Serendipity

by Roxanne Lowe

Blogger’s note: Donna’s still on vacation, but was organized enough to pass along her “valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for” (definition of serendipity). Enjoy!

In this edition of Serendipity:

  • Downloaded Books at Your Fingertips
  • Shutterfly Makes Life Easy
  • Real Photo Postcards
  • American Merchant Marines
  • Warm Fuzzy Advice from a Friend

Downloaded Books — I keep a folder on my computer desktop labeled “Downloaded Books.” This is not a folder of my Kindle books, my evening-reading books. This is a folder for books to study, for educational books. Most of these were free-to-download books; many come from Ancestry, FamilyTree, or from Thomas MacEntee. Many were from library sources. For instance, here are some of the titles in my folder:

  • All About Ancestry DNA
  • Ancestry Toolkit
  • 38 FamilySearch Tips
  • 84 Best Tips, Tricks & Tools from Lisa Louise Cooke
  • 23 Secrets to Organize Your Genealogy
  • MyHeritage Users’ Guide to Family Tree Builder
  • Free Online Educational Resources (MacEntee)
  • The Password Trick, A Foolproof System (MacEntee)

I also have the 100-page guide to hostas from Naylor Nursery, and the User’s Guide to my Canon camera. And The Battle of the Alamo, a free download book from the Texas State Historical Association.

The beauty of having a folder of downloaded books on your desktop is that (1) they take up no shelf space; (2) they are available at your fingertips; (3) they are FREE (for the most part).

Dick Eastman, in his Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter back in March 2014, said it this way:

You can download 83,947 genealogy books free of charge. You can keep a huge genealogy library in your own home. You don’t need to purchase bookcases or build an addition onto the house. You can keep the entire collection in your computer or even in a handheld Kindle, iPad, or similar device. Actually, you don’t have to keep a local copy at all as the entire collection is available online, and you can retrieve the books of interest at any time.

My point with all this is that you could do the same thing as I have….. set up a folder on your desktop, label it “Downloaded Books” (or some such), start adding books into this folder as you discover them, and then, most important of all, READ AND STUDY THOSE BOOKS

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Would you like to make your own postcards for a baby shower announcement or a birthday party invitation or a family reunion reminder? Or to send to family to commemorate great-grandparents’ wedding day? Shutterfly can help you start to finish! Click on their website, and then “cards & stationery” and you’ll see all the different event templates from which to choose. This idea really excites me because a postcard is so effective, so timely and so easy to do. For instance, there were over 200 different choices for Birth Announcements. You just upload your digital photo, add your own words/information and your credit card number and then sit back and watch for that orange Shutterfly envelope in your mailbox.
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On the subject of postcards, do you know the difference between a postcard and a real-photo postcard? A “plain old” postcard can have “Greetings from Oklahoma” on it with colored images of the state flag or capitol or some such. A real-photo postcard is “the result of developing a negative onto photo paper with a pre-printed postcard backing….. the first documented photo postcard was mailed in 1899…the vast majority of real-photo postcards were created in black and white…” This info comes from Collectors Weekly. There are all sorts of real-photo postcard collectors, clubs and shows.

This website also offers the opportunity to list and/or watch for and purchase certain postcards to add to your collection. Doing a search for “Washington State” I found five cards listed: Men with 60-ton humpback whale, Cosmopolis, WA; Nahcotta Ilwaco Oyster Company Plant; Nahcotta Tonging Oysters, Willapa Bay, 1854; South Bend gathering oysters; Deming High School in Washington State under construction.
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Did your ancestor serve with the American Merchant Marines? Did you know there is a website for this service and about these men? Click to www.usmm.org. Wikipedia defines this service as: “The United States Merchant Marine are United States civilian mariners and a fleet of U.S. civilian and federally owned merchant vessels.” According to the USMM website, there have been Merchant Marines serving America since the Revolutionary War and service continues to today. The website has lists of WWII Mariners killed, names of WWII Mariners buried in National Cemeteries overseas, and many other categories.

If your ancestor served his country as a Merchant Marine, you will get a real kick from this link from their website: “Slop Chest: A stock of merchandise, such as clothing, tobacco, etc. maintained aboard merchant ships for sale to the crew.”
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Lastly today, a genealogy warm, fuzzy bit of good advice from a friend: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when are you going to have time to do it over?” She was teaching documenting our genealogy research finds. I’m sure you agree.