Holiday gift giving

Sorry for the posting delay but we were out of town visiting the kids! Arizona was gorgeous this time of year and we visited some amazing historical sites and walked back in time through an old (circa 1000 A.D. cliff dwelling.) I bet there were some stories there!

I wanted to share some gift giving ideas with you – both for other genealogists and your own family. First, many subscription sites have sales this time of year. Either the annual subscriptions are discounted or the subscription terms are extended. Now that the free access for the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is gone, if you are feeling particularly generous, how about giving a gift subscription to Ancestry.com? A six month US membership is $12.95 per month. You don’t have to give the whole world or even a whole year.

Worldvitalrecords.com (now a MyHeritage site) offers annual and monthly subscriptions for 89.99. The annual subscription includes free Family Tree Builder software CD. A month’s subscription is 16.25 so you don’t have to break the bank to give a month’s worth of searching before committing to a year. The 3 day trial is just not enough to figure out what databases you will want to use.

Fold3.com (now part of Ancestry.com) is 79.95 per year and includes the ability to upload your own information for sharing with other researchers. Fold3 refers to the third fold of a flag representing the veterans for the service and sacrifice.

Genealogy Bank is 69.95 for a year and has a lovely 30 day trial. This site is great for printed articles and has one of the most current SSDI’s I’ve seen.

Americanancestors.org (the old NEGHS.org) is great for those of us with New England, New York, and increasingly – just American Ancestors. They even have gift certificates!

OK – that’s enough for the websites, now onto what you can give from your own research. How about a family chart? It’s a little late to order the fancy ones but the office stores like FedEx office will print on large paper. We did a 30” by 6’ family tree roll for some relatives one year. The best thing you can do, though, is set the recipient as the “home” person before preparing the chart so the relationships are specific to that individual. I know that Family Tree Maker software accommodates this very well and won’t mess up your work. Just don’t forget to set it back before you start researching again.

You could also print some of the documents you have to make the family history come alive. If you’ve scanned photos into Picasa, then the movie and CD features can make the gift very special.

Have a great holiday season and Happy Hunting!

Picasa and Screen Captures

It’s another busy week and Mom is finally coming home from rehab after surgery. It’s wonderful that there are facilities to make sure she is ready to take care of herself safely. Thanks for the thoughts and prayers during this time.

All of this means that family history has taken a back seat to actual family but that’s how it is supposed to be. I also teach two days a week and prepare all my own materials and course content. It’s a wonderful opportunity but time consuming. The result is that I can’t blog daily – I imagine you’ve noticed. I will try to keep to three times a week, though.

Today’s post is about a program called Picasa. I have mentioned it before but most of us use it for pictures. Did you know you can use it to capture whole screen shots? If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 or a Mac, you’ve been able to cut a piece from anywhere on your screen and do something else with it. All Windows programs have been able to capture screen shots but the next few steps to keep a copy of the screen shot are arcane.

Picasa to the rescue!

Open Picasa (a free download from http://www.Picasa.com  – a Google product) then minimize it. When you find a screen you want a copy of, click the “print screen” key on your computer. (Note: the “ALT-PrintScreen” key combination will capture just the active window.) You will see Picasa capture the screen and store it in a folder called “screen captures” inside the Picasa folder in the (my)Pictures folder on your computer. The best thing is that the screenshots are captured in sequence by time so they are always in the order in which you progresses through the original screens. Once they are in Picasa you can caption them, rename them, edit them, crop them, type text on them, e-mail them, or even create a slide show (with one click!!!), etc. Picasa lets you do anything to these screen shots that you can do to a picture.

OK, so why would you want to do this? It’s a slick way of creating a slide show from different source documents. It’s easy to use for teaching or demonstrating. You can add text to any slide and captions allow you to be precise with directions. Once you have a sequence of screen shots you can put them in an album in Picasa are re-arrange them in any order. You can make a gift CD or movie for someone with this free powerful piece of software. (Note: Family Tree Maker users can also run a slide show of their Family Tree Maker media files.) Picasa has so many uses that I’ll have to share more, later.

Happy Hunting!

Got the Picture?

If you have photos on your computer, then Picasa is for you. Picasa is a FREE small powerful program download from http://www.picasa.com (another Google site). It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

With this program installed with its default settings, (just click through the install screens accepting the standard replies) your computer will become your best genealogy companion. Since Picasa is built with Google technology, the tagging and search features are spectacular and the facial recognition feature will help sort out family photos.

I teach many classes on using this great program and one of the tools I use in genealogy is the facial recognition feature. As your program indexes all of your photos it finds the faces and creates a separate thumbnail of these faces. You can use these thumbnails to populate your family trees, create slide shows with the photos, help figure out who is related to whom, and in general, have some fun with your photos.

My collection of photos includes scans that date back over 100 years. When I tweaked the Picasa facial recognition feature to be LESS sensitive, the program thought my father, brother, and uncle were the same person! This can be very handy if you don’t know who someone is – the program can help.

The sensitivity setting is in the Tools menu and then select Options and then click on the Name Tags setting. As you slide the sliders to a higher number the program becomes more discerning and will help you separate siblings who the program thinks are the same person. As you slide the sliders to a lower number the program is less able to separate people giving you family groups. This facial recognition feature was able to find pictures of my nephews from age 18 months to 21 and figure out it was the same person! OK, I admit, that’s a little freaky but amazing none-the-less.

When you first install the software it will take some time for the face tagging to index the people so don’t close the program for a few hours. You can still use other programs during that time. Each time you open the program it will continue the indexing of the photos and people.

I use Picasa for so much more than photos and I’ll be sharing some of the best tips with you. Thank you for your time.

Happy Hunting.

9-11 Never Forget!