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New FamilySearch.org Web site

I know this is old news for some, but it just hit the Chicago temple district and we're very excited to announce that FamilySearch.org is rolling out a new "version" of its web site that will make it easier to tie together the world's efforts to connect the human family.

Go to http://new.familysearch.org and enter in your LDS Church membership number to register. You'll also need to enter your confirmation date and a few other details and security questions to make sure that they get the right "you" and that your information is secure. From there you can start adding people to your family tree (if they're not already in there because of someone else linking to you) and watch it grow based on the efforts that other people have already made.

The new FamilySearch ensures that duplicates of names are reduced or altogether eliminated. Because it's a group effort, nobody works in isolation anymore. If you make a change to a person's birth date, it shows up as a change you made so that others can see and provide more source material to show that your date is correct or incorrect.

The TempleReady system is replaced by and integrated into FamilySearch so that ordinance data is shown in near real-time rather than taking months to show that the person you just did ordinance work for has already been taken care of. Now you'll know instantly and accurately who needs their work done and who doesn't.

Come check it out! This release of the new FamilySearch is a limited release for Church members only, so you'll need your membership number. It is written on your temple recommend, so you should be able to hop right on. Or, your ward clerk can provide your number to you on Sunday.

Ray Wilson's Photo Album

I thought I'd post a "Scrapblog" of Ray Wilson's photo album here for all to enjoy.



Scrapblog is great for doing scrapbooking online. It's actually easier than doing scrapbooking on paper, and you have so many choices for adding your personal flourishes to every page!

Another cool thing you can do is easily share your scrapblog with anyone via email, your own personal blog, social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Mac.com, and photo sharing sites such as PhotoBucket, Flickr, Smugmug...on and on!

Give it a try!

Finally, an economical way to digitize ALL of your photos

Full disclosure: I swear I have no financial relationship with ScanCafe.com. I'm just promoting their site because

1. they're So Incredibly Cool.
2. with more family members archiving their photos digitally, we can more easily share our memories and do family history research
   

ScanCafe.com is the photo scanning service to beat them all. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm seriously considering it. With stacks of photos fading and deteriorating in my basement and attic, I've long felt a need to back up these memories in a compact digital format for preservation against time. But how can I find the time to do that by myself?

Now, I don't have to. Neither do you. Just open an account at ScanCafe.com, box up your photos and ship them to their address. Then, they get securely shipped to their secure, state-of-the-art scanning facility in India whose highly trained employees scan them at the highest quality, put them on any kind of digital media you want (the Web, CDs, DVDs, hard drives), and then send them right back to you. They'll even do custom naming of the folders the images are stored in on the disk! The whole process takes 7-8 weeks for most orders, but that's understandable given the number of images they handle (with lint-free gloves and forceps, I might add).

As a gift, you can even send a duplicate set of DVDs to family members as part of your order. That's great for when you want to share the memories while also diversifying the storage locations in case of disaster.

So, why bother doing this at all? Well, think about where your photos are stored.

• Are all of those photo albums with sticky backs and who knows what kind of plastic cover sheets preserving or destroying your photos? Acid-free photo presentation mediums didn't really come into widespread use until the late 80s.
• What about the cardboard shoe boxes your other photos are in?
• Most of all, what kind of paper were the photos themselves printed on? Are those acid free and resistant to fading and deterioration? Chances are, they're not.
• Now, think about the climate of where you live. Is it dry, humid, hot, or cold, or a mixture of all of the above throughout the year? Photos like to be stored in a cool, dry place free of dust, humidity, insects, and other environmental contaminants. It would be nice if we all had a private, climate controlled storage vault, but we don't.
  

That's where digitizing your photos is probably one of the greatest gifts you can give to your posterity. It renews the "death contract" on fading photos, especially given that you can restore color, remove scratches and blemishes, and enlarge them. ScanCafe.com charges a comparatively small fee for restoring photos and has a Professional offering that gives you a number of FREE photo restoration services including automated dust and scratch removal, manual cropping & re-orientation, manual color correction, and manual red-eye removal.

Just do it. Like these folks, you'll be glad you did.

Genealogy Challenge

From time to time, as I do editorial passes of the book, I come across little mysteries that remain unsolved and tidbits of tantalizing information that would be nice to expand on. I'm going to start posting these to the blog for all of you to comment on there and research.

The first is about when John Powell and his family first arrived in the Salt Lake valley. The history as written by Ruth Young states:

Arriving in Immigration canyon September 26, 1856, they were met by President Young and several members of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. They brought watermelons for them. He told them not to eat too much, John said, "Brigham Young was quite sensible."

John's little daughter age 4, who walked all the way, got the large piece of bread and butter she had been promised.

In the afternoon they went down into the valley, camping on the square in the 16th ward, staying from Friday until Monday. Brother Brigham Young told them they had fulfilled a prophecy.

What was the prophecy Brigham Young referred to? Was it a specific one he had uttered and is it recorded anywhere? If it is, where? Or, was it part of the overall prophecy that the Church would grow in the West?

If it helps, here is some more information, quoted from the same account:

June 9, 1856 the Saints left for Salt Lake, pushing and pulling handcarts...John and his family were in Edmund Ellsworth company. John was counselor to the captain of his company...[in late August] the McArthur company was with them going to Laramie.

About 21 September, the company camped at Fort Bridger. Here they stayed all night. "The men killed a beef." Mary says, "This was the first meat since we left the buffalo on the prairies." At Fort Bridger they met Brother Parley P. Pratt. Two men from the fort were on their way to Salt Lake, they asked Captain Ellsworth what message they could take and he told them, "Tell them we haven't a bite of food left in camp." They were completely out of provisions.

A relief party met them with food before they arrived in Salt Lake.

Now Available: WilsonBingham.com Web Site Tour

Some folks may not have had a chance to visit and explore our new web site, WilsonBingham.com. To make it even more user friendly than it already is, I've added an animated tour to walk you through the site and what we have to offer.

Visit now by clicking this link --> http://www.wilsonbingham.com/?dftid=1427954

Famous Bingham Relative

Here's one I knew about, but hadn't taken the time to figure out in more detail until tonight.

I was reading stories of amazing coincidences when I happened upon the following:

Three strangers on a Train, with complementary last names
In the 1920s, three Englishman were traveling separately by train through Peru. At the time of their introduction, they were the only three men in the railroad car. Their introductions were more surprising than they could have imagined. One man's last name was Bingham, and the second man's last name was Powell. The third man announced that his last name was Bingham-Powell. None were related in any way. (Source: Mysteries of the Unexplained)

I remembered reading once about a man named Hiram Bingham, an archaeologist/historian who discovered the ruins of Macchu Picchu, so I decided to do a little digital archaeology of my own to figure out how he might be related to us.

Hiram Bingham is my mother's 3rd cousin, 3 times removed (my 3rd cousin, 4 times removed). The common ancestor linking us together is Joseph Bingham and Ruth Post. Joseph Bingham (b. 1738) and Calvin Bingham (b. 1750) were siblings under Joseph and Ruth and that's where ours and Hiram's lines split. Hiram, who is actually Hiram III, is Calvin's great-grandson.

More facts about this branch of our family, plus pictures:

Wikipedia entry for Hiram Bingham I
Wikipedia entry for Hiram Bingham II
Wikipedia entry for Hiram Bingham III

And now you know.