Month: April 2006

Virtual Tour of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906

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The USGS (US Geological Survey, not the US Genealogical Survey!) and Google have teamed up to provide a virtual tour of the “Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906”, and it helps put things in perspective. For many genealogists who have done research in regards to that area of California, it’s caused quite a few problems. It’s one of those major events where many important records are lost (not just genealogy-related but historical as well), people are uprooted, people died and were buried in unmarked graves, etc.

You can access it at the USGS site

More on Macs, Windows

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Another major announcement about Macs, and kind of a follow-up to yesterday’s announcements. Again, from MG – Virtualization for Mac OS X – basically it’s a way to run Windows inside of Mac OS X at “near-native” speeds, so that one doesn’t have to reboot into Windows.

What this means, is for diehards like me, I can use the new Macs, but keep my collection of Windows genealogy software that I am still hanging onto, and easily run them whenever I need to.

RANDOM THOUGHTS: A “Found” Cemetery is a Treasure

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Good article, RANDOM THOUGHTS: A “found” cemetery is a treasure, in the Crossville Chronicle, (Cumberland County, TN), by Dorothy Copus Brush, about people who go out of there way to clean up cemeteries as well as document them. Without these people over the past decades, there is no telling how much important genealogical information would have been lost, as well as families being able to find some closure and/or care for the graves of their ancestors.

New Macs From Apple – Run Windows and Mac OS X!

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This caught me off guard – a story at MacGenealogy.org about Apple releasing a utility that would allow people who buy the new Macs (that have Intel CPUs) to boot both Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X. Not at the same time, mind you, and not like VirtualPC where you have Windows running slugishly under Mac OS X in its own environment.

I’ve been a Mac user for a while. Genealogy is the one area that I never fully “switched”. I had too much data in Windows-based genealogy programs, and at the time there wasn’t much in the way of Mac genealogy software (there was kind of a low-point a few years back where only a few companies/individuals kept things going on the Mac genealogy front). My solution was to both keep a PC around, as well as VirtualPC (which, in my mind is basically a Windows emulator, it allows you to run Windows, and thus Windows applications, under Mac OS).

Things have changed big-time in the Mac community, especially the Mac genealogy community. There appear to be ten or eleven active Mac genealogy applications, both from companies and individuals, including several free ones. Last year, Steve Jobs announced that Macs are moving to Intel, and that Mac OS X was available for Intel Macs (or MacIntels or whatever you want to call them).

Read more

Library Gets Another Tool to Aid Genealogy Searches

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Krista Corner has an article in the Havre Daily News (North-Central Montana), Library gets another tool to aid genealogy searches, about some work being done to increase the genealogy resources for a library, and the area as a whole, including some unique local genealogy records. Eventually it looks like it will be available online, which will be welcome news to those who are outside of Montana (I’ve driven through Montana, it’s a great state, but it has its quirks).