Dancing Around the Rumor

For the last few months, there has been a steady undercurrent of discussion among the genealogists both online and offline about the agreements made between FamilySearch.org and the other three large genealogy companies; Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and findmypast.com (D.C. Thomson Family History). Last week's huge access by Ancestry.com to hundreds of FamilySearch.org's collections fueled even more discussion.

Here are some of the pertinent online documents:

• 21 January 2014 Ancestry.com Expands Groundbreaking Collaboration With FamilySearch
• 17 October 2013 DC Thomson Family History and FamilySearch.org Announce New Partnership
• 14 October 2013 MyHeritage and FamilySearch Enter Significant Strategic Partnership to Advance Family History
• 5 September 2013 Ancestry.com and FamilySearch to Make a Billion Global Records Available Online

I am assuming, perhaps speculating, that we might hear more at RootsTech 2014. But the timing of the Ancestry.com announcement of 21 January 2014 does not seem to indicate that the four entities are particularly focused on RootsTech as the forum for further announcements. During the events of the 21st of January, I wrote down some of my own conclusions and immediately had most of my ideas contradicted by the huge number of collections added to Ancestry.com.

One of the recurrent themes of the rumors surrounding these agreements is the question of the extent that FamilySearch users will either gain or lose access to any of the other programs and even of the databases on FamilySearch.org. It has been a long-standing practice by FamilySearch.org to share its collections of records with other entities. For a considerable time, there have been links from FamilySearch.org to images of records on Ancestry.com, so that users of FamilySearch.org have not had free access to the images without going to a Family History Center (now FamilySearch Center) to view the Library edition of Ancestry.com.

I have had people ask me if Ancestry.com has purchased FamilySearch and if all the records are going to be subscription only and also if FamilySearch has purchased Ancestry.com and so forth. Most of these arise because some genealogists seem to have only the most tenuous understanding of who all the entities are and how they relate to each other. Because of public statements made in the past, which I have reported in previous posts, many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are questioning the type of access they may have in the very near future to records on any of the three non-FamilySearch entities. To date, I have seen nothing online clarifying that issue and there may or may not be any further information made available at RootsTech on that issue.

One thing you can be sure of. I will likely write about any announcements made at RootsTech just as soon as I can get to my keyboard.

When is a disaster a disaster for genealogy?

If your ancestors were living in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889, they probably suffered some kind of loss or may have even been killed by what is known as the Johnstown Flood. On 31 May 1889 the South Fork Dam failed after several days of very heavy rain. In the resultant catastrophic flood, 2,209 people were killed and there was millions of dollars in damage.

As genealogists, perhaps our first impulse (depending our your degree of immersion in genealogy) would be to lament the potential loss of records. Heartless as we are, we tend to think of wars, fires, earthquakes, destructive storms and other catastrophic events as "record loss" events, often ignoring the loss of life and property. But in reality, the real disaster for genealogists is when we are researching in such a historical vacuum that we don't even recognize the disasters that have occurred in our ancestors' lives. I am continually asking people with unsolved genealogical problems about what happened to their ancestors. Why did the family move from one place to another? Almost never do I get an answer.

Collectively, we have a woefully deficient awareness of history. There are individual exceptions, bright lights of knowledge about some war or another or even about some general events in world history, but like happened yesterday, when one of my friends was researching a family in Tennessee, he had absolutely no knowledge about when Tennessee became a state, what parts of the state were previously in what other states or anything even vaguely like an idea of the historical context of the family he was supposedly researching. What's more, after a few minutes of questions, it turned out all of the place designations he had for the family were historically wrong. Neither the towns nor the counties were in existence at the time the events were recorded to have happened. Unfortunately, I did not have time to sort out the facts and had to leave him with his tangled mess.

It has been said in may contexts that we ignore history at our peril. In genealogy, we do this day after day, week after week. I am eminently unsuccessful in getting the patrons and volunteers at the Mesa FamilySearch Library to look at the overall history of the places and events when their ancestors lived. I am certain that not three out of ten could give the beginning and ending years of the American Civil War or any other war for that matter.

Disasters of whatever kind are relatively common. In 2013 for example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lists almost 100 declared natural disasters. How did all those events affect the people involved? How many such events have occurred to our ancestors in the past? How many times have we researched the local history to find out about such disasters?

In my own family, I heard stories from my Grandmother about a disastrous dam collapse in St. Johns, Arizona where there was loss of life and property. How many of the descendants (even the genealogists) of those who suffered in that almost unrecorded flood in 1915.  Here is an account from a faraway newspaper the Wisconsin Daily Journal, Madison Wisconsin for 15 April 1915:

Phoenix, Ariz., April 15. -- With a terrific roar, the Lyman reservoir suddenly gave way today and sent a great wall of water racing down on St. Johns, Ariz., twelve miles below.
Eight persons are known to have been drowned, including three grandchildren of MRS. RACHAEL BARRY, a member of the Arizona General Assembly. Several persons are missing. 

Two smaller reservoirs near St. Johns are weakening and are likely to collapse at any moment, according to brief advices from the scene.
The eight victims lived close under the reservoir dam which collapsed. At St. Johns the flood was three feet high and rising.

If the reservoir at Hunt, northwest of St. Johns, collapses as it threatens to do, Woodruff, Ariz., will be in great danger. The inhabitants of Woodruff have been warned to prepare for flight. Many have moved out of the danger zone already.

My Grandmother, Jessie Christensen Morgan, was 22 years old at the time and told me in a recorded interview about her experiences in seeing those who drowned in the flood.

Many of the unsolved mysteries of our ancestors' lives may not be so unsolved if we take the time to research the local history of what may have happened to cause the circumstances we now see only as names and dates. The real disaster for us today as genealogists is our lack of historical perspective. That is when a disaster is really a disaster. This also includes our lack of feeling for the tragedy of our ancestors' lives.

Why we need an #InnovatorSummit

On Wednesday, February 5, 2014, RootsTech will hold its Innovator Summit. Perhaps you have been wondering why there is a "separate" section of the Conference. The reason is quite simple, this is the portion of the Conference dedicated solely to the "Tech" part of RootsTech 2014. Part of the Innovator Summit is the annual Developer Challenge where the newest and best genealogy software will be considered for recognition. Inclusion in the Developer Challenge itself is an honor. Of course, prizes are awarded the winners, but the idea here is to foment development of useful and innovative programs for use by the entire online family history community. You should note, that last year's winner, Treelines, is an exhibitor at this year's Conference. Many of the products featured will show up as finished products whether or not they actually win a prize.

In addition, this one day event gives the participants the unique ability to mingle and attend classes with those who are immersed in developing the types of programs that will come out in the future. As genealogists, we spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the past, this one day is a window into the future. A future we will all share whether we know about it or not. For my part, I would rather know about what is coming. I will be attending the Innovator Summit and reporting on the proceedings hourly or whatever it takes. I will be using the hashtag #innovatorsummit in the title of each of my blog posts. Of course, I will be somewhat limited because of the noise level, I will have to keyboard everything instead of using voice recognition, like I often do now, but I will try to keep up with as much as possible about what is going on.

Update on RootsTech 2014 and Win a Free Entry Pass

We have been getting ready to do our presentations at RootsTech 2014. I am one of the presenters but there are really two classes of presenters. The first class are those that are going to be broadcasting live. The schedule of the live broadcasts will be published shortly before the Conference. These live broadcasts will be available online at RootsTech.org during the time of the conference each day. Bearing in mind that Salt Lake City, Utah is on Mountain Daylight Time (for now the same as Arizona). Of course, these are free. These broadcasts will also be maintained on the website for an undetermined length of time.

The second class of presentation are those that are recorded to be shown by the individual Stake Family History Fairs. My understanding is that these presentations will only be available to the Stakes who are participating. Since there are probably at least 600 Stakes around the world, there shouldn't be any problem in seeing some of these presentations. But there are 44 presentations total and of course, the Stakes can pick and choose which ones they show. So there is no guarantee that the presentation you would like to see online will ever be shown where you can see it. Unless, they relent at some point and make them all available. But also, some of the presentations are highly volatile and will be out-of-date very quickly. So who knows? Oh, by the way, the presentations are being translated into 10 different languages.

So, if you want to be guaranteed to see some of the presentations on the schedule, recorded or not, you have to actually attend RootsTech 2014. That brings up the question of a free pass to the entire Conference which I can give away. I am supposed to come up with a contest to see who deserves the pass. But I don't do so well with that kind of thing and I decided, before it was too late, to have a contest to come up with a contest. OK, so here is the deal. Beginning at this post, and for the next two days, until 12:00 am on Tuesday, January 28th or early on the 29th however you look at it, or about 48 hours from this post (Arizona Time), I will accept entries. All you have to do is give me a good idea for a contest. In my sole discretion, I will choose the best idea and that person wins the free pass. If no one enters or I only get one idea sent in that sort-of narrows the field a lot. Why do I want the ideas? So next year I won't have to sit around trying to dream up a contest.

You can add your entries as comments to this post or add your entries to my Google+ account. You can add as many entries as you like up until the deadline. OK, one more thing. I have to have some way to contact you so if you send in an entry as "anonymous" you can't win. I will not publish your entries if they contain an email address. But I will notify the winner on Wednesday when I finally get going.  I will need an email address from the winner so FamilySearch can work out the details of getting the winner a free pass.

See you at RootsTech.

Microfilm to Online Textbooks -- Ramping Up a Technology

An article in PC Magazine caught my attention entitled, "Apple Expands iBooks, Textbooks, iTunes U." The original article is called "Apple Expands Worldwide Access to Educational Content." It appears to me that there is a direct correlation between this expanding technology and what is going on with digitization in the genealogical community. I saw some parallels between this new educational content and some trends in the genealogical community.

As genealogists, as a main activity, we do research into original historical records. In the past, all of those records were "locked up" so to speak, on paper or other media, in repositories all around the world. One technological development that made many source records available was the use of microfilm. A brief review of the history of microfilm might be helpful.

The concept of using cameras to create microfilm dates back to 1839 but the idea of using microfilm as a method of preserving original records did not develop until the 1850s. The first really practical use of microfilm was during the Franco-Prussian War (1870- 1871) when microfilm messages attached to carrier pigeons were used to cross the German lines to Paris. However, microfilm was mostly treated as a novelty until the 1920s. See Microfilm - A Brief History.

The first patented microfilming process came in the 1925 with a system to make permanent microfilm copies of checks for banks. Eastman Kodak purchased the patent and used it to develop the Kodak Recordak Division. Kokak started to microfilm and publish the New York Times in 1935. The brief history above notes two significant events that occurred in 1938. Here is a quote:

Two significant events in 1938 hastened the use of microforms for archival preservation in American libraries and institutions. Because of rapid deterioration of the newsprint original and the numerous difficulties in storage and use of newspapers, Harvard University Library began its Foreign Newspaper Project. Today this project continues and the microform masters are stored at the Center for Research Studies in Chicago. This same year also saw the founding of University Microfilms, Inc. ('UMI') by Eugene Power. He had previously microfilmed foreign and rare books, but in 1938 his work became a commercial enterprise as he expanded into microfilming doctoral dissertations.

For genealogists, the 1938 date is even more significant. Beginning in 1938, microfilming became a way to move the original source records from the original repositories into the control of the genealogists. The 1938 date is also significant because it is at that time that the Genealogical Society of Utah, the predecessor of FamilySearch, began the process of making those records available to genealogists around the world.

Now of course, FamilySearch was not the only entity that started to make original source records or their copies available to research genealogists. The innovation was the use of microfilm. The process of collection original genealogically important documents into libraries actually started much earlier, in about 1845 with the establishment of the first genealogical society in the United States, the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The Genealogical Society of Utah, the original predecessor to FamilySearch, also began its efforts to collect records back in 1894. Between the invention of microfilm in the 1850s and 1838 when the Genealogical Society of Utah began microfilming records for the sole purpose of preserving them for genealogical purposes, it was the technological change of microfilm that started the process of allowing large numbers of documents to be copied while leaving the original records intact.

It is interesting to note that University Microfilms, Inc. began making selected databases online available to libraries and now does business under the name of ProQuest Online Information Service. You may be familiar with one of their products, HeritageQuestOnline.

Meanwhile, the Genealogical Society of Utah (now FamilySearch.org) continued its efforts to microfilm records all over the world, amassing a huge collection of international genealogically significant records. About ten years ago, FamilySearch started a transition from microfilm to digital images. OK, so here we are today with all sorts of digital records flying around on the Internet.

Apple's announcement about digital textbooks is just another indication of how the world is rapidly moving towards digitization. But it is also a reflection of the rapid changes in progress in our genealogical world.

Who will not be at RootsTech 2014? Why?

In this post, I am not talking about genealogists in general, I am thinking of the commercial genealogical enterprises. I count about 133 exhibitors on the list as of today. It is interesting, for example, to compare that list to a list of genealogy software programs. Apparently, genealogy software companies do not see the need to attend genealogy conferences. This is especially true of any of the Apple Macintosh genealogy program developers. From my perspective Leisterpro.com, the developers of Reunion for the Macintosh have always been conspicuously absent. This year, despite a huge online campaign, Heredis.com, with both Windows and Mac programs, is also absent. Ancestry.com is there and so the Family Tree Maker programs are covered. This is true of MyHeritage.com and their Family Tree Builder software. Other notable genealogy database companies who are on the list include the following:

• Ancestral Quest
• Legacy Family Tree
• Celebrating Family History
• RootsMagic

Don't you wonder what the other software developers are thinking?

Another interesting group of people who are missing are the archives and the libraries. FamilySearch.org is there, of course, it is their conference, and the Harold B. Lee Library is on the list. But, what about the The Church History Library, almost across the street from the conference and where is the University of Utah? or the History Department at BYU? What about the other Utah universities and colleges? I do see Salt Lake Community College there. Also, the other large genealogical libraries, Library of Congress? Allen County Public Library? Mid-Continent? Aren't we missing a lot of the players in the larger genealogical community?

I see the Federation of Genealogical Societies on the list and the National Genealogical Society, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society and the Utah Genealogical Association and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies and the Southern California Genealogical Society.

What happened to the rest of the larger genealogical societies?

I also see the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Board for Certification of Genealogists and ICAPGen. I guess we don't yet merit a visit from any of the history organizations.

I guess from this we have a long way to grow. One last comment, I am glad to see OCLC will be there. I hope to have time to talk to them.

RootsTech, the Largest U.S. Genealogy Conference -- Is large good?

As the Ancestry Insider points out in a short blog post, RootsTech Proclaims Itself Largest US Conference. Quoting from the post:

“The RootsTech 2014 conference, hosted by FamilySearch, has become the largest conference of its kind in the U.S., with attendees from 49 states and 21 countries,” reads an announcement from RootsTech. “Over 10,000 attendees are anticipated at the conference held February 6-8, 2014, in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the Salt Palace Convention Center.”

 Does large equate with good? In some cases yes and in some cases no. I happen to live in a large city because I enjoy the benefits of a large city. But on occasion, when fighting traffic or crowds, my dedication to large cities begins to waver. Last year, RootsTech 2013 reached the point where the carrying capacity of the portion of the Salt Palace was exceeded by the number of people attending the conference. This year, the whole conference has been moved to a move accommodating section of the Salt Palace that has the escalators and other people moving options to handle a very large crowd.

It is also a fact of life that most of the larger genealogy companies, such as Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com have all but abandoned the smaller conferences. In past years, a local conference, such as the Family History Expos conferences held here in Mesa, Arizona attracted companies such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and etc. It is now rare for some of these companies to attend even larger regional conferences. In addition, many of the smaller companies have also abandoned the conference circuit. The reasons why the companies have abandoned the smaller or even regional conferences are complex but obviously entail commercial and economic considerations. Conferences are looked upon as either sales events or advertising opportunities or as both. These considerations are heavily influenced by the number of attendees. The more the merrier. But in reality, the larger companies and many of the smaller ones simply do get the return they need to support the expense of traveling to a conference. Hence, large conferences tend to get larger and smaller conferences tend to become less commercially oriented. So, if you want to see the larger vendors, you have to come to RootsTech 2014 or one of the other very large genealogy conferences.

From my big city perspective, larger is definitely good. In addition to attendance by commercial entities, larger conferences attract many more bloggers and participants (isn't that a profound statement!). It may be extraordinarily obvious, but the point is that there are more opportunities for interaction between various interests at a larger convention or conference. In the genealogy world in the past, none of the conferences around the country have generated much media coverage outside of the participants and the bloggers. Having 10,000 people at a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, would not even merit mention in the local papers. On anybody's scale, RootsTech 2014 with 10,000 attendees will not have made it out of the unnoticed smaller conference category. For example, in the category of medical conferences, 10,000 attendees would just have barely made the top 50 conferences in the United States. See HCEA Top 50 Largest Medical Meetings - Total Attendance. The largest medical conference is apparently the Federation of International Medical Equipment Suppliers with over 54,000 attendees. Going back to Las Vegas, in 2012 they had 4.8 million delegates attending a convention, trade show or meeting and a total of 21,615 such gatherings.

To put that into perspective, RootsTech's 10,000 attendees would be about .2% of the total for Las Vegas alone. Notice the decimal point.

Now, that said. The issue here is genealogy and obviously RootsTech 2014 is going to be the largest genealogy conference around in 2014. So for that reason it will attract the maximum number of participants, vendors, genealogy society members, and others interested in genealogy or paid enough to come, than any other such gathering in the U.S. So, for that reason alone, it will be worth the trip, time and expense. Come and see me at RootsTech. With only 10,000 people there it should be too hard to find me.