Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Amanuensis Monday Post Compendium Page

I'm gradually adding static Pages to Genea-Musings - so far I have pages for:

*  Randy's Genealogy Links - a work in constant progress!

*  Amanuensis Monday Posts - a weekly update is required

*  Randy's Presentations - what I speak about at genealogical society meetings and seminars


There are almost 100 different posts on the Amanuensis Monday Post list now.  I was having a hard time finding a "new" transcribed will in my genealogy database to post because searching for them was difficult ancestor by ancestor.  Technology came to the rescue - here is what I did:

*  Created a report on Ancestors of Randy Seaver (13 generations) with notes and sources.  It has 2,143 pages, and a file size of 88.1 megabytes.  Yikes!! I saved it as a PDF file.

*  Opened the PDF file and used the Edit > Find to find all instances of the word "testate" (because invariably I have used that term when I added the will to my Notes).

*  As I found instances of "testate," I checked to see if I had already put the transcribed will on Genea-Musings in an Amanuensis Monday post.  If not, I put it on a To-Do list for Genea-Musings.  I found 10 more just in about 1/4 of the PDF ancestral report.  I need to do the rest of the list sometime.

That worked well, and gave me the result I wanted.


I want to add My Family History research and One-name Study Pages at some point in time.  I have some of them on my Randy Seaver's Ancestry and Family History at http://www.genealogy.com/users/s/e/a/Randy-Seaver/.  However, it is very out-of-date and I didn't want to revise it because it is an effort and I have a 10 megabyte limit on the total size of the files there.  The "next time," I want to be able to have sources, but no notes, for these ancestral and descendants reports.

I've been in a quandary for some time since I really don't want to create and maintain another web page for ALL of that text.  Today, I saw Heather Kuhn Roelker's post on Tuesday's Tip: Inserting PDF Files in Blogger with Scribd and figured out that something like Scribd might be the answer, as long as the information there can be found by search engines.  I will experiment a bit with it and see how it goes before I create a page.


Then I need to create PDF files for my 8 great-great-grandparents, my wife's 4 great-grandparents, and then for the descendants of Robert Seaver, Martin Carringer, Peter Dill, Samuel Vaux, Andreas Auble,  and several other seminal ancestors and try to get them onto Scribd (or some other freely available repository for documents).

If someone has other suggestions, I'm open to hearing about, and trying, them!

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/09/amanuensis-monday-post-page.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Randy, Good idea for keeping track of your Amanuensis Monday posts. I, too, have had trouble keeping track of documents transcribed and posted, as well as photos posted for Wordless Wednesday. I created a spreadsheet with a tab for each of the blogging prompts that I want to track.

~Denise