Follow Friday - June 1, 2012

I am really enjoying this being off for the summer from school break! I actually get to read blogs and pick and choose my favorite posts and then share them with you here on my blog! So here are some interesting finds I had this week. Oh and the photo of the ducks. I pulled it off of Google Images. I'm sure it belongs to a business who sells ducks. But when I fed the image back into the Google Images site, it was being used by so many different websites, including blogs, that I couldn't drill down to the original owner. So if you own it, let me know and I will attribute! I promise!

First up is from Lynn Palermo of The Armchair Genealogist. She wrote a post "Mind Mapping for Genealogists." I have heard of using Mind Mapping software for genealogy before, but I had always thought it required the fancy expensive versions of the software. Lynn reminds us that the free versions work just as well. And she included a simple graphic of it to illustrate what it may look like.

Next up is the Genealogics  blog by Matthew. I actually came across him on Twitter. I received an email that he had started following me. I promptly checked out his Twitter profile (@genealogics) and saw he was an avid genealogist and active tweeter and new to blogging. I then checked out his blog which I found to be nicely laid out and well-written. He had already posted photos and research "problems;" though he saw them also as "opportunities" so there is an optimist in there as well. I loved his by-line of "a tree-lific journey into family history." So please check out his tweets and his new blog and make sure to leave a comment and say hello.

I answered a prompt on LinkedIn which asked which of your blog posts were the most popular and what topics did they cover. My answer was this: One post "Am I an Evidence-based or Conclusion Based Genealogist?" and "How I use my Genealogy Software." What do these two posts have in common? They talk about SOURCES. This is a HUGE topic in genealogy circles these days. Well another reader posted her response from her blog, Essex Voices Past, as "Tuesday’s Tip – Interpreting primary sources – the 6 ‘w’s." I can totally see why this post has been so popular. Recreated from tips learned from the author's tutors at the UK's Open University lecture series, this article discusses how to interpret primary sources and go beyond just pulling names from them. If you've ever wondered if there was more out there, then read this post and you won't be disappointed!

Randy from Genea-Musings shared his experiences with the Ancestry.com online family trees in his post "Adding a Story to my Ancestry Member Tree."  In this post he showed how extended notes and descriptions can be included in your online tree by using the "Stories" feature. He warned, however, that your Stories can be easily copied to other trees, as well as information posted to websites. If you are sensitive to the information you post on your personal websites being copied to others' online family trees, then you might want to keep on eye on these stories in Ancestry.com, or keep your information off the internet. Ancestry.com will alert you to other members who are researching the same lines as you.