One Free Pass to RootsTech 2023

 I can give away one complimentary IN-PERSON RootsTech 2023 3-day pass ($98 value) to RootsTech 2023 at the Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah March 2nd through the 4th. If you send me an email at genealogyarizona at gmail.com, I will pick a winner out a hat from any emails I might receive. All entries must be received before 12:00 pm on January 31, 2023 to qualify as an entry. Thanks for coming to RootsTech 2023 if you win and be sure an look me up. Also, please do not enter if you are not coming IN PERSON to RootsTech this year. Thanks.

RootsTech Announces Jordin Sparks as a Keynote Speaker

 RootsTech 2023 announced its first Keynote Speaker; Jordin Sparks. See https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/jordin-sparks-keynote-rootstech-2023

This year's conference will be held from March 2nd to the 4th at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah and online. You can register by going to the RootsTech 2023 website at https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/

We have had some considerable discussion about what we can expect with the live, in-person part of the conference after a two year hiatus. The discussion centers mostly about how many people will attend in person when the conference will also be broadcast. Most of the live classes will not be broadcast and in addition, those who attend online will not be participating in the Exhibit Hall and will likely miss the unique offers that are usually made at the conference. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing a few people I have missed seeing for the past two years or so. I will be teaching a live class and will also have six online videos. I will also be presenting at the MyHeritage booth all three days of the conference. In addition, I will be in attendance at the GEDCOM events and probably a few other activities that have yet to be announced or determined. You can also look for me at The Family History Guide booth and the Ambassador area in the Exhibit Hall. I think this is the first RootsTech conference where I will be a speaker, an exhibitor, and an ambassador. 

Hope to see you there. 

Family History Centers all become FamilySearch Centers and more

 

By Beneathtimp - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89749588

Years ago, when we lived in Mesa, Arizona, I worked at the Mesa FamilySearch Library. Yes, the library was "branded" as a FamilySearch Library. It no longer exists. It was closed down completely when reconstruction started on the Mesa, Arizona Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There have been discussions and rumors for a long time that Family History Centers would become FamilySearch Centers. Well, the official announcement of the change finally came in a letter and email dated January 10, 2023. Quoting from the letter announcement:

To better align the identity of family history centers with FamilySearch.org, the Church’s free online family history resource, all centers are being renamed “FamilySearch Centers.” The Church’s Family History Library, located in Salt Lake City, Utah, will be renamed the “FamilySearch Library.”

If you look closely at the photo above from the WikiMedia Commons dated 2 May 2020, you will see that FamilySearch is prominently displayed on the front of the building so changing the name shouldn't be much of a surprise. What will take a lot of time is converting all the over 5000 local family history centers to FamilySearch Centers.

Additional information online from the FamilySearch Newsroom states the following:

In addition to FamilySearch centers, there are over 1,700 FamilySearch affiliate libraries (public libraries, museums, universities, and archives) that have privileges to limited-access FamilySearch databases. There will be no name change for a FamilySearch affiliate library.

This makes sense since they are called "FamilySearch Affiliate Libraries" already. For most of us, the change has been known and a long time coming. 

Important Exclusive New Israel Immigration Collection from MyHeritage

MyHeritage.com

 Quoting from a blog post, dated 8 January 2023, entitled "MyHeritage Publishes Exclusive Huge Collection of Israel Immigration Records:"

We are delighted to announce sensationally good news: MyHeritage just published a huge new collection covering immigration to Israel from 1919 onwards, with 1.7 million records! And the best news is that we’ve made it completely FREE! This collection is the Israeli equivalent of the famous “Ellis Island” immigration database for the United States. This is probably the biggest news in Israeli genealogy in the last decade! For a period of more than a year, MyHeritage painstakingly indexed thousands of public domain images made available by the Israel State Archives that include all surviving records of all those who immigrated to Israel by ships and by planes from all over the world starting in 1919. MyHeritage is the first organization to create a searchable index for this valuable collection and associate it with the scanned images. The collection is available for all to search and view for FREE, without even having to sign up, making the information more accessible than ever before for anyone researching their Jewish roots in Israel. Almost every genealogist in Israel is expected to find direct ancestors and other relatives in this valuable collection and to know for the first time the precise circumstances of their arrival to Israel.

There is a lot more information about this collection in the blog article linked above. It looks like MyHeritage.com is off to a great start adding to the over 2.5 billion records they added in 2022.  

What You Probably Do Not Know About the FamilySearch Catalog and About Catalogs in General: A basic introductory survival guide

 

I have spent a great portion of my life both working and as a patron in libraries. I started going to the Phoenix Public Library in Phoenix, Arizona when I was about 8 years old and was a constant patron of that and other libraries as I grew up. Much later, during my years at the University of Utah, I worked as a bibliographer and later at the Arizona State University Law School as a Reference Desk Librarian. Beginning in about 2004, I began serving at the Mesa FamilySearch Library (Formerly the Mesa Regional Family History Library and now abandoned) in Mesa, Arizona and now serve at the BYU Family History Library in the main Harold B. Lee Library on the campus of Brigham Young University. For one year, in 2018, my wife and I served as FamilySearch Acquisition Missionaries digitizing documents at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Maryland which are now mostly on the FamilySearch website. My working life was mostly spent as a trial attorney in Arizona and doing extensive research in law libraries and ultimately online. I only go through this short summary of some of my background to give you an idea that I just might know what I am talking about. 

I have written about this before, but it is time to get back into the heart of library research and once again write about catalogs, especially the catalogs used by the major online genealogy websites with a focus on the FamilySearch.org website catalog. 

First of all, library catalogs are organized finding aids. Once a collection of books, documents, and other items goes beyond a level it is indispensable to have some sort of organization. Rather than go through the long history of library cataloging systems and such, I would point you to a dozen or so videos on the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel. Simply click on the tab to the videos and do a simple search for "catalog." You will see a list of videos such as "How does the FamilySearch Catalog work?"

Now let's look at the FamilySearch Catalog. First of all, not all the resources on the website are cataloged in the same way. The main FamilySearch Catalog is based on the original 3 x 5-inch paper catalog in the original Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah like the one shown in the image above. However, the FamilySearch.org website has a section called Genealogies that is not included in a search of the Catalog. In addition, huge collections of documents and records are cataloged (organized) into individual collections, i.e. catalogs within the main catalog. One example is the Family Group Records Collection, Archives Section, 1942-1969 containing 5,337,178 images. You can see an extensive discussion of this and other similar collections in the FamilySearch Research Wiki article, "Family Group Records Collection." If you would like to start to understand what I am writing about, go to the FamilySearch.org website and using the Catalog, try and find these collections. If you read the Research Wiki article, you will see that the main collection is said to be only on microfilm. Contrary to this statement, the main collection is digitized but not searchable except by looking at the sheets in a sort-of alphabetical order. 

I could write an entire book about just what is and what is not in the FamilySearch Catalog. It is far easier to do a Google search of the website as long as you happen to know that a collection exists that using the Catalog. But this is not the real reason for this particular post. 

The main issue with the FamilySearch Catalog and with other such catalogs is that the organization, although superficially appearing to be comprehensive, is arbitrary and capricious. Now to some concrete examples. 

This is a reference to an Images entry from FamilySearch.org Catalog.

Paris, Bourbon, Kentucky, United States
May 14, 1953–Dec 31, 197
Cemetery Records, Directories, Genealogy Records, History Records, Marriage Banns Records, Newspapers, Periodicals, Society Records
956 images
August 4, 2018
https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/search-results?page=1&place=4123940

Here are some of the records that are actually included in this listed item.

Inventory of the County Archives of Indiana, Switzerland County, W.P.A.
Directories: 1976
Place: Fellsburg, Edwards, Kansas, United States
Record Type: Directories
Date 1976

The date of 1976 has nothing to do with the records, it is an acquisition date by the library. Here is another example from this same collection. 

Genealogy Records 1976
Place:  Painesville, Lake, Ohio, United States
Record Type: Genealogy Records
Date: 1976

Again, the date is not the date of the records, it is the date of acquisition. There are other records in this mis-cataloged collection. What I have found is that the catalog entry may or may not have anything to do with the content. In this collection, the only Paris County record is this:

History Records
Place: Paris, Bourbon, Kentucky, United States
Record Type: History Records

This record is actually a memoir entitled:

Paris and Bourbon County Of Early Pioneer Days Recalled in Romantic Detail by Mrs. W. B. Ardery Pub. Paris, Ky: The Kentucky Citizen, 1947,

Note the word romantic (this item is apparently a semi-fictional tribute).

This record is followed by Ward Records from Moore, Butte, County Idaho.
By the way, the Moore, Butte County, Idaho ward records are at

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/199898?availability=Family%20History%20Library
and in a book with the call number of 979.659 K2k

What is missing from the items in the original catalog entry are any cemetery records, directories, genealogy records, marriage bans records, newspapers, periodicals, society records or anything useful at all about Paris, Bourbon, Kentucky. 

The catalog and images are hopelessly confused so the only recourse is to search page by page on every catalog entry to see if the records even resemble the main catalog entry. Now, at this point, I have to say that this is normal. Every catalog in every library I have ever visited has exactly the same types of problems. After years of working with card catalogs and now online, I always assume the catalog is not complete or accurate. 

Now, let's suppose you have a way to put every word from every document and book into a huge searchable "index" of everything. Hmm sounds like Google. The FamilySearch Catalog is searchable by Google as is almost everything else on the website except the documents that have not been added to the catalog and are in the Images collections and information about living people. What if I do a Google search for "Paris, Bourbon, Kentucky history FamilySearch"? Will I find the romantic record?

The answer is complicated. Yes, I will find a huge number of records on FamilySearch for Bourbon County, but this doesn't help me much unless I want to click down through pages and pages of results and that one document is probably somewhere in the huge list of returns. 

Is there a solution? Yes, as a matter of fact and if I had the next two weeks or so to write everything you might need to know to solve the problem and find all the records, I could tell you what I already know. But the caveat is that I don't have any better way of finding the records than by going through each entry carefully page by page and seeing what records actually are available in any one collection or entry. In the old days, this was called "walking the shelves." Seeing what was in the library and not what was in the catalog. I have always done this since I was a child in the Phoenix Public Library and still do it while I am searching online. 

So, happy searching. I don't ever get tired of searching because I always seem to find more. 

If you are still at least partially interested in actually doing research, genealogical or otherwise, I also suggest my video as follows:

Where are all the rest of the records on the FamilySearch website? 

If you are even more interested, you can always contact me through the BYU Family History Library. We will be open again on January 9th, 2023, and follow the BYU academic schedule for when the library is open and available. 

An ending explanation. When the original records were microfilmed, the individual microfilm rolls had a catch-all of whatever was being digitized without any real organization. Almost all the original microfilm rolls had several "items" which may or may not be related. The FamilySearch Catalog has tried to itemize each of the items on each set of records, now digitized from the microfilm or originally digitized. But the catalogers do not always go through each item and topic on an entire microfilm, so you might have baptisms, deaths, marriages etc on an entry marked baptisms or marriages. This inconsistency is consistent that makes it expected and therefore part of the research process. This has been going on since antiquity and is the case for all libraries. Walk the shelves. 

MyHeritage's Big Year

 

The statistics on this infographic are overwhelming, especially adding 2.5 billion historical records. It is also interesting to see that my wife and I are still shown with the animated photos. Anonymous popularity is somewhat of a halmark of genealogy. There is no doubt that almost all of the innovation and increase in basic genealogical tools such as more indexed original records is taking place due to MyHeritage.com.  

MyHeritage.com ended 2022 with more than 106 million users worldwide in 42 different languages, 90 million family trees, 18,916,419,826 historical records, and 6.3 people in its DNA database. 

The resources on the MyHeritage.com website are tremendously useful and some, such as the photo innovations are virally entertaining. For example, one of my friends used the AI Time Machine™ to do a series of activities for all of her grandchildren. 

I am looking forward to all of the new opportunities that we can expect from MyHeritage in 2023. 

Where is genealogy going in 2023 and beyond?

 

I have been watching artificial intelligence develop since I read I Robot for the first time back when I was probably about ten years old. Of course, I didn't really know anything about AI until I was well into my studies of linguistics during my years at the University of Utah. Later, as I became totally involved with computers, I discovered programs that were supposed to try to pass the Touring test for machine intelligence. Then genealogy came along in about 1982 and I realized that AI could help with many of the aspects of genealogy, one major area being optical character recognition and speech transcription. I had seen a demonstration of speech transcription at the IBM exhibit at the World's Fair in Seattle in 1962. See “IBM100 - Pioneering Speech Recognition.” 2012. CTB14. IBM Corporation. March 7, 2012. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/speechreco/breakthroughs/. I have written quite a few blogs about using speech recognition mostly when I was using the Apple version of Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance Software which was the commercial implementation of IBM's program. Unfortunately, Nuance discontinued development and support for the Mac version, and I lost interest in using speech recognition because none of the Mac compatible programs seemed to work well enough to compete with my typing. The editing capability of the Google and Microsoft dictation programs is rudimentary. 

As the years passed, I became involved with learning about handwriting recognition. Optical character recognition has reached an extremely high level of competence and for documents that are in type, accuracy is sufficient for all levels of genealogical research with the one qualification that the original document be available. The current challenge of OCR is not recognizing the characters, it is formatting the output. This turns out to be the larger challenge of handwriting transcription also. It is one thing to transcribe a document written by hand such as a letter and it is another challenge to transcribe a parish register with columns and keep the written document such as this Swedish Household Examination document. 

 The arrangement of the information is just as important as being able to read the handwritten text. 

Now, what has happened in the past few years is a constant improvement in handwriting recognition and document transcription that now allows billions of records to be transcribed in a relatively short time. We saw this in 2022 with the release of the 1950 U.S. Census and the rapid transcription and index of the census by Ancestry.com with the support of FamilySearch.org and a lot of volunteers. 2023 will see the implementation of this technology to transcribe a flood of new documents and indexes to unlock many more. 

Will the human element be replaced by computers? That is still an unanswered question. But the recent news about ChatGPT is an example of what will undoubtedly affect almost every aspect of the research process for genealogy and a lot of other academic disciplines. Here is an AI attempt at the subject from ChatGPT.openai.com

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already starting to impact genealogical research in a number of ways, and it is likely to continue to do so in the future. Some of the ways in which AI could potentially affect genealogical research include:

1. Handwriting recognition: AI-powered handwriting recognition software can help to transcribe and digitize handwritten records, making them more easily searchable and accessible to researchers. This can be especially useful for older documents that may be difficult to read due to faded or illegible handwriting.

2. Image analysis: AI algorithms can be used to analyze images and extract information from them. For example, AI could potentially be used to identify people or places in photographs or to transcribe information from census records or other documents.

3. Data analysis: AI algorithms can be used to analyze large datasets, such as census records or military records, and extract useful information for genealogical research. For example, AI could potentially be used to identify patterns and connections between different individuals or families.

4. Predictive modeling: AI algorithms can be used to make predictions based on historical data. For example, AI could potentially be used to predict an individual's likely occupation or place of residence based on their age, education, and other factors.

It's important to note that AI is still a rapidly developing field, and its impact on genealogical research will depend on a number of factors. Some limitations of AI in genealogical research include the need for high-quality data and the potential for biased or inaccurate results if the algorithms are not properly designed and trained.

I am not worried about being replaced by this or any other program but I appreciate the advances that make doing research possible.  You are going to see a lot more AI involved in genealogy in 2023 and beyond and how we do genealogical research will continue to change just as rapidly.