Week In Review

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

• Deborah Large Fox at Help! The Faerie Folk Hid My Ancestors discusses Ireland's new Certificate of Irish Heritage.  This certificate is meant for anyone not born in Ireland who can document their ancestry back to Ireland. More details on eligibility and application procedures can be found at Irish Central. I doubt they will accept the bio my great grandfather Barney wrote as proof, but there are several members of my mishpochah with a better argument. (Since the certificate doesn't come with any entitlements, they might not really care how reliable the 'proof' is.)

• Jeff Baker, in a guest post at Geneabloggers, discusses Is Ancestry.com a Scan? 6 Common Misperceptions

• MIchael Hait at Planting the Seeds shared his First Encounter with Indirect Evidence

• Michael John Neill at RootDig discusses The Anonymous Census Entry

• The Ancestry Insider discusses the differences between census enumerations in Darned Second Enumerations 

• Passive Guy at The Passive Voice discusses the adventures of Dorothy Parker's Ashes, as well as offers some legal insight (not advice) into estates.

• Letters of Note shared a 1990 exchange of letters between Marge Simpson and Barbara Bush.

Technology and Social Networks

• Todd Wasserman at Mashable discusses Amazon's announcement that Kindle E-books are now available at 11,000 Libraries. 

• Melissa Mannon at ArchivesInfo discusses The Value and Pitfall of Tagging Tweets.  Her discussion of the confusion that can be generated due to lack of uniformity in hashtags reminded me of a local controversy when several St. Louisan Twitter users got upset because some Twitter users in Lebanon were using #stl to refer to the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.  Today, both uses co-exist, and there is international tolerance. 

•  Google moved Google+ from "Field Trial" stage to "Beta," and access to the social network is no longer 'by invite only."

•  Facebook announced some major updates at their annual Developer's Conference

Other Weekly Link Lists

• Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak's Genealogy Round Up at MSS's Roots World
• Deb Ruth's Follow Friday Gems at Adventures in Genealogy
• Elizabeth O'Neal's Best Bytes at Little Bytes of Life
• Randy Seaver's Thursday and Friday "Good" Genea-Reads at GeneaMusings
• Diane Haddad's Genealogy News Corral at Genealogy Insider
• Ruth Blair's Ruth's Recommendations at The Passionate Genealogist