Blogger’s note: Donna’s on another exciting vacation, but she just couldn’t leave without passing on her musings. Enjoy!

In this edition of Serendipity:

• Facebook Likes Promote Society Pages
• Life is good for Seenagers!
• Why Search Engines Cannot Find All Your Online Genealogy Information
• Free new resource on WikiTree — Genealogist-to-Genealogist Q&A
• Google’s Boomerang Helps Schedule Emails

Just learned a great new thing! Does your society have a Facebook page? Have you encouraged your members to visit the page and LIKE the page? A member of the Clallam County Gen Society (where I visited last weekend) was explaining that we all need to visit the Facebook page of our favorite society and LIKE that page so as to help it come up in searches. Apparently, until a Facebook page gets 100 LIKES it does not come up. So, first, click on the Washington State Genealogical Society’s Facebook page and click LIKE and then visit your society’s page and follow suit. Great thing to do, eh?
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Subject: Life is good because I am finally a Seenager !! (Senior teenager)

I have everything that I wanted as a teenager, only 60 years later.
I don’t have to go to school or work.
I get an allowance every month.
I have my own pad.
I don’t have a curfew.
I have a driver’s license and my own car.
I have ID that gets me into bars and the whisky store.
The people I hang around with are not scared of getting pregnant.
And I don’t have acne.
Life is great.

I have more friends I should send this to, but right now I can’t remember their names.

My sister-in-law in Missouri shared this with me and I just had had had to share it with you.

Why Search Engines Cannot Find All Your Online Genealogy Information……….. this was the title to Dick Eastman’s EOGN blogpost on March 21, 2016. It was a (+) article, meaning that I’m subscribing for $20 per year to read all his posts and not just some of them which are free. Now why do you care? Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter (EOGN) is among the top genealogy weekly news sources in the genealogy world (my opinion). Click to www.EOGN.com and check it out for yourself. But back to this article….. “Sometimes,” Eastman says, “you cannot find anything about the person you seek” and to help you understand why this is so, you must understand a bit about how search engines work (and he then explains). He explains spiders, web crawlers which are constantly searching the Internet “to build lists of the words found on Web sites….those word lists are used to build indexes.” This article surely helped me explain why I cannot find something….. or better yet, why I could find it yesterday and cannot find it today on the Internet.
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Ever used WikiTree? According to Wikipedia, “WikiTree is a free, shared social networking genealogy website that allows users individually to research and contribute to their own personal family trees, while building and collaborating on a singular worldwide family tree within the same system.” Here is a brand new reason to investigate WikiTree….. they recently launched their “G2G Q&A” portion of their website. This is where genealogist to genealogist can post questions and answers in a public forum. Folks are posting outright queries on the site (“Who is the Jane Rankin that…….”) as well as asking questions (“what’s a good underutilized website for sourcing?”) Or how about “How do you put unsavory details of ancestors into perspective?” There was a lively discussion on how to merge two pre-1500 individuals; many opinions were offered. Best of all, this opportunity is FREE!
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Do you use the Google family of products? I’ve seen books 3-inches thick trying to explain all the many wonderful features of Google and have heard many presentations on this so-timely topic. But I discovered a new feature of Google on my own and it’s WONDERFUL. It’s called Boomerang. With this FREE tool, you can craft an email message and then schedule a later date to have it sent! Like if you want to send a birthday greeting in two weeks when you’re out of town, craft it now and send it later…………with Boomerang’s help. Once installed, at the bottom of your Gmail sending-message-box, right below the blue-box SEND, there will be a red-box SEND LATER. Easy as that! And did I mention that it’s free??