About Books and Printed Records

Jerome's Prologue to the Pentateuch from the Gutenberg Bible in the British Library

From time to time I get a question about finding a birth certificate. Many people just assume that birth certificates are a fact of life and have always existed. They are usually surprised when I start telling them about the limitations on all kinds of government based personal records. In a state like Arizona, birth certificates were not required state-wide until July 1909 and did not become common until some time after that. Compulsory registration of births by governmental agencies was first done in the United Kingdom in 1853 but the UK General Register Office has some certificates for births, marriages and deaths going back to 1837.

Although birth certificates did not exist, many governments recorded births, marriages and deaths. In America, Massachusetts mandated birth records beginning in 1841 however earlier records are in existence dating back to 1700. Obviously, church records concerning births, marriages and deaths go back much further. Obviously, investigation of the records becomes much more difficult than simply ordering a copy of a birth certificate. Even though there are some printed compiled records for Massachusetts and other New England states, verifying the original copy at the town clerk’s office is extremely important since the bound books are secondary sources and therefore subject to errors in transcription or omission from the original unless you can find a copy of the town clerk's records on microfilm or scanned online. See Massachusetts Vital Records.

For each type of record there is an absolute time depth. This is especially true of all books. The earliest printed book is the Diamond Sutra scroll, the Jin gang ban ruo bo luo mi jing. This is a copy of the Sanskrit Vajracchedika-prajnaparamitasutra, translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva, printed by Wang Jie in May 868, and discovered in 1907 by Sir M. Aurel Stein at the Dunhuang Caves. See Encyclopedia Britannica Blog. In Japanese the earliest woodblock book is the Busseltsu kokkuji jinshu ogyo printedin 1052.

Our Western tradition of printing dates much later,  the first printed book is the Biblia Latina [42-line Gutenberg Bible] (Mainz, Germany: Johann Gutenberg, 1454). An estimated 180 copies, 140 on paper and 40 on vellum, of the first printed Bible were manufactured in Mainz. Today, 49 complete and incomplete Gutenberg Bibles are known to exist worldwide, of which only 12 are printed on vellum. The four complete vellum copies are located in the State and University Library of Lower Saxony in Göttingen, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Library of Congress. Encyclopedia Britannica.

Gutenberg bible Old Testament Epistle of St Jerome.jpg WikiCommons

Through the Early European Books project, ProQuest is building an increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700 by digitizing and bringing together the holdings of major rare book libraries. Scanning on-site at each library, the books are captured in vivid detail.

I have written many times now that I find many genealogists who are totally unaware of the historical limitations of the records they are seeking. For any given type of record, there is a definite physical limit as to availability. Don't look for printed books in Europe before Gutenberg, don't look for birth certificates in Arizona before 1909.

The Dominant Genealogical Resource on the Internet -- The FamilySearch Wiki

I would like to make an observation and a prediction. First, the observation. The FamilySearch Research Wiki is presently the largest single genealogical research tool on the Internet. Next, the prediction. At its current rate of growth, the FamilySearch Research Wiki will shortly become the most valuable genealogical resource in existence. One comparison to support this observation and prediction. As of the date of this post, the FamilySearch Research Wiki startup page had been accessed 251.6 million times. By comparison, the Ancestry.com Wiki startup page, on the other hand, had been accessed 1.03 million times. There does appear to be any reference to the number of pages of the Amazon.com Wiki, but the FamilySearch Research Wiki is growing at the rate of about 1000 pages a week and is presently at 58,080 pages.

The growth of the Research Wiki has come despite the lack of major exposure, even on the FamilySearch.org website itself as witnessed by the lack of any reference to the Wiki on the FamilySearch.org startup page. This growth is coming despite the lack of a prominence of the Wiki on the FamilySearch.org startup page and despite the fact that many (most) of the users of FamilySearch.org have no idea the Wiki even exists.

The dominance of the Research Wiki comes from several factors. It is a Wiki and as such, it will grow larger and become more valuable simply as a function of the value of the resources it already contains. In addition, FamilySearch is posting millions of historical records online every week. As collections are added to the FamilySearch Historical Record Collections, they are, at the same time, integrated into the Research Wiki. For example, look at the millions of records added just since 1 May 2011. One collection, the Poland, Roman Catholic Church Books, 1600 - 1950 contains 2,063,625 images but is dwarfed by the huge Argentina, Catholic Church Records collection with 4,005,399 images. These two collections by themselves, constitute a major online resource. But they are drowned in the sea of records pouring online from FamilySearch.

The Research Wiki is the master catalog or metadata source for all of this vast collection of collections and the Historical Record Collections are presently in their infancy. Only a very small percentage of the available records have yet to be posted online.

What else portends the dominance of the Research Wiki in genealogical research? The fact that there is nothing presently on the Internet pertaining to genealogy that has even a ghost of a chance of becoming more important or that is growing more rapidly.

I would also make a request to everyone who reads this post. If you find a new resource on the Internet and blog about how valuable it is. Take a moment and add a link to the resource on the Research Wiki. This one act will leverage your knowledge and make the resource even more valuable by making in known in the larger international community.

Digging into books -- genealogy online and digitized

One of the first things I usually tell patrons as they begin a tour of the Mesa Regional Family History Center is to check to see if someone has written a surname book about one of your ancestors. That is always a good thing to do in Mesa, especially for people whose ancestors settled in the area. But now that same suggestion can be made to anyone. Why not check and see if one or more of your surname ancestors has a digitized book online?

I would look first at the FamilySearch.org Books link to the Brigham Young University Family History Archive. The link is on the main startup page for FamilySearch.org. The number of books in the digitized collection is a complete mystery since the counter has been non-functional since last year some time. In addition to surname books, the collection also has:

• Histories of families
• County and local histories
• How-to books on genealogy
• Genealogy magazines
• Periodicals (including some international)
• Medieval books (including histories and pedigrees)
• Gazetteers

I searched on my Tanner surname and had 20 results, some of which are surname books I am familiar with. But my search doesn't count, I have searched many times and am pretty familiar with what is available online. But if you haven't searched, you might be surprised.

The second place to search is Google.com Books. Try putting in the surnames and the word genealogy or family or history. A search for Tanner genealogy returned 10,200 results, including many public domain books that were available to read or download. It might take you a while to exhaust this vast collection.  If the books are not online in a readable format, you can add them to your Google Books account and purchase a digital copy.

Next try Archive.org.  I didn't find very many under a search for Tanner genealogy, but I found quite a few with a search for Tanner. If you strike out with Archive.org, try searching in WorldCat.org and look for online editions of the books you find.

When you get through with those searches, you might just try a Google.com search for related topics. I searched for "tanner genealogy books online digitized" and got some interesting results. You might even run across my recent post on reading genealogy books online - a survey of sources.

Now, you might worry that some of these "sources" might, in fact, be drivel. That is entirely possible. But, I would suggest that you at least become familiar with what some of your relatives may have done before. Many of the older books are ascendancy books and the information about the progenitors may be suspect but a lot of the information may have been gathered first hand by the author. Once in a while, you hit a gold mine of information tied to contemporary sources.  Good luck in your searching. 

Listening to Wind

Wind has always played a big part in my life. One of the things I most remember about my time spent up on the Colorado Plateau is the wind blowing almost all the time. If is hard to remember things like wind because they are so prevalent that you do no form an independent memory of any one event, unless the wind played a big part in some other memorable activity. Years after I left the Plateau, I remember going back for a trip and sitting outside as the sunset. I suddenly became aware of the wind noise and it brought back all the impressions of my years spent on the Plateau.

One time when we were driving from Holbrook south, we crossed the Little Colorado River where it flows in a shallow wash-like depression, not really a canyon. The road went straight down the bank on one side, across the low bridge and up the other side. We were driving pretty fast, as was usually the case, but as we came up the bank we came right into the wind. I remember it was like hitting a wall. The car almost came to a stop from the force of the wind.

One time after a funeral, we all drove up from the Valley and went directly to the cemetery for the burial. As we got out of the cars, we began walking around and suddenly we all sort-of looked at each other and said, "This is really strange." The wind wasn't blowing. After a few comments on the lack of wind, we continued with the graveside service, when suddenly, as if in answer to our observations, the wind came, blowing over all the flowers, and slamming all the car doors. It makes you think that the wind is an active participant in the life of the Plateau rather than just a natural phenomena.

When I think about listening to the wind, I realize that there are a lot of experiences in life that are, in a sense, in the background, like the wind blowing all time, they are taken for granted and not remembered. At the same time, these background experiences are what make up the reality of life. They fill in gaps between the time when events we consider significant occur. As I make a record of my life and the life of my ancestors as I can find it, most of what I write, nearly all actually, excludes the wind noise. There is little or nothing preserved of the day to day insignificant events that make up a life.

I sometimes speculate on the day to day life of my Great-grandparents. Living out on the Plateau, they had no running water, no air conditioning, no indoor plumbing, almost no communication with the outside world, no electricity. Their days had the common background of finding firewood, cleaning the wood stove, lighting the stove, boiling water, hauling water, finding more wood, taking care of animals, feeding a large family, riding miles and miles on horseback, cultivating rock hard ground with few tools and nothing but horses or oxen to pull the plough. But these are things that I can only imagine, they are the background of life that didn't get recorded.

So how can I listen to the wind that blew for my ancestors? Fortunately, even though my own ancestors did not leave a written record of their day to day life, we have a few people in the same communities that did leave a record. Fortunately, I found the records preserved in the Cline Library Special Collections and Archives of the Northern Arizona University. The Library has the Colorado Plateau Archives consisting of 37,220 items. Included in their collection was a journal of one of my Great-grandfather's closets friends. His day-by-day account helps me to listen to the wind.

Where can you go to listen to the wind? Have you looked at archives near where your ancestors lived to see if there are journals or other documents that can fill in the background lacking from your own ancestors' accounts? Why not take a look.

Multiple changes to FamilySearch websites

FamilySearch websites continue their evolution from multiple individual "Beta" sites into a unified structure under the umbrella of FamilySearch.org. The individual sites still maintain, to some extent, their own identities, but the interface continues to incorporate more links and changes to make them all word together as a single website. With the exception of New.FamilySearch.org, most of the sites are now pretty well incorporated into FamilySearch.org.

In case you have missed the very recent changes, here is the line up so far:

The former Record Search Pilot is now completely incorporated into a newly named heading called simply "Records." See this screen shot:

You can click on the image to enlarge it. You will see that the names of the links have been shortened. Records, instead of Historical Records and Trees instead of Family Trees and Catalog instead of Family History Library Catalog and so forth. These are more than merely cosmetic changes since the idea is to integrate those formerly disparate sites into the main website, cutting down the names reduces the association with the former sites. I don't really know if that is what they were trying to do, but that is the result anyway.

FamilySearch added a link called "Books" that goes directly to the Brigham Young University Family History Archive, which, by the way, when you get to the startup page is no longer identified as being from BYU except in the URL. 

There is still some streamlining that needs to be done. There is an extra page for going the FamilySearch Research Wiki, which shows a very out-of-date total for the number of articles. I might also mention that the counter on the Books page hasn't worked for over a year. We have no idea how many books are online or scanned.

There was an issue of the startup page for FamilySearch.org changing when you logged in. Some of the menu items changed. But that has been corrected and Indexing has now replaced Give Back which has moved to the bottom of the page. Several of the links at the bottom of the page have also changed.

Some of the websites are still obscured by the structure. For example Forums.FamilySearch.org is invisible and FamilyTech.FamilySearch.org is still hidden on the Learn page.

FamilyTech.FamilySearch.org has been undergoing a complete facelift. I will have to go into that in another post. All of the changes seem to work to integrate the separate programs, but I am sure that there will be more changes as we go along. Most of the changes are occurring unannounced, by the way.

Awareness of Kinship Systems -- When is an Aunt not an Aunt?

A kinship system is the structure of the social relationships that constitute kinship in a particular culture. Kinship includes the terminology that is used to define those social relationships and the reciprocal cultural obligations that are associated with the terminological categories. The kinship roles are culturally determined and therefore imposed on the individuals by reason of their cultural and linguistic background and unless an individual consciously changes his or her culture and language it is highly unlikely that the individual will escape the restrictions of the dominant kinship system.

Genealogists and genealogy as a study come primarily from a historical and not an anthropological or sociological background so there is little or no mention of kinship systems in the context of family histories. This is likely due, at least in major part, to the fact that most people are unaware of their own cultures kinship system as a system. In a sense they are too close to the forest to see anything but trees. Likewise, kinship studies of very large complex societies are, for the most part, conspicuously absent from the literature.

Familial relationships are for the most part so integrated into the genealogical studies that it is only when there has be an historical shift in the meaning of a relationship terms, that the issue is even discussed. The issue is the tendency that we will all have to impose our own understanding of the familial relationships on cultures that are entirely foreign to our own. We take it for granted, that the terms we use apply universally. That a Grandparent is always the parent our own parent, when in some cultures the relationship may be much more complex than that. Since genealogy is essentially the names of individuals and their kin relations to one another, ignorance of these relationships and the terminology used in any particular cultural context may contribute to completely misleading conclusions about relationships.

Every person belongs to both a biological family of orientation (i.e. mother, father, and if present, brothers and sisters) as well as a procreative family (i.e. spouse, wife, husband, children) In all of these cultural contexts we have a culturally defined terminology for referring to various iterations of the family unit, such as step-father, step-mother, half brother or sister, etc.

From the genealogical standpoint, it is important to be aware of these systems so that we can accurately assess relationships. Some of the factors that go into a kinship system is in the terminology. For example, a female spouse is called a wife, a male spouse is called a husband. English also has words for male and female siblings, i.e. brother and sister. Some subcultures within the U.S. use these terms for other purposes. For example, a Catholic Priest may be called Father, or a member of the same religion might be referred to as brother or sister. The use of these terms is external to the kinship system.

The dominant kinship systems in the U.S. can be defined as open, multilineal, conjugal systems. In English we have the word family that refers to the conjugal unit, no matter how constituted, and the term "relative" that refers to anyone who is considered a kinsman. Our relations are constituted almost exclusively of interlocking conjugal families. As such English speaking Americans are always members of two interlocking families and unless the brothers of one family marry the sisters of another each individual is the unique member of the intersection of both familial groups.

Kinship is an extensive study. Lack of awareness of basic kinship relationships can cause genealogists to make invalid conclusions. If you would like to have a greater understanding of how kinship system terminology may affect your genealogical conclusions, I might suggest starting with Parsons, Talcott, The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States. The complete article is available from the American Anthropologist for a free download.

Genealogy on Toasted Oats?

What to my wondering eyes should appear but a plug for genealogy on the back of a cereal box! The American Library Association (ALA) is working with Safeway Inc., on a roll-out of five Safeway-brand cereal boxes with back-panel content about libraries and librarians. The boxes launched last  October and will be available at Safeway’s 1,500 stores across the nation. Quoting from Cooperation Today,

We are proud to partner with the American Library Association and collaborate in the creation of educational panels for our line of Safeway Brand cereal. This is a way we can support the efforts of the ALA and bring education and enjoyment to our consumers,” said Mike Minasi, Safeway president, marketing.
“We want to thank Safeway for presenting us with a unique opportunity,” said ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. “The cereal boxes will bring information about some of the exciting ways to enjoy libraries – and about the value of libraries — straight into people’s homes.

 All feature the @ your library® brand of ALA’s Campaign for America’s Libraries and links to resources available at www.ilovelibraries.org, ALA’s advocacy and public awareness Web site for the public. The first panels focus on genealogy and international libraries.

And you thought Who Do You Think You Are was big!