#NGS2014GEN State Collection Pages on Ancestry.com

“Understanding State Collections on Ancestry.com” was presented by Crista Cowan, Ancestry.com’s Barefoot Genealogist.

Who was that guy in the Lil’ Abner comics who was followed around by a dark cloud? The dark cloud of technology troubles seems to have been following Ancestry.com presenters on Wednesday. Like Peter Drinkwater, Cowan was plagued by Internet connectivity issues. That was bad because she had prepared just four slides and no backup presentation. But Cowan is one of Ancestry.com’s best presenters and made attendance worthwhile, even though she didn’t get connectivity until late in the session.

I’ve attended some vendor presentations that feel more like infomercials. Most cater to the absolute beginners, product-wise and genealogy-wise. In fact, many vendor presentations aren’t presented by genealogists at all. Cowan’s presentation, however, was worthy of an attendee serious enough to attend a national conferences.

She didn’t mince words.

“We get so used to filling in search boxes we don’t stop to think,” she said. The three questions she emphasizes over and over are:

• What do I know?
• How do I know it?
• What do I want to know?

Cowan told us that Ancestry.com gives lots of different ways into their records. After all, they have 13 billion of them. “My job is to help you be more focused in your searches,” she said. To that end, she added two more questions:

• Does the record exist?
• Does it exist online?

A mainstay of genealogical research is the book, Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources. Cowan keeps a copy on her desk and refers to it often. Few people know that it is also available online—for free! Go to Ancestry.com, hover over Learning Center (on the menu bar), and click Family History Wiki. On the right in the section titled “Explore the Wiki” click Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.

It is organized by state. Scroll down and click on a link to a state family history research page. Read it to learn what records exist. It will often also tell you where they exist. The further East you go, the more complicated it becomes to figure out what records exist and where they can be found.

From state overview page, the right column contains links to the different record types.

“I love these articles. I read them regularly still,” said Cowan.

Someone has added links at the bottom of each state vital records page to collections on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. However, the links are about two years old.

Ancestry.com contains state pages for searching the records of each state. To get to a state’s page, click on Search, scroll down to the map, and click on a desired state.

Under a heading for each record type is a list of a few of the databases. These are specific to the state. Country-wide databases, such as Federal census population schedules, are not shown. Click View all to see all the collections, including country-wide databases.

Above the list of databases are three rectangles labeled Collections, History, and Resources. The history tab gives a short summary of the state’s history and some links for learning more. The resources tab has some resources for state research. It has links to other websites as well. (“Don’t tell anyone, but Ancestry.com doesn’t have all the world’s records online,” whispered Cowan.) This resource is available whether you are a subscriber or not.

Those who watch Cowan’s videos or hear her speak know how much she pushes the card catalog. (“Coolest thing ever!” she says.) The card catalog shows all 32,000+ databases. (Ancestry.com adds an average of two million records a day.) Filter by title, record type, and so forth to narrow the results to a manageably small set of titles. Cowan illustrated with an example, trying to locate an 1863 Carroll County, Arkansas marriage record.

A search for title “Arkansas” returned 57 titles. Filtering to Birth/Marriage/Death dropped the number to 14. Filtering to Marriage/Divorce dropped the total to 10. Why are there multiple Arkansas marriage collections? Because they come from different sources and as genealogists, we want to know where our information comes from. Reviewing the list you can see what records Ancestry.com has online.

Cowan selected one of the titles that included the year 1863, “Arkansas Marriages, 1779-1992.”

“Some of you are tempted to just start filling in the pretty search boxes. Stop that!” she scolded. First scroll down and read the database description. She did so for the selected database and the description indicated that it doesn’t include Carroll County.

To reiterate the point, she looked at the next database, “Arkansas Marriages, 1851-1900.” In the database description for Carroll County it states that “the records in this database cover the years 1869 through 1900.” This database doesn’t include 1863.

“We try to give you as many ways into the records as possible,” Cowan said in her conclusion. Once you’ve answered the question, “What do I want to know,” using the catalog and searching particular databases helps address the subsequent questions, “Does the record exist?” and “Does it exist online?”

#NGS2014GEN Genealogists’ Declaration of Rights

In the opening session of the National Genealogical society 2014 annual conference, Jordan Jones announced the participation and support of the NGS in the Genealogists’ Declaration of Rights.

“We, the undersigned genealogists, in pursuance of our individual and collective rights as Americans, do hereby declare that genealogists possess the right to the pursuit of genealogical exploration through unfettered access to the records of our government; and we call upon our governmental representatives to recognize our rights.”

Previous to this declaration the document begins with a series of whereas clauses. One states “WHEREAS, the American people have recognized that the right to open government and unfettered access to the records of our government…enrich the lives of all Americans.”

The declaration goes on to list the things our representatives can and should do, such as preserving our freedom to access public records of our government.

Attendees were invited to sign the declaration.

I hope the entire declaration will soon be available online. Perhaps the Records Preservation and Access Committee, one of the declaration’s sponsors will place it on their website (http://www.fgs.org/rpac/).

#NGS2014GEN Comet Ison

Jim Ison, FamilySearch area manager gave the luncheon presentation at the FamilySearch luncheon Wednesday at the 2014 annual conference of the National Genealogical Society. The presentation was titled, “Introducing Your Grandchildren to Your Grandparents.”

Ison started by reminding us about last year’s Comet ISON. The comet made lots of news. It was reported it might become brighter than the moon. While we ate Thanksgiving it grazed the sun and perished. Once it was gone, memory of it faded fast.

One day Ison had a realization. “I am the linking pin between my grandparents and my grandchildren.”

Aaron Holt said, “It only takes three generations to lose a piece of oral family history.” (See “Judy Russell Nails Friday Keynote.”)

A New York Times article has results from a study done at Emory University by Marshall Duke.

The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.
…
Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves. (Bruce Feiler, “The Stories that Bind Us,” The New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/fashion/the-family-stories-that-bind-us-this-life.html : published 15 March 2013])

Ison has a box of photographs that was handed down to him for safekeeping. He said something that reminded me of the role of archives. Our keynote speaker, Sandra Treadway, noted that archives have a duty to preserve artifacts and also make them accessible. Ison said that keeping the box safe “preserves but doesn’t provide access.”

So he digitized them and uploaded them to the FamilySearch Family Tree. “Now they are accessible anywhere in the world,” he said. “They are in the cloud.” He’s also uploaded their stories, several of which are the discoveries of a lifetime of research.

Now he sponsors the Annual Ison Ancestor Challenge. He assembles some intriguing questions answered in the stories. For example, what unusual piece of equipment was issued to Lorilla when she became a school teacher?

He’s printed out a copy of the stories. This printed book has become a favorite source of bedtime stories.

He’s created crossword puzzles, a bingo game, and other games.

By the end of his presentation I understood his point about comet Ison. Once we are gone, our memories of our ancestors are gone as well, unless we capture that information and pass it to our descendants. “Be the intergenerational connection for your posterity.”

#NGS2014GEN Newspapers.com

Peter Drinkwater addressed the topic, “The Scoop on Newspapers.com.” Drinkwater is with Ancestry.com who owns and operates Newspapers.com.

Drinkwater learned the hard way that a presenter should show up early to check out the room before presenting. I know. I know. I’ve been there too and lived to regret it. He certainly did.

There was no Internet signal in the room. He’d prepared slides as a backup, but the slide deck was incompatible with the software on his Mac. He didn’t have a dongle that connected his Mac to the projector. Once he got a dongle, his backup Internet source was too slow to do much.

But Drinkwater is a great presenter and forged ahead with great information.

About two years ago Ancestry.com realized that their newspapers on Ancestry.com were not being found. OCR doesn’t work very well on newspapers, so results weren’t surfacing well. The Ancestry.com website works best with fielded record collections. So they started Newspapers.com with about 20 million pages, about half of them from Ancestry.com. Those who built the site came from Fold3.

They have over 68 million today. They add about 2 to 3 million more pages a month. Over time they will add all the newspapers that Ancestry.com has online.

They are often asked how their content differs from other newspaper websites. There are three ways to find out.

One way to see is the browse page. At the top, click on Browse. Click country, then state, and then city and it will list all the papers in that city. Click on the paper and it shows the years. Then click month and date.

Another way is the papers page. At the top, click on Papers. Sort or narrow by typing words for the title, by dragging date sliders, or by clicking on the map. Note that coverage can vary greatly between papers, some having as little as a couple of pages.

A third method is a map that shows pins for each newspaper location. From the previous page, click on Map next to the title, All Newspapers.

Q. Can you save something to Ancestry.com? Yes. Click on the bright green Ancestry.com button.

Q. Can you save it to your hard drive? Yes.

Registering on the site for free will give you better results. It takes just an email address and a password. The Save/notify feature can be used to notify you by email when new matches show up.

Q. Do you have international papers? Just a few. Some in London. A couple elsewhere.

The OCR search process compares just a bunch of words. You’re not searching for names, per se, but for words. The search system is smart enough to list at the top the pages whereon the words occurred the most.

For names that are also common words, like Fair Milton, try putting quotes around the name, with and without middle name or initial.

The search results can be narrowed in the same way as the newspaper list. The map is a “heat map” and the darkness indicates the number of matches for that state. The date range graph has bars for each year range; the height indicates the number of matches. The search results show snippets. You can narrow by the date the newspaper was added to the site, which is nice for searching newspapers that have been added since the last time you checked.

You can specify a plus/minus range around a date.

Q. Can you limit searches to African American papers? No. We only have a couple. We also have a few foreign language papers, but can’t limit the search to just them.

A little known hint about the viewer page: Double-click zooms in. Shift-double-click zooms back out. The viewer was started from the Fold3 viewer, so it works very similarly.

Q. When you add major features to the site, do you notify people? We are terrible at notifying users. They notify using their blog, Facebook, Twitter, and monthly emails. (And I thought he was serious about not notifying people.)

An annual subscription is $79.95 for a year. It is half price for Fold3 or Ancestry.com subscribers. Use the same email address and the discount will be given automatically. The new all-inclusive Ancestry.com World Explorer Plus subscription includes Newspapers.com, but is only available monthly. It may be cheaper to buy an annual subscription with the half-price discount.

From the viewer you can print or download, whole or a portion of the image, and in JPEG or PDF format. PDF format includes a source citation. You can also publish a clipping that anyone can view for free.

You can mix browsing and searching. So if you browse to a state, when you perform a search it searches just that state.

While a death certificate is located in just the one jurisdiction, a news story about a death might be reported in many places, depending on how interesting the circumstances were.

Your profile page is public. You can follow other people and get notices when they clip new things. You can make initial contact with them without knowing their email address, but they will be given yours.

Given all the technical hurdles, Drinkwater made a good go of a bad situation.

#NGS2014GEN Opening Session

“If your history goes back far enough in the United States, then somewhere you have a Virginia ancestor,” said Sandra Treadway, Librarian of Virginia and State Archivist. That’s certainly true in my case. Treadway gave the keynote address to open the 2014 annual conference of the National Genealogical Society this morning (Wednesday) in Richmond, Virginia. She addressed the topic, “The Evolving Library.”

“The library of Virginia is all about preserving the past, but also providing access to it,” she said. There are challenges in doing that with evolving visitor needs and technologies.

The library and archive building was designed in the mid-1990s. The world then is worlds away from the world now. They can’t change buildings, so the building needs to change with it.

“If you come back in seven more years, it’s going to look and feel very, very different,” she said.

When they designed the building “it was very clear we were in the middle of a technology revolution,” she said. But they didn’t appreciate just how fast technology would evolve. The Internet was mostly email. There was no Google because there was nothing to search. For Internet access, tables in the library provided dial up lines.

Today visitors have lightweight computing devices and need Wi-Fi access. They store documents on flash drives. Economic pressures have caused staffing cuts and the likelihood is that they will never regain that lost staff.

They will add more lively signage out front to make the building more approachable. They want to lighten up the lobby space. “We want visitors to appreciate why their tax dollars support this organization.”

Part of the transformation they’re going through is not just how to use the library space, but how to best service visitors. Shifting the perspective and thinking of staff trained decades ago is a challenge. Visitors are less likely to approach a reference desk. They want someone out on the floor moving with them. They want signage that leads them to what they want. They need records and books used in common to be located near one another.

There are people who care about Virginia’s past but don’t do serious research like we do, said Treadway. The library needs to reach out to them. The library will try to engage them with book talks, exhibitions, talks, and group visits.

They have 118 million manuscript items. They need to get the relevant materials digitized and online. Prioritizing the digital plan needs to be planned from the users’ perspective. “That’s our goal, to make as much available digitally as we can,” she said.

Cataloging has to be complete so users have confidence that they’re not going to miss things.

In the past they could use human beings for tasks like redaction of private information. It could occur when each document was requested. Now it has to be done across an entire collection before it can be published online.

Looking back at pictures of the past, Treadway thinks about how things change very quickly. When compared with a photo from the 1940s, about the only thing that hasn’t changed is the chairs in the reading room. So how will the library look in just seven years from now?

“I can’t tell you today exactly what the library will look like but when you walk into our lobby…you’re going to feel energy…you’re not going to wonder where to go.”

The library and archive will still be about preserving documents of the past and giving access to them. It will all be focused on you.

#NGS2014GEN FamilySearch.org Blogger Dinner

FamilySearch’s Paul Nauta and Jennifer Anderson
prepare to address bloggers at NGS conference

FamilySearch addressed several topics at their blogger dinner on the eve before the National Genealogical Society’s 2014 annual conference in Richmond, Virginia. (The conference has started, even as you read this!)

Registration for RootsTech 2015 opens in August. About 800 local RootsTech affiliated family history fairs have been held since RootsTech 2014 with average attendance exceeding 250. Do the math and you see that 200,000 people have taken part in RootsTech this year.

FamilySearch is partnering with Lexmark to put an Internet-connected printer in each FamilySearch family history center around the world that will scan pictures directly to your FamilySearch account, according to Paul Nauta, FamilySearch spokesperson. All 2,800 U.S. centers should already have them. Once uploaded, you can come back later to tag the people in the photos and attach them to people in FamilySearch Family Tree. Or you can scan the photos directly to a flash drive. An official press release will be made in the next couple of weeks.
Nauta spoke about FamilySearch’s partnerships with Ancestry.com, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage. FamilySearch has greatly improved the time it takes to get images of records to users. In the days of microfilm, it took about 18 months between camera click to patron availability. Now it takes about 60 days between click and online publication. However, indexing can’t keep up. More images are being published than indexed records by several times (2 times more? 4? I can’t remember what he said). At current indexing rates, it will take about 300 years to index just the 5.3 billion records in hand. With collaboration, they hope to cut the indexing time to 30 years.

In areas where FamilySearch has been acquiring records, they have preserved about 5.3 billion records and need to preserve another 10 billion. Beyond those areas, there are another 10 billion. (See the February 2014 infographic.) FamilySearch needs partners to accomplish all that needs to be done.

Indexing

Indexers have accomplished a lot since finishing the 1940 U.S. census project, according to FamilySearch’s Jennifer Anderson.

• U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Community Project: 75 million records completed
• Surpassed one billion records in March 2013. Current count is 1,155,629,832. For the daily total, see familysearch.org/Indexing.
• 2014 is the Year of the Obituary and over 17 million have been completed so far.

Anderson shared a video of Captain Jack Starling addressing attendees at RootsTech. To see the clip, click on the image to the right and click the corresponding image on FamilySearch’s indexing Facebook page. Hand written records can be hard to index because you have to decipher the handwriting. Obituaries can be quirky because you have to decipher the relationships. FamilySearch will announce soon—probably in the next 30 days—where it will be acquiring the obituaries from. It is potentially four times larger than the 1940 census.

Anderson said a browser-based indexing program will be released later this year and touched on four of its features:

1.  No need to download a program
2.  Enhanced project selection feature allowing users to more quickly identify projects of interest. In some cases, this will even mean selecting specific locales within a project, such as a U.S. state of interest.
3.  Ability to join multiple indexing groups
4.  Indexing on your tablet

The browser-based indexing program will require a current Internet connection. Offline support has been too expensive to develop at this time but is a desired, future feature.

FamilySearch is organizing a campaign called “Lift Where You Stand.” The goal is not number of records but number of volunteers. The goal is to have 20,000 index during the 24 hours starting at 6:00 pm, Mountain Daylight Time on 20 July 2014. At this time of the year there is usually just 13,000 indexers a day. The campaign is worldwide, with volunteers encouraged to work on projects from their own part of the world and in their own language. Watch for more information on FamilySearch Indexing's Facebook page.

Product Improvements

Bill Mangum and Grant Skousen, FamilySearch product managers, talked about new and coming FamilySearch features.

Family Tree now has a Descendency view in addition to pedigree and fan-chart views. The descendency view includes icons indicating individuals with data problems and individuals with research suggestions.

Some of the possible data problems and research suggestions identified are

• born before died
• lived too long
• missing birth and death year
• born after father died
• born after mother died
• born after mother could bear children
• born  before father could father children
• born before father
• born before mother could bear children
• born before mother
• died too young to be married or have children
• person may have children
• possible child gap in middle
• less than 3 children

The Enhanced Attach feature is already available. When a record contains more than one family member, the record can be attached to all the members of the family in a single operation. The feature is activated by attaching the record to one of the members of the family. Other family members are then offered for attachment.

“Hinting,” FamilySearch’s version of Ancestry.com’s shakey leaf, is currently in beta. No projected release date was given.

FamilySearch has two smartphone apps in beta. (See my previous articles for more information.) If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, email fs-mobile@familysearch.org and indicate your device type, iOS or Android.

Stay tuned for more of NGS 2014, later today or tomorrow.

#NGS2014GEN Is Here

General sessions of the National Genealogical Society’s 2014 annual conference begin tomorrow.

If you can’t make it to the conference (or even if you are), you can go to http://ngs2014gen.tweetwall.com/ to follow conference twitter.

On your smart phone you can follow the twitter using the conference app. Go to http://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/attend/mobile-app/. On your computer, access the conference app at http://app.core-apps.com/ngs2014. Click on Twitter or Facebook.

You may wish to follow postings by the conference’s official social media press. A list can be found on the conference blog in the right hand sidebar. The blog contains articles about all of them which include links to their websites.

I’m attending the FamilySearch blogger dinner tonight. I’ll have a report for you shortly. I guess Ancestry.com isn’t doing a briefing (or didn’t invite me?!) so I can’t give them equal time. Oh well; I know who butters my bread.

#NGS2014GEN Is Almost Upon Us

The National Genealogical Society’s 2014 annual conference is almost upon us. If you’re there, come say hello. I’ll be at the press table outside the exhibit hall ever so often. I must apologize in advance, however. If we’ve met before, I’ve forgotten your name. Even if we’ve met several times. My memory is slipping away faster than the rest of me.

Plus I’m…

Well, I’m a lot like Diane Richard. And she explains me more eloquently than I could myself. To learn more about me, take a moment and read about her in her article, “Genealogy Conferences and the Introvert…” on the Upfront With NGS blog.

It’s not too late to register and attend the conference. Registration is accepted on site and is open

Tuesday, 6 May 2014
12:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.

Wednesday, 7 May 2014
7:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

Thursday, 8 May 2014
7:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

Friday, 9 May 2014
7:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

Saturday, 10 May 2014
7:00 a.m.–12 noon

Conference events will be held at the Marriott Hotel at 500 East Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia, or the Greater Richmond Convention Center (GRCC).

Its free to come by and check out the Exhibit Hall in the convention center.

Details about the conference can be found in the conference brochure and on the conference website.

Darned Origins of Family Legends

We depend upon records to reveal the “truth” about our pasts.

Yet sometimes records have anomalies.
Some are amusing or humorous.
Some are interesting or weird.
Some are peculiar or suspicious.
Some are infuriating, even downright laughable.

Yes, “Records Say the Darnedest Things.”

Reader Betty Martin shared with me an indexing error that may well start one of those dubious family legends.

Betty’s gg-grandfather was Aaron Boss, a Wesleyan Methodist who, with his wife Eunice, had raised a family on their farm in Athol near Maccan, Cumberland, Nova Scotia. In “Oral History of Early Athol,” H. R. Baker wrote of the family:

They also had an excellent farm and were thrifty
well-to-do people. I spent two days with them once
when a boy, helping to put in the spring crop. They
were wonderfully religious people. If I remember
correctly, we had worship morning and evening. First
the father would pray – and such praying I have
rarely heard since. His whole frame swayed and shook, and his voice
rolled aloft in a great volume which fairly stormed the gates of
Heaven. Then the boys followed, more quiet, but none the less
fervent and earnest, and when we arose from our knees every face
seemed transfigured and aglow with Heaven's light. They were great
friends and supporters of Methodism in those early days when
Methodism was young and comparatively poor and small in numbers.

With this background, Betty was amused when she eventually found Aaron in the 1871 Canada census.

Searches for Aaron Boss turned up nothing.

“Varying the spelling of Arron brought up nothing,” she wrote. “Searching only on the surname ‘Boss’ brought up nothing useful. Searching only on given name ‘Aaron’ brought up nothing.”

Using good search strategy, she next searched for members of Aaron’s household. A search for Eunice Boss had previously returned nothing. Finally a search on just her given name located Eunice.

“There was Eunice living with the Bishop of Avon in Maccan!” wrote Betty. (See the screen image, above.) While she knew Methodists have bishops, she was quite certain her gg-grandfather had never been one. She also wondered where Avon was located.

Armed with a subscription to Ancestry.com, (the image is unavailable on FamilySearch.org) she viewed the original record. She calls what she found “a very creative transcription error.”

The obsolete form for double s, so often mistaken for a p, had somehow induced the indexer to read “Bishop” instead of Boss. And “Aaron,” possibly written as Aron, had been read “Avon.”

“What fun!” she wrote. “I can hardly wait until word gets out to the family that our Aaron Boss was the Bishop of Avon!”

AncestryDNA Management Changes

I noticed a couple of items on LinkedIn recently regarding AncestryDNA. Kendall Hulet has been appointed “vice president of product – DNA at Ancestry.com.”

Ancestry.com has also posted a job opening for a “Senior Product Manager – DNA” in San Francisco, California. Perhaps this will be Hulet’s first hire. According to the job description,

The role of Senior Product Manager will be at the hub of the AncestryDNA organization, working closely with world-class scientists, engineers, designers, marketers, and others to create an innovative, science-based family history product like none other. The Senior PM role will focus on creating and improving AncestryDNA product features, and the ideal candidate will have demonstrated experience product managing a rich, interactive online application. Having a strong personal interest in science, technology, and family history will be a distinct advantage – and will bring perspective and insight into this role. This position will report to the product director for DNA, and could be based either in our San Francisco, CA office or our Provo, UT office.

AncestryDNA is led by Ken Chahine, general manager and an Ancestry.com senior vice president.

Ancestry.com Adds Page Control for Swedish Church Records

One of the things that makes browsing images difficult on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org is that the image numbers don’t match the page numbers. This has been especially problematic for Ancestry.com’s Swedish Church Records collection, since some pages have hand-written cross-references to other pages.

Ancestry.com has addressed this problem by adding an additional control. One can now jump to any image number or any page number in that collection.

This is a great feature, especially for collections like this one that don’t include a name index. It’s one that I’d like to see implemented for all such “browse-only” collections at both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

In other news, Ancestry.com has made it easier to attach a record to someone in your tree after browsing to the record among the images in a collection. Click the Save button, and then Save to Person in Your Tree. A popup appears wherein you select the name from the names indexed on that page, select the tree (if you have more than one), and specify the person. Previously, you had to open the Index pane, find and select the name and then click the Save button.

Another recent addition is a fix to the new Search Sliders interface. When first released, it didn’t show all the stuff you specified for the search. As I recall, it didn’t show anything that wasn’t a name, date, or place. Things like gender, race, and relationship to head were not shown. I’m thinking they also didn’t show all the people and all the places. One had to click Edit Search to show the complete search form to see all that had been entered.

Now there is a link underneath the sliders which expands the area there and displays the additional values.

FamilySearch Donates $1.5 Million to MoAR

Dennis Brimhall addresses MoAR press conference
Photo courtesy Lisa J. Godfrey

Dennis Brimhall, president and CEO of FamilySearch International, last week presented a check of $1.5 million dollars to the Museum of the American Revolution (MoAR). He did so on behalf of FamilySearch sponsor, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The museum is being built in the historic heart of Philadelphia and is set to open in 2016. The gift boosted funds raised on the $150 million project to over $100 million.

“The story of America’s founding is one of faith, family, and religious freedom,” said Brimhall. “The Church is pleased to be a partner in the ongoing efforts to engage people in their heritage in inspiring, immersive, and interactive ways.”

The museum will tell the story of the American Revolution using its collection of objects, artifacts, artwork, and manuscripts. The museum will have permanent and special exhibition galleries, theaters, and large-scale tableaux and will engage people in the history and continuing relevance of the American Revolution.

The museum will include one of the new FamilySearch “Discovery Centers” announced at last year’s FGS conference. (See “Über Cool Family History Center of the Future Shown at #FGS2013.”) According to FamilySearch’s Merrill White, “the Family Discovery Center offers individuals and families simple yet powerful in-person experiences to discover their heritage and have their hearts turned to their ancestors.”

Fold3 Commemorates Civil War Commencement with Free Access

I received this from Ancestry.com (the company, not the website):

To remember the commencement of the Civil War in April 1861, Fold3 invites you to explore all records in its Civil War Collection for free April 14–30.

Explore Civil War documents featuring everything from military records to personal accounts and historic writings. Soldier records include service records, pension index cards, “Widows’ Pension” files, Navy survivors certificates, Army registers, and much more. Other record types include photographs, original war maps, court investigations, slave records, and beyond. Items such as the Lincoln Assassination Papers, Sultana Disaster documents, letters to the Adjutant General and Commission Branch, and the 1860 census are also contained in the Civil War Collection.

Confederate-specific records include Confederate service records, amnesty papers, casualty reports, and citizens files, as well as Confederate Navy subject files and Southern Claims Commission documents.

Join Fold3 in its commemoration of the Civil War. Discover information on famous participants as well as your own Civil War ancestors through documents, photos, and images that capture the experiences and vital information of those involved in America’s deadliest conflict. Then commemorate your ancestors by creating or expanding memorial pages for them on Fold3’s Honor Wall [http://www.fold3.com/wall/]. Get started searching the Civil War Collection here [http://go.fold3.com/civilwar/].

#NGS2014GEN Conference Pre-Registration Deadline

If you’re planning on going to the 2014 National Genealogical Society’s 2014 annual conference, today is the last day to pre-register, but it is also the last day to buy meal tickets, social events, and workshops.

Here’s a press release I received from the NGS.

Registration for the NGS Conference
and All Ticketed Events
Closes 22 April 2014

Arlington, Va, 16 APRIL 2014: Have you registered for the NGS Family History Conference in Richmond? The deadline for pre-conference registration is 22 April 2014. Registration will be available on-site beginning at 12:00 noon, 6 May 2014, in the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

Registration for all meals, social events, and workshops closes on 22 April 2014. No ticket purchases will be available on-site at the conference for meals, social events, or workshops. Likewise, registration for Librarians’ Day also closes on 22 April 2014. For conference information and to register, go to http://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/attend/.

Breakfast, Luncheons, and the NGS Banquet

Participating organizations sponsor several luncheons during the conference. Seats are still available for several of the luncheons, the NGS First-Timers Breakfast, and the NGS Banquet. Make your reservations now at http://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/attend/. The NGS First-Timers Breakfast is $24, luncheons are $32, and the banquet is $51. Menus are in the registration brochure at http://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Registration-Brochure-Final-Rev-11.pdf.

Live Streaming

If you are unable to attend the NGS 2014 Family History Conference, ten lectures featuring some of the most popular topics and nationally known speakers will be available to you via live streaming.  Details about viewing the live streaming program and the costs can be found at http://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/attend/live-streaming-at-ngs2014gen/. Registration for the live streaming program closes on 30 April 2014.

Society Night

On Wednesday evening 7 May 2014, many Virginia genealogical and historical societies will be available in the Richmond Marriott from 5:15 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. to answer questions about local repositories and resources, discuss their group’s activities, and sell their publications.

Richmond Area Tours

There are a few seats left on the historical tours prior to the NGS 2014 Family History Conference through Richmond Discoveries’ Tours on Tuesday, 6 May 2014. To register go to http://www.richmonddiscoveries.com/ngs.php.  The password is NGS2014 and is case sensitive.

Add Items to an Existing Registration

To add meals to your current registration, log on at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org, click on My Account, select My Events, and then click to Add Sessions. To add pre-conference events, click on My Account and then select Upcoming Events.

You really don’t want to miss this year’s exciting conference program from 7–10 May at the Greater Richmond Convention Center and Richmond Marriott.

Founded in 1903, the National Genealogical Society is dedicated to genealogy education, high research standards, and the preservation of genealogical records.  The Arlington, Virginia, based nonprofit is the premier national society for everyone, from the beginner to the most advanced family historian, seeking excellence in publications, educational offerings, research guidance, and opportunities to interact with other genealogists.  Please visit the NGS Pressroom for further information.

Monday Mailbox: Hiding Dead Individuals Online

Dear Ancestry Insider,

We living genealogists place dead ancestors on various websites such as FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, and RootsWeb World Connect.  We collect every shred of information we can on our living relatives and place it in our PAF or FTM or whatever genealogy program.  However, because of privacy concerns, we truncate and do not post that information on-line.  If we don't truncate that information, the FamilySearch or Ancestry.com, or Rootsweb World Connect website does it for us. 

Question: Will these companies eventually put all the information we have collected on these now living persons on line at some future time, say 75 years, like the census?  I'd hate to have collected it all, then have it lost to posterity.  How can we handle these situations to assure eventual access to the next generations?

Signed,
Charles R. Heath II

Dear Charles,

That’s an interesting question. It made me think. If Ancestry.com or FamilySearch automatically hides persons in our trees which they consider living, will those persons automatically reappear at some future day?

I asked Ancestry.com and FamilySearch what rules they use to automatically hide people in trees. I asked if there was a certain age past which they are no longer considered dead.

FamilySearch did not respond.

Ancestry.com spokesperson, Matthew Deighton, wrote that Ancestry.com “hides anyone who does not have a death date and who is less than 100 years old.” He also pointed me to an Ancestry.com blog article, “Living people in your family tree,” which goes into the issue in more detail. Basically, you can explicitly specify that a person is living. Or Ancestry.com will assume they are living using the rule Deighton mentioned.

Unfortunately, neither Deighton nor the article addressed the issue of the passage of time. 

Once flagged as living, is a person in the tree forever hidden, even when they are older than 100 years? My guess is that a person explicitly flagged as living will continue to be considered living forever if you never enter a death date. Your desire to have this information eventually public will be thwarted.

I further guess that if implicitly treated as living because the age is less than 100, that such an individual will be considered dead when they reach the age of 100. If that’s the case, be careful what you say about your living relatives. What you write may one day be visible to the general public. To keep a comment private forever, use the “Add a Note” feature. Notes can be seen only by yourself and others that you give Editor permission to.

Charles, your desire to have your living people revealed after your death—after they are too old to still be living, of course—touches on another issue facing the online public. After you die, what happens to your online information? You don’t need to be an Ancestry.com subscriber to have a tree on Ancestry.com. Your tree there will persist until you remove it. If you leave it up and you and your heirs never come back, presumably Ancestry.com will leave it there forever.

Thanks for your thought provoking question.

Signed,
The Ancestry Insider

Short Easter Greeting

My goal is to make this blog inoffensive to readers of all religions and denominations. On this Easter morning, permit me a short aside. Mormons—members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—do genealogy “because of Him.” If you want more information, visit http://easter.mormon.org/.

FamilySearch Obituary Search

A couple of people have pointed me to https://familysearch.org/obituaries/. This is a useful little page for searching for obituaries on FamilySearch.org, but I wonder if it suffers from limitations of which you should be aware.

The page searches the Memories feature of FamilySearch Family Tree, perhaps for stories containing the word “obituary.” It doesn’t seem to search the obituaries being indexed by FamilySearch Indexing. One example collection is “United States, Obituaries, American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1899-2012.”

Both have their place. Perhaps FamilySearch will one day have a search system that searches both.

FamilySearch Breaks, Fixes Image URLs

Several weeks ago users of the FamilySearch.org website reported that bookmarked URLs to images on FamilySearch.org stopped working. Users received this error:

A year ago Robert Kehrer, FamilySearch product manager explained that “[links to] FamilySearch person records and their associated images are built on a technology called Persistent Archival Links [PALs]. That is what the pal portion of the record URL means (ex. https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/X79S-N78). This is a technology that makes it so that the links should not change.”

In reporting the error above, “GeneJ” complained about “PALs that aren't PALs for long.” Users were angry and fearful.

Randy Wilson, rock star and FamilySearch Information Architect, responded to the report. He said, “This looks like a bug. I will get some engineers working on it.” A couple days later the bug was fixed and old URLs worked as expected.

Wilson explained why the URLs stopped working. FamilySearch had just switched the system it uses to hold records. This caused the URLs of all its images to change. An image that used to be

https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-36329-6301-93?cc=2106411&wc=M9QJ-NDD:n306540615

became

https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-36329-6301-93?cc=2106411&wc=MCBG-FW5:361613201,361916501

and the old URL stopped working.

Trouble was, the old URLs were supposed to continue to work. The guts of the PAL (the part before the question mark) didn’t change, so an old URL was supposed to still work. It didn’t. FamilySearch fixed it. Everyone’s (mostly) happy now.

Wilson also revealed that this change won’t be the last. In the coming months FamilySearch will switch from PALs to industry standard ARKs: Archival Resource Keys. He said old PALs will continue to work.

Citation Goobledeegook This makes me think about some citation principles and why you should always copy and paste the FamilySearch suggested image citation rather than just the URL. Persistent identifiers are not persistent. Redundant information in citations is sometimes a good thing. I have a family group sheet that lists one source: a Family History Library film number. The problem is, the FHL changed its numbering scheme since that sheet was authored. I have a PAF file that lists a single source: a Pedigree Resource File (PRF) submission identification number. The problem is, FamilySearch changed its numbering scheme when it republished the PRF on the current website. There are citations consisting of nothing more than Dewey call numbers for libraries now using LOC call numbers. Today’s ISBN numbers will be replaced by tomorrow’s ID du jour. Using a lone identification number (or URL) in lieu of a full citation is short sighted. Redundancy in citations is generally avoided to avoid overly long citations. But in its suggested image citations, FamilySearch is redundant. Consider this citation: "Massachusetts, Land Records, 1620-1986", images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-36329-6301-93 : accessed 12 Apr 2014), Essex > Deeds 1728-1731 vol 56-58 > image 554 of 792. It has both the PAL URL and the bread crumb trail. If the image is moved from "Massachusetts, Land Records, 1620-1986" to another collection, the PAL will get you to the image no matter what collection it is in. If the PAL breaks, the bread crumb trail will still get you to the image. If the bread crumb trail is changed, the PAL will still work. If several of these change, there is enough raw metadata that with some effort you will be able to relocate the image. FamilySearch has made copying the image citation convenient. Click Show Citation and Copy Citation. You can then paste the citation where ever it is needed. One day you will be glad you did.

Win Ancestry.com Subscription, DNA Test, and Research Package

This month you can win a free Ancestry.com sub-scription and other prizes worth more than $3,000. In Ancestry.com’s Branch Out Contest six lucky Grand Prize winners will receive:

• One (1) Ancestry.com World Membership,
• One (1) Ancestry.com DNA kit
• One (1) 8x8 Premium Leather Photo Book from MyCanvas.com, and
• Twenty (20) hours of ProGenealogists research.

The research time can be used in a variety of ways, such as to start your tree, or teach you how to use Ancestry.com to build your tree, or help you break through a brick wall.

To enter, go to the Branch Out Sweepstakes page. To enter you must provide your:

• Name,
• Address,
• Email Address,
• Phone Number, and
• Provide a brief story (500 words or less) about your family history.

Ancestry.com says the story will not be judged or graded. You must consent to have it displayed in connection with the sweepstakes, so you have to own the story or have the story owner’s permission. Ancestry.com may wish to display photographs of the people in the story, so you’ll need to be prepared to obtain permissions to display those as well.

With the tax deadline today, its time to think about getting some money back. The sweepstakes deadline is the end of the month.

Monday Mailbox: More RootsTech Sessions Than I Thought

Dear Readers,

Two weeks ago I told Claire that all the recorded RootsTech sessions were available on the RootsTech website. Several readers wrote in to set me straight.

Dear Ancestry Insider,

I am chairing a Family History Fair in Naperville, IL on April 26, 2014. As a Roots Tech satellite, we have many more programs available to present than those view able online. Of the 10 presentations being shown at our family history fair, only 2 of them are available online.

Signed,
Christine Bell

Dear Ancestry Insider,

I counted the number available on the RootsTech Website, there were 19 (of course, I'm pretty mathmatically challenged, so it is possible I counted wrong, but I'm going with 19) I counted the number of videos available under the Fair Organizer's resources (videos that I counted were not specifically aimed at [members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]) and came up with 32. There were two additional videos that I considered of interest to both [members and non-members] but which had been included specifically in the LDS portion, so if you add those in there were 34 that were not available for viewing on the RootsTech website.

Signed,
Cathleen

Looks like you should use the “Find a Fair” page to check out what locations in your area might be available. There’s a page titled “List of Recorded Classes” that gave a list of classes RootsTech planned to record, subject to change. As you can tell from the comments, local organizers choose which sessions to rebroadcast.

Signed,
The Ancestry Insider