When Dick Eastman announced that The Generations Network changed its name back to Ancestry.com, I thought of this comic. All in good fun.

Here is another statistics snapshot of GenealogyWise just 25.5 hours from the last one. It is amazing how fast it is growing. July 9, 2009, 8:00 PM MST Members: 1157 (+685) Forums: 26 (+16) Groups: 361 (+162) Blog Posts: 50 (+26) Videos: 150 (+33) Not bad for a single day.

If you haven’t already heard, FamilyLink has created a Facebook clone specifically for genealogists. It is called GenealogyWise . When I found out about it yesterday, there were already 130+ people registered ahead of me. I thought it would be interesting to capture some of the site’s statistics so that we have something to compare it against later. July 8, 2009, 6:30 PM MST Members: 472 Forums: 10 Groups: 199 Blog Posts: 24 Videos: 117 Not bad for a site that won’t officially release until Friday, July 17.

In gotcha #1 we looked at the issue of having the Source quality associated with the Source Details instead of the Master Source. In gotcha #2 we look at issues dealing with evidence. Source, Information, & Evidence According to Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills, ”sources are artifacts, books, digital files, documents, film, people, photographs, recordings, websites, etc.” (see page 24) Information is the content of the source. Evidence “represents our interpretation of information we consider relevant to the research question or problem.” (see page 25) So ...

I applaud the work the RootsMagic team has done to bring professional-quality research practices to the most recent version of RootsMagic. The work that they (and others) are doing is truly innovative. Just the other day, I awarded RootsMagic 4 an Innovator award for the implementation of research analysis around their citation quality feature. I strongly encourage users of RootsMagic to use this feature, but in its current implementation there are a few gotchas and workarounds that need to be followed. The Genealogical Proof Standard & Evidence Explained define research analysis ...

Writing about this next innovation has been on my backlog for many months (at least 3). In a previous innovator award, I spotlighted one of the first genealogy software packages to support source citation templates following those found in Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills. These templates help the beginning and professional genealogist to accurately cite sources as part of their effort to do professional-quality work. As early as the 1997 book, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian , Elizabeth Shown Mills has ...

The Challenges One of the challenges that need to be solved for online source citation is the ability to give structure to digital assets. Think of an online book that consists of a hundred images each representing a page. There are other images for the cover, title page, etc. There might even be text documents, audio files, or video associated with it. How do we keep track of all those individual files and relate them as a single digital entity? That is part of the problem that METS is trying to solve. In online citations, we also have the issue of source provenance. Where did the digital ...

In this post, we continue our exploration through existing bibliographic standards to see how they might work as a format for online sites to easily share citation information. To see the journey we have made so far, visit the page, A Better Way to Cite Online Sources . From the Library of Congress standards page for MODS , we see the following description: Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is a schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications. On the MODS overview page , we get more details: As an XML ...

Previous posts have explored a better way to cite online sources (Part 1 ), how citation information can be stored as a file using GEDCOM format (Part 2 ) and MARC format (Part 3 ). This post takes the next logical step and discusses MARC XML . MARC was created as a machine-readable format many decades ago. In the last decade, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been developed as a standard format to allow validation, processing, and transformation of data. MARC XML takes the MARC format and represents it as XML. This is done in a lossless way so that conversions between MARC and MARC ...

Over the past few months, I have shared an idea about how to make citing online sources easier. You can find out more about this on the page, A Better Way to Cite Online Sources . Some of the suggestions that came from the survey and posts Details Part 1 and Details Part 2 (GEDCOM) was why not use an existing standard. One of the suggestions was using Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) . MODS is a “schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications.” and is maintained by the Library of ...

Two days ago I discussed my new cartoon profile picture and talked about my interest in making a cartoon version of one of my ancestors. One of my favorite ancestors is my great grandfather, Worth Tucker. I have few pictures of him and what I do have is the result of too much photocopying. The picture is grainy. For this cartoon, I decided to do it all myself without the middle step of the Cartoon Me website. Here are both the original photo and the cartoon version: What do you think?

I have received some positive feedback on my new profile picture. Others have asked where I got it. So here is the story. Last week I was traveling around the internet and came across the website for Cartoon Me . They provide a service where you can upload a photo and within 72 hours an artist will digitally render that image as a cartoon. The cost is €3.50 EUR which turns out to be $5.09 USD. So I powered up my PayPal account, uploaded a photo and hoped for the best. The process for submitting a photo is easy. Two days later I received an e-mail containing a GIF image that closely ...

The 2009 BYU Conference on Family History and Genealogy will be held July 28-31 in Provo, Utah. The deadline for syllabus material is June 22. My presentation is one I have done before: “Navigating Research with the Genealogical Proof Standard.” We are allotted 4 pages for the syllabus material and so far I have used 3. Here is a preview of the syllabus material . Please provide constructive feedback. P.S. I will be presenting on Friday, July 31 from 1:30-2:30 p.m. My presentation is part of the Methodology track. I love to meet my blog readers, so attend the presentation or ...

Almost 50 days ago, I posted a video titled “A Better Way to Cite Onilne Sources” with 2 corresponding surveys. Since then 358 people responded to the individual survey and 9 to the company/organization survey. It was my first time using SurveyMonkey for online surveys and overall I was pleased with the website. I did have grand hopes that at least 1,000 people would respond to the survey to get more accurate results. To date, the video has been viewed 2,483 times. It seems like a good time to end the survey and analyze the results. Plus, keeping the survey going costs $19.95 a ...

Going along on a similar car train of thought as the genealogy license plates here and here , I created some sayings for genealogy-related bumper stickers. As far as I know these are original creations: My Fred is dead. Is yours? My Cherokee princess ancestor is more documented than your Cherokee princess ancestor. Researching your ancestors is a grave pastime. Genealogy is so much fun people are dying to help you out. Slow down; you could be my 3rd cousin twice removed. Genealogists are strong; they break through brick walls. Genealogy is all around. Just look at the evidence. I’m ...