Online Archive of Digitized Genealogical Books

So, I am still on the e-mail list for the family history department at BYU and I get e-mails from them every once in a while, usually job offers for genealogy majors. But today I got an e-mail telling about the progress that has been made in digitizing the genealogy books in the collection from the Family History Library in Salt Lake, along with several other genealogical collections. The link to the database is, www.lib.byu.edu/fhc, if you’re interested in taking a look. I haven’t had a chance yet to see if I could find any new info about my ancestors in this archive, but I did type my name into the “author” field real quick, just to see if anything would turn up. It was fun to see the paper that I wrote about my great grandmother, Nettie Dorothy Graham Spohr, and her ancestors while I was studying genealogy at BYU – I had given a copy of my final paper to the FHL in Salt Lake when I finished it, so I knew they had it in their library, but it was fun to see that it has been totally digitized – photos, genealogical charts, maps, and all, so that it can be easily shared with any interested relatives. Kind of fun. (If you are one of my relatives and are interested in looking at that paper on Nettie, here is the link).

What I've Been Working On

So, I’ve been busy the last few days with a new project. They handed around a sign-up sheet in church a couple weeks ago with lists of possible Relief Society Enrichment activity ideas, and everyone was supposed to mark which activities they would be interested in participating in, and if they would be able to teach about any of the topics. One of the activities listed was “How to Make a Blog,” and I marked that I would be able to teach people how to do that. So, I got a call the other day from Dorene Lynch, a sister in the Relief Society presidency, asking me if I would make a Relief Society blog for our ward. She came over a couple days ago with some ideas of what she wanted included, and we got the blog all set up. It was pretty basic and plain-looking in the beginning, and I wanted to make it look nice. So I went online and spent quite a while searching for a template that would add a nice background and design to the new blog. I found nothing that I thought looked nice and was appropriate for a Relief Society blog. So then I decided to teach myself how to make my own background by using one of the basic templates that blogspot provides for you (I love that searching on Google will almost always help you figure out what you want to learn to do on the computer). So, after messing around with the HTML code for the blog template for a while, I finally figured out how to change the background image. Then I spent another couple hours yesterday (during the boys’ nap time) designing a header for the blog. I have to say I was pretty pleased with how it all turned out. Last night and this morning I added lots of links and made a slideshow from photos that that sister from the Relief Society presidency e-mailed me for the blog, and I figured out how to add a calendar, so it’s pretty much up and running now. So, that’s what I’ve been working on the last few days (I promise, I will get the rest of the San Diego pictures and some fun Halloween pictures of the kids posted eventually).

http://www.wv4th.blogspot.com/