Week in Review

Below are some noteworthy news stories and blog posts I have read in the past week that deal with my overlapping interests in Genealogy, History, Heritage, and Technology.

Genealogy Research

• Michael John Neill at RootDig discusses Percents and Genealogy, and how overall statistics are irrelevant when dealing with specific cases. Agreed. I could probably find some statistic saying that 90%, or higher, of Ashkenazic Jewish families didn't name a child after a living relative between Year X and Year Y. But that doesn't mean Sol X's grandfather, Sol, had to be dead when Sol was born. There are always exceptions.

• The New York Times asks, "Who's on the Family Tree?"  Randy Seaver at GeneaMusings provides an overview of the discussion this news story sparked on the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) mailing list.

• A genealogist provides some assistance to the police on a 50 year old murder case. [h/t EOGN] 

History

• The MoSGA Messenger looks at the historical question: Did the Seceding States Commit Treason?

Photographs

• Thanks to footnoteMaven's post, I discovered the DearPhotograph tumblr site this week. Open to submissions, the idea of the site is to take old photographs to their original location, and take a photograph of the photograph, held up so that the old background merges with the new background, and then to write a brief letter to the photograph.  Visit the site to understand what I am saying. 

• Recently John Foster was given "two large boxes of century old glass plate negatives" and he has begun sharing some of these pre-1900 images of St. Louis on his blog.  A book proposal is in the works.
  

Technology / Social Networking

• Do you find yourself overloaded with PDF documents on your computer?  MakeUseOf looks at 3 PDF Document Management tools for Organizing Your Research.

• Melanie Pinola at LifeHacker looks at several online syncing alternatives. [h/t EOGN]

• The Library of Congress's Digital Preservation blog considers the best way to create a digital time capsule

• As part of Google+, Google will be rebranding Blogger and Picassa as Google Blogs and Google Photos

• Facebook announced its partnership with Skype allowing users to video chat with their friends.

•  As Google+ catches on, some are looking at it as a possible blogging tool.  Digg founder, Kevin Rose, has forwarded his personal domain KevinRose.com to his Goggle+ page. If you aren't on Google+ yet, you can view his posts, and all the comments, but can't participate.  Science Fiction editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a few issues with using it as a blog replacment.  And if your blog readers aren't among the early adopters, they're not going to be happy about not being able to comment.

A few Google+ pages for those who want to see what's going on:

• Randall Munroe, webcartoonist, XKCD
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden, SF editor, publisher
• Neil Gaiman, author
• Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com
• Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com
• Tom Anderson, retired, co-founder of MySpace
• Alyssa Milano, actress
• John Newmark, I had to include myself in this list

Carnivals

• History Carnival 100 at Walking the Berkshires

• 31st Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy at Jessica's GeneJournal

• 107th Carnival of Genealogy at West in New England

Animals have genealogy, too!

• Polar Bears have Irish ancestry.

• A chicken adopts some baby ostriches

Other Weekly Link Lists

• Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs at Genea-Musings

• Greta Koehl's Follow Friday at Greta's Genealogy Bog

• Jen's Follow Friday at Climbing My Family Tree

• Lynn Palermo's Monday Morning Mentions at The Armchair Genealogist