Philadelphia ‘Living Monument’ of the Civil War — #History, #150th Anniversary

Stanczyk loves the history of our nation (USA). The U.S. history is much younger than our European ancestral villages. But, in 2013, we will celebrate and remember the Battle of Gettysburg July 1-3rd, 1863  on its 150th anniversary.
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Philadelphia is the cradle of American Civilization. During the Fourth of July Celebration  (Welcome America), in addition to the normal July 4th celebrations, there will be additional events this year, the 150th after the battle of Gettysburg.
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Philadelphia

Philadelphia ‘a living monument’ to the Civil War [Philadelphia Inquirer article]

There are so many historical and genealogical things to experience beyond the fireworks & concerts:

• Reading of the Declaration (by Independence Hall) on July 8th
• Visit Laurel Hill Cemetery – General Meade is buried here above the Schuykill River
• Civil War Reenactors in Gettysburg (before and after the 4th)
• Constitution Center
• Liberty Bell
• Civil War Museum
• Historical Society of PA (1300 Locust Street, Phila.)

Related

• Map: Civil War left its mark on Philadelphia
• More on Gettysburg’s 150th anniversary
• Military Graves locator

VE Day: Few know story of Jews in Red Army

AP: Few Know Story of Jews in Red Army

JERUSALEM (AP) – Once a year, Israel’s Jewish war veterans don suit jackets and uniforms dripping in Red Army medals, the shiny bronzes and silvers pinned to their chests in tight rows like armor. About 500,000 Jews served in the Soviet Red Army during World War II. Most of those still alive today – about 7,000 – are said to live in Israel. Every year on Victory Day, which falls on Thursday this year …

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An excellent piece detailing how European Jews fought against the Nazis in the Allied Forces.

Holocaust Remembrance Days

Reblogged from HeiressMommy™:

• 

Born post Holocaust - in the 1950's meant for me and other Jewish children an almost etched in DNA early knowledge of the Holocaust. Parents and teachers anxiously compelled to both inform and protect our youthful minds. No escaping the REAL facts that just a few years before our births there were those determined to annihilate our kind. So even today - as a Mother, Aunt and a friend to others children, I ask "

Read more… 1,074 more words

Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day 2013 starts this evening. Tonight Nisan 27th arrives at sundown. Yesterday, I wrote a blog on this topic from this jester's Catholic perspective of reflective respect . But I wanted to be able to embody a Jewish perspective for today. So I thought, "Why not have my wife 'guest-blog' for Stanczyk?" Therefore, I give you my wife and her blog (re-blogged from HeiressMommy.wordpress.com). Please enjoy. You can reach her blog from my blog-roll!

RootsTech 2013 … — #Genealogy, #RootsTech, #Technology

iGoogle as customized for Stanczyk

Today is the start of RootsTech 2013. So in honor of the conference I will blog today about  Genealogy, and Technology.

Last year Google announced it was getting rid of iGoogle and now this week it said it was getting rid of its RSS Reader (hence probably why they announced iGoogle was going away). So I have decided how I will replace these two tools in my portable genealogy toolbox. My Solution … the FlipBoard app.

FlipBoard

The screenshot above (at the top) shows a portion of my iGoogle (still available until July). As you can surmise, I used it as a newspaper dashboard for keeping me abreast of the genealogy news in my focus areas. You may have noticed it is quite TEXTUAL. As such, it lacks appeal and ease of scanability. This is where Flipboard app comes in.  Now Stanczyk was not using Google’s Reader … that is directly. I think iGoogle probably was a tool that used its own Reader (RSS feeds). It gave me the ability to have a genealogy dashboard (or portal as we used to say). Flipboard will however import your Google Reader. There are other alternatives like Pulse or even WordPress that can import your RSS subscriptions for you. But this jester likes FlipBoard.

As you see, Flipboard is visually appealing and easily, quickly scanable. What you may not realize that these Flipboard “blocks” are the same feeds I had in the iGoogle tool. However, now my Eastman Online Genealogy and my GenealogyBlog are visual. Notice I was able to also get my Ancestry Member Connect Activity feed too! So I have everything I had before in a kind of retro “Life Magazine” visually appealing way  updated for the Internet age ! I actually think of Flipboard as my Internet Magazine that is finely attuned to MY interests. But as you see, you can use it as your genealogy dashboard of what is going on currently in genealogy (or any topic you are interested in).

You may not have noticed in the Flipboard image, I have my own blog in the lower left corner. When you click on that “block” it takes to my “section”. Where my own blog posts are very attractively displayed in the Flipboard magazine style. Very nice!

Flipboard runs on your smartphone or your tablet. I really like how it looks on the tablet (iPad in my case). Seeing my blog in Flipboard changed my style of writing a blog. I wanted my blog posts to look good and be visually appealing in Flipboard. So now I take some extra measures to make sure it will  look good, but I have to admit that Flipboard does most of the work and it does make your blog look good.

Flipboard can take your Twitter feed, or Facebook or Blog or even a custom RSS Feed like my Ancestry Member Connect Activity. It even takes Flickr or LinkedIn or just about anything you may use in your social networking / media creation world.

So I am no longer sad that iGoogle or the underlying Google Reader are going away. I have evolved and I am using Flipboard and I am much happier. I can keep tabs and I can keep informed and I am frequently entertained too. What a great app!

Hey add “Stanczyk Internet Muse” to your Flipboard. Enjoy RootsTech 2013 too!

RootsTech 2013 — #Genealogy, #Conference, #Technology, #Apps

RootsTech.org is a genealogy conference that combines two of my passions: Genealogy (Roots) and Technology (Tech). Stanczyk went to last year’s conference and was impressed!

It is a Family Search International conference and is based in Salt Lake City at the Salt Palace Convention Center, not far from the Family History Library. It is a 3-day conference with a wide variety of topics covered. The dates for 2013 are: 21-March-2013  -  23-March-2013 (THU, FRI, SAT).

This jester thinks that last year was a better year, judging by the sessions that are planned for 2013 as compared to what sessions were done in 2012. However, the 2013 exhibitors seems to shaping up to be much better (they say 40% more).

The smartphone Apps were released:  25-Feb-2013.  So for those mobile genealogists, gear up by clicking on the following links:

• Apple iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rootstech-2013/id605380427?mt=8

Its a universal app (meaning it works on both iPhone and iPad).

• Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps (click on the link). The actual URL(link) is so long I just posted the the text to take you to the Android Apps, but the link will take you to the actual app.

The conference hall is wonderful and the people putting on the conference have conferences down pat. The logistics of this genealogy conference are well thought out.

Thinking About Gedcom — #Meme, #Genealogy, #RootsTech

Stanczyk has been thinking about GEDCOM a lot these days. As you may know, GEDCOM is the de facto standard format for a genealogical family tree file, in order for it to be shared amongst the many genealogical software programs / websites / apps. Most genealogy programs still use their own proprietary format for storing data but will import / export the data in the GEDCOM standard for you to exchange data with another program or genealogist.

Did you catch the phrase ‘de facto standard’ ? OK it is NOT an open standard maintained by ISO or ANSI standards organizations. But it is widely supported and in fact you should NOT buy or use software that does not support the export and import of GEDCOM files!

Well we are coming up on RootsTech 2013 and my mind is turning back to the technical part of genealogy again!

Today’s blog is about the GEDCOM used by Ancestry.com. Were you aware that you can export your family tree from Ancestry.com? You can by selecting/clicking on ‘Tree Settings‘ under the ‘Tree pages‘ drop down menu (Tree Settings will be the second from the bottom in the menu list). If you click on ‘Tree Settings’ you will see a screen similar to:

Notice that after you click on the ‘Export tree‘ button, that you get a new button named, ‘Download your GEDCOM file‘  in that same place.

In all likelihood if you click on the  ’Download your GEDCOM file‘ button you will get a file in your Downloads directory on your local hard drive. It will have a name of:

<your-family-tree-name>.GED

Now the phrase ‘<your-family-tree-name>’  will actually be something like ‘Eliasz Family Tree.GED’ . So your Downloads directory will have a similar named file (complete with blanks in the file name). The size of the file will be dependent on how many individuals, families, sources, etc. that you have recorded in your family tree. Figure on a file size of 2MB for about 1,100 people.

Now this file you just downloaded from Ancestry.com is really just a plain text file with a set of standardized ‘tags’ defined by the GEDCOM standard. Software vendors are free to define their own custom tags too. Although CUSTOM tags must begin with an underscore (‘_’). I was curious as to how well Ancestry.com implements/adheres to the GEDCOM standard, so I wrote a little program (in PERL for you programmer types) to analyze my GEDCOM file that I just downloaded.

My program, read_gedcom.pl, spits out a slew stats about the GEDCOM including the tags used. As you may be able to see from the screenshot, there sorted at the end were 5 custom tags:

_APID,  _FREL,  _MILT,  _MREL,  _ORIG

These names do not have any meaning except to Ancestry.com and their website’s program(s). What you also see are that in 48,538 lines (in the GEDCOM file downloaded), that 5,158 lines have one of these five custom tags. Normally, I will just ignore these tags and import the GEDCOM file into my laptop’s genealogy software (REUNION, RootsMagic, PAF, etc.) and let that software ignore these non-understandable tags and within seconds I have my Ancestry.com family tree imported in to my computer’s genealogy software. That is fine  – no problems.

But what do you think happens you if turn right around and upload that GEDCOM file into your RootsWeb family tree? If you use RootsWeb, then you know you get a LOT of _APID notes across all of your ancestors and sometimes, if you have many facts/citations for any ancestor, then the RootsWeb page for him/her will be horribly marred by all of these _APID tags!

TIP

Remember I said the GEDCOM file is a TEXT file. As such it can be edited by whatever your favorite text editor that you use. If your editor does global search/replace, then you can easily remove these CUSTOM tags (_APID, etc.). That will make your RootsWeb family tree individual pages look MUCH better.

Now I know what you are thinking. Do NOT go editing your GEDCOM file!  I agree.  Make a copy of your GEDCOM file and edit the copy of the downloaded GEDCOM file to remove the lines with ‘_APID’ on them. You can remove all custom tags, but I just bother with the _APID which are so irksome. If your editor can remove the lines with ‘_APID’ then that is what you should do. But if all your editor can do is replace the lines that have _APID on them with a blank line then that is OK too. Make those edits and save the edited (copy) file.  The blank lines seem to be ignored by RootsWeb – thank goodness.

Now you can upload the edited file, with the _APID custom tags removed to RootsWeb and your family tree will again look the way it used to before,  without these irksome custom tags.

Next time I will tell you what I found when I looked closely at what ANCESTRY.com was putting into the downloaded GEDCOM file.

Presidents Day — #2013

It is President’s Day on Monday. That got me to thinking about Washington and Lincoln. Stanczyk, has had an awful lot of mathematical training – the product of a degree from a School of Engineering. It is funny, the teachings that stick with you your whole life. One of the things that I learned that stuck with me was a little factoid from a Probability & Statistics course. I was taught that in a gathering of just of 19 people that the probability that two of them having the same day of birth (not the same year though) would be 50-50. That in any gathering of 19 people it would be a 50% chance of two people celebrating their birthday on the same day each year!

This being President’s Day weekend, I noted that we have had  44Presidents (only 43 different, since Grover Cleveland was the 22^nd and the 24^th President). So I asked myself did any two Presidents have the same day of  birth? Now if we ignore the Grover Cleveland issue, and we examine the dates of birth of all US Presidents, we do indeed find that two Presidents had the same day of birth. The day in calendar is November 2^nd. The two Presidents who share that day are: Warren G. Harding and James K Polk.

Now you might expect that since we have > 38 Presidents, that there should be two pairs of matches. But the odds are only 50-50. So we have just one matching pair of Presidents. There were a lot of near misses (off by one day). If your birth month is not September or June (each of which only had one President) then the odds are pretty good that you, my dear reader, share a birth day with one of the Presidents. I’d say better than 50-50. So click on the link and see for yourself.

Happy President’s Day!

Auld Lang Syne – 2012

So as we draw to a close this elder year 2012 AD, I take but a moments pause to wish my friends and good readers well and much happiness and wishes for a healthy and prosperous New Year.

Verily, this jester says, “All Is Well, That Ends Well“. And 2012 has indeed ended well.

Let me endebt myself further and borrow again from the great bard to close out this year. In Shakespeare’s play, “All’s Well That Ends Well”, in the first Act, the first Scene is a quote that suits me well to use though I steal it from a woman’s lips:

That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, she who is so above me:
In her bright radiance and collateral light.

My bright star is my much beloved wife, Teréza !

I love her so. Those who love her cannot be faulted for she is such a force of a nature and a wonder to behold. And those who fault her, do not know love. Theirs is a terrible loss indeed. Pity those fools for their jealousy and praise this jester for his steadfastness in the face of such folly. Bless my wife for her devotion made stronger and more holy for her mettle that was tempered by the trifles of miscreants.

That’s my closing thoughts for 2012. Better Genealogy in the coming year to all genealogists!

Happy New Year 2013 !

–Stanczyk