Saturday Serendipity (September 3, 2016)

Saturday Serendipity is posted this week from the beautiful coast of Maine with the items of interest following some Maine views.

1.   UpFront With NGS posted again about the important issue of privacy vs. access and this time provides a link to the Power Point slides for the recent presentation on the subject by the Records Preservation & Access Committee (RPAC) at the FGS Springfield 2016. You can view the post and get the link here. Another post at UpFront this week dealt with digitization of records from the War of 1812.  The private funding for this important and massive project has been declared complete, but (as the post points out) pension applications for service in the war are already available online. You can see the post and get the link to a search function for finding pension applications of your ancestors and relatives here.

2.  In the continuing saga of Randy Seaver's experiment in testing the updating of Ancestry member tree indexing, Randy reported this week that the indexing of his test tree updates has occurred. You can read Randy's good news update on his experiment here. 
  
3.  Janine Adams of Organize Your Family History blog has a brief, but illustrative, post this week about the importance of doing your own browsing and not relying solely on the work of others -- and particularly of the well-intentioned, but sometimes error-ridden, transcriptions by others. Read Janine's "Sometimes you gotta browse" post here.

4.  What do the old S&H Green Stamps have to do with genealogy today? To find out, have a look at James Tanner's interesting post this week about genealogical source evaluation at Genealogy's Star blog. You can read his post here. 
   
5.  Laura Mattingly of The Old Trunk in the Attic blog has posted another old photo of an unidentified little girl.  Have a look here and see if you can offer any assistance that might help Laura reunite the photo with a family member.    


_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

Copyright 2016, John D. Tew

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _