The Genealogy Guys Podcast #131 - 2008 March 25

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.