Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Top 5 or 10 Fee-based Genealogy Sites

It's Saturday night, so it must be time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver!  Tonight he's gone in a direction I don't think I've seen before.

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Ken McKinlay posted My Top 10 Fee-based Genealogy Sites this past week, so I've made it the challenge this week (thanks to Linda Stufflebean for the suggestion!).

(2) List your Top 5 or 10 top fee-based genealogy sites and a short reason for listing them.

(3) Share your list on your own blog, in a comment on this post, or on Facebook.  Please leave a link to your list wherever it is.

Ah, so this is a third-hand challenge!  Ken McKinlay wrote it, Linda Stufflebean saw and suggested it, and now Randy has posted it for the rest of us.  It's a good thing we're all friends in genealogy.

This is an interesting question for me, because I don't actually pay for many sites.  But here we go.  I'm going to stick to a Top 5, and I will point out that this list is skewed toward American research.

1.  Yup, Ancestry.com.  It has to be.  It's the 500-pound gorilla of the genealogy world.  And for fee-based sites, I believe it does have the most records of anyone.

2.  FindMyPast, I think.  I still don't like the fact that it dumped the really good search forms that it used to have and dumbed everything down for the American market, but it's a great collection of records, including many not available on other sites, such as the British parish records.  This is the one subscription site I pony up for every year (in fact, they just charged me my renewal recently).

3.  Newspapers.com.  It's a tough call which should be #3, this or NewspaperArchive.com, but I went with Newspapers.com for two reasons:  its strength in mid-20th-century newspapers and the fact that you get a discount if you bundle it with Ancestry.com, which owns it.  I was known as the "newspaper queen" in the San Francisco Bay area because I taught so many classes on using newspapers for genealogy, and I still think they're goldmines for research.  For a lot of people who are still working on tracing their families back to the early 20th century, the mid-20th-century ones can be critical in bridging the gap backward from what relatives still remember.

4.  NewspaperArchive.com.  I find that NewspaperArchive has a broader collection than Newspapers.com, but its strength is in older periods.  That won't help you so much if you haven't gotten your family lines back to the 19th century.  So I made it #4.

5.  Fold3.com, I guess?  After my top four, I really had trouble deciding what would be the next most useful site.  I decided on Fold3 because that's where Ancestry shifted a lot of its military records and where the new ones in that category have been added, plus it has a lot of city directories and some newspapers.  In addition, as with Newspapers.com, if you subscribe to Ancestry also, you can get a discount.

RootsTech 2018: Days 3 and 4

The second half of this year's RootsTech was just as much fun as the first half, and I continued to find opportunities to learn.  On Friday I was having trouble deciding which session to attend, and I finally went to Myko Clelland's talk on the "hidden" British and Irish gems on the FindMyPast site.  Great choice!  I particularly enjoyed learning about the older parish records available on the site, especially the marriage record of a deaf man in 1576, because it included a description of how the man communicated during the ceremony.  I didn't catch the groom's name, so I've sent Myko a message asking that, as I want to read the record myself (I've taken American Sign Language classes for many years and am always on the lookout for historical mentions of deaf individuals and communities to share with my teacher).  Hey, if anyone reading this happens to remember the groom's name in that record, please let me know!

During the lunch break on Friday I participated in a focus group for MyHeritage.  I can be very opinionated (which I'm sure will surprise everyone who reads my blog), so that was a lot of fun.  I was even asked to stay a few minutes after the others had left to give some additional insights.  I hope some of my suggestions turn out to be useful.

The big MyHeritage party was Friday evening, which was a blast, as usual.  I remember seeing Thomas MacEntee, Lisa Hork Gorrell, Jacqueline Henderson, Banai Feldstein, Debra Robinson, Michelle Goodrum, Leslie Lawson, Jamie Mayhew, Sheri Fenley, Dan Earl, Randy Seaver, and Robert and Alice Burch, and as usual I know I've forgotten people (I must be getting old).  Along with several tasty food offerings (was that actually a pork sausage served on the antipasti tray?) and yummy mocktails (I particularly liked the frozen mango lemonade), there was a hat-decorating station and a video set-up.  I, of course, wore the hat I decorated for the video.  (I learned that only Banai Feldstein and I took the time to sew the decorations on our hats; everyone else used glue.  I guess we wanted our hats to last longer than the party.)

Saturday morning started with a MyHeritage Friends breakfast, where attendees were asked to give our thoughts about the company's current and future directions.  MyHeritage really seemed to be trying to find out what its users think of its offerings.  Some of us started talking about a possible conference in New Orleans in October 2020.  Would you go?

I am very happy I went to Dan Earl's class on "Funeral Homes and Family History", which he had listed as being suitable for beginners but which covered a lot of interesting material about the history of funerals and of the funeral home industry.  He has an uncommon perspective on the subject, his father having owned a funeral home.  I learned some new stuff, which is always a good thing.

My session, on copyright and its impact on genealogists, was in the very last time slot on Saturday.  I had been joking that only half a dozen were going to show up, but I was happy to see about 30 people in the room, including artist and author Kathy Marshall, whom I know from the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California.  She even had a real-life copyright question she asked me and then allowed me to use as an example during my talk.  Many people asked good questions, and it was clear they were thinking seriously about how copyright issues could affect their work.

After that it was back home to Portland and my boyfriend, cats, and birds.  I'm glad I had the opportunity to go to RootsTech this year, and I hope I'll be back next year.

RootsTech Ruminations

I am really surprised how quickly time has passed since RootsTech ended.  I planned to post about it right after the conference, but somehow a week and a half has slipped by while I've been catching up to my regular life.

This year's experience was quite a bit different from when I attended two yeas ago.  That year the FGS conference was held in conjunction with RootsTech, which worked out well for me, because three quarters of the sessions I attended were FGS ones.  I found the vast majority of the RootsTech sessions so basic that I didn't feel I would learn anything from them.

Being a speaker this year was the biggest difference, of course.  I had to pay much more attention to the time on the two days of my talks!  (I'm glad both were in the afternoon, as I'm not much of a morning person anymore.)  I'm happy to report that both talks went well, with good questions from attendees and many thank yous for the helpful information.  I was even interviewed about my classes for the RootsTech Facebook page!

One negative aspect of the conference was like "déjà vu all over again."  My talks (on Freedmen's Bureau and Freedman's Bank records), along with almost all other presentations that were part of the Africa-focused research that was heavily promoted this year, were in the very, very, very far end of the Salt Palace, closer to the Family History Library than to the main hub of activity for the conference.  (This is where the FGS talks were in 2015.  I joked then about FGS being the red-headed stepchild.)  That meant that none of the talks (that I know of) had as good attendance as they should have.  It isn't as though there aren't appropriately sized rooms closer to the main hall that could have accommodated our sessions.  And I'm not the only person who has commented.  One has to wonder why FamilySearch would market African Heritage Day so much and then put the classes that supported it so out of the way.

Another thing that was (happily) different this year was that several RootsTech sessions were actually geared for intermediate and more experienced researchers.  I found quite a few presentations to attend and learned a fair amount.  By far my favorite speaker during the conference was Myko Clelland of FindMyPast.com.  I missed his first talk — on the British Newspaper Archive collection on FMP — but I did attend his talks on British crime and punishment records and on British research beyond the census.  He was knowledgeable, entertaining, and a great presenter.  I never did figure out what he thinks is so difficult to pronounce about his name, however.

Another standout session, primarily because of my own presentation on the same subject, was the talk by FamilySearch's Ken Nelson on Freedmen's Bureau records.  He was the coordinator of the Freedmen's Bureau digitization and indexing project for FamilySearch, and he explained how he assessed the records and decided which ones would be prioritized for the project.  This helped me understand what is and is not indexed and why, and I've been able to share the information with others.

I also learned a lot in Bernice Bennett's session on the Southern Claims Commission.  Hers was the best talk I have heard on this subject.  I feel much more comfortable now with beginning my research into these records.

I had a great time meeting and networking with other genealogists.  Not only did I get together with other genealogists about potential future projects, I saw people I know leaving behind-closed-door meetings.  Lots of business was going on at the conference, on many levels.

Unfortunately, not everything was good.  Besides the "afterthought" location of the black genealogy programming, one major bone I had to pick with the conference was the decision to make handouts available only via the app.  I don't have a smartphone, which meant I didn't get to have handouts.  And the handouts for my sessions weren't even available through the app when I taught my first class!  I guess this is RootsTech's way of saying that if you don't have a smartphone, they don't want you to bother coming to the conference; you are not their target market.  The only place I could find information about this policy was buried near the bottom of the FAQ online, though I freely admit I may have missed it somewhere else.  Personally, I think this is shortsighted of FamilySearch, but my opinion carries no weight.

And not all classes were as good as Myko Clelland's.  I think the worst I went to was one by a prominent British genealogist who claims to be "the best genealogist in the UK."  That person's session covering what was supposed to be "unique" and "unusual" records spent half the time rehashing records that are basics of research and are known to most researchers.  A lot of ego but not much substance.  Another woman in that session and I had a running commentary during the talk, as one common record after another was discussed in great detail.  (That attendee is a missionary working at the Church History Library; she has an ongoing project to identify and find detailed information on all the members of the Mormon Battalion.  There was so little of substance in the presentation that she worked on her own research during the entire talk.)

My other big beef with the conference is the large number of sessions presented by company employees that weren't always clearly noted as such.  I think every talk that is essentially advertising for a company's site and/or services should be marked as "vendor session" in the program.  Then at least you know what you're in for.

I was so busy at the conference, I had hardly any time for the Family History Library.  I did get over there for a few hours to work on my Mundy research, in my search for my grandfather's biological father.  I didn't make huge progress, but every little bit helps.

Notwithstanding the problems I experienced at the conference, overall I had a great time, and I'm very happy I was able to attend.  I hope my talks were reviewed well by attendees, and maybe I'll have presentations accepted next year on my own merits.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Survey of Genealogy Activities

This week's challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun sounds similar to the one Randy Seaver posted on May 21 of this year, but this time he has given specific questions and made the exercise less open-ended, which actually makes it easier in a lot of ways.  But it's a lot longer!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible music, please!):

1)  Answer these questions in my survey about your genealogy resources and usage:

a)  Which genealogy software programs for your computer do you use (e.g., Family Tree Maker, Reunion, GRAMPS, etc.)?

b)  Which online family trees have information submitted by you, in either a separate online tree (e.g., Ancestry Member Tree) or a universal (collaborative) online tree (e.g., WikiTree)?

c)  For which subscription genealogy record providers (e.g., Ancestry) do you have a subscription?

d)  Which FREE genealogy record providers (e.g., FamilySearch) do you use regularly?

e)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research online?  [Note:  not reading, or social networking, but actual searching in a record provider.]  Estimate an average number of hours per week.

f)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research in a repository (e.g., library, archive, courthouse, etc.)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.

g)  How much time do you spend each week adding information to your genealogy software program (either on your computer or online)?  Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one-month period.

h)  How much time do you spend each month at a genealogical society meeting, program, or event (not a seminar or conference)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.

i)  How much time do you spend each month on genealogy education (e.g., reading books and periodicals, attending seminars, conferences, workshops, Webinars, etc.)?   Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.

j)  How much time do you spend each week reading, writing, and commenting on genealogy blogs, Web sites, and social media?   Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one-month period.

2)    Answer the questions in a blog post of your own (and please drop a link as a comment in this post), in a comment to this post, or in a Google+ or Facebook post.

Here's my breakdown:

(a) The only genealogy software program I use regularly for my own family tree information is Family Tree Maker, v. 16.  I also have:

• Reunion 9
• Mac Family Tree
• Legacy Family Tree
• PAF
• Personal Ancestry Writer
• Roots Magic
• and I think one or two more

I keep the other programs handy to be able to open other people's files if necessary.

(b) I have submitted no information to any online family tree anywhere.  I have a page with the names I am researching on my own Web site.  I have also discovered that a distant relative of my brother-in-law has entered my mother's information on Geni.com.

(c) I have a paid subscription to FindMyPast.com, because it's the only way I have found to have access to the British newspaper collection.  I still think the interface sucks.

(d) My definition of a free genealogy record provider includes those databases I can use for free at my local Family History Center (technically, FamilySearch Library), in Oakland, California.  These are the sites I use regularly.

• FamilySearch.org
• JewishGen.org
• SephardicGen.org
• Chronicling America
• FultonHistory.com (another site with great material but an awful interface)
• FindAGrave
• USGenWeb
• FreeBMD
• RootsWeb
• Google
• Wikipedia
• Ancestry.com
• Fold3.com
• Newspaper Archive
• 19th Century British Newspapers
• ProQuest Obituaries
• GenealogyBank
• Newspapers.com
• VitalSearch

(e) Online genealogy research each week averages about 15 hours.

(f) Repository research each averages about 3 hours.

(g) I don't spend a lot of time adding information to my own family tree program.  It's probably only about 2–3 hours each week.

(h) Genealogy society meetings and events run about 15 hours every month.

(i) Genealogy education takes about 15 hours of my times every month, once I take into account conferences and seminars.

(j) Reading, writing, and commenting on genealogy blogs, sites, and social media runs about 20 hours each week.

Yikes!  My weekly total is about 70 hours each week that are devoted to genealogy.   That sounds about right, but I hadn't realized it was so high.  This year is probably running a little higher than average due to the number of conferences and seminars on my schedule (SLIG, San Francisco History Days, Sacramento African American Family History Seminar, CSGA [twice!], Jamboree, Ancestry Day, Civil War Teachers Institute, IAJGS, IBGS, and the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society's John Colletta seminar).  And this total didn't even include volunteer work!

Were They Murdered?

Belvidere Apollo, March 27, 1885

I recently wrote about my discovery of the index to obituaries and other mentions of deaths in the Belvidere (New Jersey) Apollo/Intelligencer.  I now have all the copies, and while I am very excited to learn more about my ancestors, the most intriguing item was about a collateral line.

I was curious about this one when I found the names in the index.  The index entries for Joseph W. Sellers and Mrs. Joseph W. Sellers were on the same day.   I had wondered if maybe there had been a tragic accident and the two had died on the same day, or something similar.  But no, the story is even more interesting than that.

"Coroner Harry H. Davis, of Camden, said that the suspicious circumstances connected with the death of Joseph W. Sellers and his wife, and the fact that several other persons of his household have suffered with symptoms of poisoning, leaves but one course for the officials to pursue, and that is to make a thorough investigation.  The body of Mr. Sellers will be exhumed and possibly that of Mrs. Sellers also." (Belvidere Apollo, March 27, 1885, page 3, column 6, under "State Items"; image above)

When I checked my family tree for Joseph W. Sellers, I didn't find him.  I had to look for him in the 1880 census and work backward to determine that he was a great-grandson of Abraham Sellers, my 4th-great-grandfather; I had begun work on his father's line in the past but had not pursued it forward in time sufficiently to have learned about him and added him to my tree.  Joseph W. Sellers was the great-nephew of my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers, and therefore the first cousin once removed of my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, second cousin of my great-grandfather Elmer Sellers, and my second cousin three times removed.  (Not exactly a "close" relative.)

But he was a relative!  Now that I knew he was a relative, I couldn't leave that poisoning question alone, could I?  And down the curiosity rabbit hole I fell.  I jumped online and started searching for more information.  A couple of Google searches immediately found three more newspaper articles.  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on March 20, 1885 that Joseph had died on February 15, supposedly from typhoid fever and fatigue contracted while taking care of his wife, who had died a short time before him.  The deaths were not considered to be suspicious until Mary Bowyer, a cook who had worked for the Sellers family, moved with the Sellers' son to another family, which apparently was going to adopt the boy.  Suddenly everyone in that family became ill, except the cook and the boy.  The doctor called in to take care of the family members stated that they were suffering from arsenic poisoning, which made people wonder about Joseph Sellers and his wife (Sallie, by the way, though she is identified by her own name in only one of the articles I found).

The next day, March 21, 1885, the Philadelphia Times carried more information on the developing story, on the front page!  The decision had been made to exhume Joseph.  More people, including a former housekeeper of the Sellers family, had come forward to say they had had bad reactions to food prepared by the cook, and a motive for the hypothetical poisonings was being bandied about.  Apparently Mary was very attached to the Sellers' son and wanted to have him for her own.

By March 22 the story had gained more traction and was being republished in other areas of the country.  The Indianapolis Sentinel ran a synopsis of the Times story and included commentary from the doctor who had attended Joseph, saying that he had observed no signs of poisoning and still believed Joseph had died of typhoid.

The next step was checking dedicated newspaper sites.  Searching for "joseph w sellers" and "joseph sellers" on Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, and NewspaperArchive.com provided several more articles.  All told I found almost twenty articles, ranging from Philadelphia and New York City (including the New York Times!) to Boston and Indianapolis, covering the ongoing question of the possible poisoning of Joseph and Sallie Sellers.  The articles were published between March 20 and March 27, 1885.  One article, from the Philadelphia Times of March 24, 1885, even ended on the chilling note that "[i]t was semi-officially stated that they [the Coroner, County Physician and Dr. Snitcher] were satisfied that Mr. Sellers did not die of typhoid fever."  I noticed, however, that I hadn't found anything from New Jersey, where they had died, or about a resolution to the investigation.

Next I looked at New Jersey links on the Wikipedia newspaper archive page.  None of the pages had any hits for "joseph w sellers" or "joseph sellers."  I also checked the newspapers on Google News Archive and found a local paper, the Camden Democrat.  Unfortunately, the only issues online for the 1880's were for January 1880.  I was starting to wonder if perhaps the matter had been a tempest in a teapot and nothing had come of it—notwithstanding the opinions of the coroner, county physician, and Dr. Snitcher—for otherwise surely there would have been more local coverage.

Then I remembered that FindMyPast.com has been adding many U.S. records to its site, including newspapers.  So I signed in to my account on that site and searched for "joseph sellers" in 1885 in the newspaper collection.  (I wrote in 2013 about how much I dislike the disastrously awful interface that brightsolid created for the FindMyPast.com site and then had the stupidity to port over to the FindMyPast.co.uk site.  I originally planned to allow my subscription to expire, but when I learned that the Family History Library edition of the site allowed access to only the index for the newspapers and not the images, I decided I needed the newspaper access enough to keep up the subscription.  It pains me every time I have to use the site, though.)

The first thing I noticed is that I finally had some results for New Jersey papers!  I found articles from the New Brunswick Times and Trenton Times that pretty much rehashed the same information I had found before, during the same period.  But then I saw an article from April 9, 1885 in the New Brunswick Times:

"The jury in the Sellers poisoning case at Camden agreed that the deaths of both Joseph W. Sellers and his wife were due to natural causes."

New Brunswick Times, April 9, 1885

Well.  It's good to know they weren't poisoned, but I have to admit it was rather a bit of an anticlimax.  On the other hand, a few valuable lessons were illustrated by my search for the answer.

First, and it's something I say all the time (even in classes focused on online resources), not everything is online.  The Camden Democrat, being the local newspaper, probably would have had more detailed information about this case and been able to give me a direct answer more quickly, but the only site I could find with any issues didn't have them for the right period.

Second, never rely on only one source of information when you're doing your research.  I started with a short item from one newspaper and ended up looking for information from thirteen sources (and finding useful info in most of them) before getting a fuller picture of the situation and finding out what happened in the end.

Third, more than one finding aid (i.e., index) for the same records can be really helpful!  I mentioned that I had searched on NewspaperArchive.com early on.  I didn't have any New Jersey results from that search.  But when I used FindMyPast.com, all the significant results were noted as coming from NewspaperArchive.  So that search found items that NewspaperArchive's own search didn't.

The last lesson has to do with a fact that I haven't mentioned until now.  Most of the articles talking about the possible poisoning mentioned that Mary Bowyer was "colored."  Considering the time period, I have to wonder how much that affected people's opinions of the likelihood of a poisoning having occurred and of her being capable of doing it.  Depending on what kind of research you are doing, you might need to take into account perceptions of the time.

Spurred on by this little excursion, I have found a few more pieces of information about the Sellers family.  FamilySearch provided the death dates of Joseph and Sallie, and the number of the microfilm roll on which the records appear.  I also found their son, Robert, in an index entry for the 1885 New Jersey state census; he was living with the family that was said to have wanted to adopt him.  I have not been able to find Mary in 1885 in New Jersey, although she was with the family in the 1880 census.  I am curious what happened to her.  More than one article mentioned that she was still in Camden during the investigations, and even that her residence was being watched.  Taking into account that her name was spelled Bowyer (most common), Bower, and Bowers in the articles (and Boyer in the 1880 census), however, who knows how she might have been enumerated.  Or maybe she decided that leaving the state was her best move and didn't stay around long enough for the census.

Randy Seaver's Genea-musings Saturday Genealogy Poll

Today Randy Seaver posted a genealogy poll on his Genea-Musings blog.  I don't often answer online polls like this, but I found his questions interesting.  The Mission Impossible music isn't playing in the background here, but these are my answers:

a)  Which genealogy software programs for your computer do you use (e.g., Family Tree Maker, Reunion, GRAMPS, etc.)?
The program I use regularly is Family Tree Maker, PC version 16.  I also have installed and use to varying degrees PAF 5.0, Legacy Family Tree, Reunion, and Mac Family Tree (yes, I'm "computer bilingual").  I even used to use the old Mac version of Family Tree Maker!

b)  Which online family trees have information submitted by you - in either a separate online tree (e.g., Ancestry Member Tree) or a universal (collaborative) online tree (e.g., WikiTree)?
I have no family trees posted online anywhere, and I advise others to do the same.  I don't want my family tree information appropriated, inappropriately linked, and/or mangled by people who don't do good research.  (A good genealogy friend of mine had her entire tree copied with no attribution by a Ph.D. student, of all people!)  I do, however, have a family research page on my own Web site with the names and locations I am researching, and family members have found me that way, which shows you don't need to put a tree online to collaborate with family.

c)  For which subscription genealogy record providers (e.g., Ancestry) do you have a subscription?
The only site for which I have a paid subscription is FindMyPast.com, because the paid version shows the newspaper images, which the FHL Portal version does not.

d)  Which FREE genealogy record providers (e.g., FamilySearch) do you use regularly?
At home I use FamilySearch extensively, along with FindAGrave, Google, JewishGen.org, Library and Archives Canada, RootsWeb, USGenWeb, many newspaper and genealogical society sites, and any site that includes information I am looking for.  I also regularly visit my local LDS FamilySearch Center (which in my case happens to be the Oakland FamilySearch Library) and use the databases available through the FHL Portal, which include 19th Century British Newspapers (a Gale database), Ancestry.com World Edition, Fold3, Godfrey Library, Newspaper Archive, and more, and which are free to use in the library.  The Oakland FSL also has individual subscriptions to GenealogyBank, VitalSearch, and Newspapers.com, each available on only one computer.  I also use Steve Morse's One-Step Webpages, but it isn't actually a records site, just a better way to search on other sites that do have records.

e)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research online?  [Note:  not reading, or social networking, but actual searching in a record provider].  Estimate an average number of hours per week.
I probably do a minimum of about 20–30 hours of online research every week.

f)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research in a repository (e.g., library, archive, courthouse, etc.)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period. 
The amount of time I spend doing on-site research varies from week to week, but it probably averages out to about 5–10 hours per week.

g) How much time do you spend each week adding information to your genealogy software program (either on your computer or online)?  Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one month period.
I have no online trees so spend no time adding information to them.  (That's one way to save time!)
 
h) How much time do you spend each month at a genealogical society meeting, program or event (not a seminar or conference)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.
I attend several meetings and programs from different organizations.  It's probably about 9 hours per month, assuming about six programs per month at one and a half hours each.

i) How much time do you spend each month on genealogy education (e.g., reading books and periodicals, attending seminars, conferences, workshops, webinars, etc.)?   Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.
This is another hard one, because of the number of hours spent at conferences.  Maybe about 20 hours per month on average.

j)  How much time do you spend each week reading, writing and commenting on genealogy blogs, websites, and social media?   Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one-month period.
This is probably about 13 hours per week.  A good chunk of that is writing for my own blog, of course!

I noticed that one question Randy didn't ask is how much time we spend just talking to other people about genealogy!

IAJGS Conference Days 1 and 2

Here I am in beautiful Salt Lake City!  I have been told it was 100+ degrees the past two days, but it really is a dry heat, so it's much more comfortable than when I used to live in Florida.  On the other hand, I do appreciate the air conditioning at the Hilton Hotel, which is where the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy is being held this year.  We've already gone through two days of the conference, and this is the first chance I've had to write about it.

I was told several years ago by a former boss that if you go to a conference and learn one thing that you can take away and use in your work, that's a successful conference.  Going by that, I'm doing very well so far — I've had one session each day where I learned new techniques I could take away and use, plus I've had some great social get-togethers.

The biggest surprise for me so far has been the sessions I have found the most interesting.  On Sunday I went to a presentation by Crista Cowan of Ancestry.com on search tips for the site.  Now, anyone who knows me has probably heard me rant about Ancestry and how they present records on the site (along with a lot of other things).  The main reasons I decided to attend the session were that there wasn't really anything else in that time slot I was interested in, and I thought it would be amusing to see what Cowan had to say.  I figured it was going to be nothing but a sales pitch.

Cowan opened by emphasizing that the presentation was only about search and that she wouldn't answer questions about any other topic.  She then asked attendees what burning questions they had about searching on Ancestry.  My contribution was to ask why entering terms in fields on search pages returned results that didn't match those fields when I specified exact matches only.

After noting several questions, she told us, "You know that Ancestry ad where they say you don't have to know what you're looking for, you just have to start looking?  Well, they're wrong.  That's for those people who are just starting, so they can find something and then they'll buy subscriptions."  That was an indication that the class was going to be more worthwhile than I thought!  She was refreshingly honest about how Ancestry markets.  She said you absolutely need to think about what you're looking for, which I've been saying for years.  She also agreed with what I tell people, which is that you should never search from the home page.  Just like me, she always goes to the advanced search page.

I already use most of the hints she told us about, such as going to the database you need when you are looking for specific information, marking "exact only", restricting by location, searching without names, and more.  And she told us the reason the search pages are not set on exact search by default (which someone asked about) is for new researchers, because otherwise they probably wouldn't find anything and then wouldn't want to pay.

Some technical aspects she discussed were also informative.  If the database is index only and has no images, Ancestry didn't create it, so it is licensed from someone else; Ancestry usually does not make corrections to those databases.  Most of the databases with images have indices that Ancestry created.  The reason a search term must have a minimum of three letters is because otherwise it takes too much processing time on their servers (something I had learned previously from Steve Morse, who has improved search pages for many Ancestry databases on his One-Step Webpages site).  At the bottom of the advanced search page, if you change the collection priority to Jewish, the Soundex search will be based on Daitch-Mokotoff instead of American Soundex (which could turn out to be very helpful to me).

At the end of the presentation, when she was doing her wrap-up, she had not addressed my question about receiving irrelevant results when I requested exact matches on a search page, so I asked again.  The specific example I cited was searches in the California voter registers, where I can specify a register year of 1946 and receive results from other years but that have street addresses of 1946.  I had long suspected that the cause was that the database of search terms was not mapped to the fields on the search page.  She confirmed this in a roundabout way by telling us that typed documents, such as those voter registers, are not transcribed by people but are OCR scanned.  That means that the terms are not coded in search fields, so when you search for anything, it's just a word in the database.  As far as I'm concerned, that means the search page shouldn't have fields such as first name, last name, or year, because it's misleading.  There should just be a line for keywords.  I have the same problem with newspaper databases such as NewspaperArchive.com.

The other informative session I attended was on Monday, by Josh Taylor of FindMyPast/BrightSolid/DCThomson and the Federation of Genealogical Societies.  He spoke about ways to get members of the younger generations — "21sters" — interested in genealogy and active in genealogy societies.  This was essentially the same presentation of his I heard a couple of years ago, but he has updated it and refined some of his opinions.  I went to this primarily because I volunteered to introduce him and be the room monitor, but I hoped there might also be helpful information that could be applied in the societies I belong to.

His big message for attracting the younger generation is that you have to connect online and use technology.  You also have to abandon old-fashioned approaches such as pedigree charts and citations, because those don't appeal to this generation.  He did not say it directly, but the message was that people accustomed to instant gratification don't want to take the time to learn how to research, prove, and document information.  They just want to know the answers and then move on.  While I don't agree with trying to implement that part of what he said, he had some ideas about marketing and outreach that could be interesting to try.  One was reaching out and trying to build community partnerships, such as with schools and youth organizations, and maybe sponsoring a writing contest or scholarship.  Another was having some sort of table or event at a mall, where the younger generations hangs out.  He spoke about Reddit but admitted that answering a bunch of questions online for free didn't readily translate into someone becoming involved with a society.  Something that wouldn't necessarily apply to 21sters but could help attract more inquiries was to have your society listed at the local convention and visitors bureau.  There were a lot of ideas, which I'm going to have to type up and bring to my next couple of board meetings for discussion,.

The networking opportunities so far have been wonderful.  On Sunday several professional genealogists got together and talked about what kinds of research and other professional work we do and how we might be able to work together and help each other.  On Monday IAJGS President Marlis Humphrey held a media lunch for bloggers, writers, journalists, etc., apparently the first time this has been done at an IAJGS conference.  She discussed some of the marketing concepts IAJGS is considering and how outreach can be improved.  And Monday evening a bunch of us Jewish bloggers (and James Tanner, who is not Jewish) sat down for an informal bring-your-own-dinner meeting.  We talked about our blogs, why we started them, and what kinds of things we write about and generally schmoozed for a couple of hours.  It was really nice to meet a lot of people face to face and not just as e-mail addresses and URL's online.

There have been some significant disappointments at the conference, unfortunately.  One speaker just talked about personal anecdotes from his family; another mumbled and didn't project into the microphone; at three sessions the speakers read directly from their typed notes and didn't look at the audience.  (At one of those, I could see from the reverse side of the paper that text was formatted as from a journal, so I walked out and figured I'll search for the article and read it myself.)  Two talks gave no information about how to research the topic, just showed several examples of information with no context.  Another speaker started off by saying that there was a lot of material to cover so we had to get going, then spent the first ten minutes telling us what she wouldn't be discussing.  And the worst was an hour of excruciating, painfully executed English that was mostly not understandable, which ended with a shill to get money.  And to think the conference isn't giving us evaluation sheets for the talks!!

But tomorrow (Tuesday) is another day!  Which I really need to get some sleep for ....

Genealogy Research in the East Bay via BART

A death certificate from
the Oakland History Room

I've previously written about using BART to travel to genealogical research locations in San Francisco.  It's time to give equal attention to the East Bay.  Since I live in Oakland I often drive to these places, but parking in downtown Oakland and Berkeley is comparable to San Francisco, so being able to take BART lets you avoid that mess.

The first stop on our East Bay research tour is Lake Merritt station.  Follow the exit signs toward 9th Street, and you'll see a very large sign that says "Superior Court."  Exit at that corner, and when you come up above ground, you'll be at the corner of 9th Street and Oak Street.  That puts you five blocks from the main branch of the Oakland Public Library, four blocks from the Alameda County Administration Building and Superior Court, and three blocks from the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder.

If you're taking a train from Pittsburg/Bay Point, Millbrae, or SFO, you need to transfer to a Fremont or Dublin/Pleasanton train get to the Lake Merritt station.  Instead of waiting for a connecting train, you might want to get off at the 12th Street/Convention Center station, though it's a longer walk.

Similar to the San Francisco Public Library, the Oakland Public Library has two important resources for genealogists:  the Oakland History Room and the Newspaper and Magazine Room.  The History Room is on the second floor of the library and has information and records primarily about Oakland, but also for other cities in Alameda County.  Probably the most significant items are original Oakland birth and death certificates from 1870–1904, before the state of California began collecting vital records, but you can also look at a complete collection of Oakland city directories (1869–1943); Alameda County voter registers (1867–1944); Tax Assessor's block books for Oakland (1877–1925); various Sanborn fire insurance map books from between 1882–1951; photographs of Oakland, Piedmont, and Emeryville; vertical files of newspaper clippings; several local high school yearbooks; information on the origins of street names for Oakland and Berkeley; and more.  There are indices to several local newspapers and to articles in books and magazines.  Staff will do free look-ups and will mail you copies of items for a small fee.  The Newspaper and Magazine Room, which is at the other end of the second floor from the History Room, has the complete historical run of the Oakland Tribune on microfilm, along with many other local newspapers, including a significant number of black newspapers.

The Alameda County Administration Building houses the Superior Court records office and the Tax Assessor.  The records office, on the basement level, holds probate and civil indices and microfilms.  If the records you want to look at have not been microfilmed, they'll have to be retrieved from storage, which can take several days.  Unlike San Francisco, there is no charge to request records from storage.  Also, some records may be housed at different courts.  Criminal records apparently are treated similarly.  The Tax Assessor's office is on the first floor.  You can walk in and ask the nice people there to look up who owns a property.  I've been told it's possible to get complete tax records for a property, but I haven't done that myself (yet).

The Alameda County Clerk-Recorder holds birth, marriage, and death records from 1905 to the present and land records dating back to the 19th century.  There are no restrictions on who can order an informational copy of vital records in California, but more recent records may have some names, such as the medical examiner on a death record, redacted (privacy laws).  The Recorder section has computerized and microfilm indices and records for land transactions and fictitious business name registrations.  A computer with an in-house index for vital records includes records that occurred after the published indices end.

The 12th Street station is the closest one to the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).  Exit toward Ogawa Plaza and then head west on 14th Street.  AAMLO is about four blocks away.  AAMLO is a great resource for researching the black communities of the Bay Area and California.  It has diaries, oral histories, videos, newspapers, and other materials relating to local people and organizations.  It also has general resources relating to black history in the United States and important historical individuals.

Our next stop is the 19th Street station in Oakland, the closest station to the California Genealogical Society and Library (CGS), as Kathryn Doyle pointed out in my post about San Francisco genealogy locations.  You can follow the exit toward Broadway and 20th or the one toward 20th; either way you'll have to cross a street (20th for the former, Broadway for the latter) to get to the corner with the beautiful green I. Magnin building.  Then walk up Broadway two blocks, cross one more intersection, and turn left to enter the old Breuner Building, where you will find CGS on the lower level.  CGS has resources not only for California but for the entire United States, as so many people came to California from other places.  Its extensive library includes books, manuscripts, and microfilm.  It also offers genealogy classes throughout the year, including an introduction to genealogy the first Saturday of the month.  Several databases are available on the Web site and in the library.  The library is open to all, but nonmembers must pay a $5 user fee, except for the first Saturday of the month.

Continuing further up the Richmond line (but passing MacArthur and Ashby stations), the Berkeley station puts you not too far from Bancroft Library on the University of California campus and in easy walking distance of the Berkeley Public Library and the Berkeley Historical Society.  If you're going to Bancroft, exit the station via the plaza escalator.  Go east on Center Street, cross Oxford, and enter the campus on Grinnell Pathway.  Turn left on Campanile Way.  After about three "blocks" distance, you'll come to Doe Library; Bancroft is on the east end of the building, with the entrance on South Hall Road.  Bancroft is primarily an archive, with collections of Western Americana, Mark Twain papers, the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, and the university archives, among others.  It also has a significant photograph collection, much of which is being digitized.  Generally, you need to page materials ahead of time (which is a whole separate post!), but some reference materials are on the shelves.

To go to the Berkeley Public Library, follow the signs at the Berkeley station to exit at Shattuck and Allston on the west side of the station.  When you come up above ground, walk south one more block and you'll be at the library.  The big attraction for researchers here is the Berkeley History Room, which has city directories and phone books, Berkeley High and University of California yearbooks, Sanborn insurance maps, the Berkeley Daily Gazette from 1894–1983, oral histories, photographs, maps, and more.

For the Berkeley Historical Society, exit the Berkeley station through the plaza escalator and head west two blocks on Center Street.   The society's History Center has a library and an archive.  I've been told it has Berkeley High School yearbooks (including some years that the Berkeley History Room doesn't have) and a photograph collection, but I haven't actually made it there yet to see for myself.

One very important genealogical location that BART doesn't reach directly is the Oakland FamilySearch Library.  The closest station is Fruitvale.  When you exit the station, to the right is a large board listing the AC Transit buses that leave from the station.  The board also has a handy map showing the bays from which each bus departs.  Currently the #39 bus will take you to the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Monterey Boulevard (but AC Transit has changed this route several times, so the specific bus line might be different when you go).  From there walk back down the hill a little to the entrance of the LDS temple campus and follow the signs to the Visitors' Center/Family History Center (the former name of the FamilySearch Library).  The library is on the lower level of the building.  Before you walk in, make sure you enjoy the beautiful view of the bay.

The Oakland FamilySearch Library is a branch of the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah (the mother lode of genealogy libraries).  It is a noncirculating genealogy library with almost 10,000 print items, 38,000 microfilm reels, and 10,000 microfiche.  The collection has a strong regional focus, so you will find lots of records about California (particularly the Bay Area Portuguese community), but there is something for almost everyone here.  The San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society (SFBAJGS) regularly donates publications and microfilm, so the library has a significant number of Jewish research resources.  The 75 computers have access to more than a dozen subscription genealogy Web sites, including Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.co.uk, NewspaperArchive.com, and Fold3.com.  Classes are offered regularly, and several genealogical groups, including SFBAJGS and CGS, hold meetings, classes, and events in the library.

A really interesting set of records is at another location that requires you to take an extra step after getting to the BART station.  Go to the Hawyard station and take the shuttle to California State University of the East Bay.  In the university library's special collections is a set of original Alameda County voter registration forms from 1875–1925.  Most of this type of record around the country were destroyed, so these are unusual survivors.  This particular set includes a record for author Jack London.  The library also has collections of historical slavery documents and World War II Japanese relocation materials.

So far I've only discussed Alameda County locations, but Contra Costa County is also in the East Bay.  I don't know of anything you can get to directly by BART, but some core repositories are reachable by BART and a bus connection.  The Contra Costa County Clerk, Superior Court, and Historical Society are all in downtown Martinez.  The best way to get there by BART is to go to the Walnut Creek station and take the County Connection #98X (express) line to the Amtrak station, which is only a short walk from the three locations.  You can also take a bus to Amtrak from Pleasant Hill (#18), Concord (#16, #19), and North Concord (#28/627), but the bus lines from those stations take significantly longer.

The Contra Costa County Clerk's office has birth, marriage, and death records, land records, and fictitious business name filings.  Searchable indices are online and on computers in the clerk's building.  The Superior Court records office holds records for closed cases, which are what genealogists usually deal with.  The Contra Costa County Historical Society's History Center is an archive with photographs and original documents relating to the history of the county.

I realize it seems as though I'm giving Contra Costa County short shrift, but I don't know of other genealogy research locations that are easily BARTable.  For example, the Plesasant Hill branch of the Contra Costa County Library has a genealogy collection, and members of the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society volunteer at the library and help people with their research—but the closest station is a mile away on the other side of the freeway, and I didn't see a direct bus connection.  If you know of other BART connections, feel free to post a message letting us know!

FindMyPast: .com versus .co.uk

When brightsolid, the parent company of the British genealogy site FindMyPast.co.uk (and brightsolid is itself owned by publishing group DC Thomson), decided to break into the U.S. genealogy market, it made a big marketing push for people to subscribe by offering discounts on subscriptions to the American counterpart of the site, FindMyPast.com.  The price was good, and it is convenient to be able to use subscription sites at home at 2:00 in the morning (and FindMyPast has several useful databases), so I splurged and paid for a year.  But because I spend so much time at the Oakland FamilySearch Library (there have been jokes about setting up a bed in the corner for me), and the fact that all Family History Library satellite libraries have subscriptions to FindMyPast.co.uk, I hadn't actually used my personal subscription.  Then one day while I was at the library our subscription to FindMyPast.co.uk wasn't working, so I tried using my personal subscription instead to do my research in the outbound passenger lists.

That was not as successful as I had hoped.

On .co.uk, when I want to search in only the migration records, I mouse over the search button:

click on "Migration Records", and then I get this screen, which allows me to choose which database I want to search in:

If I want to search in the outbound passenger lists, I click on the link and get a search form:

Here's I'm searching for Harris Doctors.  I get my search results:

When I click on a result (in this case the second one on the list), I get the page the person appears on:

The information at the top tells me what page of this ship's manifest I'm looking at (3 of 19), and there's a convenient link to the first page of the manifest, which has the ship's name, departure port and date, and destination port, which are not included on the subsequent pages:

This all works very nicely.  On .com, however, when I do the same mouse-over:

I also click on "Migration Records", but this is what I get:

Really?  30 million + results?  What happened to the the nicely laid-out list of databases and the search form?  They do allow you to restrict your searches at this point, but only in stages.  When you click on one of the filters (in the lower left of the above image), it automatically updates, for which you have to wait.

Then you can use the second filter.

And so on.  When I search for Harris Doctors via this interface:

I get a similar list of results:

When I click on the same person as I did on the .co.uk site, I get the same page of the manifest, but no header with helpful information.  I don't know how many pages are in this manifest or what page I'm on.

And on another search, when I did go back page by page to find the header (I think it was about 40 pages), I tried to download it -- but the page that downloaded was the one I had clicked through to from the search results.  No matter what page I viewed and tried to download, the interface was set up to download only the page that I clicked through to.  To download the header page, I had to look at the names on that page, search for and find one through the (horrible) search interface, and then click on that result.

The census interface is also different between the two sites.  Here's the British site, .co.uk:

and here's the American site, .com:

I didn't check every section, but I'm guessing that it's the same across the board.

The first thing that is confusing about this is why anyone would create the poor interface that is on .com.  Beyond that, however, is the question of why FindMyPast/brightsolid would hire programmers to create the second interface when there was already a good, working interface:  the one on .co.uk.  Maybe there's a logical reason that interface couldn't be used on the U.S. site, but I haven't been able to think of one.

My first thought when this happened was, "Well, so much for ever renewing that subscription."  I don't need to do my research at 2:00 a.m. badly enough to put up with this interface.