Photos and comments from Arizona and around the world
These entrenched bends in the river are called Goosenecks. This is the Colorado River from a cliff looking down 2000 feet or so. Along the edge of the cliff in the foreground, you can see the Shaffer Trail.
Ancestry.com reported the following: Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012 was $131.1 million, an increase of 25.8% over $104.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, driven by growth in our core Ancestry.com branded websites revenues. If you...
Walking Arizona Almost every tourist bureau type photo of Phoenix includes a shot of the Papago Buttes. They were once part of a National Monument but are now a Phoenix City Park. This shot is misleading since the park sits right on the edge of Phoenix,...
Walking Arizona One of the halmarks of the desert is that old machinery and equipment is preserved by the dry climate. so we have a lot of old farm and mining machinery scattered here and there. I am always tempted to take photos of the equipment, just...
Walking Arizona The cholla is the most fiercely protected cactus and apparently puts so much energy into spines that it has little left over for flowers. Cholla flowers are small and sometimes overlooked because the rest of the plant is so formidab...
Walking Arizona These yucca flowers are too gorgeous to ignore. I took several pictures of different plants but had to choose the one I thought was the best. I like the lacy-looking blooms on this plant.
As an issue, civil rights' disputes don't usually intrude themselves into genealogical discussions and to be quite frank, dead people don't have many rights, civil or otherwise, But since our society is so pervaded with the idea that people have a variety...
Legacy Mobile is a free app that allows you to take your family tree with you wherever you go and uses the latest genealogy technology LegacyTec. The app syncs with FamilySearch and BillionGraves (and other genealogy sites coming very soon!) to give the...
I have found that there are many of the people I talk to who trace their ancestry to Eastern Europe and uniformly, there is a lack of English language resources for researching Eastern European ancestors. Additionally, few of the records have made their...
At very few times in your life do you get to witness something that will literally change the world. This is one of those occasions. On April 18-19, 2013, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will celebrate the groundbreaking work of hundreds...
Perspective in the Colorado Plateau Country is really strange. It looks like I am standing a few feet above the river, not more than 467 feet above the river. I noticed how the steel girders of the newer Navajo Bridge are like a window and I am always...
I got so busy at RootsTech 2013 that I didn't conduct as many interviews as usual. Most of my interviews were "informal" but this one was important. This interview gives a very good idea of the new developments at MyHeritage.com I talked about in the...
The Vermillion Cliffs are made up of hard and soft layers of rock. When the softer layers erode, they leave the harder rocks to fall down the cliff. It always looks to me like all this just happened a while ago, but I know how infrequently they fall and...
One of my favorite photo shots is looking out of a window and nothing in particular. I am fascinated by the views people choose for themselves out the windows of their homes, especially very old homes. Most of the time, when they could choose almost anywhere...
My adventures at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah started about 30 or so years ago. My first big effort to identify my family consisted of primarily tracking down hundreds of Family Group Records accumulated from family members over...
In honor of the upcoming ANZAC Day, findmypast.com.au has added thousands of military records and has just launched its inaugural Findmypast Anzac Memory Bank. Plus, to commemorate Anzac Day the entire military collection (including the newly released...
It is amazing to me that immigrants that came to America almost 400 years ago and that are so famous and have so many descendants in the United States, are still the subject of a considerable controversy. I have been spending some of my time at the Family...
I couldn't resist this little fellow with its unruly assortment of spines. Yes, it does need a haircut.
With all the news today, it is really hard to distinguish what is really going on in the world, even the smaller world of genealogy. But here is a major development in access to information going on without much fanfare and almost no notice by the major...
It is hard to imagine how many different shapes and colors you can see in the course of one Spring looking at cactus flowers.
There are some many fantastic flowers in the Spring, we hate to miss the opportunity of seeing all of them and of course, taking pictures of too many of them.
Yuccas are attractive enough and tame enough to be used frequently as landscape plants. This is also likely because they are so resilient and hardy. They can bloom more than once a year.
In the past week or so, I have run into another round of researchers fixated on names. Fortunately, through some not-so-gentle persuasion they were able to overcome their mental block and move on to find some productive leads in their family lines. I...
It is hard to compare flowers, they are all so beautiful. But cactus flowers are unique in their form and color. This single Claret Cup flower is an example of extraordinary form and color. Just think, all of the beauty is free for the looking.
I was struck by the almost perfect form of this wind-blown grass. The stems are so delicate and look almost like hair. I don't think I would have appreciated this type of plant and the beauty of it when I was younger. There is something about this image...
