I have been writing and scheduling all of my post through a great plug-in called WordPress Editorial Calendar.  The calendar can be set to view anywhere from a week to a whole month.  This makes it great to see how many posts you have planned, any series or memes you want to participate in, and generally the activity of your blog.

You can draft a post by adding a title on a date.  You have the option to Edit it fully or Quick Edit the post.  Once the post is written, you schedule it for a date and time.  One nice thing about this plug-in is that if you decide you aren’t ready for something to be published, you can just drag and drop the post title to another date.

This plug-in has been a big help in writing and staying on schedule with this blog.

Tech Tuesday – WordPress Editorial Calendar is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Have you been eyeing that genealogy book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble?  Do you like to have a little extra in the PayPal account?  Then let me introduce my method of earning free gift cards to keep me in the Nook Books.  Meet Swag Bucks.  Swag Bucks is a search engine that rewards you.  When you sign up for a free Swag Bucks account and start using their search engine you win random Swag Bucks rewards.  And on Friday, you can earn Mega Swag Bucks which are random awards of 100-1000 SB.  Just so you know, a $5 gift card to Amazon is 450 Swag Bucks.

I have been using Swag Bucks for a few years.  I have certain blogs and news sites that I visit everyday and I use the Swag Bucks search engine via their toolbar to get to them.  I earn, just from searching for my favorites, an average of 10 Swagbucks per day.  I easily earn 1 $5 gift card from Amazon every month.  The Swag Bucks site has more ways of earning, including Groupon purchases and an online portal to online shopping.  Personally, I tend to use only the search engine and the online polls (when I remember).

If you would like to check it out and perhaps sign up, please use either the ad button to the right or follow this link to swagbucks.  This is a referral through my account and it will help us both earn Swag!  Thanks!

It’s Mega Swagbucks Friday! is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Prompt:  Free Offline Genealogy Tools:  For which free offline genealogy tools are you most grateful?  How did you find this tool and how has it benefitted your genealogy?  Describe to others how to access this tool and spread the genealogy love.

My favorite offline tool for genealogy would have to be local libraries.  Not just your county’s public library, but local college, historical society, and possibly state resources depending upon where you live. 

I have been visiting our local public library branch recently and checked out just their genealogy section (929 in the Dewey Decimal system).  They not only had older community histories, I came across a wonderful book from the North Carolina Daughters of the American Revolution published in the 1920′s.  I got 2 leads on a known ancestor and a possible brother I knew nothing about.  They also described some of the battles each Company fought in.  My local society is taking a bus trip to the National Archives in March, and now, I plan on taking my first trip there.  If the DAR has those records, it stands to reason the Archives will also.  Our local library also has reciprocal agreements with public libraries from adjoining counties, so this greatly increases the free resources that I have access too.

I live in Henrico County, VA, the suburbs of Richmond.  We have a few local universities I could take advantage of like Virginia Commonwealth, the University of Richmond, and our local community college J.Sargaent Reynolds.  They have great records on newspaper and other print media.

We also have, since this is Virginia’s capital city, the state Historical Society and the Library of Virginia.  The Historical Society of Virginia has a great library with wi-fi.  Their focus is more on documenting personal and historical stories of the people of Virginia.  The Library of Virginia provides genealogical resources along with the personal and historical stories. They focus on saving the records bureaucrats create.  Now, it is like I died and went to genealogical heaven when I go to the LofVA.  They have a great deal of information just waiting for you to discover. I have a 10th great-grandfather Elkins whose handwritten will is in the archives.  And I have touched it and read it.  For your first visit do not be afraid to ask questions and remember to get your parking ticket validated.  The librarians are very helpful and seem to throroughly enjoy their work.

Check out the libraries in your area, and do not overlook the ones you would not normally visit.  Enjoy the search, do not be afraid to ask questions, and take notes.  But most of all, have fun!

Abundant Genealogy – wk 4 is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Updating the Surname page on Saturday is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

For Tech Tuesday, I am going to review a wonderful family tree and report generator for wordpress.  It is called Rootspersona, and I love it.  I had been looking for an easy to use GEDCOM to family tree generator.  The ease of use of this one makes it great.

After you install the plugin, you will find Rootspersona on both the Tools and Settings buttons in the Dashboard.  The Tools menu for Rootspersona is the interface at which you upload your GEDCOM, add uploaded persons, upload missing evidence pages, and so on.  It is what runs in the background of the program.  The Settings menu is where you go to set up privacy settings and customize the generated report styles.

When you visit the “home” page for rootspersona, they have very good support.  The developer of the plugin follows the threads on comments closely and does his best to answer any concern.  When I first installed the plugin, I had my tech savvy husband help me and he found the information on some of the coding to be easily explained enough he could teach me very, very basic programming explanations from it.  Alas, programming logic escapes me, but I at least found I understood the very basic command lines.

Currently, on my header under the Rootspersona Tree page, I only have my 4 great-grandfathers listed.  This was the way I decided to proceed, but you have the option of having everyone in your tree on that page.  I will slowly add people as I feature them on the blog.

If you are looking for a good Family Tree plugin for your blog, I hope you consider this plug in.

Tech Tuesday – Rootspersona WordPress Plugin is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Prompt:  Which free online genealogy tools are you most thankful for?  How has it helped your family history experience?

The Family Search site from the LDS is a great online tool, that is free, and they now offer the images also.  However, I do not think I am most thankful for that.

I think what I am most thankful is the myriad of information on everything that I get from fellow researchers via their blogs, twitter, and facebook.  Everything from organizational ideas to upcoming events, you can find it all.  I have encountered researchers who have overcome some of the same “brick walls” I find myself facing.  I can learn from their experience.  I see people as organizationally challenged as I am, and I see how they deal with it.  Hey, wasn’t there an event in Podunk County in anystate?  I can certainly find out.  And then find either a podcast, report, or synopsis somewhere on the web.

With the online social tools, all can be encouraged and enlightened.  Support from fellow researchers is amazing, and one twitter plea can bring back many responses.  I think I am most thankful for the human knowledge and kindness that you find through the online genealogical community.

Abundant Genealogy – wk3 is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Our wonderful printer

I love this project because it is teaching me how to use our new printer – the HP Officejet 6500A plus- more efficently.  The printer has apps that can connect it to websites and google.  I am a sucker for planner pages, and one of the apps lets you print out various blank planner pages.  It faxes, copies, and scans from both flatbed and by scrolling papers through (so you can load multiple pages in a pile and tell it to scan and they all become one document).  I have been scanning each photo on the flatbed and importing it into Google’s Picasa.  There, I crop the photo and caption it.

We had a dinosaur scanner for a long time, and the steps to get it to scan and save always intimidated me.  I find with this scanner it is as close to point and click as you can get.  The ease of use compared to what I was had used gives me much more confidence with scanning projects.  I have already decided to  scan in my Mom’s family pictures.  I am also going to be scanning in all of my old notes.  Any one have any recommendations on OCR programs?

This printer has a few other features that we LOVE! It can be hard-wired or wi-fi.   We can print to it from our i-phone while on our wi-fi network.  And…we can e-mail the printer to print.  To use the e-mail feature you have to set up an HP print account through their website.  We don’t use the e-mail feature much and I do not give out the address.  I love my neice and nephews, but I don’t want multitudes of their pictures spitting out of the printer every day.

There is only one thing that I would change about the printer, and that is its ability to scan larger documents.  But, I am not so worried.  For the oversize copies of the deeds that I have right now, I am planning on going to Kinko’s and scanning them there straight to a USB drive.  Hopefully they have the ability to do that.

Happy scanning!

Tech Tuesday – Our HP All-in-One printer is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Hands down, my laptop is my favorite and most appreciated paid genealogy tool.  I remember the first few years of pursuing my genealogy research and what a hot mess that was!  I am not, by nature, a highly organized person.  I have gotten better over the years, but even today, after tracking the activities of 4 kids (everything from Robotics to sports to scouts)  I still chase down paper.  True confession, only since the advent of the iCloud have I kept my electronic calendar updated.

The laptop changed everything for family genealogists.  Even when you only had very basic programs and Compuserve was your internet, suddenly you had a way of keeping everything together and easily accessible.  Now, with the ease of using scanners and smart phones, you could get away with never copying to paper another document.  All documents and sources can be inserted into your database, associated with the right person in your tree, uploaded, downloaded, rearranged, without you lifting a finger.  They are zipped into GEDCOM’s and shared.  I could never keep anything properly arraranged and spent alot of time re-researching.  I kept all of the Logs, Family Group Sheets, all of it, but still couldn’t get it together.  This is where my laptop saved me by giving me fully-portable genealogy.

Prior to my laptop, I had a regular desktop.  I used a desktop for genealogy for many years.  I waited patiently for the cost of laptops to come down, knowing I really wanted one for my research.  I made the leap about 5 years ago.  I would be willing, at this time, to keep a desktop at home for certain things I did not think of in my lust for a laptop.  Like Quicken and other records I keep stored in the hard drive.

I am laptop dependent now.  Here I am using it for blogging, online research, collecting what I scanned, and keeping it all together for me in RootsMagic. I use it for calendaring, home organization, family records (current ones) and correspondence, along with a million other things.  It is true Laptop Love.

Abundant Genealogy – Wk 2- Laptop Love is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012

Also, please note the surname page and the rootsPersona tree page.  I am trying out a new plug-in for family tree generation from a GEDCOM.  So, enjoy the site and leave a comment.  Follow me on twitter and RSS.  Subscribe to the site.  And let me know if my ancestors are also yours.  Consider this post an open thread for the first of the year!

Jumping back into the Fray (Open Thread) is a post from: Briley Genealogy copyright 2012