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Posts Tagged ‘Morons’

Worst seat in the house

12 Mar

What are these for?

The Family History Library has 2.4 million rolls of microfilm, 3 quarters of a million microfiche, a couple hundred thousand books and a bunch of other cool stuff.  Then why is it that the majority of the people here are sitting in front of computers looking at Ancestry.com and other online databases?

I want to *scream* at these people.  What an absolute waste of time and resources.  Every decent public library in the country has Ancestry.com and HeritageQueset Online.  Don’t get me wrong, those are great tools, when you are NOT sitting next to 2 and a half MILLION rolls of 16mm and 35mm microfilms.

On the bright side, there is barely a wait for the microfilm scanners.  Most people are still doing photocopies and printouts.  Pfft.

 
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Posted in Genealogy

 

What’s in a date?

26 Feb
World War II Draft Registration Card

Fortunately they got this date right

“According to The Longmont Ledger, 9/8/1911 page 5 she died at the age of 33 at 105 Main Street-Longmont”.

I just saw that on Findagrave.com. Did she die on September 8th or August 9th? If you’re in the United States, it’s probably September. If you’re in Europe, it might be August. Either way, it’s a dumb way to write the date.

The really annoying bit is that I recovered the obit for that researcher, and my email stated, “8 Sep 1911″. Pfft.

Writing the date should be such a simple task and not open to interpretation. Unfortunately, many family historians manage to muck it up. There are two common issues you want to avoid:

a) Never write the month as a number
b) Never write the year with only two digits

The Good

04 Jul 1776
07 May 1942

The Bad and the Ugly

1/8/2001
8/1/2001
Jan 1, 08

You might as well be writing it as, “Either January or August the 8th or 1st”

http://www.findagrave.com/

 
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Posted in Genealogy