Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Products

Last year I intended to do stupendously rich articles about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day presentations. Since I never got around to it, this year you’re getting my stupidously poor notes.

Eric Shoup gave the presentation on Ancestry.com products.

• 2009 new product features:
  
  • Member connect
  • Enhanced image page
    
  • Message center
  • New person page
  • New design for collection home pages
    • Showed an example
    • Displaced an advertisement to bring the browse interface to the top-right of the page.
    • Added a section of related DBs
    • Added color-information about collections
  • Lifespan filter
  • FTM 2010
• Customer input obtained from:
  • Surveys
  • Message boards, blogs
  • Member services contacts
  • Conferences
  • Usability tests
  • Focus groups
  • Follow-me home visits
• 1.25 billion people in member trees

Is it my imagination, or have my notes gotten lighter as we tired throughout the day? Next time: Tony Macklin talks about search.

Eric Shoup is the vice president of product for Ancestry.com. Prior to Ancestry.com he spent five years at eBay in senior product and general management roles. Prior to eBay, Eric’s product experience included online groceries in Hong Kong, and Lexus.com.

Vault Vednesday: Optimized for Preservation

It’s Vault Vednesday! This is another in a series highlighting the Granite Mountain Record Vault (GMRV) and the NGS Family History Conference coming to Salt Lake City, 28 April—1 May 2010.

Optimized for Preservation

The Granite Mountain Record Vault was designed to be an ideal long-term storage facility. The location is ideal in many ways, shielding genealogical records from most natural disasters: hurricanes, flooding, tornados, lightning, and so forth.

Office space (above left), hallway (above right).
Air treatment equipment (below left), electrical generator (below right).

The natural climate of the vault is also ideal. The temperature is 57 to 58 degrees, year round, and the natural humidity is always 40 to 50 percent. To these natural conditions, FamilySearch has added air treatment machinery to produce a clean-room type environment, filtering most dust, smoke, and chemicals out of the air. Emergency power generators keep the equipment working during power outages.

The 2010 NGS Family History Conference

The Utah Genealogical Association, the local host for the 2010 NGS Family History Conference, is organizing twenty-minute consultations with genealogy experts. This service is provided for no additional charge with your conference registration. Sign up when you pre-register.

Bring a pedigree chart, applicable family group sheets, and a list of sources that you’ve already consulted.

Early bird registration must be postmarked by 8 March 2010. There are just days left.
Pre-registration must be postmarked by 12 April 2010. There are just days left.
The conference begins 28 April 2010. There are just days left.

---

Sources

     The Genealogical Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records Protection in an Uncertain World, 16 p. brochure ([Salt Lake City, Utah: self-published, 1973]).

Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Member Services

Last year I intended to do stupendously rich articles about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day presentations. Since I never got around to it, this year you’re getting my stupidously poor notes.

Following our virtual tour of the Ancestry.com Washington, D.C. scanning facility, Tom Foster, director of member services gave us a real tour of the Ancestry.com call center. The center is located one floor below digital preservation services.

The funnest part of the tour was the moment we emerged from the elevator and were greeted with squeals of delight. An Ancestry.com employee caught sight of Dick Eastman, ran up and asked for his autograph. Boy, did we tease him! We were jealous, of course, The only person who’s ever asked for my autograph was a state highway patrolman. (But I digress…)

• Ancestry.com has 1.66 million paying subscribers
• The Ancestry.com website has over 7 million unique visitors each month
• Visitors have created 12 million family trees
• There are more than 1.25 billion people populating these user-contributed trees
• Ancestry.com will be switching from a few, large attendance webinars towards lots of webinars that may have smaller attendance
• On the 4^th day of a user’s subscription, Ancestry.com does a welcome call

For a couple more thoughts on member services I refer you to an article by fellow attendee, Leland Meitzler. Next time, I’ll review the product presentation from Eric Shoup.

Tom Foster has served as director and then senior director of member services at Ancestry.com since May 2005. Over the past 25 years Tom has held various leadership positions in the customer care and support operations industry, focusing on high tech, multi-client care, and sales and product support. He has worked in these roles at Microsoft, Compaq, T-Mobile, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Nike.

The Hayes Ohio Obituary Index

In a recent Bloggers Day article I bulleted Ancestry.com’s intent to publish the Hayes Center Ohio Death Index. Now that Ancestry.com has published that database, orders for obituary copies from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center have quadrupled over last year, according to the Port Clinton News Herald. Orders now come in from across the nation and all over the world.

Raising the awareness of a database is one reason I’ve never had a problem with Ancestry.com including free databases in its subscription content. This has been a definite win-win situation for Ancestry.com, the Hayes Center, and in my opinion, Ancestry.com subscribers.

The Ohio Obituary Index contains over 1.5 million entries from as far back as the 1810s right up to the present. You can access the database for free at the Hayes website. Go to rbhayes.org/index . Search options are pictured above left. (Click on the image to see the original full size.)

But even if you’re not an Ancestry.com subscriber, you can tap into the more powerful Ancestry.com search index. On Ancestry.com go to the database and you will see the search options shown to the right. (Click for original.)

However, as a non-subscriber, to see all the details of a search result, you must click the link (pictured below) to the Hayes Center website.

Insider Ketchup

 
Modification of an image
© 2005, The Facey Family
Some rights reserved.

Once again, it’s time to ketchup on the many items I’d like to write articles about, but don’t have the time.

There has to be some joke that could be made about this news story, but I don’t have the time to tickle it out. Maybe Chris Dunham, the Genealogue, could give it a shot:

• Genealogy Project tracks ancestry of Charles Darwin

Ancestry.com is doing an interesting co-marketing promotion. You can earn dividend miles on U.S. Airways by subscribing to Ancestry.com:

• 6 month U.S. subscription for $89.70 (14.95/mo.), 1250 dividend miles (13.9 miles per dollar)
• 12 month U.S. subscription for $155.40 (12.95/mo.), 2500 dividend miles (16.1 miles per dollar)
• 6 month World subscription for $161.70 (26.95/mo.), 2500 dividend miles (15.5 miles per dollar)
• 12 month World subscription for $299.40 (24.95/mo.), 5000 dividend miles (16.7 miles per dollar)

For more information, click here.

Dan Lawyer does short interviews with several techies that worked on the Search feature of the new FamilySearch website Beta.

(If you can’t see the video above, click here to see it on YouTube.)

Proving once again that there’s nothing new under the sun, Ancestry.com has added “bucket” searches (as we called them internally) to New Search. I still remember the hue and cry that erupted back in July 2006 when Ancestry.com introduced search buckets. “Now I have to do four searches instead of one!” users complained. Users wanted to go back to the “old search,” which searched all databases. Sounds like today’s “new search.”

(Above, top: Bucket search on new search. Above, bottom: Bucket search on old search.)

There are been several new articles in Mormon Times on New FamilySearch (NFS) since I last pointed in that direction. These articles talk about temple work and will be of interest mostly to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

• Getting started on the New FamilySearch – 3rd in the series, 27 January 2010
• Web site is all about families, temple work – 2nd in the series, 22 January 2010
• New FamilySearch means no more excuses – 1st in the series, 14 January 2010

You may be interested in the map photographs at the top of the articles. They are of a large map on a wall inside FamilySearch’s offices. It is difficult to see in any of the photographs, but if you look carefully at the closeups, you can see little green LEDs. As each temple went live, an LED was lit. In real life, the effect is pretty electrical (so to speak). Very cool.

 

Good grief. I’m out of time again, and I’ve not cleared out even half of my backlog. Here’s a couple more quick ones:

UPrinting is giving away five 24x36 poster prints, which I assume could be PDFs generated by Ancestry.com’s MyCanvas feature. For information about the giveaway, click here. You must enter by 19 February 2010.

Genealogy Gem’s Lisa has scored big with an exclusive interview with another Lisa: Lisa Kudrow. Way to go, Lisa! Lisa will be releasing the Lisa interview on Valentine’s Day. For more information, click here.

Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Content (Part 2)

Last year I intended to do stupendously rich articles about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day presentations. Since I never got around to it, this year you’re getting my stupidously poor notes.

Today I’ll finish Gary Gibbs’s content presentation.

Ancestry.com ran a survey at the end of November to learn customers’ content requests for 2010. There were 30,000 responses to the survey, which is an incredibly high participation rate. That’s even more amazing when one learns that the survey contained 110 questions about content. This survey was for U.S. content acquisition, only. Here are the results of the survey:

• Most request record type:
  1. Birth, Marriage, Death (BMD) (29%)
  2. Census (21%)
  3. Immigration (11%)
  4. Family and local histories (9%)
  5. Court, land… (8%)
  6. Directories (4%)
  7. [Sorry, I didn’t get the percentages or the ranking for Newspapers and Military.]
• Order in which customers desired these records:
  1. BMD 1861-1914
  2. Funeral home records
  3. State census
  4. BMD pre 1861
  5. Land ownership maps 1860-1920
  6. … [I didn’t get the remaining dozen or more items.]
• State (region) ranking:
  1. Mid-Atlantic
  2. Eastern Midwest
  3. Southeast
  4. … [I didn’t get the rest.]
• Time Period ranking:
  1. 1861-1914 (64%)
  2. 1816-1860 (57%)
  3. 1776-1815 [I got the order but not the percentages for the rest.]
  4. 1915-1945
  5. 1620-1775
  6. 1945-present
• Ancestry/ethnicity is (mark all that apply):
  1. English (78%)
  2. German (68%)
  3. Irish (63%)
  4. Scottish (50%)
  5. French (32%)
  6. Welsh (21%)
  7. Native American (21% [Really? Did I write that one down correctly?] )

Q. When are you going to do a Mac version of your keying tool?
A. (Andrew) We aren’t currently working on it. However, we currently have one very large Mac project under development. I can’t say what it is, but it is a product for which you wonder, “Why has it taken them 15 years to produce a Mac version?”

Q. Will NARA allow you to index the 1940 census ahead of time?
A. No. However, NARA is pre-scanning the images.

Next time: If Ancestry.com comes through for me, we’ll have a virtual tour of the Ancestry.com scanning facility in the District of Columbia.

Vault Vednesday: FamilySearch Open House

This is another in a series highlighting the Granite Mountain Record Vault (GMRV) and the NGS Family History Conference coming to Salt Lake City, 28 April—1 May 2010.

Vault Rooms

Open house visitors were treated to views of the vault rooms. Each vault room was 27 feet wide and 15 feet tall. The tunnels were lined with heavy corrugated steel and concrete was pumped in to fill the space between the steel and the granite tunnel walls(photo top right).

Drop ceilings hid most of the curvature of the roof. Florescent lighting illuminated work areas. There are indications that vault rooms were empty at the time of the open house (photograph, middle right and subsequent newspaper stories).

In addition to the facilities, tours showed open house visitors a film explaining the purpose of the vault and scenes during vault construction (bottom right).

An apocryphal story states that early, impish employees snuck a firecracker into the vault and set it off. In these contained rooms, the sound of the blast must have been intense, reverberating and echoing in the confined space. Today such a prank would likely result in termination. Vault access is tightly controlled. Public tours are a thing of the past. Workers and private tour visitors are prohibited from taking photographs. Upon seeing these vault articles, FamilySearch officials warned off publication of some vault details that were present in the publications of FamilySearch, International back when it was known as the Genealogical Society of Utah.

 

NGS Conference: FamilySearch Tour

NGS conference attendees this year, in addition to the virtual vault tour and Church History Library tour, are invited to tour the FamilySearch Center in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB). The center contains computers and ample personnel to help beginners begin the search for their roots and includes an activity center that will keep children of visitors busy while parents have an opportunity to explore their roots.

For non-beginners, the center has several draws. A recent facelift included installation of an immigration pier photo op, giving visitors an opportunity to generate a keepsake, putting themselves in the context of their immigrant ancestors. And the center offers discount coupons for dining in JSMB restaurants.

Groups can reserve instructional rooms equipped with individual computers and presentation equipment. My family has used these rooms several times for our bi-annual family history reunions.

The JSMB serves as the world headquarters for FamilySearch, International.

The Ancestry Insider arrives at Ellis Island with his trusty dog (or is that a rat?). While in Salt Lake City for NGS, stop by the FamilySearch Center and get a picture of yourself arriving!

Early bird registration must be postmarked by 8 March 2010. There are just 27 days left.
Pre-registration must be postmarked by 12 April 2010. There are just 62 days left.
The conference begins 28 April 2010. There are just 78 days left.

---

Sources

      Dexter Ellis, "Inspection Tours Set for Records Vaults in Canyon," Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 30 November 1963, Church News section, p. 3, cols. 2-5; digital images (http://news.google
.com/newspapers : accessed 25 December 2009). 
     "Church Invites Public To Visit Cottonwood Genealogy Vaults," Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 2 December 1963, p. B 5, cols. 6-8; digital images (http://news.google.com/newspapers : accessed 25 December 2009). Also see “Deep Vaults to Protect Church Files,” Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1963, p. b15; and “Plan to Show Record Vault of Mormons,” Chicago Tribune, 2 December 1963, p. C16.
     "Vault Toured By Church, Civic Leaders," Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 3 December 1963, p. 12 B, col. 1; digital images (http://news.google.com/newspapers : accessed 25 December 2009).
     The Genealogical Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records Protection in an Uncertain World, 16 p. brochure ([Salt Lake City, Utah: self-published, 1973).
     Lynn Arave, “FamilySearch Unveils New Face and Products,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 1 October 2009; online archive (http://www.deseretnews.com : accessed 7 February 2010).

Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Content

Last year I intended to do stupendously rich articles about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day presentations. Since I never got around to it, this year you’re getting my stupidously poor notes.

With lunch just past, was Ancestry.com going to keep us awake during siesta hour? First up was Gary Gibbs, vice president of U.S. Content. His energetic presentation did the trick.

• Developing and working to bring a constant flow of records
• Upwards of $10 million annually on content.
• Worldwide content acquisition
  • Canada, Provo, UKI,… [I didn’t get the whole list in my notes, but I believe it included all countries with Ancestry.com offices:]…, Germany, France, China, Australia
• Domestically, have three people negotiating with state archives and vital records offices
  (Brian Peterson, Quinton Atkinson, and Al Viera)
• Big new announcement is on the horizon
• Archives’ digitization priorities spreadsheet
• Terms of a typical agreement:
  • Digitize collections
  • Available on Ancestry.com
  • Available for free at the archive
  • The archive receives digital copies
  • Ancestry.com has an exclusive period during which the archive can’t offer the records to other organizations
• For 2009
  • Delivered 29 of the top 30 promised content
  • Another came out near the beginning of 2010
  • The last one, land records, is coming in Q1 2010. It was delayed by the decision to key all the names on cadastral/land ownership maps.
• Customers are attaching records to their trees at an accelerated rate since the addition of member connection features
  • Total of 400 million at the end of 2009
  • 150 million at the end of 2008
  • 50 million at the end of 2007
  • Started with 0 on 2 August 2006
  • Currently experiencing 5 million attaches a week
• U.S. records coming in 2010 (see the Ancestry.com web announcement for more information and for International records)
• 1920 census improved
• Early census years 1790-1840. First every field keying.
• State and Territory Census Records (pictured to the right) †
• 1950 census substitute (2,500 city directories in 48 states)
• DDD (Deaf, Dumb, Dehydrated) censuses *
• Historic public records & voter registrations (1930s-1980s, 700 million records)
• Connecticut Divorce Records (1969-1997)
• Delaware BMD (1800s-1933)
• Missouri death records (1910-1958) †
• Hayes Library Ohio Death Index (1830-2009)
• Vermont vital records, 1909-2003
• U.S. funeral home and cemetery records †
• Naturalization records (1795-1972) (pictured to the left) †
• Boston, Honolulu and New Orleans passenger lists (1899-1957) †
• Revolutionary War CMSR, pension, bounty land applications †
• Returns from U.S. Military Posts in 21 states (1800-1916) †
• Navy muster rolls (1900s) †
• Civil War Union draft registers and Confederate pension applications (pictured near right)
• WWII 1942 draft records for Idaho, Oregon, and Washington (pictured far right)
• US county land ownership maps (1860-1920)
• McNeil Island and Atlanta Federal penitentiary records †
• Yearbooks, 7 million names from 1900-2000
  * Not mentioned in the web announcement
  † This may have been mentioned on Bloggers Day, but my notes aren’t complete.
• World Archives Project
  • 33.5 thousand contributors
  • From 92 countries
  • 31 partners
  • 45.3 [?]
  • 23 million records keyed in 2009 (counting each double keying)
  • Two people recruiting societies (Lou Szucs and Suzanne Russo-Adams)

Next time: I’ll finish up Gary Gibbs’s content presentation.

Gary Gibbs is vice president of U.S. Content and is responsible for content acquisition and partnerships. He has worked for Ancestry.com for ten years in various roles, spending his first five years as vice president of product management. Gary has an extensive background in technology, having worked in product development and management roles at Novell, WordPerfect, and TenFold. He has bachelors and masters degrees in computer science from BYU and an MBA from the University of Utah.

See You at the St. George Family History Expo

#FHExpo stands for this month’s St. George Family History Expo, to be held in… (don’t get ahead of me now) …Timbuktu! Just kidding. It’s in St. George, Utah on 26th and 27th, February 2010.

St. George is best known as the birthplace of Cafe Rio, a popular restaurant chain. What? You’ve never heard of Cafe Rio? Okay, maybe St. George isn’t best known as the birthplace of Cafe Rio. But if you haven’t heard of Cafe Rio, I recommend you check it out while you’re in town for the Expo. It’s a local favorite!

St. George is best known as the birthplace of Amanda Righetti who plays Grace Van Pelt on The Mentalist (seen in this photo with Tim Kang as Kimball Cho). Wait a minute. Now that I look at her biography on the show’s website, it says she was born “outside Las Vegas.” Hmmm. Maybe Righetti is not what St. George is best known for. If you eat unrefrigerated leftovers from Cafe Rio, you may have to check out of the hospital also.

I think it is safe to say that among genealogists, St. George is best known for the St. George Family History Expo! With its golf courses and Las Vegasque weather, it’s the perfect place for a February conference.

Yours truly will be teaching, “Blog Your Way to Genealogical Success.” Having your own genealogy blog will give you a free, easy way to publish your results on the web, log your research, and establish contact with helpful relatives. This class is for beginners. You’ll get a step-by-step guide for successfully creating a blog. Prerequisites: You must know how to turn your computer on, use a mouse, and browse the Internet.

Mine is not the only session you’ll want to attend, of course. This conference is the perfect place to increase your genealogical maturity. Go to the show’s website. Review the presenter biographies. You’ll see national experts and local favorites.

While I’m in town I’ll also be one of the Expo’s “Bloggers of Honor,” along with some of the industry’s best known. I am very honored. Native St. Georgers have, maybe, never seen a more popular chain of august bloggers than the group I have been asked to join.

Bernie Gracy, who writes the historicaltownmaps.com blog, will present the conference keynote. While he is perhaps best known for his lectures on location-based genealogy, in St. George this year he plans to give “an unconventional and hopefully motivational keynote, ‘Let Your Light Shine; Let Their Light Shine.’ ”

If you’re busy on the 26th and 27th and can’t make it to St. George, I will try to post notes live on Twitter. For information about following the St. George Family History Expo live on Twitter, see my August 2009 article, “The Ancestry ‘Tweety’ Insider.” But this month follow the hashtag, #FHExpo.

Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Lunch with Tim Sullivan

This is another in a series of reports about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day 2010.

We had lunch with Ancestry.com CEO, Tim Sullivan and general manager, Andrew Wait. Here’s my brief notes:

Andrew Wait told us that feedback from their My Story ads said the ads didn’t explain enough about what the genealogy experience was like. In fact, the life-changing stories set the bar so high that average people couldn’t identify with the experiences.

As a result, five days earlier Ancestry.com started a new advertizing campaign that goes back to the previous style a bit.

Tim Sullivan asked us if we had any questions for him. When there was a half-second pause, he said if we didn’t have any questions, he had questions for us. Then he asked us…  uh…  …something. I don’t actually remember what it was. My notes are devoid of anything Sullivan said. Sorry, Tim! I did jot down some comments from my fellow writers:

DearMYRTLE said, “Genealogy is a winter sport.” Does that mean Tim asked if we were seeing an upswing in genealogical interest?

At some point Andrew said, “Try a Twitter search of ‘Ancestry.com.’ You’ll see lots of positive feedback.” I think that means several of us expressed appreciation that Ancestry.com had taken the time to meet with us and said our opinions of Ancestry.com were much improved. I think someone even contrasted the day with the infamous “Internet Biographical Database” fiasco. [To read more on that subject, I recommend the series of articles by fellow attendee, Craig Manson.]

I can’t remember what led to my favorite comment of the day. Thomas MacEntee said, “I’ve always thought of genealogy as CSI without the icky bodies.” Mysteries. Dead people. Detective work. Yup; I think he nailed that one pretty well.

The final note I have on lunch was Andrew’s announcement that Ancestry.com had submitted “Tree to Go,” an iPhone application which would be available soon in the iPhone store. [Ancestry.com announced the application to the public on 19 January 2010.]

 

Who did Ancestry.com throw at us right after lunch? We were hoping it would be someone who could keep us awake. We were not disappointed. Stay tuned…

 

Tim Sullivan is the CEO of Ancestry.com, Inc. He was previously CEO of Match.com. Under Tim’s leadership, Match.com expanded globally into 29 local languages and grew paid subscribers from 189,500 to nearly one million while growing revenue more than six-fold. Prior to joining Match.com, Tim was vice president of e-commerce for Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch, Inc. Before that he spent seven years at the Walt Disney Company where he was vice president and managing director for Buena Vista Home Entertainment Asia Pacific. Tim is a graduate of Harvard Business School and was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Vault Vednesday: Open House

The public were invited to tour the awesome caverns of the Granite Mountain Record Vault (GMRV) starting 4 December 1963. After the open house, the vault would be closed to the public.

Storage vaults were constructed between about 120 and 350 feet into the mountain. Each of six vaults is about 200 feet long, extending 27 feet wide, and reaching over 15 feet high. The tunnels were lined with heavy corrugated steel and concrete was pumped in to fill the space between the steel and the granite tunnel walls.

NGS Conference Church Library Open House

The Church History Library is a state-of-the-art archival library for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It just opened in June 2009. See fascinating demonstrations of the latest conservation methods for photographs, sound recordings, and aging books. The archive uses high-density, climate controlled storage vaults for old manuscripts, photographs, maps, books, Church records, and other artifacts.

The tour is included in your conference registration for no extra cost. For a sneak peak of what you will see on the tour, click this link and then click the play button.

Early bird registration must be postmarked by 8 March 2010. There are just 36 days left.
Pre-registration must be postmarked by 12 April 2010. There are just 71 days left.
The conference begins 28 April 2010. There are just 87 days left.

This is another in a series highlighting the Granite Mountain Record Vault (GMRV) and the NGS Family History Conference coming to Salt Lake City, 28 April—1 May 2010.

---

Sources

      Dexter Ellis, "Inspection Tours Set for Records Vaults in Canyon," Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 30 November 1963, Church News section, p. 3, cols. 2-5; digital images (http://news.google
.com/newspapers : accessed 25 December 2009). 
     "Church Invites Public To Visit Cottonwood Genealogy Vaults," Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 2 December 1963, p. B 5, cols. 6-8; digital images (http://news.google.com/newspapers : accessed 25 December 2009). Also see “Deep Vaults to Protect Church Files,” Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1963, p. b15; and “Plan to Show Record Vault of Mormons,” Chicago Tribune, 2 December 1963, p. C16.
     "Vault Toured By Church, Civic Leaders," Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 3 December 1963, p. 12 B, col. 1; digital images (http://news.google.com/newspapers : accessed 25 December 2009).
     The Genealogical Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records Protection in an Uncertain World, 16 p. brochure ([Salt Lake City, Utah: self-published, 1973).

Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Technology (Part 2)

Last year I intended to do stupendously rich articles about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day presentations. Since I never got around to it, this year you’re getting my stupidously poor notes.

Mike Wolfgramm and Jonathan Young gave us the last presentation prior to lunch. Yesterday we talked about Dexter, the flexible content digitization pipeline. Today we will talk about:

• Named entity extraction
• Vertical [unique to Ancestry.com] search engine
• Record linking
• Hint engine – technology behind the shaky leaf
• PersonRank – Search engine that powers Mundia (pronounced, “Moon-dia”)

Named entity extraction

Named entity extraction derives facts from unstructured data using advanced algorithms to find names, dates, and places. As I mentioned yesterday, computers are very stupid. Ancestry.com uses machine learning to train the system to identify names, dates, and places.

Having these facts separate makes the records searchable.

Wolfgramm and Young showed us the example below. I’ve circled items in these colors:

• Name of Deceased: Lime green
• Age at Death: Yellow
• Death Date: Orange
• Obituary Date: Red
• Locations Mentioned: Purple and pink (we’ll see why I used two colors in a moment)
• Other Persons Mentioned: Green

Below I’ve included the corresponding record from the Ancestry.com U.S. Obituary Collection. I’ve circled items with the same colors as above so you can easily compare the two. As you can see, the algorithm did pretty darn well, for a stupid computer. It got the name of the deceased wrong, but did pick it up in the list of others mentioned. It got the obituary publication date wrong. The algorithm missed three locations (circled in purple): California, San Bernardino County, and Deplaines, although that last one is probably a misspelling of Des Plaines. It got the seven locations circled in pink. Lastly, it picked up all six names of other people.

Interestingly, this same, exact obituary also appeared in another newspaper and was picked up by Ancestry.com a year earlier. Back then, the performance of their named entity extraction technology apparently didn’t work as well. Notice in the record, below, that no names were picked up.

I asked why the dates were displayed ambiguously, rather than spelling the month out. Wolfgramm explained that they received the data from a third party in that format. He told us that they could fix the problem. Sure enough, within a couple of days, Ancestry.com had the problem fixed. Wow! I wish I could get all bugs fixed that fast!

Vertical Search engine

The problem:

• Variations in names, dates and places
• Need to apply name authority (name alternatives)
• In 1841 UK census ages of those over 15 were usually rounded down to next 0 or 5
• Rogers, 1985 study found 15% of birth places differ between 1851 and 1861 censuses
• Significant number of recording and transcription errors
• Searching 4+ billion records quickly is a challenge

The solution is a vertical search engine that can measure closeness:

• typographically
• phonetically
• date proximity
• place proximity
• fuzzy matching

Record Linking

• Example: How do 3 tree records relate to each other?
• [I can’t remember how this differed from PersonRank, below.]

Hint Engine

• Leverages search technology and record linking
• Computationally expensive – built with a scalable architecture
• Key collaborative networking technology – don’t have to do brute force compare between all people in all trees when users establish links between trees
• Acceptance vs. rejection of hints allows algorithmic improvements.
• Slightly over 80% of hints are accepted.
• Hint-originated searches are usually more effective because of the additional search information taken from the tree

PersonRank

• PersonRank is the algorithm used to determine if two individuals in different trees are the same person
• Q. Is PersonRank used only between tree individuals?
  A. It was Initially, but it is used now for all tree hints.
• Q. Is it used for regular searches?
  A. No. Perhaps in the future.

Finally! We made it to lunch time! Lunch was with Tim Sullivan and Andrew Wait.

Ancestry.com Bloggers Day: Technology

Last year I intended to do stupendously rich articles about Ancestry.com Bloggers Day presentations. Since I never got around to it, this year you’re getting my stupidously poor notes.

Mike Wolfgramm, senior vice president, and Jonathan Young, vice president, of development gave us the last presentation prior to lunch. Their opening slide listed the six key agenda items below. In this article I’ll cover the first item. Tomorrow I’ll finish the remaining five items.

Key technologies we will talk about:

* Flexible content digitization pipeline

* Named entity extraction

* Vertical [unique to Ancestry.com] search engine

* Record linking

* Hint engine – technology behind the shaky leaf

* PersonRank – Search engine that powers Mundia (pronounced, “Moon-dia”)

It is a challenge to handle different document characteristics

* Documents are very different: census, Chinese family history, manuscript, newspaper, German directories

Flexible Content Pipeline “Dexter” – applies only the appropriate steps from a plug-in toolset:

Scan manager* – handles alternate multi spectral scans.

-  Showed the examples that I included last Monday.

-  Kimberly Powell suggested including the spectrum type in the source metadata. I was not able to locate any alternate spectrum images online. I suppose these are yet to be published.

Auto de-skew*

Auto crop*

Image QA

Watermarking* – intelligent algorithms for placement of watermark

Table of contents tool

Auto leveling

Image conversion

Binarization* * – converting a grayscale image to black and white [also called thresholding]

-  Niblack’s method has 0.67% OCR error rate

-  Ancestry.com method has 0.04%

Auto Classification

-  Automatically classifies document types per page

-  Routes desired page to next stage

-  Wolfgramm mentioned an example from the British Army WWI Pension Records 1914-1920. Only the first page—the Attestation page—of a soldier’s pension file required indexing. Automatic classification distinguished these pages (below left) from other pages (below right).
 

Auto name fielding* is necessary because computers are extremely stupid and must be taught to recognize names. This works best for consistently formatted pages. Yearbooks are an example. The computer must be taught that the words to the left of the pictures are names, family name first, an then given names (below).

Even though the computer is taught how to look for names, it still has a hard time. Because OCR is used instead of indexers, not all names are recognized. I tested the example above and found Eileen Draper and Joan Clark were recognized, but not John Earl or Mary Jo Ellis.

Keying tool*

Fact extraction

Inference engine – advanced algorithms to create inferences from existing data. Infer birth year from age, infer mother from wife, infer father from son-in-law

Field normalization - [I think this is the same as “Named entity extraction,” below.]

And more…

Dexter tools, above, that are followed by an asterisk * are technologies with patents or patent applications.

Tomorrow we’ll finish up the technology presentation.

Mike Wolfgramm serves as senior vice president of development and is responsible for the development and delivery of Ancestry.com (the website). Wolfgramm has over fifteen years of experience in technology and product development. Prior to Ancestry.com, he served as senior architect and senior director of development at Open Market, Inc., where he managed the overall development of the Infobase technology application which had more than 35 million customers worldwide. Wolfgramm began his career at WordPerfect in Orem, Utah. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University where he received a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Jonathan Young is vice president of development for Ancestry.com. He joined Ancestry.com from Earthlink, where he served as vice president of development and was responsible for development, testing, subscription, and billing platforms across multiple sites. Prior to Earthlink, Young spent ten years at Turner Internet Technologies, where he served as vice president of product development for Turner’s internet properties. Young earned his bachelor’s degree in astrophysics and Asian studies from Williams College.