Earthrise
[Called one of the most significant photographs in history, "Earthrise" was taken by astronaut Lt. Col. William Anders, USAF, while orbiting the moon with Col. Frank Borman, USAF, and Capt. Jim Lovell, USN, aboard Apollo 8, on 24 December 1968.]
Google announced earlier this month that they now have online an archive of various magazines’ content. This is just the first iteration of an initiative that will bring online millions of page of magazine content. The initiative is being carried out with the cooperation of publishers.
The magazines are searchable through Google Book Search and eventually will turn up in regular Google searches.
Those who research African-American history will be interested to know that Jet and Ebony are in the first group of magazines to be digitized and are online now.
This is the third major Google announcement this fall. The first was the addition of newspaper content; the second was the acquisition of the LIFE magazine photo-archives.
I’ve tried the magazine search and it is satisfactory. From my viewpoint, however, I would like to see a mechanism to segregate magazine searches from book searches.
Ancestry.com’s UK site has posted slave registers from British colonial dependencies for the years 1812-1834. Although on the UK site, they are accessible from Anncesrty.com in the U.S. The site is here. The site is free. I first had heard that there was some registration requirement, but I went to the site directly without even signing into my Ancestry.com account.
Read more about British colonial slave registers at the UK National Archives wiki, Your Archives.
Friday, December 19, 2008 is the day that the resignation of historian Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, becomes effective. Professor Weinstein, who has Parkinson’s disease, cited health reasons for his decision.
Deputy Archivist of the United States, Adrienne Thomas, will serve as Acting Archivist until a new Archivist is appointed, in accordance with the National Archives governing statute.
In his resignation letter to the President, Weinstein said “During my tenure as Archivist, my team of colleagues and I have made substantial progress in achieving virtually all of our goals. Moreover, we at the National Archives have worked diligently and successfully on our primary mission of maximizing public access to the records of all three branches of government while protecting at all costs this agency’s rock-solid nonpartisan integrity.” The Archivist says that the time has come for him to address fresh challenges.
Weinstein was nominated by President Bush on January 24, 2005, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on February 10, 2005. Under the National Archives statute there is no specific term of office and the position is not intended to change hands automatically with the election of a new President.
Weinstein has a PhD in history from Yale University. He has been a professor at Smith College, Georgetown University, and Boston University.
From 1985 to 2003, he served as President of The Center for Democracy. Weinstein was a founding member in 1985 of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace and Chairman of its Education and Training Committee, remaining a Director until 2001, and now serves on the Chairman’s Advisory Council. He was a founding officer of the International Institute for Democracy from 1989 to 2001.
FamilySearch Record Search has added marriage records for Cook County, Illinois. The collection is currently what FamilySearch calls an “early access collection,” meaning that the collection is accessible though not yet entirely complete. What’s there now are records from 1900-1920. The entire collection ulitmately will go back to 1871.
[H/T to Tom Kemp at the GenealogyBank blog].
And while we’re talking about FamilySearch, today they also added records of the Catholic Diocese of Toledo, Ohio, covering the period 1796 to 2004. These records have images, but they are not indexed.
Soon after Tuesday’s post about MyHeritage, the company responded. I got a lengthy comment from Alon, portions of which I’m bringing up here.
COMMENTER (Alon of MyHeritage.com): . . . IMHO, the fact that you received a positive Smart Match and got in touch with a relative after entering just 3 people in your tree, shows the power and coverage of MyHeritage more than anything else.
GeneaBlogie: I agree with that statement. That’s never happened at any other site I’ve tried out.
Alon: With regards to the prices you quoted, MyHeritage is now on a special for the holidays and some of its plans are 50% reduced.
GeneaBlogie: I think that’s great. A number of companies are running specials at this time of year. This is a good one.
Alon: The help FAQ does have an article about deleting trees, is it possible that you didn’t search the FAQ, but only looked at the most popular articles? You can run a search for ‘delete’ and find it easily.
GeneaBlogie: Alon is right about this. Being constructive, however, I would like to suggest that the “Help” or “FAQ” link appear on the front page, perhaps in the same line as “My Profile” and “My Sites”.
Alon: The Live Chat button doesn’t provide 24/7 chat, it works during our business hours; and when we’re offline, it says so on the button, and then you can leave a message. How many genealogy companies that you know, even have a live chat option to begin with? The fact that you got an email response in 3 days and not even being a paying customer (these receive premium, immediate support), is not that bad. In some companies you wouldn’t get any reply at all.
GeneaBlogie: Alon has a good point here as well that most genealogy companies do not have live chat. That point and the others he makes were amply illustrated the same day I wrote that post, when I went to cancel my Genealogy.com subscriptions (more about why in a later post). It was very difficult to find any information about cancellation on the Genealogy.com site. When I did find it, it was an email form. I filled out the form and pressed “Send.” I was then taken to a page which said that if I wished to cancel, I would have to call them. So I picked up the telephone and called them. It was still during business hours in the Mountain Time zone. The number rang and rang, but was never answered. No “All of our representatives are busy,” no cheesy holiday music; just ringing. And when the phone had rung a certain number of times, it simply hung up! Talk about frustrating!
I would say however that I hope if MyHeritage is going to continue “live chat” support that they extend it outside their Tel Aviv/London business hours. It’s a global economy out there and people want support when they want it. I’m sure this will entail some not insubstantial costs (but if people want it when they want it, they’ll have to pay for it!).
And I confess on second look that that the Live Chat Button does note that they were off-line at the time.
Alon: If the smart matching feature isn’t as smart as you wish, please send us feedback and examples! We are currently in the progress of improving it drastically and we always like to get suggestions.
GeneaBlogie: I think the SmartMatch feature is about as smart as Ancestry.com’s search engine with “Exact Matches” off. That’s pretty good considering the affordable, available technology.
Alon: With regards to aiding researchers, I recommend that you try out our genealogy search engine at http://www.myheritage.com/research. It searches almost 1500 genealogy databases in every query, I doubt you’ll find anything quite like it on the Web, and it may assist even very experienced researchers.
GeneaBlogie: I had forgotten that I had tried the “MegaDex” search engine some tome ago. I do agree that it’s unique and that its results are good.
I clearly missed some things about MyHeritage that are important, so I’m going to spend some more time with it and report again in the future.
I was quite excited a few mornings ago when I opened my email and found a message from MyHeritage.com that said, “Craig, You’ve Got SmartMatches!”
I had signed up for MyHeritage in June to see what it was all about. I had posted an abbreviated family tree consisting of myself and my parents. Then as the summer went on, I got distracted with real time family issues and I forgot about MyHeritage. So getting word that someone in my three-person family tree matched someone else’s tree was interesting news indeed.
As it turned out, the wife of one of my cousins in Kansas City was working on her family history on MyHeritage and had used their Family Tree Builder software to create a family Website. MyHeritage has several levels of privacy control, and hers was set at “mixed site,” meaning that some items were visible to non-members and other information was restricted. A person may request to become a member of a family site, subject to the approval of the Webmaster.
I went to her site and sent her a message. I explained who I was and that I wanted to become a member of her site. Within a very short time, I got word back that I was approved as a member of her site. I got a very nice message from her and we began a dialog about exchanging information.
In part to help her and in part out of my own curiosity, I tried Family Tree Builder. I created a GEDCOM from my Roots Magic file and loaded it into Family Tree Builder. At that point, MyHeritage began to raise MyHackles. Family Tree Builder asked if I wanted to create a family site for the family tree had just created. I pressed the NO button. Family Tree Maker and MyHeritage ignored my command and created a family site with two family trees: the three person original one and the new one!
The next problem was that my second tree has something more that 3,800 individual in it. That exceeds the Basic Subscription limit (500; free) of MyHeritage. This I did not realize, and it’s not very prominent on the site. The site gave me the option to upgrade to a Silver Subscription (2,500 individuals; $3.95/month billed annually; i.e., $48.00) or a Gold Subscription (unlimited; $9.95/month billed annually; $120.000 or a Platinum Subscription (also unlimited individuals, but with 2000 MB storage; $14.95/month, billed annually–you do the math!).
None of those options seemed palatable to me, so I decided to delete the large database. I’d take it down to the 500 size which is all my cousin needed from me anyway. Except I couldn’t find any way to delete it. I seemed to have recalled seeing a “Manage Tree” button earlier, but I couldn’t find it now! The site map does not mention deleting trees; however, the help FAQs discuss deleting entire sites. I did not want to delete the entire site, just the too big tree! After an hour of frustration, I found a link that said “LIVE CHAT.” So I clicked there to find out that it’s not live chat–it’s email! But I wrote my problem anyway. “Live Chat” is really “Comatose Chat.” It took 81 hours to get a reply!
While I was waiting for a reply, I changed the privacy settings on my site to “Private” so non-members could see none of it. Before I heard back from MyHeritage, I got an email from someone I’d never heard of inquiring about a surname in my database! I checked the privacy settings to discover that they had been set back to “Mixed”!
Well, I finally heard from MyHeritage tech support and everything is fixed now.
I willl say that there are some positive aspects of MyHeritage. The fact that a family site can be created and family members or others invited to become members of the site (for free) is good. The setup of the family trees in a 3-D sort of format is cool. The SmartMatches feature isn’t as smart as one might wish, but it’s pretty good. The integration between Family Tree Builder and the Web is good.
MyHeritage won’t aid the serious researcher very much, but it is a good place to display one’s work and make it available to families. It would be a good tool to get younger folks interested in genealogy.
So all is forgiven!
One (Not so) Great Family
Back in August or September, I promised to do a series on social networking sites. Then I went to the hospital and things got backed up. I haven’t done the whole series, but I done a couple of brief reviews of several sites. First up is “One Great Family.”
Soon after I first started my genealogical research about five years ago, I came upon a Website called One Great Family. I subscribed and uploaded a GEDCOM file. I think that OGF was at the time in the forefront of Web-based shared family trees.
Exciting at first because of their declarations that OGF could help link one’s family tree to many others, soon it was easy to become disenchanted with OGF as a serious researcher. There are a number of reasons for this disenchantment.
First, one gets the impression that a lot of OGF users care little for documentation. There are trees that purport to go back to “Adam & Eve”! And OGF is complicit in this ridiculousness by offering a “Genealogy Browser” that provides views of up to 196 generations!
As for OGF’s vaunted claims to link trees, there are no new links to my original tree in the last three years, although there appear to be names on the whole site that would match up with names on my original tree.
Navigation around the site can only be described as weird, especially when trying to view a family tree.
Then there’s the cost. OGF costs $79.00 a year (they presently have a $60.00 special offer good through December 28).
There are many places to spend your genealogical dollars; in the current recession (or any other time for that matter), I wouldn’t recommend One Great Family.
Elias Bowie (Jr.) was my father’s uncle. He was the the brother of my grandmother, Jessie Beatrice Bowie (1909-1973). Their mother was Hattie Bryant (1888-1944). Hattie had been born on the Texas Gulf Coast. After a marriage at age 15 and another relationship, she headed for San Antonio with her infant son Herman Walker (1906-2002). In San Antonio, Hattie found work as a laundress, which occupation fit the expectations for an uneducated black woman in the first decade of the twentieth century. Hattie also found Elias Bowie, Sr. (1874-1970).
Elias senior was a hotel porter who had come to San Antonio from Longview, Gregg County, in east Texas. Why he had moved to San Antonio is not known. Hattie and Elias senior may or may not have been married, but they had three children together. In addition to Jessie and Elias junior, there was a boy named J.C. who died about a year after birth. The 1910 census shows Elias senior and Hattie living apart.
At some point after J.C.’s birth, Hattie returned with her four children to the Gulf Coast. Elias junior and his siblings grew up around Corpus Christi and Rockport, Texas. In Rockport, Elias finished eighth grade and then engaged in the family business, viz., being basically indentured to a prominent white family (which remains a force in Rockport to this day). He drove and cooked for that family until the beginning of World War II. In 1937, he moved to Oakdale, Allen Parish, Louisiana, where he worked for a timber company. After time in Louisiana, he returned to Corpus Christi and ran a small taxicab company.
Military service took Elias to McClellan Field, California, near Sacramento. Eventually, he ended up in Oakland where he remained.
Elias Bowie was a quirky personality, but also an ambitious businessman. He took on small jobs to finance his dream of building a big chauffeur and transportation company in the San Francisco Bay area. He was a cook and a cabdriver. By the early 1950′s, he could afford a Cadillac and to open his transportation business.
Driving his Cadillac was Elias Bowie’s passion. He drove frequently between San Francisco and Reno to indulge his other passion–gambling. He was also a baseball fan–his team would be the Yankees before the Giants moved West. In 1951, he drove cross-country to see the Yankees play the Giants in the World Series. As the Series went six games, he made several transcontinental trips. On one of his World Series trips, Elias Bowie stooped i n Kansas City, where he met Ceola. She was from Mississippi, but was visiting her sister who lived in Kansas City. A while later, they were married.
Loving to drive as he did, Elias Bowie ran up against the law from time to time. Occasionally, his lead foot on the way back to San Francisco from Reno would cost him the entire yield of the otherwise successful trip! So it was natural that in 1955, he decided to enter a stock car race.
The NASCAR Grand National event was held on July 31, 1955, at Bay Meadows. The prize was $2400. Uncle Bowie drove his Cadillac. Many of the nation’s top stock car racers participated.
The race was extremely exciting for stock racing fans as it turned out to be a duel between the country’s No. 1 and No. 2 drivers, Tim Flock of Atlanta and Johnny Kieper of Portland, Oregon. Flock, driving a 1955 Chrysler 300, started in the pole position, but lost the lead to Kieper in his 1955 Oldsmobile after the 17th lap. Kieper was overtaken by Buck Baker on the 81st lap, but regained the lead on the 102nd lap. Kieper took the checkered flag, but a recheck of the matter showed that Flock had regained the lead very late in the race and he was declared the winner.
Uncle Bowie’ performance was described thusly by a local newspaper:
Unintentional comedy relief during the grim racing was provided by Elias Bowie of Oakland driving a 1955 Cadillac in his first stock car race. Bowie toured the course as a Sunday driver checking the scenery. He had the largest pit crew, topped by a lanky double-jointed chap in green fatigue uniform. He also had provided a full tank car of Mobiloil gas. In spite of (or because of) these precautions, Bowie completed the race.
San Mateo Times, August 1, 1955.
Elias Bowie thereby became the first African-American to drive in a NASCAR race.
In the 1960s, Elias Bowie began operating a gas station on Ellis Street in San Francisco. As an adjunct to this business, he also ran a small jitney service up and down Market Street in San Francisco. [During vacations in California, one of my jobs was to collect the 10 ? that the riders paid during morning and evening rush hours]. Eventually, he gave up the jitney for higher profit margin taxicabs. He named his cab company in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King Cab Co. did so well in San Francisco that Elias Bowie and a partner opened a branch of the company in San Jose. The San Jose operation was not as successful as the San Francisco division. When the partner pulled out unexpectedly, my parents took over the San Jose company, despite the fact that they had other, full-time jobs. They ran it for several years until suitable buyer was found.
Everyone, including his wife Ceola, referred to Elias Bowie as “Bowie.” Nobody ever used his first name. I don’t know why.
He favored Cadillacs his entire life as well as a fedora he was rarely seen without. Uncle Bowie had a grand house on Baker Street in San Francisco which we visited and stayed in when we came to San Francisco on vacations. But at some point, it became apparent that he and Ceola were getting a bit too old to maintain it as they would have wished.
Uncle Bowie was a warm, generous and jovial man. After my grandmother died and my father’s other aunts and uncles eventually did too, Uncle Bowie was an important link to my father’s family history on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Elias Bowie died on January 26, 2005, at the age of 94. Ceola Bowie died on August 29, 2008, also at age 94.
There is one more chapter to be written about he life of Elias Bowie. Unfortunately, a number of unfortunate circumstances prevent me from telling it now. But you’ll hear about it some day . . . and soon, I hope.
Thanks to the nice folks at the Randolph County Historical Society, particularly secretary and museum curator Emily Lyon, I can tell you that this Sunday, December 7, the Prairie du Rocher Chamber of Commerce will put on La Fete de Noel, a festival of shopping, home tours, music and more. The annual Christmas Tree Lighting will be held at about 8:00 pm and winners of the Christmas Light Decorating contest will be announced.
Indeed, this season is a great one throughout the region. In Chester, Illinois, on Friday through Sunday this week, there will be a house tour, open houses at historical sites, a arts and craft fair at the Courthouse, a quilt show, a parade, and other activities; with refreshments.
Ste Genevieve, Missouri, starts the season this weekend by welcoming Mr. & Mrs. Santa Claus, listening to Christmas carolers, lighting the city’s Christmas tree, late shopping, and enjoying a live nativity scene. The parade on Saturday starts at 11 am. A Christmas Art Sale and Show sponsored by the Ste Genevieve Art Guild will feature area artists showing and selling their work. Cookies and Spiced Apple Cider are served throughout the weekend. A painting is raffled each year and there is a silent auction with the proceeds used to fund an art scholarship for a graduating senior. A Meet the Artists Reception will be held on Saturday evening, December 1st from 6 pm to 8 pm
On Sunday, December 14, at Felix Valle House State Historic Site, Ste Genevieve’s French Christmas Celebration will highlight the music, customs, and decorations of an early French Colonial Christmas celebration known as “Le Reveillon.” Costumed guides will explain the early 1800′s customs and the dining room will be filled with traditional foods.
GeneaBlogie