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Recording Your Genealogy

By on September 25th, 2005

Marina Garrison wrote a little article at 50 connect.co.uk, called “Recording Your Genealogy”, about publishing your genealogy research in a book (and why many of us are reluctant to do so).

This jumped out at me:

For most of us, genealogy becomes addictive after a short time and this is why I think it is so hard for us to commit to actually publishing our findings. We know we are “that close” to finding the next missing link and, for every ancestor found, there are at least two more (the parents) to discover, so our work never seems complete.

That’s been a problem of mine – not wanting to go through and print full-blown charts or have books made up, because I’m always on the edge of adding more information. With laserprinters being so cheap, there’s no reason not to print the occasional chart or booklets, and the solutions that she suggests can easily work for at least branches of your family that you feel are fairly complete (you could even call them “Volume I of the Abner Smith” family or some such, leaving yourself room for more, and setting the expectation among family members that there will be more).

If your a Mac user, although it falls slightly out of the scope that Marina is discussing, Apple’s iLife/iPhoto Books have proved exceedingly easy to use, well made, and very popular. Great holiday or birthday gifts (as would a book on your family’s genealogy in general).

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The Digital Dark Age

By on September 24th, 2005

The Digital Dark Age, an article in the Fairfax Digital by John Huxley, details the problems we may face with storing our information on media such as CDROMs/DVDROMs, only it’s from a different angle – not the problem with “digital rot” or the breaking down/physical deterioration of CD/DVDs, but rather with our descendants not being able to read the information.

Excerpts from the article:

It is 2045, he suggests, and his grandchildren are exploring the attic of his old house when they come across a CD-ROM and a letter, which explains that the disk contains a document that provides directions to obtaining the family fortune. The children are excited. “But they’ve never seen a CD before – except in old movies – and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?”

In the here and now, almost everyone, from the humblest to the highest and mightiest, is already confronting similar problems. Families contemplate how best to preserve old snapshots, which may have been copied and restored, then transferred to video and, more recently again, to disk.

Something for genealogists to ponder when thinking about how to pass information down to their descendants. These quotes jumped out at me :

Only belatedly was US census data rescued from digital tapes that became obsolete faster than expected.
….
To those who believe in the immortality of new media files, Rothenberg offers a suitably new-age adage: “Digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first.”

When your thinking about how to pass down your genealogy information, keep in mind that hopefully your descendants will keep transferring the data to newer media. The problem arises when the media “skips” generations.

One suggestion might be to buy a cheap laser printer and print out all of your genealogy information and give out multiple copies to people in different lines in your family, and as always, photos, if made properly, can last several generations.

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Dogwood City Books

By on September 23rd, 2005

I came across an interesting website, DogwoodCityBooks.com that reprints old books (typically 1800s and early 1900s).

One example: The Conquest of the Old Southwest by Archibald Henderson, 1869, “The Romantic Story of the Early Pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky 1740-1790.” This particular example contains a huge surname listing.

Another example: American Prisoners of the Revolution by Danske Dandridge, 1910, with chapter titles such as “Names of Some of the Prisoners of 1776″, “The Prisons of New York – Jonathan Gillett”, “Some Southern Naval Prisoners”, “Some of the Prisoners on Board the Jersey”, and Appendix A: “List of 8,000 Men Who Were Prisoners on Board the Old Jersey”.

Because these books were written a long time ago, certain things were romanticized or were treated in a different way than we would treat them now, and therefore you may come across material that is offensive to you. Don’t let that turn you off to what could be valuable information for genealogists and for putting your ancestors’ lives in context. Nobody ever said genealogy was easy (contrary to Ancestry.com’s ads).

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Genealogy Based Card Game – “Six Generations”

By on September 22nd, 2005

Press Release (Yahoo): Six Generations – A Card Game for All Ages.
www.sixgenerations.com

When Ted Soloview, a graphic designer from Alaska was searching his genealogy with the roots of Russian, German, and Ukrainian ancestors, he caught an idea that anybody’s triangle-looking family tree could be used to create a new card game.

After a year of research and choosing a universal match for parents and children, husbands and wives, lifestyle and clothing, names and countries for the European family of immigrants to America, his idea has generated an innovative card game, “Six Generations.”

“The amount of our ancestors is doubled in each older generation,” Ted Soloview said. “We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. In six generations we get 62 ancestors. It’s a perfect amount for cards in a deck, since we need to shuffle them easily. That’s how I stopped at number six.”

Looking for a fun gift to give to another genealogist, or perhaps trying to interest a child in genealogy? For under $10 (USD) this might just do the trick.

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Introduction to Soundex

By on September 22nd, 2005

Adam G. Carstensen wrote an article, An Introduction to Double Metaphone and the Principles Behind Soundex for the “Business Intelligence Network”, that explains the background and history of Soundex:

Immigrants to the United States had a native language that was not based on Roman characters. To write their names, the names of their relatives, or the cities they arrived from, the immigrants had to make their best guess of how to express their symbolic language in English.

The United States government realized the need to be able to categorize the names of private citizens in a manner that allowed for multiple spellings of the same name (e.g. Smith and Smythe) to be grouped. Thus, the United States Census bureau, more specifically Robert C. Russell of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania created an algorithm capable of indexing the English language in a way that multiple spellings of the same name could be found with only a cursory glance. Thus, in 1918 Soundex was born.

Even though many genealogy programs and genealogy websites can handle Soundex for you, it’s still interesting to read about how and where it came from.