November Projects

The Buchanan Family Tree Book, for the current year was published electronically on November 7th. This year the number of newly added descendants is fewer than in previous years. But of course, the day after emailing it, I received 4 more names! It is nice to get a start on next years version.
http://billbuchanan.byethost17.com/buchanan/Buchanan_Family_Tree_2012.pdf

Congratulations to Leonard and Darlene Perrett of Neepawa, Manitoba on becoming grandparents! And to daughter Lindsay and her husband Brian, and baby Ryland who made this possible! Darlene is a genealogy buddy who has contributed endless hours and substantial money in the cause of researching our Buchanan family. Her husband Leonard has been very supportive of her efforts. Judy and I stayed with them during two trips to Manitoba, and we found them to be wonderful people. (Her Death by Chocolate recipe has been a favorite of our family.)

My family website update happened last week. It involves creating a special copy of my main database from which I have stripped the dates and places of events in the lives of living people, to help protect their privacy. Then I do other tweaking as needed. Then I replace the existing online database with the new one, and have the 1000 webpages or so re-indexed. It isn't rocket science, but it is enough work that I have only done it once this past year.

The Americans chose Barack Obama as their president. He seems like a very good man, but I have to wonder whether Romney's financial wizardry wouldn't be handy over the next 4 years. I guess time will tell.

Today I had a phone call from my friend Octave, and he brought over the updates he wanted me to make to his tiny Bales "R" Us website. Updating the price list for hauling bales of hay was a 5-minute job. Resizing the new pictures and adding them took a little longer. The big job was adding the video. I have never done that before. The version he had from the manufacturer was in MP4 format. I know from my work in FamilySearch Support that this format is a problem to the cheaper versions of Windows Media Player. I tried various things, but found the same video on the manufacturer's website and linked to it. The result turned out OK. I was quite relieved to to able to phone him and ask him to try it. He is a good friend and a great neighbor. He and his wife are always giving home-grown and home-canned food, plus help and encouragement to others. I am glad to be able to do something for him that he finds helpful. You can see the results of my efforts at http://balesrus.co.cc/ It is not great but it meets his needs.

The Lidgett Family Book is my big December project, at least I hope to complete it in December.