Wisdom Wednesday: Wow! This is Strange

It's Wednesday again and time to take stock and visit the GeneaBlogger's blogging prompt called Wisdom Wednesdays. It keeps me grounded yet moving forward to make a tally each week of what progress I've made learning about the wild wacky world of genealogy. This week I seem to be noticing a lot of things that maybe I should have noticed before and used or taken advantage of. This has been a week where I feel like I've been missing some great stuff and need to pay more attention to what's going on around me. But then maybe I need to cut myself some slack. There is so much to learn and we are all doing a lot of learning all the time, aren't we?

New Favorite Thing Person: Ancestry Anne and her blog! Message to Anne Gillespie Mitchell of Ancestry Reference Desk, and that's the official blog of the Ancestry.com Library Edition: here's a big e-hug for you, Anne, and how you deliver such good stuff in such a neat, clean package. I can hardly wait for my email syndication of her blog posts to arrive! I'm not a library at all but I surely do like her posts.
I dunno, Anne popped up on my radar all at once just about the time of RootsTech. Then Randy Seaver mentioned her and her presentations - especially the one about searching which is pure gold - on his wonderful blog, Genea-Musings. So poof! There she was seemingly out of no where, at least to me. Strange how someone with such valuable info can be around and you don't know a thing about it until she pops up a couple of time in a short period! Don't ya love it when that happens?

YouTube! Do you know how many great genealogy videos are on YouTube? I don't either but it's a lot! FamilySearch has a channel there as does Lisa Louise Cook as Genealogy Gems. Or Dear Myrtle! There are so many but I'll stop now so that you can have the fun of discovering more yourself! Just plug "genealogy" in the search box and see what you get. If you don't use YouTube for anything but Psy's latest video you're missing a sure bet. This week I watched a couple of videos and vowed to watch more on a regular basis because it's fun and just takes five to ten minutes, except for Ol' Myrt and the Hang Outs. I even found some interesting videos of the B&O Railroad in Western Maryland, which is where I do a lot of my research. Strange, YouTube was there all the time and underutilized by me.

This is not strange: Armchair Gelealogist on Citing Sources! Here's a different slant on citing sources from one of my fav bloggers, Lynn Palermo over at The Armchair Genealogist. It's a post and chart about how to use a workflow strategy for citing your sources so that it's not a great big hairy deal but something you do automatically as you work, or at least that's what I was reading into her post. I like it because it gives a way to refine and develop all of your sources for one ancestor and just tuck it into your overall workflow. Had not thought about it that way before and was thinking that citing a source is a single stand-alone function. Lynn shows us how it's not some isolated strange event that hangs off the side. Bigger picture, and very cool! Thanks, Lynn!

Strange Visitors to the Blog! For about a month now I've noticed that all of a sudden between 1 and 2AM there will be 200 to 300 visitors to this blog, all to the same obscure post! I have no idea what the heck that's about but it was freaking me out so I took down the post. I checked the post for anything that might be taken another way or the unfortunate misspelling of a word or turn of a phrase to make it X-rated, but I got nothing. Too strange for my tastes so I took the post down. What was that about, I don't know?!

"National Pike Through the Cumberland Narrows"

By E. Irwin Gilbert, 1906.

(For more National Pike photos from this historic album, click on the tab at the top.)

The URL for this post is:

Merry Christmas to All, and Especially Mom and Aunt Betty

All the presents are wrapped and sent, all the cards are mailed. The potato latkes were really wonderful, if I do say so my own self;) Plans for Christmas Day are set and there's not much left to be busy with.

Have amused myself between holiday activities making an online album of historic photos by a photographer who worked in Frostburg, Maryland in the early years of last century, E. Gilbert Irwin. He put together a photo album of the National Pike being refined and it's a really important documentation of Western Maryland. Unfortunately, it's not been online as far as I know.

Fortunately, Mom has one of those albums. When I visited her last I took photos of the photos... OK, not the best way to proceed. I should have scanned then... that is the preferred practice for archiving. But I did what I could do in the time available with the equipment on hand.

I took each image into PhotoShop and sharpened the contrast, cropped to get rid of black edges, mostly. I know, it's not 100% pure to the artistic integrity of Mr. Irwin's work. But it's the best I can do now.

So click on the tab in the upper right that says "Album: Nat'l Pike". Or click here: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/p/album-natl-pike.html

If you want to know more about the National Pike, also called the National Road, go to WIKI at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road