GenealogyClassBlog

I received an email from Footnote today with an update on their new situation. Here is the text of the email:

Several weeks ago Footnote.com (as part of iArchives) agreed to be acquired by Ancestry.com and that transaction has officially closed today. As we join forces with Ancestry.com there is a huge opportunity to leverage each other’s strengths and move even faster toward our goals. You may be curious about how this deal effects members of Footnote.com? The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com — continuing to do what we believe is best for our customers, our business and our brand.

Now that the deal is officially closed we are excited to leverage some of Ancestry.com’s resources and expertise to take Footnote.com to the next level. It has been exciting to see Footnote.com grow over the past 4 years. Footnote.com started with only 5 million historical documents and today we have nearly 70 million searchable documents, over 1 million members, nearly 100,000 Footnote Pages, and over half million annotations added. We couldn’t have done it without our members and the great team at Footnote.com and we are excited for Ancestry.com’s support in the next chapter.

I am glad to hear that Footnote.com will stay the same for now and will have the resources of the larger organization to make it even better. We talked about Footnote in class yesterday — and found Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 U.S. Federal Census image. Remember that Footnote.com has some historical documents that are free to view, and that library cardholders at the Tulsa City-County Library have access to Footnote.com at the Genealogy Center. To take a look at Footnote.com, visit www.footnote.com.

Boston Avenue Church

It’s time again for the School of Continuing Education at Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. My five-week genealogy classes will move from their usual Tuesday evenings to Wednesday mornings, from 9:30 to 10:30 and from 10:45 to 11:45. Registration for the school is $12.00, and includes all of the classes you can take for that same price. Other classes are listed in the brochure or in the church newspaper, available at BostonAvenue.org.

Genealogy classes are in two different series — one to learn the basics and the other to pick up particular topics in a lecture format. All five of these are programs that I have presented locally, including two that I presented at the 2009 Federation of Genealogical Societies National Conference. Here are the specific titles:

GENEALOGY:  FAMILY HISTORY BASICS  9:30 – 10:30 am

Oct 6 – Important First Steps
Oct 13 – The Census
Oct 20 – The Family History Library
Oct 27 – Court, Land & Military Records
Nov 3 – Tour of Internet Resources

FIVE GENEALOGY TALKS  10:45 – 11:45 am

Oct 6 – How Do You Know? Understanding Evidence and Citing Your Sources
Oct 13 – How to Be a Power Hitter: Improve Your Online Searching Skills
Oct 20 – What’s New at FamilySearch®?
Oct 27 – Oklahoma Settlement:  Territorial Homestead and Allotment Records
Nov 3 – Deutsche Vorfahren:  German Ancestors

For more information call Boston Avenue at 918-583-5181 or visit the church’s web site at www.bostonavenue.org/newspaper.shtml and download the newspaper from 24 September 2010.

I will be presenting two programs at the Family History Fair in Pagosa Springs, Colorado on Saturday, August 14, 2010. This will be my first time ever to visit Pagosa Springs and I am looking forward to it — to a brief vacation there, to meeting the genealogists there, and to presenting two of my favorite lectures:

• How to Be a Power Hitter:  Improve Your Online Searching Skills
• Information Overload: Organizing Your Genealogy Records

My friend, Patricia Lee is one of the main organizers and a part-time resident of Archuleta County, Colorado. She will be presenting at the Family History Fair, too. Her lecture will be “Irish Family History Research.”

You can read more about this all-day event in the Pagosa Sun. There have been two articles:

Photo by John Fancher

July 14, 2010 “Pagosa to host Family History Fair” by Patricia Lee

July 22, 2010 “So, who do you think you are?” by Patricia Lee

For more information, or to register for this free Family History Fair, contact Sharron Oldham, the Director of the Family History Center in Pagosa Springs, or Barbara Ford, vice-president of the Archuleta County Genealogical Society.

Hardesty Regional Library

The Tulsa City-County Library is offering some great programming for July again this year, during what it calls Family History Month. Download a copy of the beautiful, new, July Event Guide for the complete schedule as well as an interesting article about Linda Colvard and her help with adoption cases, Or go to the library’s Events page to see what programs are scheduled for the rest of July.

On Tuesday, 27 July, I will be presenting “What’s New With FamilySearch?” from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Hardesty Regional Library, 8316 E. 93rd St. in Tulsa. FamilySearch, also known as the online face of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, is a free website that is fairly easy to use even before attending a class. But there is much more to FamilySearch now that they have enhanced and improved it in the last two years. I look forward to exploring it with you on the 27th.

Last night I attended a very interesting program presented by Dr. Mary Larson from Oklahoma State University on oral history (more on that later), and on Saturday seventy people were in the audience with me as Meg Hacker of Fort Worth’s Southwest Regional Branch of the National Archives introduced us to what genealogists can find, how to access descriptions of collections, and how to use some online databases at their website — www.archives.gov. Both of these were held at Hardesty, as will most of the remaining programs for the month. This is a major change from the past, but the move from to Hardesty was necessary so that there will be more room and chairs for the large number of people who attend these programs every July.

This Saturday, though, the programs will be held at Central Library because the speakers will be featuring the collections of Tulsa City-County Library’s Research Center, where you can find city directories, maps, the vertical files, high school yearbooks, newspapers, and other little-known treasures for local research. See the descriptions of both the morning and afternoon sessions, to be held in Aaronson Auditorium on the first floor. There will be an open house on the fourth floor between the sessions. Parking should not be a problem on Saturday because of all of the unused metered spaces nearby. I hope to see you there.

Dick Eastman has come through for those of us with Macs. See his June 21 listing of thirteen genealogy software programs for Macintosh, as well as comments from his readers.

Each of the listings include a brief description, the producer, distinctive features or attributes, the selling price, and the link to the producer’s website, just as he did in his June 17 listing of twelve genealogy software programs for Windows (see my earlier post).

The list of Macintosh programs includes:

• Family Tree Maker Mac 2010
• GEDitCOM II
• GenealogyPro
• GenScribe
• GRAMPS
• Heredis
• iFamily for Leopard
• MacFamilyTree
• MyBlood
• ohmiGene
• Osk
• Personal Ancestry Writer II
• Reunion

Dick also describes how Macintosh owners can install Windows onto their Macs, using Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox, and run Windows genealogy software programs on Macs, too.

As in his June 17 blog post, each of the listings includes a brief description, the producer, distinctive features or attributes, the selling price, and the link to the producer’s website. Prices range from free to $90, but the price for the not-yet-released Family Tree Maker for Mac is not yet known.