North Carolina Genealogy Forum | North Carolina Genealogy Newsletter
You will probably have noticed the link at the top of the page for the North Carolina Genealogy Forum. I’ve just finished adding forums for each county of the state and linking to them from the respective county pages. It’s been a long time coming, but feel free to post your genealogy queries in the appropriate forums! The old forum archives are still available here as well.
For those of you that view this site via the RSS feed. I noticed in the last day or two some strange behavior with Google Reader’s treatment of the site. I don’t know, but it may affect viewers that use ANY google service to retrieve the feed. Anyway, I migrated the northcarolinagenealogy.net domain out of the server where averyjparker.com is hosted over the weekend and strangely enough in the Google Reader view of my feed HERE it shows posts from averyjparker.com. As new posts come out here it will expire the old posts, but I thought I’d give a mention for those that may have noticed something strange. The server move was something I’ve needed to do for quite some time to help insure the growth of this (and my other) site(s). Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
My recent posts on historical photos got me thinking about historical newspaper articles. Our Asheville Citizen-Times site offers articles older than 7 days for a fee online. Of course, that archive only goes back to 1999 online. This isn’t exactly what I was thinking of. I remember once upon a time researching in old newspaper archives at the library. It required using the microfilm reader, wasn’t indexed and was very slow and tedious to go through if you were looking for something specific. It was much like the proverbial needle in a haystack search.
Last time I talked about a new historic photos archive at the Asheville Citizen-Times. I think this is a great thing and would love to see more news organizations push ahead and release their older photo content for public browsing. But how is the average person to do that. We all have boxes or old pictures it seems. I know I’ve scanned quite a bit of our older picture collection. Some I’ve included on this site, but the process for attaching them here is sometimes a bit cumbersome. Are there easy ways to share those old pictures online?
For many years, if you didn’t have photos of a particular event in the past, you had to go to a library and browse special collections, or contact news organizations and see if they could search their archives for a specific photo. The internet has made our access to older photos (any photos really) so much easier we take it for granted. Services online let us share a bazillion pictures of last Christmas with everyone around the world. It’s good to see newspapers opening up some of their historical photo file collections.
I’m taking a little respite from the genealogy article series and delving into one of North Carolina’s most iconic symbols, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. For those that don’t know the outer banks, the oceans in that area are known as the graveyard of the Atlantic. The shifting sand shoals are treacherous and unpredictable and the only constant is change. For that reason, as early as 1797 the United States Congress allocated $44,000 towards the construction of a lighthouse as they put it…
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A long time ago my Mom came up with the term “cemunking” for the hobby of going out to canvas a cemetery and look for familiar names, and record information from the markers. It’s a hobby that’s not nearly as risky as spelunking (exploring caves), but it does have it’s risks. Poison Ivy, Wasps/Hornets and other bees, snakes, briars, unstable headstones, etc. I can’t help but think back on the many expeditions we’ve made in search of our ancestors final resting places and wonder why we picked the time of year that we did.
I think when I started researching online I must have gone through 500 pages of paper a month printing out leads from forums, printing out copies of census records, etc. etc. etc. It was quickly overwhelming and I think I still have portions of an unsorted stack of “leads” that are possibly related to one branch or another of my or my wife’s family. So, how do you deal with the avalanche of information that our day and time presents? And how do you manage to find something again? I’ve known some that scan information and then throw it out, I’ve never been that … willing to go without a hard copy backup, so here are some ideas that I’ve used to tame most of the data..
Another challenge that the online world brings for genealogists is the issue of privacy. Family history researchers as a general rule are very open and willing to share lots of information. At least in the part of the country I live that’s how people are. I don’t know how many times I’ve had someone call and leave a message and describe how he’s related to me and before long we’re hip deep in sharing the parts of the family history that we’re each missing. This is a great thing for the hobby because it makes the barriers to entry pretty low. You don’t have to worry that someones going to give you a “shut up and leave me alone” kind of answer. However, many genealogists are eager to post their data online. Again, this is a great thing for beginning genealogists as it gives them a “lead” on who to start researching. But at the same time there’s a great risk to this.
What if, this moment, as your reading this sentence all of your genealogy data vanished? All your research notes, all the pictures you’ve diligently collected and scanned, all your ancestry and kinship reports? How much time and effort would you have to reconstruct? OK, I know some of you are backing up frequently and are well prepared to deal with it if your hard drive crashes, but how many of you aren’t? This article is for both groups because no matter how prepared you THINK you are your data could be at risk of dying abruptly.