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.

An Important Message and Lesson

I just read a short preface in a book that was written more than a century ago. If you have any interest in discovering more of your ancestors, it is valuable for you to read it.

It illuminates how some of our ancestors were thinking long before we were born, and more importanly, it reveals a secret that genealogy big business does not want you to know.

In 1894 Guy Scoby Rix began a valuable 20-year genealogy research project that includes parts of the ancestry of probably more than one million living people. From Concord, NH in 1905, he wrote the preface to his work. It reveals his character, his intentions, and his commitment to accuracy.

Over the centuries there have been thousands of people like Mr. Rix who have published similar works on different families. Isn’t it much smarter to find out what knowledge is contained in those works, before spending tedious efforts sifting through raw unfiltered data?

The next time someone suggests that the first place for you to begin searching for your ancestors is in the raw data that hundreds or thousands of oftentimes very qualified people have been combing through for decades if not centuries, ask them, why?

Isn’t it best to find out first what the experts have already discovered? Why use any of your valuable research time to search for what’s already been found?

Naturally, I strongly recommend that the best starting point for ancestral history is our high quality tour guide service (the primary Family Forest® or some of it’s  hundreds of secondary publications.

The Power of Goal Setting Proven by a US Senator

Long before Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich” at least one person was actually demonstrating the power of goal setting.

Often when Ancestry.com announces some discovery they have just made, I look in the Family Forest® and find that we already have most or more of that same information already networked. This time we were lacking Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

So while searching for any ancestral history that links to Ann Coulter, I found an 1893 book titled Creoles of St. Louis.

The book starts with a young girl, Marie Therese Bourgeois, who was “Left an orphan at a tender age, was placed under the care of the Ursuline Nuns at New Orleans, La., where she married, in 1749, Rene Auguste Chouteau, a native of Bearn, France. He came to New Orleans in early youth and engaged in business, and at the time of his death was possessed of considerable means.”

Before I found out who the author was talking about, I ran into the following passage on page 118 about one of that young orphan girl’s descendants.

Upon his leaving home he left the following document with his mother: “St. Genevieve, Mo., Jan. 16, 1832. On this day I left home, under charge of Mr. William Shannon, an old friend of my father, to go to Kaskaskia to study law in the office of Judge Pope. My education is very limited, but with hard study I may overcome it; I am determined to try and my intention is to return to my native State to practice law if I can qualify myself, and while doing so to become U. S. Senator from my native State, and to work for this until I am sixty years of age. I will pray to God to give me the resolution to persevere in this intention. I have communicated this to my mother and given her this paper to keep, so help me God.” In January, 1873, he was elected U.S. Senator from Missouri, and in the April following he was sixty years of age.

That determined young man who actualized his goal was US Senator Louis Vital Bogy.

Alliance Set to Market to Game Publishers Key “Time Travel” Game Elements

Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc.

 

 

Dec 30, 2009 09:59 ET

ROME and KAMUELA, HI–(Marketwire – December 30, 2009) – Past Perfect Productions, srl, the Rome-based company representing “Rome Reborn,” and Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc. headquartered in Kamuela, Hawaii, and home of the “Family Forest® Project” today announce joining forces to form an alliance for licensing core elements for the next generation of AAA console-based 3D games.

Today the owners of the licensing rights to two immense, academically precise digitization projects, each requiring over a decade of research and development, have united in a Joint Marketing Alliance. Their goal is to provide the means for a visionary game publisher to take a giant, cost-effective leap forward in creating the next generation of 3D console games. The theme of the games to be developed with the combined digital content is “participatory time travel” with ancient Rome as the ultimate destination with celebrity avatars serving as ancestral tour guides to the past.

“We recognized immediately upon learning of Rome Reborn last year, when its licensing agreement with Google Earth was announced, how ancient Rome in their detailed 2.0 version would provide a wonderful ‘end-game destination’ for a breakthrough, ‘time travel’ 3D game utilizing digitized ancestral pathways mapped out from the Family Forest® Project. It makes a perfect fit because ‘all paths lead to Rome’ — and that includes ancestral pathways,” according to Bruce H. Harrison, co-founder and CEO of Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc.

Ancestral Marketing Partners, under the direction of Tom Nocera, has been tapped to market the digital rights of alliance partners to game publishers and game developers. Nocera stated, “The alliance offers all the unique digital content needed to bring the next generation of video games into the homes of a vast ‘non-traditional’ gamer audience — as well as appeal to traditional game consumers. Content this significant has to be showcased using video, and we were fortunate to find in New York the editor with a talent big enough to tell the story. Matthew Belinkie gets a ‘tip of the hat’ for what he has created for www.r2f2.com the alliance website.”

Professor Bernard D. Frischer of the University of Virginia is credited with having the vision and leadership to guide the digitization of ancient Rome, precisely as it appeared in 320 A.D., the height of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great. Frischer welcomed news of the alliance, stating, “The combination of our scientifically certified architectural model with the enormous Family Forest® genealogical database provides the basis for a compelling serious game that can entertain and educate people today about ancient Rome and its relevance to the contemporary world.”

Joel Myers, CEO of Past Perfect Productions, stated, “The alliance is a powerful combination of digital assets, a classic example of how the whole adds up to much more than the sum of the parts. All that is missing now is a brilliant game designer to bring Rome and its citizens to life once again for people of all ages and backgrounds around the world.”

Media Contacts:
Kristine Harrison
Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc. (Kamuela, Hawaii)
Kristine@familyforest.com
Ph. 808-883-8060

Bernard Frischer
Past Perfect Productions, (Rome, Italy)
Bernard.D.Frischer@gmail.com
Ph. 310-266-0183

Tom Nocera
Ancestral Marketing Partners (Clearwater, Florida)
TomNocera@yahoo.com
Ph. 727-710-0666

On the newswire at: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Millisecond-Publishing-Company-Inc-1096346.html

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.

Big Picture Story from the Big Island

A new story just appeared, and we’re pleased that it doesn’t misleadingly try to squeeze our exciting leading-edge digital project into the genealogy pigeon-hole.

 

We do like stories that highlight some of the surprising family ties we’ve networked between famous people such as Brad Pitt and President Obama, and the Family Forest® does perform some amazing genealogy feats for everyday people that no other genealogy resource can, but the real picture of our digital project is so much bigger.

 

The Family Forest® Project is about so many more exciting possibilities than just plain vanilla genealogy, and the new story points to some of them.

 

Please continue to stay tuned here for enriching previews of the future of your own past.

 

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.