Episode 137 - Food and Family History, and NetVibes Update

Published July 22, 2012

In this episode author Gena Philibert Ortega and I talk about her new book From the Family Kitchen: Discover your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes. Who doesn’t love yummy home cooking? There is a lot to be learned about our ancestors, and in particular those elusive female ancestors, through a study of our culinary history. 

 

We’ll be talking about the invaluable genealogical records that are so often over looked, ways that you can really dig in to your fabulous food family history, and I’m even going to share a recipe and utensil that our grandmother’s use and that you can still use today to make super scrumptious treats for your family. (Video coming to the Genealogy Gems YouTube channel!)

 

 

NEWS:

Speaking of grandmas, I finally found my awesome grandma in California in the 1940 census and it was a snap because the California index along with several other states on July 13, 2012 by Ancestry.  Grandma and Grandpa were just 3 months away from moving in to their first real home which they were in the process of having built, and from the birth of their first child, my mom. 

 

FamilySearch

FamilySearch continues to add records to the free familysearch.org website. They just announced that they have added the 1881 and 1891 Scotland Census Indexes and Millions More records for Brazil, China, Ecuador, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Other Countries.

 

Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems website:

We’ve got an entirely new website for you, and thanks again to all of you who have been writing in. I know we’ve had some hiccups along the way getting the Premium feed switched over, but that’s up and running now, and let me remind you, Premium Members are now getting all 88 Premium Episodes published to date.

 

In the past you would get the most recent 6 episodes and then a new one each month. But now, you have a wealth of episodes available to you.  I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be able to make all of the content available to you Premium Members, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but the old site just couldn’t handle it.

 

Premium Membership is now a HUGE value – same price, at least for now - $29.95 gets you one whole year’s access to all of those episodes.

 

Donna wrote:

“My question is how do I access the early premium episodes, I always listen to Genealogy Gems / Premium via iTunes?”

 

Lisa’s Answer: Sign in to your premium membership. From the menu go to Premium Episodes and there you will find instructions for updating your premium podcast feed.  It’s important to delete your current premium feed in iTunes first and add the new feed. The need feed will download all the episodes for you and then bring you the new ones as they are published.

 

Mike wrote in to say: “The new website looks great.  Having recently redesigned one at work, I know how much time it can take.  I particularly appreciate the back catalog of premium podcasts and have started listening to them.  And I hope that your video on hard drive organization will finally motivate me to get electronically organized. Keep up the good work!”

 

Lisa’s Answer: Thank you very much Mike I really appreciate it!

 

I am really tickledthat the new site was Randy Seaver’s Tuesday Tips on July 10, 2012 on his wonderful Genea-Musings blog which you will find at www.geneamusings.com

 

Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems website his Tuesday's Tip - Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems Website

Thank you Randy!

 

Life After iGoogle Follow up

In Genealogy Gems podcast episode #136 I gave you a neat solution to the demise of iGoogle. As you know Google has announced it will be discontinuing iGoogle which is the way you can customize the Google homepage just for you, and here on the podcast we’ve talked many times about how to customize it specifically for genealogy research. Now while it won’t go away until later in 2013, there’s no time like the present to make a switch and Netvibes.com is a great alternative. So in our last episode I walked you through a special process for converting your tabs and your RSS feed gadgets to a new free Netvibes account to get you started in the transition.  And I also published a video at the Genealogy Gems YouTube channel to show it to you step by step.

 

VIDEO:  Life After iGoogle – How to Convert Your Genealogy Homepage to Netvibes

 

 I’ve heard from many of you that you love the Netvibes solution:

 

Nanby said: “Thanks for saving our iGoogle pages. I am...