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Messages - Gamone

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1
Family History Programs, Tree Organisation, Presentation / Re: GEDCOM files
« on: Monday 17 October 05 14:45 BST (UK)  »
My website demonstrates a splendid Macintosh-based tool called GEitCOM for handling gedcoms. My website also demonstrates how to exchange gedcom files through a forum such as this one, either by displaying it in your browser as a textfile or by downloading it as a zipped textfile.

Since joining this forum, I've never seen gedcom exchange requests, neither to give nor to take. Whenever I use the Mormon online service, I spend my time downloading gedcoms. I'm surprised that this fundamental aspect of family-history research doesn't seem to interest many RootsChatters.

It's better to send your gedcoms to friends so that they can examine them offline, using their favorite genealogy tool, and maybe pick out pieces of them for their own research, rather than transforming them into HTML stuff for a website. HTML websites with family trees in them are a positive bore, even if they've been built with user-friendliness in mind, and attractive to look at (which they usually aren't). Thanks to the excellent invention of the gedcom language, HTML websites with family trees in them are totally unnecesary.

William Skyvington

2
Australia Lookups completed / Re: NEW BDM INDEXES FOR NSW
« on: Sunday 16 October 05 08:53 BST (UK)  »
Reg,

Thank you for posting that great news.

So, the marriages of my grandparents and parents should be there.

 :)
And - who knows? - maybe I'll make my appearance there myself - birthwise, I mean - in the not-too-distant future.
 :)

Are you aware of any plans under way in NSW for something like the British FreeBMD thing? All my Braidwood research (see the thread I started on bushrangers) runs into a financial brick wall, because it would costs me a lot to obtain all the BMD stuff I need to sort out my Hickey ancestors. I cannot understand why the NSW BMD people don't drop their charges for family-history researchers, because we are rendering a heritage service when we publish our findings. To my way of thinking, the financial burden of this kind of research should be borne by NSW corporations and philanthropists...

William

3
Technical Help / Re: Spam
« on: Saturday 15 October 05 14:39 BST (UK)  »
Kerry, I fear you've got a bigger problem than "ordinary" spam. I don't know a lot about such things (because I've always worked in the luxurious environment of a Macintosh), but I have the impression that your machine is infected by so-called spyware.  I'm sure that lots of RootsChatters with PCs and Windows will rush in to give you advice. Maybe you should start another thread on this problem because, as I say, it's worse than mere spam, and it's a rather nasty phenomenon. Recently, a friend of mine started to get email that seemed to be coming from my son, but they don't know one another. I believe that I was, unwittingly, the common denominator between these two individuals, not because I actually sent them the infection (unthinkable, coming from a Macintosh), but because the virus thing was able to establish links through emails that both individuals received from me. 

Best of luck,
William

4
Technical Help / Re: Rootschat Free Webspace Problems
« on: Thursday 13 October 05 18:23 BST (UK)  »
Whatever the possible faults in your website (and I've found at least one), it would take more than make to make my sturdy Macintosh crash!

The weird fonts in your menu don't exist on my machine, and I would imagine that they could upset certain browsers.

Incidentally, what kind of tool did you use to build that site? I took a glance at the source code, and it appears to be rather top-heavy. After all, your site looks like very ordinary HTML stuff.

Another detail: I don't like reading green on green.

William

5
Scotland / Scottish students' songbook
« on: Thursday 13 October 05 13:43 BST (UK)  »
My ex-wife (who had an antiquarian bookshop in Brittany until she retired last year) has just given me a charming book:

My edition, 360 pages long and containing words and music of a couple of hundred songs, appears to date from the 1890s. The songs themselves are not particularly Scottish, but rather songs that would have been sung at that time by students in Scotland. For example, the collection starts with the inevitable Gaudeamus igitur, and it even contains the French Marseillaise.

I can't scan the entire contents, but maybe I could put at least the song titles in my webspace if there were nostalgic Scottish oldtimer students who wished to recall memories of musical evenings in Edinburgh pubs. And I would be happy to answer specific questions.

Nothing bawdy, of course. On the contrary, I was amused to find a 100% clean version of Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

My ex-wife seems to think that this is a rare edition. There's nothing Scottish in my genealogical preoccupations, but I once wrote a tourist guide book on Britain (in French, English and German editions) and, since then, friends have got into the habit of offering me old documents about Britain.

William

6
Technical Help / Re: Spam
« on: Thursday 13 October 05 11:31 BST (UK)  »
Hi Hackstaple,

When spam starts to reach a massive level, the only solution is to complain about the problem with your ISP (Internet service provider).

Like many people in France, I have an email account with the national service called Wanadoo. And I send them spam complaints periodically at the following email address:
<abuse at wanadoo dot france>
Incidentally, you might notice the way I've just written this address. It's understandable by human readers, but could not be picked up easily by a robot.

 ;) Now, there's another thing that might be playing a role in the fact that you are apparently a prime target for Internet pranksters and gangsters. They might be interpreting your delightful profile image as an imperative button. ;)

William

7
Australia Lookups completed / Re: Braidwood bushrangers
« on: Thursday 13 October 05 10:04 BST (UK)  »
Trish, your encouragement is perfectly appropriate. Sound advice. I must do that, because it's easy (through phone directories available on the Internet), receivers are free to ignore my letters if they're not interested, and I actually had an opportunity of proving quite recently that this method can work in certain circumstances. That's how I found out the exact location of the tavern, The Farmers Home, of my great-great-grandfather Charles Walker. I simply sent off a letter to a person who seemed, according to the phone directory, to be listed in the right vicinity. The results of that discovery appear in the downloadable chapter on my mother's people (see my website).

I'll keep you informed of any results (maybe through this thread, if it doesn't disappear).

Meanwhile, in a forthcoming posting, I'll relate briefly an unbelievable story (already noted in my website) based upon my research concerning the above-mentioned Charles Walker. To understand it, Australian readers might like to look up their school history books to brush up on the exploits of the Henty pioneers.

William

8
Australia Lookups completed / Re: Braidwood bushrangers
« on: Wednesday 12 October 05 16:00 BST (UK)  »
I forgot to say that, in my charts, the letters b, m and d mean born, married and died, and that a squiggle means "about". I notice, too, that Billy's third son died as a child.

I've often thought of sending off postcards to all the Hickey people listed in the phone directory around Braidwood, in an attempt to find cousins. But they might not appreciate the opening line, which is neither nice nor diplomatic: I'm wondering whether one of your ancestors happened to be a bandit...

9
Australia Lookups completed / Re: Braidwood bushrangers
« on: Wednesday 12 October 05 15:41 BST (UK)  »
O'Sullivan's title refers, of course, to bushrangers, not brushrangers! But my invention is nice... Bushrangers operated in the really wild outback country, whereas brushrangers did their dirty work in more civilized settings.

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