Steve’s Genealogy Blog

On Tuesday, during one of the online chat sessions I attend as part of the classes I’m taking through the National Institute of Genealogical Studies, I learned that the Canadian television program Ancestors in the Attic is premiering this week.  I searched the program schedule for Dish Network to see if, by chance, the program would be available here in San Francisco.  It is not.

I did, however, find a listing for a genealogical television program that I hadn’t heard of before - Questions and Ancestors.  This program airs on BYUTV and I tuned in on Tuesday evening to a half-hour of How To Do British Research.  The show is the televised version of a radio program that answers genealogical questions submitted by listeners/viewers and is actually part of the Ancestors series that ran on PBS a few years back.

Episodes in the series include:

• How To Get Started
• How To Use the Internet In Your Research
• Preserving Family Heritage
• How To Do African American Genealogy (The Freedman Bank Records)
• How To Do British Research
• Daughters of the American Revolution
• How To Do Oral History
• Using Cemetery Records
• Coats of Arms In Family History
• Using Military Records In Family History
• Native American Genealogy
• Tracing LDS Families
• Asian Genealogical Research
• Early American Immigration
• British Military Records
• Hispanic Research
• Basic Scandinavian Family History Research

The Questions and Ancestors website provides a form to submit your questions, an episode guide with air dates for future programs, and links to downloadable podcasts of the episodes that can be played on your computer, downloaded to an iPod, or burned to a CD.

Tune in and watch, or download and listen!

Purists might define podcasts very narrowly as audio files that can be captured and played on a digital audio player.  Podcatchers such as iTunes and Juice can be used to automatically download podcasts and transfer those files to a digital audio player such as an iPod or the MobiBLU DAH-1500i (”the cube”).

Personally, I don’t own a digital audio player.  I manually download podcasts, use Roxio CD Creator to create a music CD and burn the podcast onto a CD.  After that, I just play the audio CD on my car stereo to help make it through the long commute.

Since Barb Poole wrote about podcasts the other day, I thought I’d throw in my 2-cents worth and list three podcasts in addition to the ones she mentioned.  New episodes appear fairly regularly on these sites.

A recent addition to the podcast scene is the Genealogy Tech Podcast, concentrating on the technology side of genealogy.  Bill Puller posted his first episode on June 10, 2006 and has posted four episodes so far on 1- Choosing a Web Browser, 2-  Protopage, 3- A9.com, and 4- Map Builder.  His voice reminds me of Stephen Hill from public radio’s Music from the Hearts of Space, and if you’ve heard Hearts of Space, you know that can’t be bad.

Dick Eastman occasionally throws a podcast into Eastman’s Online Genealogical Newsletter; the most recent podcast entitled Excavating Grandma’s Privy for Family History Data was posted on June 15, 2006.  Wow!  What a title to get your attention!  Earlier this month, Dick’s podcasts covered an interview with Liz Kerstens about Clooz 2.0 and an interview with Christine Rose about her book Courthouse Research for Family Historians.

DearMyrtle publishes a podcast, but deal old Myrt has been busy with some family issues the last few months and we’ve been anxiously waiting for word from her.  The wait is over.  She published her most recent podcast on June 20, 2006 including interviews with Kathy Meade on Swedish Church Records and with Denise Olsen on creating folders in Microsoft Outlook and Uninterruptible Power Supplies.  DearMyrtle has posted over 30 episodes so far.

I’ve found several other genealogy podcasts on the web, but most of them appear to have been one-time or short-lived podcasts.  That doesn’t mean the content is uninteresting or non-informative.  Further discussion of these “orphan” podcasts will have to wait for another day.

Today, I’m pleased that Barb Poole has written another GuestBlog for this site!  Thanks again for your contribution Barb! 

Podcasts, what are they?

Ok, let’s get the definition of Podcast out of the way first.   According to my question to www.ask.com, I wrote “What does Podcast mean?”  They reply was short and to the point.   Podcast means A sound file distributed by a podcasting server.  I don’t think we need to worry about the server, but a sound file I do understand.  Just be sure to have your sound turned on!

Googling the words Podcast + genealogy, generated 400,000 hits on June 24, 2006.   I suspect that list will grow as time goes on.  This does not mean there are 400,000 separate podcasts; some of the more popular sites are mentioned in different blogs or web pages, so the same podcast could be mentioned several times.   To find a more specific site, you can add more words in your search engine, subjects such as Italian, Canadian, organizing, filing, or Polish (the words podcast + genealogy + Polish will give you Steve Danko’s blog.

I am only going to discuss two of the well known genealogy podcasts.  The first one listed below has been around for quite a long time, and the second much more recent.   Each is uniquely different.  One has just the sound of the speakers; the other has visuals to go along with the lecture.  There are many other podcasts out there; you should be able to find some which meet your needs.

A very popular podcast is http://www.genealogyguys.com/  in which George G. Morgan and Drew Smith discuss news items, have interviews and answer listener’s mail.  There is also a short advertisement from their sponsor.   The two interact well with one another, and a discussion outline is provided as well.  Their voices are soothing to listen to, and it is a joy to listen to them while doing something else, either at the computer or away from the computer.  

One of the first podcasts I listened to was through the New England Historical Genealogical Society (NEHGS) web site: http://www.newenglandancestors.org/. The lecture was called Who Was Your Mother’s Mother’s Mother’s Mother? by Julie Helen Otto, a genealogist at the Society.  This is a free lecture, and technically is a Macromedia presentation, not a podcast.  Listening to this was like being in a lecture hall, as there were slides & graphics, as well as an outline and the length of time shown for each topic (you always knew how much time was left).   In addition, It is very easy to press replay or skip a topic.  On another note, I know Julie personally and was very impressed with her lecture, I must tell her that.   If the icon for this lecture is not on the home page (it will probably be removed when the next new lecture is posted), just go to the Education Center tab and you will see archived lectures, including several for Getting Started in Genealogy.

I am thinking that this might be the future for some genealogy seminars at conferences.   Instead of purchasing the lecture on a tape cassette, you would pay for the lecture when you download it.  The last large conference I attended, I ordered a set of 9 cassettes (you normally can’t attend each lecture you want to hear as there are too many being held at the same time), and so buying them was the next best thing.   The worst thing was having to wait around after the lecture for the cassettes to be copied.  Then you had to carry them home in an already stuffed suitcase!

It should be noted that Podcasts are not just for genealogists, people in other professions use them too, but of course we like to think they were developed just for us, as were blogs, emails, message boards, chats and computers!