My 2017 Dear Genea-Santa Letter

This year Randy Seaver didn't have the Genea-Santa letter as part of Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, but it's a fun tradition to maintain, so I'm writing one again.

I tried to be a good genealogy girl again this year, but I admit I slipped up later in the year.  I still do a lot of genealogy volunteer work, including editing three publications and sitting on three boards.  I moved from California to Oregon but found a new Family History Center at which to help people.  I attended four genealogy conferences, three one-day seminars, many in-person presentations, and several dozen Webinars, plus I taught twenty-nine classes.  I have not been able to keep up my blogging as well since I moved, as I'm still (!) unpacking boxes, but I do post regularly, at least once a week and usually twice.  And I have managed to continue researching my own family and helping others with their research.

I did receive some very nice genealogy gifts during 2017.  In July I connected with a cousin on my paternal grandmother's side of the family, from a branch on which I had little information.  She provided me with enough info that I was able to add a lot to my family tree, and we'll be working together more in 2018.  In March I was contacted by someone related to one of the families I've been writing about for Treasure Chest Thursday.  The person who wrote to me shared documents, photos, and stories that helped me learn more about the individuals.  And in January a reader was able to help me identify a found photograph and return it to the person who had lost it.

As much as I appreciate those gifts, I didn't get any of things I actually had on my list, so this year's requests are going to sound familiar.  But I've cut down the number of items by almost half.

• My absolute number-one priority is still that I want to help my now 92-year-old aunt find and make contact with Raymond Lawrence Sellers, the son she gave up for adoption 72 years ago, or his descendants, or at least find out what happened to him.  We haven't made any progress since last year.  She did a DNA test through Family Tree DNA, the results of which are also on GEDMatch.  (Unfortunately, AncestryDNA was unsuccessful at processing her test.)  She still doesn't show any close matches besides family members we already knew had tested.  Maybe her son didn't have any descendants, or absolutely none of them has decided to try DNA testing.  It is so very important for her to find him, so I really am hoping for this one.  It's the most important item on my list.

• I've seen more and more stories about surprise discoveries of stored-away documents in Eastern Europe, so I would love for someone to find a treasure trove of previously unknown surviving Jewish records from the former Grodno gubernia.  If some of my relatives were mentioned in them, so much the better.

• It would be really nice if optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of old newspapers could become more accurate and reliable.  I swear I heard that someone had come up with a way for computers to assess poor-quality spots on newspaper pages (torn, ink blobs, type dropped out) and try logical infilling, rather than merely scanning them as is and having something that looks like a bunch of control characters come out as the search text, but I haven't seen anything more about it.  Does anyone else remember reading about that?  Can you point me to a reference somewhere?

So that's my shortened list for this year.  Please, Santa, see what you can do, okay?  I have a really nice Port I'll be happy to share with you.

National Volunteer Week: What Can You Do to Help?

National Volunteer Week is a week of observance in the United States and Canada designed to spotlight the contributions volunteers make and to thank them for their efforts.  In 2017 it will run from April 23 through April 29.  In my little corner of the family history blog world, I regularly post about ways in which people can volunteer their time, talents, and more to help with various genealogy and history projects.  So in honor of next week's event, it seemed like a good time to help publicize opportunities to help out.

A historian is researching the history of personal ads in the United States.  She is looking for information about couples who met each other through a personal ad published in a newspaper any time between 1750 and 1950.  If one of your ancestors or another family member met a husband or wife through a personal ad, or if you know of someone else who did, Francesca Beauman would love to hear the story.  You can contact her by e-mail at francescabeauman@gmail.com.  All information that is shared with her will be treated with the strictest confidence.

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Ho Feng-Shan

Researcher Mark Sy is working on a project about Dr. Ho Feng-Shan, a Chinese diplomat during World War II who issued thousands of exit visas to Austrian Jews fleeing the country after the Nazi invasion.  Sy would like to communicate with survivors who received these visas, or their descendants, to learn about their plights and experiences during that time.  This could be anyone who was living in Vienna from 1938–1940 and received a visa.  Many of the refugees exiled to Shanghai ended up settling in North America, as several documents of survivors obtained from Yad Vashem and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center reference early U.S. postal codes and New York ZIP Codes.  Interviews so far have been conducted with individuals based in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Melbourne, but survivors and their descendants could be anywhere in the world.  Please contact Mark at marksy85@gmail.com.

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How much do you know about Colorado history?  Maybe you can help solve the mystery of the woman in the portrait.  At the Colorado State Archives, while cleaning up after a leak in a storage area, several old portraits of former Colorado governors were found, along with one portrait of a woman.  The problem is that no one has any idea who the woman is.  The local NBC affiliate covered the story, and the reporter posted about it on his Facebook page, but so far no one has come up with the answer.

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Speaking of history, the Pioneer Village Museum in Beausejour, Manitoba is asking people to help identify early 20th-century photographs from the area, about 30 miles east of Winnipeg.  The photographs are being scanned from negatives that were donated to the museum after the woman who had them passed away.  So far the photos appear to range from about 1900 to the 1930's.  One man actually recognized himself in a photo!  The museum is looking for identification of people or locations in the photographs, which are being posted to Facebook.

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Another repository seeking help in identifying people in photographs is the Oak Ridge Public Library in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  The photos were taken by resident Ruth Carey from the 1960's to April 1994 and were donated to the library, along with many undeveloped negatives, by Carey's daughter.  Some of the prints and negatives have been digitized, but the majority have not and must be viewed in person at the library.  Carey apparently was Jewish, and a good number of the photographs are of the Jewish community in Oak Ridge.

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About 30 some odd years ago, a man living in Hrodna, Belarus (formerly Grodno in Russia and Poland) discovered two albums with photographs and letters in the attic of the building in which he was living.  Some of the photos have writing in Polish and Hebrew, and the names Konchuk/Kanchuck and Vazvutski appear.  The items were likely left in the building, which seems to have been in the Jewish section of the city, before or during World War II.  The man is now trying to find family members to return the items.  There's a long article in Byelorusian about the story (here's the Google Translate version), but apparently without contact information.  A woman who has posted about this on Facebook seems to be functioning as a contact person.

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Two more photos that are currently unidentified arrived at the Belleville (Illinois) Labor & Industry Museum with a donation of printing materials.  Each of the photographs is of an individual (one man, one woman) laid out in a casket for viewing.  The museum is asking people to look at the photos and call if they can provide any information.

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This year, the West Midlands Police (main office in Birmingham, England) celebrates the 100th anniversary of its first female officers, who joined the force in April 1917.  Three female officers in an archive photograph are unidentified, and files on four of the early officers have not survived.  The force is looking for help from the public in identifying the unknown faces in the photo and in gathering any information on these pioneering policewomen.

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Not all photographs are unidentified, which is a good thing.  If you have any family connections to Truro, Nova Scotia, particularly from 1967 to the late 1980's, you might want to contact Carsand Photo Imaging.  The company is owned by the son of the late Carson Yorke, who founded Carsand-Mosher Photographic.  The elder Yorke kept all the negatives of portraits he took during the aforementioned years, and his son, Colin Yorke, is now trying to reunite images with families.  Colin Yorke is apparently taking contacts primarily through his company's Facebook page, but you should be able to get in touch with him through the company's Web site if you don't use Facebook.

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The University of South Florida at St. Petersburg is looking for donations of back issues of The Weekly Challenger, the historic black newspaper of Pinellas County, from 1967 through the 1990's.  Even clippings can be helpful.  The newspapers will be digitized to create an archive.  Contact information is in the article linked above, as is a link to a recording of a lecture about the Weekly Challenger digital initiative.

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When I teach about online newspapers, I discuss the problems that optical character recognition (OCR) software has with reading old newspapers due to ink bleed, typeface dropout, damaged pages, and other problems.  Something I've never considered is whether the software has problems recognizing old fonts.  That issue apparently did arise for Iowa State University when it digitized its yearbooks for 1894–1994 (except 1902).  Because of that, and to have the content be more accessible (as in ADA) online, Iowa State is asking volunteers to help "Transcribe the 'Bomb' " (the name of the yearbook is The Bomb).  An article has information about the digitization project and a link to the volunteer site.

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Dr. Ciaran Reilly is coordinating the Irish Famine Eviction Project to document evidence of evictions between 1845 and 1851.  His vision is to create a dedicated online resource listing GPS coordinates for famine eviction sites and to create a better understanding of the people involved in the evictions.  It is hoped that the project will shed new light on numbers, locations, and background stories of those involved.

Sponsored by Irish Newspaper Archives, the project will use primary and secondary source information to research, gather, and catalog evictions.  One of the goals is to collaborate with individuals, societies, and libraries across the world.  The project is looking for any information about evictions, locations, and local folklore.

To see the 500 sites that have been mapped so far, visit https://irishfamineeviction.com/eviction-map/.  To submit your own research for inclusion in the project, e-mail your findings to famineeviction@gmail.com or tweet @famineeviction.

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Writer David Wolman wants to have a huge party with descendants of the approximately 600 passengers (most of whom were Irish) rescued from the sinking ship Connaught in October 1860.  Failing that, he would at least like to make contact with any of those descendants.  Wolman recently published a story about the rescue of the Connaught's passengers and a modern-day treasure hunter who wanted to find the shipwreck, and issued an invitation to contact him via e-mail or Twitter.  A list of the passengers is in a New York Times article available online.

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I don't usually post stories that have already appeared on Eastman's blog, because he has much, much wider readership than I do, but this one is important enough that I felt I should (because I know not everyone reads Eastman).  Extreme Relic Hunters, a company that specializes in World War I and World War II relic retrieval, discovered a huge cache of WWII dog tags (more than 12,000!).  The majority are from British servicemen, but there are some from other countries.  Of the British, almost all are from Royal Armoured Corps, Royal Tank Regiment, or Reconnaissance, with no RAF or Navy personnel.  The guys from the company want to reunite as many of these dog tags with family members as humanly possible (one was returned to the veteran himself).  You can read about the discovery and the project to return the dog tags on the Forces War Records and the Extreme Relic Hunters sites.  Oh, and Extreme Relic Hunters is looking for volunteers to help them with the return project; they're just a little overwhelmed.

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If you have not read about it yet, well known genealogy speaker Thomas MacEntee has posted a survey to learn what family historians and genealogists think of the industry today and what they would like it to be.  Read about it here and then click the link to take the survey.  He promises that your e-mail address will not be saved and you will not be contacted.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your 2016 Dear Genea-Santa Letter

Christmas is coming soon, so it must be time for Randy Seaver to suggest that his readers write to Santa for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Come on, everybody, join in, accept the mission, and execute it with precision. Here's your chance to sit on Genea-Santa's lap (virtually) and tell him your Christmas genealogy-oriented wish list:

(1) Write your Genea-Santa letter.  Have you been a good genealogy girl or boy?  What genealogy-oriented items are on your Christmas wish list?  They could be family history items, technology items, or things that you want to pursue in your ancestral quest. 

(2) Tell us about them in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook status or Google Stream post. 


Here are my wishes:

I've tried hard to be a good genealogy girl again this year.  I'm still doing lots of volunteer work for a number of genealogical organizations, including serving on three boards and editing four different publications (one went away, but I added a new one).  Somehow I have been able to maintain my blog schedule, posting regularly between two to four times a week.  I had my 1,000th post a little while ago!  I've continued a robust educational program, attending four conferences, three all-day seminars, many in-person classes, and another 50 or so Webinars, in addition to teaching 30 classes myself.  Plus I've done more research on my family and helped other people with their research.  I am a genealogy geek indeed!

I'm very grateful for the gifts I received this past year.  I found a cousin willing to take a Y-DNA test and determined that my grandfather's biological father was not Mr. Sellers.  I'm now in contact with someone from a Y-DNA line that matches my father well, and I have a strong lead for my great-grandfather (this guy seems to have been somewhat of a ladies' man).  Some cousins from my mother's side of the family coordinated a small family reunion and invited me to attend, so I met more relatives and now have scans of more than 250 photographs from their branch, along with additional information for the family tree.  And an article about my Cuban cousins and the research I've done on them was published this summer.

But people always want more, don't they?  And I do have some wishes for next year.  These are things I would love to see in 2017 (and I'm dreaming big again):

• My top priority is still that I want to help my now 91-year-old aunt find and make contact with Raymond Lawrence Sellers, the son she gave up for adoption 71 years ago.  We haven't made much progress since last year.  She did a DNA test through Family Tree DNA, the results of which I've uploaded to GEDMatch.  (Unfortunately, she wasn't able to manufacture enough saliva for a successful AncestryDNA test, so we aren't able to search directly in that pool.)  The bad news is that she doesn't show any close matches besides her siblings, her son, and me (i.e., family members we already knew had tested).  It's possible that her son didn't have any descendants, or that absolutely none of them has decided to try the whole DNA thing.  It is so important for her to find him, so I'm really hoping for this one.  It's the number one item on my list.

• Last year's plan for my brother and me to join a Ukrainian research project didn't end up happening.  It would be great if another project were to start this year, and maybe we can find actual records from the Kamenets Podolsky area on our Gorodetsky family (and even the Kardishes).

• I keep hoping for a treasure trove of heretofore unknown surviving Jewish records from the former Grodno gubernia to be unearthed.  If some of my relatives were mentioned in them, so much the better.

• I'm still waiting for optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of old newspapers to become more accurate and reliable.  I thought I had heard that someone had come up with a way for computers to assess poor-quality spots on newspaper pages (torn, ink blobs, type dropped out) and try logical infilling, rather than merely scanning them as is and having something that looks like a bunch of control characters come out as the search text, but I haven't seen anything more about it.

• I agree with Randy in wishing that Ancestry.com give subscribers access to their raw DNA data and permit chromosome browsing, rather than relying on the twitching, dancing leaves to do everyone's research for them.  (I gave up years ago on Ancestry correcting indexing mistakes; those corrections won't add to the bottom line, so Ancestry has no interest in putting out money for them.  I'm happy it shares the "alternative readings" that people submit.)

I don't think I'm being greedy, Genea-Santa.  Most of my wishes are for things that other people will benefit from.  If you'd really like cookies this year, I promise to get some for you.  And last year's offer of brandy or wine instead of milk is still good.  Or maybe you like a good Port?

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Dear Genea-Santa Letter

It's been a long, long time since I wrote a letter to Santa Claus, but I can get into the spirit of things with Randy Seaver tonight for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

1) Write your Genea-Santa letter. Have you been a good genealogy girl or boy? What genealogy-oriented items are on your Christmas wish list? They could be family history items, technology items, or things that you want to pursue in your ancestral quest.

2) Tell us about them in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google Stream post.

Here are my wishes:

Dear Genea-Santa,

I think I've been a pretty good genealogy girl this year.  I've done lots of volunteer work for several genealogy organizations, serving on boards and editing four different publications.  I've managed to keep up with my blog, posting between two and three times a week.  I've paid attention to my education, attending two conferences, four all-day seminars, and about 50 Webinars, and I spoke to several societies myself.  I even managed to do some research on my own family and have added quite a bit of information to my database.  I have genealogy on the brain day and night.

This year's gifts were welcome:  I was able to organize a small reunion of Sellers family members to celebrate two milestone birthdays.  I traveled to Cuba looking for information on my cousins who used to live there, and I've found and made contact with several cousins on both sides of my family.

I do have some wishes for next year, though.  These are things I would love to see in genealogy (and yes, I'm dreaming big):

•  I want to help my 90-year-old aunt find and make contact with Raymond Lawrence Sellers, the son she gave up for adoption 70 years ago.  We've already made progress:  The state of New Jersey found an index card confirming the adoption.  My aunt has signed and mailed in the paperwork that authorizes contact if the boy who was born Raymond Lawrence Sellers on September 23, 1945 should contact the New Jersey State Adoption Registry.  She's also doing a DNA test so we'll have another avenue to search.  It would mean so much to her if she could talk to him, so I'm really hoping for this one.  It's the most important item on my list.

• I hope we are able to resolve the question of just who the father of my paternal grandfather was, and whether he was also the father of my grandfather's siblings.  I've grown up my entire life as a Sellers, so it's been a bit of a surprise to discover that might not be my bloodline after all.  But I'm keeping an open mind and am waiting to see what evidence I can find either way.  One of those new cousins I contacted agreed to do a Y-DNA test, so the first step will be to see if it matches my father's.  Considering the latest family rumors I've been told, I might need to do a little bit more testing even after that, but it's a start!

• My brother and I decided we'd test the waters for Ukrainian research on our Gorodetsky line.  It would be really nice if the researcher there could find lots of great records for our family (and if somewhere in those records there were confirmation that the Kardishes really are cousins, that would be icing on the cake).

• A discovery of heretofore unknown surviving Jewish records from the former Grodno gubernia would be fantastic.  If some of my relatives were mentioned in them, so much the better.

• Moving out of the personal realm, I'd love it if optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of old newspapers could somehow become more accurate and reliable.  Maybe someone will come up with a way for computers to assess poor-quality spots on newspaper pages (torn, ink blobs, type dropped out) and try logical infilling, rather than merely scanning them as is and having something that looks like a bunch of control characters come out as the search text.

• I hope the fact that Ancestry.com has announced it will be dropping Family Tree Maker will help people figure out that they shouldn't be relying on Ancestry (or any other online site) to store and manage their family trees, but that they should have them resident on their personal computers, where they can control all the information.  I certainly won't trust a huge corporation run by faceless investors with all my family information.

• And I'm with Randy in wishing that Ancestry.com will give subscribers access to the raw DNA data and permit chromosome browsing, rather than relying on the twitching, spastic leaves to do everyone's research for them.  (I've given up on Ancestry correcting its indexing mistakes; I figured it was a huge victory when it finally conceded it would at least post the "alternative readings" that people submitted.)

I hope I don't sound too greedy, Genea-Santa.   A lot of my wishes are good for other people also.  I don't usually have cookies in the house, but I can promise you some fresh fruit and dark chocolate.  And if you would like some wine or brandy instead of a glass of milk, we can probably arrange for that too.

FGS and RootsTech: Thursday and Friday

On Thursday, the RootsTech part of the joint conference with FGS began.  This meant that the exhibitor hall opened!  I was ready and waiting at the entrance for the 10:00 a.m. opening because I wanted to go straight to the E-Z Photo Scan booth.  There had been lots of announcements prior to the conference about their free scanning opportunity, with the company having a goal of 100,000 photographs preserved the course of the conference.  The purpose of the promotion was to show off the capabilities of the Kodak Picture Saver Scanning System (I think I was using the PS50).  I have to say, I was extremely impressed.  Arnold Hutagalung, one of the company reps at the booth, was very helpful.  He showed me how to get started, and it was pretty smooth sailing.  I scanned almost 350 photos in half an hour!  That's all it took!  It took a little while longer to copy the files to my flash drive, and I was done.  I can't afford one of these, but I was told that a big focus of the company's marketing is FamilySearch Centers and Libraries.  I'm hoping we'll get one in Oakland.

After I retrieved my flash drive, I ran off to the far reaches of the Salt Palace for more FGS learnin'.  The outstanding session of the day was Craig Scott's talk on Civil War medical records.  When I wrote about my great-great-grandfather Cornelius Godshalk Sellers, I mentioned that he had been in the hospital twice, and I'm very interested in finding more records related to those incidents.  Craig started off his talk by warning everyone that if they would be uncomfortable seeing information about STD's, they shouldn't go anywhere near Civil War medical records.  Apparently STD's were the leading cause of men needing to go to the hospital during the war.  Craig mentioned that even George Armstrong Custer (then only a lieutenant) was treated for gonorrhea!  Craig explained things such as the levels of care men might have received, which records might mention medical information, the top two medical reasons for which men received pensions (diarrhea and dysentery), and several of the National Archives Record Groups in which records might be found.  I felt inspired, but now I need to go to Washington to do research!

The other great talk of the day was by Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist, who spoke about federal court records and how they can be useful in family history research.  (This was scheduled as a RootsTech session, though the only discernible "tech" connection I could find was the seven URL's she listed in her resource list.)  This was the first time I have heard Judy in person, and it was fun.  She discussed which types of cases could be heard in federal courts (and which couldn't), where records are held (almost nothing is online), and who might appear in records.  Beyond the expected plaintiffs, defendants, and judges, maybe you have a relative who was a court officer, investigator, attorney, witness, juror, bondsman, or someone in Customs, the Treasury, or the FBI?  Judy also talked about how you could follow people or an issue through a case and showed some interesting examples.  One man was prosecuted for running a still, and the file had lovely photographs of the still, from several different angles no less.  An inheritance dispute between some family members (which went through the federal court because it involved people in one state and land in a second state) included photographs from childhood to old age of the deceased man who had bequeathed the land, and fantastic family information about who was related to whom and questions of the paternity of a putative grandchild.  The cases she chose to showcase issues were on polygamy in the Utah Territory, and the famous Dred Scott case.  The decisions in those cases had lasting effects and are obviously relevant to families affected by them.

The best talk I attended on Friday was also by Judy, this one on justices of the peace.  After pointing out that, while originally the position was held almost exclusively by men of high social standing, not-so-prominent men could be JP's, Judy gave several examples of historical JP's, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.  A couple of unexpected justices were Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones (no, not about the genealogist), and the famed Judge Roy Bean.  We heard about the first known black American JP, Macon Bolling Allen, who was appointed in 1848 in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and the first female American justice, Esther Hobart Morris, appointed in 1870 in Sweetwater County, Wyoming.  Judy covered the varying responsibilities of JP's, what kinds of records might exist, and tips on finding the records.  Again, most of these are not online.

The other session I found particularly useful on Friday was a computer lab on finding and using online newspapers.  Yes, I know, I am the genealogy newspaper queen of the Bay Area :), but there is always more to learn.  The focus of the class was on telling attendees about large free online newspaper collections.  (They included the Wikipedia newspaper archive page I contribute to regularly.)  A short slide presentation showed the basic process of how newspapers are digitized.  Then everyone was instructed to go to the Indiana Digital Historic Newspaper Program site, create an account, and sign in.  After that we were told to do a basic search. None of that is too exciting, right?  The useful part was when the presenters explained in detail how the system to correct mistakes in the OCR worked.  This correction system is valid in almost all Veridian newspaper databases, so I tried it with the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which I use as an example in several of my newspaper talks, so I know of some specific mistakes there.  It was interesting to see the search results change after making a correction.  The search engine no longer finds the incorrect word, but when you search for the corrected text, the results still display the incorrect OCR reading.  I'm going to be adding this to my talks.

Other cool things on Friday were scanning another batch of photos at E-Z Photo Scan (thanks again, Arnold!), meeting Eric and Karen Stroschein of the Northwest Genealogy Conference (where I am scheduled to be a speaker), doing a group photo of California Genealogical Society members here at the conference, helping at the Association of Professional Genealogists booth during lunch, getting my photo taken with Randy Seaver (because I won my RootsTech registration through his contest), and talking with Schelly Talalay Dardashti, Thomas MacEntee, and Dear Myrtle.  The only real downer was the people at the GenealogyWallCharts.com booth.  They paid to have a promotional card inserted in the registration packets, saying that there would be free blank charts and free black and white charts available.  It seems that they didn't plan adequately for the number of attendees, whether ones asking for the promised charts or printing out color charts at the booth, and the booth people got grumpy and snappish and told me there weren't going to be any more free charts.  Sorry, guys, not a good impression to make on a (former) potential customer.

The other negative was that FGS' position as red-headed stepchild meant that less attention was given to that end of the conference hall.  Not only did the containers of ice water run out and were not refilled, even the attention to maintaining the women's room was minimal, and trash overflows were common.

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My other comments about the conference are here for Tuesday and Wednesday, and here for Saturday and my overall impressions.

IAJGS Conference Wrap-up: Days 5 and 6 (only a little delayed)

As always, I had the best of intentions.  I was going to work on this post while I was waiting in the airport to return to California on Friday, and it would be all finished by the time I got back, so all I would need to do is upload it.  But apparently I looked suspicious when I was going through security at the airport, and I got the full-blown, take-you-to-the-side-room inspection.  They kept me so long I was in danger of being late for boarding my plane.  And when I did arrive, I was sucked back into my regular schedule immediately.  But there were some pretty good sessions (and no duds!) the last two days of the IAJGS conference, and I wanted to share the information.

The most interesting session for me from the final two days was the presentation on Newspapers.com (but then again, I am the newspaper queen).  I have had some real frustration working on this site, so I was hoping there would be good information.  The speaker, Peter Drinkwater (who mentioned that he used to work for Footnote.com before it was bought by Ancestry), did a thorough job of going through the entire site, showing ways to search, options that are available, and generally explaining things very clearly.  Newspapers that are on Ancestry were brought over to Newspapers.com, but they will also stay on Ancestry.  Newspapers.com has added many more papers and has some larger newspapers, such as Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, albeit only for the years 1922 and earlier (the public domain years), but that makes the site a more approachable option then the ProQuest databases, which are institutional subscriptions only.  While most of the newspapers are from the United States, a smattering of papers are from Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Panama.  The newspapers on the site are scanned with OCR; Drinkwater did a good job of explaining how that works and the fact that the search database is just a big bunch of words.  One nice thing about the site is that you can register directly for a free account, with no need to give them a credit card number for a trial and then cancel.  Registering gives you better search results than if you search without signing in.  Another feature is that if you do have a subscription and later cancel/don't renew it, any clippings you have saved to your profile are still accessible.  Drinkwater invited attendees to submit suggestions of newspapers that the site could add and mentioned that they prefer to work with microfilm rather than printed newspapers, the latter being much more expensive to image digitally.  One think Drinkwater couldn't explain, however, was the decision to use so much space on the site to show the top half of a random issue of each newspaper in the list of newspapers available.  (As a side note, one of the attendees was someone who also does presentations on newspapers, though less focused on teaching others how to use them effectively; she mostly talks about her own family stories.  She made snide remarks throughout the presentation.  Near the end she commented about getting too many "false positives" when she did her searches, but amazingly enough Drinkwater was not able to replicate those results when he used her search term.)

We had a two-fer on Thursday and Friday.  Oleksiy and Nadia Lipes, a husband-and-wife research team from Ukraine, gave presentations on the types of Jewish genealogical records available in Ukrainian archives and on how documentation of Ukrainian pogroms that occurred between 1917–1921 can be used in genealogical research.  Some of the document types they showed examples of in the first session were metrical and rabbinical records, business reports, Soviet registration documents, census/revision lists, householder lists, tax books, refugee letters, passports, and notarial documents, and several types of documents related to pogroms in the second session.  So the good news is that lots of documents of many different types are available.  The bad news is that most of these are not indexed, so any research can take a long time.  But there is a wealth of information in the archives.

Other speakers I heard were Joel Spector, who showed the growth of the Jewish population in Russia by analyzing data through the 1897 census; Rony Golan, who talked about how to communicate better with Israeli researchers and relatives (in great measure to help promote next year's IAJGS meeting in Jerusalem); and Mike Karsen, who volunteered to help a friend tie up a loose end in his family research and ended up spending several few months tracking a woman acquitted in a Chicago murder trial across the country and through several marriages.

Oh, yeah, and my talk on searching for maiden names was on Friday morning. :)  I was pleasantly surprised that I had about 40 people attend my presentation.  I figured between my talk being in the last time slot on the last day of the conference, and the scheduled tour of Ancestry.com happening at the same time, I was going to have half a dozen people show up.  But everything went well, attendees asked some good questions, and someone suggested an excellent resource I'll add to the presentation the next time I give it.  So it was a great finale for the conference.

I don't think I'll be able to go to next year's conference, unfortunately; it's probably a little more than I can afford.  I hope everyone who attends has a great time, though.  I'm thinking ahead to 2016, when the conference will be in Seattle.  That's just up the West Coast from me!

Earlier commentaries on the conference:
Days 1 and 2
Days 3 and 4

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 ....

IAJGS Conference, Boston - Day 1

Today was the first day of the 2013 IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy.  I haven't been to Boston in about seven years, and it's a great city, so just being here is part of the fun.  I've even started to remember my way around.  I've already seen many people I know -- Schelly Dardashti, Banai Lynn Feldstein, Ava Cohn, Kahlile Mehr, Gary Mokotoff, Eileen Polakoff -- including several from the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogy Society at home -- Rosanne Leeson, Lynn Rhodes, Jeff Lewy, Sita Likuski, Judy Baston, Vivian Kahn (definitely more of us than I thought were coming!).  And that is part of what makes these conferences enjoyable -- networking and seeing people in person.

The main reason to come, though, really is the opportunity to attend lots of lectures and soak up information.  I got a good start on that today.  A couple of the sessions I attended were kind of duds, where the handout told you pretty much everything that the speaker had to say, but at most of them I came away with new knowledge.  Ava Cohn, AKA Sherlock Cohn, talked about analyzing photographs.  She emphasized thinking about the four people involved in a photo (the photographer, the subject, the person who kept the photo, and the genealogist who is mining it for clues) and looking at details in the photo that can help you pinpoint a time, place, or other tidbit that could open the door to new revelations.  Gladys Friedman Paulin discussed U.S. ports of entry other than Ellis Island.  Some of the important points were what made a good port of entry, which ports were officially recognized by the immigration service, the primary ethnic groups that came through several ports and what factors contributed to that, and which ports have surviving records other than federal ones.  And I finally got to hear Judy Baston's talk about using the American Jewish Yearbook for genealogical research.  Not only did the yearbooks include officers of local organizations such as landsmanshaftn, charitable organizations, and educational societies; obituaries and necrologies; lists of subscribers; Jewish members of the armed forces; international information; and more, all of the yearbooks have been digitzed and are online and freely available.

The highlight of the day was the keynote speech by Aaron Lansky, the founder of the Yiddish Book Center.  I'm sure many of the stories he told are in his book Outwitting History (which I forgot to bring my copy to have him sign!), but he is an entertaining speaker and great storyteller. Besides hearing about the amazing story of the Yiddish Book Center and all the books that have been saved, some of the most fascinating information was about what more is expected to come in the future.  Around 11,000 of the books have been digitized and are available online.  Yiddish voice recordings that were recovered from the Jewish Public Library in Montreal are also being digitized and placed online.  Thanks to a "computational linguist" from the Pyrenees (who is really a rocket scientist), it is likely that soon OCR scanning of Yiddish will be possible.  And Lansky said that within ten years there should be comparable "scanning" of audio files, which will create searchable transcripts.  And to think that not so long ago people were saying that Yiddish was a dead language ....

I'm looking forward to another interesting day tomorrow, unfortunately starting at 8:15 in the morning!  But sleep is overrated, right?

Legislative History of Prince Edward Island Online

A partnership between the Prince Edward Island Public Archives, Government Services Library, and Legislative Assembly and the University of Prince Edward Island's Robertson Library has brought about the digitization and posting online of legislature documents from March 1894 (the beginning of the modern legislature) through 2011.  The Prince Edward Island Legislative Documents Online archive also includes images, sound recordings, and biographies of former legislature members.

Obviously, this is a great resource if you had relatives who served in the legislature.  But there are also gems such as the list of machine operators and others who were paid by the Department of Public Works (and the amounts they were paid) during the fiscal period of September 30, 1911 to December 31, 1912, on page 90 of a report by that department.  The names include Charles Diamond, Joseph A. Gallant, William Folland, Gallant Gideon, Ernest Currie, and S. W. Crabbe (see the image above).  So if you had any relatives who lived in Prince Edward Island, search for their names and see what you find.

Judging from the text displayed in the "snippet" results (e.g., "Gontin ued"), it appears that the records were digitized using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which means letters can be misread if the original document was not in perfect condition.  A report about the online archive mentions that some of the materials were extremely fragile.  If you don't find someone you think should be there, you may need to use creative search techniques.

Ancestry Day San Francisco

Ancestry Day San Francisco went well today.  The numbers I heard for registration varied between 900 and 1,000, but counting all the volunteers it had to be least 1,000 attendees total.  Everything seemed to run very smoothly, and the California Genealogical Society had plenty of people around if you needed help.

I did several consultations with attendees who had questions on next steps in their research, I taught one class, and still managed to go to two talks myself, so it was a busy day.  Most of my consultations were on Jewish genealogy, and along with making suggestions for additional research I shared a list of resources for Jewish research in the San Francisco Bay area.  I also tackled questions about German research and a deadbeat husband in Oklahoma.  I think I was able to give everyone good advice on what to do next.

My class went incredibly well.  The ballroom was pretty packed with about 140 people, probably the largest group I've had for my online newspaper talk.  And it was the first time I've used a microphone for the class!  I'm still pretty sure everyone would have been able to hear me (many years of vocal training have taught me how to project my voice very well), but the AV guy convinced me he didn't want to catch any flak, so I gave in.  Several attendees came up at the end to tell me they really enjoyed the talk, including the senior reference librarian from the Oakland Public Library.  That was a particularly special compliment for me, as I respect her opinion very much.

The first class I attended was about Fold3.com, the new, modified verison of Footnote.com since that company was purchased by Ancestry.com.  I picked up quite a bit of useful information.  The most promising was that the acquisitions division is aware of the U.S. Army morning reports in Kansas City and is trying to work out an arrangement with the National Archives to digitize them.  These morning reports aren't exactly a substitute but can help with research where the records are missing due to the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.  These records have not been microfilmed, so currently you must travel to Kansas City to view them.

The speaker told us that the majority of the indexing on Fold3 is done manually, not by OCR scanning, which I think is a good thing.  He also mentioned that the indexing is done overseas, however, but didn't say if any quality control or checking was conducted.  The other interesting tidbit was that I learned what happened to SmallTownPapers on the site.  Apparently the original license was extremely favorable to SmallTownPapers, and they were not willing to renegotiate the terms, so the decision was made to drop the license.  That's a shame, as it was convenient to have that bundled with the Footnote/Fold3 subscription, but it was a logical business decision.  On the other hand, SmallTownPapers is now a free site, but I haven't been able to determine if they're offering the same content they did previously.  If they are offering the same content, and it's free now, then what was the point in Footnote licensing it before?  And if it isn't the same content, what happened to the rest of it?

The second class I took was a mixed bag.  Some of the information I was familiar with, some was new and helpful, but some I knew to be inaccurate.  It's always frustrating when a speaker gives bad information, but it can be more of a problem for beginners, because they tend to have less experience to critically assess that information.  Ah, well, such is life.  I did learn something new, so overall that makes it positive, right?