Once again, I expect to supply free Wi-Fi networking at the NGS conference being held this week in Kansas City, Missouri. If you are attending the conference, you should be able to check your e-mail and/or surf the web a bit at no charge. There's no need to feel isolated from the outside world simply because you are traveling. You can bring your own laptop or PDA or use one of my laptops to check your e-mail.

I expect the Wi-Fi signal will cover the entire Exhibitors' Hall and possibly may “spill over” into nearby hallways or other rooms. However, for the best ...

This has nothing to do with genealogy, but it is a great story. Perhaps you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Thieves recently stole an Apple laptop from Kait Duplaga, who works at the Apple store in the Westchester, New York, mall and thus knows how to use all Macintosh bells and whistles. What the thieves did not know is that Kait has remote control software installed on the laptop so that she can access it from any other Macintosh. She can sit at any other Macintosh computer, connect to the laptop across the Internet (wherever it is located), enter a user name and ...

Good news! After more than 20 years of research, the Peer book is near completion! The Peer Family in North America: Vol. 1 Jacob & Anne Peer, Immigrants from Sussex Co. New Jersey to Upper Canada in 1796, a study of the first two generations (including documents, maps and photos) is scheduled for publication July 1, 2008. Volume 1 contains narrative (footnoted) chapters on Jacob Peer Sr,

Just on the off chance anyone's taken an interest in Zotero, any of the 800 of you who have traipsed through my site in the past few days, virtually shutting down the LUG yesterday and choking Zotero's bandwidth, I'd like to mention a few things that weren't immediately obvious to me. continued...

Are you a frequent user of Footnote.com? Or are you interested in learning more about the site? Will you be at the NGS conference this week in Kansas City?

The Footnote.com team is looking to hear from people that use Footnote. As the Footnote.com blog states:

Every time we go to these events, we meet with great people that give us straight talk about Footnote.com; the good, the bad and the ugly.

In order to make sure we have time to listen to our members and potential members, we have reserved a room to hold a Footnote User Meeting. This meeting gives us a chance to ...

A number of us are fortunate enough to own old books, birth certificates, marriage certificates, naturalization certificates, old newspaper clippings, or other family heirloom documents that we want to preserve. What condition will they be in 20 or 50 years from now? For that matter, will the fruits of your genealogy labor be available to your descendants 200 years from now? You should take steps now to make sure the documents remain in the best possible condition. I thought I would discuss the techniques of document preservation a bit more in this newsletter.

...

Any three-year-old child will tell you, the sky is blue. That’s one of the fundamental truths in life. Even on a cloudy day, you know that blue sky lies above the clouds, soon to return. Blue sky, green grass, white snow, clear air. These are constants you can count on. Unless you live in China. Maybe other places in Asia too, but China is the one I know about. In China the sky is white. So is the air. Not white like snow, but white like pearl dust. I’d heard about the air quality problems in China, and I expected to find nasty brown air when I stepped off the plane in Beijing ...

Yesterday I wrote about Jonathan Coe's book and his characters use of oral history and photography. If you'd like have your life imitate the literary device in Coe's book try recording the stories associated with your family photographs. It's a lot easier than you think. Voice Quilt, a gift company offers customers a way to record memories and package them as a present. You can invite other members of your family to contribute as well. Everything you need is on the VoiceQuilt site except for your voice. It's all done using a toll-free number, an access code and your telephone. What ...

The archives at the International Tracing Service formally opened to the public on April 30 and genealogists are already beginning to take note. An organized group of 42 genealogists from...

If you write a genealogy newsletter or other genealogy-related publication, you already know how difficult it is to constantly find new information to write about. I thought I would take this opportunity to remind you that you may use information from this newsletter in your publication.

I do copyright this newsletter, but then I grant rights to others to republish the articles with some minor restrictions:

You must do so strictly for non-commercial purposes (commercial publishers should see my comments below). Articles in this newsletter marked with a Plus Sign (+) are ...

This week's news includes: the Vatican has issued a letter instructing all dioceses not to give any information to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, due to concerns about the Mormons' practice of posthumous rebaptism; a new Midwest Genealogy Center (see http://www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/genlh/mgc.htm ) will open in Independence, Missouri, on 21 June 2008 with the largest collection of genealogical materials in the U.S.; DNA links have been found from the ancient "iceman" found in British Columbia in 1999 to at least 17 living people; an American couple touring in Germany visited a ...

The meeting of the Utah Valley chapter of the Utah Genealogical Association will be a little earlier in May, on Friday, the 16th. The meeting will be held at the Utah South Area Family History Training Center located at 85 North 600 East, Provo. The meeting will begin at 7:00 p.m. The speaker will be Fran Jensen from the Research Support team at the Family History Library. The topic will be the new Family Search Wiki -- a place where you can share your information and gather information from others. It will be specifically helpful by location. Bring your friends, this will be a new and ...

A neat article by travel writer Jan Burak Schwert appeared in the Seattle Times earlier this week recounting her husband's unusual meeting with his third cousin Franz - a man...

If you're looking for a way to honor the women in your family tree start by labeling your photographs. Paper photos can easily be captioned on the back (never write on the front of a photograph) using a soft lead pencil. Those resin-coated images from the 1960s to the present require a Zig marker. I've honored one of my maternal grandmother by writing about her photo and her life. Nana (on the left) died when I was just a tot so I never really knew her. She appears in a movie of my first birthday party and of course I'm familiar with her image. This postcard sits on my mother's bureau. ...

Years ago Jack Finney used photos of old New York in his book Time and Again (available from the store on my website). It's a bit of a cult classic in some circles. You can read more about it in a Wikipedia article. While Finney's book is considered an illustrated novel there are plenty of fictional works that incorporate pictures into the story line. I'm going to turn the comments section of my blog on this week so that you can send me your favorite books mention old photos. Be nice! The inspiration for this posting is a book review in the Santa Cruz Sentinel (California) for Jonathan ...