Scripophily- Your Friendly Neighborhood Collecting Craze

If you are looking for an interesting browse on the stranger side of the historical, check out Scripophily.net, or Oldstocks.com. Defined as the study and collection of stocks and bonds, scripophily is an interesting trip into the business successes and failures of yesteryear. Take, for instance, the New England Breeders' Club (illegal horse-racing anyone?). And many of the certificates are beautiful!

Ah collecting. I have to say that I had no idea that people collected old stock and bond certificates. What's next... collecting the names of dead people and putting them in a database?

Readability

Perennial favorite blog resourceshelf pointed out a great web tool, Readability, which has the ability to declutter, streamline and customize pages to increase their, well, readability. You may think installing another tool in order to avoid clutter seems silly. If, however, you are anything like me, and you struggle with trying to accomplish satisfactory in-depth reading online due to all of the poopoo flung in the sidebars and in-between paragraphs on most sites... Readability may well be for you.

Here's an example of the detritus that Readability removes, from a book review at the New York Times, the first is the page as normal:




And here's the page after invoking Readability:



Much cleaner, and less distraction! Hyperlinks are bumped down to footnotes, pics are gone, and the text fills the screen in luscious, black-on-white readability! Scrumptious!

Installation of Readability is very easy (took me about ten seconds on Google Chrome). Here's the video on installation from the company:

Readability - Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

California Oral Histories

I recently set out to see what types of oral histories relevant to California research were online. I was stunned to see the breadth and depth of oral history information on the web, and the list below is just for California! I hope someone finds a gem in here, as there are countless hours of first-person history here to be perused.


* CSU Fullerton: Featured collections include town histories, various ethnic collections, WWII and labor issues. None online.

* The Bancroft Library (UCB) focii include: Italian-Americans, Portugese, and Jewish. Recordings and videos online.

* The Regional Oral History Office, in connection with the Bancroft Library, has a number of transcripts online at archive.org. Topics include regional history, the AIDS epidemic, Napa Valley history, agricultural history and more.

* The Holocaust Center of Northern California has oral histories available to researchers and the general public. None online.

* UC Santa Cruz has a program devoted to regional and institutional histories. Transcripts online.

* CSU Monterey Bay has an African American Legacy project centered on the central California coast. Video online.

* CSU Long Beach has various ethnic collections, as well as regional and labor histories. Recordings online.

* The Marin County Free Library has a host of interviews online regarding early Marin County (and Bay Area) history. Audio clips and full transcripts online.

* UCSB has various regional, ethnic and event histories. None online.

* The California State Archives has conducted individuals with notable governmental figures since 1986. None online.

* UCLA library has a huge collection of oral histories, on a large variety of subjects. Some transcripts online.

* USC maintains a collection of interviews concerning the history of social work in the State. None online.

* The California State Military Museum has histories of WWII submarine veterans online.

* Claremont College has a number of interviews on a large variety of subjects. None online.

* Caltech has oral histories involving various technical projects and professorial studies. Transcripts and audio online.

* Urban School of San Francisco has an oral history project covering Civil Rights, Japanese internment, the Holocaust, and issues surrounding the redevelopment of the Fillmore in SF.

Historic Video Online-Critical Past

A veritable movie feast for the historically inclined is to be found at CriticalPast.com, an historic film archive.

The site has films from 1890 - 1990, with the heaviest concentration in the 1940's (particularly in regard to WWII).

Some neat films include Coney Island in 1898, William Jennings Bryan in 1910, and a 1929 New Orleans Mardi Gras parade.



Site via MakeUseOf.

SepiaTown [Resource Shelf]

Here's another one for the "potential" pile: SepiaTown, a grand mash up of photos and Google Maps, provides an historical look into the past, searchable and browseable by location:



The number of photos is slim, at the moment, but this resource could be a fascinating browse and a great resource if it takes off and we see more content added by everyday users.

Especially cool is the "Then/Now" feature, which will juxtapose the historic image with a modern-day photo:



If genealogists got into this project, we could have a seriously useful resource on our hands!


(Link via ResearchBuzz.)

Dream Research Resources [Random]

I've been engaged in smatterings of random research on relatives lately, as I attempt to organize and tame my research files. I realized that often we are blessed with a great resource in one research location--great newspaper coverage, fabulous online records, that sort of thing--that we wish we had for EVERY location we're researching.

I thought I would share with you some of my absolute FAVORITE online resources for research, whether because of their usability, potential, or content. Each resource is particular to a certain geographic area, but each gives us an idea of what is possible when it comes to the future of online research. Only in my dreams would a single place I am researching have all of these kinds of resources online!

Newspaper Resource:

Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers. Impressively searchable (wildcard, phrase and exemption searching) as well as an easy interface. I wish Ancestry could get something this usable working on their newspaper collection.

Vital Records Indices:

Louisiana Secretary of State. All death records that can be ordered are found on this index. No more shots in the dark when ordering a record! As a runner up I would vote for the Illinois State Archives and their myriad databases, although I find their site a little more confusing to navigate; I suppose that could be because they are presenting so much more information on so many more people from so many more places!

Vital Records Online:

South Carolina Death Records, 1821-1955, from Ancestry. I may be biased in this, since my husband has roots in South Carolina on both his mother's and father's sides, therefore I do a lot of research there. I do find this database (along with the Delayed State Births and Charleston Births database) to be very very useful to me as they provide images of the original certificates! This saves me about $15 per record I would have had to order from the state (and their turn around time was in the MONTHS)! Well worth the cost of the Ancestry membership just right there. I imagine that as data storage costs continue to drop, and broadband access increases, we'll see more and more primary documents going up on the web, as opposed to the index focus of previous years.

Various online indexes and transcriptions:

sfgenealogy.com. Hands down one of the best. A mind-boggling assortment of information bound to help anyone researching in the Bay Area. I have found reference to many people that I've researched in the Bay Area. That's pretty impressive.

For this category, I also really like the Illinois Genealogy Trails sites. The Genealogy Trails sites started in Illinois in 2000, and they recently started expanding to cover the entire United States. They don't say it directly, but I get the feeling they're trying to take another crack at what GenWeb has tried to do, but has failed in some regards: provide updated, data-heavy sites that are user-friendly and contain pertinent information. I would imagine as Genealogy Trails expands it will have the same "hit or miss" character to the individual county sites (some better than others, as is the case with GenWeb), but for right now their emphasis on DATA DATA DATA seems to be working.

Religion-specific:

Cheers to the Milwaukee Archdiocese for their Catholic Cemeteries Burial Records database. While some other diocesan records are incongruously protected from the light of day (*COUGHCOUGH ORLEANS PARISH I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU COUGHCOUGH*), the Milwaukee Archdiocese seems to understand that genealogical research connects people to their Catholic heritage. Seems like a no-brainer, but, well. As a Catholic myself I can admit that the Catholic church can stymie all reason sometimes.

Overseas Research:

The Jewish Records Indexing-Poland project. Talk about a dream online resource for overseas research! Unfortunately, the project was axed by the Polish government a few years ago, which saddens me greatly.

These are just some of the resources that come to mind when I think of sites that I visit again and again. What are some of your favorites?

The Lay of the Land [Quick Tip]

Happy New Year!

Did you notice, in the rush of the holidays, that Google Maps has added a new terrain feature to their site?:



Obviously, this has huge implications for genealogy researchers, for whom an awareness of natural travel barriers like mountains, rivers, etc. can be helpful in determining behaviors of ancestors.

Here's a typical street map view of Belt, Montana, a residence of my great-grandfather Peter Shannon:



Compare the information available through the street map to that available from the new terrain view, and you can see how the terrain view could influence my understanding of Peter's activities and movements around this town:

Tag Dragging [Quick Tip]

Sometimes, in the course of your research, you open a slew of tabs, and then realize, for one reason or another, that the order of the tabs is less than optimal. Don't forget that in all browsers you can remedy this situation by dragging tabs into an order that more approximately suits your needs.

In this case, I want my ancestry.com tab to move to the second tab position. Just click and hold the tab, then drag the cursor to place you want the tab to be:



Release the button, and voila'!



Your tabs are reordered like magic, and your addled brain has one less hurdle to overcome while doing vast amounts of online genealogy research!

Wordless Wednesdays: Sites To Checkout

Read It Later, Part II [Site Review]

Last week, we talked about the online bookmarking tool Read It Later, and how it can help you organize web sites that you want to mark to read, but don't necessarily want to bookmark.

This week I want to talk briefly about another feature of Read It Later, namely its integration with RSS feed reader Google Reader. This feature is only available with use of the Firefox extension, so those who have installed and use RIL on another browser will not find this post of use.

Reading It Later, Blog Style

If you subscribe to a number of different blogs in a number of different areas of interest (as many of us do), you may find that you have a difficult number of blog posts to track and read. Using Read It Later can help maximize the time you spend reading blogs, while minimizing the time spent wading through hundreds of thousands of posts.

Here's a shot of my Google Reader genealogy pane, with the Read It Later Firefox extension installed. Notice the line of checkmarks which has been added to the list-view lines, between the stars and the blog post titles:



While browsing posts in list view I can select blog posts that look to be of interest to me by clicking on the checkmark:



Doing so adds those blog posts to my Reading List, visible here as the last three items on my list:



I can now mark all the items in my genealogy folder as "read" within Google Reader, and I am no longer drowning in unread posts that make for a daunting visit to my RSS Reader!

The Best Part

The excellent thing about this feature, is that when clicked on to read from the Reading List, these items will open on their original site. That is, the integration between RIL and Google Reader means that you can bookmark the pages of the original blog posts without ever leaving the Google Reader environment. Previously, a user would have to see the blog post in Google Reader, click through to the original item on the original blog site, then add the page to the Reading List. The new integrated version accomplishes the same things with much more efficiency!

Wordless Wednesdays: Site Explore

Covering Your Copyright Back [Site Review]

If you are a genealogist and blog, or if you have any content online which you consider to be proprietary, you may be interested in a few websites which aim to provide easy searching for misuse of your own content on sites across the internet.

CopyrightSpot.com and Copyscape.com are both simple enough to use; simply enter the URL of a page of content you would like to search for (you can also enter the address for an RSS feed), hit search, and the sites report back with sites that have duplicated your text.

No News is Good News?

I used my blog as a trial:.



Both sites got some results, which was impressive, but on a usefulness scale they scored pretty low. Particularly, CopyrightSpot listed a variety of sites which graciously list my blog on a blogroll; as these blogrolls tend to include a snippet of new posts as they scroll through the roll, they come up on the copyright search as potential content crime!



Copyscape came up with similar results, although from some different sites. Because the duplicated text in these cases were dynamic (i.e., they scroll through the roll and then disappear), click-throughs on the results, which would typically highlight occurrences of duplicated text, only resulted in a message saying the sites "appear to have removed your text":



The sites work well enough for what they purport to do (the search engines obviously have no way of delineating real plagiarism from quotes or blogrolls), so are worth checking out for a quick check on how (or if) your content is being used by someone else on the web. In this case, no news definitely is good news!

[Via: MakeUseOf.com]

New Online Book Resource [Site Review]

Background
Recently launched, Hathi Trust bills itself as the "shared digital future", being a common digital repository that already has over 2 million volumes and 700+ million pages on its servers. According to their site, "HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections."

Using Hathi Trust
This site is relatively new, and at the moment there is no single search-interface for works digitized under this cooperative, but their site mentions that this is an ultimate goal. For now, users have to use the search engines of various participating institutions (like the University of Michigan)to find some content, or can browse some of the collection through the Digital Library Interface, also particular to UMich.

Poking around, I found some interesting titles just by running a few easy subject word searches. A search on cemeteries yielded 164 results, including some monument transcriptions from Eastern Europe, and death records of European deaths in Southeast Asia. Numerous volumes record transcriptions from graveyards along the Eastern seaboard. Public domain volumes are full-text, those volumes not in the public domain are "search only", meaning they are not browsable:



Unfortunately, the results shown for intra-text searching on restricted, "search only" items, are uniquely unhelpful (note that you can't see the search results in situ at all):



The breadth of the collections seem to be interesting, and will be of use to most researchers. A quick search on Oakland, California yielded me (among other things) a 1910 report on the urban park system in Oakland California... this from the UMich library! Therefore, even if you don't see an institution from the exact areas of your geographic concerns, you should make an attempt to check out what you can of Hathi Trust to see what you can find. You may be pleasantly surprised.

In Conclusion

It's clear from Hathi Trust's site and the lack of a centralized searching function, that this project is in its early stages, and is first and foremost crafting shared digital depository practices for its central users, Universities and Archives. However, as the ultimate goal is to make the repository "available, to everyone, anywhere, any time", this is a site to watch, and one which, if successful, could give Google Books a serious run for its money.

Wordless Wednesdays [Random]

Some sites to explore:

Copyright? Or No Copyright? [Site Roundup]

As genealogists, copyright is something of interest to us. Whether we are doing transcription or abstraction work, writing a family history, or collating information on resources available for our research area, the copyright status of various works is often important to our work. To that end, I wanted to give a short roundup of what is available online for your use when copyright questions arise.

• Stanford SULAIR Copyright Renewal Database covers renewal records for 1923-1964, a key period for many genealogy works. The database offers simple and advanced searching by keyword, title, author and registration dates.
  
• U. S. Copyright Office has online copyright renewal records from 1978-present. The search options are comprehensive.
  
• WorldCat Copyright Registry is a new resource, currently in Beta, which allows for collaborative input on copyright status for different works. The site is mainly geared toward library and institutional use, but anyone with an interest in the copyright status of a particular work, and a free WorldCat account, can add information to the item pages.
  

(As an aside, one of the most comprehensive tables on copyright status I have found is at Cornell's website. Very comprehensive, and covers the thorny foreign work/author/renewal issues.)

Google Newspapers Announcement

Google's Official Blog today got around to announcing the new newspaper archiving project it has undertaken recently, which I covered last month.

One interesting tidbit is buried in the post:

You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure trove by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like [Nixon space shuttle] or [Titanic located]. Stories we've scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators, and are marked "Google News Archive." Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we'll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you'll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well. (Emphasis added).

I love the fact that we are looking at a future integration between the news archive search and general google searches. Imagine a day when you google an ancestor's name and see newspaper articles as results!

What the article doesn't address is the issue of access to what the above excerpt references as "archive aggregators", which, in this case, invariably means sites like ancestry.com and newspaperarchive.com (to name two I have noticed in search results). I have subscriptions to both of these sites, so google's search function is quite helpful for me. But what about general users who are unlikely to have subscriptions to these sites? Will there be a per-article access feature? Will the sites simply be shilling their annual subscriptions to searchers?

I'd personally love to see free access to searchable online newspapers within the next few years, especially since a huge bulk of historic newspapers are public domain; I doubt it will happen, but it sure would be nice.

Flickr Civil War Pools [Tidbits]

For today's tidbit, I present some Flickr groups of interest to those with ancestors who fought in the Civil War. I covered how to subscribe to the RSS feeds for Flickr groups in a previous post. If you haven't yet given Flickr an eyeball with your ancestry in mind, give it a shot. Some groups serve as virtual visits to battlefields and towns. Some document cemeteries, headstones and monuments. Some include uploaded photographs of individuals. All are bound to interest the genealogist-turned-Civil War buff.

• Veterans of the American Civil War: "This group is dedicated to photos and other images of authentic veterans of the American Civil War; 1861-1865. Photos may have been taken before, during, and after the Civil War, in or out of uniform."
  
  
• Graves of Veterans of the American Civil War: "This group is dedicated to photos of the tombstones, headstones, and graves of authentic veterans of the American Civil War; 1861-1865."
  
  
• American Civil War Battlefields: "We hope that this group will be a place where you can showcase your best photos of Civil War battlefields throughout the United States."
  
  
• Photographs of the Civil War: "Many photos were taken and are now archived. Many are still in the pocession of family members and collectors. Please share your images with this group, be they yours or from other sources. Include those sources if possible. If you have any history of the photographs you post please include that as well."
  
  
• War Between the States: "This group is dedicated to those who died or sacrificed in other ways for the cause they believed in regardless of the side they fought for. This group is for the memory of those souls."
  
  
• Civil War Sites and Memorials: "pictures of the sites and memorials today"
  
  Confederate Specific
  
  
• Confederate History Sites: "Photos of sites, monuments, etc. connected to the history of the Confederate States of America."
  
  
• Confederate Monuments: "Confederate monuments, like the type that are found on most courthouse squares across the South, are the focus of the group."
  
  Union Specific
  
  
• Southern Unionists: "Like their Confederate brethren, they fought to defend their homes, neighborhoods, and families, and stood up bravely for principles they held to be true and right. This group is to document the lives and careers of these Southern Unionists."
  
  Site Specific
  
  
• Gettysburg: "This group is for people who love the historic town that hosted one of the most famous battles of the U.S. Civil War. Battlefield, surrounding area and town photos welcome."
  
  
• Journey Through Hallowed Ground: Gettysburg to Charlottesville: "This stretch of land, less than 200 miles long, has witnessed a disproportionate amount of US history: the greatest concentration of Civil War battlefields in the country, the homes of four US Presidents (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Eisenhower), African American sites, scenic rivers and countryside, etc. Virtually the entire length of the corridor is threatened, by explosive growth in the towns at the two ends of the corridor, exurban sprawl from Washington, DC, etc."
  

Research Options Online [Tidbits]

Today I ran across a great post on mashable.com regarding online tools for researchers. It covers some options that were omitted from my discussions of Google Notebook and Google Notebook Alternatives.

Definitely worth checking out if you are shopping around for a new online note-taker.

So Fresh and So Clean!

A mini round-up of applications that have caught my eye, and seem to be (potentially) useful for genealogists of different stripes:

* del.izzy: A handy site that lets you search your delicious bookmarks. Adds a functionality missing from delicious' own search, in that de.lizzy allows you to search the page content of sites you have saved in your bookmarks.

* GuardarComoPDF: Don't let the foreign language scare you off. This site allows you to create a PDF document from any .doc, .txt, .rtf, .jpeg, .xls, or .ppt file, without having to own a program such as Adobe Professional.

* Earfl: Another weak and weird URL, but an interesting service: make a phone call, speak like you're leaving a voicemail message, and after you hang up, your recorded "message" is available online, and can be embedded on a website. Quick, get your great-aunt Winnie on the phone!

Mad love to MakeUseOf which helps me help you stay abreast of things...

PDFGeni

[Via MakeUseOf]

PDFgeni is a new (still in beta, and still lacking navigational links kind of new) search engine that focuses on indexing and serving up PDF content found on the web.

The interface allows you to preview PDFs, which is great, especially when compared to Google's notoriously mangling "View in HTML" PDF preview option. This is accomplished using PDFMeNot, a classic app for those unwilling to submit themselves to the often hellish implications of launching Adobe Reader.

I fiddled with the search engine, and it has a long way to go before it gets marks for polish. Quoted search terms don't function correctly, and the design is a murky with some AdSense overload, but I think this search engine can be very useful as a portal into the sometimes underutilized world of PDF content.

I searched around on my current research dilemma, Acadian genealogy, and found some items of interest that I hadn't run across before. It's definitely worth giving this site a shot.

Try out PDFGeni here.