The Heritage Canada Foundation has introduced SPERO-L, a free email-based tool about places of faith that are at risk in Canada. Connect with others to find answers to questions about building maintenance, community outreach and fundraising, or share success stories on how re-purposed places of faith are being preserved and reused in your community.

For more information, visit http://www.heritagecanada.org/eng/spero-l/index.cfm.

There is an interesting web site that will tell you whether a surname occurs in a number of countries throughout the world. The countries include yjr U.S., Canada, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and most of Europe but not Finland, Greece, Portugal, Czech and Slovak Republics, the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The site claims its sources are telephone directories and electoral rolls. It is located at http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames.

Other statistics for a given surname include the most common forenames, top countries that include the surname including frequency per million inhabitants, top regions and top cities. If you click on a country, it displays frequency by region.

Over the course of the year and especially during the summer months, many out-of-town visitors will come in to the Prairie History Room and use our collection. Staff will often provide instructions on how to get to other institutions such as the Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB) and Saskatchewan Genealogical Society (SGS).

To help you, we have now created a Google map (www.tinyurl.com/regina-genlocmap) listing all of the libraries, museums, archives, cemeteries and government agencies that hold and provide access to genealogical and historical records. The map includes the usual favorites such as SAB, SGS, City of Regina Archives, and the RCMP Heritage Centre as well as some of the lesser known resources such as the University of Regina Archives & Special Collections, Saskatchewan Military Museum and the Zichydorf Village Association.

If we missed an organization that should be included on the map, send us an email so we can add it to the list.

Like many of you, staff at Prairie History also like to bookmark many of their favorite history & genealogy websites on their computers. Now, we are happy to announce that these web links are now on del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website that enables users to store their bookmarks online and access them from any available computer.

As you can see, each of our recommended web link is given a brief description of the site, what information it offers and assigned a tag (one-word descriptor) to help you locate similar websites. The number above the web link indicates how many people have also bookmarked the site as one of their favorites.

To learn more about social bookmarking, check out this short video from CommonCraft.

Because del.icio.us enables users to share their favorite bookmarks with family and friends, the Prairie History Room also encourages you to join our network and share your favorite history and genealogy web links with us so can all benefit from the many wonderful online resources available to us.

In addition, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up-to-date with the Prairie History Room’s favorite web links.

Saskatchewan Vital Statistics has finally launched its online death index. This index will eventually contain deaths more than 70 years old but currently, it only contains deaths prior to 1917. Other years will be added as they become available.

If you have ever tried using the online Montreal city directories at the Bibliotheque National de Quebec website, you will notice the complete lack of a search field where you can type in the surname and have the site pull up all the relevant pages. Instead, you are forced to go through each directory one by one and scroll through each alphabetical list.

Steve P. Morse, creator of One-Step portals for genealogy, has now created a search portal for these directories.

Simply type in the name, select the year and hit "update display" button to get to the digitized images. The portal will then direct you to the relevant pages. You will still have to scroll through the pages to get to the name you are looking for but at least, you won't have to open up each directory and each alphabetical listing to do your search.