Hello readers. I hope you remember this blog, because you’re still subscribed if you just got this email. I haven’t done a nitpicker’s guide in a long time, but I find myself sitting here shouting at my monitor while watching Finding Your Roots, so here goes. This episode featured Bob Odenkirk and Iliza Shlesinger. I had no idea who these people were, but I knew at least one of them had a Jewish story, so I wanted to check out the episode. Fifteen minutes into the episode, they finally started with the genealogy. Well, I guess that’s better than introducing them for even longer. Bob’s genealog ..read more

That’s a wrap! My next two days were much like the first one. I watched the keynote from home, then later drove downtown where I hung out in the expo hall for an hour or two. Again, I went by the MyHeritage booth, but you couldn’t not go by it, right at the front entrance. Then spent most of the time hanging out and chatting at Reclaim the Records. I thought I would volunteer with them like I did the last RootsTech, but they seemed better staffed this year. I did walk down all the aisles in the expo hall eventually too, to see who and what was there. Friday night I had a little time to kill an ..read more

Hello again world, and subscribers. Yes, this blog is still here. I haven’t had much to write about for a while. But I also felt guilty writing for my blog when I wasn’t writing to people who were emailing me. So quick update, I caught up on old emails just days before the new year. (Some were very, very old. Embarrassingly old.) Then I wrote a blog post, but I was rambling and stuff, so I made it private. And now, I kind of want to blog again. So here we are. A big genealogy event to write about. Today was the first day of RootsTech. I am a virtual attendee, because it costs less and I don’t ..read more

It’s been a long, slow, and overwhelming year. But here we are again, summer, time for an IAJGS conference. This is the Jewish genealogy conference. This year, as in most, I’m a speaker. I got my videos submitted late, but they were done well. And now we’re in the midst of the conference. Unlike the other major conferences, this one is longer. It was always longer in person, but even virtually, it’s longer. Because it’s international, it could go for more hours of the day, but they’ve scheduled short days. The first day, there was a very long lunch break. Who needs a big lunch break when we’re ..read more

Well, that was a year. Or eight. I lost track. When the pandemic shut us down in March, my brain kind of went with it. I’m still trying to recover. But, time kept ticking along. I had to do some things the hard way as people ordered records. That got easier later in the year when I regained access to a lot of records I usually need access to and had lost in March. Then I started working again. I finished off some work that clients had been waiting for. Record orders got easier. Everything went to hell more in July when my mother passed away. I had no idea it was coming. She didn’t die of covid ..read more

I think that many people have heard that it’s a Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. If we didn’t understand it before, I think we all do now. These are interesting times. But we are lucky. We have the Internet. We have Skype and Zoom, Facebook and Twitter, email and more ways to keep in touch with friends and family and strangers. We have online games, ebooks, YouTube, Broadway stars making videos, Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals every weekend that we could never see before, virtual museums, operas from the Met, the arts are coming through for us after years of so many people trying ..read more

MyHeritage just introduced a new feature to colorize photos automatically. I logged in and had a new home page that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know where to look for the colorizer (today it’s at the top of the new home page; I don’t remember it there yesterday), but found it easily — and marked “new” — in the “Family Tree” menu. I’m not the kind of person who ever wanted old photos colorized. If they were black and white or sepia, I was fine with them. But I tried it anyway for fun. For the first few photos I tried, it really emphasized to me that we don’t need to colorize old photos becau ..read more

I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month since I moved to Salt Lake City in 2003. Literally, the day I arrived in the city was the first day of my first year, so I can remember it easily. My tagline for the month is “I’m a novelist, but only in November.” I’m more of a vignette writer than a novelist anyway; I don’t always have an idea that could fill a novel. I haven’t written a novel every year. In fact, I took last year off entirely, though I showed up at a couple events. And there have been a few rebellion years where I tried to accomplish tasks and awarded myself with points rath ..read more

Day Five I began my day in Carole Vogel’s session about creating a town-wide genealogy. Currently indexing all the vital records for a city puts me in a good position to create such a project, so I’ve been considering it. I continued to shmooze and whatnot until my second presentation in the late afternoon about CSI: Crowd Sourced Indexing. I was in the big ballroom this time and had ten people. I wasn’t expecting a huge crowd, so it was fine. If IAJGS actually had a society day like FGS or a society track, then I might get more people interested because CSI is for societies and SIGs rather th ..read more

Day Three It was time to give my new presentation. I had a bad feeling about the room they put me in and I was right. When I got there, the room was already full, and I wasn’t late. My session was a fire hazard. I had people sitting up the aisles and standing in the back. I heard from several people that they wanted to attend but couldn’t get in. So Lesser Known Online Resources was a big hit. I have already submit it to other conferences and maybe I’ll finally be accepted to speak at some of those. People have approached me since that time, for two days so far, telling me they either loved it ..read more