You're Watching Genealogy Roadshow Wrong

Another genealogy television show, another round of comments online about how the show doesn't reflect how genealogy really works and is doing a disservice to new genealogy recruits.  Aside from the obvious response, which is that watching a real genealogist doing "real" genealogy would be a lot like watching grass grow, I think there's another way to look at this:

Those critics are watching it wrong.

They are assuming that the goal for the genealogy community is show people how rewarding it would be to be genealogists.  They are assuming that we want lots of new genealogists.  I think they're wrong.

Think about your own family and your own genealogy hobby.  Do you honestly want a lot of members of your family to become active genealogists?  Really?  Do you really want to share your files?  Your online tree?  Looking forward to the meeting where all 12 cousins want grandmother's family photo albums...and have 12 different ideas about how to digitize and display them?

I don't.  I think that sounds crowded.  In my ideal genealogy world, I have a few genealogy buddies, at a nice 2nd or 3rd cousin distance, each of which is also working on one of my major lines.  It would also be nice to have someone in the next generation of my closer family who looks like they can take over my research when I'm gone.

What do I want from Genealogy Roadshow?  I want it to model great family conversations.  I know that when I make a major discovery, my family doesn't stand around a table waiting expectantly for the great reveal...but wouldn't it be great if they did?  I don't expect Genealogy Roadshow to turn my family members into Kenyatta Berry...I want it to turn them into Kenyatta's audience!

I also want to use it to train myself to do a better of job of communicating my research to my family.  Think of the way they structure that conversation:  One simple question, a bit of context, maybe a tree, a couple of original documents and photos, and an answer to the question.  No long narratives about research methods.  No points for tree size.  One or two stories per session, strongly tied to the interests of the audience and, if possible, with an emotional payoff.  Since it's a new show, some segments are more successful than others...and I think we can learn from that, too.

Of course, more genealogists would be a good thing in a general sense.  More researchers = more money for records access and preservation, developing cool tools, and helping to dust the genealogy library. I'm exaggerating to make a point.  Mostly.

But it would be cool to have an audience act like that, wouldn't it?

I Can't Believe a Word I Say

If you were reading this blog (both of you ) a few months ago, you will remember my rant about remaking my local genealogy library. prompted by the resignation of the librarian.  You might even remember this line:  I have zero interest in the job


You can see where this is going, can't you?  Yup!  I'm now the "associate librarian," which means that I've agreed to take on about half of the librarian's responsibilities for the rest of her term, with the understanding that I will most likely run for and be elected librarian at the next election (the librarian is an elected member of the society board.)  I did this partly because the current librarian is suffering from a severe mismatch between the workload and her available time, and partly because it turns out I kinda like being a librarian, especially the organizing part.  I've also found that several other members of the society have been harboring some of the same ideas about change, and we've already started to implement some of the smaller, easier ones.  


Wish me luck!  And don't believe anything I say...

Those Darn Digital Records!

Marian Pierre-Louis has been posting on the complexity of digital records this week, and today's post is about how the variety of indexes, records and actual images can make things tricky for a researcher.  I started to add an "Amen, sister!" comment regarding an example I encountered last week, but decided it was too long for a comment...

I was updating my Ancestry.com tree entry for Enoch Langel with a photo of his cemetery marker, which shows he died in 1894.  Just for grins, I checked the historical records they're suggesting for Enoch, and found a whole list of city directory listings for Enoch and his wife Esther, all of which dated after 1900.  Curious, I clicked through to one of the records...and it clearly said there was an entry for Enoch, with spouse Esther, in the 1940 directory for Lancaster, Ohio.  What gives!  Did I match the wrong cemetery marker with this Enoch?

Nope.  If you click on through to the actual digital image, you see that the directory listing is for "Langel Esther E (wid Enoch)"

So...Marian's point stands true -- you must click through to the original record, even for something as simple as a city directory.  It's good that Ancestry.com indexes Enoch's name, since it gives some help in deciding if the Esther Langel is the one you're looking for...but the index, and the fuller indexing record, are incomplete.

Makes you wonder what's hiding behind all those indexes for which we don't yet have digital originals, doesn't it!

Flip-Pal Correction

Last Friday, I posted about my experience with the Flip-Pal scanner.  Diana, from Flip-Pal, commented with a correction -- the screen keeps a count of pictures left to take, so alert users can tell when the card is almost full.

Obviously, I'm not an alert user.  Those tiny numbers on the screen are pretty subtle (and invisible if you've taken the lid off and turned the scanner over).  I need the screen to turn red and flash.  Or maybe a foghorn.  No, that would get me kicked out of libraries.  Perhaps they could add a more eye-catching warning in a future release.

And I will put a note in my case reminding myself to watch the counter.

Thanks, Diana.

Me and My (Flip) Pal

I jumped on the bandwagon and bought a Flip-Pal scanner before leaving on my research trip.  I used it several times, with mixed results.  My thoughts:

• It weighs practically nothing and was totally easy to throw in my research kit.
• It was great for the obituary cards at the Licking County Genealogy Society, which are 4x6.  Everyone in the room was impressed.
• It was not great for deed books at the courthouse.  Each page was taking 6 or 8 scans, which was just too long.  The digital camera was much better.
• It attracts a lot of attention!  Be prepared to give a couple of demos and have people watch you work.
• It eats batteries like candy.  Fortunately, it lets you know when the batteries are dying and they are easy to change.  Definitely get a recharging set.
• It also eats up your digital storage card.  Unfortunately, it does NOT let you know when it's full (or at least, not in a way that I noticed while I was at the library).  It will keep scanning, but not saving anything.  I lost about an hour's worth of work. You'll have to pay attention to this on your own, and get used to transferring files every night to clear up space for the next day.
• Like most scanners, it works best on flat things.  Scanning books works, but occasionally I ran into places where the frame of the scanner butted up against the binding of the book or photo album and I  couldn't quite get the whole page.   
• Almost all of my scans require editing, mostly to crop away the table top or extra album page, since the scans are all the same size, regardless of what you are scanning.  Easy to do, but plan for it if you're in a hurry.

I mentioned the Flip-Pal at a sewing retreat and learned that they are being marketed to machine embroiderers as well.  My friends were a bit peeved when they learned that I paid about half what the local sewing machine store is selling them for -- but now they know where to go for a better price!

NGS 2012 in the Rear View Mirror

I really like the idea of conferences.  I do.  What's not to like?  The chance to meet with others who share (and understand) your passion, listen to dozens of first class speakers on a dozens of interesting topics, check out all the interesting new products in a vendor hall, get special access to local museums or libraries...it all sounds so good.

But, once I'm there...I'm reminded of all the reasons I don't like conferences.  The lousy and expensive food.  The uncomfortable chairs.  Sitting cheek by jowl in a lecture room and getting antsy from the heat, the lousy chair, and the elbow of the guy sitting next to me who doesn't seem to understand the idea of personal space.  Standing in lines.  But mostly, feeling like you're back in high school and there's an in-crowd and everyone else, and you are, of course, an everyone else.  The in-crowd was having insightful conversations and catching up with friends; everyone else was passively consuming lectures and drifting through the exhibit hall.

Some random specifics:

The FamilySearch blogger dinner.  Very cool -- a chance to meet other bloggers, meet some of the folks at FamilySearch, and hear about what they're up to.  It was a bit surreal to try to have a dinner conversation with someone who was guarding himself because he was "talking to the press" but I enjoyed hearing about how NARA is working on preserving the ocean of digital data being created every day.  Even walking back to the hotel was cool because I chatted with Cheri Daniels of Pastology.  This is what the conference experience is supposed to be like...and it was a very in-crowd, invitation-only thing that came from having a blog.

Any conference session that was being recorded.  Annoying.  If the session was being recorded, someone made an announcement that the audience was supposed to hold all questions until the end.  In a few sessions, this was disregarded, but mostly it was pretty chilling.  One speaker even announced that she was going to just read a few slides at us so the content would get into the recording.  I know that the recordings are useful to those who can't go to the conference, or who can't be in two sessions at once, but I didn't drive 12 hours and spend a fortune to sit quietly and not get to interact with the speakers.

And what's so bad about just holding questions to the end?  In practice, that meant no questions.  The speakers had apparently been told to get out to let the next speaker set up, so they were reluctant to take questions after the official time was up.  And the audience, having figured out that many of the sessions were either crowded or full, was practically running from one room to the next to stand in line for a seat.

The exhibit hall.  Mixed.  The FamilySearch, Ancestry.com and 1940 Census booths had very helpful staffers, things to talk about, and were very welcoming. The ladies at the Oklahoma Genealogy Society made me wish I had relatives down there so I could do some research at their library. On the other hand, I had the misfortune to try to visit the booth of a software product I use while Dick Eastman was standing in the aisle; the guy working the booth was so desperate to be cool with Dick that I, apparently, didn't exist.  At a couple of other booths I visited, the staffers didn't even have the Dick Eastman excuse but still couldn't seem to figure out how to talk to me except to answer direct questions as briefly as possible.

The evening at the Cincinnati History Museum.  Awesome.  An amazing building.  Private access to the museum.  Good food and an interesting talk.  A real highlight of the week for me.  I hear the Slavery museum was really good, too, but I was so tired that night I collapsed in bed about 7pm.

Thomas Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills. I made a point of going to one talk by each of them; I'd have gone to more, but people were getting turned away and I thought it would be selfish.  Mixed.  Both are excellent speakers, with very interesting things to present, but I went away a bit unsatisfied.  Partly because these were being recorded, so there was very little give and take with the audience.  Partly because they were presenting big ideas in little bites (ESM had clearly designed her talks to be a series on the FAN club, so going to just one was only giving you part of the story; this would have been awesome if there had been any realistic way to attend all of them.)  Partly because I'll never have the patience to work that hard to solve a genealogy problem <grin.>

Am I glad I went?  Yes.  Do I think I got more bang for my buck from the research half of my trip?  Yes.  Will I go again?  Maybe.  Should I be looking into the week-long genealogy institutes and guided research trips for the depth and personal touch I appear to want?  Definitely!

Obligatory 1940 Census Post

1) I tried to get on the NARA site on Monday and failed.

2) Once Kansas was posted on FamilySearch.org, I found 4 grandparents, 3 great-grandparents, 2 aunts and some assorted cousins in the first ED I looked in, even though there were a couple of candidate EDs.

3) I'm going to wait until the indexing is done to look for my Ohio folks.  I don't know the area well enough to figure out EDs.

4) Instead, I've been indexing.  It's very relaxing.

5) For some reason, I had a flash back to the release of the 1930 census.  Outside the genealogy room at the library there was a map of Kansas with the counties marked... the genealogy society was trying to raise money to buy microfilm and were asking people to sponsor individual counties.  I don't remember how long it took to raise the money for all the films, but it seems like it took most of the summer.  How times have changed!

Remaking a Genealogy Library

I learned today that the main librarian for our little genealogy library is moving this spring, so the hunt is on for a new librarian.  I have zero interest in the job, having just started my year as president of another organization, but I entertained myself by thinking about what I would do if a) I were to take the job and b) I could be the queen librarian, by which I mean I didn't have to worry about committees or money.

Frankly, I think I'd probably scare away all the current members...

First, I would have a big bonfire.  I would throw away anything with the title "federal census of," on the assumption that there are a number of really good online options for the U.S. census, all of which are better than the dusty, crumbling, single-state transcriptions of which we have a small and apparently random selection.  That alone would open up about 15 feet of shelf space.  I would go through all the general genealogy how-to books and throw away anything that doesn't mention the internet, which would slim down that section by about two-thirds.  I would borrow my brother's sheet-fed scanner, make a DVD of all our old publications and offer it in trade to all the other societies with whom we exchange paper for a DVD of all their old publications; if they didn't have one, I'd make one of our holdings and throw away all those decaying photocopies.  That would empty a full room!

Second, I'd beg, borrow or steal some real computers.  While not everything is available online, enough is online that a genealogy library should have modern computers available for patrons, with good internet access.  All those DVDs of society journals could be viewed from these computers.  This would also let us offer hands-on classes, for which we might even be able to charge a little something.  I'd add flat-bed and 35mm slide scanners as soon as possible.

Third, I'd refocus acquisitions on creating new, local "content."  The library already has old records from the court house and a marvelous new collection of invoices from the local cemetery monument company.  I'd go proactive in a big way.  I'd start a team that contacted local churches for copies of old directories and cookbooks and asked about scanning their old records. I'd try to team up with a local university history department to go after grants to digitize the records of long-time area businesses and non-profits.  I'd team up with the schools with an essay contest that would create an army of little oral history interviewers.  I'd suggest indexing projects for scout projects.  I'd prepare a "preserve your story for posterity" flyer and distribute it to nursing homes and estate sale planners; I'd ask funeral homes to include it in their "preplanning" guides.  I might even see if I could find volunteers to form an action team that would help people cleaning out homes or businesses to identify materials that we could use; it might be good to work with the historical society (who might be interested in items) and the university (who might be interested in less family-focused documents) to create a checklist for the team to use.    And classes -- lectures and workshops -- offered any place, any time, any day to encourage people to collect, preserve and donate materials.

I'd probably die of exhaustion!  Perhaps it's good that this is only an imaginary exercise...Of course, it's the imaginary-ness of it that frees me to be so extreme.  In the real world, I'd probably never have the nerve to do half of this.

Setting Family History Priorities

While working at the MHGS library Saturday morning, I chatted with a woman who had come in to see if we had anything to help her prove her second or third DAR ancestor (I was unclear on the count because she has also proven some on her husband's line for her daughter).  As the conversation wound about, as it does, she told us that she was one of the very first women in the Army Women's Auxiliary and had been in the first group of women sent to Hawaii after Pearl Harbor.  As she rattled off an impressive list of military and government jobs she has held in her 93 years, I wondered -- why on earth was she spending time searching backup DAR ancestors when she could be writing a memoir about all the fascinating things she's done?  There are probably hundreds of people who could work on those DAR lines, but only she can record what it was like to be one of the first Chief Clerks in the Army during WWII!

I told her she should write her autobiography, but I doubt she listened to me.  I'll have to work on her daughter <evil grin>.  It would be a great pity to lose her story.

I wonder if there's anyone in Wichita working with folks on their memoirs or recording oral histories. I'll have to check into that...

Collaborative Genealogy

Another issue that has come up with respect to the geni.com kerflufle is the question of "the one true tree."  The debate has been framed in terms of a choice between everyone working on their own, private trees and everyone contributing to a master tree with a single "profile" for each person.  There are the predictable questions of how to make trade-offs between efficiency and quality control.

Personally, I think we need to look to the third model, which I think is kind of a genealogical version of a folksonomy.  For the long version of a definition, refer to this article by Clay Shirky.  For a short definition...a taxonomy is when you arrange things in pre-defined, top-down categories, and the operating assumption is that there is a "right" category, or categories, for each thing.  To my thinking, this is analogous to the one true tree approach to genealogy.  A folksonomy, on the other hand, is a bottom-up sorting system, where each user tags things with his or her own categories, everyone can see how everyone else has tagged those things, and what is useful emerges from general consensus.  Oddly enough, someone is already doing this in the genealogy world...Ancestry.com.

Consider.  I can build a tree on ancestry.com.  This is my tree, and only those people I specifically select can edit it.  But, through Member Connect, I can tag people in other trees that I think are, or could be, the same as a person in my tree.  Now, I get the efficiency of seeing what other people are doing without the rigor and angst of forcing a merging of our research.  The same is true of the ability to link people in my tree to source records like census records and newspaper pages.  Anyone else looking at the same census record can see this link and other records that have also been linked to the person this record has been linked to.  The more people who agree with these links, the stronger the consensus, but no one is forced to accept the consensus view against their will.

Of course, if I don't want to collaborate, the ability to link source records to people in my tree serves as my own personal set of organized bookmarks into ancestry's monster site.  Which is also sweet.

Geni.com, WikiTree and Charging for User-Contributed Content

Like a lot of folks, I've been following the Geni.com kerfluffle.  I just had a chance to listen to the recording of the Geneabloggers Radio show with the CEO of Geni.com, and I have a few thoughts.

First, a bit of background.  Before the geni.com announcement, I hadn't been terribly impressed with geni.com before this -- I posted a small tree and found it frustrating that it wouldn't accept place names it didn't recognize (which I assume was a result of privileging the ability to use a master place name database for cool mapping purposes over the ability to enter the name of a place as it was used at the time of the event), the lack of basic error-proofing (like simple date checking to prevent accidentally entering a death that was earlier than a birth), and the fact that I found content from my personal website lifted wholesale and pasted in as a "document" without any credit whatsoever.  I also don't care for what seems like constant and almost deceptive attempts to get me to upgrade to pro.

I am now unimpressed with geni.com as a company -- they didn't handle the introduction of these changes well, and now that I've listened to Noah explain the problem they were trying to solve, I have to say that the problem, which is a variation of data decay, is one anyone working professionally with databases should have predicted from the beginning.  If they're not great programmers and not great communicators, what are they great at?

I've also entered a small tree at WikiTree, and, while I like the basic idea, and the ad-based income model, I fear that they may be a bit too techie for the average genealogist.  I found it tricky to figure out how to edit the various sections, and I think I'm pretty web savvy.

Part of the general problem here has nothing to do with genealogy.  All over the web there are social sites wrestling with the same problem.  Developing and operating a good site is not free and requires full-time attention, so the host is not being unreasonable to want some revenue.  However, while the host may provide the site and the features, there really is no product until the users contribute a critical mass of content (or social-ness), which they are usually doing for free.  Thus, when a site operator sells the site, or starts charging for it, those members who contributed often feel betrayed or robbed; of course, if the site operator tries to continue subsidizing the site, the operator, and the site, probably won't last.

While I was doing interviews for my doctoral research, I heard a lot about a very similar situation in another hobby area.  When the site operator decided to stop going to a full-time job all day and supporting the social site all night and try to make a living from the site, the community almost imploded; many formerly active participants left and have never returned.  After a few false steps, I personally think the site operator has found a good balance -- the parts of the site that depend on free contributions from users are free to use, and she has put a her effort into finding ways to provide other features that premium users are willing to pay for.  And, no (I'm talking to you, geni.com), site search and editing your own content don't count as premium features.

So...on one hand, this mess is not caused by some flaw that's unique to geni.com, because this is an issue that is coming up all over the web and hasn't been resolved, but, on the other hand, this issue has come up before, so geni.com should have seen it coming.