Genohistory

NOTICE OF ERROR IN EXERCISE 3 IN_A QUICK GUIDE TO ZOTERO 7_ BOOK
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Those of you who have downloaded the sample data from the Genohistory.com shop have probably encountered an error in Exercise 3. The sample data should have a third subcollection called "My Exercises." It is not there. I will be fixing that and posting the corrected sample data to the shop. But you can fix the problem by simply creating the subcollection yourself. It has no contents until you do future exercises. I apologize for any inconvenience. For any of you who are planning to buy the book, the revised sample data should be replaced within the next 24 hours.

Many thanks to the Genohistory forum member who made me aware of the problem.

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https://genohistory.com/product-tag/zotero-7/

You can learn how to use the brand-new release of Zotero to gather, cite, store, organize, and take good notes on all your research. This book is valuable to beginners and those upgrading to Zotero 7. Useful to all fields of research, though especially targeted to genealogists, historians, and genohistorians. Zotero is used worldwide by academicians and independent scholars. Maximize your knowledge! (Available in paperback, EPUB, and Kindle.)

https://genohistory.com/product/a-quick-guide-to-zotero-7-knowledge-management-in-genealogy-history-and-other-fields-paperback/

For my colleagues who know the anxiety of thousands of thoughts a day pushing for attention, here is my solution. Inspired by the day books our ancestors used to keep up with promises made, experiments in progress, and other elements of daily life, My Day Book becomes your plan, your record, and your legacy. Check it out at the Genohistory.com store.
https://genohistory.com/product/my-day-book/

New research that backs up the need to keep handwriting in our lives: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/benefits-of-handwriting

My Day Book: To Gather the Scattered Thoughts of Daily Life Keep sane in a busy world by capturing what occupies your daily thoughts. It becomes a record of your deliberately lived days.

ZOTERO 7 is HERE!

I am installing mine now. I will make any last-minute changes to _A Quick Guide to Zotero 7_ and will immediately release the Kindle version as soon as that's done. The paperback will probably be about a week behind. If you haven't already added your email to the mailing list for notification and future news about Zotero, you'll find the signup link below. You're going to love it!

landing.mailerlite.com

Had an incredible introduction to the records collections of the US Air Force today at Maxwell AFB, Montgomery. Military research expert KB Barcomb was my learned guide. I grew up in Alabama, got my PhD here, and ran Alabama Heritage magazine for 19 years but never knew it is the official USAF archive, especially WWII records. And, they train officers here. And the Air University's 2-story periodicals collection is the best I have ever seen for 20th-century journals and magazines. Stunning treasure trove!

Many thanks to KB for opening my eyes to this place!

The wait for Zotero 7's official release continues, but for those of us on the beta, it's WOW! The book is ready when the new software drops and should appear within days of that. Want me to let you know when? Here's the signup form with no obligation to buy: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/o4z7d2

Join me Saturday (May 4) at 10AM (Eastern) for "Our Founding Fathers Would What? Presentism in Genealogical and Historical Research"--a presentation I am giving for the Bucks County (PA) Genealogical Society's monthly program. I'll discuss the ways we use or abuse our present-day perspective to damage history. Very important topic for anyone who researches the past. Register now!

https://www.bucksgen.org/index.php/register-for-online-meeting?pgmdate=202405

What's your response to a mammoth pile of granite boulders blocking your progress in your genealogical or genohistorical research? Call it a day? Climb over and keep going with the other "guessers"? Or do you have to start blasting stone to find the true path? Genohistory.com's newest blog post, "Boulder Demolition for Genohistorians: Uncovering Ancestral Trails," may help you decide:
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walls

Boulder Demolition for Genohistorians: Uncovering Ancestral Trails Master the techniques of boulder demolition in genohistorical research. Overcome the toughest obstacles on the way to your ancestors.

Enjoy this article about daily life for Colonial American settlers:

A Day in the Life of a Settler in Colonial America There was no one typical day in colonial America — the experiences of colonial families differed based on their location, economic status, and individual circumstances. The colonial era not only spanned a large period of time — from the early 17th century to the late 18th century, before the Un...

Zotero 7 Beta--Big Developments!
To all who have gone to Zotero 7 ahead of the major release, we got big news today. The interface has been beautifully redesigned. Click below to see the announcement. Meanwhile, I'll be quickly updating the version 7 book that I thought was ready to go. Many images to change--and it's all good! Well, I'm still exploring, but it looks great!

Available for beta testing: Zotero, redesigned This is a big one. In the latest Zotero 7 beta, we’ve introduced a major redesign of Zotero, as well as a new app icon.

It's been my privilege to sit in on some fabulous lectures at SLIG this week, in Gena Philabert-Ortega's course on social history for genealogists. Today, we hit the motherlode with a section by Tammy Hepp, the mastermind behind the Homestead Hebrews project. It's the most intricately, exhaustively valuable one-place study you can imagine, and is turning some faulty "big history" on its head. To discover why truly skilled "microhistory" is the foundation big history has to build on, visit this site:

Welcome to HomesteadHebrews.com Celebrating the legacy of the Homestead, PA Jewish community online. Browse records, stories, photos, and memories about this once thriving community.

In reading a Zotero forum post this morning, I became aware that there is a problem with the Google Docs extension. I have never used it beyond a quick test, so I haven't encountered it. But due to a bug in Docs that Google has not fixed, the Zotero extension gets slogged down in large Google Docs documents. Also, apparently today, another glitch has appeared that is activating an error loop. Zotero is working on this second one now. The recommendation from Zotero on the first problem is to use another word processor for large projects until Google fixes its error.

See:

add/edit citation link disconnect My "add/edit citation" stopped working at some point and kept loading. I tried exiting Google docs, exiting Zotero and nothing worked.

THREE DAYS LEFT TO GET $10 OFF IN RARE SALE OF THE 90-60 CENSUS WORKBOOK!

Use coupon code "9060 holiday 10" to get the 90-60 for $19. This is your answer to the dreaded PIP Census nightmare--the U.S. censuses that only have Partially Identified Persons between 1790 and 1860. Discount good through the end of 2023 (Central Standard Time).
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90-60 Census Workbook The 90-60 Census Workbook makes the mining of the name-deprived U.S. decennial censuses (1790–1860) not only feasible but at last fruitful. Tapping the Google Sheets environment, you can gather, organize, analyze, and share your findings. Pinpoint the most likely ancestors, identify their major fa...

The world's best knowledge management tool will soon launch a new version. Zotero 7 is a marvel of efficiency and has expanded its PDF Reader to include EPUBs and HTML snapshots. I will be rolling my new book out right behind its launch. It will be the perfect place for a newcomer to get his or her bearings. But I also expect even experienced Zotero users to find new insights here. Add your name and email to my email list, so that I can notify you when the new Zotero version and my book are ready!

https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/x2n4r0

Changes in 6.0.30 (November 2, 2023)
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[Security] Disabled libvpx support (CVE-2023-5217)
[Security] Added content-loading restrictions to generated reports

Changes in 6.0.29 (October 23, 2023)
Mac only
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Fixed “Run-time error '5'” in Word on some computers (since 6.0.27)

Changes in 6.0.28 (October 11, 2023)
Mac only
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Fixed “Run-time error '5'” in Word on some institutional computers (since 6.0.27)
Fixed error if the Word application was located on a non-default path containing extended characters (since 6.0.27)
Use previous Word integration mechanism on pre-Sonoma systems if localhost HTTP requests from Word are blocked
Updated Zotero Connector for Safari to fix transferring documents to/from Google Docs

THE HANNA MEN MYSTERY
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My newest blog post demonstrates how I got the story behind three mystery men--all surnamed Hanna, all in their 20s--who showed up in the 1850 census in the separate households of three brothers named Crook, who I am studying in Jacksonville, Alabama. How do you go back to 1840 and find the origins of the Hanna Men when the 1840 censuses would have only put a number in a column for the then-teenagers? See how I used the 90-60 Census Workbook to find out who they were, where they came from, and what propelled them to Alabama to these specific households.
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A 90-60 Census Workbook Case Study: Mystery of the Hanna Men Why were young men named Hanna starting to show up in multiple households of the sons of James Crook? The 90-60 broke down the PIP brick wall.

For the most frequent nuggets from Genohistory, follow me on Twitter .

Genohistory (@genohistory) / X Where genealogy and history converge. Studying a group of interconnected people, often family, within the context of their time and place. (Donna Cox Baker)

My newest Genohistory on Purpose blog post describes my method for breaking through brick walls created by the censuses that only list heads of household--the ones I call PIPs (Partially Identified Persons). You may know them as pre-1850 censuses. I have successfully solved many tough mysteries using this method. It's not a quick fix to brick walls, but it is the sledgehammer that gets the seemingly impossible job done.
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Passably Equipped: Conquering PIP Censuses with the PASSED Method PIP census (often mislabeled "pre-1850") brick walls can be demolished with the PASSED Method and a good tool to align birthyear data.

If you've noticed the long silence from Zotero's developers, they've been pouring their time into Release 7, which is imminent. You'll see in this recent update to Release 6 some structural changes in preparation for the changes ahead. Much of the work on Release 7 has been under the hood and will speed up the product (if you can imagine THAT) and expand its capacity for add-on tools. The changes regarding annotations made in this current update will be a great addition to Zotero 7's value. We'll be able to annotate web snapshots and ePUBs the way we currently do PDFs, converting annotations to notes at will. And the PDF Reader will have text and drawing tools!

Changes in 6.0.27 (September 5, 2023)
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*macOS Sonoma compatibility
*Fixed error using Word for Mac plugin with the Sonoma beta
*Compatibility with databases containing new annotation types from the Zotero 7 beta
*Reduced likelihood of rate-limiting when saving many items via *Add Item by Identifier
*Fixed startup error due to numeric value for Type: in Extra field
*Fixed potential sync error after using Replace Online Library in group
*Allow window dragging from PDF reader toolbar
*Fixed some PDF downloads from ScienceDirect
*Miscellaneous bibliographic output and word processor integration fixes
*Updated citeproc-js to 1.4.63

GENOHISTORY ON PURPOSE BLOG -- AUGUST 16, 2023
Immersion in the lives of ancestors empowers us with something so precious and hard to come by: perspective.

Read my newest blog post about a recent visit to the dentist, which was put into stark perspective against an 1835 dental tragedy. See "Dental Terrors: How Sarah Made Me Smile" at

Dental Terrors: How Sarah Made Me Smile Nothing cures dental terrors like seeing what your ancestors went through. Sarah Gayle was terrified of the dentist, and her fears were well founded.

You can now set these Facebook posts to appear in RSS Feeds! For users of Zotero, you can receive the posts by clicking on the little brown folder icon--second on the toolbar-- and choose "New Feed" then "From URL." This is the URL:

https://rss.app/feeds/f0WPtxfxufySzlMP.xml

The feed will appear in the Feeds section of the Collection Pane in Zotero. You can set your preferences there about how long posts will be available.

Genohistory is now properly represented on Twitter. You'll find posts at . Follow and help to build the genohistorical community.

For our Zotero users: Do you find yourself needing to jump back and forth between the same two or three collections as you work on a research project? I've created a little hack that lets me quickly jump from place to place. It's posted in the Zotero forum at https://genohistory.com/forum/topic/when-research-is-bouncing-you-back-and-forth-between-several-collections/ -1074. Hope it helps!

When research is bouncing you back and forth between several collections.... I often find myself using multiple collections at once as I build a presentation outline or think through a complex idea. I paste information between things, …