourly rate

and keeping track of my time for over 35 years, I am acutely aware of

how much time it takes to perform tasks on a computer.… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 18, 2010 at 8:52pm — No Comments

Why I use Apple computers especially for genealogy

t is about time to explain why I use Apple computers for genealogy and

all the rest of my computing. The obvious first question is why waste

time/money/frustration with using a computer to do Windows 7 in

emulation when I can be a "just as fast" PC for less money? The

beginning response is that the Quad Core i5 iMac is a lot

faster than even I need for my thousands of graphic files, videos, audio

files… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 17, 2010 at 5:35pm — No Comments

Apples big and small for genealogy -- Part One

Apple Inc. is a topic that draws both praise and criticism. In case you have been on an expedition to somewhere they don't have telephone, TV or Internet service, you may not be aware that Apple has just released a new product called the iPad. Apple now sells six, soon to be seven, major product lines, MacBook laptop computers, Macintosh desktop computers,…

Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 16, 2010 at 2:00pm — No Comments

Searching for perfect in genealogy programs

Actually, the perfect genealogy software program doesn't really exist,

but like running after rainbows, you just never know, you might finally

find what you are looking for. In response to a comment on one of my

posts, I decided to compile a wish list of features I would like to see

in my perfect genealogy program. All of the perfect features fall into

three categories; necessary, useful and imaginary. You will likely

recognize some or all of these features in many… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 16, 2010 at 8:42am — No Comments

Closing in on Kerlin's Well

In 1829 or 1830 www.upa.pdx.edu/IMS/currentprojects/TAHv3/.../Ewing_Young.pdf">Captain

Ewing Young led a large trapping party west from Taos, which at

the time was still part of Mexico, over the Mogollon

Plateau (now the Colorado Plateau) and west along the south side of the

Grand Canyon… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 15, 2010 at 9:07am — No Comments

What do we mean by features in genealogy programs?

Looking at almost any advertisement or Webpage for a genealogy program and somewhere it will mention the product's "features." Generally, these features are functions of the programs that

are highlighted by the promotional materials. For one example, if you

look at the Family Tree Maker Website,

you will see a link to product features. Often, the features of…
Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 14, 2010 at 7:40pm — 2 Comments

More Apple Genealogy

Apparently, I was not specific enough in my last post about Apple

Genealogy. John Newmark

in his TransylvanianDutch

Genealogy & Family History
blog had a lot of comments. All of

his comments, as usual, are very good and to the point. I do agree with

his… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 13, 2010 at 9:14pm — No Comments

Apple for genealogy

There is a commonly inaccurate perception that there are no programs for

doing genealogy on Apple Macintosh computers. As it turns out, the list

of available programs is very limited, and there are barely enough

offerings to make the Macintosh a viable platform for those doing their

family history. But there are at least two or three programs that

compete favorably with anything available on the Windows/PC type

computers.



The now old Personal Ancestral… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 13, 2010 at 8:30am — No Comments

Apple Computers and genealogy -- all things great and small

My earliest attempts to use computers for genealogy began with an Apple

II with a primitive program that was entirely text based and used a dot

matrix printer with fan-fold paper. I remember that I ended up

re-entering my entire file a number of times either due to data crashes

or to incompatible upgrades. The amount of information about each

individual and family was minimal, but the promise of organization and

convenience was worth the effort to keep entering… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 12, 2010 at 9:03am — No Comments

Using information from New FamilySearch

A few days ago, I had a patron at the Mesa Regional Family History

Center ask me about a problem she was having with New FamilySearch.

She had a huge pile of printouts from her Personal Ancestral File

program and was methodically going through each one and comparing the

information to that found in New FamilySearch. She was… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 9, 2010 at 8:37am — No Comments

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