Sunday, December 27, 2009

Best of the Genea-Blogs: December 20-26, 2009

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:

* Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850: Are they really? by Christine Sharbrough on The ProGenealogists(R) Genealogy Blog. Christine has excellent comments about using the Massachusetts "Tan Books" and provides a link to a list of online Massachusetts vital record books. This is a big help for me!

* Name Game: Celebrities Have Nothing on the Rest of Us by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak on The Huffington Post blog. More "unique" and funny names from the records related to Christmas.

* How to Deal with Distant Repositories by Katrina McQuarrie on the Kick-ass Genealogy blog. Katrina makes excellent how-to lists! This one is valuable, especially to researchers who don't go often (or have never gone) to a distant repository. A keeper.

* Privacy, Identity Theft and Genealogy -- First in a series, Privacy, Identity Theft and Genealogy -- Privacy, an issue?, and Privacy, Identity Theft and Genealogy -- Privacy worries by James Tanner on the Genealogy's Star blog. James tackles the privacy issue for genealogists in terms of identity and information. Wonderful series, to be continued.

* A Visit to Moultrie Creek by Becky Wiseman on the kinexxions blog. Becky is still on her road trip of the eastern USA, and visited Denise Olson in St. Augustine, Florida. They had fun sharing tales and information, and did some sightseeing too. I love it when genea-bloggers get together!

* WorldCat and Online Special Collections, Internet Archive - audio, video, texts and more!, and Other Collections for Family Stories Online by Tami Glatz on the relatively curious about genealogy blog. This series is about finding family stories online - but Tami covers several very useful websites too.

* Ancestry World Archives Project: Keying During the Holidays by Crista Cowan on the Ancestry.com Blog. Crista summarizes the efforts by dedicated indexers in 2009 to create free indexes on Ancestry.com.

* Special Stocking, Precious Gift by Apple on the Apple's Tree blog. Apple's story touches my heart every time I read it - a Christmas nightmare turns out well, eventually.

* Advent Calendar - That Certain Christmas Eve by Thomas MacEntee on the Destination: Austin Family blog. Thomas's birth story is poignant and interesting.

* Weekly Rewind by Apple on the Apple's Tree blog. Apple's weekly summary of her reading and research.

* Weekly Genealogy Picks by John Newmark on the TransylvanianDutch blog. John's weekly summary of his favorite readings.

* There were many fun, poignant and interesting stories on the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories series hosted on the Geneabloggers blog.

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 570 genealogy bloggers using Bloglines, but I still miss quite a few it seems. Especially this past week - with the holidays I read through my blog list hurriedly and may have missed your great post.

Read past Best of the Genea-Blogs posts here.

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