I’ve never thought of a single reason to applaud Microsoft. They design junk. IMHO. They’ve got more money than God and you’d think they could do better. I use the XP operating system out of sheer laziness. No other reason. As all my regular readers know, my hate of Internet Explorer is a raging inferno. Hate is an understatement. I pride myself on my self-control in this matter.

But they’ve finally come up with something that I would have chewed my toenails off for. It’s been around for a year and I never knew. It’s called Photo Info. My thanks to Jean-Marie over at the Legacy User Group for this tip.

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Back at that favorite topic: how to share family history. Or as I prefer, how to share family history that your family will actually read and enjoy.

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Some people have, it seems, never heard of genealogy and they have no idea why the Rootsweb Social Security Death Index is even online. They just see it as one more way to be violated.

Apparently, some other people spend their time impersonating dead people. They use SS numbers and birth dates from the index, and other information gleaned from obituaries to create false ID’s. The U.S. government does not keep up to speed with who’s living and who’s not. So the scammers are able to rack up millions in purchases that are then charged to the deceased. Are you following this? So who pays in the end? Can the purchases be applied against the person’s estate if it hasn’t been settled yet? I didn’t know that dead people could accrue bad credit histories when they’re already, you know … dead, but apparently they can.

Can we kiss social security numbers and obits good-bye?

Read this: Grave Robbery

Here’s an interesting excerpt: “About 400,000 checking accounts were opened in the names of deceased people in 2004 …”

Over the holidays one of my sisters phoned me and we got to talking about the family history ‘installments’ that I wrote a few years ago.

She told me, sheepishly, that she couldn’t follow them.  Couldn’t follow them?!?  I was so clear about everything.  Every week or two, I emailed another chapter with stories and photos of people and places.  Every chapter was hinged to the previous one.  Family history written as a cliff-hanger.  I left out the descendants book reports and other charts, so as not to confound her with too many names and dates.  I stuck to the mainline and didn’t go side-tracking all over the place with 4th cousins.  I made it as interesting and riveting as I possibly could.  What more could she want?

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I sent the first version of my Family History wiki to 3 relatives, and immediately heard back from two of them that they could not open it. I’m guessing that could be happening for some of you with JLiki, the wiki I’ve added to my site.

Wikis are programmed with html, css and javascript and you need to have javascript enabled in your browser to be able to view one. There are simple graphic instructions here that will tell you what javascript is and show you how to turn it on whether you’re using IE6, IE7, Firefox or something else.