Smartphone Sales Hit 1.5 Billion Units in 2017: What does this mean for Genealogy?

Genealogy is rapidly becoming technologically sidelined. Two interesting statistics point out the core reason for this phenomenon. First, during the last quarter of 2016, Apple sold 78.3 million iPhones and overall global smartphone shipments grew 3 percent to a total of 1.4 billion units out of a total world population of 7.5 billion. In other words, last year alone, about 18 percent of the world's population bought new smartphones during the year 2016. It is projected that by the end of 2017, 80 percent of all mobile phone users will be using smartphones.

What is a smartphone? It is a highly sophisticated computer attached to both the cellphone network and the internet.

The second interesting development is that Amazon.com, the world's largest e-retailer is spending $1.49 to build its first world-wide air cargo hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport in Hebron, Kentucky. In short, Amazon is vertically integrating its worldwide sales and will be taking business away from UPS and FEDEX as well as the U.S. Postal Service.

How are these two facts related to genealogy? Both of these developments illustrate a major shift in the distribution of both information and actual physical goods. Genealogists are, for the most part, stagnated in the backwater of paper-based technology. Even though millions of original source records are being digitized every day, very few genealogists are aware of the magnitude of that digitization effort. Although a few genealogy software programs have "apps" that run on smartphones, most of those apps are limited to viewing data rather than processing it. Almost uniformly, all genealogical computer-based programs require the use of a desktop-based computer when the movement worldwide is to smartphones.

Can smartphones be used to do genealogical research? Right now, there are very few of the genealogically oriented programs that work adequately on smartphones. Most of the apps act as viewers rather than being interactive. Granted, most people find entering data into a smartphone to be awkward and slow. But those who use smartphones as their primary computer are more adept at quickly interacting with the small, usually virtual keyboards. Many of the apps available for smartphones are tied to downloadable, standalone programs that only run on desktop computers and many of the features of the standalone programs are not implemented in the apps for smartphones.

For example, the worldwide indexing program sponsored by FamilySearch.org does not yet run on smartphones or tablets. Perhaps it is time that the genealogy community starts to more aggressively incorporate smartphones in the process of doing genealogical research.

What does Amazon have to do with genealogy? Hmm. More and more of the world's commerce is moving to the internet. This major move by one of the largest retailers in the world illustrates that importance of being online. There are still a significant number of genealogy programs that do not have smartphone apps or do not operate at all well on smartphones. In addition, many genealogists are still using programs, such as Personal Ancestral File, that do not have any possibility of being incorporated into the online world of the internet. In addition, there are only a very small number of genealogy apps that are being distributed or sold through Amazon.

Discovering Important Church Records at the Family History Library and the BYU Family History Library

Both the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and the Brigham Young University Family History Library in Provo, Utah, just 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, have very extensive genealogy collections. Since both institutions are sponsored and operated indirectly by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you would expect that both would have a lot of original source records about the Church. But perhaps surprisingly to some researchers, they both have extensive collections of church records from hundreds of other denominations.

It always surprises me when I ask genealogical researchers about the church affiliation of their ancestors and they indicate that they do not know that information. Regardless of the researchers' religious interest or affiliation, it is highly likely that the researchers' ancestors were involved in a particular religious denomination. This is important because of the preeminence of church records in recording births, marriages, and deaths along with other valuable information concerning the movements of our ancestors. Additionally, some of the oldest available records have been preserved by the churches.

Civil registration of birth and death records, especially in the United States, is only a very recent phenomenon. For example, in Utah where I now reside, civil registration of birth records began only in 1898 and both marriage and death records have been kept only from the previous year of 1897. In the eastern part of the United States, some birth and death records were kept at a local level in town records from the very earliest times, but there were no laws requiring the registration of either births or deaths. Marriages, because they affect property ownership, have been the most widely recorded. Since each state developed its own system and laws concerning recording vital record information, in most of the states these records do not exist until the 1900s.

Genealogical research is historical research and to understand and find church records genealogical researchers must know the history and religious practices of their ancestors in some detail. However, one of the obstacles to learning and using this information is the variety of the different religious practices and the relatively large number of separate denominations. There is sometimes a major challenge in locating the records that may have been kept locally, regionally or even nationally. Historically and even today, some countries have established "state" religions and all the people living in the country must "belong" to the designated church. For genealogical researchers, this fact makes locating their ancestors much easier than it could be. But for those whose ancestors belonged to alternative denominations, the task of finding the records, if they exist, can be overwhelming.

A good place to start your investigation of church records is to review the background material provided in the following, very valuable book.

Szucs, Loretto Dennis, and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking. The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy. Provo, UT: Ancestry, 2006.

This book has been incorporated into the Ancestry.com online wiki and look for the section on Church Records. See http://www.ancestry.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

For the serious researcher, the Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library has a large and impressive collection of books about religions of all types and denominations. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article concerning the Library. See Wikipedia: Harold B. Lee Library.

The Harold B. Lee Library (HBLL), located in Provo, Utah, is the main academic library of Brigham Young University (BYU), the largest religious and private university in the United States. The library has approximately 98 miles (158 km) of shelving for the more than 6 million items in its various collections, as well as a seating capacity for 4,600 people. With over 10,000 patrons entering the building each day, The Princeton Review consistently ranks the HBLL in the nation's Top Ten University Libraries–#1 in 2004 and #3 in 2012. Named for Harold B. Lee, former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), the library's motto is "...Learning by study and also by faith."

Likewise, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah is world renowned for its genealogical collections. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article about the Family History Library. See Wikipedia: Family History Library.

The library is in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the headquarters of the LDS Church are located. It is the largest genealogical library in the world and is open to the general public at no charge. The library holds genealogical records for over 110 countries, territories, and possessions. Its collections include over 1.6 million rolls of microfilmed records onsite and access the total collection of more than 2.4 million rolls of microfilmed genealogical records; 727,000 microfiche; 356,000 books, serials, and other formats; 4,500 periodicals; 3,725 electronic resources including subscriptions to the major genealogical websites. 

The library offers research assistance to help patrons trace their own family history. Professional genealogists and volunteers offer assistance in about 30 languages, which includes reading and translating genealogically relevant documents. The library also offers free one-on-one consultations on difficult research problems. Additionally, there are classes on genealogical research topics free to the public and classes available online. Free family history research advice and information are offered online at the FamilySearch Research Wiki.

In order to utilize these vast resources, it is still absolutely necessary to identify the religious affiliation of your ancestors. In some cases, especially for those ancestors who lived in rural areas, it is possible to identify their church by where they lived. Where there is one predominant religion, any search should begin with the denomination of the closest church building. Some churches, such as the Catholic Church, are organized geographically so locating ancestral church records is dependent on identifying the exact location of the events in your ancestors' lives. Many other denominations also have geographic divisions and the process of finding the records is somewhat simplified, but in some cases, such as in large cities, identifying the church where the records might be kept is much more difficult.

Assuming you have determined your ancestors' religious affiliation, your should begin your search for records with the FamilySearch Catalog on FamilySearch.org. There are a vast number of church records from around the world included in the huge microfilm collection at the Family History Library and these microfilmed records are all cataloged in the online FamilySearch.org Catalog. In addition, all of these microfilmed records are in the process of being digitized and many of the records are already available in the FamilySearch.org Historical Record Collections or directly available from the catalog entries.

Stay tuned for further installments.

Dear {Insert First Name} Re: Controlling your email and social networking

The days of having a physical mailbox filled with a huge pile of paper seem to be over. There are even some days when we don't receive any mail at all. The term "junk mail" was coined to refer to the piles of unsolicited paper mail we used to receive. It seems that the earliest use of the term dates to around 1954. See Online Etymology Dictionary: Junk. The concept of junk mail is also closely allied with the idea that "one man's trash is another man's treasure." See English Language and Usage: Origin of "one man's trash is another man's treasure." It is readily apparent that we use the word "junk" to refer only to those things that are not important to us personally. The term has lately been expanded to include unsolicited and unwanted electronic communications.

However, the term "junk email" never received much traction. Instead, the term "spam" has dominated this particular portion of the etymological universe. The word "spam" is apparently an artificial contraction from sp(liced h)am that originated in the 1930s. The term was apparently first used to refer to unwanted electronic transmissions or communications in 1993 and probably originated from a Monty Python's Flying Circus skit first aired in 1970. Just in case you missed the episode, here it is.

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spammity spam

To paraphrase a statement I once read (and cannot now find again):

If you want to avoid spam, don't buy a computer and if you do buy a computer, don't turn it on but if you do turn it on, do not connect it to the internet. 

Does this have anything to do with genealogy? Well, it is a real stretch, but some of us do sit in front of computers all day and write and in my case, I get as many as 100+ email messages a day. I just checked and even though I opened or deleted all of the mail in my inbox late last night, this morning I have ten new messages and if today is like yesterday, I will end up with more messages than I can open and answer in many hours of work.

Ironically, on the LinkedIn.com website, I am most highly endorsed for my skills with Social Media. Now, am I ever going to address the topic in the title to this post? The answer is really complicated.

First of all, social networking is just that: social. The easiest way to control anything social is to be antisocial. So, there are those who opt out of social networking altogether. If that is your solution, then you are probably not reading this post. But the real way of handling both an abundance of email and getting caught up in social networking is to take a hard line attitude towards both. In both cases, I use intermediary programs that allow me to monitor both my email and any social networking without actually reading or even looking at most of what is posted or sent.

For example, for my blog reading I currently use Digg.com. For example, I just checked and since late yesterday, I have 215 new blog posts to review. But each of these posts is categorized by the Digg.com program and arranged in a short, headline-type list which I can read through in a matter of minutes and select to view only those posts that interest me directly.  This type of program is called a news aggregator or reader program. I use a similar program for my email from Google called Inbox. It isn't perfect, but it organizes everything in a headline fashion by subject and allows me to delete any spam email without even opening the messages. By the way, we still do this with physical junk mail. We have a waste paper basket where we open the mail and any unwanted items go right in the trash.

With social networking programs such as Facebook and Twitter, I use filters. I get notifications from email rather than constantly checking the programs to see any new posts.

I do get distracted now and again, but by using filtering tools and avoiding mindless scrolling through social networking programs, I get quite a bit done every day.

Genealogy's Most Persistent Modern Myth

One often repeated statement is, in fact, a complete myth. Genealogy is NOT the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening despite this claim being repeated over and over by bloggers and news commentators. See quote by Dick Eastman in this blog post entitled, "Genealogy and Seniors." Dick is quoting another blog post from Kimberley Fowler entitled, "Genealogy and Seniors." Ms. Fowler's statement is as follows:

Older adults who are retired and have time on their hands are taking advantage, making “genealogy the second most popular hobby in the U.S., after gardening,” according to Time.

Her article also makes the claim that genealogy is the "second most-visited category of websites on the internet." This link from both these statements in her blog post is to a Time.com article written in 2014 which further supports the statements with the following:

Four decades later, genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening, according to ABC News, and the second most visited category of websites, after pornography.

Hmm. We are following a train of quotes from quotes. It has been a while since I wrote on this subject. Here are a few of my previous posts.

• Hobby Claims about Genealogy are Unfounded
• The Second Most Popular Topic?
• America's Favorite Pastime -- Genealogy?

Here is something I seldom, if ever do. I will quote myself. Here is what I had to say about the ABC News article back in 2015.

Here is a quote from the ABC News Website back on October 24, 2012 in an article entitled "Who's Your Daddy? Genealogy Becomes $1.6 B Hobby." 

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but hobby experts believe that genealogy ranks second only to gardening as American's favorite pastime. 

That is the only mention made by the article, which by the way, was primarily about Permira's acquisition of Ancestry.com. 

Notwithstanding the fact that there is no substantiation or even a citation to this claim, another article, this time in the Dickinson Press in Dickinson, North Dakota, takes that statement and claims the following: 

According to ABC News, ancestry is the second-most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening and the second-most visited category of websites after pornography. 

The unattributed article by the ABC News has now been elevated to doctrine. Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it. Find one list of currently popular hobbies that includes genealogy as a hobby. I don't even care if it is number 50 or 100, just find a list where genealogy is listed as a popular hobby. 

So who are the hobby experts and where is their list?

Why is this something to write about? That is a fair question. I think genealogy has enough inherited myths without inventing new ones to add to the pile. Here is my response to the issue of genealogical myths:

Don't You Believe It! Debunking Genealogical Myths - James Tanner

By the way, if you do find a list of hobbies that includes genealogy, you might note that it also contains a reference to the ABC News article by putting genealogy right after gardening. Let's go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey. This is about as close as I can get to substantiating what Americans do in their spare time. Search this website and see if you can find any mention of genealogy as a leisure activity in the United States. In the United States, the most common leisure activity is watching TV. Here is the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart.

https://www.bls.gov/TUS/CHARTS/LEISURE.HTM

What about spending? What activities in the United States garner the most spending by Americans? Here is an interesting article from Forbes.com entitled, "In Depth: How Americans Spend Their Money." Unfortunately, estimates of the amount of money spent by the average genealogist are not included in any of the credible national studies on how Americans spend their money. In this regard, there was another story circulating in the news media about the fact that the average genealogist spent $18,000 a year on genealogy-related activities. For example, see "Ready to spend $18,000? The high cost of searching for your ancestors." Once again, whenever you see a claim like this, you need to investigate further. That article links the $18,000 to another article entitled, "Online Researchers Spur Growth of Genealogy Industry, According to a New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc." The actual quote is as follows:

Genealogical enthusiasts are spending between US$1000 to US$18000 a year to discover his or her roots. The growth of the genealogy research market is being spurred by the spending of over 84 million genealogists.

Global Industry Analysts, Inc. is a company that charges businesses for marketing information. A copy of their studies would cost over $1000. You might notice that they do not say anything about the average genealogist spending any amount of money. The range is from a low of $1000 to an unsupported high of $18,000 a year. When was the last time you spent $18,000 strictly on genealogy?

This post shows how myths begin and become accepted as fact. When you are doing your own genealogical research, take the time to verify your facts with competent sources. Like Pandora's Box, once a statement is made online, it is impossible to stop it from being repeated and each time the statement gains greater credibility until it is accepted as the truth even when there is absolutely no substantiation for the claim. 

New Discoveries Pages and Value Add -- Major Improvements for MyHeritage

MyHeritage.com today announced a major upgrade to their website. The new addition is called Discoveries Pages. Here is a description of the new features. from their blog post entitled, "Introducing the New Discoveries Pages."

We’ve unified all matches and organized them into two main pages: Matches by People and Matches by Source. Now you can look at all matches that were found for a particular individual in your family tree, or all matches found in a particular collection of historical records or matching family tree. Whatever you choose to use, the new pages combine Smart Matches (matches with trees) and Record Matches (matches with records) into the same unified and consistent interface. However, you can still decide to view only Smart Matches or only Record Matches and not both together. 

This is much better than the previous organization, where Smart Matches and Record Matches were entirely separate sections on the website, and you had to look at each one of them separately. The historical reason for that separation was that Smart Matches were developed first and Record Matches were released several years later. Now we’ve gone back and unified the experience of using both.

Here is a screenshot of my own website showing all of the combined matches.

If you look closely, you may see that I have a combined total of 103,396 matches for 5,412 people. You also might guess that I can't really handle that number but have to focus on those people who are currently the focus of my research and sort-of ignore the rest for the time being. You really need to read the entire blog post to understand what a great new innovation these pages really are and how utility they add to the entire website.

If that were not enough, MyHeritage.com has added another incredible feature called Value Added. Here is the description, again from the blog post.

MyHeritage has invented a unique and very useful concept in matching that describes the incremental information that any match can add to your tree. We call this “Value Add.” For example, if an individual in your family tree matches a historical record such as a Social Security Death Index record, and you don’t know the individual’s date of death, but the record has it, the Value Add will include “Death date.” A Value Add factor can be partial. For example, if you know an individual was born in 1928 but the record states the birth date as July 28, 1928, and there is no contradiction, the Value Add factor will be “More complete birth date”. In this manner, we have developed about 15 Value Add criteria, and they are all useful for describing what new and incremental information a match (or set of matches) can bring your tree, that you currently don’t have. A Value Add can even be a new personal photo or a new family member (such as father, mother, sibling, spouse or child) that your family tree lacks. 

Matches are now sorted by the Value Add so that those matches that add the most value are listed first. In the past, matches were sorted by how confident we were that they were correct. We were listing matches that we were very confident about at the top of the list, but typically those matches didn’t provide much new information. If we were certain they were correct, that meant they were matching many fields and information that you already knew. So, in fact, we were listing less-exciting matches at the top of your list. They were correct matches, but less interesting for you! 

The new sorting by Value Add ensures that the matches that can teach you the most – those that are the most exciting – are listed at the top of your matches. This saves you valuable time and allows you to focus your limited time on the matches that are potentially the most valuable. Every match now describes the Value Add as “New information”.

Here is a sample of the Value Added notes on some of my ancestors.

The Value Added part is the "New Information in this match."

Every so often, MyHeritage.com adds a new feature that really changes the way people interact with and benefit from their website. This is one of those times.

Libraries: The Best and the Biggest

10 Largest Libraries Of The World

From my perspective, the biggest library in the world is the one nearest to you and the best library is the one that has what you are looking for. Lists of the biggest libraries in the world do not take into account the huge collections of books and other items being accumulated by the online websites such as Google Books or other such websites. But, here are some links to websites that have listed the largest libraries in the world and in the United States.

• List of largest libraries - Wikipedia
• List of the largest libraries in the United States - Wikipedia
• The Nation's Largest Public Libraries: Top 25 Rankings | Professional ...
• 10 Biggest Libraries In The World - O, Pish Posh!
• 5 Largest Libraries In The World - WorldAtlas.com

My own observations in the huge Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library in Provo, Utah is that the library is a particularly attractive area for students to come and study, but that almost all the activity in the library is directed at computers, either those provided by the library or those brought to the library by the patrons. 

Lists compiled of the "best" libraries are highly dependent on the perspective of the person or entity making the list. Since everything I write has to pass through the genealogical screening process, I would not be interested in a huge library that had relatively few books or materials related to my personal interests. For years, the "best" genealogical library has been the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. But now that I am in Provo, I use the BYU Library a lot more than I do the Salt Lake City, Family History Library. The key here is availability and convenience.

The real process involves formulating research goals and then identifying the resources needed to achieve those goals. It would be very unusual to find out that I needed to travel to a remote, very large library to find exactly what I needed assuming I could not obtain the items through interlibrary loan. I am much more likely to be found looking in small, very local libraries and historical societies for the information I need rather than the huge collections in the largest libraries.

If I were working on research into English Literature, I would probably have a different perspective about which libraries I thought were "good" and which were not so good. I doubt my hypothetical interest in English Literature would take me to downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

Despite the huge numbers of resources online, I still find myself going to the BYU Library for books and to the Provo City Library for books. I checked two books out of the Provo Library in the last week. I checked three books out of the BYU Library in the last month or so. What is important is to know when to go to the books for research. Ignoring what is readily available in your own area is always a problem.

But take consolation. If you live in some remote area and your public library is miles away and has almost no books of any interest, you can resort to the 2 billion items in the WorldCat.org catalog and find more and more of them online.

Update on my MyHeritage DNA Test

As time passes, I have received another notification from MyHeritage.com regarding my DNA testing results. You can see from the above screenshot of an email sent to me that the company is in the "DNA Extraction" stage of the test. I had hoped to have my results before the upcoming RootsTech 2017 Conference, but it looks like the process might go on for another few weeks.

I keep everyone posted as to any further progress.