Collecting random bits of genealogy news.
Genealogy Hints & Tips
Aliya Sternstein has an article on FCW.com, Open platform preferred for digital archives, about the government taking steps to make sure that future historians, genealogists, researchers, etc., will have access to current and future government and national archives.
Yahoo has updated their translation site – babelfish.yahoo.com. If you need webpages or snippets of text translated, such as historical documents or newspaper articles, you can paste them in (either the URL or the 150 words of text) and it’ll spit out the translated text.
Very handy when working with international records.
Update: From a genealogical perspective, Yahoo inherited Babel Fish from Overture, who bought it with AltaVista. This is the actual, official launch under the Yahoo brand.
Schelly Talalay Dardashti has a very interesting article, It’s All Relative: Getting down to it in Ynetnews, if you happen to be into Jewish genealogy. It’s about an upcoming Jewish genealogy conference that is huge.
According to Google Maps Mania, Google Maps has added street maps for most/all of Europe – good news for those who use the service in their look-ups and what not. Some people are saying that not all parts were updated, although it maybe more of a localization/server issue (i.e. the changes haven’t been pushed out to the servers they are using).
You can read more (as well as the changes) here.
A very interesting article in The Herald Bulletin, by Melanie D. Hayes, about a genealogist receiving a civil war medal that an ancestor had earned, and that nobody in the family had heard about. His great-great-grandfather was killed in action in Virginia in 1864, and was awarded a medal as a result.
The article mentions that just for West Virginia Civil War soldiers alone, there were over 5,000 medals that went unclaimed.