Photos and comments from Arizona and around the world
In a blog post by Robert Kehrer of FamilySearch, Robert relates how FamilySearch.org has updated its search system with two new features that will allow users to focus their searches in a dramatic way. These two new features are: Restrict Results by...
It is interesting to see what people think of FamilySearch.org's Family Tree program especially in a venue outside of the core genealogical blogging community. My daughter, Amy Tanner Thiriot is a regular contributor to The Keepapitchinin blog and has...
If you look carefully, you can see the dinosaur footprints embedded in this sandstone slab. This is not a famous site. It is just an ordinary looking wash at the bottom of a sandy hill. You have to know where to stop your car and where to walk to see...
Michael W. McCormick in his blog, Enduring Legacy Genealogy, posted a link to a Get Satisfaction dialoge about the future of Family Tree Photos and its possible interaction with FamilySearch.org's Family Tree. Over the years, I have been shown a number...
The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is over 7000 feet above sea level and the North Rim is over 1000 feet higher. In Arizona, that means that the winters are severe with very low temperatures, snow and ice. For me, this is the best time to be at the Canyon....
We always look for quartz rocks. Quartz is a mineral and in its pure form is as clear as glass. But usually, it comes in veins and sometimes outcrops and has a whitish color. Colored forms of quartz like agate, garnet, amethyst and turquoise can be very...
There are only a few places on the Rim where you can see clear down into the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Once and a while you catch a glimpse of a portion of the Colorado River, but mostly, all you can see is the top of the Inner Gorge of the Canyon....
There is the old saying about a bird in the hand being worth more than a bird in a bush, but I disagree. Birds in the hand are pretty messy and I enjoy them in bushes a lot more than holding them.
I love the form of feathers. They have fascinated me since I was whole lot younger than I am now. I used to try to draw them but now I am satisfied with taking photographs. I seem to see a lot more white feathers than other colors and I wonder what happens...
This is not a spectacularly beautiful building, in fact, it is almost invisible, which is good by the way. I appreciate architecture that blends into its surroundings in a way that makes the structure a part of the landscape. This is the Maricopa County...
The number in the title is 10 Petabytes which is the amount of data presently archived by the Internet Archive. Click on the link for a video explanation of this ridiculously large number featuring presentations by Brewster Kahle, Robert Miller, Kristine...
Last evening, my wife and I were looking at the resources available from MyHeritage.com, particularly the Newspaper Archive Collection from WorldVitalRecords.com. We were pleasantly surprised at the large number of newspaper article we found about my...
During the past few months, Family History Expos has been building a new version of their website to optimize the features and speed up response times. The new site will be implemented on January 20th. There may be some slight disruption in the use of...
So you start out with the obvious, Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org or WorldVitalRecords.com or findmypast.com and then what do you do? Is that the end of the genealogical research? If I don't find what I am looking for on one of these huge websites,...
I had an interesting time yesterday following my own advice. To explain a little, I often teach about Google.com and encourage those in my classes to "look for each name in your pedigree" (quoting myself). So I was sitting in the Mesa FamilySearch Library...
Hmm. Did I mention that JSTOR has over 7000 journals online? Well, I should have looked at the crack in the door a little closer before hitting the publish button on my last post. It turns out that the "Free Access" for individuals is limited to 77 journals,...
As you can see from the background, not too many of the trees and bushes in the desert lose their leaves in the winter. Although it is now after the New Year and technically Winter, most of the trees still have their leaves. Unless it gets unusually cold,...
Lemon grass is an herb with a lemony taste but is not at all related to lemons. The seeds are similar to carrots and other vegetables. We inherited a clump of lemon grass from the previous owners of our house and it has weathered the summers and winters...
Where and how a plant grows determines to a large extent whether it is considered a wildflower or a weed. Globe mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) is a good example of the the weed vs. wildflower dilemma. It has beautiful apricot colored blossoms and grows...
blog.billiongraves.com Genealogy at your feet, now at your fingertips.
In an announcement dated January 4, 2013, BillionGraves.com stated that it had been acquired by Otter Creek Holdings, which is a working strategic partner with American Granite and Memorials, Inc. and American Monument (based in Ogden, Utah). BillionGraves...
One of the "Big Four" online genealogically related commercial website companies is brightsolid.com, a company based in the United Kingdom. brightsolid is one of the major network services in the UK as well as a major player in the world-wide, online...
Sometimes we have a tendency to equate beauty with extravagance. We seem to appreciate a field of flowers more than the beauty of a single bloom. These tiny yellow flowers would go unnoticed but I was fascinated, not only with the color, but the form...
For a brief time each year, the desert wildflowers brighten the valleys and hillsides of the desert. You often have to drive for miles just to see a few flowers, but when you find them, they make the whole time searching worthwhile. The seeds from these...
