New Zealand has the highest interest in Genealogy

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=genealogy

Every so often, I take a look at Google Trends and look up various topics relating to genealogy. My first search this round was for the word "genealogy" as a search term. I found it interesting that both New Zealand and Ireland showed more activity searching for genealogy than the United States.  It is also interesting that all of the top five countries speak English. Searches for genealogy peak in about May and then drop off somewhat for the rest of the year. Here is a 12-month graph.

Google Trends takes the point of most activity or peak for any search and that becomes "100" and then any other activity is measured against the peak level. So this chart does not show the relative interest in genealogy compared to other subjects, but just the activity as compared to itself. Here is the long-term chart.

If I take some random topic, such as football for instance, here is what the long-term graph looks like.

You can easily see the seasonal interest in this particular sport.

Now, what happens if you compare the large online genealogical database/family tree programs? Here is the graph for FamilySearch.org.

Interesting that its peak of searching interest was in 2015. Now, here is Ancestry.com.

Here we go with MyHeritage.com.

MyHeritage.com peaked back in 2010 which likely corresponds to when the website was just gaining traction in the United States.

Now, with Findmypast.com.

Findmypast.com peaked back in 2007 and was exclusively in the UK and other related countries.

How do all the companies stack up? Here is a chart of all four for comparison.

It appears that Ancestry.com is living on its past glory days. Recently, both FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com have shared about the same interest but neither MyHeritage.com or Findmypast.com have reached their levels. What this chart does not show at all is the phenomenal growth of MyHeritage.com as a company worldwide. Currently, MyHeritage.com has over 91 million members, a number that far exceeds any other genealogy-related company. I surmise that those who are involved in these programs don't spend any time at all looking for them online; their users already know who and where they are located.

Here is another indicator of the cyclical nature of genealogy searches. This is a search for #RootsTech, the large genealogy conference.

I can't imagine what that little blip back in 2004 was, but the rest of the searches are predictable and regular.

So, for this go around, it looks like searches for genealogy have leveled off in a sort of background way. One more search is interesting. This one is for "genealogy websites."

The peak here was in 2010, which appears to correspond to the peak for MyHeritage.com and was also the peak for Ancestry.com. Interesting.

Oh, I thought I should show the chart for FamilySearch.org as a search term also.

FamilySearch.org shows the same 2010 peak but has another peak in 2013 that seems to correspond to the peak for #RootsTech that year. That's all for now for this update.

ProQuest Genealogy

Many local public libraries and universities subscribe to ProQuest.com. Although the company's digital resources cover much more than just genealogy, they do have a large number of valuable resources for genealogists. Here is a description of the company from their website.

ProQuest is a key partner for content holders of all types, preserving and enabling access to their rich and varied information. Those partnerships have built a growing content collection that now encompasses 90,000 authoritative sources, 6 billion digital pages and spans six centuries. It includes the world’s largest collection of dissertations and theses; 20 million pages and three centuries of global, national, regional and specialty newspapers; more than 450,000 ebooks; rich aggregated collections of the world’s most important scholarly journals and periodicals; and unique vaults of digitized historical collections from great libraries and museums, as well as organizations as varied as the Royal Archives, the Associated Press and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

ProQuest.com supplies both the HeritageQuest.com and Library Edition of Ancestry.com to many libraries. 

AncestryHeritageQuest.com has some of the following resources:

• City Directories
• 1850 and 1860 Slave Schedules
• U.S. Indian Census Rolls
• Mortality Schedules
• Agricultural and Industrial Schedules
• 1890 Veterans Schedule

If these databases look familiar, it is because Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest.com have been business partners for some time now. See "ProQuest Advances Genealogical Research with HeritageQuest Online." This is old news, but it bears repeating. 

You should check out your public library at the town or city level, the county level and at the state level for access to ProQuest.com and HeritageQuest.com and the library edition of Ancestry.com. 

Important Records from The Netherlands and Other Locations Added to Geneanet.org

As a result of the partnership between Geneanet.org and FamilySearch.org, a large number of FamilySearch.org records have been added to Geneanet.org. Here is the list of the new records.

• Belgium, Birth: 307,989 entries added
• Italy, Napoli, Castellammare di Stabia, Civil Registration (Comune), 1809-1936: 471,276 entries added
• Netherlands, Noord-Holland, Civil Registration, 1811-1950: 1,638,062 entries added
• Portugal, Portalegre, Catholic Church Records, 1859-1911: 62,865 entries added
• Spain, Province of Gerona, Municipal Records, 1566-1956: 750,000 entries added

These records are reserved for Geneanet Premium members. The records are also viewable in digitized microfilm format on FamilySearch.org but are searchable or will be searchable on Geneanet.org. 

One thing I found interesting on Geneanet.org was the number of responses to a search for my surname: Tanner. I found records for Tanners in France, Sweden, Germany, Wales, Ireland and in the United States. I have the impression that my family always assumed that all the Tanners came from England, but it looks like there could be some significant revisions to that tradition. 

MyHeritage Adds 94+ Million Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists

MyHeritage.com has added over 94 million records from the American immigrant resource, Ellis Island to its SuperSearch™technology. Here is the explanation of the newly added records from their website:

Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957
UPDATED 

94,028,112 records 

During the 19th and 20th centuries millions of immigrants came to the United States. This collection contains millions of records of individuals arriving at the port of New York between 1820 and 1957. This includes individuals who arrived at three well-known immigrant processing stations: Castle Garden (1855-1890), the Barge Office (1890-1892), and Ellis Island (1892-1957).

Searching the Ellis Island and New York Passenger Lists collection is free. A subscription is required to view records and scanned images, and to access Record Matches. Because these records have been added to SuperSearch, if you have a full subscription to the website, that includes the data searching, you will begin to get automatic Record Matches to everyone in your family tree. The new collection can be found under the Research tab on the MyHeritage.com Startup page.

Other important facts about this new collection are that the collection includes the responses to supplemental questions asked by immigration officials which have now been indexed by MyHeritage for the first time, yielding an additional 26.6 million names to the Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists collection.

MyHeritage has also solved a common issue genealogists face when trying to locate the second page of an Ellis Island immigration record. We have stitched together the double pages into single document images, ensuring that users do not miss important information.

How Many Ancestors or Relatives Do You Actually Have?

This screenshot from MyHeritage.com showing a small segment of a list of "Smart Matches" is a good place to start thinking about the enormity of the task of discovering "all" of your ancestors and their descendants. In my recent post entitled, "Pedigree Collapse, Binary Progression, and DNA: Part One," I referred to the fact that our biological ancestors increase in number as a binary geometric progression. The actual number of ancestors is not a straight binary progression. The idea of pedigree collapse incorporates the concept that some of our ancestors will reproduce offspring with their own relatives. Ultimately, as supported by current research into ancestral DNA, the number of our ancestors collapses to 2 individuals.

The implication of this is that everyone shares a common ancestral heritage. In other words, we are all related if we go back far enough. By the way, as many scientists would loathe to admit, this view of our interrelatedness is reflected in most, if not all, the existing traditional creationists stories.

Realistically, the number of relatives and ancestors that we have is essentially the total number of humans who have lived on the earth. See "What does it mean to be human?" and many other similar articles. In fact, some of the genealogical DNA testing programs include percentages of Neanderthal DNA which are subject to a debate of whether or not these ancient people were humans.

Interestingly, the FamilySearch.org Family Tree incorporates the idea that we are all related. The Family Tree purports to be a family tree inclusive of all the people who have ever lived on the face of the earth. Of course, that concept raises a philosophical issue as to whether or not we incorporate "traditional" and religiously based family lines that include, in a sense, going back to "Adam."

So, my previous illustration using a table of a binary progression is really the only a very small part of the problem facing genealogists. There is really no end to the number of people to whom you are related. I guess that answers the question posed in the title to this post.

Free MyHeritage Genealogy Seminar Available Online for Free

Here is the announcement from MyHeritage about their recent online seminar:

The recordings of Sunday's MyHeritage genealogy seminar are now available to view for free at www.FamilyTreeWebinars.com/mhseminar.
The MyHeritage genealogy seminar was presented at the MyHeritage headquarters in Israel on Sunday, October 29, 2017 and broadcast live internationally via Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Five renowned genealogical educators provided a variety of classes on genealogy research. The speakers included Rose Feldman, Garri Regev, Daniel Horowitz, Jessica Taylor and Tim Janzen. 

View the Recording at FamilyTreeWebinars.com 

If you could not make it to the live event or just want to watch it again, the recordings of all seven classes are now available to view in our webinar library for free.

The Classes 

The presentations include:

• Filling in the In-Between of the Jewish BMD by Rose Feldman
• Jewish Family Research Challenges by Garri Regev
• Introduction to the Use of Autosomal DNA Testing by Tim Janzen
• Google for Genealogy: Search Tricks to Tease Out Information by Jessica Taylor
• Discover Your Family History with MyHeritage's Unique Technologies by Daniel Horowitz
• How to Pass Your Ancestors' Legacy to Your Grandchildren by Jessica Taylor
• Advanced Autosomal DNA Techniques used in Genetic Genealogy by Tim Janzen

The presentations will be available in the Legacy library as free replays. View over 50 other free videos in the Legacy library.

You Can't Kill False Family Traditions

Family traditions are some of life's most permanent features. Currently, a major portion of the promotion going on in the media about "genealogy" and "family history" deals with encouraging people to remember and record their ancestor's stories. I certainly appreciate my heritage and the stories that have been preserved, but I frequently find that those stories that involve the details of our ancestors' lives do not stand up well to verifiable, historical scrutiny. As genealogists, we should be concerned about the accuracy of the information we record about our ancestors, but stories and other memories seem to be excluded from the general accuracy concerns.

However, a dedicated and experienced genealogist is really no match for an entrenched family traditional story or memory. I am not writing about "family traditions" such as gatherings for holidays or preserving an ethnic or cultural heritage, I am talking about the oral and sometimes written accounts of events or conditions that existed at the times our ancestors lived.

One example, that I have written about previously, involves one of my prominent ancestors. However, in this example, the problem is the provenance of the story. "Provenance" is the chain of origin of an object or story, i.e. the earliest known history of something. The earliest known written copy of my own ancestor's story was written by his grandson who never had an opportunity to meet or talk to his grandfather. So the story had already gone through two generations of retelling before it was recorded. Subsequent research questions some of the details of the account. But, there is no practical or even logical way to "correct" the traditional story.

Standard genealogical research can help assure that traditional stories are accurate in at least some of the details. It is also helpful to investigate the historical context of the story. I recently helped a patron at the Brigham Young University Family History Library who told me immediately that the ancestor she was seeking to find was from "Germany." After looking for a short time, we found census records and a birth record showing that the ancestor was born in the United States. This may seem like a trivial example, but many traditional stories end up superseding the actual history and deterring further genealogical research.

Here are some accounts of the efforts to verify orally transmitted traditions from a genealogical and historical standpoint including previous posts on this subject:

• Chaim Freedman, "The Gaon of Vilna - Verifying the Oral Tradition
• Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, "Folklore in the Oral Tradition, Fairytales, Fables and Folk-legend"
• How do historians verify the validity of oral histories?
• Folklore, Oral Tradition, and Genealogy
• People as Sources for Family History: Talking to Your Family Can Be Research
• The Importance of Oral Histories in Genealogy and Family History: give grandma a call
• EnduringLegacies:  Oral Tradition in HistoricalResearch

I am certainly not attempting to discourage recording oral traditions, but I am advocating that the stories be as accurate as possible and where possible, supported by reliable research.