This week’s news includes: NBC has purchased rights to
create an American version of the popular BBC reality series, Who Do You Think You Are?; NARA recently announced the availability of
nearly 9 million WWII U.S. Army enlistment records at its Web site, but be
aware that there were many records that could not be scanned – and the
collection is therefore incomplete; Sen. John McCain’s new book, Hard Call, indicates his descent from
Scottish heroic warrior Robert the Bruce, but the claim has been termed “baloney?
in the British press by professional genealogists; Jacksonville Public Library
in Florida has begun an “ASK a Librarian? online chat service; I.R.I,S., Inc., (at
http://www.irislink.com) has two new
portable scanners of note.



Listener e-mail topics this week include: Genealogical Publishing Company’s new
CD by Michael Hait, titled The Family
History Research Toolkit, has PDF format forms into which you can type
information or use the forms for transcription purposes ($19.95 USD); a
discussion of professional research services and researchers (Board for
Certification of Genealogists at http://www.bcgcertification.org/
and the Association of Professional Genealogists at http://www.apgen.org/ and the International Commission for the Accreditation
of Professional Genealogists at http://www.icapgen.org/)
are three resources); missing census images at Ancestry.com were reported
through the online Help facility and will be handled; a question about
searching databases that are added to sites incrementally, and not wasting your
time doing the same searches on the same data; an early pilot of the LDS’
online databases is available at http://search.labs.familysearch.org;
use of Google’s My Map feature to create maps of cemeteries and other locations
in a specific area; scanning photos using Google’s Picasa feature; Washington,
DC, records storage repositories for that jurisdiction; and issues concerning placing
one’s genealogical data online.