Civil War Oddities #2

If the Civil War had a champion soldier, he must have been George Bernhart Zimpleman, of Terry’s Texas Rangers CSA, A private by choice, who went through more than 400 battles and skirmishes up to May 1865. He led his regiment in the number of horses shot from under him, and suffered two wounds, one of which maimed him for life.

Civil War Oddities #1

Of the 425 Confederate generals, 77 were killed or died of wounds during the Civil War. The last surviving lieutenant general of the Southern armies was Simon Bolivar Buckner, who lived until 1914. His son and namesake was killed as a general in World War II.

Drum Barracks Civil War Museum

The Civil War was a pivotal event in the history of the United States, but few realize that California played an important role in that conflict. Although the major battles took place in the east, troops from the Drum Barracks kept California in the Union, protected the local citizenry, the Wilmington Harbor and much of the southwest, and secured the territory that is now Arizona and New Mexico for the Union. From 1861-1865 about 17,000 Californians served in both volunteer regiments in the west and in regiments fighting in the east. After the war, Californians from the Drum Barracks continued to serve in the southwest during the Indian Wars.

Drum Barracks was the point of origin of the California Column, formed and commanded by Col. James H. Carleton, first commander at the Drum Barracks. In 1862 Confederate Texas Volunteers had marched across the Rio Grande River and taken control of part of the territory that is now Arizona and New Mexico. Col. Carlton was ordered by the War Department to form a body of troops and retake control of the territory, pushing the Confederates back into Texas. In April 1962 the 2,350 men of the California Column began a march to Santa Fe during the driest summer of the century. On the way, these soldiers fought the Battle of Picacho Pass, the westernmost battle of the Civil War.

There were two things that stood out from this visit. One was the Gatling gun and how they were able to obtain it. The other is the extensive collection of civil war books, the largest collection west of the Mississippi River. You have to make an appointment to do research there.

The Drum Barracks is located at 1052 Banning Blvd, Wilmington, CA 90744 (310) 548-7509. They are open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 10:00 and 11:30 a.m., and on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30 and 1:00 p.m. The web site is http://www.drumbarracks.org

FamilySearch Announces Launch of Updated YouTube Channel

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

We're pleased to announce the launch of our updated FamilySearch YouTube channel, Thursday, Aug. 4th. Over the past few months, we have been creating video content to reach a variety of audiences throughout the genealogy world.  

In preparation for the launch, we are giving a few influential genealogy enthusiasts a preview of the channel along with an invitation to break the news in your online communities through your blog, and other social media.

Apple's New OS X Lion Operating System

Apple has now released its latest version of the OS X operating system, called Lion. One thing new is the distribution method: you don't buy this in a box at a computer store. Instead, you download Lion online.

The other advanced feature that amazes me is the price: $29. Compare that to the competition.

OS X Lion is available online now. The new version has a long list of new features, too long to list here. 

• Auto Save - the new OS X Lion automatically saves whatever you are working on so you don’t have to. This prevents the disaster for anyone who has ever lost hours of hard work after forgetting to press SAVE. It works automatically on all programs. Every document is saved frequently. In case of power failure, or human error (called the "ooops factor"), the OS X Lion user will never lose more than five minutes' of work.  NOTE: A few programs may need to have new functionality added to enable auto save. That might not happen for a few weeks but all Macintosh programs will probably fully support auto save within a few weeks.
• Versions - this new feature saves the history of your documents, taking snapshots in time, and displaying them side by side with the latest versions in an easily browsable timeline. You can review the past iterations of your compositions, restore a previous version, or copy and paste from old versions to new ones. If you have ever accidentally overwritten the only copy of a document you have worked on for hours, you will appreciate being able to go back to a previous version within seconds.

Why are 3,000 victims of 9/11 missing from Social Security death list?

Why are the nearly 3,000 victims of 9/11 missing from an official federal registry of death?

According to the Death Master File — the official record of 90 million deceased Americans who were issued Social Security cards since 1937 — there were 6,298 deaths recorded on that awful day in 2001 when terrorists struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a rural area in Pennsylvania.

But since an average of 6,200 Americans die every day, there should have been more than 9,000 deaths recorded for Sept. 11, 2001.

Conspicuous by their absence in the federal file are many prominent victims of the attacks, including New York City Fire Chief Peter Ganci Jr., Fire Department Chaplain Mychal Judge and businessmen Daniel Lewin, founder of Akamai Technologies, and Thomas Burnett Jr. chief operating officer of Thoratec Corp.

“The mystery about 9/11 baffles me,” said Beth Givens, executive director of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse which has received complaints about the accuracy of the death file. “The only things that come to mind are some of the conspiracy theories that we hear out there — and I don’t want to go there.”

Conspiracy theorists, indeed, have noticed and are questioning whether the government has told the truth about what happened that day. A video posted on YouTube entitled “Where are the 9/11 Victims?” shows that only 405 people are listed as dying in the state of New York that day.

The Social Security Administration, which oversees the Death Master File, does not have a clear explanation.

“There are several possible reasons,” said Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle. “For example, by law, we cannot make public the death reports we get from certain states. Another possibility is that the death was not reported to us because the person was not receiving benefits or there were no survivors’ benefits to be paid on the deceased’s Social Security record.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also compiles a mortality registry of information obtained from death certificates, which is one of the sources Social Security uses for the Death Master File. The CDC’s registry correctly shows a 3,000-death bump above average for that day in 2001.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has begun inquiries into the reporting failure after she was told of the issue by Scripps Howard News Service. She is asking Social Security Administrator Michael Astrue, and the public health commissioners for New York State and New York City to, jointly, explain how the error occurred.

“Would you explain why individuals killed on 9/11 would be missing from the DMF?” Maloney asked in a joint letter to all three commissioners.

Consumer experts warn that inaccuracies in the Death Master File are a concern for families who need protection from thieves who could profit by assuming the identity of deceased loved ones. Researchers also use the file in a wide variety of medical and scientific studies that could be skewed by inaccurate counts of deaths.

There are many other mysteries in the Death Master File.

Disproportionately more people are listed as having died on either the first or 15th of each month than should be. About 3.6 million people died on the 15th of their month of death, 1.7 million on the first, and an average of less than 1.5 million for all other days. This means that more than 2 million records likely contain the wrong date.

“Social Security receives death reports from other federal government agencies. In the past, these reports included the verified month and year of death, but did not include the day of death,” Hinkle said. “In order to process the death information in our systems, we needed to fill in a day of death.”

Hinkle said the 15th of the month sometimes was used “as a default day of death” until the precise day of death could be obtained.

Due to clerical errors, the Death Master File also contains the names of thousands of Americans who are still alive, Hinkle said.

Scripps Howard News Service was able to identify 31,931 still living Americans by analyzing back copies of the death file. Forty-one percent of these were listed as having died on the 15th.

These reporting errors are not evenly distributed throughout the nation. A disproportionate number were found in Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. The rate of error was extremely low in rural, lightly populated Western states such as Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota and Nevada.

Hinkle did not give an explanation for these discrepancies.

“We make it clear that our death records are not perfect and may be incomplete or, rarely, include information about individuals who are alive,” he said. “Because we do not receive reports for all deaths and cannot release all of the reports we do receive, the absence of a particular person (in the Death Master File) does not prove the person is alive. Our error rate is about 0.5 percent.”

Hinkle said the Social Security Administration each week reports “erroneous death data” to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division. He said the administration also “hired a contractor to review all cases of inadvertent exposure of people’s information. The contractor has found no patterns of organized misuse and no indications of identity theft.”

What to Do With Floppy Disks?

Do you or someone you know have lots of files saved on floppy disks? A man contacted me this week and asked how he could read his old floppy disks that he had saved from many years ago. It seems his present computer does not have a floppy disk drive in it. I suggested he do something NOW to save the disks. Before long, floppy disks will be about as useful as buggy whips.

Actually, there are THREE separate problems:

The first problem is that floppy disks were never designed for long-term storage for years and years. The manufacturers usually stated ten to twenty years' life expectancy for floppies if they were stored in ideal conditions. A typical residence isn't ideal. In addition, floppy disks have always been highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes. As with any magnetic storage, it is also vulnerable to magnetic fields. If the disk isn't stored in optimum conditions, the data will disappear because of these vulnerabilities. In many cases, data will disappear from floppies in much less than ten years.

The second problem is the one my correspondent mentioned: he no longer owns a floppy disk drive. In fact, the manufacturers stopped including floppy disk drives on new computers years ago. Luckily, you can still purchase floppy disk drives today although they are becoming rare. If possible, see if someone you know owns an older computer that includes both a floppy disk drive and some method of copying information from floppy disks to some other media. Possibilities are to transfer across a network, transfer on the Internet, copy to a flash drive, or maybe to "burn" to a CD-ROM.

If you cannot find an older computer, you can purchase an external USB floppy drive that plugs into the USB port of most any modern Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7  or Macintosh computer. The drives typically cost $10 to perhaps $30.

The third, and possibly the biggest, problem of all is the information stored on the disk. Even if the data has not disappeared, and even if you can copy the files to more modern media, can you find a program today that will read the files created by a program ten or twenty years ago? For instance, if you have files created by Roots 3 (a popular genealogy program of the 1980s), you will have difficulty finding any program today that will read information stored in that old format. To my knowledge, Roots 3 files can only be read by Roots 3 or later versions of the same program. Unfortunately, no program today can read Roots 3 files. The same is true for data saved in old versions of Personal Ancestral File, Family Tree Maker, or  genealogy programs that have since disappeared from the marketplace, such as The Family Edge or Generations Grande Suite.

My advice:

1. Copy the files NOW! Whatever is stored on a floppy disk may disappear at any time. Save it while you can. Copy the files to modern media.
2. Attempt to open the files with a modern word processor or genealogy program or even a simple ASCII file viewer, such as Windows Notepad. If you are lucky, you may be able to read the information.
3. If you cannot read the files, post messages on online forums asking for assistance from anyone who still has an old computer with the old software installed. For instance, if you find someone who still has Roots3 installed on a computer someplace (and if they also have the optional Roots 3 program that creates GEDCOM files), they could import your data and then export it in GEDCOM format. The information then can be read by any modern genealogy program.