Google Plus Family Forest®

For a wealth of free history lessons for you or your children, here’s the simple search formula. Google “Family Forest” + __________  = engaging stories from A People-Centered Approach To History®.

Of course we believe that these stories are much more fun and enriching if you have full access to the Family Forest® National Treasure to follow the curiosity these stories are sure to generate, but these stories are great history starters on their own.

For instance, if you are looking for stories about a history event, like the 4th of July, try Googling “Family Forest” (in quotes) + signer. Or substitute in place of signer a word or phrase such as american revolution, or declaration, or independence, or tea party, or ticonderoga, or inventor.

Other history event suggestions are “Family Forest” (in quotes) + alamo, civil war, gettysburg, world war, world war II, pearl harbor, or flight.

As you can see in the previous examples, you can search for specific places. Try Googling “Family Forest” (in quotes) + a place such as hawaii, hi, texas, tx (or any of the other state names or their two-digit postal abbreviation), america, england, ireland, rome (or many other country names), jamestown, plymouth, big bear, boston, or many other key American and European cities.

You can search for specific historical figures. Try Googling “Family Forest” (in quotes) + constantine, charlemagne, milesius, solomon, longshanks, robert I, wright brothers, rockefeller, george washington, adams, jefferson, abraham lincoln, general grant, kaiulani, macarthur, patton, etc.

You can search for general themes. try Googling “Family Forest” (in quotes) + ancestors, ancestral, ancestry, ancestral history, maps, explore, genealogy, charts, cousins, progeny, heros, veterans, baseball, texas ranger, bible, senator, governor, mayflower, first lady, white house, celebrity, history, congress, obama, kerry, bush, sarah palin, royal, royalty, king, queen, prince william, kate middleton, bill gates, etc.

You can search for Hollywood and entertainment related history. Try Googling “Family Forest” (in quotes) + a word or name such as television, tv, radio, movie, gunsmoke, hollywood, oscar, golden globes, academy awards, saturday night live, tcm, brooke shields, sarah jessica parker, wdytya, ted danson, meryl streep, braveheart, star trek, john adams, tom hanks, tudors, ken burns, marilyn monroe, paris hilton, britney spears, kevin bacon, susan sarandon, julia child, madonna, buffett, etc.

There are also corporate starters to history. Try Googling “Family Forest” (in quotes) + google, yahoo, disney, microsoft, tnt, amazon.com, hbo, cbs, nbc, or imdb.

Every parent who wants to inspire their children to be smarter and do better in school should give them full access to the Family Forest® National Treasure.

The Family Forest® is also inspirational and enriching for the whole family. Here’s a link to some short videos to show some of the possibilities.

Hint: If you do not want to spend time searching use this page http://familyforest.com/archives.html as a starting point, then follow the links in these stories.

Amelia Earhart

A new motion picture about America’s most beloved female aviator, Amelia, will be premiering at theatres on October 23, 2009. 

In advance of the release we have just posted a half-dozen related Ancestors-at-a-glance™ charts. 

One is for Amelia Earhart herself, one is for her husband, George “GP” Putnam, and one is for the famous Hollywood actor who will be portraying him, Richard Gere. 

In this role Richard will be portraying a cousin of California’s next Governor, Meg Whitman. Meg shares early New England Buckminster ancestors with “GP” Putnam. 

Another Buckminster cousin of Meg and GP is Bucky Fuller and he was a real life friend of Amelia. A video can be seen here of her in his futuristic Dymaxion car. 

And yet another Buckminster cousin is current US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. 

If all of the cousins of the cast and characters of Amelia go to see it, this motion picture will be the largest box office hit ever.

The edutaining Family Forest® Project is Networking Family History with Hollywood™ and connecting audiences through actual family ties better than any other digital resource, either online or offline, as the new Family Forest® National Treasure Edition proves.

Rand McNally of Ancestral History

I rediscovered a great quote while thumbing through one of my very many stacks of research materials. It accurately describes one of the foundation concepts steering the growth of the Family Forest® Project. 

The quote is from Andrew McNally IV, president of Rand McNally and great-grandson of one of its co-founders. Andrew said “Making the world around us more understandable is what map-making has always been about.” 

One of our goals for the Family Forest® is to become for ancestral history what Rand McNally is for geography. For 14 years now human intelligence has been digitally indexing , which translates to mapping visually, thousands of years of recorded human history. 

Another of our goals is to have a combination Google Earth/Second Life type interface for virtually exploring the world’s largest maps of human genetic migration, which are generated by the highest quality and most intricately interconnected web of networked family ties. 

Please stay tuned for the introduction of 200 or so selected Family Forest® Kinship Reports from the Family Forest® National Treasure Edition which will connect countless millions of living people, through their own generation-by-generation family ties, to more celebrities and historical figures than any other resource available anywhere, either on or off line.

Happy Birthday Darwin and Lincoln

Watching PBS last night with my family, I learned that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on the same day two hundred years ago today.

 

Kristine had been urging me to stop growing the Family Forest® long enough to write a new blog about Lincoln before his birthday passes. I had been considering comparing him to Benjamin “Don Benito” Wilson, another early American wilderness boy born about the same time who went on to greatness.

 

I had also been considering talking about the recent inaugural celebration concert at the Lincoln Memorial and the Family Forest® cousins I had noticed there in addition to the Obama and Biden families, like Pete Seeger, Tao Rodriquez-Seeger, George Lucas, James Taylor, Ashley Judd, and Tom Hanks. While channel surfing over the weekend, I stopped at Forrest Gump just in time to be reminded that Tom had already spoken in front of the Lincoln Memorial at least once before.

 

During the last few days Kristine had wanted me to watch a video about Darwin that relates to the Family Forest® Project. After watching the fascinating video over a cup of Kona coffee this morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what Darwin (and Lincoln) would think if he could visually explore the Family Forest® today.

 

Surely he would have found the world’s largest maps of human genetic migration thought provoking and helpful in his work, and I’d like to think he would have been amazed to discover what this single digital resource can do to ignite the curiosity and imagination of children.

 

Surely he would have been in awe to learn that it is has become possible to start with President Obama’s children, or Tom Hank’s children, and travel through their own generation-by-generation family ties to reach him and his family, plus

President Lincoln’s family, and to relate them personally to so many thousands of the most famous people, places, and events in human history.

 

While I don’t expect anyone will be remembering the 200^th anniversary of my birth, I do like to think that 200 years from now I will still be giving people smiles from the Family Forest®.

 

P.S. Here’s an inspiring Lincoln/Obama story. 

 

 

 

Free Money from Your Ancestors

Knowing your genealogy can actually be worth substantial money to you, and life-changing knowledge can be beyond priceless, truly of incalculable value.

 

For instance, having the knowledge I just discovered could have given a life-changing advantage of monumental value to one of your ancestors, to you, and to your descendants.

 

In fact, if one of your ancestors had discovered this key knowledge when they really needed it, you and your descendants would have been born into an entirely different and almost certainly much better socio-economic environment.

 

And you or one of your descendants may be standing at that very crossroads right now.

 

The amazing Google Book Search was the source of one key piece of knowledge that led me to the pleasing discovery that the Family Forest® contains an additional treasure trove of priceless knowledge that I was unaware of. 

 

This particular gem of knowledge was found in a book that has been in the Harvard College Library for over a century. This book is number 299 of a 300 edition printing of a 1905 genealogy book about the Kingsbury family. A sticker in the front of the book says:

 

“From the Bright Legacy. Descendants of Henry Bright, jr., who died at Watertown, Mass., in 1686, are entitled to hold scholarship in Harvard College, established in 1880 under the will of Jonathan Brown Bright of Waltham, Mass., with one half the income of this Legacy. Such descendants failing, other persons are eligible to the scholarships. The will requires that this announcement shall be made in every book added to the Library under its provisions.”

 

So a couple of quick mouse-clicks in the Family Forest® New World Edition

revealed that Henry Bright, Jr. had descendants with the surnames of Abbott, Adams, Ahrens, Alexander, Atkins, Baker, Baldwin, Barnes, Bentley, Bicknell, Bigelow, Bond, Booth, Bowman, Bright, Bryant, Brown, Burkholder, Carder, Carter, Chamberlin, Cheesman, Clark, Coffin, Cooledge, Coolidge, Crane, Cunningham, Cummings, Dalton, Dean, Deane, Dvojacki, Dewey, Dexter, Folsom, Fowle, Frary, Fuller, Gates, Gibson, Gilman, Goddard, Goodloe, Gould, Greenleaf, Greenwood, Grosvenor, Hanna, Harpole, Hastings, Higgins, Homans, Howell, Jackson, Kiblinger, Langan, Learned, Leavitt, Lipphart, Little, Livermore, Martin, Merriam, Miles, Miller, Mills, Morgan, Munroe, Niebell, Owsley, Paddock, Page, Passarella, Pearce, Perkins, Pleasants, Pratt, Pulsifer, Quincy, Ray, Raymond, Rentschler, Rice, Rodger, Rowland, Sargent, Shattuck, Shreve, Smallwood, Smith, Skillen, Stearns, Stetson, Stocker, Stone, Storer, Stratton, Strecker, Sweeney, Tatnall, Taylor, Temple, Tileston, Tufts, Walker, Waller, Washburn, Webber, Webster, Welch, Wheeler, White, Whiting, Wier, Wigglesworth, Woods, Woodward, and others.

 

One of these is the surname of a friend who was struggling last fall to find funds to give his daughter a good college education. A couple of them are names of members of my church congregation, one is one of Kristine’s ancestors, four are some of my ancestral surnames, and some are names and/or ancestral surnames of people we see regularly in the news.

 

How many people who are entitled to basically free money from their ancestors are completely unaware of it? How many people with unusual surnames such as Ahrens, Dvojacki, or Passarella, or common surnames such as Baker, Clark, or Smith, would know that they had ancestors with the surname of Bright, and that this knowledge can entitle members of their family to a life-changing advantage?

 

Which of course leads me back to the Family Forest®. If key knowledge can be priceless, what is a digital edutainment resource that leads you to that knowledge worth?

 

 

 

Bill Gates’ Misstatement

Bill Gates probably didn’t mean it exactly the way it sounded, but he did say on The Charlie Rose Show that “Everything is web-based.”

 

Everything is not web-based yet, and here’s one example that relates to cousin Bill personally, and quite possibly professionally.

 

Bill can give his children an enriching digital edutainment gift of potentially limitless value for just $50, and he cannot acquire anything similar to it now from Microsoft, or Google, at any price. This gift cannot be explored online – yet.

 

But offline, with just a few mouse-clicks in the Family Forest® Bill and Melinda Gates’ children can summon maps of their own ancestral pathways that lead directly from them and travel generation-by-generation to countless ancestral homes from many centuries ago, including some very prominent ones within the Gates family’s summer vacation destination, France.

 

Even with the basically unlimited resources of Microsoft, or Google, it seems that it will still be years before anyone can deliver the full functionality of even yesterday’s Family Forest® online (and that edition is basically only a concept sketch of the National Treasure Edition we are preparing to release next).

 

Two leading edge digital delivery companies have been trying to bring tiny slivers of Family Forest® output online.

 

Google has been working at it for over four months now, and they are not quite there yet (in fairness to Google, one is believed to be the world’s longest ebook). After having the same digital content for six months, in June 2008 ebrary estimated that it might be able to successfully make our rich content fully functional online within their system in the second half of 2009. And we’re only talking about slivers of stage-two digital content from where we were in 2005.

 

Some digital property, such as the Family Forest®, is beyond the capabilities of today’s Internet, but will be an integral part of the exciting future Internet that Bill talks about with Charlie Rose.

 

National Treasure

This is the most exciting time ever for us as we finalize the Family Forest® for the latest, and by far the greatest, release in the thirteen and half year history of the

Family Forest® Project.

 

This release will be called the Family Forest® National Treasure Edition for several reasons, beginning with what we were told early in the project by a great American who is a former Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives.

 

After looking at our work he said to us “You do a great service to our country by encouraging people to find out about their roots and engaging them personally in its history.”

 

We took this as a compliment for the work we had already completed, confirmation that we were on the right track, inspiration for moving forward, and concrete guidance steering the continuing future growth of the Family Forest® Project.

 

It has been my personal goal for quite some time now that one or more U.S. Presidents will publicly call the Family Forest® Project a national treasure, and after 

a number of great releases along the way we feel certain that this release truly deserves the title of National Treasure.

 

The Family Forest® can now connect far more people personally, through generation-by-generation family ties, to more people, places, and events in human history (including Sarah Palin and the 2008 Presidential Election) than any other single digital resource.

 

It is a unique supplemental edutainment resource to enhance the study of almost every facet of American history by students of all ages, and it is partisan-neutral.

 

As it says on almost all of our releases over the last decade “While the Family Forest® ……. Edition is very much about genealogy, it is primarily about U.S. history, and more than 3,500 years of Old World history leading up to the birth of the United States. It is a fun and very easy to use reference source that should be a valuable resource for every student of history, young or old.”

 

We are confident that our People-Centered Approach to History® has reached the magnitude and scope that deserves to be called a national treasure, and we receive delight from our belief that the Family Forest® Project will be helping to inspire future leaders to greatness.

 

Igniting a Passion, Going for the Gold

They say that within every dark cloud is a silver lining, and my heart attack and the resulting surgery and recovery have not been an exception. Being forced to take it easy allowed me time away from the computer screen to watch quite a lot of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, and to become inspired by so much concentrated human excellence. 

 

Having so many various and diverse individuals from different countries and backgrounds coming together in friendship and peace to compete, excel, and seek the highest honors in their specialties is a real beacon of hope for the world’s future.

 

I also noticed that ExxonMobil ran many ads, which focused on the need to interest children early in excelling at math and science.  

 

Growing the amazingly networked system of links that is the Family Forest® has convinced me that there is a much better approach than a direct frontal assault to their worthwhile objective. 

 

Personally connecting schoolchildren to greatness through actual family ties, as the Family Forest® can do, is a much more powerful beginning step to lead kids toward excellence in many fields, including math and science, and the pursuit of Olympic Gold. 

 

Family Forest® discoveries can be very powerful catalysts to spark children’s curiosity and excitement. 

 

After more than a decade of growing the Family Forest® Project, we know that the Family Forest® is the best digital central source to personally connect the largest number of students of all ages to greatness through their own family ties. It is a very enriching and empowering resource, and I wish it were available to me as a young student. 

 

Here are a few links that relate to igniting a passion in students: 

 

http://www.familyforest.com/captainslog/65.html

 

https://familyforest.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/probably-your-castle/

 

http://www.familyforest.com/captainslog/17.html

 

http://www.familyforest.com/captainslog/44.html