Month: April 2006

Ancestry Doubles Historical Newspaper Collection

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Ancestry.com is reporting that they’ve doubled their newspaper collection to a 1,000 different newspapers with over 16 million pages indexed.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found it slightly difficult to search through there – it’s great if it has the name indexed, but when I have to manually search the newspaper page (it doesn’t really give you exactly where it’s at) it can be tedious.

What’d I’d like is the ability to have the pages in text or Adobe Acrobat/PDF. I have found information (obituaries, etc.), but it would be great if there was a text index to make it easier (and have it matched with an image of the page so that you have it in context.

I want somebody to do an iTunes for newspapers. I would gladly pay a small amount for old newspapers if I could get both text and a good scan of the page, and if it was incredibly easy to find, store (I guess that’s what Clooz is for), and refer back to.

You can read more about it at Ancestry.com.

A Quick Look at MacPAF

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MacPAF is (I think) nearing a public release. MacPAF if modeled after Personal Ancestral File (PAF) for Mac, and for those who are waiting to upgrade their genealogy software and who are looking for a replacement for PAF for Mac, this might just be the application you are looking for. While there are more mature Mac genealogy applications (and the list has grown to a dozen or so active Mac applications, which really surprised me), and that have more features, MacPAF is more geared towards those used to PAF for Mac.

Civil War Veterans’ Descendants Meet

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Dwight Dana has an article in The Morning News Online (Florence, SC), Descendants of two Civil War veterans meet about, what else, descendants of Civil War veterans meeting.

Interesting story, and one that will hopefully become more common as people do more genealogy research and dig up the stories of their ancestors. Sarah Allen mentions one of the things she wants to do before she dies is find the family Bible, and hopefully if enough people in the Florence area see the article, she might just get that chance.