Thursday, July 22, 2010

Spencer Turner Revisited

I have recently done more research on the Turners, not enough but more. Spencer Turner was one of the first settlers in DeWitt County, arriving in Wilson Township near Waynesville just east of Logan County in 1835. His parents had moved to Illinois in 1827 living first near Athens in Menard County, then Rocky Ford in Logan County, then to Waynesville in what became to DeWitt and eventually to Wapella.

From transcribed newspaper accounts of social goings on, which I read on the DeWitt County ILGenWeb site,  he apparently was not seriously damaged by being charged with murder and stiffing Abraham Lincoln. If I hadn't read the court record I would have strongly suspected the story was not factual or heavily embellished but no, it is true.

Spencer's stone in Sugar Grove Cemetery near Wapella does not look like that of a man who couldn't pay his legal bill. You can see the stone here. When his widow Nancy Hoblit died in 1900 she had three lots in the town of Wapella and an 80 acre farm.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Useful Tools Addendum

I have been a long time user of the Firefox browser but lately I have been using Chrome a lot. Both are free. Both have good and bad points. I think it is a personal thing. Safari, the browser from Apple, which you can use on a Windows computer, is visually interesting. It's on my iPod Touch. I have not figured out Opera. It's on my phone and I do plan to try it on my computer. I don't use Internet Explorer, mostly because it is the most prone to viruses but I think there is some rebellion there too. Some programs work better with some sites than others. If one isn't working well with a favorite site experiment with another. Yes you can use five browsers if you want. Web site managers generally have several.

Chrome has a slick add on that allows you to clip a page or part of a page and send it directly to Evernote. It integrates well with Evernote, just fill out the notebook and tags and it is gone. Firefox uses Evernote's clipper which has not worked all that well for me, not to mention it is always behind the current version. The two don't seem to be communicating. What? You are not using Evernote? You really are cheating yourself of an excellent free tool. I keep all my notes from everything in it. I don't know how people live without it.

Since I have scanned all my paper and saved it in pdf I am now looking for a program to read and manipulate pdf documents. I originally used Adobe Acrobat Pro, a good but expensive program from a less than supportive company. My version isn't working well with Windows 7 and I really don't want to buy the upgrade. I have used NitroPDF reader and PrimoPDF to print. I tried the entire suite but I had problems with it, probably more related to me than it since I insist on using WordPerfect and they use Word. [It's a bigger issue than you would imagine and seems to be getting worse. Think Corel v. Microsoft.] I'd prefer not to have six programs. If you have suggestions let me know.