Archive for Genealogy

Micing hockey oplayers

I’m only a casual hockey fan. I’ll watch the Canucks playoff games, and I’ve gone to a couple of games when Tracy’s brother and dad had an extra ticket in their Ice Pack. I didn’t know until today that some players are wearing mics on the ice. Check out this fight, and listen to the replay when they play the audio.

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A solution to the digital dark age?

Something I worry about is the archiving of my data.  We take a lot of pictures with Tracy’s SLR, and also some movies with our DV cam, and currently it’s backed up on a hard drive, and to DVD.  But that’s still quite fragile, and I’d like to make sure our data could be preserved for future generations.  Could this be a solution to the problem?

Scientists: Data-storing bacteria could last thousands of years

Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire.

The universities said they successfully encoded “e= mc2 1905!” — Einstein’s theory of relativity and the year he enunciated it — on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis.

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Working on my family tree

I’m looking for information on the children of George Glover and Mary Ann Glover (nee Barraclough): James Robert Glover, John William Glover, Maud Mary Glover, Lillian Beatrice Glover, Marion Florence Glover, Elizabeth Hannah Glover, Laura Minnie Glover, Rose Evelyn Glover, and Mable Gertrude Glover.

I have information on John William Glover’s descendants, and Rose Evelyn Glover (my paternal grandfather’s mother) but I’m hoping to find more information on her other siblings.

Apparently they came on the RMS Peruvian from Liverpool to Halifax.

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Tracking your family tree with GRAMPS

I recently installed GRAMPS v2 to start tracking my family tree. I have an interest in this because I am the last male heir of a large branch of my family tree, and there is pressure to pass on my last name to a male son. Since I don’t have any kids yet, I’d like to find some other people that share my last name, Harford. I’m going to get all of my data entered into GRAMPS before I go looking for relatives on the Internets because the chances of lining up branches increases as I add more information.

GRAMPS is a very easy to use and feature-rich product for Linux that tracks all of your family tree data. I’ve never used any other genealogy software before, but this one is straightforward and easy to use.

One thing I liked is that it prompts you to enter related information as you go along. For example, when I added Tracy as my spouse, it popped up a window to enter the wedding information, which I did, then continued with the rest of my data entry.

It also lets you flag data as private (I don’t really want to publish my living relatives’ birthdays for example) and I’m going to test out how well that works when exporting data.

A missing feature (or one that I haven’t found yet) is the automatic export of the family tree data to a web page, but since it exports XML it should be very simple. dot (part of the graphviz package) should be able to handle this easily. I’ve found a PHP application called PhpGedView that should be able to handle this as well.

In terms of merging family trees, I think I will use the Ancestry.com Trees service to find other branches. There is a 14 day trial that I’ll sign up for once I get the tree done. A year’s subscription costs $49.95 US which is a bit steep, but hopefully I wouldn’t be locked in to their service if I find other branches that line up.

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