News — Tips

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to bring together my father and one of his distant cousins on the telephone. They grew up in the same factory town in the 40s and 50s, but lost touch after they moved away for college. They literally had not spoken with each other for more than 60 years.  Over the hour-long call, it was really interesting to hear what they remembered growing up about life in the town, and some of the similarities in their lives and careers. For instance, their fathers urged both young men to get into the management track at the...

Last week's EasyGenie newsletter about pirates (see "Skeletons found in sunken pirate ship off Cape Cod") coincided with a report of a modern-day pirate ... right on the EasyGenie Facebook page! A user spotted an offer for our genealogy charts that seemed too good to be true, and possibly a genealogy scam: We've also received reports of other online retailers based overseas selling genealogy charts and not delivering them, not issuing refunds, and even selling cloth genealogy charts which are impossible to write on:  Just to be clear, EasyGenie is a family-owned U.S. business which does ALL printing in the United States...

One important task for today's genealogists is organizing and preserving old photos. Over the weekend, I spent a few hours looking through some old inherited photos that I'd seen before but never digitized or checked for important information. All too often shoeboxes of old photos are forgotten in closets or attics, or even thrown away ... but savvy genealogists know old photos are goldmines of information, and a joy to look at, to boot. The first task (digitization) was easy - I lay out the photos on a flat surface, took a high-resolution picture, and then flipped them over to record the captions on the...

Recently, EasyGenie and many other companies have seen a sharp increase in delayed packages transiting through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) network and private carriers such as United Parcel Service (UPS). Some USPS first class packages are taking more than two weeks to be delivered, and even standard Priority Mail packages are taking more than one week to certain addresses.  For this reason, we have the following recommendations for customers: Make sure your address is correct and complete. Assume USPS First Class Mail or Priority Mail estimates are 2x to 4x longer than stated on the shipping page.  Select USPS Priority Mail Express or UPS...

I received a great question from someone on Facebook about how far back you can go with EasyGenie genealogy charts: How far back does the big print go? I can go back to beyond 15 generations. I have one that goes back to 400’s. My answer: The farthest a single chart goes back is 10 generations, which will take some people now alive back to about 1600 on certain lines. If you were to make a parent or grandparent the key person at the start of the chart, you could go back further on a single chart, to the 1500s. However,...