Friday, November 9, 2012

Follow-Up Friday - Helpful and Interesting Reader Comments

It's Friday, time again to review some useful and interesting reader comments on Genea-Musings posts.

1)  On Yearbook Collection FREE on Mocavo (posted 7 November 2012):

*  Anonymous said:  "You are showing 'Mocavo Plus' in your example. This is not free. When I searched various names, I kept getting a chance to upgrade."

*  Katelyn explained:  "Hi! Just to clarify, the Yearbooks collection looks the same for both Mocavo Basic and Mocavo Plus users. In order to see the collection, the site asks that you either log in to your account or create a Mocavo Basic membership, which is completely free and only takes a minute to sign up for. You can view all of Mocavo's content for free with the Mocavo Basic account. Mocavo Plus is a subscription service and offers advanced features such as Advanced Search, Discovery Alerts, Search Re-runs, Smart Trees, Browsing History, and Advanced Document Viewing."

My comments:  Thanks for the comment and the explanation!

2)  On Ancestry.com Has General Land Office Collection (posted 29 October 2012):

*  Norm Prince noted:  "I was thinking that the land office records have been available on the free BLM web site - http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/
for some years now. This has worked for me many times without the need to be an Ancestry subscriber."

*  Geolover said:  "These records have been indexed and available through Ancestry.com since 2008. There was a recent "update" but you can never find out what was amended or added."

*  Connie Sheets commented:  "As best as I can determine, Ancestry's database is not identical to the one at the BLM site. I know I have recently found bounty land records at the BLM site that do not appear in the Ancestry database. They were ones that were somewhat recently added to the BLM site, so it may be that Ancestry has not updated yet."

My comments:  You guys know more about this than I do - thanks for fighting through the Captcha to help us out.

3)  In Follow-Up Friday - Helpful and Interesting Reader Comments (posted 26 October 2012):

*  Geolover noted:  "Randy, you said 'The Ancestry World Trees seem to be gone from the Ancestry record collections.'

No, they are still there. Here is a link to the list of trees on the site:
http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?rank=0&db=dbatitles&ctx=%2fMercury%2fPages%2fCardCatListBoolean.aspx&hco=100&f21=42&_F0003A49=1&_F0003A49-int=1#ccat=hc%3D25%26dbSort%3D1%26filter%3D0*42%26
--or go to the Card Catalog and put just Trees in the title for searching.

"It is the AWTs (discontinued for entries about 5 years ago) that were automatically entered in WorldConnect on Rootsweb.com, not current public Ancestry Member Trees. The WorldConnect trees include many others than just the AWTs, which you can detect because the ones originating with the old AWT software show submitter names as numbers ending in a colon in search results.

"Ancestry.com stopped supporting the software for AWTs some years ago. I do not know if special report printing from them is still possible."

My comment:  You're right -they are still there.  I should have said that the Ancestry World Trees don't show up in the Search results...I just checked again, and they do not show in a global search.  Thanks for the explanation.

4)  Some additional comments on Crowd Sourcing Cousin Edith (posted 5 November 2012):

*  Carol Swensen offered:  "Randy - Find A Grave had the following:
Edith M Ott
Birth: Sep. 25, 1903
Death: Oct. 2, 1971 
Burial:
Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale)
Glendale
Los Angeles County
California, USA
Plot: Kindly Light, Map B13, Lot 78, Space 5 
Created by: Chris Mills
Record added: Feb 22, 2012
Find A Grave Memorial# 85482261"


*  bgwiehle noted:  "When trying to match former spouses in censuses, watch out for marital status errors. I've found several cases where the couple are no longer living together and one party is enumerated as married and the other as divorced or even single!"

*  Lisa Suzanne Gorrell said:  " I believe DS means 'decline to state.' "

My comments:  Thank you all for the help - our education is never complete, is it?

5)  On WikiTree Announces Automatic Matching (posted 2 November 2012):

*  Saskey said:  "Well, WikiTree gave me about a hundred matches, but each one tells me that I will need to be added as a "Trusted" viewer in order to determine whether it is a match; fortunately I can reject the majority outright as the names do not match, or the geography tells me it is not a match. However, I do not feel inclined to spend a lot of time obtaining "Trusted" status to probably reject a match!"

My comment:  I hope that Chris Whitten or Elyse Doerflinger see this and can address this.  

6)  On Hallowe'en Name Whacking (posted 31 October 2012):

*  John Newmark offered:  "Here's a post of mine from 2007:
http://blog.transylvaniandutch.com/2007/10/friday-five.html "

*  Louis Kessler said:  "No Zombies?  Well, there's Rob Zombie, the singer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Zombie

"I guess no one connects to him on WorldConnect"


My comments:  Check out John's timeless post - good ones!   Is Rob Zombie dead yet?  They don't put living people on WorldConnect.


Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

No comments: