I've bitten the bullet and had a play with the new profile in Facebook. You'll be able to see it on 1st October. I will take you through the process of setting it up (once you've agreed to do so). At the moment it's only open to developers. When I said yes, I accepted the option to take the tour. First up you can select the cover (the large photo). It selected the most recent photo that had been tagged with my name. As you can see, this isn't me - it's my beautiful great-grand-nephew: When … [Read more...]
Tumblr for Family History Societies and Libraries
17 September 2011 by Leave a Comment
I think Tumblr is a great platform for a blog. You can share enormous photos, links and news, and the format is large and easy to read. It's perfect for a family historian who doesn't want to do a lot of writing, or only occasionally. Here is an example of a Tumblr blog (mine): If you click on the picture you will go to my Tumblr blog. What does this have to do with family history? Now this is a personal blog and it's not just about genealogy, so I need you to use your imagination a … [Read more...]
Twitter for family historians
5 June 2011 by 4 Comments
What is Twitter? Twitter is what is known as a microblog. You can send and receive messages, called tweets. A tweet can be a maximum of 140 characters. Tweets can be seen, and searched, by everyone unless you restrict them only to your friends. You can search for messages by a single person, by a word or phrase, or by a topic or hashtag, which is word, often abbreviated, with a # in the front of it. A tweet you particularly like can be retweeted to your followers. Tweets can include … [Read more...]
Which is the best family tree program?
25 November 2010 by 1 Comment
I am often asked this question, and it is a difficult one to answer. The answer depends on what you want to get out of the program. There are some things you need to think about: Ease of use - is the layout easy to understand, and is it easy to work out what you are supposed to do to enter and change your data? Output - what do you want to do with the data once you've entered it? Reports, charts, websites and screen display are all ways of seeing the data you have spent all that time … [Read more...]
Top 10 Social Media Sites for Family Historians
22 October 2010 by 2 Comments
I think that social media was made for family historians. We are different from other people - we actually enjoy finding distant relatives and keeping in touch with them! Social media helps us to find relatives and old friends in ways that were not possible in the days of mailing lists and message boards. Here are 10 social media sites that are not directly related to family history (except one) but are nevertheless important for communicating, sharing and collaborating with other family … [Read more...]
Whose face is that? – Picasa 3
2 October 2010 by 4 Comments
I have recently upgraded my Picasa to version 3 and let it start running through my photos looking for faces so I could tag them. Picasa is photoorganising, editing and sharing software from the Google people. It's free. The scan started two days ago, and it's now 32% of the way there. Yes, I have a lot of photos. I have restricted to photos in the My Pictures folder for the present, which it says contains about 14,000 photos. Despite the slowness of it, and the fact that it uses up to … [Read more...]
Find-a-Grave
29 May 2010 by 2 Comments
Have you tried searching Find-a-Grave? I thought it was an American site, with only American graves, but I was wrong. I had a look around to see for myself. I searched the FAQ for 'international' to see if it covered countries other than USA, as I couldn't easily find this information on the homepage, and found that some fixes had been done to clean up the list of countries, including Australia. Woohoo! So I did a search for my usual test surname - Eason - and restricted the country to … [Read more...]
