Alan E. Mann, A.G.

fhfair@alanmann.com                                                                                        Accredited Genealogist

www.alanmann.com/articles                                                                                prepared March 2005

                                 

What’s New in Family History on the Internet

 

While there are many promising great, new services and products in family history, most are still “coming soon.” I would like to review several recent services or trends in genealogy, including:

1.      Actual Records Online

2.      Improved Searching

3.      Genealogy Marketplace; Single Sign-on

4.      Personalized Service

5.      Collaboration

6.      Internet Indexing

7.      Future Tools in Embryo

 

Actual Records Online

There are two basic categories I’m calling actual records. One is original records—scanned images of the original documents. The second category is indexes, transcripts, and abstracts. While not original records, I confidently call them “actual” records.

Let’s look at exciting examples of real records online—two from each category.

Vital Records (AZ) – genealogy.az.gov/

Church Records (Kent, England) – http://cityark.medway.gov.uk/cgi-bin/interface.

cgi?Mode=Search&PathList=%2FZ4_Imagebase%2F%0A&SearchWords=&DateList=

Cemeteries (Indiana) – www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/5881/index.html

                                                #Township_Cemetery_Directory

State records (Illinois) – www2.sos.state.il.us/departments/archives/databases.html

There are thousands more such sites on the internet. It would be impossible to list them all here. Even if I could list them all, there would be more that weren’t listed by tomorrow! So how can you find more? Use the techniques outlined in Actual Sources on the Internet at www.alanmann.com/articles/real.htm.

 

Improved Searching

There are four things to do with searching to discuss—
  • Improved Search Engines
  • Federated Searching
  • Improved MetaSearch (Clustering)
  • Intelligent Searching (the semantic web)

Improved Search Engines. The search engines keep adding new search methods, automatic adjustments, and useful features. For example, I want to use Google search the USGenweb page for Iron county for STUBBS since the site doesn’t have a search engine. I just type site:rootsweb.com inurl:utiron stubbs into my google search, and I’ve shortened potentially hours of searching to seconds.

Something new for several search engines is personalization. A great example is A9 (a9.com). With only a few improvements, this could be a major improvement in your search experience.

A surprising newcomer to the search engine marketplace is GigaBlast. Or try a slider. One early slider implementation is labs.google.com/personalized.

Improved MetaSearch through Clustering.  SavvySearch, followed by ZapMeta, then clustering with Vivisimo or Kartoo, followed by Clusty. Now, it’s improved clustering with a tool called Exalead. The concept is to refine your search using the words that are common within a result set.

Federated Searching. Looking for an ancestor who came from Germany to America? First, search the Palatine immigrant lists at GenealogySleuth. Then search passenger lists at Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild. Then search the Germans to America collection, then…  Why all these searches for one person? Why not just enter the name once and search all the databases at once? Take a look at

www.lib.byu.edu/online.html or a discipline-based federated search, such as at http://abish.byui.edu/library/r_biographies.cfm.

Intelligent Searching. Taking our analogy of the German immigrant, take it a step further. Why not just enter what you know about your German immigrant and have the computer perform the searches at all relevant sites and bring back just a list of possible matches from the various sites that have lists of immigrants or U.S. immigration records or German emigration records?  Imagine searching for the birth date of James Peterson in Holbaek, Denmark in 1786. The computer flags church records from that time period in that area which contain the name. It would find Jens Pedersen. It would include a marriage in 1810l, but ignore a marriage record in 1790 (he would have only been 4 years old). It would look at death records from the mid 1800’s, but would ignore a death record from the 1900’s. Believe it or not, this is not only possible, but is the future of genealogical research.

 

Genealogy Marketplace; Single Sign-on

The Genealogy community has suffered from competition, proprietary, etc. Commercial genealogy businesses have suffered as good business models became obsolete (paper to CD-ROM to online subscription). But we aren’t through with change. The next step will hopefully be a cooperative marketplace with non-profit, commercial, governmental, and volunteer efforts all working together to make it easier and more rewarding to find your family history. With cooperation comes the possibility of creating a single sign-on. Individuals would log on, then access their account at whatever site requires a logon.

 

Personalized Service

The Library of tomorrow will greet its new arrivals, ask them what they want, and then provide them the information they are seeking. The patron can then decide what they want to know next and restart the process. In March of this year, the Family History Library launched a greeting & assessment service that is the first step in this direction.

One example of personalized web service is Amazon Light (www.kokogiak.com/amazon4/). Find a book, click on “my library” and have your library place it on hold and transfer it to the branch nearest your home or work.  Another is Photomax (genealogy.myphotomaxusa.com), which stores scanned documents and ancestral photos online for free (currently jpg only), then offers print and merchandise services from those photos for a small fee.

 

Collaboration

One of the greatest problems with the genealogical community in the past century is the lack of collaboration. The first step in pursuing your family history is the survey phase—determining what you and your relatives already know, then determining what others have already researched. The promise of this century is that we will gather and preserve both types of knowledge so that you don’t have to repeat what has already been done. New tools are the new PRF magnet (www.PedigreeMagnet.com) and Hugh Wallis’ IGI batch # search (freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/IGIBatchNumbers.htm).

The community has attempted the same thing with efforts such as phpGedView (phpgedview.SourceForge.net) and The Next Generation of genealogy sitebuilding (TNG) (lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php). This will likely happen within the next decade.

Often, the need to redo arises from the failure to preserve the source. Current projects seek not only to preserve information, but to capture and preserve the source of that information at the same time. (see Screen Crayons, below)

 

Internet Indexing

The Internet and the digitization of records has opened a whole new field—a complete shift in the area of volunteer efforts. It is now possible for digital records to be provided to people willing to index, for the volunteers to index those records, and the indexes to be made freely available on the Internet. The index can be linked to the image of the actual records, which are then either provided for free by a non-profit organization, philanthropist, or funded governmental project or provided for a fee by a business or self-supporting project.

The true fuel for dynamic growth in online, indexed, digital records will be the willing participation of volunteers from family history societies and churches.

Future Tools in Embryo

·        Screen Crayons is unfortunately just in the alpha stage at BYU. What the software does is capture whatever is on your screen, allows you to save it digitally while adding a note about it and circling with a virtual crayon the part that is important to you. As it saves it, it automagically extracts text from the area you circled AND saves the address and necessary information for citing the source. It should be available within the next year.

·        Magic Lens (dohistory.org/diary/exercises/lens/index.htm) is an amazing tool that magnifies text and displays the text transcription.

·        Terrafly (www.terrafly.com) is a simple satellite image viewer that allows you to fly from place to place over an area (moving satellite image).

·        photos.pagesjaunes.fr/ and www.a9.com/optical?a=oyp travel up and down streets virtually. Could this be applied to records, archives, or libraries?

·        Artificial intelligence – trying to get computers to “automagically” repeat thought processes or analysis to save time. One early such effort is at www.gensmarts.com. Take a look at it, you may see some potential that may soon be realized.

·        Google Desktop (NOTE: not Google toolbar), which creates a searchable index to your whole computer! Find anything quickly!

 

Keeping up to Date

There’s a lot you can do to be aware of developing technology. I would suggest:

  • Read online newsletters, particularly Dick Eastman’s newsletter. See www.cyndislist.com/magazine.htm#E-zines for a list of many.
  • Attend conferences & institutes like this one. Check both speakers and vendors.
  • Participate in societies that with technology topics or publications (such as Blue Chips, www.ucs.org/index.php and Utah Valley PAF, www.uvpafug.org).
  • Read industry publications such as Genealogical Computing and society publications, most of which include technology articles in current issues.
  • Watch online tech news summaries like G4TechTV, which while not available on cable TV locally, is available online at www.g4techtv.com.

 

 

 

 

 

©Copyright 2005 by Alan E. Mann. All rights reserved. Written permission to reproduce all or part of this syllabus material in any format, including photocopying, data retrieval, or the Internet, must be secured in advance from the copyright holder.