Here are a couple of interesting items from the latest Rootsweb Review "E-Zine". Gene Pennington (Group 7) Chairman Research Director Pennington Research Association, Inc. www.PenningtonResearch.org ============================================================================ = NEWS. SSDI Updated. RootsWeb offers free access to the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), which currently includes deaths records through October 2006. This database contains several important bits of information on the more than 78,440,205 persons whose deaths are on file with the U.S.'s Social Security Administration (SSA), including: social security number, date of issuance, state of issuance, date of birth, date of death, and last address of record. The SSDI is created from the SSA's Death Master File. It is a database of people whose deaths were reported to the SSA beginning about 1962. The SSA Death Master File and SSDI are used by leading U.S. government, financial, investigative, credit-reporting organization, medical research, and other industries to verify identity as well as to prevent fraud -- and to comply with the U.S. Patriot Act. http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/ http://rwguide.rootsweb.com/lesson10.htm SOME SITES WORTH SEEING. Vintage Christmas Cards from the early 1900s. Perhaps your ancestors sent or received some like these http://www.twogatos.com/vintage/christmas/ GenDisasters.com chronicles the events that touched our ancestors' lives -- train wrecks, fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, storms, mining explosions, ship wrecks, drownings, and accidents. These are transcribed newspaper accounts, excerpts from historical books and photographs detail hundreds of life's tragedies that our ancestors' endured, from the 1800s to the 1950s -- and it's free. Search hundreds of articles or browse by state or event. http://www.gendisasters.com/ The North Carolina Collection Biographical Index, compiled by the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a comprehensive index of more than 500 books containing biographical sketches of North Carolinians. The index now contains over 150,000 entries. http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ncc_bio/index.html ====================================================================== REPRINTS. Permission to reprint articles from RootsWeb Review is granted unless specifically stated otherwise, provided: (1) the reprint is used for non-commercial, educational purposes; and (2) the following notice appears at the end of the article: Previously published in RootsWeb Review: 20 December 2006, Vol. 9, No. 51 End