Hacking of Sarah Palin's Email Sends a Warning to Genealogists

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Whatever your political views, the recent hacking of Sarah Palin's email is a timely reminder to genealogists to be wary of publishing potentially damaging family information online

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Technical Glitches

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My computer has been going through a bit of a torrid time over the last couple of weeks. This concluded with a complete reformat of the hard drive, so I have been busy recovering files and reloading software rather than keeping the blog up to date. Now that everything is back to normal I'm hoping to get caught up on my family history detective work.
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Online maps eroding usefulness of medium for genealogy

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Genealogical research requires a degree of peripheral vision when reviewing sources and evidence. If specific, focused searches fail you need the ability to take in a wider view. This is rarely more true than when using maps to find important locations and evidence.

This recent article from the BBC describes how the trend for using internet based maps to find specific locations is actually harming the general usefulness of the medium. These tools are great if you are simply looking for an address but by missing out other local landmarks a genealogist may miss important clues in their research.

For example, you might find the location of house a relative lived in using Google Maps but you would not see that there is a church in the same street where there may be some additional information such as marriage, baptism or death records.
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