Saturday Serendipity (January 9, 2016)

Saturday Serendipity returns this week with my first post of 2016. Having been traveling for the holidays and now concentrating on the long, painful process of reorganizing over 29,000 genealogy photos and document images (see December 19, 2015 post), I have had to put aside my blogging to get on top of things. Now that I am back to some genealogy and history reading, here are just a few recommended reads for this weekend.

1. The Weekly Genealogist of NEHGS highlighted a piece at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History blog that summarized the top ten most read of its blog posts in 2015. 

2.  Do you have any ancestors or relatives who lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts? Check out this article about the steps being taken to preserve record books and documents going back almost 400 years.  Once the material is restored and digitized, they will be available via computer; until then the documents are still available to the public as long as a town employee is present during handling.

3.  As genealogists, we are always open to locating new sources for potentially useful and informative data to better inform our genealogies. The rapidly moving era of digitization brings us new research sources almost daily. Rebecca Onion at The Vault posted two pieces about digital history projects that "dazzled" her this past year.  You can see the second of her two posts and you can get a link to her initial post here. As a teaser of what you can find, how about an online Reno, Nevada divorce history or a mapping of the occupation by the Army after Appomatox and during Reconstruction?

4.  The last issue of NGS Magazine for 2015 (Vol. 41, Number 4, Oct. -- Dec. 2015) was largely devoted to writing. As Editor Darcie Hind Posz put it, the goal of the issue was to "offer inspiration, practical tools, and new approaches to genealogical writing." The issue is worth the time it takes to read it.

5.  And speaking of NGS, UpFront With NGS blog had a recent post about the status and future of microfilm records.  You can read the brief post and get links to more extensive pieces here.

6.  And finally, here is an interesting video that only lasts 1 minute. It shows via a morphing map of the U.S. how our population grew and moved from the first census in 1790 through the most recent census in 2010.

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Copyright 2016, John D. Tew

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