Tika & Kinpoint.... A New Genealogy Opportunity

Tika was fast asleep and could have cared less when I tried to tell her about a new research opportunity I've discovered. But then she is a dogger..................

Kinpoint is brand new..... or at least it was to me. Kinpoint "makes it easy to learn about your ancestors and do family history using your FamilySearch data."

Clicking to www.kinpoint.com, this is the opening screen. It shows a pedigree circle with "you" at the center and your direct-line ancestors circling out from you. Gray areas show were you need to find these ancestors!

Kinpoint stands ready to help you do just that by using FamilySearch data. Everybody, these days, can have a FamilySearch account. And everybody should upload a GEDCOM of their info to FamilySearch or just enter their tree manually. Kinpoint will look at that data and with a great visual show you where your "holes" are.

Personally, I do not want to rely on any computer program to make connections for me. Suggestions, yes. But added-on-connections, no. Kinpoint will help you see just where you need to do some more work and will not willy-nilly add names.

Best of all, it is FREE. So why not give it a try??

"Free?" Tika sniffed as she woke up. "As in free cookies?"  Silly dogger.

Tika & Hiding In Plain Sight

Does my darling Tika look guilty as charged?  Do you see where she's rubbed the black skin off her nose right down to the "real her" where it was bleeding like heck?

We were both gone for the afternoon and I gave her a treat to chew on. When I returned I was greeting by this bloody-nosed dog. As I walked into the house I quickly spotted where she had used her nose and tried to bury her treat in our chairs (both throw covers had bloody smears), on the guest bed (all over one area on the bedspread and all over some papers Handy Man had put there, and then she'd tried to hide her treat in our bed and there were bloody nose smears all over my pillow, both sheets and the blanket! Whew! Took me three loads of laundry to get every thing cleaned up.
She always and finally will enjoy her treat but she just has to try hiding it first. This time she tried to hide it in four different places, the little rascal.

What does this teach us about genealogy? How about: our ancestors are hiding because somebody buried them? Genealogy is work!!!??? All it takes is one spot of "life" getting in our way to waste a perfectly good day of doing genealogy!

Really not much; but this was such a "good" story that I just had to share it!

Tika & Google Books

Leaving Tika in Handy Man's good hands, I joined three like-minded genealogy friends to drive across Washington state to attend a seminar with Lisa Louise Cooke as the principle speaker. And she was most definitely worth the effort!  I was telling Tika all about it when I got home.........

Lisa taught us, too, that YouTube is owned by Google (I did not know that). And there are thousands, if not millions, of genealogy-related videos on YouTube.

Google Books is now an all-purpose online digital book store... you can view for free and you can buy among thousands (bordering now on millions) of online digital books. Lisa said that Google Books is really great for those old county histories which are typically un-indexed but Google Books will word-name-search within the text for you with a couple of clicks. (What a time saver, eh?)

If you cannot quite read the text, the left side says:  Researching a topic? Search the latest index of the world's books. Find millions of great books you can preview or read for free.

The right side says:  New! Shop for Books on Google Play.  Browse the world's largest eBookstore and start reading today on the web, tablet, phone, or ereader.

Handy Man's line has a very illusive Stout family. Using Google Books, I did a search for "Stout Family History" and got a great listing of potentially likely source books. They were listed in the Library of Congress catalog but just knowing they exist is a big help. (The "bad news" was that I could not figure how to print out those two pages from the LOC catalog.)

Tika and I agree that it is always a good day when we learn something new!

Tika & DeceasedOnline.com

When I want to sit in my chair and do some reading, I often must wake up a sleeping Tika and scoot her over to her side of the chair. (And we both enjoy the heating pad, especially as the days and the house get cooler.) 

In my reading, I came across a website that I'd not heard of before:  www.DeceasedOnline.com

While Tika, as usual, was not much interested in learning about this British Isles database, I was. Below is the blurb under the tab "Coverage" on that website. While they might not have much, or everything, if they have what you want, then rejoice!

I did the free search for the surname McConnell. The site came back with 67 hits........... that means 67 mentions of McConnell deaths or burials. 

Now to explain: This database is the British model. They offer a free search but then you must order and pay for any copies you desire. (The American model...... think Ancestry.... charges a fat fee from everybody and then gives everybody everything.)

If any of you seriously use this website, and do some ordering, I would appreciate hearing your story of how it worked for you. My British Isles ancestors mostly came over on the Mayflower.

 

Database Coverage - participating cemeteries and crematoria

Below you will find a list of cemeteries and crematoria whose registers are part of the Deceased Online database. They are listed in the order in which their records have been added to the database, with the most recent first, although this can be changed to alphabetical order.

NEW RECORDS IN THE PIPELINE:

• Soon to be added to our existing database are 5 million digitised burial and cremation records from UK authorities and The National Archives.
• A further 4 million records are currently in the process of being digitised from 17 more burial and cremation authorities.
• And we are in advanced talks with a further 100 authorities about bringing nearly 14 million more records to the website.