The Genealogy Guys Podcast #147 - 2008 August 14

This episode is dedicated to our dear friend, Tom Ryder, who passed away today in Port Charlotte, Florida.This week's news includes: Ancestry.com extends its global reach to China with an exclusive partnership with the Shanghai Library - the new site is http://www.jiapu.cn; and Ancestry has also added extensive new content, including Bremen, Germany, ships and sailors databases (in German).A new episode of "Down Under: Florida" has been released at RootsTelevision.com, starring The Guys. Click here to go directly to the episode about "The Miltons." Note: The Genealogy Guys Podcast's fans at Facebook.com got an email as soon as the new episode was released!Listener email this week included: Roger (Marathon Man) shared information about school censuses and cited a database of these from Kent County, Michigan, at http://data.wmgs.org/SchoolCensus/ with samples to view; Confederate service records are available and accessible at Footnote.com (various states are still being added); Kay shared another family story about a son who acidently shot his father; a listener asked about how to locate Web pages that have disappeared, and The Guys provided some methods, including the use of the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/), a part of the fascinating Internet Archive; Richard shares a response from the Millennium Corporation about available genealogy software it produces for mobile devices; the USCIS has established a new genealogy program for obtaining immigration and naturalization records, rather than requesting them through the Freedom of Information Office - click here to go to the USCIS site; Connor has compiled an index to newspaper records and asks advice for how to disseminate the information; Laraine writes about her experiences visiting her old hometown of Marietta, Ohio, and the importance of citing sources; the Fulton County Genealogical Society has a new home for its genealogy collection in the Evergreen Community Library in Metamora, Ohio. In last week's episode, George reviewed a new book by Timothy N. Pinnick, Finding and Using African American Newspapers. Unfortunately, he included an incorrect URL for Tim Pinnick's website. It should have been http://www.blackcoalminerheritage.net. It's been corrected in last week's show notes, but please visit his site for details about the great little book.Drew discusses his new volunteer assignment as editor of the Federation of Genealogical Societies' Delegate Digest, an monthly email newsletter sent to the delegates of FGS member societies. This is a great benefit to having your society be a member of FGS.Drew also discusses CAPTCHAs (corrected spelling), the images containing letters and numbers that we all type in at Web sites to provide security from hackers. People are now working with OCR'd books to interpret problem characters and making the indexes correct.