Farewell to the Mesa FamilySearch Library

It is a sad day in Mesa and for me here in Annapolis, Maryland. We will lose one of Mesa's great institutions, The Mesa FamilySearch Library previously the Mesa Regional Family History Library and the Mesa Family History Library. I spent 10 years volunteering at the Mesa FSL and they were wonderful years. I loved the volunteers and directors over the years and had a great time with the patrons. We know that there will be a new Discovery Center in the future but the books, the microfilm, the staff and the atmosphere will be all gone. Again, it is a sad day and a great loss to great genealogy instruction and assistance.

Click Your Way Genealogical Success Online - Part Five

Moving Past Traditional Genealogical Research

If you started working on your own family history by reading about genealogical research or attending classes in a seminar or at a conference, someone probably mentioned the "Research Cycle." Here is a common iconic depiction of the Research Cycle.

The first step is commonly called the Survey Step or identifying what you know and what has already been done. From my own experience in working with newly minted genealogists over the years, I am certain that they are frequently plowing the field that has been plowed for generations before they started investigating their family. It is possible that the newcomer is the first in his or her family to take an interest in genealogy, but that may only be the case in the very first few generations.

Some cultures around the world have long-standing family history traditions. In Asian countries, family histories may have been kept for hundreds, even thousands of years. Large percentages of those currently living in the United States are descendants of European immigrants and there are a lot of records to search before you can truly claim any originality. As I have written before, my own survey took about fifteen years of research in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah before I could begin to find people who had not been recorded previously. Much of what I found turned out to be inaccurate, but rather than spend my time making the same mistakes, it was necessary to see what had already been recorded.

The huge online family tree program MyHeritage.com has a feature called Instant Discoveries™. When you first sign into the program, depending on the country of your origin, this feature may produce information about more than 50 people for your new family tree. But this is only one of the technological advancements that have dramatically changed the way people should be approaching genealogy today. There are literally millions of individual family trees online with billions of entries showing relationships all around the world. Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to help a lady from Vietnam begin her family history. She was astounded to find that other members of her family had already entered s significant amount of information into the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. She had no idea that anyone else was aware of her ancestry. This experience is becoming more and more common.  

The process of doing a survey is much more accessible than it was at the time I did my original survey. But unfortunately, it is also fragmented on websites from around the world. The goal of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is shared with some other large online family tree websites: to unify and gather together all of the information known about the ancestry of the entire world. After all is said and done in genealogy, we are one large family and we all share a common heritage. What is happening today online is making it possible to realize that goal.

Meanwhile, any beginning point for genealogical research must start with an online survey. The simplest way to do that is to begin putting your own family tree online. The FamilySearch.org Family Tree is free and open to all and will always remain free. MyHeritage.com has a free component. Here is a quote from the MyHeritage.com website:

MyHeritage family sites are based on subscriptions. Basic sites are free. If you are a member of a Basic site (a non-paying member), the limit of people that can be entered in the tree is 250 and the limit of storage space is 500 MB. This includes all family trees on the site, whether they were created online or in Family Tree Builder and published to the site afterward.

I spent a substantial amount of time and money doing my original survey. With either of these programs and an expenditure of far less time and money, I could now find much more information than I did many years ago. But with this technological advantage come some substantial challenges. I must still sift through a lot of wrong, inaccurate, and incomplete information to find the kernels of accuracy. 

Stay tuned for future installments. 

You can read the previous posts in this series here:

Part Four: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success_27.html

Part Three: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success_25.html
Part Two: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success_22.html
Part One: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success.html

Let's Call It Diligent Digging

I encountered some interesting contrasts this week. As I work digitizing documents in the Maryland State Archives, I see the same lady sitting at the same desk doing research day after day. She spends most of the day looking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I talked to another lady who came into the Annapolis Family History Center who came in "for a few minutes" to look for a brick wall ancestor who she "had been looking for for years." Hmm. I wonder if genealogy can be done in 5-minute increments or if it takes a little more time than a quick search online?

I have a photo of the card catalog at the Maryland State Archives Reading Room for a purpose. This set of 3 x 5 cards is the catalog for the Archives. I started looking is this vast collection of cards and decided to ask if the contents of the catalog were online. No such luck. Some of the cards have been digitized but the process of finding the records in all the subject categories involves a card by card search through multiple divisions of the catalog in several cabinet sections. When I first looked at the card catalog, I saw that the drawers had surnames in alphabetical order. But then I realized that each of the multiple sections started a new set of alphabetized cards. There are about thirty or so sections. What this means is that if you want to find a document relating to your ancestor, you would have to look through each of the multiple catalog sections individually.

Now, what if you were searching for an ancestor in Maryland? Since we are digitizing the probate records, some of the most valuable records in existence, you are not going to find these records online for a while. But we are digitizing only the probate records for this project and it is taking years with multiple cameras and dozens of volunteers to work on the process. As I was sitting and looking at the books, the card catalog, and the massive shelves of archival material in my view, I became overwhelmed with all the information that was available and the relatively short time I have left in my life to do research.

I am pretty sure that those people who promote genealogy as a "pass time" or a fun activity have ever spent 8 hours a day, five or six days a week looking at microfilm or pulling books off the shelf of a large library. Genealogy is work. It is captivating, challenging, interesting, and rewarding but it is still a lot of repetitious work.

As I talked to the lady in the FHC who ended up spending more than an hour, I outlined some of the records she could start to look at. She was actually far from a dead end or brick wall. She hadn't even looked at every applicable census record much less all of the other possible records that might be readily available. She had no idea of the existence of all the other records that might take time or a trip to find.

Why are we afraid to promote genealogy as work? Why does it have to be easy and fun? Maybe we need to emphasize the rewards that come from persistent dedication and searching for a long time rather than the quick and easy part of the work.

AmericanAncestors Introduces a Family Tree Program

The New England Historic Genealogical Society aka AmericanAncestors.org has introduced a free online family tree program called AmericanAncesTREES. I received an email invitation to join the new program but, as yet, I do not see anything on their website about the new offering. The program is apparently in "preview" mode.

One of the options for starting the family tree was to import information from my FamilySearch.org Family Tree. Here is the promo about the features of the tree from my email.

About AmericanAncesTREES 

American AncesTREES is a FREE, easy-to-use, online family tree that keeps your family history data safe and secure. AmericanAncesTREES offers many features to help you organize and advance your genealogical research, including options to:

• Choose with whom and how to share your tree
• Grow your tree with record hints from AmericanAncestors, FamilySearch, FindMyPast, NewspaperArchive, and BillionGraves, and search hints from Ancestry and MyHeritage.
• Use research logs to track your findings
• Make and share videos of your family stories
• Import an existing tree from Family Search, or import a GEDCOM

It certainly looks like an interesting option for a family tree program. I chose to import 4 generations of my information from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. That went smoothly and I got the following. 

However, the first time I went back to look at the family tree I imported, I got the following message:

The message says:

This tree is LockedWe're sorry - your tree has been locked. You have 6.0 gigabytes of media in your trees, which is more than the maximum allowed media storage for this plan. To unlock your tree, either remove some of the media from your trees, or upgrade to a PRO plan by clicking on your user name in the upper-right corner, then on Account.

I was not asked to limit or otherwise determine the amount of "media" I wanted to import so this is a surprise. In looking at the media, it looks like they imported a whole bunch of stuff for every person. I can certainly eliminate some of it, but then why would I want to do that. They mention a "pro" version of the program and this is what is displayed.

1 GB of storage is hardly anything. Even 2 GBs or for that matter 10 GBs is hardly enough to contain even 4 generations of media from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. If I added any generations, I would easily go over 10 GBs. I guess I will wait a while and see what happens. 

Is the Story of Ancestry.com and DNA Untold?

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900018325/is-dna-testing-telling-us-more-than-we-want-to-know-the-untold-story-of-ancestrycom.html

This recent article from DeseretNews.com reviews some of the issues raised by the recent interest in genealogical DNA testing. It also reviews some of the history of Ancestry.com.  The article is quite long for a news story and contains some interesting information sprinkled with a few questionable and unsupported "facts." First of all, the issues raised by this article are far from new. I expect that very few genealogists are aware of the dark part genealogy has played in our collective history. Let's start with this:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444

Here is a quote from the beginning of this article.

The United States has an imperfect history. Some of our darker chapters include slavery, the decimation of Native American populations, and atrocities committed during our various wars. A quick survey will reveal that most Americans have learned about or at least heard of these events. However, ask the average person about the “ eugenics movement” and you are likely to get blank stares. We at Genetics Generation believe it is time to raise awareness of this tragic time in our country’s history.

As a side note, the publishers of this post seem to have no idea how to moderate the comments left on their post. But that is another issue I deal with almost every day.

One thing not emphasized in the short article about eugenics was that originally before genetic testing became available, this movement was based on genealogy. What is not noted in either article is the fact that some genealogists, mostly those with a legal background, have been the ones to raise the alarm. For example, here are links to posts by blogger Judy Russell entitled, "The price of sharing" and "The ethics of DNA testing."

Here is a short list of articles that relate to this topic. Can you tell which of these articles are based on substantiated facts and which include scare tactics and misrepresentation?

• What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean
• Risks of DNA Testing in Search for Ancestors
• Who Owns Your Genetic Data After a Home DNA Test?
• Social, Legal, and Ethical Implications of Genetic Testing

If you want an in-depth look at the history of DNA testing and the ethical and social issues involved that go way beyond the issue of privacy, here is a short list of books you might want to read.

Mayflower, James. Genealogy: DNA and the Family Tree, 2015.

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History, 2017.

Ollhoff, Jim. DNA: Window to the Past. Edina, Minn.: ABDO Pub. Co., 2011. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=403377.

Wailoo, Keith, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee. Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

If you need a good resource for information about genealogical DNA testing, I suggest the websites maintained by the International Society of Genetic Genealogy or ISOGG.org.

For the past few years, I have been reading and studying about the subject of DNA testing and genealogy and will continue to read and study more. 

Search for the Cluster

I seldom hear references from the genealogical community to the concept of cluster research. There is a lot more written about research logs, citations, writing reports, and the mechanics of recording than what you find written about the actual process of researching records. I view all those issues as a "grade school" level of genealogy.  They are certainly things that you need to know and learn, but they don't produce information. They are like learning about the operation, function, and maintenance of an automobile, but never learning how to drive.

Anyway, since real research is seldom taught in the United States at the grade school or high school level, it is important that anyone getting involved in genealogy realize that there is a lot more to learn about the subject than the mechanics of processing information. You have to find it first.

There is a superficial resemblance between scientific research and historical research. But the difference between scientific and historical research is so fundamental as to make them entirely different pursuits. Unfortunately, the terminology used in referring to both is the same. Unless we branch out into archeology, historical research is basically the examination of the human written record. Overlaying this process of examining the written record is a significant amount of the personal interpretation and analysis that boils down to the opinion of the researcher.

One thing that all forms of "research" have in common is the need to determine whether or not someone else has already done the research you are planning to do. Since prestige in the scientific community is often based on the priority of a discovery, scientists quickly learn the need to do an exhaustive survey before beginning their research. Unfortunately, few genealogists feel compelled to survey what has and what has not been done and recorded previously. This subject reminds me of an experience I had one day while serving in the Brigham Young University Family History Library, I had a patron ask for assistance. She explained that she was in the last stages of certification from one of the two major certification organizations (which I will not specify) and she needed to know how to register for FamilySearch.org. I do not make this stuff up.

Genealogical DNA testing is seen as a way to make genealogical research more scientific and in some cases, when supported by adequate historical research, it may well dramatically influence the conclusions we make from purely historical research. DNA tests may also correct inaccurately recorded history. But long before DNA became a hot topic in genealogy, tools already existed to provide assistance in increasing the accuracy of our genealogical conclusions. Those tools are referred to as locality and cluster research.

Let's suppose you obtain a DNA test and as a result, you get a list of people who share some percentage of your DNA gene segments. We would have to further assume that many of your relatives had the same DNA test. Let's further assume that all of these relatives have their family tree online on the same website that sponsored the DNA tests. Does this begin to sound familiar? It should if you have been following the genealogy news. The CEO of MyHeritage.com, Gilad Japhet, has been speaking about this possibility for some time now. What you would likely see with an integration of DNA testing, historical research, and plotting together on a pedigree-like relationship chart, would be a cluster of people around you. If that chart also incorporated geographical and other information, you would begin to see patterns.

Cluster research, joined with locality research can produce similar results. As expressed by the Wikipedia article on Cluster genealogy:

Cluster genealogy is a research technique employed by genealogists to learn more about an ancestor by examining records left by the ancestor's cluster. A person's cluster consists of the extended family, friends, neighbors, and other associates such as business partners. Researching the lives of an ancestor's cluster leads to a more complete and more accurate picture of the ancestor's life.

I would disagree with the article's definition in that cluster research is not a technique, it is a fundamental part of the research process. Presently, depending on the time depth, DNA testing may or may not help in this process.

Locality research is simply the process of adding geographic information to your cluster research. Granted, cluster and locality research are more involved and more time consuming than searching for names and dates, but they are really the only valid way to extend research beyond the simple search for names. Interestingly, many of the commonly used records are adjuncts to cluster research. For example, a census record is not just a list of names with some added information, it is also a snapshot of a neighborhood and a community. For example, I can go through the Census record of a small town and find a whole "cluster" of related people. The records available from and about those extra people may shed light on information that is missing about my own ancestors.

The article above from Wikipedia cites a good example of cluster research. Here is the citation.

Lenzen, Connie. "Proving a Maternal Line: The Case of Frances B. Whitney". Originally published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, 82, no. 1 (March 1994): 17–31.

The GDPR and Genealogy

https://gdpr-info.eu/

If you have signed in or registered for a number of different websites and online services, you have probably received a number of email notifications about the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. What is going on?

If you buy, sell or rent any service or goods in the United States or elsewhere, you probably have provided personal information to the provider in some form or another. For example, if you have a credit card, you filled out a signed application form to obtain the credit card. If you then used the credit card to buy goods or services, the number on the card was used to transfer money from you to the provider. As we all engage in these ever increasingly complicated transactions, especially now as many of these transactions take place online through the internet, we each accumulate a significant online information presence.

This online information is also gathered by websites that use your personal information for other purposes. For example, if you make a purchase on Amazon.com or any other online retail or wholesale sales website, detailed information about your purchase is recorded and used to target you with advertising. In addition, in recent times there have been numerous spectacular data breaches where information about individuals and companies has been accessed by illegal means.

In an attempt to control the flow of data about individuals, labeled "natural persons," the EU GDPR was created and became actively enforced on 23 May 2018. The Regulation applies to any entity doing business or storing information about "natural persons" living in the EU. Here is a short summary of the Regulation from Wikipedia: General Data Protection Regulation.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area(EEA). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA. The GDPR aims primarily to give control to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU.[1] 

Superseding the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, the regulation contains provisions and requirements pertaining to the processing of personally identifiable information of data subjects inside the European Union, and applies to all enterprises, regardless of location, that are doing business with the European Economic Area. Business processes that handle personal data must be built with data protection by design and by default, meaning that personal data must be stored using pseudonymisation or full anonymisation, and use the highest-possible privacy settings by default, so that the data is not available publicly without explicit consent, and cannot be used to identify a subject without additional information stored separately. No personal data may be processed unless it is done under a lawful basis specified by the regulation, or if the data controller or processor has received explicit, opt-in consent from the data's owner. The data owner has the right to revoke this permission at any time.

I have included all the links and footnotes. From my perspective, given the data breaches constantly being reported in the media, it is strange that the United States Congress has not passed a similar law protecting personal information online. Those companies that had to scramble (over two years) to come into compliance because they are doing business in the EU, should have had these types of protections all along.

By the way, dead people are not included in this Regulation, so unless you are commercially storing or using personal information about living people, you probably will not be affected by this Regulation. That said, the Regulation is complicated, very detailed, long, and subject to all sorts of interpretation. It also imposes some huge fines for noncompliance. The Regulation also has some less restrictive requirements for businesses of less than 250 employees.

If you think you might fall under the provisions of the Regulation, I suggest you read the entire text including its 173 Recitals. You may also want to find a competent international attorney to help you interpret and make the proper adjustments to your business as required by the Regulation.  European Union's General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR