An article from Elizabeth M. Gillespie, for the Associated Press, Panel vows to fight for access to records, gets into an issue that is going to be cropping up a lot more as time goes by, access to public records. The article is about the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee, and their fight to keep access open.
Yahoo has updated their translation site - babelfish.yahoo.com. If you need webpages or snippets of text translated, such as historical documents or newspaper articles, you can paste them in (either the URL or the 150 words of text) and it’ll spit out the translated text.
Very handy when working with international records.
Update: From a genealogical perspective, Yahoo inherited Babel Fish from Overture, who bought it with AltaVista. This is the actual, official launch under the Yahoo brand.
Schelly Talalay Dardashti has a very interesting article, It’s All Relative: Getting down to it in Ynetnews, if you happen to be into Jewish genealogy. It’s about an upcoming Jewish genealogy conference that is huge.
In yet another acquisition, MyFamily.com, Inc., has acquired another company to help expand their services. They’ve acquired Encounter Technologies, which came out of the Georgia Institute of Technology Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC).
Joseph Hall has an article, History is in your genes, about the Genographic Project - the ambitious 5-year plan to use DNA and map out global migration patterns, that is being sponsored/handled by National Geographic and IBM.
Paula Story has a story (hah!) in the Union-Tribune (San Diego), Knowing your relatives’ medical history can help you identify health risks and develop a personalized prevention program, that gets into an area that some don’t want to confront or think about, or that, on the flip side, actually got some peole into genealogy and their family history.
According to Google Maps Mania, Google Maps has added street maps for most/all of Europe - good news for those who use the service in their look-ups and what not. Some people are saying that not all parts were updated, although it maybe more of a localization/server issue (i.e. the changes haven’t been pushed out to the servers they are using).
You can read more (as well as the changes) here.
Kevin Leininger has an article in the News-Sentinenel (Fort Wayne, IN), Groups unite to restore 160-year-old cemetery near Monroeville about a genealogist and county coming together to help clean up a cemetery.
