Collecting random bits of genealogy news.
Genealogy software tidbits
In yet another acquisition, MyFamily.com, Inc., has acquired another company to help expand their services. They’ve acquired Encounter Technologies, which came out of the Georgia Institute of Technology Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC).
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.
The Genealogue celebrated its 1000th post monday with a listing of many of the genealogy blogs/sites that Chris reads. You should check it out – most, if not all, of the sites he mentioned deserve a place in your bookmarks (I’m not saying that just because RG is mentioned either!).
In George G. Morgan’s “Along Those Lines” column, he has a great article, The Basics of Archival Document Storage that covers something that all of us run into, but that many don’t pay attention to – storing and caring for old documents. If you are like me, you have become the repository for many documents that others didn’t want or care about.
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.