10 Genealogy Things You Need to Know This Morning, Thursday, 19 Dec 2013

Today's Things

• Yesterday, the US Senate passed the bipartisan budget bill -- a sad day in the genealogy world as buried in that bill was a 3-year restriction on access to the Social Security Death Index [SSDI], a critical tool in any genealogist's research tool box. However, the Records Preservation and Access Committee [RPAC], a joint committee of FGS, NGS, and IAJGS, is on top of the issue and will be recommending what we, as researchers, will need to do to handle this new research roadblock. For further and in-depth information about the bill that was passed you can read two very informative blog posts by Barbara Matthews on the MGC Sentinel blog: What is Buried in the Budget Bill? SSDI Closure! and What is it about genealogists and the SSDI?

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• Speaking of RPAC, here is their end-of-the-year report on the BCG blog. We had some wins and we had some losses.
• MyHeritage has a new Facebook app to help users discover their family history.
• In its move to compete with popular note-taking and cloud storage services like Evernote, Dropbox has added support for PDF annotations and iWork. 
• Are you using court records to help find out more about your ancestors? [I hope so.] Finding where all of them are located is the first problem. In Custodia Legis is the blog for the Law Librarians of Congress. [I don't know about you, but wherever a librarian is located is where I want to be. They know where everything is.] Here is a great roundup of the In Custodia Legis blog posts for 2013, and number two seems very, very helpful for those of us who seek more about our ancestors.
• Yesterday, findmypast Ireland announced they've added the Tank Corps and Royal Tank Corps 1919-1934 to their databases. Over the next few days, these should be added to their other sites' world subscriptions, if they haven't already been added.
• Is the Paper Monster slowly taking you over? On the Olive Tree Genealogy blog, Lorine has begun a new series to help you out with that.
• The FamilySearch blog announced recently the 2014 International Newspaper Conference will be held right after Rootstech. [I mean, right after. So if you haven't already made your hotel and airline reservations for Rootstech 2014, you could totally tack this on to the end of your trip.]
• On the Irish Genealogy News blog, Claire reveals Ireland's Folklore Collection is now online.
• And yesterday the USGenWeb volunteer contributors uploaded 115 files for various counties for various US states. Sadly, due to a technological hiccup in their archives update, only the US state of Alabama's updates were listed. My suggestion would be to go to the USGenWeb's website for whichever state(s) you have research interests in and do a general search of that state's databases.

Other things that might interest you. Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe.

• Did you miss yesterday's 9 genealogy things you needed to know?
• Here are 10 ways to use the Internet as a tool to find offline info [sometimes for FREE].
• The 1 trick you need to access federal population censuses for FREE.

Happy Researching!
~Caroline
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