Sunday, March 22, 2009

Best of the Genea-Blogs - March 15-21, 2009

Several hundred genealogy and family history bloggers write thousands of posts every week about their research, their families, and their interests. I appreciate each one of them and their efforts.

My criteria for "Best of ..." are pretty simple - I pick posts that advance knowledge about genealogy and family history, address current genealogy issues, provide personal family history, are funny or are poignant. I don't list posts destined for the genealogy carnivals, or other meme submissions (but I do include summaries of them), or my own posts.

Here are my picks for great reads from the genealogy blogs for this past week:

* Kosmix: A new web search tool by Schelly Talalay Dardashti on the Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog. Schelly is, I think, the only genea-blogger to try out this new web search site. Read about her experiences.

* March Madness ~ Graveyard Rabbit Style! by Linda in Lancaster on the Lancaster, Pennsylvania's Graveyard Rabbit blog. Bunny Linda hops over to California, meets up with Bunny Diane, and they go wandering around cemeteries taking pictures of each other and interesting stones. Good work! Linda must have been assigned to the West Regional.

* The Carnival's In Town: 11th Edition - Smile for the Camera: A Carnival of Images: Brothers and Sisters by footnoteMaven on the Shades of the Departed blog. There were 54 submissions to this Carnival - a record, I think for Smile. Take an hour or two and read these great articles about siblings.

* My Genealogy Dream Site? by Chris Staats on the Staats' Place blog. Chris has it all figured out - the dream web site. I think it sounds great, and can hardly wait to see it come to life. Check out the slide show too.

* What we Lost when Life Browser died by Shoebox Genealogy on the Shoebox Genealogy blog. This is an outstanding post about something I really liked in concept, content and format. Read not only the description of Life Browser, but the comments too. nFS has this great tool for collaboration, media and sources and they are not using it. Yet.

* The Dirty Thirties: No Easy Street, Part III by Chery Kinnick on the Nordic Blue blog. This is part of Chery's series on the Depression years and how her grandfather and his family survived it by working on Boulder Dam. These are all great stories well done with lots of supporting research.

* 2nd Annual St. Patrick's Day Parade of Posts! by Lisa on the Small-leaved Shamrock blog. This was, of course, the 12th edition of the Carnival of Irish Heritage & Culture. There are about 20 entries in this parade, all of them really green-themed, it seems. Well done, St. Paddy's folks.

* Carnival of Genealogy, 68th Edition by Jasia on the Creative Gene blog. This is surely Carnival week! The topic was A Tribute to Women, and 32 posts were submitted. Read them all! Our favorite women were wonderful, weren't they?

* 5th Annual Internatonal Family Tree DNA Conference 2009 by Emily Aulicino on the DNA - Genealem's Genetic Genealogy blog. Emily summarized the FTDNA conference in Houston that she attended, including photos of notables in attendance. Looks like she had a great time!

* FamilySearch Developers Conference: Family Tree and FamilySearch Developers Conference: Family Tree by the Ancestry Insider on The Ancestry Insider blog. More summaries of the two conferences last week by The AI who is really on the inside of nFS.

* Why I continue to attend genealogy conferences by Paula Stuart-Warren on the Paula's Genealogical Eclectica blog. Paula has been on the conference circuit for awhile, and tells us why she continues riding it. I appreciate her summary, and hope that she continues to learn and have fun.

* Why Genealogy is Important to Mormons by Jessica Hall Grayless on the Family History Mysteries blog. Jessica explains some of the LDS mysteries (at least to non-Mormons!) so we can all understand why Mormons do what they do with genealogy.

* Finding 1861–1869 Names of Residents & Civil War Soldiers by Leland Meitzler on the GenealogyBlog. In this first post, Bill Dollarhide summarizes the
jurisdictions in the time period, then covers the records available in all of the states that contain names of residents and soldiers. This is great for the history and for the record summaries. This was originally published in Everton's Genealogical Helper in 2006. I look forward to the other parts.

* Bank Records: Another Resource for Tracing Immigrants by Donna Pointkouski on the What's Past is Prologue blog. Donna explores one of those Ancestry.com databases that kind of snuck in without much fanfare - the Immigrant Bank Records. See Donna's post for an example of what is in these records. Do you have immigrants that might be in them too?

I encourage you to go to the blogs listed above and read their articles, and add their blog to your Favorites, Bloglines, reader, feed or email if you like what you read. Please make a comment to them also - all bloggers appreciate feedback on what they write.

Did I miss a great genealogy blog post? Tell me!

Read past Best of the Genea-Blogs posts here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Randy,
I want to thank you for all that you do for the genealogy community. The educationals, the Saturday Night fun, the profiling of great posts of the week and more...all of it is greatly appreciated. THANK YOU!

SCHELLY TALALAY DARDASHTI said...

Thank you for the pointer to my Kosmix post. I, also wondering why no one else has blogged about it. Perhaps everyone else is secretly trying it out? :-)

Paula Stuart-Warren said...
This comment has been removed by the author.