Technology vs. Accuracy… it is not a zero-sum game!

My second year at RootsTech was just as fascinating as the first. The conference is an energetic mix of the major genealogy companies, independent technology developers, and of course, consumers.   I am excited to see all the resources that are going into making family history available to all.  The LDS church's theological mandate to gather data on ancestors has played an indescribably important role in historical records preservation, and they continue to be leaders in innovative ways to make data readily accessible.  That being said, the emphasis -- at least in public -- was to dumb down family history in order to capture the attention of those who might not be dedicated researchers.

So my first impression of the conference this year was disappointing.  Conference goers were told that family history is EASY and FUN -- sort of like playing Tetris on your computer.  Classes focused on how to interview family members to gather their stories, or how to use social media to connect with cousins.  

Barriers to entry for new users were described only in terms of time, or ability to keep track of data.  I didn't hear much about the critical need to accurately record the sources of your data… and forget about having some understanding of history and the reasons various records were created in the first place.  We live in an age of instant gratification, and to focus on those aspects of genealogy that require rigor and discipline might certainly be a significant barrier to entry for many people.

Things improved on the second day of the conference, and I felt so much better after hearing The Legal Genealogist, Judy Russell's, keynote speech.  Her talk was brilliant, centering on the idea that oral history is lost in just three generations.  She reminded us of how little we actually know about our own parents and grandparents (do YOU know what your mother's first illness as a child was, or what was your paternal grandfather's favorite toy?)  While the topic of family stories resonated with the wider audience, the more important message was that these stories need to be purposefully and accurately documented so they are not lost to future generations.

Collaboration was another major theme of the keynote speeches:  but what was meant by this term was finding more ways to connect with one another via FaceBook-esque user interfaces, or by making more records available by crowd-sourcing indexing efforts, not by improving the reliability of research collaboration.  

Collaboration was also discussed in terms of creating partnerships to share expertise and resources between the major commercial firms and smaller entities such as local genealogical societies or independent software developers.  All this will presumably help their respective bottom lines, but I am looking for a community of serious, like-minded researchers!  I love technology and all the connectivity it brings, but unless you come together with a common purpose -- accuracy -- it is just fluff.  And fluff won't stand the test of time.

A final theme that was emphasized this year was the need to get DNA tests performed on as many family members as you can afford to test.  The quality of autosomal DNA data continues to improve as the data set grows, and they estimate that it won't be long before there will be enough information to tell you what your 6th great-grandfather looked like, not to mention how many of his descendants are out there, waiting to find you so you can collaborate on finding the paper trail connecting you!

My favorite lectures of the entire conference were both by Dr. Thomas Jones, co-editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly and author of Mastering Genealogical Proof.  He said that future generations will benefit tremendously from the advances in technology that we are learning about now.  All the records we spend so much time and energy to find today will be easily available online.  Dr. Jones suggests that unless we are willing to put in the time and effort to document our sources and study the history of our ancestors' lives, our energy might be better spent on accurately and completely capturing all the data we have on our own lives -- and that includes our DNA.

I went to RootsTech from the perspective of a committed genealogist.  I want my research to be thorough, well-documented, and accurate.  I intend to create a reliable product that will stand the test of time.  Simultaneously, I recognize that technology helps us satisfy the basic human need for community and connectivity.  Technology also encourages new interest in genealogy, and that can only add to the overall knowledge base.  Furthermore, we have a right to interesting family stories that engage us at a human level -- as Todd Hansen said in his keynote speech, every single one of us has a fascinating story locked up inside.  

So why can't we have both accuracy and an open, interconnected world? 

FHL, here I come!

My husband and I came out to Salt Lake City a few days early to go skiing in the beautiful mountains only 20 minutes outside the city.  

But of course, winter being what it is, his flight home was canceled, so he spent an extra day in SLC and got to see a bit of what fascinates me about coming out to Utah….

Me… surprised while retrieving a microfilm

….the Family History Library! 

The resources of this library, as anyone reading this knows, are breathtakingly vast, and I'm so glad my husband had the chance to see it.  He now has a better sense of why I go weak at the knees just thinking about coming here.

Today is the first day of Rootstech, but I just want to quickly mention a new app I used at the library yesterday.  I often use my iPad to take photo notes when I'm researching, but this time I used a scanning App called "Turbo Scan" and was thrilled to see the results I got.  I love the high-quality microfilm scanners you can use at the FHL, but they can be a little fiddly to use, which makes it all the harder if there is a line of people waiting.  With Turbo Scan, I take three shots of any image I want, and the program somehow merges them into one highly readable document.

This is a document I scanned directly from the microfilm reader.  I am really pleased with the quality. I am blowing it up large so you can see what I'm talking about.

Rootstech 2014 -- an update on collaboration?

There has been complete radio silence on this channel for some time…. I've been working on a presentation I am preparing for my DAR chapter, focusing on the stories of our members' patriots and just who we were during the Revolutionary War.  We have 81 members, with 57 unique ancestors, so that has been quite a lot of research!  I'm using Google Earth as the vehicle to tell these stories, so I'm learning the program as I go.  Full time work, and so engrossing.

But now I have to tear myself away from 1776, because I've arrived in Salt Lake City to attend Rootstech 2014!

An article on Family Search's blog yesterday announced that the company expects to put all the world's historical records online in one generation.  The article was focused on the need to collaborate on indexing projects and to increase participation by non-English speakers in order to meet this goal.  What caught my eye, though, was contained in the accompanying info graphic.  Family Search's ultimate goal is to create the "one family tree of mankind."  Not really news, except for the fact that they seem to think that it is simply a matter of having all the world's sources in digital form.

My concern lies in how those sources are used.  Technology makes it very easy to grab a name and attach it to your tree without checking to be sure that you are attributing the correct record to the correct ancestor.  So many people had the same name -- even people with "unusual" names -- that you simply can't assume it is your ancestor without thorough investigation.  Not everyone who wants to compile their family tree has the patience to make an academic study of their family.

I've written about my frustrations with Family Search's one tree of mankind (see "Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned), and I think that this prominent force in the genealogy world can do much more to allay the concerns of serious researchers.  Collaboration is vital, no question, but it can't be a free-for-all; there must be rules.  I am hoping to hear this addressed at Rootstech.

St. Louis civil war-era cartes de visite

One branch of my husband's family emigrated from Ireland to St. Louis, Missouri by way of Canada in the 1840s.  We inherited a photo album full of cartes de visite, many of which have revenue stamps on the back, dating them to the civil war era.  Unfortunately, none of the individuals are identified, although in many cases the photographic studios are printed on the back.  So, if you have ancestors who were neighbors of the Andrew Wilcox family of St. Louis, maybe you will find them in this collection:

More later…..

The past is present

One night last week I dreamed I received a cache of old family documents and papers, all wrapped in their original ribbons and strings…. it was a genealogist's treasure trove. As I opened each package, I reveled in the complexity and wonder of it all: The papers were old and brittle, the writing cramped and hard to read, but somehow these artifacts had survived time, and were a tangible link to the past.  The dream was colored in rich, deep tones of sepia, brown, and olive green.

Finally, I unwrapped the twine from one last, rather small box, expecting to find more papers. Instead, what I found was a bundle of roots curled around a large seed.  As I opened the box, the tangle of roots and vines slowly took on color and shape, and resolved itself into a living thing before my eyes -- a beautiful, vibrant flower.  The colors, too, changed from sepia to technicolor, and reminded me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy opens the door from the black and white world of Kansas into the brilliance of Oz.

photo credit: my own photo

As genealogists, we are the ones with the patience and interest to wade through the dry artifacts of another time, and it is our task to give them life.  Our work demonstrates that all that is considered to be "history"-- dry and old -- is still alive…. in each one of us.  

Furthermore, DNA shows that if you go back far enough, we are really just one family.  Separation is one of humanity's deepest existential pains, but we are starting to understand that we are part of a whole, and can never be separate… and by breathing life into the past we are no longer separated from it.  

The day after my dream, DNA evidence helped me make a connection with a new (fifth) cousin.  Our common ancestor, Thomas Amis, is a person whose experiences in life impacted our country's history (that's a story for another day), and there are many people online who claim descent from him.  Somehow, though, the discovery of a concrete link through DNA made this particular connection seem more meaningful than the usual online meeting of a fellow researcher.  We are the living proofs that he existed!  I love how family history research is creating new communities in ways we could never even dream of before.  

Postscript:  My last blogpost was a diatribe about my frustrations with the collaborative family tree on www.FamilySearch.org, and how crowd-sourcing the family tree of mankind may not be such a great idea…. Well, I'm not sure if anyone at FamilySearch reads my blog, but two days after my post, someone from within the organization fixed my problem.  I am very grateful for that, and so is my 2nd great-grandmother; she is now linked back to her family.  My position hasn't changed, though.  I still say that there must be some kind of safeguard to ensure that the information included in the family trees are well sourced. At the very least, properly documented lines should be harder to edit in order to minimize gratuitous changes in the data set.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned

FamilySearch says this woman has no father!
(George W. Seabolt and wife Nancy Amanda Spears ca 1885;
Nancy was the daughter of Lazarus Spears and his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Amis)

My friends would describe me as a mild-mannered, easy-going kind of person -- laid back, even -- who doesn't get upset easily.  For my part, I consider myself to be flexible and willing to see both sides of the coin….

….  which is why I was surprised to find myself shaking with fury after receiving one of those emails FamilySearch sends you about the ancestors you are "watching" on their website.

You might recall that last spring I wrote about my excitement with FamilySearch's new collaborative family tree of mankind: "They're Not My Ancestors, They're Ours!" I had been disillusioned with Ancestry.com's lack of control over how users appropriated other users' data, and thought that the only way to circumvent this problem was to work collaboratively on one tree.

I still believe that working together is the best way for researchers to create an accurate depiction of our ancestors' families and relationships.  The only thing is, I forgot that people use a site like FamilySearch for many different reasons, and not all of them reflect the goals of accurate scholarship.

Now comes my tale of woe:  last April, I wrote about how I was happily using indexes created on Fold3 to cross-check Revolutionary War pensions for information about people other than the ones who were named on the record itself.  One of the records -- a widow's pension for a man named Lazarus Jones -- had a goldmine of information for my ancestor, Lazarus Spears of Hawkins County, Tennessee.  The pension had been applied for fraudulently in one state by a son of the deceased, while the mother applied for it directly in another state.  Clearly they didn't talk much!  My ancestor and many others were called on to give evidence in the case, which resulted in a lot of family data that I had never seen before (this is a family that has been fairly well researched, albeit without published sources).

So, filled with ideas of "one family tree of mankind," I painstakingly entered all my new sources on the FamilySearch website.  My data extended beyond my ancestor Lazarus, to his father Samuel, Samuel's siblings, and their home back in North Carolina.  Now here's where my optimism about this idea of crowd-sourcing ancestors started to fade.  When I started to look at Samuel's family tree, I faced a tangle of children born fifty years before the parents and families with 20 children, many with similar names but vastly different births…. you get the picture. It was too ugly and too complicated to unravel, and frustrating because the kernels of truth were in there!  So I decided to ignore the crazy stuff and focus my efforts solely on Lazarus and his family.  

Fast forward to a few months later.  I get an email from FamilySearch saying that changes have been made to Lazarus Spears….. Someone had created a new person named "Lazarus Spiers," connected him to the first marriage and deleted the link of my Lazarus to this family, somehow deleting all my carefully sourced data in the process.  I was furious, and wrote to FamilySearch asking how this could happen.  In return, I received an anodyne response to the effect that well, you can always undo any changes that are made, and we do encourage our users to cite their sources….  NO!  It was too much work in the first place to redo it just because some idiot thinks that her ancestor never had a second family.

And now, here I am worked up all over again because I just got another email from FamilySearch.  This time, some guy replaced the link to my research, but severed the tie of anyone named Lazarus Spears (or even Spiers) to his second family….which happens to be mine.  If this guy could accept my data about Lazarus from the Jones pension file, why couldn't he also accept my sources for Lazarus' second marriage? Why delete it????

Yes, the beauty of a crowd-sourced tree is also its greatest fault -- that is, we all have a hand in it.  However I firmly believe that FamilySearch should do a much better job at policing changes made to their family tree site.  For instance, changes should be much more difficult to make if sources are attached.  Maybe they should also require notification of the person who entered the data in the first place, so a discussion could take place before the changes go into effect.  

Or maybe, FamilySearch should just call it what it is…. the IGI for the 21st century.  No more, no less.  

And as for me -- I hate to say this, but I'm cleaning out my Reunion files and, against the grain, I'm keeping my research on my own computer for now….. once bitten twice shy...

The more things change, the more they stay the same

It used to be -- back in the day -- when you couldn't find the subject of your search in an index, you would have to search the old-fashioned way, page by page, through the original records.  Sometimes that meant a trip to the county courthouse or the local archives, but more often than not, you spent hours hunched over microfilms, searching line by line for "your" person.  

The digital age hasn't really changed a thing.  With this push to index the massive amounts of records that are now available online has come a new twist on the old problem.  Indexing is being farmed out to non-native English speakers who can do the work cheaply and quickly -- but with a commensurate rise in the error rate.  

I am the Registrar of my local DAR chapter, and am confronting a problem that I don't think has existed on this scale before:  original documents that clearly contain data about an individual, but with indexing errors significant enough to prevent anyone else from finding those documents using a search engine.  I just submitted an application for my mother to join the DAR and I swear, while every single document I used came from the internet, not one could be found using a search engine!  Good thing I know how to cite my sources -- If I just used "www.familysearch.org" or "www.ancestry.com" no one would be able to replicate my work.  

Nancy A. Spears indexed as "Nancy A. Spencer"

Every member of this household was incorrectly assigned the surname "Routh" except for the head, who was correctly indexed with the surname "Seabolt."  Come on, this is common sense!

Thomas Covert indexed as "James"

So we are back to the old days.  If you can't find your guy in the database, chances are he really might be there, just hidden by a poor indexing job.  Now don't get me wrong -- I'm thrilled to have so much data available at our fingertips.   I'm just saying we need to be as vigilant as ever about checking the original sources.