After much pre-publicity, DNA Ancestry 
is finally here.
Since I haven’t tried this yet myself, and it’s pretty much news for all of us, I know about this much:
You buy a kit, swab the inside of your cheek, just like in the CSI shows, send it back to Ancestry and they will process your results and mail them back to you. Your results can also be added to an Ancestry database to be compared with other people’s results or be kept totally private. DNA matches are communicated anonymously.
Please open this user-friendly pdf called DNA Ancestry and read all about the process. They say it as well as it can be said.
What DNA Ancestry Tests Can Reveal
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Check this out. Geographic Names Information System. Rick Eastman wrote about it in his blog, and I’m just passing it along in case you don’t get over there on a regular basis.
This is a way to find otherwise difficult or ‘impossible’ locations. Not just towns. Other stuff. Buildings, bridges, cemeteries …
Start here. Click on your location. “Domestic” for U. S. (There’s also a GNS International under ‘Foreign Links’. Just follow along.) On the next page, click under that heading for “Search GNIS”. On the next page, you fill in the name of the place you’re looking for, click ‘Send Query’ and there it is, with latitude and longitude.
Sometimes you’ll have a few to choose from, so those times it helps if you can at least narrow down the county. After you click on your choice, over on the right is a selection of map types for zooming in on your target.
If you can’t print or right-click and save the map, you can always Screen Capture it.
In five minutes, I’d found two of my stubborn ‘lost’ locations. This can be locations too tiny to mention, or locations long ago absorbed into others.
Brilliant. Bookmark it.
Reportedly, Legacy 7.0, that’s due out soon, will be doing something different with Sources. I can hardly wait to find out what.
I’ve heard there’s some connection to Elizabeth Shown Mill’s work, Evidence Explained, which is about source citation models. That shouldn’t affect what I’m going to talk about here. Not unless they completely re-design the Assigned Sources window and kill my present use of it.
If you’re using the digital component of the MRIN Filing System, or even if you’re not, you may have realized by now that it’s easy to link your digital images if you want to. It’s not necessary, but Legacy does make that possible. Just browse to your source image and link it up. Make sure you distinguish between Master Source and Source Detail images. In other words, if you have a Death Certificate for an individual, that’s a Source Detail image, not a Master Source image. …[continued]
My cousin, Sam, has some new companions who have just come on board.
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Do we believe in ghosts? Of course, we do. We’re genealogists. Ghosts are our specialty.
Sometimes I can feel one tapping me hard on the shoulder saying, “No, not 1852. It was 1855.” Or “No, not his brother. It was his uncle.” Sometimes I imagine they’re twisting in their graves with everything we get wrong.
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World Vital Records would seriously like to have your attention. They are practically giving away a subscription to their databases. For $49.95 you get two years for the price of one, plus your choice of a free software package, each with a value between $25 and $40. Here’s the list you get to choose from:
* Ancestral Quest
* Family Reunion Organizer
* The Handybook for Genealogists – 11th Edition
* PAF Insight
* PAFWiz Enhancements for PAF 5
* Personal Historian
* RootsMagic Genealogy Software
As soon as you sign up you will receive a key to download and install your free software immediately.
This is in addition to World Vital Records usual offerings of Everton’s Online Library, SmallTownPapers®, NewspaperARCHIVE back to 1759, International Parish Register Collection and thousands of other databases.
They regularly have good deals so be sure to check them out.
From World Vital Records:
“We have added over 800,000 browseable census images to our site. These census images include SELECT counties from every state in the U.S. except Alaska. We do NOT have an index to these census images so this new data is NOT searchable. The user can browse these census images by selecting a census, then a state, then a county. From there they must browse each image one by one to find the information they need.
Please realize that we do not have images for every county in every census. We realize this is not the ideal solution and are working hard to get an index of the census. However we do believe that there is a great benefit to our members to have this information available. Often the index is wrong and you can find the names you are looking for by viewing the images themselves. This collection will continue to grow as we scan more and more of these images.”
You can check out the census listings here. All new databases, including this one, can be used free for the first 7 days.
If you are still keeping your file backups in the same place as your computer, you may be asking for trouble. Fire, floods or theft, although unexpected, do happen, and it only takes once to lose it all. Mozy has a great online backup service. After installing and activating a small program, your choice of files are encrypted for privacy and automatically backed up to an online server.
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