Article: Preserving Genealogy Data (Eastman’s)

Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter has a good article on preserving your genealogy data.

“Genealogists have long relied on paper for storing their genealogy publications. While useful, paper does not last forever. Even the best acid-free paper will deteriorate someday. Even worse, today’s printer inks and laser toners used to print on that paper will disappear many years earlier. Suppose, then, that you print out your records on the finest quality archival paper today and put it away in a safe deposit box for posterity. Within ten or twenty years, that data may become unreadable as the printed characters slowly fade away. The cruel irony is that high-quality, acid-free paper is worthless if it looks blank!

Life expectancy of the media used for storage isn’t the only issue. A bigger problem may be the capability to read that media many years after its creation. Paper records are easy to read if the paper does not disintegrate and the ink does not fade. However, other media are often used and almost always have limitations. “

You can read the rest of the article here (Plus edition/subscription required)

Safari and IE-only Genealogy Sites, Todo X, Camino,

Find yourself at a genealogy website that only accepts Windows “Internet Explorer? eFritz.net has a simple trick to enable the “debug” menu in Safari, which lets you select the user agent – i.e., you can select “Windows Internet Explorer” and any site you browse after that will think your using Windows Internet Explorer (until you change it back). A surprising number of sites can be fooled this way. The only time you may have problems are sites using plug-ins that are not supported on Mac OS X.

Todo X 1.9 has been released. It’s a simple to-do list with some iPod and iCal functionality.

Camino 0.9a2 is out. Although it’s alpha, it’s Camino 0.9 is shaping up to be a good rival to Safari (Camino is based on Firefox).

Novacell Technologies offers historic USGS topographic maps.

Miscellaneous: GeneWeb, iWatermark, photography,

GeneWeb 5.0 is nearing completion and is in beta testing. GeneWeb is a genealogy software program with a Web interface. It can be used off-line or in a Web environment. It uses very efficient techniques of relationship and consanguinity computing, developed in collaboration with Didier R�my, research Director at INRIA.. It works with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

iWaterMark is in beta and nearing 3.0 – for those of you who publish family photos on the internet, you might want to look into this. There are a number of extensive changes in the first beta, you can read about them at MacUpdate.com

Tips for photographing cemetery markers – Ancestry.com

Update: Metes and Bounds 1.2.8

Sandy Knoll Software has released Metes and Bounds 1.2.8. Metes and Bounds is land mapping that turns metes and bounds data into a plot map. Useful for plotting cemeteries, homesteads, etc.

Requires Mac OS X 10.1.5

Changes:

* Drawings can now be shaded.
* Drawings can now be scaled up to a factor of 5.
* Distances can now be entered in varas.
* Will now calculate if the survey closes or not. And if not, how far the closing is off.
* Added the ability to save or print a drawing that has been scaled larger than the screen.
* Added the ability to print a large drawing to multiple pages.
* Will now print the auto-close line.

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GenerationX Users

If there are any GenerationX users out there (GenerationX is an open-source software genealogy application for Mac OS X), I have successfully compiled GenerationX using Xcode 2.1 (including Universal/Intel Binaries). Although the project does not appear to be active, the source code is still available.

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