How Much Privacy Have We Lost?

The Hartford Courant has an article from The Chicago Tribune, How Much Privacy Have We Lost? (which I couldn’t find on the Tribune’s site), by Eric Benderoff and Jon Van, about just how much privacy we have lost in this day and age. It’s a two-page article and worth a read – even as we are happy the internet can help companies provide incredible amounts of genealogy information, they are also providing incredible amounts of personal information about living individuals.

Microsoft Office 2007 – Try It Out

If you live and breathe Microsoft Office and/or Outlook and OneNote (and Publisher even) when it comes to correspondence, notes, presentations, biographies, etc., for your genealogy work, and you are a Windows user (or Mac with the appropriate Windows virtualization software) and interested in where Office is going, Microsoft has made the Office 2007 Beta 2 available for public users.

You can get it (and the free license keys) here: www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx

It’s got a radical new interface, and quite a few other things have changed. It runs okay if you are using it under a Mac setup with Parallels Desktop for Mac.

It expires on February 1st, 2007. Keep in mind, it’s highly recommended you don’t use this for “production” work, i.e., don’t install over your old Office, and don’t load and save documents you have created with older versions of Office without first backing all of them up. That said, it’s interesting to see where they are going with this – obviously they are going after more online-collaboration and business, but still, it’s interesting to look at it. Personally, it doesn’t offer me anything that I absolutely need – I’ve been using other word processors for my normal word processing, and for publishing newsletters, etc., I’ve been using Apple’s Pages, but I do like to check things out.

If you don’t want to go through with downloading it or ordering it by mail, you can read eWeek’s review of it.

New Jersey Awards Counties/Municipalities Millions for Records Preservation

With all of the talk lately of states trying to close off public access to many records, we have this glimmer of good news – The Associated Press/Newsday are reporting that New Jersey has designated millions of dollars for the preservation of public records and archives. All 21 counties and 40 municipalities are set to receive the money, which can be used for everything from new employees designated for the preservation, new equipment, duplication services, and training.

Disturbed Cemetery Descendants Traced

No, the descendants aren’t disturbed, it was the people buried in the cemetery that were disturbed. Don’t you love headlines like that? Jim Wallace of WLAB News (Albany, Valdosta, and Thomasville, Georgia) has news of a cemetery that was accidently disturbed a few years ago (it was harrowed over, and some of the tombstones were nearly destroyed and/or lost. They have managed to track down who was buried there, as well as descendants, and will be contacting the descendants. If you think it might concern you – two of the names mentioned are Roby and Turner, you should check the article out and get in touch with the Dougherty County DA.

Affiliates of ancestors Sometimes Offer Clues

In her column, Genealogy Today: Affiliates of ancestors sometimes offer clues, in The Columbian (Washington), Connie Lenzen has a good column about something many overlook – the areas where our ancestors originated from. To be specific, the area after our ancestors left – chances are friends and relatives were left behind, and it maybe a good resource that many people overlook. Particularly important is surnames that may have changed slightly.