Saturday Serendipity (September 24, 2016)

After another brief hiatus, Saturday Serendipity returns this week with the following recommended items of interest . . .

1.   If you have not seen the series by James Tanner of Genealogy's Star blog, "Using Smart Technology to Jump-Start Your Genealogical Research," you can check out Part Eleven here and search back for the earlier parts. Well worth the effort.  

2.   UpFront With NGS, the blog of the National Genealogical Society, had a useful post abut the new availability of digitized newspapers from NEH (the National Endowment for the Humanities). You can read the news here.
  
3.  For the eighth year Bill West of West in New England blog is holding the "Great Genealogy Poetry Challenge." Read about Bill's annual challenge and get the rules here . . . then consider submitting a poem before the November 17th deadline.  

4.  Nancy Messier of My Ancestors and Me blog had a post this week to celebrate International Centenarians Day this past Thursday. Nancy highlights two centenarians in her family, but she also includes a very interesting list of inventions and major events her 100+ year-old relatives saw during their lifetimes.  See the post and Nancy's list here.   
   
5.  Before the computers and fancy programs available to genealogists today, it was all done manually by hand drawings, handwriting, manual typewriters, etc. Barbara Pole of Life From the Roots blog posted an interesting illustrated piece about the various kinds of family trees created in her family.  Have a look here.

6.  Every once in a while it is good to be reminded that very, very few things in life are truly permanent -- and this might especially apply to things in the new era of digital technology. How often do we replace/upgrade our computers? How often do we have to "upgrade" the software and applications we use? How often do we contemplate the unthinkable and consider what would happen to our genealogy trees and all the accompanying data, documents, and photos if stored with commercial genealogy companies or stored in the cloud? Janine Adams has thought about these matters and offers some thoughts worth reviewing yet again. Read Janine's solution here.  [P.S.  I use Family TreeMaker residing on my computer, periodic hard copy runs of my trees, periodic copy to CD/DVDs that go into our safe deposit box, hard copy book volumes of my blog, and a 1.5 TB external backup disk . . . and still wonder if I have everything covered!] 

7.  Do you have ancestors or relatives who worked in the lumber camps of Pennsylvania in the late 19th Century? If so, then you will want to look at the photos posted on The Vault by Rebecca Onion.  The photos might make nice illustrations (with proper permission of course) for your family genealogy to show the conditions in such camps. And who knows, maybe you might get really, really lucky and be able to identify someone from your tree in the photographs. Check out the article and the photos here.       

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Copyright 2016, John D. Tew

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