150,000 Genealogy Books added to MyHeritage.com Super Search

MyHeritage.com has announce the acquisition of over 150,000 fully digitized and searchable books to its Super Search technology. Here is a description of the collection which presently has 37,526,996 pages and 150,544 sources.

This collection includes a compilation of thousands of published books ranging from family, local and military histories, city and county directories, school, university and hospital reports, church and congregational minutes and much more. All records include images of the book's pages. We are continually growing this collection.

Further information was outlined in a blog post entitled, "Huge Free Collection of Digitized Books Now Available on MyHeritage!" published on 7 Dec 2015.

The new collection includes tens of thousands of digitized historical books, with actual images of the books' pages, and all their text extracted using Optical Character Recognition. The books span the last four centuries and include family, local and military histories, city and county directories, school and university yearbooks, church and congregational minutes and much more. A vast amount of rich data from diverse publications makes this collection a fantastic source of rare genealogical gems, providing insight into the lives of our ancestors and relatives. 

We've added this collection using a new process that adds approximately 250 million pages to SuperSearch™ per year, utilizing a team of 40 curators. The curators examine each digitized book for relevance to family history research, and enhance its meta data if they decide to include it. The collection is sourced from various published texts that are copyright-free, and will be updated from now on several times each year. 

The Compilation of Published Sources collection is located in SuperSearch™ under Books & Publications and is free to access. Easily search the collection by any of the following: first name, last name, publication title, publication date, publication place, or keywords. 

Our unique and powerful Record Matching technology is now matching this new collection automatically to all family trees on MyHeritage, and users are alerted if Record Matches are found for individuals in their family tree. Correct matches can be confirmed and source citations can be extracted directly to your family tree, using the extract information feature.

This will be a great addition to the over 6 billion records already available on MyHeritage.com.

Searching for the Family History Library

From time to time, I review the Google Trends website. Watching what people are looking for online in an interesting window into the current culture and interests around the world. In this case, because I have been visiting the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah more recently, I decided to take a look at using the Family History Library as a search term. The graph shows that interest has basically fallen to zero as of the first part of December, 2015. This piqued my interest even more, so I started to compare it to other topics.



When I added in Family History Center, I was even more interested. What is even more surprising is adding in the general topic of family history.



When compared to the general term, both the Library and Family History Centers virtually disappear as search topics. But all have a decided downward trend. How about RootsTech as a search term?




The RootsTech search shows seasonal spikes. When I overlay a search for the Family History Library over RootsTech, I get the following:



Some searches are seasonal. I decided to compare "gardening" and "hiking" as two activities that could be classified as hobbies to "genealogy."



Both gardening and genealogy show a downward trend. In addition, both gardening and hiking show a periodic pattern based on seasons. Hiking has stayed about the same over time. I speculate that the number of people interested in both genealogy and gardening have remained about the same over time. Of course, if the same people are online, then they would have no need to do searches for genealogy or gardening because they would likely know about the websites they liked and had bookmarks or links to those sites.

How do they all compare to a current hot topic, such as "Star Wars?"



I guess the best thing that can be said is that media hype affects searching. Genealogy is not a topic that generates much media hype. Many websites list "Reading" as the most popular hobby. Here is a comparison of the search term "Reading" with "Genealogy."



I am guessing that genealogists are very predictable in their searches and that they seldom search for the term genealogy. How about adding the most popular, large online websites?



You could argue that any one of these topics only decrease in popularity because the overall usage of the Web increases and there is no real drop in interest. But the reality is that these searches are measured against their own historic interest. It looks like to me despite any increases in participation or activity on the big websites, genealogy is not fairing well in the battle for online shelf space. I have been repeating these searches for some time now and the trends continue downward for genealogy related search terms.

Is this a problem? Only if you are concerned about increasing world participation in genealogy.

When is a source not a source?

I continued thinking about my post on my Rejoice, and be exceeding glad... blog entitled, "Is there a problem with adding multiple copies of the same document as sources?" and I thought I would move over here and address some other, more general issues. As I pointed out, the terms used by the online genealogy database programs to refer to the records or documents in their files or collections are slippery. Every one of the programs has a different definition of the terms records, documents, sources, collections, names, etc. In fact, as I have pointed out in several previous posts, there are no commonly accepted definitions of these terms among genealogists in general.

What is a source? One dictionary definition is so vague as to be meaningless: "a place, person, or thing from which something comes or cam be obtained." See Google search for "define source."

A source is the identity and location concerning where you got the information you are using. 

That isn't very artfully said but genealogists are talking about sources being reliable or unreliable. A source is a source. If I got my information from a book in the local public library, the citation information about the book and the place where I found it constitute the "source" of my information. Any questions about the accuracy, reliability or whatever of the information have nothing whatsoever to do with the "source." If I think your information is wrong or unreliable and you provide me with a source, I can go an check to see whether or not you are correct. Absent a source, I have to guess where you might have gotten the information and from my perspective, I have to assume, since you did not tell me where you got your information, that the information is unreliable and quite likely wrong. When people say a "source" is unreliable, what they really mean is that the information obtained from the source is unreliable.

I get comments about a source citation to a family tree as being unreliable. Isn't it a good idea if someone is citing information from a user created family tree that they tell us about it? Would you rather have no source citation or the knowledge that everything was copied from someone's family tree in an online program?

We absolutely need to know if there is any basis for genealogical information. Here is an example. This book has 491 pages of histories and family group records for one of my family lines.

Parkinson, Diane, and John Parkinson. James Parkinson of Ramsey: His Roots and His Branches : England, Australia, America : A Biographical History and Genealogical Record of the Family of James and Elizabeth Chattle Parkinson. Austin, Tex.: Published for the James Parkinson Family Association by Historical Publications, 1987.

There are numerous references to parish records and other documents, but not one citation to any specific record. Other than a few copies of letters and a short one-page bibliography, there are no specific references to the sources. As a result, even though there are a number of very interesting stories and a lot of information, most of it has to be re-verified by my own research. It is not that I think that what is in the book is unreliable, it is just not sourced. The sourcing part does not reflect on the ultimate reliability of the book, it only goes to the fact that I cannot look at the same source and draw my own conclusions. For example the book provides the following information about James Parkinson and his wife on page 140:

James Parkinson
Born 22 Oct 1808 Place Farcet, Huntindonshire, England
Mar. 23 Jul 1826 Places Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, England
Died 2 Sep 1870 Place Brookfield, NSW, Australia
Bur. 3 Sep 1870 Place Anleys Flat (now Dungog), NSW, Australia

Elizabeth Chattle
Born Aug 1806 Place Farcet, Huntingdonshire, England
Died 18 Apr 1872 Place NSW, Australia

All this seems to be very complete and reliable. But when I began my research on this family, since no specific sources were cited, I had to re-do all of the previous research which is still in progress. From the start, I had no citation to any records supporting birth, marriage or death dates or places.

The marriage date was confirmed from the following:

Ancestry.com. Huntingdonshire, England, Extracted Parish Records [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2001.

By the way, the marriage record shows Elizabeth's surname to be "Chappell" so there is so question about her parents. But even with this confirmation, I still need to examine the original parish record. The death year for James Parkinson was confirmed from the New South Wales Deaths 1788-1945 Transcription found on the Findmypast.com website. All of the links and citations that I have found so far have now been recorded in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

An inquest into the death of James Parkinson was held in Dungog, New South Wales on 3 September 1870 from Ancestry.com. New South Wales, Australia, Registers of Coroners' Inquests, 1821-1937 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.



An so forth and so forth. By the way, there is no mention of a place named Ansleys Flat, the cemetery in Dungog, New South Wales is located on Tabbil Creek, just southwest of the town. There is a book with the cemetery transcriptions but the only copies seem to be located in Australian libraries.

This illustrates the problems that occur when there are no source citations. The information could very well be accurate or not, but I have to do the research all over again to verify what needs to done to extend the lines.

Now, back to the issue of complaining about inaccurate sources. If the source is recorded and is in existence, the source is correct. If the information is suspect, that can be determined from the source. Let's stop complaining about inaccurate sources unless they really are inaccurate. For example, information was recently added to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree about the James Parkinson Family adding source from Manchester, Lancashire. It is very apparent from the dates and birth and death information that this family was located in Huntindonshire and then emigrated to Australia. The Lancahire "sources' were welcome because they could be verified as inaccurate and detached from the record in the Family Tree.

It is important to point out, most of the complaints about adding wrong sources come from users of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. They should really be thankful that the people told them where they got their information.

WUD -- The future of Searching

WUD is a customized search engine and online curation tool for historical and cultural data. WUD stands for "what's up doc?" Quoting from the project page sponsored as a project of the Medicine and Society chair at the University of Fribourg, directed byAlexandre Wenger and Radu Suciu with IT research and development by Adriano Perlini:

WUD is a customised search engine helping you to pull, link and organise data from two major cultural heritage repositories: Europeana.eu and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). It was developed as part of the research and outreach activities of the Medicine and Society chair at University of Fribourg. 

This project was initially intended for researchers : like most Digital Humanities projects, it stems out from a previous endeavour – the Medicine and food virtual exhibition for which we had to hand-pick images and documents from around the Web. We figured we could fire up existing online tools and APIs in order to streamline and speed up this curation process. WUD does exactly that: saves us hours of clicking and downloading and assembling.

Very few genealogists are familiar with either the Digital Public Library of America or the vast resources of the Europeana.eu website. However, there is one class listed at the upcoming RootsTech 2016 Conference on the Digital Public Library of America but nothing yet on Europeana.eu. There is certainly nothing at the upcoming conference on the selection of Apps available for use with these two online databases. The WUD program or app is just one of a number of very useful utilities available from the Digital Public Library of America's App Library.



There is a whole world of information, some extremely valuable to genealogical inquiries, that is usually not mentioned in connection with the usual record repository lists. Some of these websites, such as Europeana.eu are so vast that it is difficult to determine any kind of numbers associated with their online connections. They are certainly worth exploring.

Adding Duplicate Sources to Online Family Tree Programs

There seems to be an ongoing issue being raised about adding duplicate sources to family tree programs. I have just written a long explanation of my views on this subject for my other blog, Rejoice, and be exceeding glad... I wrote the post for my other blog because it deals primarily with an issue that is related to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The post is entitled, "Is there a problem with adding multiple copies of the same document as sources?" My focus in the Rejoice blog is primarily on issues concerning the online family history community of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but from time to time my comments have a more general application. I know some of my readers severely limit their blog reading, but you might want to check the Rejoice blog from time to time, even if you are not a member of the LDS Church. FamilySearch.org certainly has a much wider interest to the larger genealogical community and I have been addressing FamilySearch issues in the Rejoice blog.

Thanks for reading this and any other blog about genealogy. I realize that many of us are becoming overwhelmed by the quantity of communication available through social networking and other media venues, but if we have an interest, it is best to try and focus on the things that really matter.

Just a side comment on social networking. Yesterday, my wife got a forwarded text from a grandson whose high school had just been "locked down" due to a supposed threat of a student with a gun. We learned about this moments after the event occurred. It turned out to be a hoax and the student responsible was arrested, but our whole family was almost instantly involved. Social networking has its place and so do blogs. I cannot get too far into Facebook etc. because I always have a lot more to say than these venues support although I do post my blog posts on all sorts of social networking programs.

The Good and the Bad of Standardized Place Names

From spell checkers to grammar correction, computer programs are becoming more proactive in helping you to spell correctly and use "correct" grammar. But what if my spelling is "nontraditional" and my grammar is whatever I want it to be? Can I stand being constantly told that I am wrong and the program is right? Why not just turn off both features? 

Now that trend has come to the genealogy programs that tells you to cite your place names according to the program's standard. Of course, correcting your spelling seems qualitatively different than a spell checker. Checking your spelling seems to be an immediate benefit, but correcting a place name is quite a bit more complicated and the benefits aren't as obvious.

Sometimes these suggested place names seem at odds with the genealogical standard that we record the place name as it was at the time the event recorded occurred. Of course, there are those who think that it is better to record the name of the place as it is today, but there are several reasons for sticking with the old names, even if the places they name no longer exist. This issue comes up frequently as the names of various places change over time. This can occur through wars, political action, expediency, or a myriad of other causes. The real concern is the researcher's ability to locate records and differentiate between people with the same or similar names.

One core reason for recording the name of the place at the time the event occurred is based on the assumption that any records will be kept and cataloged according to the historic location. This may or may not always be a valid conclusion. The current location and catalog method of the records is a completely different question and knowledge of the original location and name may or may not help in finding the records. Let's take a simple example. The historic English county of Huntingdonshire has now been realigned and incorporated in the modern county of Cambridgeshire. If I were looking for a place in England recorded as occurring in Huntingdonshire and located in what is now Cambridgeshire, where would I find the records? Here is the description of the town of Ramsey from Wikipedia:

Ramsey is a small market town and parish, north of Huntingdon and St Ives within the historic County of Huntingdonshire. For local government purposes it lies in the district of Huntingdonshire within the non-metropolitan county of Cambridgeshire.

Here is a further note about the historical records of Ramsey:

Original historical documents relating to Ramsey, including the original church parish registers, local government records, maps, photographs, and records of Ramsey manor (held by the Fellowes family, Lords de Ramsey), are held by Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies at the County Record Office Huntingdon. There is a Post Office in Ramsey.

In this case, locating the records would certainly depend, at least in part, on knowing and preserving the name of the original location where an even occurred when that location was in the Huntingdonshire county. It might also help to know the time table when these changes occurred. Huntingdonshire merged with Cambridgeshire in 1974 so this change took place well after events occurring in the 1800s.

Apart from considerations of the current location of the records, what other reasons might there be for preserving the name of the place at the time of the event? I can illustrate an additional reason by doing a search for a known ancestor who was born in Huntingdonshire, England named Thomas Parkinson. Here is the entry in the 1841 England, Wales & Scotland Census Transcription from Findmypast.com.

Census details
Family member first name ELIZA, SARAH, THOMAS, WILLIAM, JAMES, ELIZABETH
Family member last name PARKINSON
First name(s) James
Last name Parkinson
Gender Male
Age 35
Birth year 1806
Birth county -
Street Glassmoor
Parish or township Whittlesey St Mary & St Andrew
City or borough -
Town -
County Cambridgeshire
Country England
Registration district Whittlesey
Archive reference HO107
Piece number 82
Book number 9
Folio number 6
Page number 7
Record set 1841 England, Wales & Scotland Census
Category Census, Land & Substitutes
Subcategory Census
Collections from United Kingdom

(Emphasis added)

 You can see that the county of this census record is recorded as Cambridgeshire despite the fact that the original county was Huntingdonshire. Here is a further comment from Wikipedia about Huntingdonshire:

The area corresponding to modern Huntingdonshire was first delimited in Anglo-Saxon times, and the modern boundaries have remained largely unchanged since the 10th century, though it lost its county status in 1974.

Further explanations indicate that the county was split as early as 1889.

In 1889, under the Local Government Act 1888 Huntingdonshire became an administrative county, with the new County Council taking over administrative functions from the Quarter Sessions. The area in the north of the county forming part of the municipal borough ofPeterborough became instead part of the Soke of Peterborough administrative county, in Northamptonshire.

Any document created during the time when the place was in Huntingdonshire that mentioned the county, would indicate that the county was Huntingdonshire. The fact that the changes complicate both finding the present location of the records and the area covered by the original county do not mandate that the designation of the location be changed to reflect the modern county.

Another consideration is that places with same or very similar name can definitely complicate any situation involving locating the original records and determining which of the multiple locations was the one where your ancestors lived. For example there are at least 41 places in the United States named Springfield. See List of the most common U.S. Place names.  There are five of the Springfields in Wisconsin. Accurately recording the county at the time of an event would be crucial to determining the identity of an ancestor if the mention was that the event occurred in Springfield. If that were not enough of a reason, there are also eight towns in Wisconsin named "Washington" in eight different counties.

The main reason for establishing a standard name is to facilitate identification by computer search engines (programs). But my examples should point out that the issue of using or not using a standard place name is fairly complicated. After all this, the best practice is still to record the name of the place, in full, as it was at the time the event occurred.

But what happens when the program disagrees with your non-standard entry? Do you ignore the standard in these situations? It helps if the program has a way to preserve the non-standard entry and still continue to use the standard entry to search for records pertaining to the event. But you can see from the search example above from Findmypast.com, this may not completely solve the problem. FamilySearch.org relies on standard place names, but there is a method for adding a non-standard name to the program's list of standard names. This is akin to the process of adding a new word to an online dictionary. I can illustrate this process with the following example.

Here is a list of the historical names of a place in Arizona with the historical county designations (I have used this example before several times in different contexts).

Allen's Camp, Yavapai, Arizona Territory, United States 1876
St. Joseph, Yavapai, Arizona Territory, United States 1878
St. Joseph, Apache, Arizona Territory, United States 1879
St. Joseph, Navajo, Arizona, Territory, United States 1895
St. Joseph, Navajo, Arizona, United States 1895
Joseph City, Navajo, Arizona, United States 1923

Each of these locations is exactly the same physical place with some adjustments for the boundaries. So depending on when a person was born in this location, the name of the birth place varies. So which is the "Standardized Place Name?" The answer should be all of them. If the program is sophisticated enough to properly utilize place names and if the program uses a standardized place name designation in its search engine, then it should also be sophisticated enough to allow for modification of the place names to reflect the actual name of a place at the time an event occurred.

Of course, the real problem here is finding the records and the secondary, but real, problem is that many researchers ignore these jurisdictional distinctions. My experience is that a very high percentage of the so-called brick wall problems are really a result of not properly identifying the place where a supposed event occurred. Identify the place at the time of the event and you are a long way down the road to finding the ancestor. The next step is to find the record, but you have a much better chance if you know the place of the event.

Buying Into the Revolution -- Part Five -- The Challenges and the Future

Here are the previous installments of  this series:

http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2015/11/buying-in-to-revolution-part-four-how.html
http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2015/11/buying-in-to-revolution-part-three.html
http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2015/11/buying-in-to-revolution-part-two.html
http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2015/11/buying-in-to-revolution-part-one.html

When I was much younger than I am today, the street in front of our house was a dirt road. Today, I drive on a freeway that has an 80 mph speed limit. The difference here is much more that simply the cement construction of the freeway compared to the dirt construction of the road, but the immense infrastructure difference between the two roads. On the dirt road, we might have half a dozen cars pass in a day. On the freeways that many cars and more might pass every second. Access to the dirt road was uncontrolled and took place at any convenient location. Access to a freeway is highly regulated and controlled. 

The analogy here is to the genealogical community. Many of us are still living on the genealogical equivalent of my dirt road. The difference is that at the time I lived on a dirt road there were no freeways in Arizona. By the way, the first freeway in America is known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway aka the Pasadena Freeway, between Pasadena and Los Angeles. It opened in 1940 and was extended in 1953. It is now considered a narrow, out-dated roadway. Having driven the Pasadena Freeway a number of times, I would have to agree. See Wikipedia: Arroyo Seco Parkway. Back to the analogy, not only are many of genealogists living on dirt roads, we are doing so without the benefit of indoor plumbing, running water and other modern amenities. 

Part of the problem is that the infrastructure available to much of the general online community is sadly lacking in the genealogical segment of that community. Here is what I see as the challenges. This is a summary of some of the things I have already covered in this series but I am drawing this series to a close and you can think of this list as a closing summary.

1. The fragmentation of the genealogical community and the lack of a consistent way to transfer data.

I like to look at this issue in terms of my freeway example. Freeways are designed to move large numbers of vehicles from one population center to another. Unfortunately, we have no such analogy in the genealogical community. We have the slow dirt roads level of information transfer but we have no common exit points. If I have carefully researched an ancestor and have details, sources, multi-media items, books and other records of his or her life, I am forced by every one of the existing programs to move my information from my own program to their program, one data field at a time. I could create and upload a GEDCOM file, but then I would risk losing the bulk of my information in the transfer process.

2. Source records are also fragmented and scattered across the world. Access to these records is time-consuming and difficult.

Although some parts of the genealogical community are now connected by data freeways, there are still an overwhelming number of documents that are not digitized, and many of those documents are also subject to substantial restrictions on any access at all. In my analogy, the freeway system is the internet. There is no question that many valuable genealogical documents have been digitized and are available on the internet, however, simply because the document has been put on the internet does not mean that there is an adequate way to access or even find that document. Presently, to do even adequate job of researching online, I must individually search dozens, even hundreds of different websites. Although Google is a vast resource, it cannot search in the closed catalogs where most of the genealogical records are kept.

3. Our present method of recording genealogical data is merely a paper substitute and does not take advantage of the connections provided by the Internet.

It may be true that the nature of genealogical data determines the format of the databases used to store and disseminate that information but I suggest that the format of the presently available genealogical database programs has failed to provide the connectivity and access to the Internet resources in a way that mirrors the degree of access available in other areas of interest.

4. The proliferation of individualized family trees has created a vast, impenetrable jungle.

Not only do we have a significant segment of the genealogical community that refuses to participate at all in the online world, but even those who have taken advantage of "putting their family tree online, for the most part, have created the equivalent of walled cities where exchange of information occurs only through very archaic pathways. If I happen to share a program with a person with a common ancestor and it is shown that we have a match, that match implies that both of us have duplicated all of the work necessary to discover that same ancestor. There is also a strong likelihood that all of the effort we expanded to make the connection had already been researched and recorded by someone else. This situation exists within a single program and does not take into account the fact that there may be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other individuals doing exactly the same research to reach exactly the same ancestor on different programs, some of which I will never look at.

5. There is no free lunch.

This past week, I was traveling in Western Utah and was following a truck pulling a trailer with seven or eight ATVs. Each of those machines probably cost close to $10,000. If you add up the cost of the truck, the trailer and the ATVs the total would probably pay for my access to all of the online programs that I could possibly use for the rest of my life. The point here is that genealogy has a built in cost of time, effort and some monetary expenses. Compared to other common activities however, except for the time expenditure, genealogy is incredibly inexpensive. We have a tendency to focus on a very few, very large companies worth millions of dollars who are involved in providing online genealogical services. By and large genealogists are mostly benefited by incidental expenditures. For example, the United States National Archives was not specifically created for genealogists. But genealogists are benefited by the records preserved. Compared to a popular sport the amount of money invested in specific genealogical activities is infinitesimal. One example is that the production budget for the most popular movie ever made, Avatar, is approximately $425 million and the income from that one move is well over $1.7 billion. Other popular movies have similar incomes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I suspect that the top twenty movies of all time have made more money than all the genealogical programs in the world combined. If genealogy is going to have the benefit of a freeway class information structure, there will have to be a dramatic increase in the amount of money invested by the companies as well as the consumers of genealogical services.

 The future

 From time to time, Mike made his comments about my ideas of the future genealogy. Coming to the end of another year, it is time to reassess those predictions. Some of the things that will occur are merely the product of programs that have already been implemented. The amount of digitized records that will become available will increase dramatically. However, I failed to see a concomitant increase in the ability of the programs to utilize that increase.  There have been significant breakthroughs in the ability of a limited number of online programs to find pertinent records automatically. These automatic search technologies will continue to improve, however any impact coming from this improvement will be limited to those who take advantage of programs. As an example, Ancestry.com has had a significantly useful record matching technology for some time. However very very few of those with family trees on Ancestry.com take advantage of the availability of the source suggestions.

By its nature, genealogy is a solitary pursuit. There are several programs including the FamilySearch.org Family Tree that are engendering a greater degree of collaboration than has heretofore been available. FamilySearch's efforts to expand the Family Tree will have a significant impact on the entire online genealogical community. Despite its present limitations, it has the capacity to become the "gold standard" for genealogical data. It is also in a position to measurably assist in overcoming many of the issues I have outlined above. It is not perfect, but the current level of usage will increase and the obvious, major problems with the data will slowly disappear. It will reach the point where anyone who wishes to see the status of research on any ancestral line will, of necessity, have to consult the Family Tree for current information.

It may take a considerable period of time (or not, depending on advances in technology) but the backlog of microfilms and un-digitized documents will begin to decrease dramatically. The next big hurdle is overcoming the fragmentation of all of the online digital collections. In this regard progress is being made by organizations such as the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and others to consolidate and centralize access to the now isolated databases. This trend will continue and the amount of centralized information will allow for far more efficient online research. The DPLA has a long way to go before it reaches the critical mass of becoming a core source for genealogy, but it is moving rapidly in that direction.

I am not making any predictions about the future of copyright law, legal restrictions or privacy issues. These will always be severe limiting factors affecting the free access of genealogical data.

I don't ever expect to wake up and find that all the family trees online suddenly become sourcecentric but I do see a movement to greater integration of the data. One giant obstacle of globalization of the genealogical programs is that fact that the developers do not see markets in non-European sectors. Any effort in developing a truly workable solution to the way genealogical data is handled is only going to occur when someone or some entity sees the need enough to invest in the development of a truly global solution for the need to store, access and transfer genealogical data.

Thanks for reading.