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.

Bethany Hoffstetter has an article, Experts to offer free appraisals of attic ‘treasures’, in the Pittsburg Tribune-Review, about the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center hosting an interesting event, “Fling or Keep? What to Do with Your Attic Treasures”, this weekened (saturday to be precise). Hopefully it won’t cause people to go out and sell family heirlooms.

The International Time Capsule Society has listed their most-wanted time capsules. They list nine time capsules that go back to the 1790s (including one involving George Washington as well as one that concerns the MASH TV series) that are missing, and that they hope to recover or at least document.

I see that Clooz 2.0 is undergoing beta testing. Clooz is billed as a “electronic filing cabinet that assists you with search and retrieval of important facts you have found during the ancestor hunt” by its developers, and they’ve certainly added a few interesting things.

Three things about this new version of Clooz jumped out at me (and they certainly helped me decide to add this to my collection of genealogy software)

Great article at the Grand Forks Herald (ND), Historic Preservation 101: Tips to improve the odds, about a topic that doesn’t get covered enough - preserving old buildings. Peg O’Leary, the Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission coordinator, and Dale Bentley, who is the executive director of Preservation North Dakota, mention some good ideas and information if you want to get involved with preserving an old building that you are interested in.

If you are looking for antique maps online, and would like a great source, check out the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It’s one of the premier online map collections (and it’s free) and it covers areas around the world, and it includes maps that date back pretty far. The formats are mostly in JPG and GIF graphic formats (easily viewable through any browser). Most of the maps are in the public domain, so you are free to copy (see the FAQ for more details).

If you can’t find a map you are looking for, they have an extensive directory of links to other map sites online, as well as map dealers.

Political Cortex, normally a very political website (as evidenced by the name) has a very interesting genealogy story:

What follows is a very personal account of a non-political project I have been working on. It began as a quest I started some three years ago, delving into my genealogy and finally actually visiting the town in Latvia where one branch of my ancestry came from. What I found there was a Jewish population that had almost been wiped out by the Nazis and that may yet die out, fulfilling, in part, Hitler’s dream of eliminating Jews from Europe. There is one surviving synagogue in that town, though it is now a condemned building. That building has stood through 160 years of weddings and pogroms, hope and the Holocaust.

This is the story of my family’s roots in Latvia, my rediscovery of the synagogue where my great grandparents probably were married, and my ongoing attempts to save that synagogue.

The Texarkana Gazette has an article by John Fooks, covering a very interesting teacher, Texarkana College history teacher Dr. Beverly Rowe. She asked her students to research the history of the area and its buildings, and along the way, taught them how to do a little genealogy research.