Saturday Serendipity (February 18, 2017)

Here are a few recommended reads for this weekend.

1.  The big news out of RootsTech 2017 is that Old News USA is new, non-fake news!  Old News USA won top honors in the "Innovator Showdown. " Old News USA is an app that allows users to search for and discover family members in historical US newspapers using the Library of Congress "Chronicling America" collection of more than 11 million newspaper pages!  Find out more about this new app, other competitors, and get links here at the UpFront With NGS blog.       

2.  Wow . . . just plain WOW!  As a fairly new and minuscule blogger with a mere 142,000 views, I am amazed to learn that blogger James Tanner of the excellent Genealogy's Star blog will pass 4 million page views sometime today!  And when his other two blogs are included, his view total will exceed 5.3 million views.  Congratulations to Mr. Tanner for a job exceedingly well done!!  

3.  It is no wonder that James Tanner's blog has so many dedicated followers.  Speaking of Mr. Tanner and Genealogy's Star blog, UpFront With NGS blog gave Mr. Tanner a shout out two days ago about one of  his past posts, "Finding Unusual and Unique Sources: The Traits of a Great Genealogist."  Read the UpFront piece and get a link to Mr. Tanner's full post here.    

4.  Heather Rojo of Nutfield Genealogy blog posted her interview with Edwin Strickland, a scheduled speaker at the April 2017 NERGC ( the bi-annual conference of the New England Regional Genealogy Consortium).  Mr. Strickland will be speaking about reading old handwriting -- a subject many of us need help with at one time or another. I will be attending my first NERGC in Springfield, Massachusetts this year and Mr. Strickland's workshop is one block I might very well attend. Read Heather's interview here.               

5.  Thomas MacEntee of GeneaBloggers fame posted a notice yesterday that Ancestry.com is offering FREE access to 1 billion records from the UK this weekend.  You should check out his post here if you have any UK roots you would like to explore for free. Mr. MacEntee provides what I believe is the longest, most comprehensive listing of available data collections I have ever seen.  Beware that you might tire of scrolling through the massive listing, but you will certainly be able to target your searches after doing so.  Read the post here. 

6.  This must be the week for long, comprehensive listings of resources!  Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings blog has done the service of compiling a list (with links) to all the blog posts about the recently completed RootsTech 2017. I can only imagine the time and effort that went into capturing all this information. If you need to find out anything about what transpired at RootsTech 2017, I am sure you can find it among the extensive posts listed by Randy.  See his post and get links here.  [NOTE: Randy has post-dated this blog post for Sunday, February 26, 2017 so it stays at the top of his blog for a week. You have not pulled a Rip Van Winkle and awoken a week in the future if you go to Randy's post this weekend! 😀]   
    
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

Copyright 2017, John D. Tew

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