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Monday, September 12, 2011

My shiny new blog...

So, this will be the inaugural post to my newly minted blog... I suppose I'd better say something profound.......

Oh well, never mind; I'll just be me. :)

I have wanted to write a blog for some time now, especially when it comes to some of my thoughts on family history. It's just that life has been too busy for me to give it a go. After attending the BYU Conference on Family History & Genealogy in July though, I felt like I'd better get down to it. As mentioned above, it isn't that I necessarily have anything especially profound to share, but I'd like to be able to wax lyrical about both old and new topics in genealogy and occasionally the vicissitudes of life. One of the family history topics I'm fascinated with at the moment is cloud computing.

What does cloud computing have to do with genealogy? Well, as Josh Taylor shared with us at the conference, it could potentially have a LOT to do with it. The idea that you can not only store your scanned images/documents in a remote location (automatic offsite backup!), but that you can then access them from any device you happen to be using or, barring that, from any Internet connection is pretty appealing. I have taught classes for years on organizing your family history files and the combination of being able to digitize files and store them for anytime/anywhere retrieval just sounds like something out of a fairy tale!

As a result, I'm investigating... I downloaded DropBox today in order to check it out and so far I like what I see. I have it installed on my own Windows laptop and my husband's Mac desktop, and I also installed the DropBox app on my iPhone. Pretty slick! It also allows you the ability to share folders with others so that they can see your vacation photos, cute pics of your kids, or that extremely rare deed you just found in your great-grandmother's cedar chest after all these years. It has great potential and I'll be spending this week scanning and uploading some documents just to see how things go as far as storage and such. They give you 2GB for free, but you can get 50GB for $9.99/mo. if you need more space. This same idea extends to the iCloud recently announced by Apple. I'll be interested to see how that pans out...

Speaking of teaching classes, I'm going to be giving a seminar in Chimacum, WA to the Jefferson County Genealogical Society this coming Saturday, September 17 at 10:00 a.m. on Organizing Your Family History to Stay Sane. If you have an interest, drop in!

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on starting your genealogy blog. I'm a huge fan of Dropbox. I love that it keeps all my research safe from a computer disaster and that I can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. You can get more space for free by referring people. Not only do you get a bump in storage space, but the person you referred does to so it's a win-win.

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