PROVO, Utah, PRNewswire – Ancestry.com announced today it has launched a collection of more than 1,700 recorded oral histories from immigrants who arrived in the United States through Ellis Island. This is the first time this collection of poignant recordings has been available online. To celebrate the new addition, Ancestry.com is making its entire U.S. Immigration Collection free through Labor Day.

“As immigrants created new lives in the U.S., the stories of their homelands and their remarkable journeys to America were often lost,” said Christopher Tracy, senior vice president of global content for Ancestry.com. “We are thrilled to offer people the opportunity to hear the voices of their ancestors sharing stories of their lives.”

Ellis Island was the gateway for millions of immigrants between 1892 and 1954. The oral histories were captured by the National Park Service starting in the 1970s, and contain uniquely inspiring first-hand accounts recalling the lives these immigrants left behind, their reasons for leaving and their incredible and often-trying journeys to America. These recordings are housed at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and until now could be heard only by visitors to the Island itself. In addition to oral histories from immigrants, the collection also includes recordings from military personnel who were stationed on Ellis Island and former Ellis Island/Statue of Liberty workers.

“To our family it is important that we in the U.S. know the origin of the people who came to this country, settled here and made it what it is today. It makes us very proud to know that our mother was part of this,” said Yvonne Rumac, daughter of oral history participant Estelle Belford, who immigrated to the United States from Romania via Ellis Island in 1905.

Other Records Added to the Ancestry.com U.S. Immigration Collection: The Ellis Island Oral Histories are the latest addition to Ancestry.com, which boasts the world’s largest online collection of U.S. immigration records. Comprised of more than 170 million records, the Ancestry.com U.S. Immigration Collection includes lists of passengers who immigrated by ship to America between 1820 and 1960, including those who came through Ellis Island; more than 7 million citizenship and naturalization records; border crossings, passport applications and more to help reconstruct our ancestors’ journeys and early lives in America.

Ancestry.com has also added nearly 2 million new U.S. naturalization record indexes, thanks to the many individuals who are part of the Ancestry.com World Archives Project ?a community effort aimed at transcribing historical records. The indexes span 11 states (AK, CA, CT, HI, LA, ME, MT, NY, PA, TN, WA) and will provide Americans greater opportunity to learn more about their ancestors’ citizenship experience.

In addition, Ancestry.com has added nearly 2 million records documenting crew members on ships who arrived in the port of Boston. The records were added to an existing collection of over 3.8 million records from Boston Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820-1943.

To honor our nation’s immigrant heritage, Ancestry.com has opened up its entire U.S. Immigration Collection so that it can be searched free through Labor Day. The Ellis Island Oral History Collection will remain permanently free on Ancestry.com.

Here’s a nifty little tool for editing pdf’s in case you need one. PDF-XChange Viewer. It’s portable and free.

It’s not absolutely everything but it will take you quite far.

While the long wait for the new computer goes on, and on, and on, the laptop is still hanging in here. So, I can write you a quick post.

I’ve been watching the OS stats lately. This is an average for the last 500 pages visited. XP users are still way out in front. Windows 7 users are trailing behind at 24%. When I get back here as a Windows 7 user we will be in the minority.

I did not know that people visited this site from their mobile devices.

I’ve been looking around at Windows 7 from afar and I think the changes to the taskbar look pretty neat. Decent size thumbnails pop up to show open windows. I often have 15 or 20 documents open at once and this will make it much simpler to navigate between them. So, I’m looking forward to that.

The new computer will take care of several things at once:

1.) I was thinking about buying Windows 7 and talked myself out of it.
2.) I was thinking about reinstalling my OS but kept procrastinating.
(Reminds me of a friend of a friend who never washed dishes, just threw them out the kitchen window and bought new ones.)
(3.) I was thinking about upgrading to a larger hard-drive but hadn’t gotten around to it.
4.) I was thinking it would be nice to be able to afford a better graphics card.

I’m also losing a few things in the transition:

1.) A second DVD-drive that didn’t work and I hadn’t gotten around to finding out why.
2.) A fire-wire port that I never used.
3.) 2 USB ports. This is tough. The 8 I had weren’t enough and now it’s down to 6. But I’m gaining a wireless card so I guess I could switch to some wireless accessories. I have to buy a new printer anyway.
4.) My TV tuner card. I could replace  it with an external version or an actual TV. I’m not a huge TV fan although I would miss Desperate Housewives.

After the new tower arrives, it will take me a few days to install my programs and settings. And then another week to catch up on all the things I’ve fallen behind on. Lots of work coming up here pretty soon.

My laptop isn’t just old; it’s senile. I see a netbook in my near future. Any advice on which one? I may not be able to answer you right away but will read all comments when I can.

Some interesting reading in the meantime: Intel Introduces Dual-Core Atom Processor for Netbooks

Please share your experience with netbooks and help me make a decision.

Thanks. Signing off…

Hey Regs! That’s short for regulars.

In case you don’t follow me on Twitter, (tsk) my desktop computer died. I’m limping along on an old laptop that could kick the bucket any second. I could be thrown into computerlessness in an instant.

DELL is sending me a state-of-the-art replacement computer because they’re tired of hearing about the graphics card that kept crashing. Intel 2.66GHz Quad-Core processor, 6 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1333Mhz , 1000GB SATA hard drive (7200RPM), ho, ho, ho, More Power. It could take from 15-20 days they said. As we know, that’s an eternity in computer time.

So, I’m just going to have to go outside and enjoy the rest of the summer. Or catch up on sleep. Or something. Life is tough but someone has to put up with it.

I’ll be back whenever I get here.

I don’t want to leave you with a shortage of options for organization, so I had another look at FreeMind and I love it. I installed the newer version and it’s solved some of the problems I was having with the older one.

So I threw a few of my to-do’s in there and this is the map in reduced size. I started out making a map for each of my 11 categories, but found there’s no way to open them all at once. That’s too slow so I copied and pasted them all into one map called MY LIFE.

Here’s a way to get around that. If I export the main branches of MY LIFE one at a time, they create new mindmaps under new tabs. On the MY LIFE map are arrows going to the other tabs. And on the other mindmaps are arrows going back to the MY LIFE map. In this way it’s possible to open all the mindmaps by opening only one. It’s way easier than browsing.

As usual, this software also has more options than I could ever learn in a lifetime, so just getting to the basics:

Enter add sibling node
Ins add child node
Alt+Shift+Enter add new previous sibling
Ctrl+Up move node up
Ctrl+Down move node down
Ctrl+Left node left
Ctrl+Right node right
Alt+Up zoom in
Alt+Down zoom out
Alt+Home expand
Alt+End collapse
F2 edit node
Ctrl+F find
Ctrl +Shift+F search and replace
Alt+Shift+F node color
Ctrl+T show calendar
Alt+Shift+A branch as new map

and many more. If you don’t like them, they’re all changeable.

It really is like your mind. You can shut all the other doors and focus on one thing or you can try to look at everything and be overwhelmed. If you spend about 5 minutes learning a few shortcut keys, you’ll be ready to go. An hour and you’ll be flying.

At the bottom of the screen is a Notes box (much improved from the previous version) so if you need to add notes to a node, it’s simple to do and will put a notes icon on the node to remind you it’s there.

It also has all kinds of export options. You can print your maps, too, although unless it’s a very small map it would need to be taped together.

I grew up with pen and paper so no matter what I try I’m always most comfortable if I have paper to scrawl on that I can look at from anywhere. But, nowadays I’d have to rent space to house all the paper I could generate from my computer.

Time moves on and certainly there are advantages to computers since my mind hasn’t gotten any quieter. I remember, back 40 or 50 years, re-writing and re-writing my poems or stories or rants trying to get a perfect copy. By the time I got to the 8th or 10th version I’d be so sick of looking at whatever it was I’d rip it up.

If you can’t organize the chaos of your thoughts with FreeMind, there is no hope.

I decided to go looking at free outliners. I’ve had one for years, ActionOutline, but it took me a long time to figure out a ‘best use’ for it.

At one time I had notes all over my computer in a dozen different programs. One day I decided it was time to skinny down to just one, before I lost my mind, and decided that would be EverNote. And EverNote has been good to me.

But one thought that kept recurring was that it was not a good place to keep my to-do lists. EverNote is where I collect email and computer code and how-to’s. But it never seemed the right place for to-do lists. So I’d move them somewhere else and struggle around. I tried post-its and didn’t like the clutter. Then I went to a six-foot swath of paper taped to the wall. Finally, I tried mixing and matching to-do’s with my calendar app, and then I kept changing my calendar app. At some point I realized I was spending more time shuffling my to-do’s around than actually doing anything.

Everyday someone comes into JLog looking for how to use EverNote for outlines. And I’ve wondered why. It can be done in EverNote 2. (EverNote 3 I don’t know about.) Just right-click on any note and there’s options for numbered and bulleted lists.

Or you could make a category structure in the left pane of items and sub-items. You can make it work but it’s not a native talent.

Through a long and winding road, I realized that outliners make way better sense for to-do lists. The problem with to-do lists are items like:

• build a website
• de-clutter the house
• climb Mt. Everest

when really they need to be broken down into bite-sized steps that can actually be accomplished.

So, I went looking at free outliners. I looked at KeyNote, TreeDBNotes, The Guide, MemoMaster, SEO Note and several others I’ve deleted. None of them could hold a candle to ActionOutline for layout and ease of use.

I created 11 new tabs (outlines) in ActionOutline, representing each of the 12 main folders in My Documents, minus the Inbox. This mimics the same folder divisions I made in EverNote, KeePass, Firefox bookmarks, Zotero and my Lightning calendar. (Even my address books.)

If you think about it, does it make any sense to be calling something ‘ancestors’ in My Documents, ‘genealogy’ in your bookmarks and ‘cousins’ in your password manager? It’s just one more thing for your mind to trip over on its way to wherever it’s going.

All the tabs can be open at the same time so navigation is a breeze.

The free version of ActionOutline only allows 7 levels deep but I managed to move all my to-do’s into it without a problem. I now have dedicated to-do software instead of to-do lists all over the place. Each tab has its own list of 7 sub-items and as many as 7 sub-sub items, etc and a wide open area on the right for notes.

ActionOutline

If I ever need more I will be glad to upgrade. The mistake I made originally was that I decided I had to choose between ActionOutline and EverNote when they’re completely different things with different strengths.

Although The Action Machine, the time-manager, (not to be confused with ActionOutline) is designed for creating to-do lists, and I started out that way, there’s no point doing the same thing twice. The Action Machine has a box in the top left corner for adding timers on the fly. To set half an hour for scanning, just type in “30 scanning”, click the plus sign and it automatically adds the timer ready to go.

EverNote 2, ActionOutline and The Action Machine living in harmony. It’s the best of all worlds.

There’s the paperwork of the dead and then, there’s the paperwork of the living.

Yesterday I was on a roll with the READ ME files, going into the second hour, just beetling along feeling confident to get through another two hours of other tasks. I had just finished a long document, was in the middle of printing out two pages when my 7-year old printer decided to die. I only print a few pages per year so I don’t know what its problem was all of a sudden.

A long time ago, a lamp fell off the bookcase and a light bulb shattered sending glass shards for miles. It’s possible a piece was floating around in the back of the printer and finally worked its way into the innards. I suppose. Or maybe it just died of old age.

Once again, something technological eats into my day. Not something useful but something that requires me to go downtown and spend more money and more time.

This is not going to cause me to have a breakdown. I’m just shining a light of Awareness on how this type of thing goes on chronically and relentlessly.

Today, Day 7, I finally received a letter from the Canadian government I’ve been waiting over 8 months for, a copy of my Landed Immigrant document. Which I need in order to get back into Canada anytime I leave. This, I was told, would suffice as an alternative to a Permanent Resident’s Card.

I’ve lived in Canada full-time since 1967. The Canadian government knows all kinds of things about who I am. I am not a mystery. I think, after 43 years, they could just put my photo in their computer and whenever they see me they could smile and wave and say, “Hey, fellow-Canadian!, How’s it going? Been across the border for a day or two? Give us a second here to look up your Non-Existent Criminal Record again and Welcome Home!”

In order to get a Permanent Resident’s Card, there are reams of forms to fill out, photos to be taken in a specified size, money to be sent. It’s a daunting process that goes on and on and on. Nevertheless, I was psyching myself up for this.

Until I got to the last page of requirements. After the card is finally produced, it can only be picked up in person. For me, that means a minimum of 5 days of traveling to validate myself, by my physical presence, at the nearest specified government office. I might as well go by dog-sled and enjoy the great outdoors while I’m at it.

I got on the phone and was immediately reassured by an Immigration Official that I did not have to go through that; Canada is a very big place and not everyone lives a short hop away from a CIC office. (No kidding.) All I had to do was get a copy of my Landed Immigrant Record and I was good to go.

I gathered up the paperwork, printed it all out, read the instructions, sweated over getting every detail correct, and sent it off with my money. And today, eight and half months later, the precious document arrived. A one-page bad photocopy and a page of instructions. On the instructions, it clearly states:

“This document can not be used to travel.

Only the permanent resident card (PR card) can be used to travel. It is a wallet-sized, plastic status card that replaces the ….”

Just a moment, please, to compose myself. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

I guess yesterday was Day 5 of the Diary. I don’t really remember yesterday. The Action Machine report says I put in half an hour on the READ ME files, an hour on scanning and an hour on my website. Other than that it’s a bit of a blur.

I remember later in the day I downloaded an update for Task Coach and liked it even less than I did the other times. The Action Machine is functioning as a fuse to get me moving where I most like to procrastinate and it’s working just fine.

While I was tossing and turning in the wee hours, I got thinking about a friend who died in the 1970′s. For some reason I got out of bed and typed his name into Google. The 1970′s were about a gazillion years before the Internet. And there he was on the front page with a search result leading to an old FamilyTreeMaker file. Last updated 2003. They missed his middle name, and they got his place of death wrong. I think they also got his birth place wrong but then maybe I never knew what it was, just assumed I did.

Thirty-something years later it felt voyeuristic and uncomfortable. I don’t want to know anything else. I didn’t even want to know that much. I guess for the sake of historical accuracy I could try to contact the compiler of the chart and say I knew him and you’ve got it all wrong. But I won’t.

I thought back on all the good times we had and then I fell asleep. He looked so lost there as another name/born/died. He was a glorious spirit; intelligent, funny, multi-talented, warm-hearted, clear-headed. And, for too short a time, he was my best friend.

A study of time management immediately segues into health issues. That was such a profound thought in the middle of the night it kept me awake. Profound thoughts can be bad for my health.

I grew up in a family that was run like The Army. Everything had a time, everything had a place, everything had a price. Even holidays were clocked by the odometer. From such and such town to the next place was 137 miles. We arrived at 1:14 PM. We had lunch consisting of blah, blah and blah. We left at 1:43 PM. There was a slight delay because one of the kids had to go to the bathroom.

To be able to entertain a study of time management, even decades after that torture, is a miracle.

Today I went downtown (wasps on the mirror again; more about that later) to buy some concrete nails. The man at the hardware store talked me out of it. He said they don’t work. For anything. They’re on the shelf for decoration. So, I left the store with a digital timer/battery included instead. I’ve never used one and I thought it would be fun.

As it turns out, a digital timer is not fun. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t stop. It just keeps bleeping and bleeping and bleeping like a security system. I’m not deaf.

Then I went to fill up my car. The tank was half empty and I hadn’t filled it for four months because I don’t ever go anywhere. I drove all the way across town, passing 3 other gas-stations on the way because my credit card gives me points for a particular one. When I got there what I found was an empty lot with a fence around it. Did the credit card company send me a notice about this? No.

I drove back up the highway to another station, (100 degrees F again and the windows are closed, you know, because of the wasps) put my credit card in the slot, pumped the gas and closed the lid. By the time I got back to the machine to get my receipt it was too late; the screen had already flipped over for the next customer. I stood there for a moment in complete wonderment. I considered bursting into tears.

Before the snow flies again, I will turn … oh, approximately 60. I’m on the brink of developing agoraphobia. I can’t even imagine how people in their 70′s and 80′s make it through the day.

Scheduled Tasks: Too hot to think. To hot to move. Just because I have a time-management system now it doesn’t mean I have to use it. Ha, ha, I can do nothing.

But I decided to have a look at Task Coach that’s been hanging around on my computer for months. It’s not at all intuitive or simple to use out of the box, but maybe it’s just me. On the 6th try last night I finally started to get onto it. It comes as either a portable or desktop version.

Left column is the task list, sub-tasks, sub-sub tasks, etc. You can categorize your tasks, filter and search them, add notes and attachments, URL’s and budgets. Or not.

Task Coach

Double-click on any task and you get the whole menu.

Task Coach: Task Menu Options

I was curious if I could make it behave like The Action Machine, i.e. set a task with an end-point alarm. After only a few days’ experience I’m convinced the alarm is the key factor. I’m not interested in tracking time, I’m interested in learning how to manage it. It’s not the same thing.

Double-click on a task and then the Dates tab. Start date is already entered and that’s all you need if you’re only interested in the near future. Set the reminder time (say half an hour from the time now showing) and OK. Now there’s an alarm set. Click the clock at the top of the window to start. The alarm doesn’t ring but it throws a reminder onto your screen.

Task Coach: Dates & Times

Unfortunately, this is where it falls apart because the alarm window will be buried under any other window you have open. If you’re paying attention you’ll see it turn orange on the taskbar but that’s asking a lot. So much for end-point alarms.

You can start and stop tasks from the icon in the system tray. I like that. I also like the task tree. Although where you make your lists is the least important aspect of a time-management system. The other stuff; categories, appearance, attachments, notes hidden under icons, it’s too much baloney for time management.

That’s about it. Potential in the making.

I’m back to The Action Machine to get some scanning done.