Thanks again to all of you who answered the survey. It’s given me a sneak-peek into who you are which is a great relief after a year of writing ‘blind’. I hope I’ve answered some of your questions over the past month.
There was not a lot of response overall so I can only make my conclusions and comments based on a relatively small sampling. Most of you have many years experience with both computers and genealogy which makes me wonder what I could possibly have to offer. At the same time, I seem to have satisfied most of the people some of the time. (But not all the people all the time. And some people were just plain cranky. So, about how life goes… )
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Ever wish you could save and annotate web pages? I mean, conveniently. Firefox has an add-on called Scrapbook that will help you do exactly that. If you’re not using Scrapbook you’re missing out. It’s built for genealogists without even knowing it. It will allow you to save entire websites, single pages or parts of pages. Before or after saving, you can highlight sections and add your own notes. You can combine pages in any order you like, and you can back up your work. If you don’t have Firefox, you will have to install it first.
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To feed two birds with one worm: Our abiding love of organization and a special request for charts and forms.
In alphabetical order:
Assuming you’ve gone ahead and made some collages in your free time, another thing you can do with them, of course, is put them into slideshows. I also use collage a lot in my Passage Express projects to break up the tedium of the text. It’s an easy way to interject some color and keep my viewers awake. Our ancestors did not actually live in an endless atmosphere of black, white and sepia.
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Since I started writing, I’ve been trying to hit the ‘middle-ground’ with my language, without having the faintest clue what the ‘middle-ground’ is. Now that the survey responses are coming in, I see that many of you have a great deal of experience with computers and genealogy. If I ever sound like I’m talking down to you geniuses I’m really not, I’m just trying to address a wider audience. Some of you have less experience and simpler questions.
People, in general, are particularly keen on ideas for getting organized. That makes sense. After all, that’s what we’re doing – organizing history, each in our own way.
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I would like to thank everyone who’s taken my survey so far. Please keep it coming, those of you who haven’t answered yet.
I’m going ahead trying to address some of the issues that have come up, so I don’t keep you waiting til next Spring.
Someone asked about the best research sites for the money.
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A question has come up about scanning paper more efficiently.
There’s nothing like a pile of paper to get me hyperventilating and setting unreasonable goals.
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Now that it’s November, should we start thinking about how to turn our genealogy files into Christmas presents? … again.
We have made Christmas into a truly seasonal holiday. It takes two months to get ready and another month to recover. Literally a season.
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I promised you an exam. Well, I lied. However, I did put together a survey.
If you’ve never tried this sort of thing yourself (writing a blog) I can tell you this: Sitting alone in front of a computer screen with a blank page staring back, getting ready to launch into a monologue for an unknown audience, is a very very strange experience. And from one day to the next it doesn’t get any less so.
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