Sunday, April 6, 2014

Best of the Genea-Blogs - 30 March to 5 April 2014

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 daily blog prompts or 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:


*  Courtesy, Ethics and the Law by Judy G. Russell on The Legal Genealogist blog.  Thank you, Judy, for the copyright primer using my little complaint as the diving board.

*  What I Like About Ancestry.com by Michael John Neill on the Rootdig.com blog.  Michael likes Ancestry.com, he really does, and uses it to find leads to solve his research problems.

*  Old Search Is Dead.  Long Live New Search! by Jenny Lanctot on the Are My Roors Showing? blog.  Jenny says that Ancestry users need to learn to deal with it.

*  The Two Most Important Things Genealogists Can Do Now by Shelley Bishop on the A Sense of Famly blog.  Shelley describes some of the takeaways she received from the Western Reserve Historical Society seminar featuring Thomas W. Jones.

*  52 Ancestors Challenge: Week 13 Recap by Amy Johnson Crow on the No Story Too Small blog.  There are about 140 posts in this recap of ancestral biographies.

*  Attributes of a Serious Genealogist? by John D. Reid on Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections blog.  John ran a survey on last week's Pharos blog post, and shares the results.

*  1800 Federal Census of the Northwest Territory on Ancestry? April Fools! by Chris Staats on the Staats Genealogical Services blog.  Chris figures out what this collection contains and where it came from.

*  Successful 2014 Webinar Series Launch by Caroline M. Pointer on the FGS Voice blog.  This post highlights Jen Baldwin's FGS webinar on "Capturing the Community: Using Twitter to Connect, Engage and Educate in Genealogy."  Great webinar!

*  A Report Card on the Large Online Genealogy Databases by James Tanner on the Genealogy's Star blog.  James looks at the "Big 5" database providers and finds that they don't have many record types.  Shocking!  Not.

*  Telling Our Stories by Jacqi Stevens on the A Family Tapestry blog.  Jacqi makes an excellent point - we should be writing/blogging about our own stories also.  We need a meme...My Story Monday?  Tell It Tuesday?  Then we could make a Flipboard magazine out of it, pass it to our kids and cousins, and...and...another lifetime job, I fear.

*  Genealogy By the Numbers - THREE by Kenneth R. Marks on The Ancestor Hunt blog.  Ken highlights genealogy articles with three things in them.  Or 33.

*  The Death of Expertise by Michael J. Leclerc on the Mocavo Genealogy Blog.  Michael comments on a more general article on the subject and applies it to genealogical research.

*  Expertise in Neither Dead nor Sequestered by Drew Smith on the Rootsmithing: Genealogy, Methodology and Technology blog.  Drew responds to Michael's post, and James Tanner's post, on the expertise subject.

These genea-bloggers wrote weekly pick posts and news summary posts this week:

*  NN Genealogy Things You Need To Know, Sunday, 30 Mar 2014; Monday, 31 Mar 2014; Tuesday, 1 Apr 2014; Wednesday, 2 Apr 2014; Thursday, 3 Apr 2014; Friday, 4 Apr 2014; Saturday, 5 Apr 2014 by Caroline M. Pointer on the 4YourFamilyStories.com blog.

*  Follow Friday ~ Fab Finds for April 4, 2014 by Jana Last on Jana's Genealogy and Family History Blog.

*  Friday Finds - 04/04/14 by Julie Cahill Tarr on Julie's Genealogy & History Hub blog.

*  Saturday Serendipity, April 5, 2013 by John D. Tew on the Filiopietism Prism blog.

Readers are encouraged to go to the blogs listed above and read their articles, and add their blogs to your Favorites, Feedly, another RSS 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 1490 genealogy bloggers using Feedly, but I still miss quite a few it seems.


Read past Best of the Genea-Blogs posts here.


The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/04/best-of-genea-blogs-30-march-to-5-april.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver 



2 comments:

Alex Daw said...

As always Randy, a great read and thank you for sharing. For those bloggers who are looking for a meme to tell their own stories I can highly recommend the meme on Angler's Rest blog called The Book of Me Written by You. You can find it here http://www.anglers-rest.net/book-of-me-written-by-you.html

Jacqi Stevens said...

Randy, thank you once again for including A Family Tapestry in your weekly "Best Of."

As Alex mentioned, Julie Goucher's "Book of Me" meme quite handily fills the bill for generating prompts for the idea you mentioned.

Now, if only someone could invent a way to expand Time so we could get all these wonderful posts written...