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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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
MyHeritage’s platform for genealogy and DNA is collaborative, and one of its main advantages is that it allows you to connect with other MyHeritage users around the world. Whether it’s through a Smart Match™ or DNA Match that you received on MyHeritage, getting in touch with another user on the other side of the match is key to understanding how you are related. It can often lead to major breakthroughs in your research, and some MyHeritage users have said that it changed their lives. Our popular Inbox feature has been helping our users make those connections for many years, and the time has come to improve it and give it a fresh new look. We’re delighted to share that the MyHeritage Inbox has just been redesigned to make it much more user-friendly, while maintaining the same functionality our users know and love.The updated design makes the Inbox easier to use and navigate, and unlike the previous version, it is now fully supported on mobile web. You can now access your inbox from the menu when visiting the MyHeritage website in your mobile web browser.
The FamilySearch.org Research Wiki went online in 2007. Almost immediately, I began contributing content as part of the Wiki Support Team. For approximately, the next eight years or so, I worked with an ad hoc committee of contributors who mainly served at the Salt Lake City Family History Library (Now the FamilySearch Library). I continued to be actively involved until about 2019 when editing the wiki was taken internally by FamilySearch. At that time, it appeared that the Research Wiki had mostly been abandoned. Since then, my contributions have been sporadic because of my other responsibilities. On July 1, 2024, FamilySearch took the Wiki entirely internally and notified me that I could no longer add content or edit existing entries directly. Thus ended my direct involvement with the Research Wiki after 17 years. Oh, I might mention that after the Research Wiki appeared to have been abandoned, it revived somewhat a few years ago and began to be useful again.
Here is the content of one of the notices I received about the Research Wiki.
We are standardizing specific types of pages on the Wiki to improve the Wiki experience for all users including those new to our website. The following is a list of pages affected and details and standardization regarding the information on that page.
Until further notice, all new pages in the Wiki must be coordinated with Wiki Administration.
I had one rude contact from someone at FamilySearch when I questioned the complete shutdown.
Wikis can be open-edit, moderated or closed and only available by specific invitation. You might ask, how I know that the wiki has been abandoned and how do I know if it is working again? Until they purge me from the website, I am still registered and the wiki shows 500 of my most recent contributions. However, each of the pages that I worked on has a complete record of all the changes, so older pages will show my earlier contributions back to 2007. These histories are extremely valuable as a way to see when certain changes were made to each article (page). In addition, you can follow almost any of the pages of Research Wiki and be notified by email of any subsequent changes. This allows the pages to be monitored for content and accuracy. I know when the Research Wiki was abandoned because I follow 1,124 pages and when I stop getting notified of changes, I know the Research Wiki is dormant. By the way, since July 1, 2024, it has been mostly dormant but I see there have been 250 changes in the last 12 days, however, it appears that all the changes have been to broken links or adding links with a few content updates.
I can go into a long, really long, discussion about the structure, the content, and the purpose of the Research Wiki, but I don't have the time to write about it right now.
By the way, because most of the other regular contributors to the Research Wiki were older than I was at the time, I assume they have almost all died off or retired.
Now the issues.
From the very first, we were trying to establish standardized page designs for all the different categories. During all the early development of the Wiki, I frequently raised the issue of having the pages moderated with FamilySearch. I kept pointing out that an unmoderated wiki would get out of control quickly. FamilySearch never even wanted to discuss the issue. Today, despite this effort to "standardize specific pages of the Wiki" the effort will fail if there is no consistent moderation. FamilySearch has never allocated the resources necessary to maintain 100,000+ pages of the wiki with internal staff and Church Service Missionaries. I still watch a few hundred pages, and I can see that hardly any editing is going on. You could take me off of the wiki but what would that accomplish. The coordination and moderation of the Wiki does not need to be done in a "high handed" manner. Presently, you are discouraging the very people who have the knowledge to contribute accurate and consistently standardized content. For example, the English County Derbyshire page https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Derbyshire%2C_England_Genealogy is out of date, and I can only assume all the other 47 English counties are also out of date. Some or most of the pages are also out of date. The longer editing is on hold, more pages will be out of date. Here is an example of what has gone on in the last 100 years for English Counties. Cornwall, England has 213 civil parishes, with the exception of the unpopulated Wolf Rock, which is the only unparished area in the county. These parishes are governed by a variety of local councils, including: 168 parish councils, 28 town councils, A city council, A community council, and 15 parish meetings. This parish structure began changing more than 100 years ago and presently, all of the county boundaries have changed. Another example, Herefordshire. Administratively Herefordshire was merged with Worcestershire in 1974 to form the county of Hereford and Worcester. This administrative unit survived only until 1988, when the Unitary Authority of Herefordshire was formed, with much the same borders as the traditional county.
Ok, so what is my point? The Research Wiki is a wiki and maintenance requires extensive cooperation and contribution. I cannot understand why FamilySearch etc. are so certain that they all know what will "improve the wiki experience for all" when the information is becoming dated as I write this. We have a wonderful resource contributed by hundreds (if not thousands) of people. Keeping the Research Wiki a useful tool involves much more than dumbing it down to include those who are new to the website. We now have AI to help. Maybe the needs of the new users is better addressed by a section of the wiki devoted to new users. There are a lot of possible improvements that could be made but closing out experienced users is not one of them.
Last question, how many of the people in FamilySearch's group can read and edit HTML? I can.
Enriching your digitized documents comes about when the handwriting is transcribed, the photos identified, and the text indexed. All this can be done with Kindex.org. Kindex has an enhancement for every type of document. All of this is achieved through a helpful interface. Yes, is a freemium program, many of the useful services such as handwriting recognition and complete document indexing are fee based but the product cost outweighs the cost and time of manual transcription or indexing. Watch the video to see how this website may resolve many of the issues you have as a genealogist or family historian with a pile of paper stored somewhere in your house, garage, or storage unit.
https://youtu.be/MD702cXUOm4?si=w14CpdtH-WMXNby2
This video is remarkable as I am shown how Kindex.org can transcribe a handwritten journal from the 1930s in a very short time. One page is almost instantaneous, 200+ pages takes just a few minutes. You do need the explanation about how and why this works from the beginning of the video. This is worth the time.
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Quoting from an email announcement,
September 9, 2024 — MyHeritage, the leading global family history platform, announced today the acquisition of MesAieux.com, a popular family history service specializing in French Canadian genealogy. This is the 13th acquisition by MyHeritage. In August 2021, MyHeritage acquired Filae, the leading genealogy service in France. With the addition of MesAieux.com, these acquisitions bolster the company’s leadership position in the global genealogy market and secure its prominence in the Francophone world.
Founded in 2004, MesAieux.com has grown to become Quebec’s most popular family history service, with over one million users. The website offers an online family tree builder with automated features to add ancestors, based on a proprietary algorithm for French phonetics developed by the company. MesAieux.com is also home to approximately 15 million historical records from Canada, primarily from Quebec, and several exclusive collections.
Quoting further from the announcement:
“We are delighted to welcome MesAieux.com to the MyHeritage family,” said Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage. “Canadian genealogists will have much to gain from the combination of the two companies. We’ve been impressed with MesAieux.com’s accomplishments, and this acquisition reinforces our commitment to expanding the resources for French-speaking genealogists. Together we remain committed to the mission of helping everyone discover and preserve their family history for the benefit of future generations.”
“MyHeritage’s technologies are outstanding, and the company continues to make its mark as a global leader in family history,” said Jean Trudel, Founder and CEO of MesAieux.com. “Their innovative spirit, know-how, and global footprint will strengthen our brand and deliver even greater value to genealogists in Canada and abroad.”
We all look forward to the continued growth of the online genealogy websites.
Back in 2016, at the RootsTech.org conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, when the conference included an Innovator Showdown, I wrote a post about the winners. See OldNews USA Wins Top Honors at RootsTech 2017 Innovator Showdown, Kindex.org won the People's Choice award. Unlike many of the companies who participated and won awards, Kindex has not only survived, it has thrived. Now, with thousands of customers and newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) features, the website can now handle a variety of archival needs, some of which did not exist at the time of the 2016 RootsTech conference.
I didn't need to say a lot because there was so much information from Kimball Clark. I was surprised at the number of new features being added to the website. If you have any archival needs, Kindex.org is the solution. Take some time to view the video.
Even a diamond can have its flaws. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is big in the news right now but for all the hype, there is a growing undercurrent of realization that it has some perhaps fatal flaws. Unless these flaws are fixed the utility of the programs will remain superficial and only marginally useful for pursuits such as historical or genealogical research. Here are two examples of the flaws.
Flaw #1: Lack of citations to the source for the information supplied.
This isn't important to people who are not doing historical research, but when the chatbot gives you a date and description for a historical event, you need to know it is accurate.
Flaw #2 The citations, when present are superficial and sometimes inaccurate information and not to original records or sources.
The only chatbot that attempts to give source citations in the form of footnotes is Microsoft Copilot. Even then, the citations are mostly heavily dependent on Wikipedia.com and other websites heavily covered in ads. So, the chatbot is merely acting as a search engine with a Natural Language Interface. Let me show an example using Google Gemini to ask a question about the history of Apache County, Arizona.
Prompt: Tell me about the history of Apache County, Arizona including the names of some of the original settlers and the settler's background.
Here is a screen shot of the response. You might note that there are only two dates: 1879 and 1882. You can click on the image to get a larger copy.
