Dueling DVRs

We switched from cable to Verizon's FIOS for our Internet and TV services back in September. Since FIOS was delivered with its own DVR, we put our Tivo in mothballs and checked out the new technology. So far, we've been disappointed with the FIOS DVR and the service behind it. It pales in comparison to Tivo in so many ways. Here's a partial list of Tivo's qualities and FIOS DVR's shortcomings:

• Tivo is more flexible in letting you move around within a show. It allows you to jump through a recording in 15 minute increments or all the way to the end or the beginning using a fast forward or rewind jump feature. It has a smart slow motion feature that FIOS doesn't seem to have. FIOS cannot easily put you 43 minutes into an hour long show.
• Tivo has extreme details about the current show -- episode number, episode title, date of first broadcast, stars, special guests, genre, detailed summary, and a list of shows you might like if you like this show. FIOS seems to be adding features to its summary, but it has a long way to go to compete with Tivo's guide.
• The Verizon salesman bragged about the signal quality, which would be excellent due to the fiber optic delivery system. He'll have to drop by sometime to see how many times per show I lose segments of video and audio -- whole words are often dropped and little squares of video go black or flicker.
• Shows sometimes record for 59 minutes, without explanation, and we lose the exciting conclusion of an episode. Sylar was just about to toss a chair through the glass in Chapter Twelve of the latest Heroes series when FIOS decided to stop recording. Argh!
• If someone skips a planned recording or deletes a show, Tivo leaves forensic clues so you can determine the culprit and poison his/her broccoli at dinner. FIOS leaves ne'er a breadcrumb for you to follow. If your show isn't on the list of new shows, it's simply not there. No explanations. It is certainly a simple lifestyle, maybe even peaceful if you can cope with that sort of thing.
• Once in a while the FIOS set box stops showing the time, even though I've opted for the time instead of the channel to appear there. To get FIOS to show the time again, I have to opt for channel to appear then go through the motions to select time to appear. I do that about once a week.
• The movies in Pay Per View are the lamest ever. I won't test your patience (or your taste) with a list.
• The long list of channels is more a burden than a resource. We have tons of channels that are not in use yet. And lots of sports channels, foreign language channels, HBO and Showtime and other premium subscription channels, none of which I receive. I've not discovered a favorite channels feature yet. Fast forwarding through the channels is a hyperdrive experience that leaves you without your bearings.

I had to put the Tivo on the second tv set upstairs. My wife and daughter are disgusted with the FIOS DVR and prefer the features on the Tivo, so they go upstairs to watch tv. I'm all alone because of you, FIOS!

We spent $65 at Best Buy buying a special antenna for my wife's laptop downstairs because the Verizon wireless router is so much weaker than our old Linksys wireless router. My daughter goes to a friend's house to check her email rather than struggle with her laptop, which is so slow now. Maybe FIOS has a thing for laptops? My desktop computer is fast and furious, but it is hooked up with a wire directly to the modem.

The benefit of FIOS is that we get home phone service, Internet, and TV (replaced cable) for a lot less money. We'll see if FIOS will be in our household's future when the contract is up.

All Supermarkets Are Local

Erie, Pennsylvania has a section of town dedicated to the big-box stores -- places like Staples, Lowe's, Target, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Bob Evans Restaurant, TGI Fridays, and the Tinseltown multiplex movie house. All of them seem to be packed into one place, known locally as Upper Peach.

I'm not sure Erie is all that different in that regard from the other towns along I-80 that I used to pass when I was making regular runs across Pennsylvania while I was at Mercyhurst College on sabbatical for a couple of years. Each town has a clump of those familiar, national stores no matter where you go.

Not so with supermarkets in the United States. Every region I've lived in seems to have its own chain of grocery stores. They're pretty much the same, I guess, but you need a new member card and have to get the feel of the place. Where are the fruit juices? Where do they keep the Shake and Bake anyway? I shopped Quality Markets while in Erie. My brother-in-law lives near a Giant Eagle supermarket in Pittsburgh. Eons ago, my wife and I shopped at Alpha Beta in Monterey, California while I was in school there. Now I shop at Stop and Shop in Aberdeen, New Jersey. Some groceries go out of business, like the Foodtown in downtown Matawan, NJ, but most seem to eke by despite the big-box stores stealing their customers.

We stopped and chatted with the grocery clerk at A&P tonight. Named for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, A&P is closer to home than the other stores in my neighborhood but its freshness pledge is more myth than practice. The clerk thought fondly about the Piggly Wiggly stores she remembered from her days in the South. My wife, who heard rumors of price gouging while volunteering during Gustav and Ike last summer, had less fond memories of that chain.

The local grocery stores still have an edge with customers, I believe. Ultimately, it's like they say of politics: All supermarkets are local. I'm not sure I ever saved any money at the club stores anyway. They offer plenty of savings through bulk sales, but they drain your wallet by luring you into buying a big screen tv or big ticket jewelry items when all you are trying to do is pick up some eggs and milk. "That'll be $800, please." Kah-ching!

Bubble Tea

My daughter has become a fan of bubble tea over the past year. It's some concoction of tea with tapioca balls floating around the bottom, best I can tell. "It's a fad!" I told her tonight, flat out, but it's apparently the chic thing to do. I'm not convinced.

Anyway, she complained today that she and her friend went looking for Joy Bubble Tea at Menlo Park Mall, but they couldn't find it. While we found a website for the shop, the mall no longer lists it as a vendor.

We tried looking for local bubble tea shops using a zip code and keyword search in MapQuest, but it only found shops with Bubble Tea in the title. My daughter suggested I try Google. "There must be a bubble tea location search engine out there somewhere," she said. I was incredulous. But we soon found Bobafind.com, which allowed us to search for bubble tea shops in NJ. She has a new lease on life.

For those of you who read my recent posting on meticulous sourcing in genealogy, you will want to read Ancestry.com's response. They explain how alternate forms of names can be sourced using their site. It's apparently a bit cumbersome so they plan to work on the mechanism to make sourcing even easier.

My wife and daughter gave me an iPod for Christmas this year. I've got the iPod Classic 6th generation. As one might expect, Wikipedia has articles on the full range of iPods. Wiki even has each of the generations described, including a summary of the benefits and shortcomings of each iteration. I'm not sure it is a good thing for Wikipedia to become Consumer Reports, but maybe it is an inevitable detail that Wikipedians will want to include. In twenty years, maybe no one will care what the difference was between the 5th and 6th generations of my iPod? I hope people have better things on their minds.

Meticulous Sourcing

I'm of mixed opinions about the sourcing capabilities and overall reliability of submissions to Ancestry.com's Personal Tree. On one hand, an owner can link directly between entries in his/her tree and Ancestry.com sources that support the data in the tree, like census images, military records, or passenger ship manifests. On the other hand, unless I'm mistaken, the system only allows the owner to present one form of a name or date when various sources suggest alternate possibilities.

Let me just say that I am quite pleased with the Carr/King/Rodriguez Family Tree that I found at Ancestry.com But it has a few sourcing problems, which I will use to illustrate my issues with Personal Tree. I don't mean to pick on the poor tree. It's fine. I must also say that some of these links will be by subscription only. Sorry for any inconvenience. (That said, I encourage you to get a subscription to Ancestry.com.)

The tree in question has a listing for Edward Bane Carr born in 1855. If you opt to View details, the tree shows two quills which, when clicked, each indicate that the full name or exact date of birth is sourced to five different censuses. To my mind, this sourcing ought to indicate that the full name and exact dob were derived from these census records, which is not the case. In actuality, the data were found on Edward's gravestone. The census records were routinely less precise, showing a middle initial here and there, various ages, and maybe a month and year of birth.

Seems to me that Ancestry.com doesn't leave a tree owner any alternatives. Ancestry.com encourages the tree owner to pick the best option to display -- best form of a name, best date and place of birth or marriage or death -- and then connect all sourcing to each, whether or not the sources support the portrayed data or vary from what is presented in the tree.

There is no allowance for gray. The census might say Edward B. Carr, or Edward Karr, maybe even Edw.'d Carr, but only the gravestone says Edward Bane Carr. The gravestone might say Edward was born in 1861, but he appears in the 1860 census as five years old. Which date do you present in your tree? Only the one you agree with?

I realize that you can always check the original records by clicking the accompanying hyperlink, a fine feature offered by Ancestry.com, but I feel that a family tree should carry all the variations, right or wrong, and show sources for each. That is a more robust, less misleading method of sourcing. And it is leaves a more clear record for future researchers to see how decisions were made based on conflicting information.

The discovery of serious errors in an online family tree should destroy a researcher's confidence in the entire project. Even minor errors here and there ought to lower one's sense of a tree's reliability. At the very least, occasional errors should throw up red flags and raise questions about sources and methods.

To cite the Carr/King/Rodriguez Family Tree again, Edward's grandfather, John Carr, is shown as being born in Mercer County, Virginia in 1798 and dying in Mercer, Virginia (Loudoun County) in 1874. The place of birth is certainly wrong, while the place of death is very likely incorrect. John lived in Mercer County for many years, based on census records, and he was buried there, but the county wasn't formed until 1837, so he couldn't have been born there. (The troubling issue here is that even if his death certificate said he was born in Mercer County, a bit of research would have exposed that the county didn't even exist in 1798.)

The coincidence of John's dying in a place called Mercer, but in another state and far from where he lived and was buried, makes the place of death seem highly dubious. I suspect that the researcher had a research note saying that John died in Mercer but couldn't find a Mercer County in Virginia in 1874 -- the county became a part of West Virginia in 1863 -- so he/she erroneously picked a city named Mercer in Virginia as the place of death, even though it was far away from where John lived and was buried. While I can't say with certainty that John died in Mercer County, West Virginia, I'm not ready to adopt Loudoun County as his place of death, either. The obvious error with the place of birth causes me to doubt the place of death.

So, what to do? Toss out the baby with the bath? No. The Carr/King/Rodriguez Family Tree is a goldmine of data from an obscure graveyard. I simply advise caution with online trees, whether you are creating one as an owner or using someone else's for research purposes. To be generous, they can be fraught with minor errors and imprecise sourcing. Always sample the data for the accuracy of spelling and data, then decide how much you are willing to rely on it for your research needs.

While researching this piece, I came across the blog Genea-Musings, which also discusses personal trees at Ancestry.com. You might want to have a look.

The Maryland Suburbs of Washington, DC in the 1960's

In the 1960's, we lived in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. It was hard to differentiate the local news from national events. When Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis, my parents had a two-hour commute home as parts of the District burned. The first thing my dad did was come to pick me up from Boy Scouts.



After Robert Kennedy was killed and his funeral was scheduled for DC, a number of us went down to the railroad tracks to watch the funeral train pass by. I remember watching as the widow stood on a platform at the end of the train and waved to us as we paid our respects.



And there was the campaign stop of Governor George Wallace at the nearby Capital Plaza shopping center. There was a guy selling ice creams, including ices called bomb pops, which some of the kids tossed at Wallace, who was perceived as a racist to many of us even in Maryland. There was a Nazi Party van passing back and forth in the shopping center parking lot probably didn't help with his perception management. It would only be a few campaign stops later that Wallace was shot and seriously wounded in Maryland.

My father took me to a public assembly at the cafeteria of Cooper Lane Elementary School in Landover, Maryland, to sign me up for Cub Scouts when I was about eight years old. Since we lived in a new housing development, there hadn't been a Cub Scout troop there before, so the meeting was organizational in nature. Somehow my dad ended up becoming the cubmaster. During the 1960's, My Cub Scout den mother was the first wife of then Congressman Larry Hogan. Mr Hogan would end up being the first Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to back the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in 1974. My sister came home from the University of Maryland with teargas in her eyes because of ongoing campus protests against the Viet Nam War.

My dad worked as a composite artist at FBI Headquarters. While he worked some of the dicier cases of the 1960's, including the Black Panthers in Chicago, he was always preaching civil rights at home. He attended MLK's March on Washington in 1963. He battled the segregationist policies of his local church. He told me that the elders took a visiting African American couple out to the front porch of the church and gave them a brief lesson in how birds of a feather flock together and sent them away. He was outraged and immediately moved our family to another congregation. One of my father's favorite Christmas songs, one that he carefully explained to me, was "Some Children See Him" as sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford.



In this time of Christmastide, we should remember that peace on Earth begins with the observance of equal rights, racial equality, civil liberties, and human dignity. Bring compassion to your efforts in all you do, including your research into genealogy and local history.

Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project

The Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project is a volunteer effort of the RI USGenWeb Project to record for posterity the inscriptions from nearly half a million gravestones. Begun in 1990, the project was nearly three-quarters completed as of 2007. See the project's history for more information.

The project has been a great resource for my Carr surname research. The Carr family line that Edson and Arthur Carr focused on in their books (Edson's Carr Family Records and Arthur's The Carr Book are available by subscription at Ancestry) traces back to the mid-17th century, when Robert and his younger brother Caleb left the Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in Newport. Caleb lived a long life in Rhode Island, owned land, operated a ferry service, and served twice as General Treasurer of Rhode Island and even briefly as Colonial Governor. In a freak mishap, Caleb fell from one of his ferries and drowned.

You'll find Caleb's grave record within the project here. It appears as seen below.

CARR CALEB 1623c - 17 DEC 1695 JM001

The project offers a key to cemetery codes, which explains that JM001 is a special lot where the Colonial Governor is buried in Jamestown. The code description includes the name of the cemetery and its precise location.

JM001 GOV CARR LOT JAMESTOWN EAST SOUTH ROAD ->50 ft. W

Some of the Carrs from this particular line remained in the area, but many moved westward, which in the late 18th and early 19th century meant they moved west to New York, Pennsylvania or maybe Ohio. Some Carrs were in the initial Quaker settlements on the new frontier. Many Carrs prospered as farmers. Some were captured or met their death in Indian attacks.

In what seems today like a misplaced touch of the Wild West, there was a Wyoming Valley in 18th-century eastern Pennsylvania being settled by a Connecticut company. According to a Wilkes-Barre history, "The name Wyoming was derived from a corruption of Maugh-way-wame, a Delaware Indian name for The Large Plains." The State of Wyoming may have gained its name in 1865 from this Pennsylvania region, according to Wikipedia, which adds its own explanation of the derivation of the state's name. "The name Wyoming derives from the Munsee name xwé:wamənk, meaning "at the big river flat," originally applied to the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, made famous by the 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming by Thomas Campbell.^[8][9]"

There was always some movement of Carrs between Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. A marked shift of population into Rhode Island's cities in the late 19th century involved people leaving the region's less and less productive farms to accept new factory jobs. Immigrant Carrs came to Rhode Island from Europe to operate the state's many mills and factories. I've noted that many Irish Catholics came to Providence County during this period.

Those who dwelt and died in Rhode Island -- Carrs and others -- can be found in this wonderful database. I encourage you to bookmark the site and use it often.

WikiDump

Here's an interesting blog: The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump. The editor posts summaries of articles that are about to be removed from Wikipedia for notability problems or just being too bizarre for words. There are entries like Penguins in Popular Culture, the sideways bike, and the Extra-Terrestrial Exposure Law. Some are certainly just oddities, like the 100 Greatest Villains, as listed in Wizard magazine's issue 177. And then there's Elizabeth Kucinich, not particularly noteworthy but certainly a charmer.

Brick Walls And Tall Tales

Recently I overcame a thirty year long genealogical brick wall and traced my father's paternal line back to Ireland. I started this quest in 1978, with relatives passing down the family story that my grandfather was born near Red Bank, New Jersey, the son of a cattle buyer who worked at Fort Monmouth selling meat to the troops. Well, all of a sudden a flood of old records have been making their way to my desktop to prove otherwise. Amazing stuff. Ships' crew records. Foreign birth records. US draft and naturalization records.

The records tell the tale: my grandfather (man in picture, right, with moustache, hands on hips, dark suit) was born in Ireland (he was indeed the son of a cattle buyer), left home circa 1907 and went to sea aboard Anchor Line steamships. In 1910, he landed a job with Panama Canal Steamship and Railroad Co and began making runs between New York and the Canal Zone. Despite the official statements on his kids' birth records that say he was born New Jersey, my grandfather's only connection to the Garden State was a girlfriend who left New York in 1913 and moved with her parents to Ocean Port Avenue in Long Branch.

I suspect my grandfather had his reasons for telling tales. He seems to have been politically active before he left Ireland and might have been afraid for himself and his family. The earliest iterations of the Irish Republican Army formed around 1907.

My most recent find is that my ancestor, Andrew Noble, a horse trainer who was probably born around 1825, is listed in Griffiths Valuation of Ireland. It shows him living on Fort Hill Street in Enniskillen in 1863.

So, when faced with brick walls and tall tales, be persistent and ask the hard questions. Even official records, like birth certificates and the census, can be erroneous. Don't focus too tightly on what you think you know. Keep other options open.

Erie Yacht Club

One of the WikiProject Erie editors has begun to draft an article on the Erie Yacht Club. Local residents and former and current members of the club may wish to contribute details from old newspaper clippings and local histories that they've collected over the years. Those with personal photographs of the club and some of its more important past members may wish to upload some of those shots to Wikipedia and include them in the article. The county library probably has a clippings folder in the row of metal cabinets between the work tables and the CD collection. Discussion of content has already begun on the article's talk page. Feel free to add content to the article or throw some information on the talk page for editors to feed into the article.

Marinas.com has an excellent set of photographs of the marina. I came across an interesting photograph of the yacht club's lighthouse. There is also an online weather station. Boldt Gallery has some photographs of the club online. Boldt even posted some 1950's video footage of the club at YouTube. The photo in this article is from PicasaWeb and is identified as Karen's Best.

Marshall Poe on Wikipedia

The historian Marshall Poe wrote an article and a sidebar about Wikipedia in the September 2006 edition of Atlantic Monthly. The Hive is a substantial piece that covers the development of personal online interactions from the open exchange of ideas in discussion boards to peer-to-peer data sharing to actual collaboration in the development of collective content. A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) talks about the struggle within Wikipedia for a level discussion of controversial issues.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz offers an article called Common Knowledge in the August 2006 edition of the same magazine, an overview of Poe's thinking on Wikipedia. (Poe's article contains lots of links to unfamiliar terms, which I won't repeat here.)

You can listen to Andrew Keen's interview of Poe for Politics Central on the occasion of the release of the Atlantic Monthly article. Poe reveals that "The Hive" was initially going to be called Everyone Knows Everything.

According to the Daily Iowan, "Poe makes use of the network potential in his class [He is a history professor at the University of Iowa] by having students update Wikipedia articles about subjects being discussed in class."

In April 2008, Poe participated in the Eastern Michigan University College of Arts and Sciences lecture series Wikipedia: The Democratization of Knowledge or the Triumph of Amateurs?

Poe's MemoryArchive - what he calls The Encyclopedia of Memories -- is surprisingly unWiki, non-collaborative. More of an edited story board. Submissions are made directly to Poe, who edits them and places them in the database. Contributions are then "protected" from further editing. Recent edits -- not that many -- are all attributed to Poe. It's hard to discern when submissions were even made. From my perspective, the march of progress in online collaboration that Poe talked about in The Hive takes a giant step backwards at the MemoryArchive.

When You're Ready

Commodore George Dewey issued a famous command to Charles Gridley to begin to fire his weapons at the Battle of Manila Bay. Someone changed the quote at Wikipedia today from "Fire when ready, Gridley!" to "Fire when you are ready, Gridley!" Never content to let an edit like that stand unchallenged, I checked Google and found that hits for the "fire when ready" quote outnumber the longer version three-to-one, but Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions actually explains that the "Fire when you are ready" quote is correct but simply not as popular as "Fire when ready". You live and learn.

Red Cross Shelter Still Busy in Londonderry

My wife's been out of cell phone range all week. She called me the other day from the Londonderry High School, where she's been working at the Red Cross shelter during the ice storm crisis, to let me know she would be out of touch the rest of the week and not to worry. Here's the Union Leader's detailed news from that town as of Wednesday afternoon:

LONDONDERRY, 4:46 p.m. School has been canceled again for Thursday. Residents are watching to see if PSNH does have 95 percent of the town backup by midnight tonight, as the utility had forecast.

Despite the snow and freezing rain falling much of the day, PSNH did not revise its timeline released Monday for the town. However, at 3:30 p.m., large portions of south and west Londonderry remained without electricity.

Town Manager Dave Caron said PSNH had said large portions of south and west Londonderry, including customers on Apollo, Wiley Hill, Peabody, Adams, Fiddlers Ridge, Parmenter, Rebecca, Apple Blossom, Cross, Meadow and Constitution Roads would be active by Thursday, but he had not been told whether that meant just after midnight tonight or later in the day. As of 4 p.m. there were six utility trucks working in town, Caron believed.

Public Works officials managed to plow all roads safely, Caron added, believing that the work that remained in town was for utility trucks to handle.

"There's still a barricade up at Bancroft Road, but I'm pretty sure most roads are open at this point," he said.

Approximately 45 people stayed at the Red Cross shelter at the high school gym Tuesday night, down 20 from the night before. The hot meals offered at the shelter remain highly attended.

Are You In Their Snapshots?

There's an interesting website called Are You In My Photo? where you can look at other people's old family photographs and help the owners try to identify strangers or forgotten relatives captured in the shots. Click browse and view the collection by categories like military life, life in the 50s, amusement parks, etc. You might just find one of your relatives in the Aleutian Islands posing with his buddies. I came across the site today in Ancestry magazine's Jan/Feb 2009 edition. The site is a bit awkward to peruse, but wouldn't it be interesting to find Aunt Mabel as a WAC kicking up her heels?

Out From the Cold in Manchester

Red Cross redeployed my wife from Nashua to Manchester, NH, where they have four shelters to help deal with those displaced by the ice storm. 200,000 remain without power in the state. See slide show1 and slide show 2 of ice storm effects.

Comparatively speaking, New Jersey is not as troubled as more northern climes. It's a bit warmer and more carefree. My daughter and I were out to breakfast this morning and the radio was playing "My Favorite Things" as if it were a Christmas carol. As we were discussing the merits of the radio station playing this song from The Sound of Music as if it were a holiday favorite, the Emergency Broadcasting System suddenly interrupted the song with buzzes and tones. Ironic, isn't it, that this song was meant to help you forget about your troubles and think about something nice and here they were displacing the song so we could worry about who knows what on such a nice day? When the test was over and all the statements of what we were to do in an actual emergency, the song was still playing and life went on. We didn't even have to stop eating our omelets.

Red Cross in Nashua

My wife left in a hurry on Sunday to join a group of Red Cross volunteers heading to Nashua, NH to help run a shelter up there. The Red Cross has 56 shelters in New Hampshire, which has been hit hard by the current ice storm wreaking havoc over the Northeastern US. I suspect she has ended up at Nashua High School South, where a breaking news story says 65 folks are sleeping on cots in the gymnasium. Many NH residents are keeping warm in Red Cross shelters because of the lack of power in their own homes. Most of the deaths so far have been the result of carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty portable heaters in people's residences. The ice storm paralyzed the city of Nashua on Friday, shutting off electricity to more than a quarter million homes and apartments. The shelters provide warmth and food, but they also keep people safe.

Take a moment and support the American Red Cross. Their disaster relief volunteers helped in the 2008 hurricane season, particularly with Gustav and Ike. Local volunteers help victims of house and apartment fires to find temporary housing, often in the middle of the night. Give generously and volunteer if you can. And be supportive of the workers whenever you have the opportunity.

Rootsweb WorldConnect

One of my favorite links for genealogy research is Rootsweb WorldConnect's Global Search window. It offers separate search fields not only for first name and surname but for the name of parents and spouse. It offers date ranges for birth dates. You can often leave the place of birth blank. WorldConnect doesn't play well with US state abbreviations. You can search by dates of death and marriage. WorldConnect will even let you exclude a database or let you focus on search results that provide you with research notes, sources, or additional generations.

Searching a Distinctive Name
If you're dealing with a distinctive name, the less information you fill into the fields, the better. A search in WorldConnect for Barzillai Carr will yield four hits, so using a possible year of birth would only limit your chances of finding a listing. A Soundex search will give you 61 hits on Barzillai Carr because Barzillai Cary was such a popular name. Soundex doesn't help with the first name, which must be exact. (Barzillai was a minor Biblical figure in the time of King David. The name is routinely misspelled by census enumerators. I have no suggestions on how to search the possible variations. I've seen Barzilla, but many others are out there to trip you up.)

Searching a Name With a Variable First Letter
None of the special search tools at WorldConnect will find Barzillai Kerr when you search for Barzillai Carr because the tools are all oriented to the first letter of the last name. A search for Carr will find Car and a search for Karr will yield Kerr hits.

Searching for a Common Name
A search for James Carr yields over 8,000 hits, so more detail is required. You'll notice that James need only be part of the name to be included. Alexander James Carr, James Edward Carr, and a host of other James Carr names will appear in your results. If you have a full name, middle initial, and hopefully some rough idea of the birthdate, you should try each of these in various combinations and variations when the name is common.

• Provide a Full Name:Providing the full name James Edward Carr brings the hits to 83, a mix of Edward James and James Edward Carrs. (James E yields only 68 hits.)
  

• Add a Date Range:Picking a birth date range of twenty years either side of 1875 for a James Edward Carr search yields only 15 hits. (If you look back at the name only (no dob) search results, you will notice that many of the James Edward Carr hits contain no dob at all. It's important to remember that those no dob hits are excluded from the results in a date range search.
  

• Add a Spouse:James Edward Carr with spouse Edith yields only three hits. James Carr with spouse Edith produces 11 hits. If you leave the first name blank and look for any man named Carr married to a woman named Edith, you end up with 295 hits. The top of that list includes men named Carr whose first names are unknown. All of these searches can yield matches between databases.
  

Recognize WorldConnect's Limitations
You have to recognize the database's limitations. Use your results with caution and cite your sources. Try contacting the submitters to find out more about their information and where they got it. One of the weaknesses of WorldConnect is the shortage of sourcing. If you source your info as being from WorldConnect, it should remind you to seek additional sources in the future.

Categories and Lists

If you can't quite remember the name of a former mayor of Erie, you can try looking in Wikipedia for a list of mayors or check for a mayors category. A list of anything is typically more complete than a category, which will only contain items about which separate articles have been written. In the case of mayors of Erie, only a few of them are the subject of their own articles.

Categories allow you to follow the topic through more and more generic layers of the concept. In the mayors case, you can go back to mayors of places in Pennsylvania, places in the US, and by country. Or you can trace back by mayors of US cities, which is a subcategory of mayors of cities. The latter gives you mayors of cities from other countries.

You will find the more generic concepts in the category section at the bottom of the page of a category page. As the above example shows, categories can take you along separate trails.

Category pages will offer you lists of actual articles as well as lists of subcategories. They also offer you See Also links.

When you simply cannot remember that old car model's name or former airline, next time try perusing lists or categories instead of a blind search.

My Favorite Restaurants

Thought I'd take this occasion to mention a couple of my favorite restaurants.

• Peekamoose Restaurant is in the Catskills in the small town of Big Indian, NY. Very fine cuisine, rustic decor, and friendly service. We even roasted some marshmallows in a fire pit outside. The home page is rather baffling so I've linked you to the menu.
• The Washington Inn in Cape May, NJ is a wonderful dining experience. We stayed a couple of times at the nearby Duke of Windsor Inn and thoroughly enjoyed our stay. We especially enjoy visiting Cape May during Victorian Week in October.

Audit Your Local Points of Interest

When I got involved in Wikipedia's WikiProjectErie a couple of years ago, one of the tasks for project volunteers was to propose and write new articles about local points of interest. Seems there are always a few local attractions in any community that have yet to be written about. I had a subscription to the Erie Times-News, so I began reading the paper with the eye of a Wiki auditor, looking for feature articles or advertisements that highlighted area attractions. I'd fold the paper back and draw a big pencil circle around articles meriting further research. Many of the places already had articles, but every once in a while I'd find one that needed more work or a topic that hadn't been written about yet. I had an extra bed next to my computer when I was in school and it was littered with such clippings. Each one was a project in itself, requiring additional research in local histories at the county library and the Hammermill Library on the nearby Mercyhurst College campus, so only a small percentage of those articles ever got written.

Another need listed on the WikiProject Erie page was for photographs of local points of interest for inclusion in Wiki articles. Certainly a fun way to contribute to a local Wiki project is to get your digital camera out and take pictures. I found that there were many tourist attractions in town that hadn't been photographed for Wikipedia, so I took advantage of bright, clear days and took many shots that now appear in Wikipedia. I never expected to become a photo contributor, but it's a niche for you shutterbugs out there if you are looking for a way to get involved.

Now that I'm back in Central Jersey, I've been procrastinating a bit about getting involved in the local Wiki projects here. I've been finishing up my thesis and haven't had the time for this hobby, number one. But also I am still attached to the Erie project and have been contemplating additional work in that area when I have the time.

Just before I left the shores of Presque Isle Bay for Raritan Bay, I purchased original copies of Reed's History of Erie County, Pennsylvania (two volumes) and Nelson's Biographical Dictionary (in one volume) so I could continue my research. I also have access to Bates History online, both in transcription and in images. My photo work will have to support local NJ points of interest, but I just might continue my deeper Wiki research in Erie issues, including local biography.

A good place to start if you're interested in augmenting Erie biography at Wiki is to check the list of famous residents of Erie at the Erie Cemetery Association's website and make sure there are articles about each. I created the Erie Cemetery Wiki article and added all the photos that appear there. There are plenty of interesting folks buried in that cemetery and other local cemeteries, so consider joining me in rediscovering some of their lives.

Thundersnow

Friends back in Erie tell me that there was an episode of thundersnow in November. I found a short video on YouTube that apparently caught the event. We don't get such meteorological wonderment like thundersnow, lake effect snow, and waterspouts down here in Central Jersey.

I noticed while studying at Mercyhurst that the local tv station breaks the winter weather report into smaller increments so the daily snow totals won't upset viewers. The weather announcer at 6pm will say that 2-4" of snow is expected over the next few hours, with higher amounts in the snow belt. Overnight accumulations will be 6-10", tapering off to 4-6" during the morning rush, again with more in the snow belt. That's 12-20" of snow anywhere else, but just another day in Erie. (I'm not sure about that morning rush. There was great concern while I was there that major road construction on 12th Street would tie up the roads. What's all the fuss about? Maybe the locals haven't driven the 5 in LA?)

As for fidelitous: It's no fun being PNGd, but it builds character.

So, Is No One Fidelitous?

I was working on a school paper the other day and wanted to use the concept of fidelity to describe how accurate or harmonious a rendering of something was to its original. The sentence needed an adjective. But when I typed fidelitous, the spellchecker flashed red. So I went online and checked Wiktionary, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and even the Urban Dictionary. None of them showed an adjective form of the word. (I have to note that there are tons of words under the letter F in the Urban Dictionary.)

I have an account with Wiktionary, which is Wikipedia's collaborative online dictionary. I don't get the sense that the Wiktionary experiment has been all that successful, but I engage in this low impact wordsmith's playground from time to time to see what happens. It's actually not that much fun; it's more of an academic exercise.

If you look at the Fidelity article at Wikipedia, on the right side of the page there is a small box with a link to the Wiktionary entry. That's probably the easiest way to get there. Otherwise, you have to go to the bottom of the Wikipedia main page, where a list of Wiki's sister projects appears, including Wiktionary. (You might want to try Wikiquote or Wikibooks, for example. Or how about Wikispecies?)

Rather than just toss in a new word, why not talk about it? I mean, what do I know about fidelity anyway? (Don't tell my wife) So I added a blurb on the Fidelity discussion page stating my thoughts on the adj form and asked for others to comment. Not surprisingly, I was the first one to venture to launch a discussion topic on that page. And, also not surprising, there hasn't been a nibble yet. But it's only been a few days. I like leaving these issues out there, like seedlings, and I check them once in a while to see if there's been any activity. I posted a discussion item on the Vicar article at Wikipedia a year and a half ago and there's not been a response yet. Patience is a virtue on these more obscure topics.

I eventually looked up fidelitous at Google Books, figuring if it was a real word it would appear in their collection of electronic copies of actual books. I ended up finding 46 hits in books published from the 1920s to the 1960s to today. The more recent books focus on fidelity in gay and bisexual relationships. (I'm not sure whether you can be fidelitious in a bisexual relationship, unless of course the typical relationship is a threesome. If that's the case, Valentine's Day must involve lots of greeting cards and candy.)

Google itself has nearly a thousand hits. There the emphasis switches to audiophiles and their desire for fidelity in sound recordings. And, again, polyamory.

Even if I think fidelity has an adjectival form, I'm still a bit unclear exactly how to make a Wiktionary entry. The precise structure of a dictionary entry isn't for the fainthearted or all that user friendly. So I'll give it a bit more time, I guess. Procrastinate. And hopefully someone else will add the entry or let me know that there simply is no such word and correct the error of my ways. Maybe around Christmastime, if I've not heard otherwise, I'll set my jaw and strive for dictionary perfection.

While I'm on words, I just have to say that I love the fact that Wikipedia has separate articles for fish, fish as food, fish food, and seafood. It even has separate categories for edible fish and seafood dishes. Ah, diversity.

I should mention that in yesterday's post, in which I discussed the US telephone system, I didn't talk at all about international numbers. That is because they can be difficult to get a handle on. They have country codes and city codes instead of codes for states and towns, but their total lengths vary wildly, so breaking them into their component parts can be a challenge. The typical White Pages in a large city has a list of major international country codes with some of the more common city codes included for good measure. For some reason the phone company thinks you also need to know the time difference, so they show something like +6 to let you know that the city is six hours ahead. If you are researching an international number, I'm not sure there are any standard references that break down all the city codes, but Wiki has a decent country codes list.

Research Using Historic Area Codes and Exchanges

Not many folks pay much attention to historic area codes and telephone exchanges. It's always a pain when your region sub-divides and suddenly you're in a new zone. But who keeps track of all those old zones and does it matter? Maybe the phone company, but I tend to doubt it. Monk is busy solving crime, so don't count on him jotting them down. Wikipedia has some useful basic information about the North American Numbering Plan, but nothing as detailed as is required for research of individual numbers.

So, let's say you come across a home phone number for a research interest in an address book from the early 1970's. The subject of interest had a 212 area code. So now at least you know he lived in Manhattan, right? Wrong. In those days, 212 area code also included Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

New Jersey's 201 area code was the first area code and belonged to the whole state until 609 was assigned to the southern portion of the state. After I moved to the fast-growing central portion of the state in the late 1970s, the need for new phone numbers for a burgeoning population prompted a geographic split and a change of my area code to 908. A need for most Americans to have lots of cell phones and faxes and extra lines resulted in yet another change in my household, to 732.

While my area code (XXX-xxx-xxxx) has changes several times over thirty years, my telephone exchange (xxx-XXX-xxxx) has stayed the same because I've not moved. Actually, even if I had moved from one side of town to the other, I might not have been required to change my number. That's because the exchange would have been the same.

If you check the front of many old White Pages, you will usually find a guide to local exchanges. This guide was provided by the phone company for billing purposes, so a customer could determine which neighborhoods were local calls and which were in-state long distance calls. But this information can also be useful for tagging a place to a phone number. If you have a phone number and a rough idea of when it was in use, you can often discern where that phone account was situated if you have the appropriate telephone directory handy.

But old White Pages are disappearing faster than the polar ice cap. They are bulky and no one needs old phone books anymore because we have CDs and the Internet, right? Public libraries can't afford to store the big books so I'm sure they are simply recycling them. You might be able to research an old name and get a listing, but try doing a bit of research on an old phone number. When you check your sources for former area codes and the location of particular phone exchanges, you will soon see there is little out there.

The issue reminds me of the break up of historic counties as the US expanded, especially in the 19th century. Just like the rapid change of area code boundaries, county borders were amended constantly over many years and I've yet to find the state that has prepared a handy dandy guide that quickly associates towns with their respective counties over time. Newberry's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries would be a promising contribution to our knowledge but it is seemingly very expensive, incomplete, out of print, and not readily available for free to the general public.

Policy Wikis?

The only worse idea than creating a Wiki to store policy information is to try to collaborate in a policy-oriented Wiki. Hi, my name is Pat, and I am a policy Wiki victim.

Want to make the boss really mad? Add a policy to the Wiki and change some of the elements because they were misspelled in the original. Or think of something that the policy team didn't think of when they drafted the original document six months ago. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Do that one. Extra points for that one.

SharePoint has added a Wiki and managers are out there trying to imagine how to use them. I've heard a few suggest what a wonderful place that would be for noting best practices within the organization and sharing innovations with others. But all of these things get back to the documentation of policy. And you don't want to be getting creative when management already has the reins.

Lesson learned? Web 2.0 isn't for everyone. Watch out for policy Wikis.