A look at DigitalPreservationeurope

 

Preserving the British Library's C19 Newspaper Collection with Planets: A short film. 

Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access Through Networked Services) has released the first of four filmed and written studies to show how national libraries and archives in Europe are using Planets tools to preserve large and valuable digital collections. DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national initiatives across the European Research Area. DPE addresses the need to improve coordination, cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials. 

DPE defines digital preservation as follows:

Digital preservation is a set of activities required to make sure digital objects can be located, rendered, used and understood in the future. This can include managing the object names and locations, updating the storage media, documenting the content and tracking hardware and software changes to make sure objects can still be opened and understood.

1. "Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time." (ALA 2007:2)
2. "The act of maintaining information, in a correct and Independently Understandable form, over the Long Term." (CCSDS 2002: 1-11)
3. "All activities concerning the maintenance and care for/curation of digital or electronic objects, in relation to both storage and access." (Research Councils UK 2008: 6)

 Essentially, DPE is concerned with preserving the digital world. Scanning and digitizing is only part of the solution to record preservation. Once the document, photograph, video or audio file has been created, there is still the issue of migrating and preserving the digitized files in formats that will be readable to machines in the future. Quoting again from the DPE website:

Digital objects are much more 'fragile' than traditional analogue documents such as books or other hard copy mediums. Digital objects are fragile because they require various layers of technological mediation before they can be heard, seen or understood by people. Digital objects are also much more venerable to physical damage. One scratch on CD-ROM containing 100 e-books can make the content inaccessible, whereas to damage 100 hard copy books by one scratching move is - fortunately - impossible. A flash memory stick can drop into glass of water or get magnetized, portable hard drive or laptop can slip from your hands and get irreparably damaged in a second.

Digital objects require pro-active intervention to remain accessible. While you can put a book on a shelf and return to it in upwards of 100 years and still open it and see the content as it was intended by the author/publisher, the same approach of benign neglect to a digital object is almost a guarantee that it will be inaccessible in the future.

Genealogists, especially those with huge investments of time and energy into large database files need to be not just interested, but obsessed with digital preservation. All this reminds me, it is time to migrate my files again.

Rumors, half-truths, folklore and lies

I recently had an annual checkup with my doctor and as I was leaving he started to tell me about some of the folklore about what things to eat and not to eat. I won't go into the details but apparently there were some common misconceptions about the dangers of eating some foods when you had certain medical conditions. According to the doctor, it was all unsubstantiated folklore and there was no proven danger from eating the foods. I guess I wouldn't have taken notice if another doctor hadn't told me the exact opposite and repeated the folklore to me only a week earlier. Which one had the "correct" information?

Almost the same day, I was in a meeting at the Mesa Regional Family History Center and one of the participants passed along the current rumor about New FamilySearch. As recently as September, 2011 there is a reference in the FamilySearch.org Help Center to a "new FamilySearch.994 beta. " If there is a beta test going on of a new version of New.FamilySearch.org then the participants are under a non-disclosure agreement because there is nothing else out there on the Internet. Is there a Beta test? Logic tells me that there probably is some kind of development going on and that there may likely be a Beta test.

The issue of information that gets passed around also reminded me of the list of birth dates and places for my Great-grandfather in New.FamilySearch.org. I was showing someone the list, which has about 20 incorrect birth places and only one correct birth place. The person immediately assumed, because the real correct information was in the small minority, that it was wrong and all the other people listed with the wrong information were right. It must be human nature to side with the majority.

I often tell people and have written many times that copying user submitted data from an online family tree is not research and it is almost guaranteed to be inaccurate, unless, and this this a big exception, you personally know that the information is correct. Very consistently, when someone approaches me with a research problem that they or "the family" have been researching for years, there is some basic invalid assumption at the base of the problem.

In the case of the information given by the first doctor, it took me two seconds, literally, on the Internet to find substantiation for the second doctor's opinion. The first doctor was simply repeating a "popular, but unproven" dietary caution. How do I know the first doctor was wrong and not the second? Why do I trust the research I did on the Internet? Part of the answer lies with my own personal experience. My own experience shows that the first doctor was not aware of the entire story.

Now what if I look at a list of options in various online family trees? How do I know if any of them is correct? My first quick answer is personal experience and good sense, the second quick answer is a quick Internet search. Here is a list of some of the places given for my Great-grandfather's birth:

11 June 1852 San Bernardino, Los Angeles, California
11 June 1852 San Bernardino, San Bernardino, California (more than 20 sources)
11 July 1852 of Utah
1856 Joseph City, Apache, Arizona
about 1858 Joseph City, Arizona, USA
1858 Toqerville, Wash. UT
1858 St. Joseph, Navajo, Arizona
about 1859 Lakeside, Arizona

How many of these can we rule out as false without a lot of effort? What is the one fact you might want to know to answer this question? Here is the question, "When was Arizona settled by the Mormon pioneers?" Would it help you to know that the first settlements in Arizona by Mormon pioneers took place in 1875 and 1876?

Without going on to a long discussion of the history and the other dates and places, it is enough to point out that there is a lot of misinformation out there in the genealogy community and that good sense and little bit of research can get rid of a lot of it. I do thank my second doctor for clearing up the food issue and at least making me aware that the first advice was folklore and not fact.

Asterisks and New FamilySearch

One of the features of New.FamilySearch.org appears as an asterisk symbol to the left of entries for certain families. Perhaps there needs to be some additional explanation of this symbol because the consequences of having an ancestral line with asterisks is pretty complicated. Here is a screen shot showing several asterisk symbols with arrows pointing to each one:

As you move through a pedigree, the asterisk for the person moving to the primary position will disappear. Here is a screen shot showing that the asterisk for Francis Tanner disappears when I move him to the primary position:

However, note that there are icons that look like two people with a box containing a plus sign after both Francis Tanner and his wife that were not apparent in the previous screen shot. According to the Help Center, the official description of the asterisk (*) is, "The individual has other parents. Click this icon to see them." Unfortunately, that is not quite all of the issue raised.

Think of New FamilySearch as a huge network of pedigrees. Each pedigree exists as a collection of links between the individuals. In many, many cases, the individuals added to New FamilySearch were added as nodes embedded in pedigrees. So there even though there is a huge pile of individuals in New FamilySearch, the individuals are linked in a huge pile of pedigrees. Referring to the the asterisk marker (*), the list of other parents does not just indicate that there are alternative parents, but that there are "alternative pedigrees." So looking at Joshua Tanner, you will note that his father Francis Tanner has an asterisk icon. Clicking on that asterisk icon shows a screen with each pair of alternative parents:

But remember what I said about the individuals. In fact, each of those "alternative" parents leads to a completely separate pedigree. So choosing which one to select is not a simple matter of making a guess at which one looks the nicest, but it requires you to evaluate the entire pedigree to see if that is really the line you want to follow. Yes, I said that right. There are twenty different pedigree choices for Francis Tanner. These duplicates are in addition to all of the combined records for Francis Tanner in the program already. For example, here is a screen shot showing that Francis Tanner has 45 combined records:

If there is no asterisk does that mean anything? Not really, there may still be a number of duplicates in the file that have yet to be identified. Just thought you would like to know.

FamilySearch.org/New.FamilySearch.org Connection

Here was a thought provoking questions raised by a commentator to my recent post about a direct connection between New.FamilySearch.org and FamilySearch.org's Historical Record Collections: Why does Susannah Tanner's page have parenthetical vital dates "(1745-1859)," while the only birth date given for Susannah is in 1784? There is no asterisk next to Susannah's pedigree-page entry suggesting that there are other entries for her.

At first I couldn't understand what he or she was asking. Here is the screen shot of the Joshua Tanner/Thankful Tefft family showing Susannah Tanner:

There are arrows pointing to the entry for Susannah Tanner and to her birth date. Expanding the Summary Field for Susannah Tanner shows the following list of alternate birth dates submitted by the contributors to New FamilySearch over the years the underlying records were created. Here is the screen shot:

You can see a range of dates from 1745 to 1784. Most of the contributors seem to focus on the date of 22 May 1784 in Hopkinton, Washington, Rhode Island. Just an aside, you would think that people could at least identify the town correctly due to the fact that it has been in existence since 1757 and still is located in Washington County. No such luck. Now back to New FamilySearch. On her parents and siblings page you can see some of the duplication that still can't be eliminated from New FamilySearch. Here is the screen shot:

So let's go back to the linked record in FamilySearch's Historical Record Collections for Susannah Tanner. Here is the record from the Rhode Island Births and Christenings, 1600-1914 for Susannah Tanner:

Here the birth date is given as 2 May 1783. Looking at the link to the FamilySearch Research Wiki for this collection, I find the information out-of-date and apparently referring to an earlier edition of the records. I couldn't edit the record in the Wiki because I didn't have the information about the collection. I note about the earlier version notes that it came from extracted records that aren't further identified unless you follow the batch numbers back.

But let's go back to the comment and to the New FamilySearch entry. There is only one of the dates in New FamilySearch that agrees with the linked record in the Historical Record Collections, the date is 2 May 1783. Looking in New FamilySearch for a source for the information, Here were the sources given for the date of 2 May 1783:

Looking at the Batch numbers and film numbers, I find the source in the Family History Library, Vital record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850 : a family register for the people by Arnold, James N. (James Newell), 1844-1927. The Arnold book. So this is an extracted record of a compiled record published in a book. The Arnold book is considered a basic source of information about Rhode Island vital records, but it would be nice to go back and look at the original records. Oh, guess what? I have the original copied from the handwritten Hopkinton Town Record, kept Caleb Potter. Here is the photo of the record showing her birth date of 2 May 1783.

Hmm. Looks like Arnold is correct. Looks like the entry in the Historical Record Collections is correct. Looks like all the other people who have records in New FamilySearch need to do a little research before they stick more junk in the program. Would any of these records or sources or whatever have gotten me back to the microfilmed Hopkinton Town Records? Not on your life. Especially if for any reason I thought New FamilySearch, FamilySearch.org or Arnold had the correct date.

I still don't know what the commenter is talking about, but I do get the point that I cannot rely for one second on anything in New FamilySearch.

Running genealogy programs on my iMac

I don't do software reviews. I have a good reason. I use too many different programs for too many different purposes. It wouldn't be fair for me to say, "I like this genealogy program better than others so I am giving it five stars" when I can see all the problems with the program and use a completely different program to complement those problems. Also, I run all the PC software on my iMac. I use Parallels Desktop, but I am fully aware of other alternative programs that people find just as suitable for their purposes as I find my programs for my own. I deal with massive amounts of data. It recently took me eight hours to make a partial backup of my files to a new 3TB hard drive. It took another six hours to complete the backup. I am sure that if I spent even more money I could speed up that process immensely, but I have to make choices of incremental speed as against my cost. I spend the optimal amount because I have more time than money.

If find genealogy to be highly complex, although no more complex that computer programming, practicing law or any other activity that takes a long time to learn to do well. The analogy is that you may drive a car, but I take the car apart and redesign it and put it back together. You get one review from a person who drives cars, you get a completely different review from one who deconstructs cars and redesigns them. I use a variety of software programs the same way I use different wrenches for different repair jobs. A program is tool. I do have an opinion about what makes a good wrench, just like I have an opinion about what makes a good genealogy program. But my opinion isn't worth much to you if you aren't dealing with the product in the same way I am.

When I read reviews of cars, I am always amused by the negative criticism of the reviewer when he (it is always a he) says, this car drives like a truck. At the same time the best complement the reviewers seem to be able to make is that this truck drives like a car. Well, I want a truck that drives like a truck and I don't happen to care if my car also drives like a truck. I have been driving trucks for about fifty years and I am quite used to them. Thank you. What I don't like is a cheap tool that doesn't work i.e. do what it is supposed to do. I caused quite a stir recently with a TechTips post about running genealogy software on my iMac. I guess I offended the die hard Macintosh true believers.

I use Macintosh computers, even to run my Windows 7 compatible programs, for a simple reason. It is a better tool than any PC I have ever used. Now, don't go out and buy a Macintosh, just because I said I liked my iMac. Are you really ready to run Mac OS X Lion and Windows 7 at the same time on the same screen with no visual clues as to which system is running what program? One of my friends was getting so frustrated trying to figure out how to run both operating systems, she junked her new MacBook Pro and bought a PC laptop. Which, by the way, she still can't figure out. There is nothing simple about a computer operating system whether it is Windows 7 or Mac OS X or Linux or whatever. I have Mac OS X Lion running on both of my Macs and I haven't had time to even figure out how to get some of the very annoying things to quit happening, like rearranging my icons at random times and the whole screen sliding over to the dashboard when I am brushing the top of the mouse absentmindedly.

I had a couple of posts on the problems I had with loading Family Tree Maker 2012 into my virtual machine, and I admit, that one almost had me stumped. But now it is running fine and I can move onto the next huge project. The reason why I put up with all this extra complication is simple, I can run all the PC software on my Mac, but I can't run any of my Mac software on a PC. Using a PC is like owning a small car when you really need a truck. I need a truck. The iMac may have its own set of problems, but they are truck problems not skimpy little two door coup problems. I also want to spend more time doing genealogy than I spend trying to run my computer. PCs have a huge amount more overhead than Macs. I spend more time working on the PCs than I do working.

What will I do if something better comes along? Make sure it is actually better and then buy it.

Now I certainly recognize that owning a computer is like politics and religion, everyone has their own opinion. This is my opinion and I don't expect anyone else to agree or disagree. As for me, I think you need to use computers as a tool not as a religion or a political party. Learn how to use the tool, pick the best tool possible for what you are willing to pay and go with it.

Hmm. A link between FamilySearch.org and New.FamilySearch.org?

It may have been there for a while, but I just found an interesting link between FamilySearch.org and New.FamilySearch.org. I found that you have to be signed into New.FamilySearch.org to see the link. But I seriously question the utility of the link. In some cases it highlights the problems with New.FamilySearch in a dramatic way.

I was looking at New.FamilySearch.org and left without signing out. If I had signed out, I would not have found the link. I then did a search in FamilySearch.org's Historical Record Collections. I still might never have noticed the link had I not seen a new collection of Rhode Island Births and Christenings, 1600-1914. This is an index only collection with 870,030 records. I was interested because my Tanner family line comes from Rhode Island and I would expect to be related to practically all of the Tanners in that state. So I began a review of the older records. I did a straight-forward search for the surname "Tanner." There were 1,438 results. A lot of relatives! I figured I would need to go back, at least until my present family lived in Rhode Island, around the end of the 18th Century.

Here is a screen shot of the first search of the Rhode Island Births and Christenings, 1600-1914:

Of course, this is not all of the over 1,400 records. I decided to filter down the list a little to those with birth years in the 1700s. I read down the list and found one of my direct line ancestors, Joshua Tanner and his wife, Thankful Tefft.

I decided to take a look at the individual record. Here is what I saw since I just happened to be also signed into New.FamilySearch.org. I tried it later and found out that the link disappears if you are not signed in, in another window in your browser. Very interesting. OK, so here is the elusive link that appeared:

Here comes the real interesting part. Clicking on the link.

Here are the results in New.FamilySearch.org. I know it is pretty hard to see, but there are little asterisks next to Joshua Tanner and his father, Francis Tanner. Clicking on those links shows the multiple lines that are uncombined and floating out there in New.FamilySearch.org-land:

Here is the link for Joshua Tanner:

Fortunately, there are only four additional full-blown pedigrees in New.FamilySearch.org for this ancestor. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to tell which, if any, of these available pedigrees are accurate, believable or of any use whatsoever. How do I choose which one to use? I don't. I ignore them all.

Out of interest, I decided to click on Francis Tanner, Joshua's father. Here it really gets even more interesting:

Now, there are ten different pedigree lines to choose from. The dates and names are all over the place. Do I diligently copy all this information into my personal database? Not on your life. Actually, I simply ignore it all as an unsolvable mess better left to those with more time than I have to correct others' errors.

By this time you have probably forgotten that all this got started with an index of birth records for Rhode Island. Too bad someone didn't look at the index before they put all this junk in their databases and had it loaded into New.FamilySearch.org. But wait, the database for Rhode Island just went online. Interesting. Then why did I have the information pretty well sorted out in my own personal database? There were and are other records available. I got my information from Hopkinton, Rhode Island Town Records, Deeds, Tax Records and a whole lot more by looking at microfilms in the Family History Library.

What does finding this link to New.FamilySearch.org add to my knowledge about my ancestors? It really sucks the information out of my head like watching TV. I don't know what to do at this point. What am I supposed to do with the link to New.FamilySearch.org? How is the link supposed to help me understand more about my family history? If there were some way to edit the information in New.FamilySearch.org or add in a source, I could do some editing from the source record information. But absent these tools, there is nothing I can do but feel frustrated.

Can I imagine a use for having a link like the one I found? Oh yes, in a world where my ancestors' files in New.FamilySearch.org weren't a total disaster, I might be able to use the information. If New.FamilySearch.org were like a wiki and could be corrected and the additional information added to the lineage, it would be fabulously useful. As it is, I really can't do anything with the link although I can use the information from the Rhode Island records and the source in my personal database on my computer.

Mining Ancestry.com with Family Tree Maker

Family Tree Maker 2012 may have given genealogists and unintended power tool for mining sources and indexes in Ancestry.com. This procedure works well for large existing files as well as smaller files. If you have already used Ancestry.com's source extensively, you might not find very much new information, but if you have neglected to document near relatives with Census records and such, you will quite soon have a huge amount of information. Here is a summary of how it works.

Step One. Load Family Tree Maker 2012 on your computer with access to the Ancestry.com.

Step Two. Transfer your largest and/or most complete database to Family Tree Maker 2012. Consider this to be a working copy of your original. You may not wish to do this with an archive or original file.

Step Three. Upload the entire file to a new online Family Tree on Ancestry.com. I suggest not making this a public tree at first and maybe never.

Step Four. Use the Ancestry.com green leaf suggestions to add sources and images to your online Family Tree. This usually will result in mining out all the obvious and easy to find sources. Caution, as you move backward in time, Ancestry.com's suggestions become less reliable, especially as your information becomes less complete.

Step Five. Periodically synchronize your Family Tree with your local version of Family Tree Maker. Make sure you are getting down images for all of the sources that have images.

Step Six. Once you have all of the information from a first pass at Ancestry.com, you can go through again and add more information by doing specific searches on individuals even when no green leaf icons are showing.

If you are very careful in selecting only reliable sources and not a bunch of user submitted stuff from other family trees, you can get a sizable collection of documents and hints at further documents in a reasonable period of time.

One advantage to this is that you can go online anytime you have access to Ancestry.com and then synchronize your database when you have time at home.

Once you have all of your information down in your computer's database from the online Tree, you can evaluate the information or review it at your leisure. This procedure takes advantage of a short term subscription to Ancestry.com. You can also move the information from Family Tree Maker 2012 over to some other database program if you wish to do so, especially if you have been careful to copy down images to your local hard drive. You may notice that all of the Ancestry.com media images have huge file numbers instead of names. You may have to rename all of the image files.

Family Tree Maker 2012 is certainly a contender in the program lineup for genealogical databases, but this method allows for individual preferences if you like another program better. You just consider the Family Tree Maker 2012 to be a tool for using Ancestry.com.