Sunday, December 31, 2006

Free Medical Dictionary

Trying to read some of these Death Certificates I just couldn’t make out the cause of death. I found this medical dictionary very useful http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/. One of the causes of deaths I was able to make out the first letter & the end of the word. I was able to limit my search to “Ends With” then look for a word that started with the letters, and was able to find the word I wanted. These are some of options to limit your search, "Word/Article", "Starts with", "Ends with", and "Text".

The Free Dictionary website http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ has more than just medical definitions: Dictionary/thesaurus, Computing dictionary, Medical dictionary, Legal dictionary, Financial dictionary, Acronyms, Idioms, Columbia encyclopedia, and Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Utah State Archives

The Utah State Archives http://historyresearch.utah.gov/indexes have many good free indexes online, birth, death, court, government, etc… They only have what the counties have given them & not all their holdings are index, but this is a good place to look for people that have lived in Utah.

I just noticed in the 1904-1954 Vital Records & Statistics section, they are starting to put the actual death certificate images online.

One thing I don’t like, I don’t see a way to search just one database. But the search engine they do have is easy to use. All you need to do is enter “Surname” or “Surname, given name” or what I like is “Surname, first letter of given name”.

Friday, December 08, 2006

The Utah Geographic Place Names

I discovered this site looking for a place in Utah. It had a locations on it none of my other programs had http://history.utah.gov/FindAids/B01018/b1018.html .

The Utah Geographic Place Names Committee Records, ca. 1970s A Register of the Collection at the Utah State Historical Society

Genealogy Classes At The Bouse Library

Put on by professional genealogist Carol Brown .

Classes start at 9:30 AM, cost $5 per class for expenses. Located at the old Bouse Elementary School, 44031 Plomosa Road (look for the flag pole), in the building just east of the library.
  • Dec 12- Preponderance of Evidence (using DNA to prove or disprove a point)
  • Dec 14 - Military Records
  • Dec 18 - Publishing Your Family Records (there is some question whether the people who are in the class will want to have class that week).
Starting on Jan 9 we will restart the classes
  • Jan 9 - Beginning Genealogy
  • Jan 10 - Genealogy on the Internet
  • Jan 16 - We will start back to every Tuesday and Thursday for the next 8 classes.

Check the calendar for updates

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Lake Havasu Genealogical Soc. Special Events

This sounds like a good seminar if you can make it up to Lake Havasu on January 27th.

Special Events: "2007 13th Annual Genealogy Seminar will be held Saturday, January 27, 2007 at the Mountain View Mobile Home Park Clubhouse. Time: 8:00 AM registration 9:00 AM sessions to 4:00PM. Lunch break with salad luncheon included with registration fee of $30.00. Featured speaker will again be Shirley Gage Hodges from Albion, MI and Apache Junction, AZ.

Topic’s :
Immigration, The Journey to America
Newspapers, A Pot of Gold
Tracing your Ancestor through Military Records
Church Records, The Ties that Bind"

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Simple OCR

If you are a slow typer like me & want to put text from a document into your genealogy you might want to think about an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. The commercial versions can be pricy for people on a limited income. All I have found so far for free programs that works with Windows is SimpleOCR http://www.simpleocr.com/ .

One thing I DON’T like about this program is there no way to select a text area you want, just select to ignore an area. But you can choose that area you want when scanning the document, which is probably easier. “Selecting picture region” doesn’t give very good results, so if you need to include a picture scan it separately & insert it into your document later. When converting the image into text it does show the original image very well, I do like that. It does support TIFF, BMP & JPG if you already have the document as an image file.

If you can afford a good OCR program I do recommend that, if you want free this is the best I have found so far.

Note: Good news Google has released Tesseract OCR into Open Source. I don’t see anyway to run it in windows yet, let’s hope soon. More info here http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/announcing-tesseract-ocr.html