Having a Disaster Plan

If you own treasured family artifacts, photographs and scrapbooks, and who doesn’t, then having a home disaster plan is a good idea. Anyone who lives in an area susceptible to floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards knows that sooner or later the inevitable will occur. It can even happen due to fire and broken water pipes.

As a librarian and a photo curator, I served on a number of disaster preparedness committees. Museum curators and librarians know that preparing for an emergency before it happens can save their collections. Most institutions have a plan that tells staff what to do just in case the worst occurs. It’s contains information on salvaging a collection, a list of helpful contacts and outlines what supplies are kept on hand to help cope with the aftermath. While it may be impossible to avoid a disaster like a hurricane there are steps you can take to prepare beforehand...

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The Human Family Tree if Man Had Never Sinned

http://www.genetoons.com/ is a simple, one-panel, Weekly Genealogical cartoon for the whole family to enjoy.

LDS church to put genealogy records on Internet

SALT LAKE CITY - The Mormon church has more than 2 million rolls of microfilmed birth, death and census records stored in granite vaults in the Wasatch Mountains, 25 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced plans to digitize and index that information and make in available on the Internet.

"The goal is to create (Internet-accessible) indexes to all the films we have in the vault. That's a long-term process and that's a lot of films," said Paul Nauta, manager of public affairs for church's FamilySearch Web site. The date when the indexes will be available has not been announced.

Mormons are encouraged to find the names of ancestors to baptize by proxy, which they believe gives the dead the opportunity to embrace the faith in the afterlife.

For more than a century, the church has collected parish and civil records throughout the world. The records have been microfilmed and stored in the vaults, with copies elsewhere.
The church already has hundreds of millions of names in computer files and has said in the past that it hoped to eventually have 2 billion names similarly accessible.

Those attending the annual Federation of Genealogical Societies' conference this week at the Salt Palace will get a preview of the church's plans.

As the project progresses over time, indexes to records from 110 nations previously stored on microfilm will become accessible through the Internet.

"We're showing people how we'll be creating indexes from those films. Sometime in the future we'll ask people to help us create the indexes and make them publicly available, and little by little we'll start to index the films from the vault like we did with the 1880 (U.S.) Census," Nauta said.

It takes a lot of people and a lot of time to do the work, he said. "Currently, you have to look at images on paper or burn them on a CD and distribute those to index the data. We're moving the whole process to the Internet," he said.

Conference attendees are using a lab at the Salt Palace equipped with a number of computers to demonstrate the new automated database.

New advances in indexing software will enable to church to produce indexes faster, than it did with previous databases, he said. Making the database from the 1880 U.S. Census was a 12-year project, using tens of thousands of volunteers.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It's Just History - Witchcraft Events

Did you know that the definition of "Witch Craft" in 1692 in no way compares to our modern definition of "Witch Craft"?

When you hear the word "Witch" I'm sure that like many, a picture pops into your head. It's a picture we've associated with the word for years, the black pointy hat, a broom stick and lets not forget the ugly green faced woman. Along with the mental picture, you probably think of her standing over a huge pot making some vile potion with ingredients such as "eye of newt" or "scale of snake". I'll bet that you never pictured a green faced witch as someones mother or someones daughter... [ Read More ]