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October 2001 newsletter
 Midwest Computer Genealogy group

 
(Editor comments) The year is moving right along all ready into October and the third month of e-mail newsletter hopefully this month will have more of the bugs out of addresses.  Please if you change addresses let me know so I don't call you a few unpleasant names for a few minutes when I get a reject from the mail administrator.  By the way last month I made a BO-BO I put the addresses into the cc slot instead of bcc that is way you got a long list of addresses that the paper is going to.
The following is from Judy Revare on upcoming meetings so mark the calendars.
    The October 20th meeting of MCG will feature Ara Kaye who is from the State Historical Society of Missouri. She is the Senior Reference Specialist and supervisor of the Society's Newspaper Library. She will present a program on the Historical Society and the collections available there with suggestions on using newspapers for genealogical research.
    Nov 17th MCG meeting will be Ron Francis from Micro Center--"Gadgets for Genealogists"
Presidential ramblings
     There have been a lot of happenings since our last newsletter was published. Most of those happenings are a sad commentary on brotherly love. It has always seemed to me to be very odd that, through out our world history, there have been so many wars and so many people killed in the name of religion or God. Most religions teach brotherly love, doing good deeds for others, caring for friends, and neighbors, as well as strangers or even enemies. I have had a little difficulty seeing the actions that took place on September 11, 2001, as acts of love and caring kindness. I see it as our President has seen it, as an act of war. There is no question that an act of war was committed on September 11, 2001 and it was done by a group of people that claim to be devout believers in God (supposedly the same God that I believe in). That same, group of people have now declared a "Holy war" against the United States and the Western World. That "Holy war" apparently also includes some people and countries of their own religion and not of the Western World. A little more examination would lead one to suspect that it includes every one and every country that does not believe as they do or even more simply maybe just every one that they hate. That kind of religious zealots we probably do not need, and it certainly is not the kind of religion I want any part of.
     In response to the September 11, 2001 acts of war, our country and a great many of the other nations through out the world have also declared war. We have not declared war on a particular nation, and not on a particular religion, we have declared war on all terrorists and any group of people or nation that harbors, protects, or supports them. That is unlike any other war that has ever been declared or fought before. I suspect that this kind of war will turn out to be never ending, and very difficult to determine if you are winning or loosing. There will not be any spectacular battles with decisive victories. It probably would serve the world better if no one ever heard about the little battles that will occur, the number of deaths, or who they were. In a sense, that in it self would be a defeat of the terrorists, because there would be no publicity to promote their cause, and no martyrs. If there are any spectacular events, it will probably be more acts of terrorism against the enemy of the terrorists. My greatest hope is that all of the support that our nation and it's leaders now have, from within and around the world, will last as long as it takes to complete the job.
     You are probably asking yourself, what has all this got to do with computer genealogy, but in a way it does, and I will try to explain how. The leaders of our country and the leaders of the "Holy war" have both promised that we will have more terrorist attacks. We do not know in what form the next attacks will take. Some have suggested that it may come in the form of chemical, biological, or maybe by destroying our computer systems. Now, if old bin laden wants to destroy my computer, he is welcome, and the damage would not be noticed in the every day life of America. There are computer systems in our country that do perform important tasks and could severely cripple the functions of some very important activities. I know, you don't want to hear it again, but here it comes, the word is BACKUP. I setup a rather elaborate backup system for my computer and it works very well if the computer user actually uses it. With windows 98 many of the programs automatically store your data in "My Documents". If the program does not automatically store it's data in "My Documents", then when you do a backup of your data it will probably be stored in "My Documents", and if it does not, you can specify that it store the backup there. So, now all of your data and backed up data is stored in "My Documents". Next thing you do is backup "My Documents" on an external disk, Zip disk if you have it or on several floppies. The main thing is that you do it every time you open your computer and enter any data. I just copy "My Documents" to a Zip disk. In addition to that I periodically copy my entire hard drive to another hard drive. The easiest way to do that now, is to buy a external hard drive (as large or larger than the one in your computer) that attaches to your computer by USB port and copy the entire computer hard drive to the external hard drive. I use a program named Ghost. Any way you want to do it, the main thing is just to DO IT.
     Make sure that our newsletter Editor (Don Bjuland) has your proper E-Mail address so you can get your newsletter, you can probably also read it on our web site.
    See you 10-20-2001,
                     Wayne
At the September meeting John Wright gave a presentation on the use of power point and pictures to make a slide show presentation of family pictures.
Need a calendar to check on past or future years here are three sites that will give you that information.  All three of them operate sort of the same.  I could do it so can you.
Here is a site on the preservation of old photographs with links to genealogy classes and such.
Compare the various genealogy software packages at the following two sites.
Note they are a bit behind on the updates just released on some software packages.
Watching Out For Microsoft or the road to success without e-mail
An unemployed man goes to try for a job with Microsoft as a cleaner. The manager there arranges for an aptitude test (Section: Floors, sweeping of).  After the test, the manager says: You will be appointed on the scale of $30 per day. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and advise you where to report for work on your first day.  Taken aback, the unemployed man protests that he is neither in possession of a computer nor of an e-mail address.  To this the MS manager replies: Well, then, that really means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed. Stunned, the man leaves.
 
Not knowing where to turn and only having about $10 left, he decides to buy a 10 lb. box of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than 2 hours, he sells the tomatoes singly at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100.  Before going to sleep that night, it dawns on him that he could easily make a living selling tomatoes. Getting up earlier and earlier every day and going to bed later and later, he multiplies his hoard of profits in a short time. Not too long thereafter, he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again shortly afterwards on a pick-up truck. By the end of the first year, he is the owner of a fleet of pick-up trucks and manages a staff of many formerly unemployed people, all selling tomatoes.
 
Considering the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life insurance. Calling an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order that he might forward the documentation. When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned: "What, you don't even have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would have been by now, if you had been connected from the very start!" After a moment's silence, the tomato millionaire replied: "I would have been a cleaner at Microsoft!"

Morals of the story:

1: The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life.
2: Get e-mail, if you want to be a cleaner at Microsoft.
3: If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still become a millionaire.
4: Seeing that you got this story via e-mail, you're probably closer to becoming a cleaner than you are to becoming a millionaire.
Free genealogy software offer:  Legacy by Millenium is not word processing, but it is free genealogy software. The Standard Version can be downloaded at http://www.legacyfamilytree.com   There are numerous options for generating reports, including PDF format and an index of names is an option that can be selected when the report is created.