Rookie's Guide to Top CDs and Websites for U.S. Research

Directory sites as big and comprehensive as Cyndi's List are a great blessing to seasoned researchers, but such sites can easily overwhelm a beginner. With rookies in mind, then, I recently created a concise list of the most important CDs and Websites for U.S. research. This list is composed of the most oft-used electronic resources at the Family History Library. The list is meant to be covered during a one-hour class, so I've put the class handout on this site in Adobe Acrobat format. To see it, click here.

Protecting Your Computer 
from Other Users

If you share your computer with others, you've probably been burnt sometime. Whether they're infants pressing keys at random, teenagers installing new video games, library users downloading cookies, spyware, or plugins, or a spouse who constantly installs new programs that conflict with yours, the world is full of guests whose innocent blunders will keep you up at night repairing the damage they've done to your system. Isn't there a way, you find yourself asking, to protect my computer from guests?

Although there are many ways to secure your system, the drawback of most security applications is that they make useful programs either hard to find or totally inaccessible. Some security systems even require a programmer to maintain. Fortunately, though, there are tools available which can secure your system against changes while allowing it to look and act like a normal computer. 

The helpfulness of a good security program lies in its simplicity. A good program can write-protect your computer's hard drive, much like you do with a floppy disk by sliding the write-protect tab. If a guest needs to alter a file on your hard drive or add a new file, these changes are made to a part of the hard drive which is not write-protected. If these changes foul up your system, you have no worries -- all changes are erased the next time you re-boot. And while guests cannot make permanent changes to your hard disk, you still can. The security program can be turned off with a password, allowing you to add files, change files, or install new software whenever you want. 

If you want a way to share your computer without worrying about your guests ruining it, then, a good security program will help you lock down your system without a hassle. For more information on two such programs, click the following links to learn more about  DriveShield and Deep Freeze. 

FamilySearch Internet 
vs. FamilySearch DOS

One of the best Websites for beginning genealogy research is FamilySearch Internet, a collection of resources produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormons).  However, FamilySearch Internet's wide array of offerings makes some of them easy to miss.  And since the site is updated so often, even seasoned users fail to notice the differences between the Internet version and the DOS version available at Family History Centers.  Thus, to clear up the differences between FamilySearch Internet and FamilySearch DOS, I've created a comparison chart.