ABC 4 has an article/story, Utah teen’s love for genealogy earns him time on History Channel, about a fifteen year old working on his Eagle Scout project that involves genealogy research and cemetery preservation. As a result of this, sometime in the next year on an unnamed show on the History Channel, his project will be feature. Pretty cool, and good exposure for genealogy.

The Boston Globe has an article by Matt Gunderson, Website aids Jews’ search for ancestors, about, well, those doing genealogy researching concerning Jewish ancestors. It mentions how the internet is impacting many genealogy societies, while some, because of their unique nature, are doing okay.

The Hartford Courant has an article from The Chicago Tribune, How Much Privacy Have We Lost? (which I couldn’t find on the Tribune’s site), by Eric Benderoff and Jon Van, about just how much privacy we have lost in this day and age. It’s a two-page article and worth a read - even as we are happy the internet can help companies provide incredible amounts of genealogy information, they are also providing incredible amounts of personal information about living individuals.

If you live and breathe Microsoft Office and/or Outlook and OneNote (and Publisher even) when it comes to correspondence, notes, presentations, biographies, etc., for your genealogy work, and you are a Windows user (or Mac with the appropriate Windows virtualization software) and interested in where Office is going, Microsoft has made the Office 2007 Beta 2 available for public users.

You can get it (and the free license keys) here: www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx

It’s got a radical new interface, and quite a few other things have changed. It runs okay if you are using it under a Mac setup with Parallels Desktop for Mac.

It expires on February 1st, 2007. Keep in mind, it’s highly recommended you don’t use this for “production” work, i.e., don’t install over your old Office, and don’t load and save documents you have created with older versions of Office without first backing all of them up. That said, it’s interesting to see where they are going with this - obviously they are going after more online-collaboration and business, but still, it’s interesting to look at it. Personally, it doesn’t offer me anything that I absolutely need - I’ve been using other word processors for my normal word processing, and for publishing newsletters, etc., I’ve been using Apple’s Pages, but I do like to check things out.

If you don’t want to go through with downloading it or ordering it by mail, you can read eWeek’s review of it.

With all of the talk lately of states trying to close off public access to many records, we have this glimmer of good news - The Associated Press/Newsday are reporting that New Jersey has designated millions of dollars for the preservation of public records and archives. All 21 counties and 40 municipalities are set to receive the money, which can be used for everything from new employees designated for the preservation, new equipment, duplication services, and training.

No, the descendants aren’t disturbed, it was the people buried in the cemetery that were disturbed. Don’t you love headlines like that? Jim Wallace of WLAB News (Albany, Valdosta, and Thomasville, Georgia) has news of a cemetery that was accidently disturbed a few years ago (it was harrowed over, and some of the tombstones were nearly destroyed and/or lost. They have managed to track down who was buried there, as well as descendants, and will be contacting the descendants. If you think it might concern you - two of the names mentioned are Roby and Turner, you should check the article out and get in touch with the Dougherty County DA.

I haven’t been paying attention - one of my favorite genealogy applications, Clooz, has left it’s 2.0 beta testing and has now been formally released. The author refers to it as an “electronic filing cabinet ” for genealogy documents and files, and that’s pretty much an apt description.

The 2.0 series had a complete rewrite - in “.Net”, meaning it requires Windows XP unfortunately. Among the significant updates - new templates, census substitutions (for those times you can’t find somebody in the census, this is a good way to document where they were around then), and map tracking/information/storage, and most importantly, GEDCOM importing.

One thing I thought was pretty cool, they’ve added what is basically a building history area to track buildings and land that were important to your ancestors - I’ve mentioned before that people are starting to get into doing research on places and structures.