Guide to Wolfram/Alpha for Genealogy and Family History Research by Thomas Macentee

Guide to Wolfram/Alpha

for

Genealogy and Family History

Research

by

Thomas Macentee

This is an ebook that I picked up at some point in time for free.  When we flew to Phoenix mid December I realized that only books I had from Amazon that I had downloaded on my kindle app would open on the plane.  So the book I had checked out from the library and downloaded on my kindle app would not.  Because of this, before I flew back to Ohio yesterday, I downloaded a few of the books I had in my kindle library that I had always meant to read but had not. One of these books was Thomas Macentee's Guide to Wolfram/Alpha for Genealogy and Family History Research.   It is a short and to the point book that is full of good ideas for use with the Wolfram/Alpha site.   The Wolfram/Alpha site is a free tech site that a lot of mathematicians use.  There is a more advanced membership that costs money and an app that has a charge too.  Still, much can be done at no cost.  The site is also a tool that can help people researching their family history.  For example if you are trying to figure out a word you can't read on a document,  type in the letters you can read with spaces in between and the Wolfram/Alpha search engine will give you a list of possibilities.  Or if you run across one of the tombstones that has the death date and age of the ancestor you can type in the death date and the minus sign and then  the age and get the birth date for your result.   Or perhaps an obituary has a date of the publication and says the person died last Wednesday.  Wolfram/Alpha is a fast way to figure out that death date.  Also one thing I find very cool is that if you are writing an article, for example, about the day a third great grandmother got married, you can type in the date and get the weather report for that day.  Specific information like that makes an article pop to life.  I enjoyed the book and found the information contained in it useful.  It is my understanding the book is still available for free.  Click on the link above at the book title for the link to that download information.  And click on the author's name above to learn more about him.   Below is a video of the author.  The second product he discusses at about one minute ten seconds is the Wolfram/Alpha site.