Historical, Musings No comments yet

My First Impressions of Texas Ranch House 1867 (PBS)

By on May 2nd, 2006

My first impressions of PBS’s Texas Ranch House 1867 are not the best – it seemed like about half the volunteers put themselves in the right mindset. To give you a quick back-story – PBS and the BBC have put together a series of shows where they take volunteers and put them in a historical setting. It might be 1940 London, or the American West of the 1870s. This one is set on a small West Texas ranch.

This time around they cast more people who would be more comfortable with the environment, but at the same time some of the people didn’t have the sense of urgency or duty that the environment should have encouraged. They had certain conditions that needed to be met (rounding up so many cattle, etc.), and the ranch owner seemed more concerned with doing chores for his wife than going out with the cowboys to round up cattle, and this after they are already down a man, as well as having a few days of downtime due to illness among several of them.

Maybe it’ll get better (if you missed the first two hours last night, it’ll be repeated in the upcoming weeks). It runs several more nights this week.

Genealogy Events, Hints & Tips, Historical, Media Coverage, Musings, News No comments yet

The 1841 UK Census and Interest In It

By on May 1st, 2006

According to Maija Palmer of the Financial Times, half a million genealogists visited Ancestry.co.uk after they placed the 1841 census. Apparently this was the first “comprehensive” census in the UK, which led to this rush.

About 500,000 amateur family historians flocked to the Ancestry.co.uk website after it unveiled an online version of the UK’s first comprehensive census from 1841.

Visitor numbers to the genealogy website almost quadrupled from normal levels as people logged on last Monday to see what their great-great-great-great grandparents had been doing on a particular night 160 years ago.

Just kind of interesting how high the numbers were. As it’s the first comprehensive UK census, it’s probably an important one for many people. The article mentioned this as well:

According to ComScore, the market research company that tracks internet usage, visits to family history websites have almost doubled over the past year in the UK, with more than 4m visits in January against 2m in January 2005.

That’s some substantial numbers. If somebody magically came up with the 1890 census in the US, and put it online, I think it would bring whatever site that’s hosting it, to it’s knees. Regardless, it’s a good indication of just how popular genealogy is.

Hints & Tips, Historical, Software No comments yet

Open Platform Preferred for Digital Archives

By on May 1st, 2006

Aliya Sternstein has an article on FCW.com, Open platform preferred for digital archives, about the government taking steps to make sure that future historians, genealogists, researchers, etc., will have access to current and future government and national archives.

Excerpt from the article:

The National Archives and Records Administration should consider building its electronic archives using open architecture standards, according to members of an advisory committee assigned to confer with NARA.

The system’s security requirements, however, will dictate whether the Electronic Records Archives could have an open architecture, the committee said last month.

ERA is a $308 million project to preserve government records regardless of format and make them accessible on future hardware and software.

Thankfully this is being done now, before we get to heavily locked into any one particular proprietary format. As genealogists, sticking to text/ascii, or at least RTF (I believe Rich Text Format), and JPEG/TIFF formats is a pretty good idea, as we’ve already seen people run into problems when they finally upgrade their computers and find they have a hard time migrating from older genealogy software.

Unfortunately GEDCOM v6 or whatever has stalled at the starting gate, and some of the major genealogy applications are using their own formats. AS long as they can still export to GEDCOM, and as long as people make GEDCOM backups, we should be okay, at least at the personal level.

Genealogy Rights, Historical, Media Coverage, News No comments yet

Panel Vows to Fight For Access to Records (The AP Gets It)

By on April 28th, 2006

An article from Elizabeth M. Gillespie, for the Associated Press, Panel vows to fight for access to records, gets into an issue that is going to be cropping up a lot more as time goes by, access to public records. The article is about the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee, and their fight to keep access open.

She mentions something very interesting (at least coming from a genealogist’ perspective), about how organizations like this, as well as the AP itself, could team up with genealogists. Excerpt from the article:

Newspapers need to find more allies in their fight to get access to public records, since government agencies keep coming up with more ways to keep them secret, a panel of news executives said Thursday.

Decisions to classify government documents rose to roughly 15 million in 2004, the most recent year available, up from about 8 million in 2001, said Andrew Alexander, Cox Newspapers’ bureau chief in Washington, D.C., and chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee.

At the same time, the government has been denying a growing number of public records requests.

“The Freedom of Information Act seems to be in the throes of a mid-life crisis,” Alexander said.

He suggested the battle could become less daunting if newspapers can forge stronger ties with non-journalist groups that value open access to public records and meetings.

Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press, suggested partnering with genealogy experts, who rely heavily on public records laws to mine historical data.

“We don’t talk to that group of people very well, and they could be very powerful allies,” said Carroll, one of four executives who spoke on a freedom-of-information panel at the ASNE annual meeting.

Last month, Carroll noted, the AP found in a 50-state survey that 616 new laws restricting access to government records, databases, meetings and other public information had been passed since Sept. 11, 2001, while 284 laws had loosened access.

In plenty of cases, panelists noted, governments shut down access to records without any apparent legal backing.

Sounds like Kathleen Carroll (as mentioned above, senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press) understands the genealogists have a very vested interest in keeping access to records open, and could be a powerful friend – there are a lot of genealogists in the US and elsewhere, and many are older, a demographic which votes quite a bit more than younger folks.

You can read the full article at:
The Twin Cities/Pioneer Express (MN)
The Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth)
DuluthNewsTribune.com

Hints & Tips, Historical, Software No comments yet

Yahoo’s Babel Fish

By on April 27th, 2006

Yahoo has updated their translation site – babelfish.yahoo.com. If you need webpages or snippets of text translated, such as historical documents or newspaper articles, you can paste them in (either the URL or the 150 words of text) and it’ll spit out the translated text.

Very handy when working with international records.

Update: From a genealogical perspective, Yahoo inherited Babel Fish from Overture, who bought it with AltaVista. This is the actual, official launch under the Yahoo brand.