Resources of the Week: Three-for-One
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor.
I end up "collecting" a lot of sites that I'd like to share in this weekly posting, but they do start "accumulating" after awhile, so here is a three-for the-price-of-one ROTW.
+ MissingMoney.com -- Yes, the name of this site sounds somewhat...suspect, so let's poke around a little bit and see what we can find out about it:
Welcome to MissingMoney.com, a free website. MissingMoney.com and its contents and related services are operated by the ACS Unclaimed Property Clearinghouse a service of Affiliated Computer Services, Inc., dba ACS Unclaimed Property Clearinghouse, a Delaware corporation ("ACS").
...
ACS is the leading provider of unclaimed property support services to state governments. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators ("NAUPA") is the trade association of state governmental entities responsible for administering their respective states' unclaimed property programs. At the behest of NAUPA and with the cooperation of the respective states and territories of the United States (collectively, the "States"), ACS operates this web site, MissingMoney.com (the "Web Site"), as a means of providing via the Internet ACS' proprietary database (the "National Database"). ACS is compensating NAUPA in the form of an annual royalty payment, for the exclusive use of their endorsement, name and the logo on the National Database. This Database is searchable by the general public at no charge and integrates unclaimed property information from various states and territories of the United States.
OK, so here is one-stop searching for "unclaimed property" in most of the 50 states. What is "unclaimed property"?
Common types of unclaimed property include:
Bank accounts and safe deposit box contents
Stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and dividends
Uncashed checks and wages
Insurance policies, CD's, trust funds
Utility deposits, escrow accounts
Unclaimed property does not include real estate property.
On the home page, you can perform a quick search -- type in a first name, a last name and a two-letter state abbreviation. I immediately discovered that I am owed some amount under $100 from State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company. So I click the "Yes I Can Claim" button, which takes me to another page explaining that I must submit my claim through the State of Florida's Bureau of Unclaimed Property (which has the charming URL -- http://www.fltreasurehunt.org/). A link takes me there, where I need to perform another unclaimed property search, but alas, clicking on the appropriate link brings up a black page in both Firefox and Safari. Maybe it's just me, or maybe the server was having A Bad Day. I make a note to try again with Internet Explorer at work.
When you receive your initial page of search results, notice at the top that you can now do a name search across all the states in this database at once. Search tips are available, as is a detailed FAQ.
If you prefer to search directly at a particular state's official unclaimed property website, you can click on the small U.S. map on the home page, which will take you to a larger version. Then you can click on an individual state to be transported to that state's unclaimed property website. Below this map, you will find official unclaimed property contact information for all 50 states; Washington, DC, and Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
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+ Centre for Russian Studies' Database -- This resource is hosted by NUPI – the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, a quasi-think tank that was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 1959. The database, which is in English, contains:
In all honesty, it's difficult to tell when the information was updated; it definitely is not current. Also, there are some bad links, and sometimes you run into unexpected instructions in Norwegian. But it's pretty decent for contemporary history, and there's plenty to look at if you poke around in here.
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+ Ships at sea: positions and weather observations -- If you click on the prominent All ships worldwide link, you will see that it's crazy-busy out there in the world's waterways. If you go clicking around this amazing "live tracker' map, you will bring up lists of ships in the vicinity, along with the time each was last reported (UTC), latitude and longitude, and invidual ship's call sign. Each ship name is a live link that you can click on to view its route to this point. Links to information about weather, tides, water temperature, wind speed, etc., are also available here.
If you don't want to see "all ships," you can click on links that will restrict the display to:
You can also search for individual ships by call sign, name, or latitude/longitude vicinity. Keep in mind that not all ships report weather/position information for any number of reasons. So if you're looking for a specific vessel and can't find it, don't automatically assume the worst.
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