Chris Paton and Thomas MacEntee Downunder Seminar

I had a great day at this seminar put on by Unlock The Past yesterday.  I met up with other geneabloggers some I already knew and some I hadn’t met before.

Geneabloggers from all over the world

Geneabloggers from all over the world.

Here are some of the things I learnt from Chris and Thomas they aren’t in any special order:-

If you upload a picture with text in it to Google drive then right click on it, go to Open With, and click on Google Docs it will open the picture in a word processor document and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) will do its best to read the text and insert it into the document underneath the picture.  You can then edit and use the text however you would like.  You can also do the same thing with a .pdf file.

Thomas MacEntee speaking at podium

Thomas MacEntee

In Google Images if you click on the little camera icon in the search box you can upload a picture and Google will search for all websites which have that picture on them.  It doesn’t do facial recognition yet so some of the results can be quite funny but there are enough accurate ones to make it worth checking if someone else has a picture of one of your ancestors and is also researching them.

Google images search box showing camera icon

 

Google Books has many complete copies of Ancestry Magazine for free.  I did a search for “Ancestry Magazine” on Google Books and got over 7000 results.  Lots and lots of good reading there!!

The British Gazettes website has London, Edinburgh, and Belfast gazettes available for use under the Open Government Licence.  Under this licence you are free to:

  • copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information;
  • adapt the Information;
  • exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application.

You must, where you do any of the above:

  • acknowledge the source of the Information by including any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence.

The gazettes contain insolvency and bankruptcy notices, wills and probate, military and civilian awards.

Searching Find My Past UK for Irish soldiers.

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk has Irish military and merchant seamen records.

Chris Paton talking about Irish records online

Chris Paton

Chris went through loads of online sources for researching Irish ancestry.  The notes for his talk are publicly available at http://www.sog.org.uk/learn/who-do-you-think-you-are-2013-speakers-handouts/ near the bottom of the page. I’m looking forward to getting his book Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet when it comes out as an Ebook.

 

7 thoughts on “Chris Paton and Thomas MacEntee Downunder Seminar

    • February 10, 2014 at 9:22 am
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      Thanks Chris I’ll check that out. I had only looked on gen-ebooks.com.

      Reply
  • February 10, 2014 at 8:48 am
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    Great to meet up with you again, and to meet other geneabloggers for the first time. I agree the talks are great, and I learned something from each of them too.

    Reply
    • February 10, 2014 at 9:24 am
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      Thanks Alona, hope you’re enjoying the rest of your cruise!

      Reply
  • February 10, 2014 at 2:40 pm
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    So pleased to her that you enjoyed the day, Kylie. We are having rather a splendid time on the cruise ship.

    Jill

    Reply
    • February 10, 2014 at 2:54 pm
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      The cruise sounds great Jill, say hi to all the Geneabloggers and Genealogists For Families members for me won’t you.

      Reply
  • February 19, 2014 at 2:28 am
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    Thanks for your post Kylie… such a shame I missed the Seminar, here in Adelaide, and also missed catching up with genea bloggers whom I only know by name. Some great links there for me to follow up on… Cheers.

    Reply

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