1. What is your all-time favorite song? Yep, number 1. It’s hard to choose sometimes. If you made your favorite all-time Top 40 music selections, what would be #1?

2. Tell us about it. Why is it a favorite? Do you have special memories attached to this song?

My favorite song of all-time is a pretty simple choice. It’s something I have thought about in the past. It seems I’m constantly trying to figure out my favorite musicians and songs. Overall, it’s a tough thing to choose, but my Top 1 or 2 are usually pretty well cemented. My taste in music is probably a lot heavier than most of the genealogy community, but even though my favorite band is pretty heavy, the song is not.

My all-time favorite song is “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica. Metallica has been my favorite band since I started to enjoy music. I remember listening to them on my older brother’s cassette tapes in the 1980s. When I came into my own musically at about 11 or 12, it was some of the first music I bought.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Metallica? So this must be some heavy metal song about worshiping the devil or something, right? Not even close. Due to the fact that Metallica has very few songs mentioning the devil and none of those actually say anything about worshiping him, that’s unlikely. “Nothing Else Matters” is actually a very slow and melodic song. According to Wikipedia, “some say it meant that “no matter how far” away he [singer, James Hetfield] was, he was still “so close” with the heart.”

I originally enjoyed the song because I liked how it sounded and I liked the lyrics. It felt like it had a lot of emotion behind it. When I heard it on the radio in April of 1999, the song gained new meaning. I was sitting in my father’s truck on a chilly, rainy April morning outside of St. Francis-Borgia church in Cedarburg. I was waiting for my grandfather’s funeral procession and the song came on the radio. I felt I was holding my emotions pretty steady for most of the day, but that song seemed to force me to let it all out.

I bet some of you would even enjoy the song. I even have a link that will allow you to listen to it, so you can make your own assessment. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even like it. Listen to it here.

• Johann W G LAST – Civil War- My 3rd-great-grandfather, server with Company K, 50th Infantry Regiment Wisconsin – 29 Mar 1865 to 14 Jun 1866
• LeRoy THIELKE – World War II – My grandfather, served in World War II. It’s not a subject that has ever been talked about, but I commend him for fighting for our country.
• Joseph Frank ZALEWSKI – World War I – My great-grandfather, started in the 86th Division, Company B, 331st Machine Gun Battalion. Later served in the US Army Infantry and fought with the Allied Expeditionary Forces in France during several major battles.
• Richard Joseph ZALEWSKI – My late grandfather, served in the US Navy during World War II.

Continue for some select photos

Joseph Zalewski - WWI - Click for larger

Richard Zalewski - US Navy - Click for larger

Johann Last - Civil War - Click for larger

Richard Zalewski - WWII

“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services.”

You see the same sort of stuff on Yahoo, too. It’s a basic “cover all bases” clause that allows them to publicly print your information on their services. I agree that it’s not “we’ll keep your data forever and use it however we like” but it’s still your standard terms of use. Google does own a lot of other sites which fall under “Google services.” Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been using computers since I was a wee lad and have been using the Internet since I was 14 or 15 and we had to use Lynx to browse the “World Wide Web.” Plus, we had to dial-up to the Internet on our 2400-baud modems, both ways, in the snow…oh wait, I got off-track there. To me, the standard Terms of Use are pretty..well..standard. I only upload/share information that I expect to be shared around. I also can’t stop someone else from uploading a photo of me, which then completely stops me from removing it.

I’m definitely not backing Facebook and their new (now defunct) Terms of Use, since it was a bit out of the ordinary, but I’m also not going to delete my account there. I do think these sites should take a more open approach to their terms, but I think some people need to look around at all of the sites they use before coming to a final conclusion.

Late last year, my family found a line-a-day diary maintained by my great-aunt from 1937 to 1941. She was in her early teens, living on a small farm in rural Illinois with her two brothers, one of which was my grandfather.

It’s a fascinating account of life in a bygone era, a time when my family’s only connections to the world were schoolhouse chatter and a neighbor’s radio.

Check it out the full introduction or go ahead a follow the twitter feed.

I always think about backing up my important data, but I never get to it. A few weeks ago, I installed a backup program called SyncBackSE. Basically, you give it a folder or files and tell it where to send it and it will schedule backups as often as you like using Windows Task Scheduler. The freeware version that I use doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it does the backing up. It will sync the directories or just copy files over for you.

I may look into picking up the full copy in the future, since it does have some nice features, including backing up to FTP. This way I can get my data off-site in case of a fire or tornado, etc.  This is especially important for genealogy data and family photos than it is for music or movies. There are companies out there that specialize in giving you storage space for off-site backups, that they themselves also back up regularly. My backup system isn’t too involved, but if I do lose on of my drives, I’ll at least have the data on another one.

So, check into some backup software. SyncBackSE was pretty simple for me, but I haven’t used a lot of backup software. Are there any other good programs out there that other genealogists have used? 

• Trivium – “Ascendency” and “The Crusade”
• The Gufs – “A Different Sea”
• Within Temptation – “The Heart of Everything”
• Nine Inch Nails- “Year Zero” (as much as there is out there so far)
• Sevendust – “Alpha”
• John Petrucci- “Suspended Animation”
• Megadeth – “A Tout Le Monde” (2007 Re-release)

Now that I’ve scared everyone off, feel free to take on my challenge by getting tagged and posting your seven.