Learn Genealogy On Line

This is a computer?

Building a Research Toolbox

Thomas MacEntee

When Wed, May 16, 9pm – 10pm

Description: Building a Research Toolbox

Sponsored by Southern California Genealogical Society's Jamboree Extension Series

6:00 PM - P 7:00 PM - M 8:00 PM - C 9:00 PM - E

Are you overwhelmed with the number of online resources for genealogical research? Are you constantly working with unorganized bookmarks or favorites? Printing out lists of websites you use most?

Learn how to build a research toolbox that is organized, easy-to-use, and can be accessed from almost anywhere. To register visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/520924200 more details» copy to my calendar

Webinars offer flexibility: Pick a class you like and a time that works.

Easily finding a webinar is a neat service of Genea Webinars.com  as they regularly post many of them on their website: Click here to go there.

The webinar above is one I have registered to attend. I need to be more organized.  How about you?

Origon of The Porter Family

William The Conqueror

The full name of the first Porter was Ralph Roger Porter. He was born in the eleventh century A D. He was the son of William de la Grande, a Norman Knight. William de la grande fought in the Battle of Hastings in 1066, with William, The Conquerer, the Norman Duke. After the Norman conquest, William de la Grande acquired land near Kenilworth County, Warwick, England.

William the Conqueror became King of England and was known as William the First. Succeeding William, The First was his son, Henry, known as Henry the First, King of England. In 1120, Henry, the First appointed the son of William de la Grande as his "Grand Porteur". It is from this appointment that the name Porter was derived. The appointee became known as Ralph Roger Porter. He held the tile of "Grand Porteur" from 1120 to 1140.

The name Porter is derived from the French word porte, Latin Porta, a gate and a gate opener or gate protector in the same sense as John 10:3, "to him the porter openeth" It does not mean a Procter in the sense of a burden bearer.

The Kings Castle was surrounded by a moat. Over the moat at the castle's entrance was a gate. This gate could be closed by pulling it up as a draw bridge. Whenever the visitors wished to enter the castle they were required to ring the bells at the entrance and if they were eligible to enter the "Grand Porteur" or his helpers would lower the gate bridge across the moat and the visitors could then enter the castle.

The above circumstances led to the design of the Porter Coat-Of-Arms. By William Arthur Porter Sr.

Spammers Make Me Turn Comments To Moderate

When someone leaves a nice comment and plants a bunch of links to their websites with that comment they have only one objective, which is to promote their sites. The nice comment is fake. They are called spammers.

That happened yesterday on this blog.

I, therefore, deleted the comment and changed the settings so I must approve a comment before it goes live. I thought on our topic of genealogy people would not abuse the value of having the instant gratification of seeing your comment go live immediately. I might point out the my wife told me this would happen. I hate how she is always right.

What the person was doing was hoping to plant links on my blog. It would drive traffic to his sites and give him more strength with the search engines. Don't use this method to drive traffic. There are legitimate methods, this isn't one of them. Had the spammer left a comment of value, I would have gone to his blog. Were it relevent to my goals, and were it a site I liked, I would have linked to  it.

We teach how to blog for the search engines in our Free 4 part Blogging for Genealogy class.

Even though I now have comments moderated, in the future I will try and push your legitimate comments live promptly. Lar

Actually, I think if he had only placed one URL in the comment I wouldn't have had such a problem.

Watch This and Be A Little More Glad

The Interesting Impact of A Journal Entry

Grandma Blanche Bingham on the left

It has been a blessing to me that my mother spent a lot of time collecting family history items. My sister Nancy has been given most of them, but I have a few things.

This morning I came upon several pages of what is from a notebook from my Grandmother Blanche Bingham, perhaps a crude journal. They are hand written and in places it is difficult to read.

They leave me with a tender feeling about my grandmother. She discusses the positive things about the spouses of her children. She gives their maiden names. She tells how many children each had.

She is brief about her marriages but says some things about them, such as her first husband left her and how many years later she married.

I remember my grandmother as an old woman. She died when I was a teenager. My memories of her are good. I remember the apartment she lived in, in Tacoma Washington. We lived in Idaho.

The final part of the first section of these pages is what I want to publish today. "I am alone and try to keep myself busy sewing and house work. I love my church work and lady friends and enjoy my children. My health is not good but I try to keep happy. I like to go to the temples and do temple work for the dead. I hope I can finish out my generations and do more temple work. I know that heavenly fathers spirit is sure with you in the temples and it such a restful happy feeling. My prayers have been answered many times. I have sick children and grandchildren. I have been alone and no phone. I have prayed to Heavenly Father for help and the children would be healthy and resting and they would be alright the next day."

Grandmother has been gone many years now. I wish I could have given her fewer alone times. I know my aunts and uncles living in Washington State tried, but it seems she still was lonely.

I thought I knew my grandma - but thanks to a handwritten entry I know her better now.

1 Million New Entries This Month On Billion Graves

It looks like Billion Graves is rolling and thats a good thing. In a previous article: Click Here, I wrote why I like the website, it's unique features, and more.

One of my favorite likes about Billion graves is that it uses smart phones, which many of your children have. You can take the family to the cemetary and make genealogy a high tech family affair.

From the company:

Dear BillionGravers,

Wow! We’ve had record uploads every day so far in May! Keep up the good work! We’ll still need thousands more images, so let’s make the weekends our highest uploading days. Keep watching that Leaderboard to see how you’re doing—if you are among the top 25 transcribers OR picture takers on May 31, you get your choice of a free BillionGraves t-shirt or one free year of our great BillionGraves Plus Account.....

Opening a Flickr Account

I am convinced, after almost a decade of blogging that Flickr is one of your best friends. >
You can store your own photos in Flickr and you can use some of the, in fact most of the photos in Flickr. You are to give the author credit for that photo. After several procedure changes Flickr ended up with a simple solution. >
If you place the photo in your blog using the HTML Provided by Flickr, it has the necessary credit within the HTML. It sends a message to the owner of the photo that their photo is used by you. If you double click the photo after it is placed in the blog it will take you to the owners account. Photographs give life to an article. My style is to search in Flickr for something to do with a topic. Actually I go to my wife Kathleens Flickr account first. She is an awesome photographer and has so many photographs in her file I can often find one that fits the mood of my article.>
To give you an example of how I work, on May 2nd of this year I wrote an article about The Mormon Church having a culture of service. I went to Flickr and searched several words without finding a photo I liked. I searched "service", "needy" "helpless" and "old" before I thought of retirement home, where I found the photo I liked.

Church Produced Genealogy - Family History Beginner Videos

Hot off the press and found on the LDS Church Family Search Facebook page. Did you know the church as fully adopted Facebook? There are scores of pages, some specializing in certain locations for research. I friended 4 of them. There are even blogs. This article links you to four videos they have produced for beginners in family history. The article below is part of what they posted today with a link to their blog and the full article.

Quoting from the artile: "If you’re just getting started with your family history research and feel like you need some help, there are 4 great videos posted on YouTube you should see. These are easy to follow videos that were created for the beginner. They assume you know little or nothing about doing genealogy research.  In most cases, you will be starting your own research after the very first video.  All 4 videos are under 4 minutes in length, so you’re not investing a lot of time to learn these simple but valuable research skills. They’re fun to watch and easy to follow"...  Click Here

Great New Discovery: Stickies

I don't know if you are like me, and especially like Kathleen, having sticky notes sticking in a sticky and stupid manner, that being everywhere, but this is to introduce you to a way out of that situation. Katleen just shared with me how she is using a product called Stickies. We genealogy buffs usually have several notes to our side, several windows open our screens, and need Stickies. Go download it now by clicking here.

From the Author:

Stickies is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of yellow notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. It is a computerised version of those notes.
The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. Stickies will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. Stickies stores information in a single text-based ini file.
Stickies will never support animated dancing figures, or play "Greensleeves". They are instead yellow rectangular windows onto which you can put some text notes. Once created, they will stay on screen until you take them away. Just like a real sticky piece of paper.
Main features:

• Once on screen, stickies will remain where placed until closed, even through reboots
• Stickies appearance can be customised; fonts, colours and buttons may be changed, and styles saved. Stickies can be resized.
• Stickies can store text or images
• Stickies can snap to each other and to the sides of the screen to keep them neatly lined up
• Stickies can be attached to a web site, document or folder so they only show when it's on screen
• Stickies can be transferred from one machine to another either over a TCP/IP network connection, or by using an SMTP mail server or MAPI client:
  • Hierarchical friends list, which may be automatically transferred from other friends
  • Play a sound file on receive
  • Signature for transmitted or emailed stickies
  • Favourite friends, and custom lists can be made
• Stickies can be hidden for a certain period, until a specified date and time, or to wake every day, week or month, to act as reminders.
• Stickies can have alarms set to ensure you notice them at a point you choose
• International language, Unicode and RTL text support
• Stickies works with Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Stickies is small and simple, it writes to a single text file, and does not alter the registry
• AD network administrators can use Group Policy to control settings
• API to allow integration with other applications
• ...and Stickies is completely free!

Accolades
Since I made Stickies available on the web, some people have been kind enough to write to me saying nice things about it:

• This is for everyone who has an affection for good sticky notes programs. We think Stickies is the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the custom deluxe, the coupe de ville of the sticky world of sticky notes. And it's sticky world out there. (Information Avenue)
• I've just downloaded Stickies, and wanted to let you know that I'm delighted! After wading through numerous other [yellow] note style programs, to-do list aps and other similar utilities, it is such a pleasure to find Stickies! It it so simple yet powerful, has useful features rather than gimmicks, and, of course, it's wonderfully free! (Andy Nix)
• Stickies must be the most efficient, simple, small, compact, fast, useful program I have EVER installed :) (Martin Cleaver)
• Downloaded your excellent program the other day. It's great to find something so elegant and effective in this monolithic software era. (Andrew Fung)

Blogging for Genealogy Class 1

Blogging for genealogy class full powerpoint

View more presentations from Larry K Cragun is on a family history mission .

These are the slides from the Blogging for Genealogy Class yesterday. Thanks to all who attended, it was truly a fun time for Kathleen and me. 

If others want a class from us, you can just let us know as we love doing it.

I am in the mode of championing blogging for genealogy for the reasons I mention in a previous article.

I am hoping to connect in any way, especially in sharing our reserach and blogging is a great way to do that.