Fame comes to Genealogy's Star

I am guessing that the epitome of fame is to find your picture on a sign on an obscure dirt road in the middle of the Arizona desert. I can say that I was flattered to find out I had such an extensive market penetration (OK, I thought is was pretty strange also). But it turns out I had a very nice and well attended opportunity to speak at the Graham County Historical Society. The meeting place was a very nice accommodating building, that just happened to be out in the middle of the desert. In the afternoon, I also spoke to the wonderful people from the Safford FamilySearch Center. I just did not expect to see my photo out there in the wilderness. Thanks to both the Graham County Historical Society and the Safford, Arizona FamilySearch Center for a wonderful day and a tremendous opportunity to meet and talk to people that I will long remember for their hospitality.

Here is a closer shot of the announcement. They were using the signs to direct people to the meeting place which we would never have found but for a friend of a friend who drove my wife and I to Safford. Who drove in front of us to show us the way. So thanks also to Brent Bentley and his wife and daughter for driving us across the state to the conference and his friend who showed us how to get there.

Genealogy programs in various operating systems

I get the question all the time as to whether or not you can do genealogy on an Apple Macintosh computer. The answer is a decided yes, but there are not so many offerings as their are on the Windows side of the world. I always hesitate to talk about genealogy programs specifically, because there are so many good ones out there that I don't want to give the impression that I favor one over another. I always give the analogy, if I were building a house and had hammer and screw driver, do you think I might buy a few more tools. Well, the same thing goes for my view of genealogy programs. There are lot of different programs they have different capabilities and strengths. I use quite a few of them all the time.

One thing is apparent, from a news article in the tech press today, that the battle of the operating systems is simply a match between Apple and Microsoft, but Linux is garnering an increasing percentage of the operating system market. Valid statistics are almost impossible to obtain, but some online studies show Linux growing much faster than Windows 7, but falling behind the growth of Windows 8. But Linux still garners less than 2% of the operating system market.

For all the hype, Apple's OS X systems have also got single digit or less market penetration. Windows 7 and XP have more than an 80% market share. So where is the incentive for the existing Windows genealogy programs to migrate to Apple or Linux? Many of them may do so, but the migration has yet to become mandatory simply on the basis of the popularity of the operating systems.

Uploading GEDCOM Files added to FamilySearch Family Tree

The latest edition of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree Reference Manual, dated 12 November 2012, has detailed instructions concerning a way to add GEDCOM files to Family Tree. The Reference Manual is found in the FamilySearch.org Help Center available from the Help link in the upper right-hand corner of the home page.

The instructions for uploading a GEDCOM file appear beginning on page 48. It is a multi-step process during which each name is compared to the existing data to avoid entering in duplicates. Quoting from the Reference Manual at page 49:

This GEDCOM upload process has many planned enhancements. Until they are complete,
please be aware of the following issues:
• You cannot currently add the notes, sources, and multimedia links that are in your
GEDCOM file to Family Tree.
• During the upload process, you compare what is in your GEDCOM file to what is
already in Family Tree. If you stop before you finish comparing, simply make a note
of which filter and person you left off on.
• You can upload records of living people, but you cannot currently add them to Family
Tree.

With this reservation, the process of adding names is outlined in detailed instructions. The upload process has several parts:

1. Upload your GEDCOM file, and compare it to Family Tree.
2. View the results.
3. Review people who are potential matches.
4. Review people who can be added to Family Tree.
5. (Optional) Review people who are already in Family Tree. 

You can see that this might take some considerable time, if you try to add a sizable file of names.

I am highly suspicious of adding this feature to Family Tree because of the danger of adding in duplicate information and duplicate individuals. It is all too easy for people to say that a record is not a match with an existing record because of some small or large variation in the data being submitted. For more details on this procedure, please refer to the Manual.

Some Interesting Numbers from FamilySearch

The Ancestry Insider published some interesting numbers concerning the FamilySearch.org Historical Record Collections. Here are the numbers he published:

Total images published in Historical Records section: ................................................. 698.9 Million
          An image is a graphical representation (photograph) of
          an original, physical document.

Total records published in Historical Records section:................................................... 1.99 Billion
          A record is the information documented (transcribed)
          for a single life event. For example, a birth record, a
          marriage record, a death record.

Total searchable names in Historical Records section: .................................................. 3.07 Billion
          Searchable names are all (transcribed) names
          contained on a record. For example, a single birth
          record contains three names (child, father, mother).

Total collections on FamilySearch Historical Records section: .................................... 1,311 Collections

These statistics are remarkable in themselves, but in going to the FamilySearch.org website, six new collections involving millions of additional records were added on 14 November 2012 and more are likely to be added each day. So the numbers will change rapidly. 

I was particularly interested in the comments made by two commentators about the Collections. One comment said quoting exactly,

What good are these records now that Family Search sends you to Ancestry (a fee site) everytime you find a name on Family Search.
Seems to me everyone is getting shafted.
In the past you could find data on Family Search but now not so much.

What is this person looking at? It is true that there are a very few of the collections on FamilySearch.org, that at linked to images on other websites. But this is limited to very few of the collections. As the numbers above indicate there are almost 700 million images on FamilySearch.org. I do not consider this to be "not so much." I am amazed at the persistence of the belief that there is somehow a "connection" between Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. These are two entirely separate organizations and although they have cooperated on certain record collections, there is no ownership or other interest between the two. This attitude and rumor seems impossible to kill.

How are we "getting shafted" when FamilySearch.org offers this many records free of charge to anyone who wants to search them? Where does this attitude come from? Who are these people who can't read?

Understanding the Law in the U.S. -- Depositions as a genealogical source

Depositions, either written or oral, have been a part of our legal system for hundreds of years. Traditionally, they are part of the "discovery" process, that phase of a lawsuit where the parties try to find out the opposing party's position and evidence. In many cases this process is more important than the trial or the decision in the case. Under the rules of procedure, any party to a lawsuit could solicit oral or written testimony from any witness or party to the lawsuit. Many this this testimony was recorded and made a part of the record of the entire court proceedings. In very early times, the statements were often referred to a affidavits or statements under oath. The evidence obtained by this method was often used to preserve the testimony of a dying witness or one that was moving away from the jurisdiction of the court. In some instances, the written record of the testimony given by the witness could be read into a later trial proceeding, just as if the witness had been present when the testimony was given.

From and genealogical standpoint, these depositions and affidavits may contain vital historically important information. Many times, the attorney taking the deposition would ask general questions of the witness concerning their relationship to the parties in the case and even their individual background, including schools attended, degrees received, family members, work history, where the witness was born and raised and other seemingly unrelated and personal questions. Reading such a deposition can be a window into the life of the deponent (person giving the deposition).

Sometimes, especially earlier in our history, all of this pre-trial discovery was preserved by the courts. Lately, the courts have refused to maintain all this information, but some of it is still preserved in the trial transcripts and notes in the court records. Finding an ancestor's court record can be extremely valuable. But it is sometimes worthwhile to pursue the search further and see if any of the law firms or lawyers who represented the parties in the lawsuit still have any of the documents from the lawsuits or if they were otherwise preserved in some repository with the attorney's papers.

Many times the testimony given at a deposition was formally recorded by a court reporter. In very early times, these records were made in longhand, but it became popular to take them down in shorthand and later transcribe the testimony. Some of these early court reporter's transcripts may also be preserved by the courts. Sometimes the record may also be maintained in the estate of the court reporter. It may take some real detective work to find these documents, but they may hold vital information concerning long dead controversies that have been obscured by the family memory.

Look for this kind of record in any court proceedings. If you find a record of a lawsuit, don't forget to ask if the court maintained any of the evidence from the trial or proceeding. Court transcripts of deposition testimony may be maintained separately from the formal record of the court case. Also pursue seeking both attorneys' and court reporters' records to see if any of them still exist. Both attorneys and court reporters are almost always identified by name somewhere in the court proceedings. Be careful to record this information for further investigation. This is one area where persistence and doing the work yourself will pay off.

Questions about FamilySearch Family Tree

Warning, this is another of my tirades. You can skip it if you want, but I would appreciate comments.

During the past few days, I have made two presentations about FamilySearch Family Tree. In each case, I have been confronted with frustrated, annoyed, desperate, overwhelmed, and in some cases very angry people who are confronted with transitioning from New.FamilySearch.org to FamilySearch.org's Family Tree. I have been asked the same questions over and over again.

Most of the issues raised have nothing whatsoever to do with the programs themselves, but center around the data. Predominantly, the issue is the overwhelmingly large number duplicate people in the data pool and the number of inaccurate relationships, dates and events. Almost every single person has a story to relate about an ancestor with the wrong gender, married to the wrong person, with the wrong children in the family, with inaccurate and unbelievable dates or any of hundreds of other possible issues with what is being presented in Family Tree. This is nothing new. It is just that people are becoming acutely aware of the accumulated dietris of a 150 years of poorly documented and researched genealogy.

The reactions vary from "who cares, I'm not going to do anything" to intense anger. I have become the target of many people's frustration and have spent literally an hour trying to get their anger under control. I had one lady come to me with a file containing over 42,000 names "going all the way back to Cleopatra" and wanted an instant solution as to how to get all of this information "into Family Tree."

Many of the people I talk to are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and have issues with the ordinance process and the status of the records concerning ordinances. They are alarmed at the ordinances that have been performed for individuals who are in no way qualified, such as marriages to the wrong person, children not in the family and etc. An underlying problem are those people who are entering hundreds, sometimes thousands of names into the New.FamilySearch.org program of people they are not related to. They are alarmed that they will not be able to "finish" entering their thousands of names before Family Tree prevents them from uploading GEDCOM files full of names, hundreds at a time that they have extracted from old records. In almost every case, they do not have any intention of checking for duplicates, they just want to make sure their extractions get entered. I have talked to quite a few people who have pools of names they are in process of entering. I know of groups of researchers who are essentially extracting all of the names in geographic areas, related or not, and entering them wholesale into New.FamilySearch.org. I also have talked to people who have hundreds of printed cards and are worried if they will be able to keep these cards in the future. Most of these people fully realize that once Family Tree kicks in, they will be unable to add huge blocks of names without checking for duplicates and they are angry because they cannot keep just adding names like they have in the past. They are going to be dumping these names into New.FamilySearch.org in an effort to beat the deadline.

Some people are mollified once they understand the concept of the FamilySearch Family Tree program. But they are overly concerned about other members of their family entering unsupported and inaccurate information into the program. They see changes in Family Tree occurring without any rhyme or reason because the program is linked to New.FamilySearch.org. They are also dismayed at the prospect of "cleaning" up the mess. They say they simply do not have time to correct everyone's errors and they refuse to do anything about it. In my own lines, I am watching a few people already enter random information into Family Tree without any sources and without explaining where they got the information and if they do give a source, it is usually one that has long since been discredited.

OK, at this point, I have talked about the people who actually know about both New.FamilySearch.org and Family Tree. What is more than apparent, is that these people constitute a vanishingly small minority of the genealogists, much less of the community at large. Most people I mention the program to, if they are not already interested in and participating in genealogy, simply are unaware of the entire program or unaware of FamilySearch altogether. When I talked recently to one of my own adult children, he did not remember ever having looked at either program and he is the rule not the exception. I think most efforts to involve a greater participation in the process of genealogy are like trying to push a rope. All the effort you put into announcing the program ends up moving only a very, very small number of people.

Despite all this, I will keep presenting, in fact I have two more large meetings about Family Tree scheduled for this weekend in different parts of the State of Arizona. But it is clear, that with few exceptions, the message about Family Tree is not getting through yet to the average genealogist.

Geoff Rasmussen's Digital Imaging Essentials

My friend, Geoff Rasmussen has published a very helpful book entitled Digital Imaging Essentials. The book is available in both PDF and paper editions. He kindly gave me a copy for review and I spent some time reading the book. As you may know from my past posts, this is a topic near and dear to my heart since I am in the process of digitizing thousands of negatives inherited from my Great-grandmother. I have taught some classes recently on scanning and I know how hard it is to make this subject understandable without getting into a lot of technical jargon. I believe Geoff has succeeded admirably in writing a book that is both entertaining and has just enough technical explanations to make it useful.

This book concentrates on the essentials. It is not a technical handbook for the advanced photographer or photo editor. It does cover the basics of two extremely good programs, Photoshop Elements and Google's Picasa. If you are not acquainted with these programs, this book is an invaluable introduction.

Preserving our photographic heritage is a subject of vital interest both to us as genealogists and to our larger society. There is certainly a lot more that could be said on the subject, but if you are new to scanning and digitizing, Geoff's book deserves a look. Geoff Rasmussen works for Millennia Corporation, the publishers of Legacy Family Tree software. I have used Legacy for years and it is one of the top software programs for keeping you genealogical data.

One of the great challenges of genealogical research in the past was the limited ability researchers had to share copies of valuable documents and photographs. My Great-grandmother used her photographic skills to take pictures of earlier photographs in an attempt to copy them for her book on her family's genealogy. The results are usually less than adequate. However, with the new technology such reproduction is relatively simple and accessible to anyone who has an interest in preserving their heritage.

Geoff's book is a good place to start on this pursuit. Take a look. Here is the information about the book from the catalog entry:

150 pages | To be published Nov 2012 | Perfect-bound Paperback | 8.5" x 11" | Black/white
This book is also available in electronic format.
Genealogists use digital imaging technology every day. But what they do not know about it can harm their digital treasures. They have needed a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide, full of illustrated step-by-step instructions to learn how to digitize, organize, preserve, share, and backup their digital collections.
Your wait is over. You now have Digital Imaging Essentials: Techniques and Tips for Genealogists and Family Historians at your fingertips. There are some books that are meant for the coffee table, but this book belongs with you at your computer.
From the very first page you will notice that this book is much more than a boring instructional manual - it is full of real-life examples that not only teach you the right buttons to push, but it thoroughly explains how to get the most of your digital imaging experience. AND this book is written specifically for genealogists!
YOU WILL LEARN:

• The do-it-right-the-first-time techniques of scanning old documents, and snapping pictures with your digital camera.

• How to finally get organized so that you can locate any digital image in under a minute.

• Which file formats and file saving techniques to use to properly preserve your digital images.

• How to use Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Google's Picasa with illustrated, step-by-step instructions and learn about other software choices.

• How to privately or publicly share your images and videos via printing, emailing, Dropbox, CDs, DVDs, or online via cloud technology.

• How to access your digital media from any Internet-connected device including your smart phone or tablet.

• How to develop a backup strategy to protect your collections from digital disaster.

So if you are ready to take your digital pictures to the next level, go ahead, open the book, and have fun!