Photos and comments from Arizona and around the world
Walking Arizona This is a switchback trail up the side of American Fork Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. The trail leads to the mouth of Timpanogos Cave. The trail is a short 1.5 miles with an elevation gain of 1,100 feet.
Genealogy's Star Privacy is a slippery term. When someone claims their privacy has been violated, that could simply mean that they are doing something they don't want someone to know about. For example, do terrorists have privacy? Are they entitled to...
Genealogy's Star The new Shoebox Mobile App allows you to upload photos directly from your iOS or Android device to your family tree on Ancestry.com. With this free app, you can scan an unlimited number of photos. The Shoebox app has a number of interesting...
Walking Arizona In some parts of the desert Southwest, particularly at higher altitudes, the lichen is more colorful than the varieties in the lower desert. There are at least three different varieties of lichen here on this rock in American Fork C...
Walking Arizona I am sure that there are larger and more impressive saguaro specimens somewhere, but this is one of the most impressive I have seen lately. Besides, it is growing in a spectacular location.
Genealogy's Star There are a number of considerations I worry about when I talk to beginning genealogical researchers; primarily, I don't want to discourage them before they even get started. Additionally, I would like to make sure that I have given them...
Genealogy's Star A comment to my recent post about the shift to Internet or Cloud based applications raised an important issue: what about access to the Cloud? What if I have my genealogical data stored on an online database and cannot access that data...
Genealogy's Star This Quick View of Genealogy introduces the FamilySearch Library Catalog on FamilySearch.org. Most people probably do not realize that the FamilySearch Library Catalog is organized as a model of the way genealogical records are kept...
Genealogy's Star I was studying my main genealogy file and noticed that I have 18 entries for women identified only as "Mary" born anywhere from 1592 to the late 1700s. Every time I go to my file, I figure out I have my life's work cut out for me. So,...
Genealogy's Star I was at a meeting presenting about FamilySearch Family Tree and the person introducing me and taking care of the "business" of the meeting commented on how family history had advanced so far that we didn't have to be genealogists anymore....
Genealogy's Star Some times I think we are entirely too insular. In my own ancestry, I have people that came from England, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Denmark. But my closest immigrant to the United States was my Great-Grandfather Marinus...
Family History Expos Question: My Great-Grandfather’s gravemarker has the inscription “A Native of Armagh County.” He was a Protestant immigrant to Canada from Ireland in 1846. Where can I go to find more information about his origins in Ireland? Answer: Unfortunately,...
Genealogy's Star I was sitting in a class on U.S. Civil War Records and the instructor was showing how to identify the actual position in a battle that your ancestor may have participated in, when one of the participants ask a very pointed question, "How...
Genealogy's Star It seems inevitable that a cemetery recording site would partner with one of the largest newspaper archives to give access to obituaries. It has now happened with a partnership between the fast growing gravemarker site, BillionGraves.com,...
Genealogy's Star In the past, proving a family relationship in the area of genealogical research has been compared to the methods of both legal and scientific proof. Both comparisons have basic flaws. From one professional standpoint genealogical proof...
Walking Arizona You can see huge rocks that have fallen off of cliffs all over Arizona. I say one the size of a house fall at Lake Powell years ago, so I don't have to wonder what it would be like to see one fall. You find people living around where...
Walking Arizona I see faces everywhere. I understand it is called pareidolia and is a subset of apophenia where you see meaningful patterns in random data. The more I look at the supposedly random patterns, the more objects and faces I can see. Interestingly,...
Genealogy's Star It is an interesting experience to begin and continue writing a blog. I suppose that unless I was writing about food or something like that, I had every reason to expect very impassioned responses in the form of emails, comments and,...
Genealogy's Star Likely, one of the major reasons for the lack of acceptance of genealogy by academic circles is genealogy's history of rampant fraud and misrepresentation. One of the most blatant and successful fraudulent genealogist wrote dozens of...
Genealogy's Star The word "pseudogenealogy" really does exist, although it comes up in the spell checker as unknown. Sometimes the word is written with a hyphen and sometimes as two separate words. It means exactly what it says: a made-up or make believe...
Genealogy's Star In response to my recent post on the Illusion of Privacy, I got the following comment: And the place where lack of privacy is most evident is on MyHeritage.com. All the names, dates, and places of me, my spouse, my children, my sisters,...
Walking Arizona There are over 5600 species of dragonflies or Odonata so far classified in the world. I like them a lot because they eat mosquitos. They are wetland insects, so what are they doing out here in the desert? There is usually a pond or...
Walking Arizona There are over 5600 species of dragonflies or Odonata so far classified in the world. I like them a lot because they eat mosquitos. They are wetland insects, so what are they doing out here in the desert? There is usually a pond or...
Genealogy's Star If you watch the product page on FamilySearch.org, you will see the current and new products show up as they received certification to work with Family Tree. Since I wrote a blog post earlier today, both Ancestral Quest and Legacy Family...
Genealogy's Star My rule is to let the computer do what computers do well and let me do what I do well. Most organization schemes intrude on the computer's realm try to make the organizer feel useful. So the question is what do computers do well? The...
