Following the shiny ball....

I was reading Kerry Scott's blog the other day, and this post really resonated.  When I do my research --especially online -- I am constantly having to remind myself about my search objectives.  I am so easily distracted by the "shiny ball" and turn on a dime to go cavorting down a completely tangential path.  Kerry absolutely nailed it:  dead people, dead people, squirrel!

Recently I joined a few of the online subscription data sites.  I have resisted this in the past because several local libraries have subscriptions I can access, so I didn't see the point.  Rootstech and the emphasis on collaborative cloud-based genealogy changed my perspective.  Capturing and citing sources is simply easier with online material (as opposed to my old method: downloading data into a flash drive and then into my computer, where it would be added to Bento and just sit there).

Fold3 is one of my new subscriptions.  Over the years I have done military research at the National Archives and, more recently, using Heritage Quest, so I thought I had pretty much all the data there was on my ancestors' military history (now...what is it they say about hubris?)  I've been on the site 24/7 lately -- what a wealth of material!  Dangerous, too, because I've been swept into the world of tangential research.... following all the shiny new distractions that I find.

What I love the most about Fold3 is that all names appearing in a record have been indexed, not just the name on the record itself.  So, I was looking at the Revolutionary War pensions for my elusive New York patriot, Richard Rhodes, when I noticed that his widow also made statements that were included in other people's pension files.  What luck!  But then (shiny ball moment) I thought I should check out all the pension records I've viewed in the past using Heritage Quest to see if I could find other cross references.

Too much fun!  I started examining them and quickly realized why Fold3 is such a valuable resource:  they have the full set of papers in a pension file.  For one of my ancestors, Heritage Quest shows me a 10-page file.  The same file on Fold3 contains 147 pages of letters, affidavits, and bible records!  With the added value of having an index of all names appearing in a file, I have been on a feeding frenzy, darting from one name to the next, gathering new data.  I definitely have the squirrel syndrome these days.

But here comes the big question.  How do I manage all this data?  While I still love Bento as a database tool, I find that I'm changing the way I use it.  I am a believer in open research:  once someone is dead, they belong to history and the information we discover about them should be available to anyone who is interested.  So whenever I discover a piece of data that I know belongs unequivocally to an ancestor, I will use either TreeConnect or Evernote and attach it to that person using FamilySearch.  The source citation travels with the link, so others can find the original material.  I'm not worried about losing the information because I feel confident that FamilySearch will be around for a long time.  I reserve Bento for those cases where I am still gathering clues and have not yet evaluated the evidence.

Essentially, I am only recording my data in the public tree.  I'm curious, though.  Does anyone else trust FamilySearch enough to do it this way?

They're not my ancestors, they're OURS.... or why collaboration just makes sense!

I joined Ancestry.com when I got back from Rootstech.  I admit it, I gave into the promise of technology.... now I'm waiting for the rewards. What I mean is that although it is great having so many sources available that I can attach -- fully cited -- to my tree, it is by no means a perfect world.

One of Ancestry's selling points is the ability to match the indexed historical data offered on their website to individuals on your family tree. The "shaky leaf"may tell you about documents that they think pertain to the person you are working on, but it doesn't absolve you from actually reading and digesting the documents they suggest. It is too easy to assume Ancestry is right, and click "attach," but remember, these matches come from a computer algorithm after all!  I can see the temptation to just grab and run, but it's important to slow down and put everything in context.

Another thing I noticed right away was that some of my own work was already up on Ancestry..... on someone else's public tree! What happened was that several months ago, I made contact with a third cousin. He suggested we exchange GEDCOM files so we could more easily compare notes. I sent him a section of my GEDCOM that was limited to that family line, but which also included research on ancestors we did not have in common. So the first "shaky leaf" I saw when I logged onto Ancestry was a suggestion I look at his family tree -- and there was all my work on ancestors that weren't even his!

I don't think he did it out of malice or any negative motive whatsoever. In fact, we had a very nice exchange, and he sent me copies of some wonderful old photos that I had never seen before. I just think that Ancestry makes it so easy for people to add information to their family tree, that they don't think about the implications of what they do. It used to be that you wouldn't think twice about sending a relative your entire GEDCOM file, because it was only going to live on their computer. Now, it gets published to the web as the property of the person who uploaded it, even though he or she did not actually put in all the work. Let me tell you, you feel one way about your data when the sources are delivered to you by Ancestry's shaky leaf, and another when you put in days or even years tracking down documents from remote repositories, slogging through irrelevant data to find that one little nugget of gold.  

Maybe it's just a problem with my ego, but I want to take responsibility for the conclusions I draw, especially if they are at odds with "common wisdom" on an ancestor. Ancestry has a big problem with data transparency. They make it easy for users to add source citations for documents they own, but not for information that is "free," i.e., members' family trees or data from outside sites such as www.findagrave.com.

What makes it even more frustrating is the fact that there are so many overlapping trees on Ancestry. Everyone has their own little proprietary angle on the past -- I don't know if you've noticed, but some people can be very possessive about their ancestors! However my sense is that the interconnectivity of Web 2.0 is moving us in the direction of true collaboration in genealogy.

FamilySearch's new single family tree of mankind is a real game changer here. Every time someone adds a new piece of data or makes an editing change, it is tagged with the contributor's name. If someone comes along later and adds information, every change is noted in the database and should there be a disagreement, there are moderators who will arbitrate disputes.

So why is this important?  If the emphasis in Ancestry is data acquisition without transparency, and FamilySearch is all about open attribution and collaboration, it would seem to me that anyone who is serious about family history would lean towards the latter.

We have to stop treating our ancestors as belonging exclusively to us and start thinking of them as historical figures with whom we have a close and personal relationship. Once someone is dead, they belong to history, and as family historians we want as much detail about their lives as we can find. But we all have different pieces of the puzzle. One person may have all the family stories, while someone else inherited the silver, the Bible, the photos (or maybe just the good looks!) The only way we can achieve a better understanding of the past is for each of us to contribute our own particular piece of that puzzle! By collaboratively working on our ancestors in an environment that recognizes individual contributions, we can all share without any one of us losing our individual connection to our ancestors.

RootsTech 2013

It has taken me awhile to absorb the implications of everything I learned at RootsTech.  It was an amazing three days of new ideas about how to pursue genealogy, and certainly has changed how I approach my own research.  Of course, I also took advantage of all the wonderful resources at the Family History Library... and even made a rather significant breakthrough on one of my problem ancestors!

The overwhelming theme was Web 2.0 and all that it makes possible:  think Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp, TripAdvisor...... The web is no longer a place where we passively retrieve information.  We are now part of a virtual community, where we interact and collaborate with each other as both creators and consumers of information.

So it is inevitable that interaction and collaboration, this sharing of bits and pieces of our lives, would extend to genealogy.  At Rootstech, I saw four major trends that will change how we pursue family history.

The first is incorporating family stories into our genealogies.  Family history is really about families, and you draw new people into genealogy when you can hook into their emotions through family stories.  The most effective stories are the ones about those everyday moments that seem so ordinary, but which are precisely what evoke the most memories.  We were challenged to think about what our descendants will wish we had saved for them about our lives, and start capturing those memories.

Another major trend is the use of crowd sourcing to index the massive amount of data that is being digitized and brought online.  Crowd sourcing is when a task or problem is sent out to an undefined public to work on, rather than to a specific group.  The 1940 census indexing project last year was a major success because of how quickly it was completed, and at virtually no cost.  Indexing newspapers was identified as a high priority for the future because of how poorly OCR software reads newsprint.  Searches on uncorrected text will miss 4 out of 6 occurrences of a search term.

Online collaboration was the third major theme.  While users have contributed family trees online for many years, they have always been independent trees that exist side by side.  What's new today is the concept of a single human family tree, that anyone can add to or edit.  To my mind, FamilySearch is making the most efforts to ensure that this is done responsibly -- they identify every user who makes a change, provide tools for citing sources and initiating discussions and they have moderators to arbitrate disputes.

Autosomal DNA testing was the final trend that everyone was talking about at the conference -- especially after Ancestry CEO Tim Sullivan announced that they were dropping the price for the test to $99.  Ancestry.com proposes to extend their "shaky leaf" technology for data matching to DNA tests, thereby allowing customers to find relatives even in situations where the paper trails don't exist.  When you think about it, this is really an amazing feat of computing.  The autosomal tests look at roughly 700,000 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms...that's as much as I can tell you!) compared with about 47 for the mitochondrial and Y chromosome tests that most people currently use.  So in theory, Ancestry is proposing to compare your 700,000 SNPs with roughly a million family trees in their system, AND continue to measure your data against any new data that is entered into the system.  Apparently, this kind of number crunching just wasn't possible until very recently.

So, I'm left with the question:  how do I use this information?

I've definitely been inspired to capture family stories from older generations while they are still around, and create multi-media presentations to share with family members.  I'm working on scanning photos and have even filmed a skype conversation with my father-in-law about his experiences in WWII

(note to self:  next time, use a tripod! I got a little seasick watching the video....)

This isn't exactly Web 2.0, but I bought a logitech keyboard for my iPad just before the trip, and was astounded at the difference it made when I was in the Family History Library:

I am now able to transcribe directly from the microfilm!  In the past, I've tried using a laptop, but found there was no place to put it, and it was awkward to stow away in my bag if I had to get up to get another film.  The iPad just snapped into the keyboard and slipped into my bag if I had to walk away, and opened up just where I left it.  Now that makes a computer useful!

Stay tuned, because next time I will tell you how I've integrated Evernote into my routine, and what it all means for my Research templates in Bento.  It's an exciting time for genealogy!

Family history is important to your psychological health

I really should be packing for Rootstech, but I was reading the Sunday New York Times this morning and came across "The Stories That Bind Us" by Bruce Feiler.  It turns out that people who know a lot about their families do better when they face challenges in life -- anything from a skinned knee to a terrorist attack. They are able to see difficulties as part of the normal cycle of ups and downs all families experience.  I thought about this in terms of my own extended family.  Over the years we have formed a strong family narrative:  there are the success stories, the sad stories, the happy stories, and the ones you just don't want to think about, but it is all a part of who we are.   (I still say "sorry about that, cheese" even though my baby cousin who uttered that while watching "Get Smart" now has grown children of his own).  We are definitely not the kind of family that refuses to talk in front of the children!

I've written before about my grandfather, a charismatic larger-than-life figure who was full of tall tales, and no one in our family can forget how my grandmother and her twin sister came into the world.  I haven't yet told you about how my grandmother's parents met:

Abel Perminter Lynch and Jessie Lee Seabolt Lynch, ca. 1896

In the early 1890s, my great-grandfather Abel was a traveling sewing machine salesman.  He was from North Carolina, and his territory extended west into eastern Tennessee.  One day he was at the western end of his route, and stopped at a farm to give a demonstration (all the little girls in the area would come to watch because he would sew doll's dresses,which they could keep), and complimented the farmer on the beauty of his wife, saying that if there was another like her, he might just settle down and marry. The farmer said, well, you're in luck, sir!  If you just go down the road a bit, there are seven others just like her still at home and you can take your pick!  So he did, and fell head over heels in love with his Jessie Lee from Tennessee. He had to take out a bond to marry her, though, since her folks didn't quite trust those traveling salesman types.

The family narrative goes back even further in Jessie's family: we are still talking about what happened to them during the civil war!  After their home had been ransacked multiple times by transiting Yankee soldiers, all the family had left was the honey in their beehives.  When yet another group of soldiers came through, the only vessels they could find to take away the honey were the "honeypots" -- and my family has been laughing at them ever since.  I would add that a family that has a sense of humor can probably withstand any challenges the world can throw at them.

I look back at the families I really know about in my own tree, and it is pretty clear that the impetus to tell stories and keep the traditions alive (and talk, and talk, and talk) all come from my mother's maternal family.  One thing I can say is that every male who married into this line has thanked their lucky stars ever since!  Folks on my dad's side were not great communicators -- so it's a good thing I can use online newspapers to fill in their stories (and some of them are really good, too.... but that's for another post!) Others in my family lines might have been good storytellers, but were cut short when parents died young.   In the end, though, uncovering these lost stories is what really drives us all in our genealogy research.

The times they are a changin'

I am so excited to be attending Rootstech 2013 next week, courtesy of a drawing held at Nancy Shively's blog, Gathering Stories. Thanks again, Nancy!!! 

This conference comes at a perfect time for me, because I've been rethinking how I manage my genealogy research in the era of the cloud. Two issues have been particularly on my mind: first, do I even put my family data out there on the internet, and second, how do I manage the storage and citation of all the original data that I find online?

Do I even put my family tree online in the first place?

The answer to the first question has been a resounding no until just recently, when FamilySearch  opened their world family tree project to the public. I have been hesitant to join sites such as Ancestry.com and make my family tree public because of the appalling lack of citations in so many of their trees, not to mention that I would hate to have someone appropriate my work and add it to their tree without attribution. Still, I've been intrigued with the idea of crowd-sourcing ancestors, and I've read enough about the citation, discussion, and arbitration modules built into Family Search's global family tree project to think that this time someone might actually have addressed my concerns and gotten it right.  

Quite frankly, I would be embarrassed to upload my own Gedcom to a public site in its current state -- it's a mess.  I've been researching my family since I was ten, and over the years have progressed from paper files and family group sheets written out in long hand, through several different iterations of software programs.  All this took place in fits and starts while I was studying, working, and later raising a family, so consistency is not its strong suit.  I've learned quite a lot about research methodology since I was ten, but my files reflect everything I've ever done, not just the careful scholarship of more recent years.  My children are now in college and I can devote much more time to my family history, so the first thing on the agenda is a grand overhaul of my files.  If I have to clean house and start over, I'd rather do it in a way that contributes something to general knowledge rather than keep my research hidden in a file on my computer that only I can see.

That's not to say I will use the FamilySearch project for every person in my family tree.  I'm inclined to use it for the low-hanging fruit -- in other words, when the evidence is unambiguous, and there is no question about the identity of the person, my research will go out into the world wide web.  I will continue to use my Bento templates to record my research and store evidence for those situations where it is necessary to build a case to establish ancestral identities.

How do I manage digital image files from the web?

The second question, how to manage the digital image files that are proliferating on my computer, has also been hard for me to resolve until fairly recently. As more and more original records are made available online, the process of managing them on my computer was getting awkward:  I would download a file, rename it, make sure I had the correct citation attached to each file, and only then add it to my Bento research management system (and forget about adding it to Reunion... it just wasn't happening).  

Capturing and citing sources has to be fast and easy. I've recently started using two clipping apps, which allow me to save and annotate images on a web page together with their URL. 

 "Tree Connect" is an app that saves online data as a source in FamilySearch. You can drag the bookmark button to your toolbar, surf the web, and when you find a website with data on an ancestor, click the button and that page is automatically saved in FamilySearch. You can then go in later and attach the source to the appropriate individuals in your tree.  

Obviously, the tricky part of research -- and the one area that traditional family tree software does not handle well -- are all those bits of data you find that may or may not relate to your ancestors. You can't attach them to someone in your tree, but you still need to keep track of them for building a case later.  You can certainly save such information as unattached sources in FamilySearch, but that's kind of like putting it in a shoebox under your bed -- you can't easily access the material when you need it.  I use  Evernote together with my Bento templates for research on these "potential ancestors." Evernote's webclipper, which resides on my toolbar and lets me clip data from the web, annotate it, and send it to Evernote, is the other app I'm turning to more and more as part of my online research routine.  Once in Evernote, I can then migrate the data to Bento.

Technology is changing everything in genealogy these days, so you can see that I am really excited to head out to Salt Lake City for Rootstech 2013!  I'm curious, though -- do any of you use these tools for your research?  I'd love to hear about your experiences. Anyway, if you will be at Rootstech, look me up and say hi.  Send me an email, or you can find me on Twitter as @100h2ofan.  

A postcard from your ancestors

I am very excited about a website I've been exploring this week:  Old Fulton Postcards.  It is an amazing source of digitized newspapers throughout the state of New York.  I've known about it for a long time, but never really explored beyond the home page because the title made me think it focused on the town of Fulton.  My ancestors came from another part of the state entirely, so I didn't go further -- shame on me!

Small town newspapers are especially great sources for reporting on the comings and goings of people.  I learned that one of my 2nd-great grandmothers seemed to be a local Florence Nightingale, helping out whenever people were sick.  I learned the married name of her sister, too, when the paper reported that she was visiting from Albany.  This kind of social reporting can be an absolute gold mine for providing the small details that can help knock down brick walls.  A little gem like this:

.....helped me realize that there was still a connection between distant families two generations beyond the only other one I knew about (an indirect mention of a sister-in-law in a census entry more than 30 years earlier).  I still need to work out details (first names would be a nice start) to help me identify the proper New Jersey family, but this tells me they exist.

Sometimes you can get a glimpse of an ancestor's personality.  My great grandfather comes across as a very energetic guy.  He was a horse dealer and was constantly in the paper, either advertising his horses, running them in a race, or coming up with new ideas for making sales -- too bad he didn't live in the internet era or he might have been the one to invent ebay!

And then there are those things you read about that make you cringe, and give thanks that we live in a less dangerous age:

So if you have any ancestors who are from New York.... or even visited New York.... check out this wonderful resource!

Now the bad news....

I've told you so far all the wonderful things that Bento (and the Genealogical Research System templates) can do for your genealogy research.  Now for the things it can't do....

• Bento is not really a relational database.  It mimics the functions of a relational database with its related data fields, which allow you to link information you store in one library to related information stored in a different library.  Because it does not use sophisticated relational programming, these related data sets are essentially just "look-up" tables for information only and not for manipulating within the library that contains them.  One immediate disadvantage is that these related data fields aren't included in printouts, so you have to take extra steps to ensure the information is where you want it to be.
• Bento is not good for producing reports.  You can export data into a spreadsheet or a tab- or comma-delimited file, but that's about it.  You cannot choose to print only certain fields in a set of records, although you can select a subset of records in any given library.  In addition, Bento is not designed to make files that are easily imported into family tree programs.  If I want to move data from Bento into Reunion, for example, cutting and pasting is the method of choice. 
• Bento does not allow you to resize the screen horizontally.  There is so much original data online nowadays, and it would be wonderful if you could make transcriptions or notes directly from data in one screen to Bento in another.   Unfortunately Bento only allows the screen to reduce by a small amount vertically.  I get around this by switching back and forth between screens, but that leaves a greater chance for transcription errors.  If the material allows, I cut and paste data between the data and Bento, or I transcribe material into a spreadsheet or a document and then load it into Bento.  When I am researching online, I tend to have several screens open at once so I can easily switch between the internet, Bento, Pages, and Numbers.  It works, but I'd like it to be simpler.
• Rather obviously, Bento is not a family tree software.  But boy, wouldn't that be wonderful.... it would not be too difficult to add code to existing programs that will link sources to evidence, evidence to proofs, which only then can be linked to an individual in a family.  Doesn't it make sense to have software that recognizes that you have to do the research before you can make any conclusions about a person's place on your family tree?  Don't we have the responsibility to do thorough research before we send our GEDCOMs out to take their place on the world family tree?

So.....If Bento is not a perfect tool, why do I continue to use it?  The answer is simple -- I want to track my research process, and I cannot do that adequately within current family tree software programs.  I've come up with some workarounds to make Bento work for me, but they aren't all perfect.  I'm waiting for the day that the software developers wake up to this pressing need.