Wiki Loves Monuments USA: A Photo Contest

    If you've logged into Wikipedia recently, you might have seen the banner across the top of the page announcing the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 Contest. I assume that many other genealogists are like me and interested in history, so this contest is probably of interest to the geneabloggers community.

     The general gist of the contest is to upload a photo of a location on the National Register of Historic Places List. By doing this, you will be adding your photo into a database of freely licensed images of our nation's historic places. There aren't too many rules to the contest, but you can read them here.

     Having visited a number of locations on this list, I already had some eligible photos on my computer. For example, the photo below of the John Fox House in Lexington, SC.  When I uploaded the photo, only one other location in Lexington County had a photo.  Now most of the locations have a photo. It looks like the contest is accomplishing its mission!

 

A Day At The Cemetery (in photos)

     Atlanta's Historic Oakland Cemetery is having a contest using Instagram. It's a simple enough contest: take photos during September using Instagram and tag them with #OCATL. The photos should: "be taken of and inside Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, GA. Photographs should highlight distinctive elements that differentiate and identify Oakland Cemetery, featuring outstanding aspects of the art and architecture, gardens and landscape, and wildlife." Ten photos will be chosen and the winners will receive tickets to the 2012 Capturing the Spirit Halloween Tours.

     I visited Oakland today and here are my photos. My favorites are the one of the gate, the yellow flower and the gazebo.  You can click through to see larger versions of the smaller photos.

Winner of the Ancestry.com Genealogy Kit

     Last Monday I announced a contest to win an Ancestry.com Genealogy Kit, consisting of a 6 month US Deluxe Membership and a copy of Family Tree Maker.  I received seven entries and chose the winner by picking a random number (random.org).

      The winner is comment number 6 from missham. Congratulations! Please contact me within 3 days at vrc84@yahoo.com to claim your prize. Please send your name, address, phone number and whether you need the Mac or PC version of the software.

Enter to Win an Ancestry.com Genealogy Kit

     Thanks to Ancestry.com, I have been given the chance to run a contest for my blog readers. A lucky winner will receive an Ancestry.com Genealogy Kit, consisting of a 6 month US Deluxe Membership to Ancestry.com and a copy of FTM 2012 for either Mac or PC  These two prizes combined allow genealogists to research and create a family tree on their desktop and simultaneously maintain that same family tree online at Ancestry.com.

     All you need to do is leave a comment, explaining what you hope to discover about your family history if you win the prize.  The deadline for entering the contest is Sunday, July 22nd at 11:59 pm est. The winner will be announced within 24 hours of that time.

     I encourage everyone to please share a link to this contest with their friends and on any social media sites.

Notice: I am a paying Ancestry.com subscriber. The option to run this contest was given to those designated as "Ancestry Aces" via email. In return for running this contest I will receive a copy of FTM for myself. Contest is not open to my relatives.

Going to the Atlanta Family History Expo?

     Right now, the California Family History Expo is under way. I'm sure everyone over on the West Coast is having tons of fun. Over here in the East, we have only a little more than a month until the Atlanta Family History Expo (Duluth, GA) on November 12-13th. As I previously wrote, I will be attending this expo. In fact, I have been invited to attend as a Blogger of Honor, which is very exciting. I've never attended a genealogy event before, which makes this event even more exciting for me. 


     Also, thanks to the folks at Family History Expos, I have two free tickets to give away for the Atlanta Expo! I would like to encourage everyone who is interested in genealogy, from the thinking-about-getting-started to the professional to attend.  Because of this, I'm going to make this very simple.


     Details: To enter to win these tickets, simply post a comment to this blog post by October 18th at 11:59 PM EST.  Please submit only one entry per person. Please make sure that your comment consists of coherent, complete sentences so that I know you're not a spam-bot. I will draw a winner at random, using a random number generator. I plan to announce the winner on October 19th, so please check back to see if you won and for more information on claiming your tickets.