Mocavo.com adds a 1000 a day plus 450+ new record indexes

If anything, Mocavo.com is accelerating the addition of new records and indexes. The announcement came yesterday on their blog as follows:

Our pursuit to bring all of the world’s historical content online free forever is growing even stronger. Today alone, we are adding more than 450 new record indexes in addition to the 1,000 databases that we usually launch every day. These indexes include 25 million names from a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

The post goes on to explain:

Since October, we have added more than 150,000 databases to our existing collection, revealed revolutionary technologies (including handwriting recognition, transcription, and photo detection tools) and worked with organizations to digitize offline collections - all with the ambition to help our community make more discoveries than ever.  

The total number of collections has risen to 280,671.

U.S. National Archives now on Instagram

Sometimes there are online announcements that seem important and other times I have to wonder what in the world is going on. I got a news stream notice that the U.S. National Archives is now on Instagram. Perhaps you are not yet "into" Instagram. Wikipedia describes the online website as follows:

Instagram is an online photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter,Tumblr and Flickr. A distinctive feature is that it confines photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic andPolaroid images, in contrast to the 16:9 aspect ratio now typically used by mobile device cameras. Users are also able to record and share short videos lasting for up to 15 seconds.

I have commented from time to time about the somewhat feeble efforts the National Archives has made so far to digitize and make available online their huge content. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, but by and large the vast bulk of the records are only available directly on paper (or whatever) at the main National Archive locations and branches around the country. For example here is a summary of the holdings from the National Archives website:

Laid end to end, the sheets of paper in our holdings would circle the Earth over 57 times! In addition to all of this paper, we have:

• over 93,000 motion picture films; 
• more than 5.5 million maps, charts, and architectural drawings;
• more than 207,000 sound and video recordings; 
• more than 18 million aerial photographs; 
• nearly 35 million still pictures and posters;
• and more than 3.5 billion electronic records. 

The volume grows at about 1.4 billion pages per year. Creating copies for our web site, and preserving those copies, simply exceeds our resources at this time.

To see what is being done to put all this online, excluding of course the present Instagram photos, see Digitization at the National Archives (NARA). The list of documents digitized so far is listed on the page entitled "Microfilm Publications and Original Records Digitized by Our Digitization Partners." You might note from that page that the "partners" are Ancestry.com and it's subsidiary Fold3.com almost exclusively.

To give you an idea why I call the effort feeble, here is a statement from the webpage entitled "Additional Digitization Resources"

On the National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA's) web site, there are additional resources related to digitization, including: technical guidelines; presentations on archival digitization practices and theory; and the NARA Strategic Plan. NARA's Online Catalog contains approximately 126,500 digitized copies of historical documents and photographs.

That is 126,500 out of the 3.5 billion electronic records not to mention the rest of the listed holdings.

Interesting that the State of Washington Digital Archives currently has 49,491,647 searchable digital records online and the National Library of Australia on its Trove.nla.gov.au websites has 389,478,396 online resources. Apparently, the United States Government does not put much of a priority on fulfilling the mission of the National Archives to make its holding available to the public.

Aren't we glad they are putting photos up on Instagram!

Special offer from MyHeritage.com

NOTE: This special offer expires on March 8, 2014. If you are dissatisfied with your present family tree server or if you just want to expand your research with automated searches, then you may want to consider either switching over to MyHeritage.com or adding MyHeritage.com in addition to your existing family tree program. Click here to get this special offer, 

As my blog grows in popularity, various companies approach me from time to time to participate in advertising promotions. I decided many years ago when I was involved in retail sales, that I would not promote any product that I was not personally enthusiastic about. This rule has carried over to my participation in the genealogical community. As I write my blog, I will pass on information about new products and services but I will not promote a product unless I personally use it and am enthusiastic about it.

During the past year or so, many people have identified me with MyHeritage.com primarily because of my involvement in RootsTech 2013 where I substituted in presenting their keynote address.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have now heard that they will be given free access to the three large online genealogical database programs, subject to some conditions, which have yet to be fully explored. Please take note of this, as I do not want my readers who are members of the LDS Church and unaware of the program to pay for subscriptions and then find out that their subscription could have been free sometime in the future.

As I have done in the past, I am now offering this special offer from MyHeritage. Those of my readers, who are members of the LDS Church, will have to take into consideration that they may have free access to the program sometime in the future. With that said, here is the link to the special offer:

This offer is a 50% discount off the full price of the program.

Over the past few months the upgrades and new records added to MyHeritage.com make me even more enthusiastic about the company.

In just the past few months they have announced:

• 815 million US public records - this allows you to search for recent relatives, lost biological family and grandparents where you are missing basic information. and contact relatives you are looking for.
• BillionGraves and MyHeritage partnership to preserve tombstones around the world– this will allow much faster indexing of the world’s tombstones as MyHeritage recruits its tens of millions of members to help in this important project.
• 160 million US and UK records added.
• 138 million Geni profiles now available on MyHeritage SuperSearch.
• Add family tree profiles from records – this new feature allows you to grow your tree as you find new people through MyHeritage Record Matches.
• 90 million Nordic records added.
• Enrich multiple profiles from a single record match – when you confirm a Record Match. MyHeritage pulls the other family information at the same time allowing you to extract information from many people in a few clicks!
• FamilySearch Partnership – 2 more billion records added to MyHeritage.

These new features, content and partnerships are making MyHeritage a very important site, with the technology to break down many barriers.

In full honesty I have seen a few complaints made to me directly concerning issues with the program. I have worked through those issues and in many cases directly with the participation of MyHeritage's representatives, I have been totally satisfied with their support of their users. In most instances I have traced the problems reported to me as originating with defects in the GEDCOM file uploaded by the users. MyHeritage.com has solved the other issues, one that was handled when I got an email from a MyHeritage.com user. The tree in question had an improperly and very unusually formatted name, MyHeritage’s CEO Gilad Japhet personally responded to the complaint and used it as an opportunity to quickly improve MyHeritage based on the unusual formatting.

As with any large organization, there are detractors, but I have not found any of the complaints to be due to fundamental issues with the program. If the statistics on the MyHeritage.com map page are accurate, they now have over 70 million members around the world. There are a lot of people that see that this program is beneficial and I do too.

Most recently, the number of automatically obtained sources for my online family tree has increased dramatically. The inclusion of new records has provided information that I previously was unaware of. In my opinion, the price of the program is well worth the benefits, especially with this special offer. Even if I knew that the program would be free in the future, with my background in programming and product development, I would not want to wait until the changes to the product were developed before I took advantage of the automatic research available through uploading a family tree.

I am presently looking at over 6500 sources from Record Matches delivered to me, and with the automatic searching of additional records through the Record Detective feature, I am adding new people and many new records to my database as fast as I can do the work. Would I give up all that to wait until the program was offered for free? I suppose you will have to answer that question yourself, If this dilemma applies to you.

I have seen great success using MyHeritage and continue to confirm Record Matches that are adding great record finds to my tree. I am happy to present you this special offer and hope it will be as beneficial to you as it has been to me.

Click here to get this special offer, before it expires on March 8th.

Act Now!

DNA's Impact -- A 2050 Look

Nathan W. Murphy raised quite storm of comments about a blog post on FamilySearch entitled, "Family History in 2050: DNA's Impact." It is apparent that the commentators do not share Nathan's view of the future and, like many in the genealogical community, take themselves way too seriously. I have been a Popular Science reader for years. Not quite as long as this March, 1921 cover, but for a very long time. I am quite used to their "predictions" about the future. I guess that their accuracy for predicting the future is extremely poor. This is mainly caused by developments, such as computers, that no one could accurately foresee. Likewise, predicting the future of genealogy is just a risky, but still entertaining. I am afraid that I do not share Nathan's Utopian view of the future impact of DNA on genealogy, not because it might not happen, but simply because 2050 is way too soon for such a change.

You might have noticed in one of my recent posts that I made a reference to science fiction. Even if you are not a science fiction fan, I might have you recall two movies that were popular a few years back: 2001, A Space Odyssey and 2010. I might remind most of you that it is now 2014 and almost all of the events depicted in both movies are just as far in the future as ever. Nevertheless, some changes have been spectacularly more dramatic than Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick imagined, such as SIRI on my smartphone, but space travel involves huge investments in an endeavor that has yet to prove economically viable.

Likewise, technological developments are unpredictable both in their possible occurrence and in their impact. Genealogy is a very, very conservative pursuit. If you want to know the reality, think about how many people are still using Personal Ancestral File. I taught a class yesterday on Social Networking and Genealogy and some of the class members did not have even one social networking account, not even Facebook. My prediction is that in 2050, just a few short years away, there will still be a substantial segment of the genealogical community that will never have heard of DNA and will still be doing almost all of their research recording on paper.

DNA will only become valuable for genealogical research to the extent that the paper (online or physical) research is done in a way that complements the DNA results. For example, all the DNA tests in the world today will not correct the errors in the online family trees now in existence.

Thanks to Nathan for his entertaining look at the future. Without such glimpses into the future we would be complacent with the present and fail to embrace new technology when it is manifestly superior to what we have now. But just like Popular Science's monorail and very frequently featured flying cars, some developments just never seem to have a general impact on society and sometimes the real changes come from very surprising and unanticipated developments.

Genealogical Consistency in Time and Space

I have been a SciFi fan since I read Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky when I was about nine years old. See Asimov, Isaac. Pebble in the Sky. New York: Fawcett Publications, Inc, 1950. One theme of science fiction has always been time travel. There is quite a discussion about the origins of time travel stories (See Wikipedia: Time travel) but for me H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, was the most influential. See Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. An Invention. Pp. 152. W. Heinemann: London, 1895). So now you are thinking, "Here we go again, what can this possibly have to do with genealogy?" Hmm. Maybe this time I have finally gone off the deep end and starting writing random posts? It could happen.

But fortunately (or unfortunately) that time has yet to come. For the past few years, as I write this blog, from time to time I have focused on the vagaries of family trees. As I have pointed out quite recently, sometimes the information people put online is surprisingly and completely inconsistent, inaccurate, incomplete, medically impossible, physically impossible, insane, and has many other issues. Unfortunately, I am sometimes guilty of this myself. But recently, I have become convinced that the only way some of this information is correct is that my ancestors and collateral relatives knew the secret of time travel.

I am now firmly convinced that some (may all) of my great-grandmothers were secret time travelers. This enabled them to have children into their 80s and 90s and to marry 3 year old husbands. I can't imagine why this explanation for the inconsistencies didn't just jump out at me before, given my almost constant interest in science fiction. Sometimes it is hard to figure exactly which of my ancestors as shown on countless online family trees was the time traveler, but it seems to be more predominant in the female lines than the male lines. Maybe the male time travelers are just more adept at covering up their time traveling tracks?

I am seriously suggesting that FamilySearch.org, MyHeritage.org, Ancestry.com and all the others add a very prominent check box that says

Just think of all the time this would save. We could then have a rational explanation for all the temporal inconsistencies and such that clutter up the world of online family trees. Think about this and see if this doesn't explain some of your own thorny online family tree problems.

Don't forget to thank me for finally making all the junk online seem rational.

Comments on Becoming an Excellent Genealogist -- Chapter One

At #RootsTech 2014, I received a complimentary copy of a book published by ICAPGen, the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists. The book is as follows:

Meyerink, Kory L., Tristan Tolman, and Linda K. Gulbrandsen. Becoming an Excellent Genealogist: Essays on Professional Research Skills. [Salt Lake City, Utah]: ICAPGen, 2012.

After an overview of the book, I immediately decided to comment on the book, chapter by chapter, not just do a one time review of the entire book. It is that good and that important to genealogists who wish to rise to a level of excellency. Most of ideas resonate with my own and many sections of the first chapter sound very much like some of the classes I have taught at the Mesa FamilySearch Library. It is really nice to find something I can completely agree with for a change.

The first chapter of the book is entitled "What Makes an Excellent Genealogist?" by Kory L. Meyerink, MLS, AG, FUGA.  Yes, to some extent the book is aimed at genealogists who would be motivated to become accredited or certified. However many of the problems associated with the unsophisticated popularity of genealogy as a "hobby" can be overcome by learning the principles set forth in the book.

Indirectly, the first chapter addresses an interesting concept relating to the way that genealogy is practiced. For example, if I were to take up woodworking as a hobby, and began building woodworking projects willy-nilly without any instructions and without taking time to learn how to operate any of the machinery, I would probably turn out junk. However, the junk would be my own and it would be highly unlikely that anyone would copy what I had done. In contrast, if I approach genealogy as a "hobby" and I began to construct a pedigree willy-nilly with no instruction and without taking time to learn how to operate in the genealogical community, it is equally possible or probable that I will turn out junk. However, this junk may very well be broadcast to the entire world on a public family tree. In addition, we have to recognize that anytime we began working on researching our ancestral lines, we are in effect, involving all of our relatives whether we recognize that fact or not or even know who they are. For this reason, genealogy falls within a unique type of activity that automatically involves a larger ancestral community.

In essence, the first chapter of the book outlines a way to adequately function within this greater ancestral community to which we all belong. The chapter appears to reduce the process of becoming an excellent genealogist to a list of suggested methodologies. But this is in fact the basis for improving the overall function of the genealogical community. I would guess, that the most influential impression generated by the genealogical community to those outside the community, is one of marginal incompetence. Even the existence of those in the community who could be considered to be excellent genealogists are so far outnumbered by those who have little or no background, training or experience that the challenge of improving the overall image of genealogy is practically impossible.

The existence of a book such as this one indicates that there are at least some members of the genealogical community who have a sufficient amount of self-awareness to question the general practices that are so abundantly illustrated in the millions of online family trees. The first chapter of the book correctly focusing upon the issue of methodologies, provides a basis for introspection and self-assessment. As the chapter points out the only way to make any progress as a genealogist in overcoming the limitations inherent in much of what passes for genealogy is to make a conscientious effort to study, learn and begin the process immediately of correcting past errors.

Some of the key steps suggested by Kory involve some obvious issues such as watching for changing jurisdictions. But other suggestions such as implementing a research plan to research non-family lines, are not quite as commonly accepted as necessary. All in all, I felt that the suggestions in the book were extremely valuable and would recommend the book and particularly the first chapter as a basis for a secondary or perhaps advanced class on genealogy.

Comments on the Pitfalls of Cutting Your Research Short

In a recent Mocavo.com blog post by Michael J. Leclerc entitled, "Pitfalls of Cutting Your Research Short,"  he mentioned the new Genealogy Standards book from the Board for Certification of Genealogists. Here is the citation to the book:

Board for Certification of Genealogists (Washington, D.C.). Genealogy Standards. 2014.

Michael makes the following comment:

The other day I wrote a popular post about the new Genealogy Standards book from the Board for Certification of Genealogists. This is very heartening to see. Experienced genealogists get extremely frustrated with a new breed of researcher. These are people who think that discussing quality researching is only done by “elitists” who have no interest in the average person. Many of these people use their blogs and other social media to denigrate quality work, saying that a bit of work online will tell you what you need to know about your family.

He is pointing out a problem that some would-be genealogists are gathering names into family trees and as Michael further points out, "they are actually collecting a number of people who are completely unrelated and putting them into their family tree."

My wife came home from the Mesa FamilySearch Library yesterday with just such a story. Where an online program had suggested a connection and the patron had incorporated the record and the information into her family tree without a moment's evaluation. My wife had quickly detected the error and suggested that the information was not correct.

I have this same issue reproduced in what is presently showing for all the world in FamilySearch.org's Family Tree. This particular problem originates from an entry in a book about one of my ancestors. The book is as follows:

Parkinson, Diane, and John Parkinson. James Parkinson of Ramsey: His Roots and His Branches : England, Australia, America : a Biographical History and Genealogical Record of the Family of James and Elizabeth Chattle Parkinson. Austin, Tex: Published for the James Parkinson Family Association by Historical Publications, 1987.

Here is an image of the page in question. You can see the page clearly by clicking on the image.

The information here is fairly clear and there is a note that the information was obtained from a Bishop's Transcript and Hephzibah Newton's father's will and her death certificate. This research was done by the Parkinson Family Organization. In this entry, Charles Parkinson and Hephzibah Newton are shown to have the following children:

Ann Parkinson b. 8 March 1799

Thomas Parkinson b. 13 April 18_

Mary Parkinson b. 23 Sep 18_

James Parkinson b. 22 October 1808

Sarah Parkinson b. 16 October 1810

The family group is shown with child No. 3 listed as "Mary Parkinson, b. 23 Sep 18_, no death date in Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, England and with no spouse listed. 

Now, if we go to FamilySearch.org Family Tree and look at the same family we see some significant additions and differences. Here is the list of names and dates for the same family of Charles Parkinson and Hephzibah Newton:

Thomas Parkinson b. abt 1800

Ann Parkinson b. 8 March 1799

Mary Parkinson b. 23 September 1800

James Parkinson b. 22 October 1808

Sarah Parkinson b 16 October 1810

Again, looking at Mary Parkinson and going to her entry in Family Tree we see the following:

Mary Parkinson

Birth: ABT 23 September 1800

Christening: 29 February 1824

Death: Deceased

Marriage to James Quemby with a daughter, Mary Quemby, born in 1852. 

OK, so there are no sources for any of this information. But Mary was christened when she was 24 years old and had a daughter when she was 52? James Quemby is listed as being born ABT 1800 in England with no other dates and no other information at all and no death date. I checked for duplicates of James Quemby and there appear to be none. If was nice that he and his wife were finally able to have a daughter when they were 52 years old. 

If is clear that this whole entry is bogus. The dates and even the places (which I haven't mentioned) are fictitious. This is certainly not the fault of the Parkinson book. When I look at the history of the daughter, Mary Quemby, I see the notation that "This child was added when these people were merged." No source. No further explanation. 

What do I do with this information? Take out all the relationships and dates? What is my source for doing all this? Obviously, there is more research needed, but I have literally hundreds, if not thousands of similar situations and examples in Family Tree alone, not to mention Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com and all the other related family trees I have online. 

Unfortunately, I can take almost any pedigree, at random, and find the same types of errors and the same unsupported additions.