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EasyGenie provides tools for genealogists to trace family history and preserve research for future generations. Genealogy Endures™ with EasyGenie!
We are a family-owned business located outside of Boston, and make all of our charts in the USA.
Happy Smoot Day! I’m sharing a weird bit of Boston history from the Harvard Bridge, connecting Cambridge and Boston. This explanation is courtesy of the MIT Museum “68 years ago, in the middle of the night, members of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity laid freshman Oliver Smoot end-to-end across the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge. When the sun rose in the morning, there were 364 tick marks painted along the sidewalk, indicating that the bridge was 364 Smoots long (plus or minus an ear).
The tick marks are repainted each year to commemorate the hack, and are even referenced by local police in accident reports. Incredibly, Oliver Smoot would go on to become—of all things—the head of the American National Standards Institute, and later, the International Organization for Standardization.”
Using Claude AI for genealogy transcriptions. Saves time, but be sure to check the results!
It took six years, from September 6, 2020 to September 11, 2026 for these records requests to be processed by the New York State Department of health. They cashed my checks right away but took an extremely long time to respond and do the work. 😡
How to download GEDCOM data files from Wikitree. In this example, I download the public tree for FDR's family.
This is a huge time-saver for transcribing old vital records. As the video shows, you need to check the output carefully.
Hat tip to the Lost Massachusetts podcast series “Edge of Town” which mentioned boundary terminus stones. This one is located on the border between Waltham and Newton Massachusetts, close to the Charles River. Such stones can be found all over New England and the Eastern United States and Canada, and were instrumental in marking boundaries in the 1800s before modern surveying techniques and GPS were available.
09/22/2026
Beware of the page "Historic Boston Archives":
"They're all AI slop that looks like somebody told a discount AI program to drink an entire case of Four Loko, then take the photos and turn them into colorized moving images."
https://www.universalhub.com/2026/ai-boston-historical-accuracy-drop-dead via
AI to Boston historical accuracy: Drop dead There's a page called Historic Boston Archives that purports to show photos and videos of Boston of yesteryear. The photos are real, even if most have been colorized and even if the sources of the photos are never credited. But the videos? Read more.
This 1870s Gamewell fire alarm system is still used today across the northeast. The original system came out of telegraph technology in the 1870s, and while it has been modernized the basic concept remains the same as it was 100 years ago. It was actually a back up when the Massachusetts 911 system failed a few years ago!
09/18/2026
This video was sent to me by a long-time member of the EasyGenie community. Her brother put together a very, very detailed presentation about the 1700s history of an area in southern New York, from colonial times through the Revolutionary War. It's an example of the connections between family history and deep local historical research. It also highlights the importance of maps to tell a story. Thanks for sharing, Rita C.!
George Washington in your Backyard by Frank Taylor Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
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