RSS Feed Strangeness

    If you subscribe to this blog via a RSS Feed, such as Google Reader, you may have had a large number of strange posts come up. It looks like someone hacked the feed and is linking "blank" posts to another blog. I strongly encourage you NOT to click on these posts - I don't know what they'll lead you to. My blog itself is fine, but the feed has been taken over. I'm looking into having the problem fixed and apologize for the problem.


     Update: From reading Good Help Forums, I'm not the only one this happened to. It looks like some wires might have gotten crossed. It looks like the problem might be fixed, as my RSS feed is once again showing my own posts.


     2nd Update: Blogger has acknowledged the problem and reports that the issue should be resolved:

More Confusion with FamilySearch Indexing

A little while ago I wrote a post about some issues I was having with FamilySearch Indexing. Most of those issues seems to have been fixed. Today, however, I came across a new issue.

I finished indexing a batch of census images and wanted to try something new. When picking a new batch to index, I generally sort by language and pick from the english projects. I decided to try South Africa, Cape Province - Church Records 1660-1970. They were listed as English, Advanced. Much to my surprise however, the record I was presented with was in Dutch!

I thought that I must have missed something when I selected the record - but no. I went back to the selection screen and this collection is listed as english. But if I check the FamilySearch Indexing website, the project details state that the records are in Afrikaans, Dutch and English. Hmmm... now why couldn't they list this information in the indexing program?

I have absolutely no knowledge of Dutch, but it seems to be very much like German. I was able to guess at the meanings of the words, but in the end decided to find a translator. Google's translator is very good. It translated what I typed as I typed and the results were grammatically correct.

I hope that FamilySearch Indexing will correct this error. If they don't, they may find that a lot of batches may be returned. However, having been able to successfully complete this Dutch record, I may try my hand at other foreign language documents.

Image Oddities

I've been browsing through Ancestry.com's new City Directory listings (yes browsing only - the search doesn't seem to find folks half the time) and have found some image oddities. Check out the screenshot below:

See they gray spots and textured areas? It can make it just about impossible to read some of the images on this page. But what if you ancestors are on this page? Never fear intrepid researchers! Just click to save the image to your computer and...

The new image is perfect! I'm not sure what's causing the error in the original image, but this is an easy way to get around the problem.