Earlier this week I learned that my local public library allows access to Heritage Quest through my library’s website. It originally wouldn’t let me log in and I had to visit my local library branch to learn that my card had been expired (probably since I haven’t had a chance to use it for some time). A few minutes later I had a new card and could log in through the website again.
Where have I been and what am I working on?
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I noticed in the last year or so that I tend to work on all my projects in waves. I’ll work on building my model railroad for a month or two, then I’ll sort stamps for a few weeks, then knock a couple books off my reading list, then spend some time with my record collection, then do some volunteer work, and…. You get the picture.
What day of the week was it?
We don’t think about this very much, but as I was looking at some dates related to my philatelic pursuits, it struck me that it was likely that a lot of records wouldn’t have been dated on a Sunday. But how do we know what day of the week any particular date fell on in history? UNIX systems include a utility called “date” in almost all distributions.
To those of you who don’t have UNIX or Linux systems handy, which is the great majority of genealogists that I know, take a look at a site currently called The return of Calendar. Using a cgi script, the site calls the date function on the web server with year numbers dating as far back as 1582. The output is a full year’s calendar in the Gregorian calendar (the calendar that most of the Western world uses today).
Links from Geneabloggers Radio
I was able to check in at Geneabloggers Radio again tonight, making this my third week participating live. Tonight’s topic was cemeteries. This week’s reading list (in no particular order) from the chat is…
Looking at a land patent
I’m doing a little researching around today to try to fill in some of the holes in my database from the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the resources that I purchased at the FGS conference recently was Family Maps of Montgomery County, Indiana. I bought the book with the intention of looking up some of the original documents that were referenced within it. Today, I finally looked up the records listed there in my direct line.
A silver bullet from FGS
Looking through my notes again today before heading out to work, I find the best quote that I heard from my time at the FGS 2011 conference. It was from Dr. David McDonald’s session on Wisconsin history:
There is no silver bullet. We’ll show you where to mine the silver and how to make a bullet out of it.
My last day at FGS 2011 in which I scare the bejeebus out of a genealogist
Yeah, sad to say that I finished my visit to the FGS 2011 conference today. The conference will continue tomorrow, but I’ve got another meeting in another state to get to tomorrow morning. So this will be my last update from the show. But, it won’t be the last post with information and resources gained from attending the show. As to how you scare a genealogist, read on…
A little more from Thursday at FGS
Well, hanging out with other Geneabloggers is certainly much more entertaining than sitting around in my hotel room writing the next post. I said there would be more from Thursday, so here is a bit more before I head out again to attend FGS today. Also there’s a time-sensitive promo code in this post…
FGS day 2 (for me)
Okay, so I’ve got an hour or so before the blogger reception across the street from the conference location, which should be enough time for today’s recap. I didn’t get any photos yet; there may be a few later tonight at the blogger reception, so watch tomorrow. I was able to talk to the FamilySearch rep about what I missed on Tuesday, so there’ll be some of that in here too….
Can you guess where I am?
I got up early and drove for five hours this morning. Just before lunch, I arrived here….
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