Perfect It Aint

As the title indicates, perfect it aint. I'll rant and rave, maybe even curse once in a while. You are welcome to join me with your comments. At worst I'll just tear out the rest of my hair. At best, I may agree with you. Or maybe I'll just ignore it, because you know, perfect it aint!

Name:
Location: Barboursville, Appalachia, United States

Retired, Financial and Management specialist, lived all over country, but for some reason, decided to retire to West Virginia (that's the new one, not the Richmond one). Please note that all material appearing on this blog is covered under my own personal copyright as creator, except those items appearing in the Comments that do not appear under the screen name of Tanstaafl or are attributed to others by citation. No license is intended or given to copy or redistribute anything appearing in this blog unless written permission is first obtained from the author.

Monday, August 04, 2014

Genealogical News

Wow, it published it before I even wrote anything except the title.


Of late I have not done much with out genealogy.  I have about 111,000 names in the file, dating back as far as 1100 AD.

My major complaint is that I do not have all the data I need for persons about my age, as most PAF's, gedcoms, etc., will shield that data until at least 70 years from date of birth have passed.  Well, I am 72, so I cannot get the more relevant data on my own generation.  The Census Bureau did release the 1940 materials (that's 2 years before I was born.) 

And I refuse to use Social Security data/records, as I feel myself that information should remain private.

The biggest hang-up has been my computer.  For some time I could not access the internet, as the speed my ISP was giving me was so low.  I am on dial-up so it was going to be slow anyway, but speeds of 4.8 kbps is way too slow. After having my son check my computer over and pronouncing it sound, I called my ISP and we worked out a routine that gives me 16 to 24 kbps consistently, with occasional flubs, to as high as 38 kbps, which seems like lightning speed after only getting 10 or 12 kbps.

I have learned a trick.  If I don't like the speed it gives me, I log out and log right back in, sometimes as many as three or four times until it gives me 30+.  Or just postpone what I planned to do.  I keep a stack of papers to enter data from for such occasions.  Then when I do get a good connection, I go to Rootsweb and download additional data to use during the next downtime.

I have generally found that I can log into Rootsweb and then get just about all the information I need for one or another of it's subsets.

The other project I am working on is to have an ongoing list, by alpha, of all family names we have in the file.  I have to do this manually as there is no automatic function that I can find to do it for me in the PAF which I use.  I have it complete for the first 104,ooo persons, and am working to get it current again.  I go through it every four or five months to update it.


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