Friday Serendipity

 

**** Ever heard of “warnings out” when doing New England research? Quoting from an article by Cherry Fletcher Bamberg, in the NEHGS Register, Summer 2015: “The floating poor, unwelcome anywhere but the town in which they were born, left scant documentary record of their existence. They are often mentioned only in warnings out when the town council ordered that they leave town before becoming a burden on the tax rolls. As each town bore the responsibility of supporting its own poor, strangers without proper certificates from their own towns represented an undue drain on the chronically stressed town treasuries.” Have you found your ancestor on a “warned out” list??

 

**** Judy Russell has a terrific nearly daily blog. Last Friday (Oct 27) she posted a great bit about NARA, our National Archives. She reminds us that this repository of American history offers “a virtual cornucopia if information about records there, researching in person at its facilities, and about genealogical research in general.” Wanna know more? Click to www.YouTube.com then to the NARA channel, “Know Your Records.” There you’ll find 61 video-lessons listed, plenty enough for a couple of soon-to-come snow days.

 

**** Don’t most of us know about Internet Archive…. quoting from their website: “Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” The news about Internet Archive is that now you can digitally borrow a book from this site! Say you’re looking for a family history, The Turners from Tennessee, and you finally find a copy on Internet Archive….. now you can borrow that book for up to 14 days for free.  Check it out.  (P.S. I made up that book.)

**** True serendipity: Did you know that brown chickens give brown eggs and white hens give white eggs. That’s the ONLY difference; there is no difference in nutrition, so I read.