Hi, it's me - Tricia. Great advice. I agree about the birthdate. Birthdays were not celebrated like we do today and many immigrants lived in countries where vital records were either not kept at all or were sketchy, at best. Church records are baptism dates - not usually birthdays. Result - many immigrants simply did not know when they were born. So, because it was required info they made a date up and, sometimes, didn't remember what they had put on each different form. Then, to further confuse the situation many immigrants were not literate or spoke dialects using just phonics and each person from the same village spelled the same word differently. Now, add in the problems on the other end in the US (lack of ability to understand foreign languages, poor literacy rates, equally poor spelling) and mistakes were more the rule than exception unless your immigrant came from an English speaking country. I agree to check other points of entry besides Ellis Island. Remember, to a non-English speaking person Ellis Island meant nothing. But, over the years it became the place most people associated with "immigrants" so they said that is where they were processed. T'aint always so. Even if they write Ellis Island on their official paperwork. My own grandfather is a good example. All of his official paperwork read Ellis Island. He told everybody Ellis Island, including me. I spent 10 years looking for him. Nadda. Hired the National Archives to search. Nadda. I'm a contact person for the German-Russian Historical Society for the village of Norka. Got an email one day - from a women searching for one of my aunts who immigrated with my grandfather. She said, "Ellis Island? Gee, that's funny. My aunt always said they arrived through Portland, Maine." With the correct point of entry - Grandpa was easy to find. Fifteen years old and towing behind 3 younger sisters. Sometimes, there no better genealogical research than dumb luck. :) I also think a membership with ancestry.com is a good investment if you're just getting started. But, I warn you - BE CAREFUL! People are idiots. They just copy what somebody else has written with no further research on their own. So, mistakes get passed on and on and on and on. LOTS of them. I use whatever I find on ancestry.com as a clue, nothing more, until I've confirmed the info by independent resources. Also, the Mormon church site is notorious for mistakes. So much so I could not with good conscience even recommend using their data bank. But, if you do - proceed with caution. My goal is always 3 separate confirming documents saying the same thing. And, I get copies if possible. I've got tens of thousands of hard copy records. I set an annual budget for vital records and such because it does get expensive. I had my second book, "Thunder on the Steppes, a genealogy of ______________", edited this past spring (while we were rebuilding from Sandy). I was especially nervous because I've written a novella inside the book to bring my German-Russian ancestors to life for my grandchildren. My first attempt at fiction. My editor loved it and said I should seek a publisher believing it has a broader audience than immediate family. I'm thrilled. First though I need to publish the entire genealogy and not get sidetracked. I'm so close to being finished - just got to sprint those last 200 meters and cross the line. It's taken over fifteen years. At that point, I'm going to call my genealogy project finished. Genealogy is never truly finished but after nearly 3 decades of research and two books each exceeding 800 pages and going back to the mid-1200s it's as complete as I'm going to take it. I'll leave it up to future generations to carry on. Have Fun! /tricia

What you are needing is editing software to do what you want to do. I have Edit & Stitch by Amazing Designs, which works great for me. I am sure there are many others that work well, but this is the only software that I am familiar with. You bring each letter into your design in the software and position where you want it, save the design on your computer and then you can take the whole designed name into your Ultimate Box and then on to your machine. I do believe there is a trial version of this software that you can try out for a month. It can be found at www.amazingdesigns.com. When you get to the page, click on embroidery software on the left hand side. I think Edit & Stitch 2.0 is the newest version. If you basically want to do only personalization, then maybe Personalize & Stitch would be a better option. However, if you want to do different things with designs (the website will explain the differences) then I think maybe Edit & Stitch would be the one. Good Luck!

My dad was an avid photographer (I am too), and left me thousands of negatives, prints, and slides from the 1920s to the 1960s. I bought a Canon 9950F scanner, which does a beautiful job on all three. It is no longer manufactured, but this one comes close and costs a lot less: Canon Canoscan 9000F Luckily for me, my dad was far more organized than I. All the negatives, all the slides, and most of the prints were neatly filed. Still, the sheer volume was daunting, as was the fact that I knew nothing about using a photo scanner. As a result, the scanner sat in its unopened box for a couple of years. But once I pushed myself to "just do it," it turned out to be an enjoyable and often exciting task. I've been doing it for about five years, a few at a time. My dad would be amazed to see the technology--and, thanks to the Internet, how many people enjoy seeing his photos. His photos are a legacy, and a valuable one. I'm so lucky to have them, and to be able to hand them on to the next generations. I hope they will feel the same way about my own photography.

We'll get 2 boxes free for one year. I think we've decided to keep the main TV and the basement TV and just get a DVD player for the small TV and not have it connected to cable at all. Raven... the Charter tech that installed our cable hooked up the splitter for us so we could have multiple TVs. That seemed to be common practice in the area I live in. I'm sure that wasn't Charter policy though. When we had DirecTV (for over 16 years) we had our secondary TV's on an antenna which now no longer works. Redcurls, I have looked a little into the Chromecast.. will have to do some more research on that. Thanks.