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The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has received a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize local newspapers from
1836 to 1922. The newspapers will first appear on the Library of
Congress's Chronicling America Web site and will later be added to the
University of Tennessee Library's Web site. They will be digitized over the next two years.

Here is a link with more details:

http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2010/06/17/ut-library-digitize-newspapers/


This is great news for me, since
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Regnal dates

Some of old editions Burke's Peerage have "living temp Henry II, which is fairly obvious, but what does "living 5 Henry IV" mean, I wondered?

If it meant 5th year of his reign, but if so why not just say 1404?

I discovered that this is the system of regnal years which in medieval times was more commonly reckoned from 25 March (or sometimes from 25 December). In England, and later the United Kingdom, until 1963, each Act of Parliament was defined by its serial number within the regnal year in which
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Why is Microsoft Office online for free?

I did a Google search on the word "free" and got 7,500,000,000. That isabout two frees for every man, woman and child on the planet. Somenotable free products on the Internet are Adobe Reader, OpenOffice.org,Google Earth, RootsMagicEssentials, (you might not realize it, but Google Search learns fromyour previous searches and produces results consistent with thoseprevious searches), QuickTime 7 Player, and on and on and on. So whywould a company that makes zillions of dollars selling complicateds
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American Memory

If a pedigree chart were compared to the bones of the body of familyhistory, the flesh and life of the body would be the stories and historyof the people. But have you ever wondered how your ancestors' speechsounded? Have you ever explored the AmericanEnglish Dialect Recordings of The Center for Applied LinguisticsCollection in TheLibrary of Congress, American Memory? The website describes theproject as follows:
The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings docume
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I am not a big user of social networking sites. About fifteen months ago, I opened a Facebook account to explore sharing photos with family. I decided to go another route and never looked at FB again. Occasionally, I'd get friend request emails which I ignored. Couldn't figure out why I was getting them, because, as far as I knew, my account was "invisible.” As it turns out, if one's email is in someone's address book, and they authorize FB to send invites to their address book, well, then peopl

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Random thoughts on FamilySearch

For the past couple of years, I have been closely following developmentsmade by FamilySearch to a variety of online products, including NewFamilySearch, FamilySearch.org, the FamilySearch Wiki and several otherwebsites. For most of that time, FamilySearch has facilitated theobservations by making semi-public announcements about its intentionsand by posting explanations of changes on its websites. Most recently,that whole system of announcements seems to have disappeared. Here are afew examples:

R
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According to my grandmother, her father spent time in Birmingham working as a streetcar driver. I can place him in Georgia during each census year, so this would have been during an “in-between” time.

Newt and my great-grandmother were married in 1909. They were courting at the time this picture was taken; they are the young couple . . . → : CONTINUE READING

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You can now create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents onlinewith WindowsLive. Once you sign up for Microsoft's online service, you canaccess Microsoft's SkyDrive for your new documents. The release of thesefree online versions of the standard Office software was simultaneouswith the release of the Microsoft Office 2010software. The new Office product promises to be even more complicatedand feature driven than any of the previous versions of the programs.The programs included in the Of
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I've spent well over ten years researching data from the archives of the Ministry of Culture Spain. Countless hours downloading resource documentation, more than three for each individual within the Juan Ponce de Leon immediate family, ancestors, into my computer and into my own family tree. Juan Ponce as it turned out is a cousin of mine because we have the same ancestor, Poncio de Minerva also known as Ponce de Cabrera.

As a backup to the resource documentation I also hunted down the digital co

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A Letter from a Proud Grandpapa

Michiel Ockers Hogerzeijl was the captain of a whaling ship from 1729 to 1759. He lived in Holland and hunted for whales off the coast of Greenland. His father, Ocker Bruins Hoogerseijl, was also a commander of a whaling ship from 1720 to 1730. There is a Hogerzeil Street in the town of Krimpen aan de Lek, Holland, where they lived. In the 1970s the village decided to name the streets after people and items related to whaling, which had been an important industry in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Good news for those who are interested in the genealogy of Juan Ponce de Leon, his immediate family members, ancestors and his descendants.

My work has made it to Barnes and Nobel.

Check it out:

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A chance connection at Jamboree

I was at the Southern California Genealogical Society's 2010 Jamboree this past weekend. I dropped by the Los Californianos booth, for at least the fourth time. The nice lady at the booth (I forgot your name!) asked me what the surname was of the family I had in early California. I told her Echeverría, and she asked if I was related to "that guy over there." Umm, not that I know of?

It turns out, another attendee (whose name I've also forgotten!) had asked about the same surname shortly before I
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New FamilySearch Beta Test

A recent announcement from FamilySearch began another round of BetaTesting of the New FamilySearch program. This particular Beta Test wasaimed at three changes to the program. Quoting from the announcementE-mail:
We need your feedback on the following changes:
· New Discussions feature. This feature allows users to post and respondto discussions about deceased persons in the new FamilySearch. Userscan share and coordinate information they have.
· New exact search feature. This feature allows users
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Columbus Public Library

On a recent business trip, I visited the Columbus Public Library in Columbus, GA. What an amazing genealogy collection! They have as many stacks in the genealogy wing as my local library has in the whole adult section. They also have wi-fi throughout the library, so I was able to post my notes directly to my . . . → : CONTINUE READING

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Finding John Tanner

Sometimes all the computer power in the world cannot help you find thefamily history records you are looking for. My Great-great-greatgrandfather, John Tanner, is a case in point. My research goal wasreally to look for John's great-great-grandfather, William Tanner. Butthe search for William eventually lead to direct information about JohnTanner's birth, dates that had been passed down for hundreds of yearsand had been the subject of a number of books. Unfortunately, not one ofthose traditional
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Yo soy una mezcla de muchas cosas
La arena mortal de mis células llenas de
España con su música de toros

Cuando las caras de un pasado
Me miran por entre sus ojos rasgados
Que soy yo

Española o amerindia
El mestizaje me llena de confusión
Maldita sea

Porque es que mis antepasados
Se mesclaron
Llenándome de pena

Y curiosidad acerca de mis raíces
De aquí, de allá y de todo sitio
Y entonces todo queda claro

Yo soy mestiza
Un poco de todos los genes del mundo
Dándole sabor a mi vida

I’m a mixture of many things
The m
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My regular blog is Nutfield Genealogy at www.nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com where I blog about Londonderry and Derry, New Hampshire local history and genealogy in general for our our part of New England. This was one of my most popular blogs last month, not just for local people, but from readers all over the internet.

In his autobiography, “Recollections of a Busy Life”, Horace Greeley remembers his childhood in Nutfield. His parents’ families were from Londonderry, and he used to spend his summ

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Finding my past UK FREE

For anyone with UK interests. Finding My Past UK is have free access during the World Cup when England play.
http://www.findmypast.co.uk/world-cup.jsp?utm_source=FB&utm_content=120610&u

And here's the time table for the World Cup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_FIFA_World_Cup_schedule

12 June 8.30 pm
18 June 8.30 pm
23 June 4.00 pm


All records available using our Full subscription (including the 1911Census) will be free: Living Relatives searches and Memorial scrolls are
not included.



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