Category Archives: Websites

Genealogy Related website, both information and research oriented

Rootsweb.com Now Read-Only

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I have an add on for my blog that tells me when there are broken links.

Suddenly I had 13 broken links, all to Rootsweb.com. The issue is that there were all RSL entries. Clicking them took me to Ancestry.com. Ancestry acquired Rootsweb many years ago.

Somehow I missed the notification that the World Connect feature at Rootsweb that allowed one to upload GEDCOMs would be changing to read-only and accounts would be eliminated. This means that no more GEDCOMs may be uploaded to this website.

Screenshot taken 09 October 2021

The good news is that information that is there can still be searched. The bad news is that links to my RSL entries are broken on the Rootsweb site. Thankfully, I was able to find archives at the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine for all but one surname.

Sadly, one cannot modify those GEDCOMs with corrections. This leads to the issue of does one request that their tree be deleted, or leave it in hopes it is helpful to others?

At the moment, I am not aware of any errors in that data, so I will leave it for now.

Free Holiday Weekends

Most fee-based genealogy sites have free weeks or weekends around different holidays throughout the year.

Memorial Day many sites give free access to their military related records.

It depends on the site which holidays, if any, and which records they grant free access to.

Some sites may require a sign up for their limited free offerings, such as Ancestry.com. This is the one I am most familiar with, but I have received emails from several other services.

I am not paying for access to genealogy data until I can have both the time and the money to make it worthwhile.

If you are not busy with activities with family and friends and have the weekend off, you may find some things that will help you expand your search.

G is for GEDCOM

G

GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. It is a data transmission standard developed by the LDS church, Mormons, for moving data between different genealogy programs.

It is an old standard and not maintained. There are some efforts for an new standard.

The issues with it are that it is not designed to deal with certain types of data or conclusions.

It is helpful in that it is a text file and you can make sense of it by reading it.

The best use of it is for sharing data with other researchers who are researching one or more of your family lines. It is also a good backup. If you backup your database to GEDCOM periodically and have it in a safe place, if your computer dies, you can import it into a new program without data lose. This is in addition to backing up your genealogy program’s native database format.

GEDCOM is also used for the various popular genealogy websites to upload your data to them, and you can download GEDCOMs from them.

Be careful with downloading GEDCOMs from online sources as it is up to you to verify the information in them is accurate. If you merge a gad GEDCOM into your database, you cannot “un-merge” it. This illustrates the importance of frequent and verified backups.

A verified backup is one that you have tested and know that it can be used to restore your data.

Ancestry – Good Resources – Except for Member Trees

I saw this on EOGN.

Ancestry is an Excellent Genealogy Resource, but its Member Trees? Not So Much

 

Writing in The Jersey Journal, Daniel Klein describes his experiences with Ancestry.com’s member-contributed family trees. He describes the problem caused by novice genealogists using information from a reasonably reputable source (The US Census) and applying it to the wrong person. Now other people have accepted this erroneous information as gospel and it perpetuates over and over. You can read Daniel Klein’s article here.

Note Taking and Research Logs With Evernote

Evernote is a very handy program that allows you to store notes online and locally. It autosyncs when there is an internet connection. You can have Evernote on your computer, laptop, tablet, phone, etc. Each device can access all the same notes. If you want, you can also share your Evernote notes with others.

Notes are organized into folders so you can keep different kinds of items separate.

I like having it on my phone for grocery lists and for things like the size of wiper blades and oil and air filters for my car, or the size of the filter for my furnace.

It is also great for use as a genealogical research log to avoid searching the same material more than once, or to plan out a research trip.

The genealogy blog, Moultrie Creek Gazette, has a great article on using Evernote for research logs using the Web Clipper browser extension. I found it thanks to Dick Eastman’s blog EOGN, http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2014/03/has-evernote-made-genealogy-research-logs-obsolete.html.

The Moultrie Creek Gazette has several other articles on using Evernote. I will have to add this to my list of genealogy blogs to follow.

Military Records Free on Ancestry through June 6!

Ancestry.com has made its military records collection available for free until June 6. There is a cool newsreel about the end of WWII in Europe.

This collection covers all U.S. wars, and a wide variety of records. Plan who you want to seek out and you should be able to organize your search to bear fruit. Many of these documents can hold potential clues for breaking down walls. Revolutionary and Civil War pension applications mention spouse and children, so other avenues of research can be opened. Be sure to print out what you find, if you do not become a paid member of Ancestry, so you can refer to it later.

ISBN Lookup on Google

Google has several neat searches. I discoverred last week that one can type weather: followed by the Area Code, and get a four-day weather report.

On a hunch, I tried isbn: and the ISBN number of a book, and got hits specific to that book. For example, isbn: 1556135777, will find all online references to Researcher’s Guide to United States Census Availability, 1789-1910/1920, by Ann B. Hamilton, my late mother.

I have found that Amazon.com has the ISBN number in both a 10 digit and 13 digit format. The 13 digit ISBN number started January 1, 2007, according to Wikipedia. ISBN numbers are regulated to identify the country, publisher and other information about a book. Amazon.com also has its own numbering system, ASIN, for items without an ISBN number.

Any book submitted to the Library of Congress will have an LC Classification or Call Number, and it can be located using the online catalog. The call number has a link to similar call numbers, so one can learn which books on the same surname are also in the Library of Congress.

Google also has Google Book Search. This has a feature to find books in libraries and gives an estimate in miles of the distance to that library from the search location. One can also find out if their ancestor’s names are mentioned in any of the books scanned in this massive Google project.

Having this information makes it easier to find the complete bibliographic source citation for a book or any other published work.

I recommend building up a bibliography of your genealogy library, to simplify future citations. For example, I have one collection for the books my parents published, and another collection of genealogy books by other researchers, etc.

A good bibliography building program makes this easier. I use Zotero, an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It can capture online information, but can also be used offline to edit citations, and import or export them in a variety of styles. Zotero supports citations for a wide variety of publications, and can make copies of images, and attach notes to each source. This makes it easy to create a bibliography for anything you publish.

To stay organized with your genealogy library, update your bibliography data with a new citation for each addition to your library. This will save problems with “What was that source?”, and frantic searches for a book you know you have, just to get the proper citation. In addition, add these new sources to your genealogy program as sources, so they are ready for reference.