One of the primary reasons to update your WeRelate profile page is to provide contact information so you can make connections with others researching your families and locations. As WeRelate grows, I’m finding that I frequently visit pages outside my family pages. Although WeRelate provides a watch list to notify you when selected pages are updated, there isn’t a facility to bookmark my favorite pages. No problem, create your own bookmarks on your profile page. At a page you want to bookmark, select the page name/title at the top of the page, right click and choose the copy ...

You can now use Skype on your mobile phone! Yes, Skype is now available for the iPhone (and iPod Touch 2nd generation or higher using the earphones with mic ) and Symbian phones with Android and Blackberry phones following soon. On the iPhone, you can see who’s online and text message them through either the phone’s data service or via wifi. When you’re in wifi mode, you can call other Skype users at no charge or even other phones if you’re using Skype’s pay-as-you-go or unlimited subscription. Obviously, the Touch will only work over wifi. There are some ...

The featured page at WeRelate is James Kerr – and with good reason. It’s a fabulous example of how to organize and present your research using WeRelate. And, while you’re there, follow the link to the Augusta County page – another delight! Related posts:WeRelate: Building Your Family Story Research Guides WeRelate Research Guides

Every day more and more books are added to ebook libraries like Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive with historical and genealogical value. From journals of Civil War soldiers and regimental histories to diaries of settlers as they travel across the country looking for a new home, these manuscripts have great research value. The key to many of these books is a good ebook reader. One very nice free reader, Stanza , is available for Windows, Mac and the iPhone/iPod Touch. Although I’m more familiar with the mobile version and always have several books on my iPod Touch for pleasure ...

eBay is a tremendous resource for the family historian. It is used to track down family Bibles, photographs and other treasures. I use eBay to expand my collections of vintage postcards and military sweetheart jewelry. If you are a collector or just hoping to find a family treasure, spend a few minutes setting up a saved search or two with the results delivered to your desktop via your newsreader. Once done, every time someone posts an item on eBay matching your search, that notice will appear in your newsreader. Yes, it is just that simple. All of this begins at the eBay search page. ...

Most of us are quite comfortable with our word processing software. We know the everyday commands needed to perform the tasks we need. However, when it comes to serious writing projects such as a family history, it’s necessary to push our word processing skills into new territories. To that end, I’ve created the Word Processing for Publishers series of guides to demonstrate how your word processor can support you in all your writing projects. The series began here at Family Matters, but I have moved it to Moultrie Creek Press , my blog focused on family publishing.

As repetitive stress/carpal tunnel issues continue to plague these old bones, I’m watching with more than just a little fascination as digital speech recognition continues to improve. Services like OnStar and Sync have made it easier to operate systems within your vehicle using your voice and take advantage of outside support such as navigation and emergency assistance. Dragon Search for the iPhone uses your spoken search request to find restaurants, maps and even music on your device. Speech recognition applications make sense for vehicles where you don’t want to take your ...

One of the most useful tools a researcher has is the newsreader. It is an extremely efficient way to keep up with a large number of information sources. Unlike your email inbox where you must physically action everything that lands in it, with a newsreader you only have to “touch” the items you want to keep or action. Everything else is marked as read and removed from your view automatically. And, with a good newsreader and a little effort, you can set yourself up to have a surprising amount of research delivered right to your desktop. The newsreader is designed to find and ...

Today Family Tree Magazine announced their selection of the 40 Best Genealogy Blogs. I am thrilled and so honored that Family Matters is included in the How-To category. And, what a delight to be included with so many other wonderful bloggers! Family Matters is a labor of love and a way to give back something to the genea-community that has grown up around blogging. Many of the others included in the list are people I’ve met through our blogs and am honored to call my friends. This community of genealogy bloggers – which is many times the 40 on this list – is an ...

An interesting news item popped up in my newsreader this week. Nuance , the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software for Windows, has purchased MacSpeech , who makes similar software for the Mac. Actually, the recent MacSpeech apps – Dictate and Scribe – are built using the Dragon speech recognition engine. While that did significantly improve the speech-to-text functionality in the Mac products, they still were far behind the Dragon product in supporting application command functions. Recently Dragon Mobile Apps released two very nice iPhone apps. With ...

If you’re like me, your collection of Facebook friends is an eclectic bunch. Family, friends, co-workers and your genea-community friends, among others, share your updates, photos and other posted content. Are there times when you’d like to post updates that are only visible to a certain group of friends? For example, Facebook is an efficient way to get the word out that Aunt Emma is ill but it’s not something the whole world needs to know. Actually, you can do this quite easily. All it takes is a bit of organization using Facebook lists. Start by clicking on the Account ...

The folks at MacSpeech have just introduced a new voice-to-text product called MacSpeech Scribe. Like their original Dictate app, Scribe will convert audio to text. The difference here is that Scribe doesn’t require live dictation from approved microphones. Scribe can transcribe from audio files. Scribe supports .wav, .aif, .aiff, .m4v, .mp4, and .m4a formats, but not .mp3, and can handle up to six different speech profiles (people’s voices). Like Dictate, there’s a training requirement for each profile, but it doesn’t require reading a standard text. Instead you ...

Hat tip to O’Reilly Radar for spotlighting this. What a great idea! The NARA facility in College Park, Maryland has a wealth of information available to researchers, including over 1,500 DVDs that are works of the government and can be freely copied using a DVD duplicator. NARA is kindly allowing us to install a second DVD duplicator for use of Scanning League members, who will systematically copy those 1,500 DVDs, place them in a FedFlix return envelope, and send them back to Public.Resource.Org. These DVDs will then be uploaded to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and our own Public ...

OpenOffice.org, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office for Windows, Mac and Linux users, has just announced its latest release. Current users will see an update notice when they open any of the OOo apps. For details and downloads visit the 3.2 New Features page.

Scrapblog , the online scrapbooking platform, has just released a Facebook app called Share the Love where you can build scrapbook pages using your Facebook photos and share them with your friends in Facebook. It’s fun, easy to use and there’s a large collection of free components for building a page. You start with 100 credits for selecting from their collection of design elements. Right now most of the designs are Valentines, but I’m sure that will change when the holiday passes. Your creations are saved in your Facebook photos, making it easy to share them with ...