Thursday, August 2, 2012

City of Tonawanda Cemeteries including the Town of Tonawanda, Kenmore, and North Tonawanda in Niagara County, Erie County, New York

City of Tonawanda Cemeteries including the Town of Tonawanda, Kenmore, and North Tonawanda in Niagara County, Erie County, New York

Updated: 1 March 2004

City of Tonawanda Cemeteriesincluding the Town of Tonawanda, Kenmore,and
North Tonawanda in Niagara County
Erie County, New York

(MF) Microfilm (B) Book

This is a good resource for anyone researching the area. I have a lot of family on my mom's side buried in Elmlawn Cemetery, so I am using this as a point of reference and source of information for some of my research...

Locals forced to log on in graveyard - National News - Independent.ie

Locals forced to log on in graveyard

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/...

RESIDENTS of one village starved of reliable broadband had their prayers answered when they discovered a local graveyard five miles away got a good signal.

OK, I think the above story is pretty funny...talk about a "dead signal"...hahahahaahaa!!!!

Free Family History and Genealogy Downloads. | Family History Quick Start

http://www.familyhistoryquickstart.com/d...

Free Family History and Genealogy Downloads.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

THE ZANGARI NAME IN HISTORY, by Ancestry and Amazon

I purchased the above mentioned book from Amazon.com last week, and WOW!

My book THE ZANGARI NAME IN HISTORY arrived from Amazon.com today! I will read it over and see what (if anything) I can discover! I will let you all know how it turns out!

Out of 21,161,111 World War I registrants, there were a total of 34 Zangari registrants...well, that's a neat fact, but let's get over the general history lesson and get more specific with the Zangari's, shall we?!

Wow, a Maytag Corporation history that has nothing to do with my family or any other Zangari family...just what I want to read in a book about THE ZANGARI NAME IN HISTORY that I paid good money for... =/

OK, here's something...there were 19 Zangari World War II U.S. draft registrations in the fourth registration out of 2,285,693 registrants...neat fact, let's get more specific now, please...

Why is Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin mentioned in detail in this book and NOT any Zangari people specifically mentioned thus far (page 60 out of 73)?!

OK, that took me all of about 20 minutes to read and I am EXTREMELY disappointed with the results!!! This book should have been called something like

"A BRIEF HISTORY WHERE WE ADDED 12 GRAPH PAGES THAT ARE NOTHING MORE THAN GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT THE NAME ZANGARI; THIS BOOK HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ZANGARI FAMILY NAME, SO DON'T THINK YOU WILL GET ANY ANSWERS HERE"

I am extremely upset and disappointed!

They did not so much as bother to put in even ONE PASSENGER MANIFEST! No secrets revealed, no real research on the Zangari family done. The information garnered therein could have been found on any yearly census, and that is probably exactly where the information was garnered from. That takes all of ten minutes in a Google search!

I want my money back!!!

I feel that I was ripped off by this purchase, and I will be informing both Ancestry and Amazon about this!

~ Vince ~

Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness Wiki

WOW,

Rest In Peace Bridgette Schneider

(1946-2011)

What Happened to the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness Website? - Nashua, NH Patch

What Happened to the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness Website?

Posted on March 20, 2012 at 4:35 pm

This is the number one question heard this year in the genealogy community “What happened towww.RAOGK.com?” I was a longtime RAOGK volunteer for over ten years, photographing gravestones in Londonderry and Derry, and looking up obituaries in the Derry News for descendants all over the US, Canada and even Australia. Over the years I’ve also been asked to find living cousins in the Derry phone book, to photograph childhood homes, and one time I found a contractor who was renovating a family’s ancestral home. It was fun and helped me to hone my genealogy detective skills.

The RAOGK website matched up volunteers willing to do “acts of kindness” across North America and in several other countries across the globe. I took advantage of asking for my own favors twice. The first was before I went to Nova Scotia on a research trip, and I asked a local Nova Scotia genealogist her opinion of some archives I wanted to visit. The second was to ask a volunteer in Hawaii to locate a gravesite I wanted to photograph during a vacation, and she went above and beyond the call of duty by sending me photos, maps, hand drawn diagrams of the family plot and her private contact information in case I needed assistance while in Honolulu.

The RAOGK site administrator, genealogist Bridget Schneider, fell ill and the website closed on 16 October 2011. Bridget passed away on 12 November 2011. Her husband, Doc the webmaster, closed the site as he grieved and it has not re-opened. The entire genealogy community felt the loss with him. Several volunteers opened two RAOGK groups on Facebook for requests. This seems to be working for now, and is a grassroots effort to keep these “acts of kindness” going.

There are many websites out there run by individuals, not corporations, run out of the goodness of someone’s heart. If anything should ever happen to Cyndi Howell of the famous website “Cyndi’s List” www.cyndislist.com where would we all be? And what about Thomas MacEntee of the GeneaBlogger website www.geneablogger.com ? I also count Jim Tipton at www.FindAGrave.comin this category, although he has a team of administrators assisting his project. These websites, which are as valuable as Ancestry.com and familysearch.org, are small operations run out of basements or home offices. As long as they remain one person administrators of their websites I worry about another RAOGK crisis. There are also hundreds and hundreds of genealogy blogs, local history projects, transcription projects and other genealogy website in this same category.

Since RAOGK already had thousands of volunteers, and FindAGrave does, too, they may find a way to build new websites and continue their missions if the administrators die, retire, or just decide to walk away from their websites. Using Facebook is not a perfect solution for RAOGK, but I see many requests posted every day, with lots of folks collaborating on responses. I like that multiple responses seem to be not only answering these requests, but also teaching new genealogist some of the basic research techniques.

Anyone who has spent hours and hours listing cemetery records and photos on FindAGrave should be making backup records of their work, because if the website folds, their work will be lost. The same is true of BillionGraves www.billiongraves.com , which is becoming popular because of its use of GPS in its apps on each volunteer’s cell phone or iPad. I have donated photos and transcriptions to both projects, and save all the work myself as I go along. There is no reason why your photos can’t be donated to both projects or to any other cemetery project that comes along in the future.

Website mentioned above:

www.RAOGK.com (closed indefinitely)

www.BillionGraves.com Billion Graves website, which syncs with the app is a commercial project run by AppTime, LLC, but uses the photographs taken by thousands of volunteers

www.cyndislist.com Cyndi Howells website, Cyndi’s List

www.findagrave.com Find A Grave

www.geneabloggers.com GeneaBloggers by Thomas MacEntee

On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/raogkUSA/ for requests in the USA

https://www.facebook.com/groups/raogkinternational/ for international requests

Random Acts of Genealogy Kindness (RAOGK) will be Offline for Some Time - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

This post is all most a year old, but I just stumbled over the information while doing some research...had no idea the RAOGK site had been down, since I had not used them, but only had heard of their great works through others. My best to the site owners and admins and hope there will be some information forthcoming should there be any turns in health. Prayers are with you all...

Random Acts of Genealogy Kindness (RAOGK) will be Offline for Some Time - Eastman's Online Genealogy

blog.eogn.com

Random Acts of Genealogy Kindness (RAOGK) will be Offline for Some Time - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter