A Very Cool Site

Someone, I wish I could remember who (may have been a mailing list post), sent me an email about one of those satellite map websites that I think is among the best I've seen yet. It's called Windows Live Local. Registration is free. Type in an address and you get a satellite view of the address. You can often choose between "Road" view, where it shows you the neighborhood surrounding the address you typed in; "Aerial" view, which gives you an over head shot of the area; and "Bird's Eye" view, which gives you overhead, close-up views of the address you typed. You can then use the scroll button on the mouse to zoom in or zoom out. You can then add pushpins to show important addresses for your own use.

I've spent about an hour a day this week on this site, exploring my childhood neighborhood, my grandparents' house (or what used to be a house they lived in), and the city I grew up in itself. It was rather fun, I admit, to see what the modern-day neighborhood looks like (didn't change a whole lot in the past 30 years, actually, other than some additions to houses).

Today I entered in the addresses I have for some of my ancestors in Pittston, Luzerne County, PA and Nanticoke, Luzerne County, PA. The Bird's Eye view wasn't available, but the aerial was.

Speaking of Luzerne County PA, which includes Wilkes-Barre, I hope anyone there reading this came through the flooding without a scratch.

The newest descendent of Doyle/McHugh

Iseaha, newly christened Izzie, is a Pomeranian/Cocker Spaniel mix, about one year old. I just took him home from the Rescue home. He's so cute! I can't wait until he settles in enough for me to give him a bath, though. Which shouldn't be too long. I've had him home all of 25 minutes and he's found his way to the food already. When I went to see him he was playing in a big bowl of water, so he's not afraid of that! We'll see how it goes. He is not leash trained, and may not be house trained. We'll soon see! You can kind of see the leash on the floor in front of him. I was told it's easiest to leave the leash on him for a while so he gets used to it.


You can check out Izzie's Blog HERE

Networking Opportunity

Rootsweb offers free webpages to genealogy researchers to help them further their research. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I put a lot of stock in the value of networking. This very blog has helped cousins find me, AOL chats have helped me learn how to do this research and helped me further my goals, and genealogy message boards have increased my potential contacts.

There is a site offered through the rootsweb freepages that I strongly recommend. The Genealogy Lookup Forum is a web-based genealogy look up site. It also has chat rooms. They have general genealogy chats nightly, and scheduled chats as well. I encourage any researcher to take advantage of this resource to increase their networking capabilities and further their research. You do need to register to enter the chat rooms, but it's free and easy (just be sure to allow pop-ups for the registration process only).

Two chats I'd like to emphasize are (1) GENTREK, hosted by GLF-HOST Dae and GLF-HOST Jayne. This chat starts off interactive as chatters catch up with each other and pose questions about their research. Then there is a structured presentation on a specified topic of interest, and then a follow up discussion. Dae and Jayne really know their stuff, so please come over and have a look-see. GENTREK is offered on AOL at 9:00 p.m. MONDAYS in the Genealogy Chat room, and on the Web at 10:00 p.m. on THURSDAYS here.

The other chat is Your Ancestors in Pictures, hosted by GLF-OMcHODOY. Yes, that's me. This chat will be held on TUESDAYS at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time at the Genealogy Lookup Forum. This is the same chat that I used to host on AOL. It is an interactive chat where we share our trials, tribulations, successes, and questions about anything relating to the use of pictures in our research. We touch on topics such as equipment to buy, how to use the equipment, identifying ancestors in photos, scrapbooking, and other photo-related topics. Please come join us.

Well, DUH!

I really wish I could afford to work on my genealogy full time. Perhaps if I did I wouldn't forget about information I had!

I finally gave up on AOL and got a cable internet connection. I've spent most of today setting it up. I made the mistake of using the cable program's utility to transfer my saved emails from AOL to comcast. It sure sounded like a good program. And it is. It is so good that it managed to find over 1100 emails from my genealogy email alone! I have no idea where it found them, as I do not have AOL set up to save all my emails; I have to manually save them. And I promise you, I probably have 100 emails at most saved. So the utility must have found stuff in cyberspace that I figured was long gone! Anyway, instead of trying to wade through 1100 emails to figure out which ones to save, I deleted them all from the comcast email and went back to my saved mail from AOL. Many of these are too old and won't forward any longer so I had to copy the text and then send to my new email. Tedious, but as it turns out, I'm glad I ended up having to do that.

Do you remember these pictures? Your'e probably getting tired of them! (Hey, at least they are really cool pictures). The question was what storefront this was that had their surname, HODICK, on it. I'd followed up not long ago with a post after talking to my cousin who said that my great-grandfather Edward HODICK had owned a bar.

Well, one of the emails I had saved was one from the president of a Historical Society in Luzerne County,PA, where Nanticoke is, and where my grandmother and great-aunts grew up. Her emails informed me that many areas of Nanticoke had streets that were lined with storefronts, and that often there was a residence right next to a business with one of these store fronts.

Well, another thing in the emails from this same Historical Society president that I reviewed today was the listing for this place of business. I totally forgot I had it! The listing showed the business to be the Edward Hodick Hotel. It was located at the corner of Market Street and Union in Nanticoke.

This email was dated from February of this year. I've had the answer all along and never even knew it. This is what I mean when I say I wish I was able to do this full-time. It's so hard to remember things when you can only research sporadically.

Okay, I'm going away from the keyboard now to create a genealogical "To-Do" list so that I can at least record things that I need to follow up on!