New Irish Genealogy Records, 2014 - free e-booklet

New Irish Genealogy Records, 2014 - free e-booklet:

Just in time for St Patrick's Day, Irish Genealogy Toolkit has published a 20-page e-booklet providing brief details of all the brand-new or, in some cases, upgraded Irish Genealogy resources released in 2014. All of the collections featured in the e-booklet were the subject of blogposts on Irish Genealogy News at the time of their release.

Miscellaneous useful stuff

Miscellaneous useful stuff gleaned from the web: a hard copy research trip bible, and a digital scrapbook

Creating a Genealogy Research Trip (GRT) Bible | Genealogy With Valerie:

You have the location of your trip picked out, you know the route you will take and if you will make any stops on your way there or back, you know where you will be staying and you have a list of the documents that you want to search for. What now?

The next step would be to make your GRT Bible. This is what my husband called covermy master binder that I put together for my first trip. In it will be your itinerary and other much needed information. It will save you time and keep you on track. It is also an easy reference that you can look at anytime you need to.

Book Review: BarbwireDigi’s Guide to Creating A Digital Genealogy Scrapbook | Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter:

Ms. Groth has published a guide for creating a digital scrapbook, specifically targeted for the users of Adobe Photoshop Elements. This program is an excellent photo-editing software for many genealogists, most especially for beginners. It’s fairly easy to learn, and does an excellent job of preparing photos for viewing and publication, adequately meeting the needs of most of us. Besides removing red-eye and cropping photos, I use photo-editing software to enhance contrast and modify light values on fuzzy scanned documents for improved readability and clarity. And, most importantly, Elements is affordable.

The first chapters of Creating a Genealogy Digital Scrapbook review the advantages of creating digital scrapbooks over the traditional scrapbook methods, then recommend the basic tools you’ll need: computer, scanner, digital camera, and the like.

My instinct is to do it the other way round: for our last few research trips I've used Microsoft OneNote for our trip planning. Evernote would work too, but I find OneNote better for drawing tables. And the tables have a list of things to do in each place, and notes can be added when you are there -- how much you did, and what you found or didn't, people you saw, and so on. But this article makes a good case for having a hard-copy binder as well -- opening up the laptop while sitting in the car and squinting to see the screen to find directions to that cemetery is a hassle. Hard copy would be easier.

Genetic study reveals 30% of white British DNA has German ancestry

Genetic study reveals 30% of white British DNA has German ancestry | Science | The Guardian:

The analysis shows that the Anglo-Saxons were the only conquering force, around 400-500 AD, to substantially alter the country’s genetic makeup, with most white British people now owing almost 30% of their DNA to the ancestors of modern-day Germans. People living in southern and central England today typically share about 40% of their DNA with the French, 11% with the Danes and 9% with the Belgians, the study of more than 2,000 people found. The French contribution was not linked to the Norman invasion of 1066, however, but a previously unknown wave of migration to Britain some time after then end of the last Ice Age nearly 10,000 years ago.

See also British Isles mapped out by genetic ancestry : Nature News & Comment:

Today, few Britons have ancestors from just one local region of the UK, so it is hard to identify patterns of genetic variation specific to any one place. But Donnelley and his team found 2,039 Britons of European ancestry who lived in rural areas and knew that their four grandparents were all born within 80-kilometres of each other. Since these volunteers’ DNA was a mosaic of their grandparents’, who themselves were to known be strongly linked to one British region in the late nineteenth century, Donnelley hoped to find genetic variation that clustered neatly with their grandparents' geographic location.

I was not surprised at the finding that most of the English had German ancestry, but what did surprise me was the differences between Cornwall, Devon and Somerset.

Indexing the books of Lawrence G.Green

Lawrence G. Green was a prolific author and raconteur who wrote stories about people and places, mostly in southern Africa.

I've found some of his books useful in family history research, as some of them mention family members, or places where they lived. In his life as a journalist he collected notes on all sorts of topics, and wrote them up in his books, sometimes reusing the same story in more than one book.

I have been rereading some of his books to make notes for family history research, and in response to a recent review of To the river's end someone pointed me to a combined index of 23 of his books.

I downloaded the index, which was unfortunately in PDF format, though someone kindly converted it so that I could get it into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately none of the books in the index had any references to the families I was interested in (Morris, Stewardson and Green) and it did not give page numbers. Also, the personal names were listed with surname last, which makes alphabetical sorting by surname difficult. It also appeared to be simply based on the printed indexes in the books, which are not complete, and many of the most interesting and useful bits in the books do not appear in the printed indexes at all.

Someone else sent me another index, which was rather too complex and difficult to use.

So I would like to propose a new collaborative indexing project for the books of Lawrence George Green.

I propose that people who have access to Lawrence G. Green's books undertake to index one or two of them, and communicate with each other to ensure that the work is not duplicated.

The entries should be in book index format, and entered in a spreadsheat or database program that can export a file in "comma-separated values" (CSV) format.

The fields should be:

1. Combined Index
2. Book
3. Page

They should all be text fields.

The Combined Index field should contain the index entry, initially compiled from the printed book index, and then supplemented by going through the book and adding missing entries. The Combined Index field should look like this:

Moffat, Robert
Monomotapa
Moore, Leopold
Morton, (hangman)
Morris, Abraham
Moss, George
Moyle
Muchison Club
music
Musina people
muti
Myres, Prof J.L.
Oates, Frank
Oberholzer (farmer)
Old Drift
Oswell, William Cotton
Ovamboland

Personal names should be listed with surname first, and proper names with the initial letters capitalised.

If you use a spreadsheet program, when you enter the title of the book, it will usually offer a duplicate entry, which can saving typing (and typos).

If you have any comments or suggestions to make about this proposal, please write them in the comments section below, and also if you would be interested in taking part in such a project.

You can get a copy of this article, with a sample index, at the following link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25096784/GreenNdxProj.pdf

I suggest that discussion and coordination of this project take place in the African Genealogy Forum on Yahoogroups, which has facilities for uploading and downloading files and entering files in a database.