News from FamilySearch Family Tree?

I have never claimed to be a FamilySearch insider. If I do learn some information from FamilySearch.org or from people at FamilySearch, I usually only pass it on when the information is verified and obviously public. But I do watch the blogs and if someone else has information that I do not have, I try to include it here in this blog. 

Larry Gragun is evidently in Salt Lake City, Utah, while I languish away here in sunny Mesa, Arizona. He posted a summary of a meeting with the FamilySearch Family Tree project manager, where he said the following:

Printing features: Pedigree charts, Family Group Sheets, and Fan Charts are probably a couple of weeks away.
Those who input sources into new.familysearch.org need not fear - those sources will be moved to Family Tree.

Unfortunately, FamilySearch does not have a very good record of meeting its own deadlines.  But it is interesting to see where the program is going. I suggest reading Larry's entire post. I don't make any predictions about when features will be added to Family Tree.

MyHeritage adds millions of historical records

The news of new collections being added to a large online database is getting so common that it hardly merits attention. But this case is different. MyHeritage.com is striking out in a new direction. Rather than create a huge clone of Ancestry.com, MyHeritage has chosen to create a dedicated search engine to search records on other websites. Yes, that means that when you upload your family tree information to MyHeritage.com, after subscribing to the service, the Record Matching technology will immediately begin to look for records in other websites as well as the ones in WorldVitalRecords.com owned by MyHeritage.com. Since I loaded my GEDCOM file into MyHeritage.com's Family Trees, I have found literally thousands of original documents, including hundreds of direct links to FindAGrave.com and other sites with copies of original documents. Understand this, when you have a subscription to MyHeritage.com, all of these records plus many, many more are automatically searched for each person in your database.

So here is the press release from their blog about the newly added connections to online records:

We've recently added millions of new records to MyHeritage's data collections. 

The international collections include headstones, military records, yearbooks and even wanted posters and mugshots! 

The records are searchable on MyHeritage's SuperSearch engine and are integrated with MyHeritage's Record Matching technology. This means that MyHeritage users will automatically receive notifications about records from these collections that match individuals in their family trees. 

Here's some more information and links to the main collections we've added: 

Interment.net- We've licensed a collection of over 4 million online international cemetery entries from Interment.net. This is a fantastic resource to find burial information about relatives from around the globe. 

Genealogy Today - We've partnered with Genealogy Today to provide over 750,000 documents and high quality images from a wide range of fascinating sources including school catalogs, telephone directories, Masonic lodge rosters, funeral notices, insurance claims, church member lists, prison records, criminal mugshots and wanted posters. 

Historic U.S. Maps - United States property atlases, antiquarian maps, nautical charts, bird's-eye views and special collections (including celestial maps, portraits, and other historical images). With more than 1.5 million individual map images to explore, find out where your ancestors lived, see the names of their neighbors and trace the former owners of the land which could well be ancestors of your ancestors. 

Canadian Headstones - We've partnered with CanadianHeadstones.com to provide 500,000 images and transcriptions of Canadian headstones, helping you research your Canadian ancestry. 

U.S. Army Casualties 1961 - 1981 - This collection contains information about U.S. Army personnel and their dependents who died or were injured worldwide, including missing-in-action and prisoners of war. It includes a large number of records relating to the Vietnam Conflict, 1961-1975. 

British Militia Attestations Index, Royal Garrison Artillery, 1872 - 1915 - This collection currently contains the names of over 86,000 recruits from across England and Scotland and an index of a further 12,500 men from Ireland. These documents were completed at the time of recruitment and contain much personal data which is extremely useful for genealogical research. 

We've added hundreds of other unique collections extremely useful for searching specific locations or events. Here are some examples:
Volume of Records Relating To the Early History of Boston, Containing Boston Marriages From 1752 - 1809Deaths Reported in Manhattan, 1902State Teachers College, Yearbook (North Adams, Massachusetts)Massachusetts Soldiers And Sailors of the Revolutionary War, a Compilation From the Archives, Volume 131892 Births Published in 3 San Francisco Newspapers: Examiner, Chronicle, Morning Call

The Breadcrumb Trail

When Hansel and Gretel wanted to find their way out of the forest, they left a trail of breadcrumbs. Although the idea was good, the execution of the idea was bad since the birds ate the crumbs and left them stranded in the forest. I think a lot of genealogical researchers can relate to Hansel and Gretel. We think we are recording our sources and keeping a research log, but when we go back to use it, we cannot make hide nor hair of what we have recorded.

To a large measure, this problem can be overcome by properly citing your sources. So does citing your sources mean following some predetermined pattern of citation? I guess my answer would be only if you are planning on publishing the results of your research in some formal genealogical journal or other such publication. Ultimately, what is important is whether or not someone who looks at your citations, which includes you at a later date, can decipher where the materials came from.

Let me give an example of what I am talking about. Here is a perfectly proper citation:

Tanner, Maurice, and George C. Tanner. 1923. Descendants of John Tanner; born August 15, 1778, at Hopkintown, R.I., died April 15, 1850, at South Cottonwood, Salt Lake County, Utah.

This citation conforms to the 15th Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.  See University of Chicago. 2003. The Chicago manual of style. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. But guess what? I really need a lot more information to find the book. First of all, how about recording where I found the book? Such as which library I was in when I made the citation. For convenience, I may also wish to note the page of the information I used. I also suggest I might want to note if the book is available online. I may have looked at a paper copy of the book in the library where I found the book, but if I look online, I might find the book is readily available in digital format. In fact, the above Tanner genealogy is available both in the HathiTrust.org Digital Library and in HeritageQuestOnline.com.

Keeping a list of sources searched can become really burdensome. If you are like me, I might initially search eight or ten different websites in a matter of a few minutes. I do not become overly concerned about recording these initial searches because I will probably come back to the same sites more than once anyway. But once I begin to address a specific research issue, such as finding a specific record or date, I have a greater incentive to avoid duplicating my searches. This is particularly true if I am visiting a library. Of course, if I do find any information about an individual, either online or in a paper document, I record the information immediately, usually by making a digital copy of the document or linking to the website with a source in my genealogical database.

Having just recently finished another series of presentations to several genealogical societies, I fully realize that recording the information gathered in a genealogical database is far easier said than done. This is where I find the advantage of carrying a copy of my database with me, either on my laptop or smartphone, where ever I go. So I either end up with a digital image of the document and the source where the document came from or a notation on my computer or smartphone in Dropbox.com or Evernote.com about the item.

What I have found is that if I do not transfer that information to a more permanent location in conjunction with my genealogy program, I will often forget the origin of the information and lose the notes I have made. So there is a fairly large measure of discipline involved in successfully creating a research trail that you can follow back to the source.

LegacyTec: groundbreaking technology for headstones

I got a heads up on this new product from Devin Taylor, the CEO of Otter Creek Holdings. Otter Creek Holdings recently purchased the BillionGraves.com website. From a press release dated 8 February 2013:
Otter Creek Holdings—in conjunction with BillionGraves, My Legacy Memorial, and Legacy Mobile—is proud to announce the release of groundbreaking technology in Family History: LegacyTec. Hudson Gunn, Vice President of Otter Creek Holdings, announced it at MBNA's Industry show this weekend.

LegacyTec gives you access to all the information connected to a certain headstone based on a picture. All you do is take a picture of a headstone, and this technology will bring up information about that headstone from BillionGraves, Family Search, My Legacy Memorial and other sites. LegacyTec supersedes the QR codes you currently see on headstones by eliminating the need for them all together.
I struggled with the title of this post because the whole subject needs an explanation. The title of the news article is "Utah software company to release app it says changes genealogy research, makes QR Codes obsolete" from the Deseret News of 11 February 2013. The best explanation of what is happening involves understanding that the people who make headstones or gravemarkers have been selling products, including QR code or barcode links on their products allowing the family or friends of the deceased to create an online memorial linked by the code on the headstone. Here is the explanation from the news article of the new product:

Many gravestone makers, including a product owned by Otter Creek Holdings called mylegacymemorial.com, currently offer a service of attaching matrix barcodes to gravestones so family members or other passersby can scan the barcode from their smartphone onsite and be directed to an interactive memorial website page. 

And although such monument pages have obvious advantages that make them nearly impossible to replace in the foreseeable future — families can personalize and edit those pages with their own photos, videos and stories — Otter Creek’s “Legacy Mobile” app opens the possibility for anyone to pull up a webpage of genealogy information on any gravesite in a cemetery.

The article goes on to describe the new product from

Instead of searching “a billion records at a time” the app first uses GPS metadata from uploaded photos to filter search results by location, usually by cemetery or city, Gunn told Deseret News in an interview from the Monument Builders of North America Full Industry Show in Ohio. 

After the app drastically narrows the search to perhaps a couple hundred possible candidates in the area, a heavy mix of proprietary algorithms kick in and image recognition gears start to churn. Using optical character recognition, Gunn says the app compares the uploaded gravestone image and its text to an existing, and still growing, gallery of gravesite monument photos, especially from sites like the company’s recently acquired billiongraves.com, a site that took on a healthy 30,000 new users this past year. 

But using geocode to grab a location and image recognition science to compare text and photos — both technologies that have been around for a few years — is only half of the app’s recipe. The other portion that could make it the next big thing is wrapped up in the number of personal contacts Devin Taylor, the company’s CEO, has initiated over the years in his effort to connect with more and more partners. After all, the app would be worthless without a mega-database to query for results.

Tying online information to older gravemarkers that do not have any sort-of QR code or bar code is a really interesting development. Watch for updates.

Back to Sources

Isn't genealogy all about feeling good about yourself and connecting with your family? If copying a pedigree back to Adam makes me feel good and I'm not hurting anybody in the process, then why should I care if I have sources? What good is a source anyway? They just confuses me and contradict how I think about my ancestors. Anyway, why should I do the work all over myself if I find someone else online that has a common ancestor then we are obviously related and there is nothing wrong with just copying their file and adding it to my own. Really, all I am looking for is a lot a names anyway and I now have over 100,000 names in my file. I just found another relative on Ancestry.com and by adding in his file, I can get another 30,000 or so names. I may easily have one of the largest pedigrees in entire genealogical community. Just wait until tell my friends back at the RV Park about my file.

No, I have not gone over to the darkside. I am merely characterizing a whole sub-culture of so-called genealogists who collect names rather than do research. Their idea of success deals with the number of individuals in their file. The larger the number, obviously, the more successful they can appear. I know I am talking to one of these people when the first question they ask me when they find out I am interested in genealogy, is how many names I have in my family file and how far back have I collected family members. So, should I stop mentioning how many names I have in my file?

Back to reality. Why am I so preoccupied with sources? Who really cares anyway? Do I really need to try to convince the name collectors that they need sources? Shouldn't we all just be content with having all the spaces filled in on our pedigree chart, like collecting trading cards and getting a complete set? Then are all of use with large genealogical database files immediately suspect? Do we inadvertently belong to the name gatherers by default as a result of having a large file? Is it true we need to be mindful of the feelings of all genealogists and worry about whether or not our blind emphasis on sources will harm their budding genealogical psyches?

If only genealogy were as simple as the name gatherers would have you believe! As genealogists,we can't even come to a common agreement concerning what we mean by sources, let alone agree on how to record them.

So what is the fundamental idea or goal of genealogy? Are we motivated by the collecting instinct or is there more to the pursuit than an accumulation of names and dates and places?

May I suggest that genealogy, not just name gathering, addresses some of the basic human needs. One of those needs involves belonging to a family and genealogy addresses that need. If we are cast adrift in the modern world by technology and cultural and social changes, then the real anchor in our lives lies in returning to our family. Discovering our family is much more than just a pastime, it is a discovery of what is fundamental in human relationships. None of the superficial TV view of life, but a real involvement in our heritage. Too many people have no heritage because they have no family. Genealogy addresses that need and adds a measure of security.

Recording your Research is not Enough

A commonly used analogy of ineffective research is a dog chasing its tail. How do we stop endless repetition? The solution is to record every place we search so that we don't repeat our searches in some sort of Research Log. But this very common advice is also a trap. Why is that? In our rapidly changing online world, making a checklist of places we have searched can lead us to ignore rapidly changing online databases. It all depends on how we view what we search and how well we search.

Looking in an index is not a search of the original records. So, I search in Ancestry.com and record that I looked in Ohio, Deaths, 1908-1932, 1938-2007 and do not find my ancestor. Does that mean I am finished with that record? What if the database is updated by Ancestry.com in the future and I don't know about the update? Considering that Ancestry.com's collection is an index extracted from more than 4 million birth, baptism, and christening records from Ohio, how do your know that your ancestor wasn't skipped by those doing the indexing? Or even more likely, how do we know that the person doing the index didn't mis-transcribe the information? But realistically, are we really going to search through 4 million individual records looking for our ancestors?

So it appears to me that recording where we look is valuable but not conclusive. Reviewing or re-searching records, especially those that are searched by using search engines or indexes may be fruitful from time to time. If that is the case, then what is the main value of a Research Log? No matter how prolific your memory, you will not remember where and what you have looked at after the passage of some time. Without a record of where you have searched, you will find yourself repeating the research. As I indicated at the beginning, this may not be all bad, but can be frustrating.

A more fundamental reason for recording where we search is to give us an indication of the limits of our previous searches. Hopefully, as we progress in our genealogical knowledge, we come to realize the vast number of additional types of records we could have searched initially but were unaware of their existence. As we go back and look at our Research Log, we may start to understand that we could have used many more records at the time.

When I mention a "Research Log," am I talking about a paper form you fill out with the places you look? Yes, it could be a form and in fact there are number of different forms for that purpose available online. But realistically, I am really referring to the notes and lists you can keep in your genealogical database. Every major commercially available genealogy program provides for a way to store your notes on an individual and/or family. Many programs provide a to do list capability and some have the flexibility to design your own reports including Research Logs. There is no "one way" to keep such information. You have to evolve and adapt each method of recording information to your own needs and style of doing research. But basic to the entire idea of doing research is recording your sources and that includes the places your research that do not contain specific information as well as those that do.

The key here however is to remember the transitory and ever changing nature of Internet research. You may need to dig down a bit more than is comfortable to find the original source and not rely so heavily on indexes, abstracts, summaries and other online finding aids as conclusive evidence of whether or not your ancestors are recorded in the original record.

Go to the newspapers for help

Underused is an overused term in genealogical circles. But it is appropriate to say that newspapers are underused. Let me give an example of the type of detailed information available on local newspapers. I am using the Utah Digital Newspaper Project with links to most of the newspapers in Utah with coverage starting about 1850. Here is the example:

No event was too trivial for the newspapers. See Southern Utonian 1883-09-21 Local News. Fortunately, the newspapers covered births, deaths and other events along with the trivia. Here is Sidney Tanner's obituary:

This was in the Ogden Standard Examiner 1895-12-07 Death of an Old Pioneer. Note that this obituary appears in a newspaper printed many hundreds of miles away from Sidney Tanner"s residence in Beaver, Utah. As a matter of fact, there were several obituaries about Sidney Tanner, some of them much longer and much more detailed in newspapers around Utah. 

If I look in the Library of Congress' US Newspaper Directory, you can see that there are 593 newspapers that have been published in Utah since the arrival of the pioneers in 1847. Of those, 16 newspapers were published in Beaver County, Utah where the Tanners lived. 

When I bring up this subject, the researchers usually say something such as, "Do you really expect me to search through all the newspapers?" Yes, as a matter of fact I do unless they are already digitized and searchable online. Newspapers are the go-to source for stories and events in the lives of your ancestors.