Link love, Feb. 15 edition

I guess this is the week in which you’re officially living under a rock if you still don’t know that the U.S. version of  Who Do You Think You Are is premiering on March 5. Yesterday, Lisa Louise Cook unveiled her  Genealogy Gems podcast interview of  actress and series subject Lisa Kudrow, which can tide you over until the show gets here.

In all the Who-pla, please don’t lose track of Faces of America, PBS’ excellent series with Henry Louis Gates. Episode Two is coming up on  Wednesday, Feb. 17. You can search for local broadcast times at the show website.

More link love:

Database digging: Black History Month is a useful time to consider resources of interest in African-American genealogy, such as a recently launched database of 83,000 individual slave names in the Digital Library on American Slavery at the University of North Carolina/Greensboro. UNCG has more on the database and its contents here.

On a completely different note, I was tickled by this news item from the Newberry Library, in which expert knowledge and deft database searches unearthed the genealogy of an accordion. You never know when genealogy will come in handy.

Gadget Corner: I’m always a sucker for online mapping tools, and a poster on the NY-Irish genealogy list spotlighted a nice one this week. Map viewer Virtual Turnpike incorporates Google maps and area photos from Panoramio and Picaso. The site is cleanly designed, easy to use and read, with generously scaled type and graphics. Fun and potentially informative in mapping ancestral locations.

Event Corner: If you’ll be in Washington, D.C. in the spring, it’s never too early to start planning for a visit on April 14-15 to the Sixth Annual Genealogy Fair at the National Archives and Records Administration’s headquarters. At NARA’s main site they have pictures from last year’s event, which looks as if it was a good time indeed.

Closer to home (for me, anyway), I was wondering when the next NARA orientation was coming at the New York City Northeast Region headquarters. Turns out it’s Tuesday, Feb. 16 from 1:30 to 4:30 PM. According to program notes, it includes “an overview of some of the lesser known genealogically pertinent holdings of the Archives.” NARA staff and members of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society will be on hand to assist with research questions.  Here is more information on this and  other New York City area genealogy events in February and March.

Now I’m off to set my DVR and put on my podcast headphones … see you later!

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