Sunday, April 25, 2010

Best of the Genea-Blogs - April 18-24, 2010

Hundreds of 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:

* Do you use the proper Latin names for your ancestors? by Terry Thornton on the Hill Country HOGS Blog. Terry introduces us to Latin terms for relatives - these might be useful in...church registers, what else? Fascinating.

* A Beginner’s Guide to Eastern European Genealogy – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 by Stephen Danko on Steve's Genealogy Blog. What a great treasure trove of information for Steve's specialty. A keeper!

* The Genealogy Zombie by Lee Drew on the FamHist blog. Lee makes a startling discovery and describes his file organization methods. Very good, unless...

* Massachusetts Town Records by Martin Hollick on The Slovak Yankee blog. Martin provides an excellent listing of the availability of Massachusetts town records, which are the original source material.of the MA town Vital Record books.

* Digitized Book Websites by Gena Ortega on Gena's Genealogy Blog. Excellent list! I saw some new ones for me on this list.

* An Index is Only as Good as Its Spelling by Donna Pointkouski on the What's Past is Prologue blog. This is a useful research story about "the way it was" and "the way it is." Donna probably has to go test the new Ancestry.com search now!

* Facebook’s Open Graph: How Could It Help Genealogists? by Dean Richardson on the Genlighten Blog - Genealogy Documented blog. Dean finds so many great ideas and applies them to genealogy - this looks like a winner!

* 2nd Edition, Carnival of African American Genealogy ~ Grandma’s Hand: Grandmothers and Their Influence On The Family by Sandra Taliaferro on the I Never Knew My Father blog. There were 20 entries for this carnival about Grandma's Hands. What a wonderful collection of family stories!

* The Ultimate Genealogy Purchase by Amy Coffin on the We Tree blog. Amy got some new wheels and turned it into a genealogy research tool. Cool!

* DNA Day, Dr. Sykes and Me by Barbara Poole on the Life From the Roots blog. Barbara is meeting with Dr. Brian Sykes (yes, that Brian Sykes) soon to go over her DNA test results.

* Treasure Chest Thursday - Publishing a Book for my Blog and Blurb Blog Book Update by Heather Rojo on the Nutfield Genealogy blog. Heather has self-published a local history and photo book, based on her blog posts, on Blurb - here is how she did it.

* Saturday Musings ~ Ain’t Nothin’ Like Going Home!:-) by Luckie Daniels on the Our Georgia Roots blog. Road trip!! Luckie and Sandra go together to ancestral counties - sounds like they had a fabulous time.

* Genealogy Research in the Year 2060 by Dick Eastman on the Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter blog. Dick lets his mind wander ... 50 years into the future. Visionary. Interesting. Sad. Real? Nice to know how things end up, though!

* Follow Friday: Branching Out Through the Years by Great Koehl on the Greta's Genealogy Bog blog. Greta shares her reading favorites from the past week - nice list!

* Weekly Genealogy Picks by John Newmark on the TransylvanianDutch blog. John's weekly readings are always worthwhile.

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! I am currently reading posts from over 630 genealogy bloggers using Bloglines, but I still miss quite a few it seems.

Read past Best of the Genea-Blogs posts here.

NOTE: Best of the Genea-Blogs will miss next week - I'll be in Salt Lake City all week enjoying the FHL, the NGS Conference, meeting Genea-Musings readers and talking to genea-bloggers, so will NOT have a post next Sunday.

3 comments:

Greta Koehl said...

Thanks for the mention, Randy, and have fun in Salt Lake City. BTW, thanks for posting the links for FamilySearch Record Search beta; I wasn't sure where to go when the old site stopped linking to most of the databases.

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

Thanks for the roundup Randy!

Barbara Poole said...

Thank you Randy for mentioning my post regarding DNA and Dr. Bryan Sykes. It was a nice surprise.