Collecting random bits of genealogy news.
Your Rights
Terry J. Allen has an article about a topic that many genealogists should be aware of, called Information is power. It’s pretty frightening, and unfortunately if everything goes through as planned, getting any of it reversed is going to almost be impossible. States are fighting it, althought not out of any love for genealogists, but rather out of costs and whether or not it’s a federal or state issue.
Louise Gray has an article, Priceless pieces of history left to gather dust, in The Scotsman, about very valuable items that are just gathering dust in underground storerooms and warehouses, and they are in danger of being lost. There is a lot of valuable information that genealogists researching Scottish heritage would be very interested in.
Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter has word that there is a bill being sponsored in the Tennessee state legislature that would “require property owners to grant access to graveyards on their property to visitors. The visitors are defined as “family members, descendants and close friends of the deceased persons buried there.” Visits would be legal for the purposes of visits the graves, cemetery maintenance, genealogical research, and for possible future burials.”
Kimberly Blair has written a touching story in the Pensacola News Journal (FL), about an 83 year old woman who was taken/illegally bought when she was a baby, and never knew her blood relatives until her daughter tracked them down 83 years later using a lot of patience and the internet.
Yesterday I mentioned an article about some old records found in a high school and donated to a local history organization. In an ironic twist, the Reporter-Times (Martinsville, Indiana) has an article by Amy Hillenburg that is the exact opposite: County record disposal concerns historian. This is one of those areas where even though genealogists and historians (and archivists if we want to get technical) have all of these modern tools for preserving important documents, those documents can still be easily lost forever.