Saturday Serendipity (January 28, 2017)

After missing a Saturday Serendipity posting last week due to a very early departure to participate in the Women's March on the Mall in D.C., here are a few recommended reads for this weekend.

1.  Up Front With NGS blog had two posts of interest this week. The first will be of great interest to those with Catholic ancestors who lived in the Archdiocese of Boston (the city of Boston and surrounding towns) between 1789 and 1900.  NEHGS and the Archdiocese have agreed to collaborate in a multi-year project to bring millions of sacramental records from more than 100 parishes into a searchable database online! You can read more about this project here and get a link for how you could get involved by contributing to the project.     

2.  The second interesting post on UpFront this week is a bit of obscure history about reenslavement petitions in Virginia.  While I was not born or raised in Virginia, I have lived in Virginia for a few decades now. I had never heard of this part of Virginia history. You can read here more about this odd legal process whereby free slaves could petition to be reenslaved . . . and find out why someone might have wanted to do such a thing.   

3.  James Tanner of Genealogy's Star blog posted an interesting and useful piece this past Thursday titled, "Mortality for Genealogists."  It is worth a read and you can get directly to it here.     

4.  Confession . . . I plead guilty to being one of those self-appointed helpful people who cannot resist re-shelving a library reference book once I have used it (often despite signs that ask me not to).  Amy Johnson Crow explains why I -- and others like me -- might be committing a genealogy funding misdemeanor (if not a genealogy funding felony) these days.  I pledge to mend my ways when I see a no re-shelving sign. Read here why we should all pay more attention to these signs and follow the directions.         

5.  No link to read for this item, but what's fair is fair and so this is a necessary update on my part. I have posted previously about my disappointment with the new owners of Family Tree Maker software (Software MacKiev) due to the long delay in releasing the promised FREE upgrade to those of us who had the last Ancestry version of  FTM (so that we could seamlessly continue using FTM and sync it with our online Ancestry trees). On New Year's Eve day I received the long-awaited notice that the time had come and the update was available. Out of fairness I now report that soon after getting the notice and required link I downloaded the update.  
I followed the easy instructions and it worked smoothly and quickly. I did have a question afterward about purchase of a so-called Family Pack Upgrade for use on multiple machines and I was able to get a quick and clarifying explanation about what could and could not be done with a Family Pack purchase.  The explanation and near immediate agreement to refund the cost of my mistaken Family Pack purchase were much appreciated.  Weeks into my use of the long-promised free FTM Upgrade, I do not think it is premature to say "Thank you!" to Software MacKiev . . . the wait appears to have been worth it.          
  
6.  And finally, if you were told that a friend was going on a history tour of the United States this coming summer and planned to visit -- among other places -- Sucker, Puke, Fly Up the Creek, Sage Hen, Foxes, Gun Flints, Tooth Pick, and Chaw Bacon, would you want to go along?  Would you have any idea where he or she was going? Read this post at The Vault and you will.  😃 
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Copyright 2017, John D. Tew

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