Hard and Soft Genealogy

I got an email pointing out a fault in the "Ancestry of Maria del Carmen Hill" that is linked to in the items at the top right column of the blog (#6.)

The death of John Palmer (#162) in 1661 would have made him 117 years old when he died. Yes, it is unlikely that he was that old. Maybe the year was 1616 and there was a transposition error or there was another John Palmer who died in 1661.

This above ancestry is an ahnentafel that someone had shared, and I have lost the identity of the good person who shared their work. The best way to find our errors is to have them pointed out, we are otherwise blind to our own errors otherwise.

Some of you Bloggers want to cross from soft genealogy where people collect names of people suggested as ancestors to carefully listing ancestors, their siblings, parents, birth-marriage-death dates and places, and a record of where all of the information came from. Many of us are in the genealogy area in-between soft and hard.

One problem has been online space to store this information that would be shared. The items in the upper right column are stored on the 10 megabytes that Verizon allows me the create a webpage. However, there are now other places to store the information.

• Scribd at http://www.scribd.com/ allow you to store documents for free that anyone can read (that is after they register (and they have not sold me to the junk email dealers.))
• Google Documents at http://www.google.com/ allows you to store documents for free, but to share them you need to list everyone you want to allow access to them. You will have to register here as well.
• Microsoft Windows Live at http://login.live.com/ has a similar free service as well. You will have to register here as well.
• There are likely other such resources.

The blog is not designed for sources, footnotes, and references. But it is great for "soft" genealogy.

Some of you have a great deal of research that you want to share. You are not going to make a financial profit from it. Most genealogies are self-published and breaking even becomes a lot of work too. Please, share your work with us. Use one of these above services or even another that the readers can access.

Some of you have collected family stories and tales. These are treasures that might be lost if they are not shared. I have heard two stories about diamond rings and glass panes as their canvas. I think more people would like to hear or read these tales that have been handed down. Please, share these tales with us and tell us who you heard them from. The blog, Orlando Stone Soup, is a continuing collections of tales and stories about people and places in Orlando, WV. There are no "Sanchez" in these stories, it is just a great example of what is possible. Check out: http://orlandostonesoup.blogspot.com/

If you are just a name collector of possible ancestors, you can share your speculations with us as well. Continue to share with us.

We also have historical fiction writers among us. They to are welcome please with the caveat of labeling their work as historical fiction. Consider sharing with us.

If you don't have the privileges to post to this blog, just write me at tomsantacruz@gmail.com and I will have an invitation sent to you (this blog is a free service of Google.)

These rest of you, I hope you change you mind and step-up with your opinions, insights, tales, and such. You can still comment on any of the postings. If you send SPAM, it will disappear.