Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Monday, December 23, 2024

Preview RootsTech 2025 today

 


https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/schedule

You can already review classes scheduled for in person and online from RootsTech 2025. At the time of this post, there were 220 classes listed including the 108 live classes. The live classes will only be available at RootsTech in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City during the conference. I will be presenting at RootsTech at the MyHeritage booth. The schedule will be posted at the booth all three days. If you keep clicking on the Browse the Library link under the Watch Videos selection on the menu bar, you will see an option to Search the full library. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/library

You will see that there are, at the time of this post, that there are 4223 results in the full catalog. 

I am quite certain that there is not a large genealogical video collection in the world. Happy Searching!



Friday, December 20, 2024

MyHeritage introduces LiveMemory™ Get ready to be astonished

 LiveMemory™ is a smartphone app that works with the main MyHeritage.com app. The animations are incredible. Here is the explanation from an email. 

LiveMemory™ uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to convert any still photo to a 5-second video, animating the scene in the photo. The AI was trained on a large number of photos and videos in order to create highly realistic results. LiveMemory™ is available exclusively on the MyHeritage mobile app for iOS or Android. To access LiveMemory™, tap the banner on the app’s home screen or use the app menu . Then, simply upload a cherished photo and LiveMemory™ will bring the whole scene to life, enabling you to travel back in time and reimagine the scene.

When you select a photo to add to a LiveMemory™, the live memories are processed and emailed to you as an MP4 movie. Here is an example from one of the photos on my own MyHeritage photo gallery. 


Reminder at this point. This was a photo taken in 1919. You might want to spend some time exploring how this works. Obviously, it only works with photos uploaded to the MyHeritage.com app and you will need a MyHeritage account. Here is another of my own photos for an additional example. 


Friday, December 6, 2024

Major Breakthrough: 3.4 Billion Records Extracted From Historical Newspapers Were Added to MyHeritage

 

https://www.oldnews.com/en and myheritage.com

Artificial intelligence is beginning to have a huge impact on the way genealogists do research into the large online genealogy database/family tree websites. A recent email from MyHeritage.com explains how using AI they were able to index/extract 3.4 billion records from 200 million English newspaper pages. I did a preliminary search for my great-grandfather, Henry Martin Tanner, in the OldNews.com website and had these results.


All these articles and many more are about my great-grandfather. I am sure that additional searches will show a significant increase in other relatives also. Now on to MyHeritage.com's announcement. Here are some quotes from the email. 

We’re happy to announce the publication of four huge new collections of names and stories on MyHeritage, extracted from newspaper pages on OldNews.com. The collections contain 658 million records from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; 998 million records from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska; 1 billion records from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; and 651 million records from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia.

The new collections are searchable on MyHeritage, with the full images of the newspaper pages available on OldNews.com via direct links from MyHeritage. 

As part of this update, we’re also thrilled to share that OldNews.com now hosts more than 300 million newspaper pages!

Search the new collections now:

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia

Now I don't normally go into such detail with these announcements, but I wanted to explain that the structured records in the new collections were extracted from nearly 200 million English newspaper pages using cutting-edge AI technology developed by the MyHeritage team.

The new collections allow MyHeritage users to uncover rich information about their ancestors that was previously out of reach. This is because they are indexed and structured, so they can be searched using imprecise names, nicknames and synonyms; whereas searching in newspapers that are not indexed is typically done using keywords and requires the user to write the name exactly as it appears in the newspaper. 

This AI is designed to extract not just names from the newspaper articles but also the relatives of every person mentioned, as well as additional fields such as occupations, residences, travel from one location to another, and more.

Last but not least, every record includes a useful summary of the article, generated automatically by AI.

We are going to see even more announcements like this one in the very near future. 

 


Thursday, December 5, 2024

RootsTech 2025 announces 4 keynote speakers

 

RootsTech 2035 Announcement 

RootsTech 2025 has announced the first four speakers for next year's event. They include left, Ndaba Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela, author and speaker; Olympic and Paralympic Gold-medalists Tara Davis-Woodhall and Hunter Woodhall; and artist Dana Tanamachi. 

Quoting from the announcement:

RootsTech 2025 has announced the first four keynote speakers for next year’s event.

The global family history gathering — scheduled for March 6-8, 2025, with an in-person event in Salt Lake City, Utah, and available in multiple languages online at RootsTech.org — will feature the following keynote speakers, according to a Dec. 4 news release:

Olympic gold medalist Tara Davis-Woodhall and Paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhall, track and field athletes who are married.

Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of the late Nelson Mandela, speaker, writer and philanthropist.

Dana Tanamachi, an artist.

Please click here to read the full story on Deseret News/Church News. 

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Get up to $30 off your in-person RootsTech pass for Black Friday!

This is a short term reduction for the RootsTech 2025 live conference. If you haven't registered already, take advantatge of this price reduction.  

RootsTech.org


Friday, November 22, 2024

RootsTech is still online during the year

 

RootsTech.org

You may not realize that RootsTech is now running all-year long with new videos and presentations. Here is a screenshot of some of the content that has been added during the months since RootsTech 2024. 

I would love to see you at RootsTech 2025 in person. I will be teaching one class and I will post it when the final class schedule is released. Watch the website for other special events and offerings. Here is a video about RootsTech 2025.

https://youtu.be/PQoFOVhCuD0?si=cbbZ_hj_1MGIxAz8


Introducing MyHeritage LiveMemory™ -- Almost beyond belief

LiveMemory™Gallery

LiveMemory™from MyHeritage.com looks like magic. Yes, it animates old photos. Here is an example of animated photos from my MyHeritage Gallery. This goes well beyond the previous animation efforts. 


If this video does not work go to the LiveMemory™Gallery or the recent blog post see for yourself. 

Imagine that iconic photo of your mother as a young dancer, or of you and your siblings playing together on the beach as children. Wouldn’t it be amazing to revisit those moments and relive them as if the scenes were playing out right in front of you? Well, we have fantastic news: now you can, thanks to our brand-new feature, LiveMemory™, available exclusively on the MyHeritage mobile app!

Yes,  LiveMemory™ is only available on the mobile app and yes, you can only do a few videos without a subscription to MyHeritage.com's app. Here is the full explanation from the blog post. 

Anyone can try LiveMemory™ for free, for a limited number of videos. To create more LiveMemory™ videos, an annual Photo plan or Omni plan is required. The annual Photo plan currently costs only $49.90 per year and is available exclusively on the MyHeritage app. It provides unlimited access to all of the other MyHeritage photo features including MyHeritage In Color™, Photo Enhancer, Photo Repair, Deep Nostalgia™, and the Photo Scanner. Users with a Photo plan can create 20 LiveMemory™ videos annually. As a thank you for their loyalty, Complete subscribers are eligible for a 25% discount on the Photo plan, and can purchase it for just $37. Users with a MyHeritage Omni plan can create 30 videos annually. Learn more about the MyHeritage Omni plan here.

I have already tried a few videos and I can see that it works better with some photos and not others. 

Saturday, November 16, 2024

23and Me in the headlines

 


It isn't very often that the national news features articles with direct consequences to the greater genealogical community. In this case, many genealogists and family historians have taken DNA tests from 23andMe.com over the years. The simple caution for those with 23andMe tests is to download your data. A quick Google search indicates that downloading your data is fairly simple. Here is one of many links to the process from 23andMe.com


You can also upload your data for free to MyHeritage.com, the large online genealogy company. Here is a link to the process.


What I find online is that Ancestry.com does not allow raw DNA data to be uploaded. There are many posts online explaining about Ancestry's position. 






Monday, November 11, 2024

MyHeritage Holiday Season DNA Sale


 MyHeritage DNA

Quoting from a recent email announcement:

MyHeritage DNA  is now on sale for a great price at https://www.myheritage.com/dna/.

 

What could be a more meaningful gift than the opportunity to discover more about who you are and where you belong? With the most international user base and the most comprehensive set of advanced genetic genealogy tools, MyHeritage DNA is the best DNA test for exploring global roots. It reveals your origins across 2,114 geographic regions and finds new relatives from across the globe — all with a simple swab of the cheek.

I currently have well over 17 thousand DNA matches. MyHeritage DNA enabled us to resolve an old adoption issue with one of my great-grandparents. I have DNA matches in almost a hundred countries around the world corresponding to the historical spread of my family over the world. 


 

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Update on the end of the FamilySearch.org Catalog

 

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&placeId=1927135&query=%2Bplace%3AArgentina 

What is missing from this screenshot of the FamilySearch.org Catalog? The answer is the entire Province of Buenos Aires. I realize that I wrote about this previously in this blog post.

https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-beginning-of-end-of-familysearch.html 

But now I have more information about what is happening at FamilySearch. However, saying anything about FamilySearch usually includes a healthy dose of speculation. The FamilySearch folks are usually responsive in the FamilySearch Community but there is issue with the Catalog and the Images sections of FamilySearch go way beyond leaving a comment in the Community. 

I recently saw a Facebook post from David E. Rencher, Chief Genealogical Officer at FamilySearch, notifying the genealogy community at large about this issue, quoting from the Facebook post:

FamilySearch product managers have set up automatic creation of Full-Text Search collections based upon the primary life event of the image. Internal genealogists have advised that researchers are better served by record collections organized by record type. Product managers feel differently. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067913932788

The issue is illustrated by this chart:

The issue of changing the entries in the old FamilySearch.org Catalog and the Image section as well as developing the Full-Text Search capabilities are the same issue: how do we find valuable genealogical information?

Catalogs, such as the FamilySearch Catalog (Old) mirror the reality of where documents might be found. The Catalog is organized geographically i.e. by the places where documents may be found in the real world. 

Well, what about using "Life Events"? One example will suffice: Coming-of-Age. Not only is the category vague and could include a huge variety of unrelated events, it is not found in any existing cataloging system. To illustrate this, do a Google search for "Arizona coming-of-age" and see the results. 

What you will see is a long list of ceremonies performed by Native Americans in the present and the past. There is no mention of records or record sources. You can get another idea from the Library of Congress Classification Outline. See https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/  

You can also get some idea about cataloging systems from the WorldCat.org website. Try searching for Coming-of-Age and see the responses. Do you see any genealogically related books or records? 

My example of searches using "Coming-of-Age" is just the same as changing the jurisdictional categories in the Old FamilySearch Catalog by adding Buenos Aires City and dropping the category for Buenos Aires Province (where the records are actually found). Why are these people at FamilySearch thinking that they can somehow come up with a new system of organization for finding genealogy records when all the world's records are organized by location and topic?

There is a lot more to say on this topic but I have stacks of other pressing matters besides trying to explain to engineers at FamilySearch how to do genealogy. But, of course, I will take the time if they are willing to listen. One example is a review of the "New" FamilySearch Library Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/our-catalogs which makes no effort at all on organization and looks a lot like the university catalogs I have been working with for the past 60 years. 

Monday, November 4, 2024

Challenges in adding one tag to the FamilySearch Memories almost defeats me

 

I am concerned that the FamilySearch.org website is going through a phase of reorganizing rather than taking advantage of new tools without throwing out the old. 

Recently, I spent about 45 minutes adding two image to the FamilySearch Memories section. I found that the entire procedure for uploading a single memory had changed. The last explanation of the update was a post back on May 11, 2024. https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/memories-viewer-updates-2024 This short announcement doesn't describe any of the major changes.  Here is a screenshot of one of the two uploads that took so long to do. 


The main issue was tagging a photo. The process of tagging apparently now takes several steps. I didn't think I could yet describe the steps because it is so complicated. When I started writing this post, I noticed that Elias W. Tanner's wife Rebecca P. King was also on his grave marker so I decided to see if I could describe the process. 

Step #1: I clicked on the image with Rebecca's name. Here is what showed up. 


Step #2 I remembered that I needed to have her ID# or name, so I typed in her name. The name wasn't recognized so I had to click on her husband who I already had listed and found her name Rebecca Potter King and ID#. I copied the ID number and pasted in the number. 


Step #3 Remember, I had recently already managed to tag four other people. However, at this step, if I click on the name that says "Add New" the program does not look up the ID# it just adds the ID# as the name for the tag. 


Step #4 At this point I am puzzled. Below the number it says Attach to Tree. Well, Rebecca is already in my part of the Family Tree, but I decide to click and see what happens. Now it asks me to search for the number I just copied from the Family Tree. 


Step #5 I don't seem to remember that it was this complicated just to add one tag. But I click on search the family tree and now I am lost. I am taken to the general search page. 


I already know that Rebecca is in the Family Tree so I change the field to Find by ID and once again put in her ID#.

Step #6 Remember again, that I am trying to tag an image in memories and it shows me her entry in a search field. 


Step #7 So far, I haven't tagged the photo and I am totally lost because I don't know what to do next. I see the normal Select button that takes me to the person in the Family Tree where I started. So, I click the button. Amazingly, this takes me back to the Memories section and there is a tag on Rebecca's name. although the name on the tag is an ID#


Step #8 Now, I can't remember how I got the names on the other tags. I randomly decide to click on the ID#.


Step #8 Remember, I am still just adding one tag to one person and I have spent almost an hour writing this blog post so far. Here is what I am looking at when I randomly click on Rebecca's ID# 


Step #9 I can detach the memory from the Family Tree. This is not what I wanted to do. So, I do what I usually do in these situations, I click on stuff.  I click on the number. Not that there was any particular reason for clicking but I see that the number is blue and that usually indicates a link. 


Step #10 Apparently, I can now edit the ID# tag to a name. So I type in her name. That changes the name to Rebecca Potter King. 


Step #11 Now what? Do I have to do this for every single memory I put on the FamilySearch.org website? There must be a shorter way to do all this. So I look for some instructions on the new changes. Remember, this is me looking for one of my memories. I know how to search since I sit here and do that almost all day, every day. I do not find any instructions. I decide to click in the image. 


I now have one tag on an image with seven potential tags. 

Does anyone out there know of a better system for adding one tag? I do figure out that there is one small shortcut. But I am keeping that to myself until I see the explanation in print from someone who should have stopped trying to reorganize the team. 

RootsTech 2025 Genealogical AI Spotlight on Military Records.



RootsTech 2025 Reel Stories presents your Genealogical Artificial Intelligence Spotlight. This month’s AI spotlight is about the treasure trove in military records. 172 countries have had military forces during the last 100 years and there have been more than 35 wars. Many countries with a miliary kept records about their soldiers. Military Records may be detailed but can be elusive. They are always a valuable source of genealogical and family history information. Artificial intelligence helps make all records, including military records more easily discoverable. The huge video collection on RootsTech.org and the documents and records on FamilySearch.org, with assistance of AI can help you find elusive military records. Sign in for free on both RootsTech.org and FamilySearch.org and begin discovering your military ancestors.

You can register for free at RootsTech.org online and also register for in person at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 4th through 6th, 2025. 
 

Friday, October 25, 2024

The Beginning of the End of the FamilySearch Catalog or another Beginning?

 


It is common knowledge among those genealogists that I come in contact with that the FamilySearch.org Catalog has not been updated for over two years. What this means is that the millions of digitized records being added daily to the FamilySearch.org website are not in the Catalog. So where are they? I will leave that question for a while as I try to explain what is going on from the perspective of someone who uses the Catalog and other resources on the FamilySearch.org website many times in a single day. 

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog

The main use of the Catalog is to find stuff (records, documents, etc.) on the FamilySearch website. It has worked sort-of well since the website was first put online on May 24, 1999. Its main use for serious genealogists is to discover the jurisdictional organization of the various geographic areas of the world. Now, I happen to do an extensive number of online consultations with people from Argentina. See the following link. 


https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/genealogy-help

Now some a short (hopefully) look at the government of Argentina and its jurisdictions. This is important because certain types of records are located in specific governmental jurisdictions. Here is an example of the location of the Argentine Civil Registration Records. 

Los registros del registro civil en Argentina son mantenidos principalmente por el Registro Nacional de las Personas (RENAPER). Este organismo gubernamental es responsable de mantener y administrar registros vitales como actas de nacimiento, actas de matrimonio y actas de defunción.

El RENAPER tiene oficinas regionales en toda Argentina, donde puede solicitar copias de sus registros del registro civil. Puede encontrar la ubicación de la oficina del RENAPER más cercana visitando su sitio web oficial o contactándolos directamente.

Hmm, that explanation seems to be in Spanish. What is says is that Civil Registration records are found in the National Register of Persons in various locations around the country. If you search the FamilySearch.org website for Argentine Civil Registration records, a valuable resource for genealogists, you will find that FamilySearch.org has very, very few of these records. The partial explanation about the existence of these records is explained in the FamilySearch Research Wiki,  

Now what is going on with the Catalog? Yesterday, in the morning I did my regular searches in for records in Buenos Aires Province for a potential consultation. By the afternoon, when I needed more information I found that Buenos Aires Province had been removed from the Catalog. See above. Some at FamilySearch inserted a link to "Buenos Aires City" which is probably a reference to the fact that Buenos Aires is an autonomous city and the capital of Argentina. But the other issue is that the entry for Buenos Aires Province had been removed. Buenos Aires City is divided into 15 Comunas. An Argentine "comuna" is a neighborhood or group of neighborhoods in the city of Buenos Aires. However, Buenos Aires City located in Buenos Aires Province. Here is an explanation of the provinces from a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Argentina
Argentina is divided into twenty-three federated states called provinces (Spanish: provincias, singular provincia) and one called the autonomous city (ciudad autónoma) of Buenos Aires, which is the federal capital of the republic (Spanish: Capital Federal) as decided by the Argentine Congress.[1] The provinces and the capital have their own constitutions and exist under a federal system.

Here is another quote from an AI search with references to Wikipedia. 

Administrative divisions: Provinces are divided into departments, which are further divided into municipalities. Buenos Aires Province is divided into partidos and localidades. 

There is no real translation of the divisions in Buenos Aires Province. Why is knowing all this necessary? Because any successful genealogical research depends on know where and how to find the records. So now, the FamilySearch Catalog has no entry for Buenos Aires Province. I assume all the records are still there somewhere. 

Now, there is a new FamilySearch.org Catalog. See https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/our-catalogs however, this is what is said on the website.

Either catalog can be searched, however it's best to use the new Library Catalog because it's continually being updated. The existing Catalog on FamilySearch.org was last updated September 2022. 

Let's just say that giving us a list of all the records of Argentina in a list does not help much. Especially, if you do not automatically know the names of all the provinces (see the first image above) and which cities (municipios) are available. Like in the old Catalog. The "New" Catalog looks a lot like a university catalog so that if you click enough you might run across some of the records for a specific location. 

What about the Images? Oh yes, there is another part of the website with digital images of a whole lot of records. These are simply organized by jurisdiction and date. But they are searchable or should I say they were searchable? 


There is an entry for Buenos Aires Province but this is to unindexed and uncataloged records which, for the most part, have to be searched day by day. There is also a mysterious reference in the Images list to Distritos Militar. These seem to be a long list of military draft records with no reference to where the records came from. 

Well, I could go on for a long time but I have other obligations to my time. 

Good Luck at finding anything in the FamilySearch.org record collection if this spreads to other parts of the website besides Argentina. I realize that I haven't gotten into more detail about the Catalog and the Images, but I ran out of time to write. 

 

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Please Help The Family History Guide


 thefhguide.com

This was sent out to many of our friends across the world. We are at a crucial stage in our growth and need some help. I realize there are many good ways to donate but this is a way to directly affect genealogy. Here is the text from the email. 

The Family History Guide will soon be exposed to its largest audience ever!  We will be featured on the VIEWPOINT documentary program, hosted by Dennis Quaid, and broadcast nationwide by PBS and other major TV networks. VIEWPOINT will be highlighting Genealogy and Family History and our partnership with The National Genealogical Society.  VIEWPOINT has a viewership of 60 million+.  In addition, we will be both in-person and virtual at the largest genealogical conference in the world, RootsTech 2025.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

We are growing rapidly and so are our financial needs.  We need to raise an additional $25,000 to cover the increasing costs of our outreach program and expenses for broadcast production and RootsTech 2025.

Please consider donating and thereby helping support our mission To greatly increase the number of people actively involved in family history worldwide, and to make everyone's family history journey easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable.


Please Remember

  • We have NO PAID staff.  All are volunteers. (Click HERE to see staff)

  • We are a 501c3 charitable non profit

  • We operate ENTIRELY on donations

  • Your donation is usually tax-deductible (See your financial advisor)


There are so many ways to support our mission.  Click the DONATE button below to see how YOU can help.


Here is where the donate button goes. Remember, The Family History Guide Association, the sponsor of the website, is a qualified 501 (c) 3 corporation and all contributions are tax deductible in the U.S. 


Click here to donate


My wife and I have been working with The Family History Guide for over ten years and now we are seeing the results of all the work we and mostly others have done to make this a global support for family history and genealogy. We donate time, and some money, but we do need help. 

Thanks for your consideration. 

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

The key to adding a generation to your family tree and thoughts on quality ratings

The crucial issue with any individual entry in the Family Tree is if there is a valid historical source (record, document etc.) showing a parent/child relationship. Absence of this important documentation means the person without a continuing source for a parent/child relationship is essentially the end of the line, not a child of the family, or is not a sibling. I certainly understand about beginning genealogists adding information from their composite family memory, but these living and recently dead people are usually easier to document. 

The issue of the absence of a document showing a parent/child relationship is extremely common in lines on the FamilySearch Family Tree that go back into the early 1800s and 1700s. I find this end of line almost 100% of the time when I see one of these lines that wanders back into the Middle Ages. To make this clear, the end of the line on any ancestral line occurs when there is no document showing a parent/child relationship. 

So any quality rating that does not include some way of determining this basic relationship for moving back an additional generation is incomplete and needs further research. Records that could show such a relationship to the next generation include birth records, probate records, land and property records. military records, tax records, census records, and many others. 

In addition, continuing research for additional generations based on one document is also a very bad idea. The main reason is the prevalence of people with the same name. The accuracy of the family tree rises and falls on this one simple issue. 

Here is an example of an ancestral line that begins with this person who has NO sources and continues for generations: Edward Morgan L4Y1-F4P.  The Family Tree shows 17 or 18 or more generations back from this one person without a source record who was married in Shepherdstown, Jefferson, West Virginia, United States up to a hundred years before any of these places existed except Shepherdstown that was established on December 23, 1762.  Jefferson County was established in 1801 in Virginia. West Virginia did not exist until June 20, 1863. This is just the tip of this messy ancestral line. The last person in this line without a further generational parent/child relationship is Garrad Morgan L7GZ-YBB who was born in 1755. He is the "real" end of the line that stretches back more than twenty generations. It doesn't really matter too much at all that the Quality Score for L7GZ-YBB is Medium and his non-existent father GM8Y-L9D is also Medium and does not exist.  I do think the ratings are helpful, but do not yet assess the accuracy of the entries. 

Monday, October 21, 2024

Some common steps to online security

 


Security is one of the major concerns of the day. You can regularly read about huge websites and databases being hacked and the information stored compromised. Security on your computer or your smartphone should be as automatic as locking your door at night (or during the day depending on where you live) and routinely locking your car unless you live in San Francisco and leave it unlocked and empty to avoid a broken window. Even genealogists need to be aware of the security of our data. 

The first and most common issue is logins and passwords. Basic security mandates logins and passwords that have enough characters (letters, numbers, and other symbols) to be harder to sign in (weak vs. strong). In addition, each password should be unique. It is not a good idea to reuse a password. Most of us have a place we keep our passwords. That place should be secure and subject to password protection also. If you have them on a piece of paper, make sure the location of the list is secure. 

One way to create a strong password is to use a combination of words, numbers and symbols. For example: this is a strong password "ElephantMachineDoctor34!!" assuming it does not exceed the number of characters mandated by the website or program you are entering. Random letter, number, and symbol passwords are extremely hard to remember and difficult to type correctly. Although the password generated by the websites or programs are strong, they are also random and arbitrary. 

The next level of security concern is when you are using a computer in a library, FamilySearch Center, or some other publicly accessible place. Depending on the facility where the computer is located, unless you log out of any programs you use, the computer may remember the login and password and allow any random person who uses the computer have access after you leave. For example here in the BYU Library Family History Center, if you login to websites and programs, some of the websites and programs will keep you logged in even if you log out of the main BYU access program. In the case of the university, all the computers are supposed to be wiped clean every night but we still find absent people signed in on a regular basis. 

Email addresses are not intended to be secure. One obvious reason is that your email address will likely be used as your login although sometimes the website will send you an email to verify that it is your email address. It is a good idea to have one email address for day-to-day use and another used for signing into secure websites. You can have several different email logins but using more than one or two for routine email become complicated. The multiple emails can cause problems when they are used as the login for a website and then forgotten. You may have to log into the website and the website will send a key for logging in to your old email address and if this happens to be the one you have forgotten or closed, you may go through a complex issue with the website before being admitted.

If you forgotten your login or password, most websites and programs have a way to restore the password or have create a new one. Always remember to immediately write down the new password. If you are like me, I would forget what I used almost as soon as I was through logging in. 

An unrelated issue is maintaining the security of your computer, smartphone, or other device. Pinning your passwords on a stick it note is not a good idea unless you take another step and encode all your pass words. Your code could be quite simple: 3456Missippi23!!! could be shown on your password list as 34M2!!! and you could then have created a system that only you know about that lets you know that 34 is 3456, M is Mississippi, and 2!!! is really 23!!!.

There are many more security concerns. Phishing is one issue that is becoming endemic. Phishing involves send a legitimate looking email requesting some personal information. Phishing is not limited to email,  it is also becoming common with text messages and phone calls. If you get an unfamiliar email, text, or phone call make sure that you do not open the email or text and do not answer the phone call even to tell the person on the line to hang up. You should have a working voice mail if you are concerned about having phone calls from a sizable group of people. Let the phone call go to voice mail and if it turns out to be a legitimate phone call, text or email, you can either call the person back or contact them in some other way. Legitimate contacts will leave a voice mail or call you more directly so you know who is calling. 

Genealogical information is usually not private and since it found in available historical records, the information is not something that people who are trying to gather personal information to sell or use for criminal purposes. One exception is the common banking "secure" question that is the maiden name of your grandmother or some other relative. People like me have multiple family trees on various websites and almost all my family trees are open to the public and contain the maiden name of my grandmother (or some other person). Apparently banks do not know about online family trees.

Another issue happens when a website you are using is hacked. You might get a notice to change your login and/or password. Do it the minute the procedure is available. On the other hand, if you are not really using the website it is a good idea to sign out, if you can, and take the program off your computer or stop using the website. But don't use the old password.

This subject could go on for volumes with examples of dangerous behaviors. But the basic idea here is to be aware of the need for security and learn about the ways your security can be increased.