Yesterday I pointed out that as our research extends further into the past, we must rely on multiple records to create a “complete picture” of an ancestor. By complete picture, I mean we must gather together enough information about an ancestor to reach correct conclusions about the ancestor’s identity and family relationships.

A principal skill required of all genealogists is the ability to examine two records and determine if there is enough evidence to conclude that both are the subject of the same person. Just as putting together two overlapping photographs ...

Last Wednesday in “Three Reasons Vendors Get It Wrong” I gave three reasons why unwise product managers produce genealogically unsound products: 1. personnel turnover, 2. the deceptive complexity of genealogy, and 3. a chasm that separates time frames 2 and 3.

I was a bit vague about that last one. (Maybe I ran out of time and couldn’t finish the article… Or maybe I wanted to pique your curiosity… Yeah… that’s it… That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.)

There are three time frames or stages of ...

“We have failed to recognize the chasm” Image used with permission.

I am obsessed with explaining a phenomenon I’ve witnessed for 30 years. When it comes to tree management software, why do unwise product managers re-make the same mistakes over and over? (As I’ve said before, these observations do not apply to wise product managers in the industry today.)

I’ve written of two theories. Today I wish to add a third.

Genealogical Maturity

One theory is that personnel turnover limits product maturity.

The name, genealogical ...

FamilySearch announced today that select presentations from this year’s RootsTech conference are now available online.

The available sessions are:

Jay Verkler – “Turning Roots, Branches, Trees into Nodes, Links, Graphs” Click to view Click for bio See “Jay Verkler Opens RootsTech Conference” for my report Barry Ewell - “Digitally Preserving Your Family Heritage” Click to view Curt Witcher - “The Changing Face of Genealogy” Click to view Click for bio See “RootsTech ...

Dan Lawyer’s comparison of NFS to a moldy refrigerator struck a chord with many readers. Here are some of their comments.

Dear Ancestry Insider,

"You’ll be able to reject the change with one click of a mouse." - So what's to prevent edit warring?

Anonymous

Dear Readers,

In case you don’t already know what an edit war is, Wikipedia describes it thusly:

An edit war or revert war is a situation that sometimes arises on websites which are run on wiki principles, such as Wikipedia, where users ...

Like the St. George Family History Expo, attendance at the South Davis Family History Fair is way down in the wake of RootsTech, a new national genealogy conference. Two years ago 1,700 people attended the fair. Up against NGS in Salt Lake last year, attendance dropped to 1,100. This year, less than 800 people pre-registered and walk-ins were unlikely to exceed 200.

The South Davis fair will almost certainly survive. It is a non-profit, all volunteer enterprise sponsored by several stakes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The same cannot be said of ...

During his keynote at the South Davis Family History Fair, Dan Lawyer mentioned scenarios allowing different groups of people to see record images on FamilySearch.org. FamilySearch negotiates contractual agreements with record custodians to photograph, digitize, and post records online. In addition to those Lawyer mentioned, I’ve added others I’ve heard publicly.

Sometimes record custodians (archives, governments, libraries, companies, and so forth) have no problems letting FamilySearch publish images online for anyone to use without limitation. But sometimes ...

“The new FamilySearch Tree (NFS) is like a refrigerator,” said Dan Lawyer, “with a rule that you can only put stuff in; you can’t take it out.” That produces some really rotten stuff. While there is some really good stuff, the view is tainted by the presence of the bad stuff. “We’re working on that,” said Lawyer. “We’re going to fix it.”

Lawyer made the comments during his keynote at the 14th annual South Davis Family History Fair.

“We failed to understand what it would take to build this ...

FamilySearch has been immensely successful in assembling a large, volunteer workforce of indexers. Yet digitizing microfilm images still outpaces indexing by many orders of magnitude. Many, many more indexers are needed. How long FamilySearch can continue to grow its indexing workforce is unknown.

I think there is a better way to harness the capabilities of the genealogical community. I call it laissez faire indexing. It uses what I call the Amazon model.

The Amazon Model

The Amazon model is to leverage normal user actions to gain information that can be ...

Many websites support “tagging,” which is nothing more than assigning a word or phrase to something on the website such as a photograph.

The National Archives is promoting the concept of the citizen archivist and recently gave recognition to a Flickr user, TVL1970, who has assigned over seven thousand tags to NARA photographs on Flickr.

For example, Tom (TVL1970’s real name), tagged one photograph with the words of a sign in the photograph. Search on NARA’s website for “Bernie’s Bait and Tackle” and you will not ...

“In February 2011, we’ve invited a limited number of public users to begin testing public access to the new FamilySearch [Family Tree] website,” disclosed FamilySearch. “These valued testers will help us make sure the system can handle the increased load.” Don’t bother begging; FamilySearch has already selected the testers.

The mid-quarterly release of the New FamilySearch Tree (NFS) last week brought this positive news to members of the public waiting for access. Alert Insider reader, J.O., alerted me to the announcement.

The title of ...

I imagine Genealogical Publishing Company (GPC) has made a lot of money selling Elizabeth Shown Mills 4 page, laminated citation guides. Their “Genealogy at a Glance” series appears to be an attempt to capitalize on this format. GPC recently sent me two of the three guides in the series, Scottish Genealogy Research by David Dobson and French-Canadian Genealogy Research by Denise R. Larson.

They describe the guides this way (underline added):

Designed to cover the basic elements of genealogical research in just four pages, the ...

Image: Phototree.com Ambrotype, ca. 1861

I have an old photograph. According to the name on the back, it is my great grandfather, Samuel Frost Insider. But it is really old and I’ve held out hope that it was his father, John McCormick N’Sider.

Today I learned how to date the photograph. I attended Gary Clark’s class, “19th Century Cased Images & Tintypes: Discovering the Picture’s Date.” Clark is a professional photographer, photo restorer, and the author of an upcoming book on dating 19th century photographs.

We usually ...

“Never drink downstream from the cows,” said Glenn Rawson in the keynote session of the St. George Family History Expo. “The same principle still applies to historical research.” Rawson said that to connect with history, we need to go to the original documents. When he first started producing television shows about history he had to delve into what he considered nothing more than “dusty old books.”

“You grab ahold of those old documents and suddenly you are connected,” Rawson said. “To know that I was holding something that ...

Don’t tell me that wasn’t big fun! I still have a big stack of RootsTech stories I wanted to do. But the party’s over and I need to turn my attention to the St. George Family History Expo this weekend, 25-26 February 2011.

Time to ketchup…

FHCs get Ancestry FHL Edition

Family History Centers now have access to the Ancestry Family History Library Edition, which I believe has all the genealogy databases as the full Ancestry.com offering.

It has been widely miscommunicated that centers have access to the ...