April Fools Day

Here are some April Fools pranks from the past, courtesy of  the Genealogy Insider blog at familytreemagazine.com

The Genealogy Gophers website allows you to search 40,000 genealogy books for free.  The results are from genealogy books only and include the title of the book where the information is found, and a portion of the text including your search term. We learned about this from GeneaPress.com, via ResearchBuzz.

Grave marker photo contest

Its March, and BillionGraves is offering those who aren't basketball fans an alternative to March Madness: a billiongraves-march-madness-competition. Prizes will be awarded for participants willing to take a large amount of gravestone photos, or produce a lot of transcriptions.

Thanks to GeneaMusings and ResearchBuzz for letting us know.
Also from BillionGraves:  a place to go to request headstone photos.

Hernando County Newspapers

As you probably know, the Hernando Today ceased publishing at the end of November. They kindly donated to the library bound copies of the paper covering the period January 1986-June 2013.  They are available at the Main branch at 238 Howell Avenue, in downtown Brooksville. Also donated were microfilm copies of the paper for the period 2010-2014. These are located at the West Hernando branch.
In addition, the library holds old Brooksville newspapers on microfilm. These include a small number from the 1920's, most of the 1930's, and then just about everything up to the final edition of Daily Sun-Journal, published on June 17th, 1992. This microfilm is located at the West Hernando branch, along with a limited number of editions of the New York Times- a few months of each year from 1856-1963, and reels covering all of 1979 and 1980. 

Florida Ancestors

In 1845,  residents voted to make Florida the 27th state. Florida Memory digitized the returns in 2014. This blog post by Josh Goodman  of the State Archives  shows how the data can assist genealogists trying to learn about their ancestors from the Sunshine state.

Black History Month

fold3.com is making its Black History Collection of more than a million photos and documents available for free this month.

Searching categories on Cyndi's list

This May 2014 post on the Cyndi's List blog talks about the advantages of browsing the categories instead of entering keywords in the site's search engine. You may be missing out on some helpful information, or new directions in your research.