The Genealogy Guys Podcast #149 - 2008 August 31

A correction to last week's story about the death of a Confederate widow can be found in last week's show notes.

The news this week includes: an update about the collapsed project to digitise the UK's GRO's Birth, Marriage, and Death records from 1837 forward; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) will be moving its office to a new home in central Belfast; the National Archives of Australia in Canberra plans to make almost all 7 million immigration records available online in the next several years (click here to learn more); and a new genealogy social network site, Genetree, is up and running at http://www.genetree.com.

This week's rich collection of listener email includes: Sharon's use of Bloglines.com to catch all of here URLs for her day's work; Valerie wrote to say she is 24 and a listener to the podcast (another young listener!); Laraine wrote to discuss her confusing marriage and birth situations for her Putnam family; Tom asked for opinions about when to prune the family tree; Betty asks about the benefits of subscribing to Genealogy.com, and The Guys ask for feedback from listeners; the Grand Traverse Genealogy Society has published a CD of cemeteries in its area at http://grandtraverseregion.com/gtags/cem_rural_flier.htm; The Guys' latest episode of "Down Under: Florida" is "The Miltons, and George's case study titled "The Milton Family Tragedy" has just been published in Family Chronicle Magazine; Michael shares information about his ancestor, John K. Zacherle, a TV horror show TV host from New York who was a candidate in the 1960 presidential election (listen to an MP3 of his campaign ad at http://www.zacherle.com/President.mp3); Gus reports that his niece, Alyssa Skalski, is possibly the youngest listener to this podcast at age 14; Rich asks about the inability to upload PDF files to the Ancestry.com famiy tree; Ben Sayer provides a terrific primer at his blof site (http://MacGenealogist.com) about secrets to digitally restoring family photos and uses one of Drew's treasured family photos as an example  (He uses iPhoto for Mac but there are certainly other excellent PC and Mac programs, but Ben provides an excellent overview.); Maureen discusses George's article for Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter titled "The Legacy of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic"; Roger (Marathon Man) discusses multimedia file usage in Family Tree Maker; and Sean shares an intensive blog article he wrote titled "10 Essential Steps to Protecting Your Family History Data".

Drew discusses the genealogical stories about Today Show hosts Meredith Vieira, Matt Lauer, and Al Roker with expert genealogist Maureen Taylor.

Don't miss joining us for our 150th Episode!