Collecting random bits of genealogy news.
Genealogy software tidbits
Although it’s been mentioned in the past (and wasn’t just recently created), a little blurb on deseretnews.com is a good reminder about the Perosnal Ancestral File (PAF) Tutorial available at BYU. It does look like it’s been updated.
Many people still use PAF, especially those who are looking to accomplish certain tasks, and so it’s worth repeating – if you use PAF or are thinking about it, check out this tutorial:
If you are looking for a printable map of the United States (or several actually), for one genealogy project or another (perhaps tracking migration, where everybody is living now, etc.), then look no further than NationalAtlas.gov – The maps are in several different formats/sizes, and there are even individual state maps.
A compliment to these is the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas, that I’ve mentioned before, that covers historical maps. The PCL collection has a large range of maps covering various periods of history (not just the US, but the world as well).
Tom Viti has a good article, Technology and the Library, in the Westwood Press (MA), concerning how modern technology has changed the way in which people use libraries, as well as how the libraries themselves have changed how they do things, including helping with inter-library loans (more and more library systems are doing this).
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 If you need webpages or snippets of text translated, such as historical documents or newspaper articles, you can paste them in (either the URL or the 150 words of text) and it’ll spit out the translated text.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.