October 2008 News

I've been gone for nearly two months on a trip to Canada. Wonderfully, I was able to find the land of an ancestor, Phineas Stevens which was granted to him in 1784 after the Revolutionary War. He was a Loyalist and left New York to try to begin a new life in Nova Scotia. Within 20 years he was back in Vermont to stay. I was fortunate to go to his land and imagine what might have been going on in his life while gazing out from his land to the Sissiboo River and St. Mary's Bay south of Digby. I know members of our society have visited their ancestor's home sites, and I encourage others to make a few trips back in time if you haven't already.

Unfortunately I had to miss a few of our genealogy society meetings this summer. But if anyone will give me information about the meetings I will post it here. If you gave a mini-bio please provide a copy of it and I'll post it here.

Since I've returned to Hawaii and gotten back on the internet I found a few interesting news items:
1) A great website offering reviews of genealogy software is at www.gensoftreviews.com

2) Family Tree Maker will soon come out with version 2009. It is offered free to those who have already purchased the 2008 version. Importantly by next Spring the 2009 version will have a free update that is supposed to include the previously deleted "Book Making Ability" that was missing in 2008 version.

3) On a free archieved webinar (video) at Ancestry.com http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Webinars.aspx I learned about their new World Archives Project. As near as I can figure out it is similar to FamilySearch.org's. Except only the index, not the images, will be free to the public. Subscribers will see both. The good news for Ancestry.com subscribers is that you can get some kind of a discount on the annual subscription rate, if you decide to do at least 900 names of indexing in a quarter. I don't know how much the discount will be, but it might help the pocketbook a bit. The project in in Beta testing right now. Volunteer indexers will be able to vote on which of the different types of digitalized documents might be worked on next. Supposedly World Archieves Project in association with NARA will focus on projects other than what FamilySearch is projected to do.

4) Next month (November 8th) at our Genealogy Society meeting, Harriet Hoffman will give an interesting and very entertaining presentation on her journey to know her great-great grandparents. Join her as she traces Jewish roots through Kentucky and Illinois back to the German heartland. She and her husband treked across land and sea this year to be apart of a unique event that was a genealogist's dream come true.