After my early morning visit to Stonehenge, I continued on with the tour to visit the town of Salisbury and the Salisbury Cathedral. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the Salisbury Cathedral, formally known as the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, has the tallest church spire in the United Kingdom. The foundation stone [...]
Those Places Thursday | Stonehenge
Today, I was simply awestruck by the shear impossible-ness of Stonehenge. That the stones stand, that they weigh thousands of tonnes and that they came from miles and miles away seems incredible in a somewhat academic way when you read about them, but seeing the huge sarsen stones standing before me, above me, around me, [...]
Website Wednesday | Host Your Family History Photos on Flickr
Flickr is the largest and one of the most popular photo sharing websites on the internet. It offers both free and pro accounts, easy uploading, a vast community of amateur and professional photographers, detailed privacy and sharing options, all on an easy to navigate website. Although Flickr is owned by Yahoo, it is no longer [...]
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Website Wednesday | Digital Public Library of America Launches
The Digital Public Library of America website launched on April 18th. The DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to [...]
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Methodology Monday | Beyond Online Records
From census records to vital records and many things in between, records for genealogy research are increasingly available online in searchable databases, even complete with images of the original documents. But not everything is online, not yet anyway. Sometimes the most fantastic records are still only available at the archives, the court house or the [...]
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Social History Sunday | Smallpox
One of our ancestor’s greatest fears was the highly contagious disease, smallpox, a disease that has thankfully been considered to be eradicated from the earth since 1980. There were two variants of smallpox: Variola major, the more severe variant, with 30-50% fatalities and Variola minor, the less severe variant, with 1-2% fatalities. Within seven to seventeen [...]
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Mappy Monday | Ancestry Emigration Atlas 1852
While exploring the new UK map collection on Ancestry, I stumbled upon their Emigration Atlas 1852 which is an image-only item. This thin volume provided basic details for people looking to emigrate from Great Britain. It includes maps of Canada, the United States, Mexico, South America, the Cape Colony and Fort Natal, Australia, Tasmania, and New [...]
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Social History Sunday | London Bills of Mortality 1715
From Tuesday April 12 [1715] to Tuesday April 19, within the Bills of Mortality, London. (Christned) Males 153, Females 159, In all 312, (Buried) Males 203, Females 223, In all 426, increased in the Burials this Week 34. (Casulaties) Drown’d herself (being Lunatick) at St. Olave in Southwark 1. Found dead in the street, at [...]
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Security Saturday | Massive Botnet Targets WordPress Blogs
This post is not, strictly speaking, a genealogy related article. However, since many genealogists are also bloggers, and since WordPress is often their platform of choice, I’m hoping that this post will help get the word out there to all my fellow bloggers that they need to do an immediate security review of their WordPress [...]
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Tech Tuesday | Put This Post in Your Pocket!
I read. I read a lot! I try to keep up with what is going on in world news and particularly in genealogy, technology and the freelance writing world but some days, I just suffer from information overload. I find an interesting article, crammed full of information and I want to remember it, and read [...]
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Sunday Supper | A New Kind of Recipe
IFTTT is a free service that lets you create connections between different accounts and apps to perform actions based on events or triggers. As an example, I created a recipe that would add every post in Google Reader that I marked as a favourite to a special notebook in my Evernote account so I [...]
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Tech Tuesday | Roots Magic To-Do List
Whether you’re planning a trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City or ordering films from the FHL to your local Family History Centre, the Roots Magic To-Do list is an excellent tool to use to organize your film search. Before you set off to view your films, print a to-do list report [...]
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Sentimental Sunday | Do You Have a Favourite Ancestor?
Probably one of my favourite ancestors is Rebecca STOREY (nee WEARNE). She was baptised on 25 May 1788 in Newchurch on the Isle of Wight in England, the daughter of Richard and Molly Wearne. On 28 Apr 1809 at Newchurch, she married Thomas STOREY, son of William and Fanny STOREY. They had six children that I [...]
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Follow Friday | The Next Generation of Genealogy SiteBuilding (TNG)
Last week, I got an email from Google Webmaster Tools telling me that I’d been receiving an unusual number of 404 errors on my website. That is what happens when pages disappear. Not a good thing. In fact a very bad thing! Today was the first chance I’ve had to take a proper look at [...]
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Mystery Monday | DNA and Richard III
When asked by my mother what I wanted for my birthday in 2007, I told her that I wanted an mtDNA test from FamilyTree DNA. I wasn’t really sure why I wanted the test. I knew that mtDNA was unlikely to tell me anything about my family history but I had just finished reading The [...]
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