Most Popular Browsers, Search Engines and Operating Systems

It has been quite a while since I wrote about browsers, search engines, and operating systems. During the past few years, there have been significant changes in the way we access our computing devices. There have been significant changes in the market percentages of the different programs. Time to see what is going on out there on the internet.

First browsers. A browser, also known as a web browser, is a program that runs on your device (using the term to include anything attached to the internet) that enables the user to navigate the World Wide Web to access and display data of all kinds. You might be surprised at what are now the most commonly used programs. Here is the lineup from Statista.com for 2018.

• Chrome for Android 27.62%
• Chrome 63.0 13.76%
• Chrome 64.0 11.55%
• Safari iPhone 9.58%
• Firefox 58.0 3.41%

Here is another list from ZDNet.com

• Chrome 44.5%
• Safari 25.4%
• Various versions of Internet Explorer 15.5%
• Firefox 7.4%
• Edge 3.5%

Here is another website with statistics: Digtal.gov. This is where some of the information about usage comes from. There are many other sources.

Now, what about search engines? Here is another list from Statista.com. But really, the answer is there is Google and everybody else. Google has 63.5 percent of the overall search inquiries in the U.S., but on mobile devices, it has 93% of the market share. Worldwide, Google has an 86.3 percent market share. No other search engine has even close to 10% of the market. 

Next, on to operating systems. Here we have two divisions: desktop and mobile. There are probably not many surprises here. It is back to Statista.com. 

Desktop

• Windows 82.55%
• MacOS is about 12%

The rest share what's left. 

Mobile again from Statista.com

• Android 30.5%
• iOS 23.8%
• Microsoft 2.6%
• RIM (Blackberry) 6.8

Many others with very small percentages.

If you can remember what was popular back a few years, you can see that there has been a huge change in the way computers are used and the programs that are the most used. 

What Are Special Collections?

Most of the larger libraries and archives of the world have a storage area set apart from the regular books and other materials where they keep items that are either very monetarily valuable, in a delicate condition or are extremely rare. These sections of the libraries are usually called "Special Collections." In most cases, access to the items in these areas is restricted in some way. The Special Collections are not the same as libraries that have "closed stacks" restricting patron access to the books and other materials and requiring all of the patrons to request items for retrieval by library staff. Some libraries and archives even have the items in their special collections separately cataloged.

Smaller local libraries may also have a section of books or other items that are restricted from circulation and not kept on the regular shelves.

In my experience, most of the genealogists I talk to have little or no experience in researching in a special collections library. The first challenge is finding it. There may or may not be a designation or sign acknowledging that a special collections library exists. For example, the Library of Congress has most of its collection in closed stacks, but the Special Collections part of the Library is ent

Another example, the state of North Carolina has over 80 colleges and universities. Nearly all of these entities have libraries and special collections. Think about it. If you had ancestors in North Carolina, have you check the catalogs of all these libraries? Now, there is a North Carolina Digital Heritage Center that has a huge online collection of some of these items but this is only a small part of these valuable collections.

I have written about this experience previously, but while I was researching my great-grandfather, Henry Martin Tanner, I found a collection of records from one of his sons in the University of Utah Special Collections Library consisting of 21.25 linear feet of records. These records contained information about almost all the people who had lived in the small Arizona town where Henry lived. I also found most of the same collection in the Northern Arizona University Special Collections Library.

Since the items in the special collections libraries do not circulate, you may have to plan on spending the time at the location of the library looking at the items in a special reading room like the one shown above in the Library of Congress.

To find a special collections library simply do an online search for the location, i.e. the state or county, with the words "special collections." You may be surprised at what you will find.

Busy Week at Conference in Pennsylvania

My wife and I are busy this week assisting FamilySearch at the Registers of Wills and Clerks of Orphan's Court Association of Pennsylvania's 91st annual conference. We were asked to support the FamilySearch representative and help to promote the idea of using FamilySearch to help digitize their records. The Conference is being held in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. So we have taken a short drive through the beautiful countryside to help out.

We are there to relate our experiences in digitizing records for Maryland State Archives. I may have to catch up with posts once we get back.

MyHeritage Adds 25 Million New Records

The new additions include millions of records from Ellis Island, West Virginia, and Sweden and hundreds of thousands of records from Denmark. The new records bring the total number of records on the MyHeritage.com website to 9,145,401,868. Yes, that's over 9 billion records.

You can read about the new records on the MyHeritage Blog. See New Historical Records Added in June 2018. If you have Swedish ancestors, you should take note. Here is the explanation of the new Swedish records from the blog post.

Sweden Household Examination Books 1860-1930 Update 

This 3,662,252 million historical record collection update to the Swedish Household Examination Books marks the final installment of this collection which now totals 87,401,340 records. 

The Swedish Household Examination Books serves as the primary source for researching the lives of individuals and families throughout the parishes of Sweden, from the late 1600’s until modern times. The books were arranged by the Swedish Lutheran Church who maintained the official records of the Swedish population until 1991. Each year until 1894, the parish priest would visit each home, first testing each individual’s knowledge of the catechism, and then collecting information about birth dates, marriages, deaths, changes in residence, etc. After 1894, the parish priests continued their visits but tended to be less focused on the doctrinal exams and more focused on collecting population information. These post 1894 records came to be known as the Församlingsbok. 

This June installment is comprised of the records of those who were away from home at the time of the original collection.

 This was particularly interesting to my wife who has Swedish ancestry.

Returning to the Challenges of Francis Cooke

Week after week as I receive an email generated from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree about those whom I am watching, I see almost constant changes to people such as the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke. Insanity is often defined as extreme foolishness or irrationality. I think this definition applies to those who feel that they need to keep editing a prominent person. It boggles my mind to think that there are so many people out there in the greater genealogical community that know so little about history and particularly about New England history to think that they have "discovered" some new information for a person such as a Mayflower passenger.

Notes, life sketches, memories, documents, and dozens of source do not seem to make an impact on the waves of changes. Of course, all of these "changes" also fail to be supported by even one source. Fortunately, there is a small group of people who ardently defend the reality of the entries and change everything entered back to conform with the more than well established and sourced information.

For example, there is some who added a birth date for Francis Cooke of 1 October 1577 and further shows he was born in Gides Hall, Essex, England. In fact, no new sources have been added to his entries for at least a year and there are no records showing a birth or christening record for Francis Cooke. The Gides Hall records date from the 1700s and show a person named Francis Cooke marrying a woman named Hester on 2 November 1766. Remember, the Mayflower arrived in America in 1620.

These few entries in my Family Tree take up an inordinate amount of time and effort just to maintain the status quo. Over the years, there has been some discussion about making such entries read-only or locked, but that presupposes that the information is complete and correct at the time the entries are locked.

There are presently 1357 people in the Family Tree with the name of Francis Cooke.

As an example, one of them was born in England in 1566 and supposedly died in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States in 1675.

He apparently lived to be 109 years old. There are no sources listed for this person. By the way, the actual entry and the search listing do not agree. The entry is for Francis Cooks KGS8-47J.

Usually, when I write a post like this one, I get several suggestions to make my views known in GetSatisfaction. There are presently 4929 topics on just the Family Tree in GetSatisfaction. The total number of topics is 12,209. Am I supposed to search through all these topics to see if this issue has already been raised? Should I start a new topic?

Well, I did search and, as I already knew, found that this topic has been around for at least five years or more. It also turns out that one of the people who commented on this problem is the same person who is cleaning up Francis Cooke today. So some of us have been working on this same issue for many years.

By the way, the response here outlines several options for limiting these irrational changes. This is only one of the many similar topics.

Now, short of requiring a psych evaluation for potential users of the program are there any other ways that the number of changes to these prominent people can be reduced?

I don't have an answer that is any different than all the different responses in GetSatisfaction. But I do know that I will outlast those who are making irrational changes and I already have assistance from a 2nd generation and will now start working on the third generation of those who will defend the integrity of the Family Tree.

Where are we with social networking?

What is happing in the world of blogs? What is happening on Facebook? What about Google+? And what about Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram? Not to mention, what is going on in the hundreds of other social networking websites. Last, of all, what does this have to do with genealogy?

Here is a graphic display of some of the more prominent social networking websites. How many do you recognize?

I am only on about nine of them. What do I know?

I have observed many times in the past few years that genealogical blogs are on the decline both in content and number. I have been going through lists of genealogy blogs online and continually find blogs listed that haven't posted for years. Some have been abandoned altogether. For example, out of ten blogs I checked, only three still had viable and updated posts. Many of these were abandoned as long as three or more years ago. Even though some of them had postings in 2018, the posts were outdated by many months. As I continued to search, I looked at posted "best genealogy blogs" and "genealogy blogs worth reading." Interestingly, my blog was seldom listed but most of the ones recommended hadn't published in years.

My reality is that one of my most popular venues is Pinterest.com. I get more visits on Pinterest.com than I do in almost all my other blogs.

One interesting development is the invitation I received from RootsTech 2019 (RootsTech.org) inviting me to apply to be a RootsTech Ambassador. There was no mention of blogs or bloggers in the invitation.

Where have all the bloggers gone? To flowers every one?

Facebook.com has a lot of current genealogical activity but it is not immediately evident from a common news stream. Even if you subscribe to a lot of Facebook genealogy posts, you will probably lose them in the stream of viral videos.

What about Pinterest? I have no idea how to focus on genealogy on Pinterest. Everything goes by in huge streams of photos.

Instagram? I limit my friends to my family to keep from seeing everything that goes on everywhere.

I could go on but my impression is that genealogical information of the kind sent out regularly by experienced genealogists is getting harder and harder to find.

Are you aware of the Veridian Newspaper Collections?

https://www.veridiansoftware.com/collections/

It has been some time since I last wrote about VeridianSoftware.com. Veridian is a company called DL Consulting located in Hamilton, New Zealand. Here is a quote from their website about the company.

Since 2002 DL Consulting has been helping libraries around the world retain their position as critical and important community resources. We understand that libraries are responding to an increasing demand for online access to content. Our Veridian digitization services give libraries the ability to preserve archives of historic material and deliver the content as a digital collection to their communities. 

DL Consulting has proven experience delivering large projects for prestigious university libraries, large state and public libraries, and national libraries in the U.S. and abroad. Our staff is highly skilled in managing complex digital collections and is always responsive to issues large and small. DL Consulting is based in Hamilton, New Zealand, with an office in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The company maintains a huge search engine called Elephind.com that searches more than 149 million items from more than 2,700 historical newspapers around the world. Some of the collections include:

• 2017/06 Purdue University Library new http://exponent.lib.purdue.edu Done
• 2017/07 Catholic News Archive new http://thecatholicnewsarchive.org Done
• 2017/08 The Vassar College Digital Newspaper Archives new http://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu Done
• Kent State University http://dks.library.kent.edu Done
• 2017/09 Colorado Historic Newspapers http://coloradohistoricnewspapers.org Done
• Digital Michigan Newspaper – Central Michigan University http://digmichnews.cmich.edu Done
• 2017/10 Hudson River Valley Heritage Newspapers new http://news.hrvh.org Done
• 2017/11 Stanford Daily – Stanford University new http://stanforddailyarchive.com Done
• 2017/12 Eastview/Hoover Hoji Shinbun new http://hojishinbun.hoover.org/ Done

Here is a link to the complete list: https://elephind.com/?a=p&p=browsepubs

Once you begin to recognize that there are an overwhelming number of online resources to search, it will change the way you do your genealogical research.