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It seems that every day or so I make new and exciting discoveries! I've been doing the genealogy "happy dance" quite a bit. I have added an "Audio" recording to my "Hague Family History Site" at Ancestry.com. You get to it from ancestry's home page where there is a tab called "Family Trees". You click on this and type Alfred Vincent in the search box first name and Hague in the surname box. Then click Search. Select the Hague Family History Site choice. Click on the "Audio" tab at the right end of the other tabs to hear the story. This is a new feature, still in it's BETA or trial phase. But it really works well. I clicked on a link to make a recording that accompanies the family tree. A screen came up to type in my phone number. Right away my telephone rang ready for me to record whatever story I wanted - for up to 12 minutes in length. I talked about my line of the Hague family in America for 11 min and 59 seconds. It was off the top of my head because I wanted to just test it out, but it didn't come out too bad. Better than nothing, and that is what I had in the way of telling a story for that side of the family. I do plan to also write about each of my direct ancestors. So much to do, so little time. This Audio option is similar to "snapgenie.com" which allows you to send a free e-mail with a photo embedded in the body of the e-mail and you dial a toll-free phone number to record a message about the photo, which is then also embedded to the email.
Another happy dance was done all yesterday when I was reading some blogs, and came up with the website http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ and looked at the databases in Minnesota. I was very, very happy and pleasantly surprised that my Blanding and Akins and Ells family appeared in their free online small town newspapers (for Minnesota) - in the "news from Skyberg" gossip columns in 1886 and 1887! I learned a lot, especially important was that my great-grandfather, Frank W. Blanding was a school teacher before he moved to Los Angeles in 1905 (where he was a small family hotel owner, carpenter and building contractor). Also his brother-in-law, Welty Akins was a school teacher. I spent about 10 hours saving all the images of the newspaper and copying off the images, and documenting the information under their names into Family Tree Maker. Yippee! In 2002 I spent a couple days around Skyberg / Kenyon /Dodge Center, Minnesota and didn't find this newspaper information. I'm sure it wasn't available and INDEXED just a couple years ago. This website can be searched by name or state, or newspapers within the state. They only have small town newspapers, but that is the best kind because of the local resident news.
It is hard to keep up with all the databases and creative genealogy sites on the internet. I spend my driving and exercise time listening to podcasts from the internet. I'm up to date on listening to "The Genealogy Guys" and other genealogy podcasts, now I've starting listening to some American history podcasts.
Besides these things I'm working towards editing 10 hours of digital video that I took on my trip last year to Mongolia, Russia, Finland, Baltic states, England and Wales. Yesterday I finally downloaded "Easy Media Creator Suite - version 9" after I removed version 7 from the hard drive. I always get a little quesy when I'm doing things like this, but it seems to be working well. Now I'll have to learn the new features of this version. I've got all my PC harddrive backed up to an external harddrive, so if I crash everything while trying to edit the video, at least I'll not lose anything. I am also making headway towards editing the 5,000 photos I took on this trip.
Another day in beautiful Hawaii.
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