The Genealogy Guys Podcast #159 - 2008 December 15

This week's news includes: Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, submitted his resignation to the President, effective 19 December 2008, citing health reasons for his decision; and FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org) just completed digitizing its 25,000th book. (Visit http://www.familysearch.org and click on Search Records and then on Historical Records.)

This week's listener email includes: Rich discusses how he used Windows Home Server to back up his data, and how he was able to use it when his son's hard drive failed; he also shared another website at which a small program can be downloaded for free that allows you to locate and use special characters -- It is at SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/allchars; Rollin wrote to clarify that support for adding GPS coordinates is available in the purchased Deluxe version of Legacy and not in the free Basic version; Rich in PA advised us that Find A Grave (http://www.findagrave.com/) has added the great facility to link parents and children, and spouses, to records there (using the Find A Grave Memorial number at the bottom of the left-hand column); he also shares another social networking site for book lovers called Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/), similar to LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com); Claire shared an excellent census map resource at http://www.familyhistory101.com/map_census.html at which you will find maps for most U.S. states that you can use to see boundary changes for each of the census years; Tom shared a story from the Kansas City Star from 15 November 2008 [the story has been retired from their website] in which Linda K. Lewis was highlighted as having spent 5 years with volunteers documenting and photographing 40 of the 44 known cemeteries in Johnson County, KS -- and she has documented them all at http://cemetery.cottonhills.com/;  Tim asked for The Guys' opinions about using a genealogy database software program vs. Ancestry.com as a repository for his genealogy information; Rod in Australia shared an excellent interview from Australian Radio National regarding cousin marriage with Cathy Day, PhD researcher, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU -- listen to it at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2008/2426440.htm or click on the link above.