All posts by Banai Lynn Feldstein

WDYTYA – 6×02 – Josh Groban – The Nitpicker’s Version

Categories: Genealogy, Genealogy on TV, WDYTYA
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 17 seconds

The second episode of Who Do You think You Are? this season featured Josh Groban.

Starting With The Family

This episode started with a visit with his parents and brother. In his monologue interview, he mentioned that both his parents were only children, so the family tree “just doesn’t come up in conversation”. Sorry Josh, I don’t think that’s how that works. Either someone in the family wants to talk about the family, or someone wants to hear about it. Otherwise, no one talks about their genealogy. Even so, he said his father’s side had a documented tree.

As he was leaving the house, they showed the laptop open on the table, but not what they were doing with it. I guess they saved their first Ancestry commercial for a little later in the episode.

Josh did leave the house carrying a notebook. I always like when we see the celebrity taking their own notes rather than just going where the episode takes them. I spotted that same notebook in several other scenes as well.

Check the Finished Tree First

Josh met with genealogist Kyle Betit at the LA Public Library. Kyle mentioned to Josh that he “used records like wills and deeds and newspapers” to construct the tree. Is this an attempt at WDYTYA to teach how they do the research? I don’t think it was successful.

Looking up his mother’s side of the family, her mother was Dorothy Blumberg. As a Jewish genealogist, obviously this branch sounded more my style. But alas, Dorothy was completely ignored in the episode. A little further back, the tree switched to the female line again, to Zimmerman, which can be Jewish but isn’t always. In this case, it was definitely not Jewish.

And once we get a few generations, the tree goes straight back on the Zimmerman line, showing only the male ancestors on that line. But there are so many more people involved to get to Josh from his 7xgreat-grandfather.

When Was He Born?

Showing the date of “before 1694” for his birth bothered me, especially with the source being a ship list. I haven’t worked in ship lists that far back. Did they not list ages? But then we saw that the source was a compiled book, not the ship list itself, and the children were not even listed individually. So, while they were only showing research up to a point, with the unknown birth date, they’d really already gone past that just to find a mention of his arrival where he’s not specifically mentioned.

They actually showed two different paragraphs from the book. Josh was reading from one, and they flashed to a completely different part in the middle of the scene.

Josh’s ability to pronounce the location names in German was also surprising.

Off To Germany

In Stuttgart at the Wurttemberg State Archive, Josh met archivist Prof. Dr. Peter Ruckert. Again, it’s kind of remarkable that Josh could read some of the old handwriting. I work with this stuff reasonably often and I have a hard time reading it. Were some of those names and dates pointed out to him or did he really find them on his own?

Back To School

At the University of Tubingen, he met head archivist Beate Martin. This was where Josh learned that his ancestor not only studied theology, but also taught music. No wonder the episode focused on this ancestor.

Soon, Josh learned his ancestor was writing books about astronomy.

To Church

Off to Bietigheim, Josh headed for the church where his ancestor was a deacon. Historian Dr. Jonathan Clark had a few more records. Josh was already anticipating that something had to happen to make him leave Germany, and the first document, a letter written by his ancestor, was the first clue.

With the book where he used a pen name, he seemed to believe that the church would fall. It seemed odd that he would want to keep his job with the church anyway. “He was crazy,” Josh determined.

Then The Church Archive

He met with historian Dr. Jan Stievermann at the Archive of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Josh’s first question was exactly what I was thinking — why would he want to stay with the church with what his beliefs had become?

Interestingly, the year he prophecized about the churches falling was the year he died. Maybe he was reading the stars wrong?

 Conclusion

We saw some interesting documents in this episode. Normally, genealogy is done with censuses and vital records first, then we try to find more information in between those events. In this show, we saw a single marriage record, then many other types of documents including school records, letters, and books authored by the ancestor. I wish I had access to those kinds of records for my ancestors.

Except for the skipping of so many generations at the beginning, I liked that the story followed Josh’s ancestor who was a musician. I wonder how much time they spent on everyone else in the family in order to find that one musician in his ancestry.

The URL of this post is: http://idogenealogy.com/2015/03/29/wdytya-6×02/.

WDYTYA – 6×01 – Julie Chen – The Nitpicker’s Version

Categories: Genealogy, Genealogy on TV, WDYTYA
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 32 seconds
7 Comments

It’s time for another season of Who Do You Think You Are? and this time, the season didn’t begin during an IAJGS conference, which means, I have a chance to keep up.

The season began with Julie Chen.

They Always Start with Ancestry

Instead of visiting and talking with family on screen, her mother and sister put the family tree on Ancestry and Julie visited that. She focused on her grandfather, Lou Gaw Tong, and noticed that he had six wives, with one completely unknown. That part of his history was never revisited in the rest of the episode. It makes me wonder why they focused on it at the beginning.

Was this their way of saying that you don’t always find the specific family history answers you’re looking for without actually saying that, but just forgetting about it?

Off to Asia

With both of her parents US immigrants, Julie immediately headed to Singapore, where her grandfather died. Meeting the first historian, she walked in completely empty-handed. I was starting to like watching the celebrities carrying around their notebooks.

Upon finding the Chinese language obituary, Julie quickly admitted that she can’t read and write Chinese, but earlier said that Mandarin was her first language. So she learned to speak but not read or write? They didn’t say. She had a translator throughout the episode, but she did speak in Chinese sometimes. Maybe she was just out of practice?

Julie became fixated on the “improper childhood” mentioned in the obituary for her grandfather and asked everyone else about it in the episode. Maybe it was at this time that she forgot about the six wives that interested her before.

Her next documents presented a bit of history that World War II began in China in 1937 after the Japanese invaded. At this point, they did their only history lesson sidebar for the whole episode. I think this episode could have used more. I can’t be the only person who knows nothing about Chinese history or culture.

To The Ancestral Home, in China

Julie was able to visit the Anshan School, which her grandfather and his brother were the founders of in 1937. She then met her cousin, who lived in the same house that her grandfather had.

After the commercial break, the camera panned back to Julie’s cousin, who was subtitled as a “distant cousin”. I didn’t realize a first cousin once removed was considered distant. I don’t consider my second cousins to be very distant, but I am a genealogist.

Another Archive

At the Anxi County Records Office, Julie got to see the Anxi Gazetteer. At the school, she read from the Anxi County Gazetteer. Were those different books? They had different information.

Visiting the Gravesite

I think this episode had the most unusual gravesite visit, which required a hike to a solitary grave. Again, there were Chinese rituals involved that I didn’t feel like they explained. Also, they hiked with more of her relatives but they showed no interaction between them and her. Is that a Chinese cultural thing or did they just not show it?

I felt like they should have explained the location better, or at least sooner. Luckily Julie asked and we learned something about why it was there. Also, how is anyone supposed to know who’s buried somewhere if they put a different name on the stone? How often does a group of people hike up to the site and follow those rituals? Did they pick up all those little pieces of paper from the ground before leaving?

Final Thoughts

This episode was the most foreign to me of the series. I could have gone for more of those history lessons since it only had one. I’d also like more of the cultural stuff to be explained, but they skipped over that too.

It seemed to me like Julie had no interest in meeting her cousins, since she did meet a few. I hope that it just didn’t make it into the episode. How can someone not be excited to meet a cousin they never knew existed? I’ve met plenty and, as a matter of fact, I’m going to meet some new ones this week.

The URL of this post is http://idogenealogy.com/2015/03/15/wdytya-6×01/.

Internationalization in PHP (in Windows)

Categories: Web Site Development
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 37 seconds

I have been working on a web site, written in PHP, that will need a translation. In programming, this is Internationalization, or I18N. I could easily write something that would check for the language variable and provide the alternate translation, but I wanted to do it correctly.

Yeah, I know, silly me, wanting to do something a little more complicated and using Windows for the development machine.

I decided to use gettext, because it seemed easy and it’s what WordPress uses, so I’d be more familiar with it when I get to it on a blog.

After fighting with it for a while and doing everything right but getting no results, I uploaded it to the server to test it out… and it worked perfectly.

The problem is that gettext doesn’t work in Windows. Sure, it seems to work, but setting the localization doesn’t work and there doesn’t seem to be any alternative way to set the localization to make use of the translations… so no way to actually see the translated text while in development in Windows. And I want to see it working.

I spent hours over two days searching the Internet for answers. So many answers… none ever worked.

Until I found this page: http://www.extradrm.com/blog/?p=1035

Thank you nameless person for finally providing a correct answer. And the correct answer is that the setlocale function of PHP does not work in Windows. Period.

But thanks to Danilo Segan, there is an alternate version of gettext that actually works in Windows, and that’s over here (https://launchpad.net/php-gettext/+download).

Now I can move forward with programming the project.

And I’m putting this blog post out here so that maybe the next person who goes searching all over the Internet for a solution will find this post and not waste as much time as me trying every which type of code and finding that none of them works.

A Memory, Because of Leonard Nimoy

Categories: Memory Monday, Random Musings
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 49 seconds
1 Comment
Leonard Nimoy at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention 2011. Photo by Beth Madison, found on Wikimedia Commons.
Leonard Nimoy at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention 2011. Photo by Beth Madison, via Wikimedia Commons.

I haven’t blogged on the usual themes in a while, but I didn’t want to save this one for Monday.

With lots of tributes going around the Internet on the day of his death, I just watched a video of Leonard Nimoy in which he explains where the Vulcan hand salute came from. Here is the video.

Growing up, I watched a lot of TV shows that I don’t remember. I remember which shows, but none of the episode content.

One that stands out is Star Trek which I used to watch with my dad. I had to watch the whole series as an adult to remember any of the episodes, but I know I watched them as a kid.

And then came college, when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out. Well, it actually started when I was 14, but I didn’t watch it until college. At the time, it was playing on several stations, several times per day. While flipping channels, I saw something just before a commercial break and I had to know what happened next. I was immediately hooked.

I didn’t watch sooner because Dad was loyal to the original show. He insisted that Kirk was the only Captain of the Enterprise. (Psst, hey Dad, what about Pike?)

It turns out, however, that we must have watched the pilot, at the very least. As the series finale approached, I had to rent the pilot to be sure I had seen it, as I knew they were closely related. And I remembered that the station was actually an alien, so I had obviously seen it before.

Back in those days, there were lots of smaller Star Trek conventions. A few ran in South Florida and for a few years, I went to all of them that were within a few hours’ driving distance.

At the time, I had a Star Trek themed bumper sticker. I remember it was green and said “My Other Vehicle is a Federation Starship”. I was driving south to Fort Lauderdale for one of the conventions and I noticed another car on the highway with a Star Trek bumper sticker. I passed the car, the car passed me, back and forth a couple of times.

We both pulled off at the same exit, as I expected, and pulled up next to each other at the traffic light. We looked at each other and I smiled and waved.

The guy in the other car waved with a Vulcan salute.

Whoops. I quickly changed finger position before the light turned green.

And I’m pretty the main actor at that conference was Tim Russ who played Tuvok, the Vulcan on Voyager. (Yes, I liked Voyager too.)

One of my favorite tweets today has a genealogy twist to it.

Leonard Nimoy’s Twitter account is retweeting many messages sent out today, but his final tweet…

Thank you Leonard Nimoy for the memories. Live Long and Prosper.

RootsTech 2015 Review

Categories: Conferences, Genealogy, RootsTech
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes, 2 seconds
2 Comments

So I guess this is my annual rant about RootsTech.

The Fun

I had a great time last week. I spent a lot of time in the IAJGS booth with the IAJGS folks. Mark was always there, Marlis, Garri, Michael, Barbara, and Emily were around a lot. I finally met Debbie in person. Schelly and Pamela came over many times. And I shudder to think I’m missing someone who I saw a lot of. Of course Daniel was in his own booth, but I saw him quite a bit too. I went out to eat with some of them and many others not listed here, sometimes in large groups, every day. I really enjoy the company of these people, who I usually only see once a year, and RootsTech gives me a second opportunity now to see a bunch of them.

I enjoy saying hello and chatting a bit with some of the other bloggers and Twitterers as I see them. The media center was on the opposite side of the expo hall from my booth, so it was a trek to get over there. I talk to random people who I just happen to be sitting next to sometimes, and obviously the ones who come to the booth.

Some of my local Utah JGS folks came around, some more than others, like Beth, Marelynn, Rochelle, Gary, and Barry.

It was fun.

The Conference

But then there’s the conference. It’s not supposed to be just a social event. It’s supposed to be educational, and as it started but has since left behind, all about genealogy and technology. That’s not genealogy or technology, but genealogy and technology. It’s a big difference. And ironically, RootsTech has forgotten it’s roots.

How Many Sessions?

When signing up, I noticed that RootsTech claimed to include 200+ sessions. The web site listed 128. I was told later that there were more sessions not listed on the web site. Why not? Are they not technologically capable of including all the sessions in the schedule? They included FGS on their site. How would I know that there are more session and how do I review them to choose what I want to do? I went very carefully through the web site listings to look at the skill levels, but the book received at registration nor the app had those levels listed. So I ended up adding a few sessions after registering only to walk out within minutes because of their simplicity level.

I happened to pop into one session, that was a late addition to my schedule, just as the presenter got to the “who this session is for” part. The options were things like, and I paraphrase, non-coders who are curious about the topic, code-dabblers, programmers who want to know how to explain this to non-techies, etc. And back to the exhibit hall I went in under a minute.

Where’s The Non-Beginner Tech?

Again, the Innovator’s Summit segregated the programmers from the genealogists. It’s a separate ticket that costs more in order to go to sessions focused on creating technology. And very few of those even appealed to me this year. Only three of all the sessions were marked as advanced skill level, two at the Innovator’s Summit and one at RootsTech. What kind of programmers did they attract this year if nothing was advanced? And what is there for genealogy tech users who aren’t total beginners at using computers?

The one session I went to on Wednesday had no tech in it at all. It was supposed to be about what was needed in genealogy technology. I recall something similar last year or the previous one too. I admit that I didn’t stay for the whole thing, but while I was there, it was droning about… work flows? I don’t even know. So I still don’t know what other people think needs to be programmed. I guess they won’t be getting it from me.

There are plenty of beginner level tech courses in genealogy in webinars, at society meetings, at other conferences. Why do we need them at RootsTech now? So many sessions had titles that sounded interesting and only got rejected by me for their beginner level tech skill listing.

Where Is The Tech?

And then there were the sessions that had absolutely nothing to do with technology, save for the fact that it is the 21st century and we all use computers to do things. RootsTech included two sessions on Jewish genealogy, both presented by friends of mine. Even those friends admitted there was nothing tech about their lectures. So what were they doing at RootsTech? They should have been at FGS. And there were a plethora of other sessions about genealogy that had nothing to do with tech. French, Irish, and Italian were included, as I recall, among others. The only tech in any of those sessions was when they admitted they were simply teaching how to use a single web site.

Where’s The Streaming?

For the first time in RootsTech history, one of the keynotes was not live streamed. Did they tell us this in advance to give people like me a chance to try to get there early enough to see it in person?

No.

The schedule clearly showed they would live stream from 8:30-10am, but they cut off the feed at 8:50 after the initial speaker. And it wasn’t a technical glitch, it was deliberate.

So what did the Bushes have to do with genealogy and technology? Who knows? Not me. I was livid.

Fifteen minutes after cutting off the stream, the conference Twitter account finally announced the stream would return at 10:30. Nice timing. At least they were on the ball that night, being very clear that the next day’s keynote would be streamed in full, but only after I asked. I guess everyone’s angry tweets wasn’t enough for them to volunteer that information.

Sessions I Stayed For

I did go to a few sessions where I didn’t leave immediately. I listened to one person with OCD tell me how to organize my files and some other things… the way I already do because I have OCD. So that didn’t help me. The RPAC session just informed me that everyone else in the room was on the same page as me. It was interesting, but not educational. Another session posed a question in its description but never answered it. I waited it out and didn’t learn anything except the thought processes that one company used to develop their own product, without sharing the actual solutions.

Non-Innovation In The Challenge

I’m not entirely sure what the Innovator’s Challenge is for anymore. They’ve reversed the original rules, which was to program something new. Now they want something that is ready to launch. So instead of programmers beginning a new project, they have to be finishing it.

So third place was GenMarketplace. How is that innovative? There are several genealogy marketplaces now, including one that’s been around since 2008 that I use regularly. The intro video on their site begins with presenting a listing of what documents are missing from your genealogy, but I could find nothing on their site that analyzes your database to find what’s missing. It’s just a rent-a-genealogist site and it devalues the skill or even just the time needed to do anything by starting the jobs at 10 cents.

Second place was ArgusSearch. Their site gets very technical with the description and skimming the content doesn’t explain it. Are they indexing and searching handwritten records? And that wasn’t the winner?

No, the winner was StoryWorth, a site that emails a question then either receives an email answer or records a phone call. Seriously. This is what FamilySearch thought was the most innovative entry. Recording a phone call. As someone else was tweeting, I don’t think innovation means what they think it means.

Next Year

I’m sure I’ll be in the IAJGS booth again next year. I see no reason why we would stop having the booth. I’m sure I’ll enjoy my time and socializing with the folks who come to town. I doubt I’ll register for RootsTech though. I almost didn’t this year and should not have bothered.

I will probably enter the Innovator’s Challenge with something I started working on last month. It won’t win because it’s not mainstream enough for everyone to use it, but it’s for genealogy and it will be more polished after I’ve worked on it for a year. I may even submit some papers again, but not expect to be accepted, as usual. I’ll probably send in something that’s too techie for them.

Conclusion

I go to IAJGS conferences to socialize, sometimes learn new things, attend SIG and BOF meetings to meet other people in the field and with the same interests, present my own sessions, and to network myself to promote my business. IAJGS stays on topic and everything is related to Jewish genealogy.

So thank you FamilySearch for bringing this conference year after year, which brings some of my non-Utah friends to Utah so I can see them just a little more often. But you’re not giving me any new knowledge about genealogy or technology. There are no meetings of like-minded people, outside of the dinners I attend outside of the schedule. You have so far rejected all of my papers to speak. I promote my society rather than my business. And you definitely don’t stay on topic of technology in genealogy.

RootsTech is just a social gathering for me. And a week when the FHL is too busy to get any work done. If it wasn’t local, I wouldn’t bother at all.

Don’t Believe Everything You See On TV

Categories: Genealogy, Genealogy on TV
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 40 seconds

I’m watching Genealogy Roadshow online since I missed it on TV. Every now and then, I try to look up the documents they have found, or the ones they skipped over.

The New Orleans episode followed the story of Charles Montaldo, who the family thought had gone to Alaska.

They showed him in the 1880 census in New Orleans, with wife Bridget and children, and I was able to find the listing easily.

The family believed he went to Alaska, but the researchers were certain he wasn’t in Alaska.

Instead, he went to Sacramento in 1880. Next they found him in Albuquerque in 1882. The next record was the 1910 census, with a different wife, Ida, allegedly married for 20 years, in Reno. They then found an article that he died in 1910.

The thing is, the 1880 census said he was born in Tennessee and his parents were born in Louisiana. The 1910 said he was born in Kentucky, father born in Italy, mother born in Louisiana. Are they sure it’s the same person?*

But what happened to the 1900 census that they skipped over? Searching online, I found only three listings for Charles Montaldo. Two were in Louisiana, one was clearly his son, the other did not match his age.

The third? Nome, Alaska.

Charles.Montaldo.Alaska.0

Charles.Montaldo.Alaska.1

No other details are listed for him beyond his name, but it is the only possibility that presented itself and matches the family’s story. It’s an unusual census page that appears to have just copied a ship list, clearly stating in the address column “Passenger List” for the steamer Aberdeen of Seattle. The column immediately after his name is for “Date of Locating in Alaska”, which says June 1900. The date of enumeration was 12 June 1900.

* Trying to find this census on FamilySearch so I could link to the page (which they don’t seem to have), I came across the 1870 census that says he’s born in Kentucky. So there’s that, to go with the 1910 census find from the show. Did those borders move or was he from near the border?

NaNoWriMo Follow-Up

Categories: Genealogy, NaNoWriMo
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 4 seconds

Winner-2014-Twitter-ProfileWell, that month went a little differently than I’d planned, but NaNo tends to do that. I am going to call it a smashing success. My final word count is 80885. That means about 40 hours of genealogy organizing. I’m probably a little closer to 50. I certainly didn’t always stop when I hit the hour mark, I sometimes started an hour but didn’t finish so it didn’t count, and I did some other shorter bursts of work that didn’t get counted.

I finished off most of the documents sitting around on my computer, but there are still a few more to go. I am currently churning through emails. I have found some emails that did not get used as sources which I’ve had to add, and I’m being more consistent with the way the others are presented, so I’m going through every single one of them.

Email organizing highlights: I found an email from a cousin asking if we’re related — I had no idea back then but I know now. Others asking about a unique surname, I’m sure they will be related to me when I finish the records for that branch of the family too.

I continued to do some research as I went, finding some records online and scanning others from the FHL. I still have a list of things to scan from film, which of course will lead to doing a little more research. I never got carried away with it this month like I can do, following up on every lead, so that was good.

I did not get to my family newsletters at all. To do those, I need to finish sorting the emails and the Facebook posts, because that’s where the recent news comes from. Since I’m in the middle of one of those, clearly I couldn’t work on this.

I did not do much blogging. I worked on two posts that were already mostly written, but I never came back to finish them up and post them.

I did not do much on my short story writing. For write-ins, I intended to write some fan fic about minions. I wrote two. I wasn’t thinking about it enough to come up with any other story ideas, so I was at a loss for what to do at write-ins. (I wonder if the movie trailer interrupted my train of thought — my stories depended more on an entirely different origin story that was mentioned in a mini movie.) I did some translating once, attended a genealogy webinar during one, but mostly just goofed off.

But even with all the things I did not do, I still did an awful lot. So now, without the support of NaNoWriMo, I need to continue what I’ve been doing and try to get a lot more finished. I won’t need to work in solid hour blocks anymore for my word count, so I may do smaller bits more often. I’m on a roll and I’m feeling really good about how much I’m getting done.

And then soon, hopefully by next year, I can get back to working on projects I haven’t even started. Like my Feldstein one name study. Or the Mularzewicz one name study — in this case, I believe they’re all my relatives. Or going through the Polish Catholic records in search of earlier records about my people. And don’t forget returning to Europe for even more. And getting another project off the ground which has been patiently waiting for my programming attention to get it finished.

I think I’ll get a little more organizing done now before the Last Chance Write-In tonight. Will I add it to my word count? Possibly.

Genealogy for NaNoWriMo

Categories: Genealogy, NaNoWriMo
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 55 seconds

NaNoWriMo 2014November is about to begin and that means National Novel Writing Month. I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo since 2003. In fact, I discovered the event just before moving to Utah and that was my first year. A few years later, I volunteered to be ML, Municipal Liaison, for Salt Lake City. So I’m not just participating, I’m also in charge of organizing for the area.

I win every year. My OCD requires it. Even when my story idea is a failure, I still somehow write 50,000 words in the month, which is the goal of NaNoWriMo.

A few years ago, I tried to make it a genealogy year. I didn’t have a story idea so I decided to get my genealogy books written. It didn’t go well. Yes, I wrote enough words, but I didn’t get the writing done that I wanted to do.

This year, my genealogy goal is different. I’ve already been working on it for a while, but I want to do more faster. I plan to get all of my genealogy organized. My own research always takes a back seat to client work, but it needs to get done. I have files sitting on my computer of records I found years ago that haven’t been added into my database. I still have records that I printed from microfilm that need to be digitized (I usually rescan from the film rather than scanning the paper). I was cleaning up my old sources and putting them into different formats and writing better source citations, and I never finished.

I’ve also fallen horribly behind with my family newsletters. The last couple of years, I’ve gone back and forth about doing one big issue or individual ones for each year. I’ve decided that I’m going to do individual ones, and I plan to get them done in November. Well, I usually take longer than that on a newsletter, so if I can get two of them done, I’m doing good.

I also have a more goofy idea that will hopefully turn into a few short stories, so I have something to do at the write-ins. I can’t really do the genealogy work at those; maybe a little, but not really.

I will have to measure my words differently since there won’t be quite as much typing in my organizing. Being a rebel for NaNoWriMo sometimes means setting a different goal and a unique word counter. Since I can type 85 wpm, that’s over 5,000 words an hour. I will count an uninterrupted hour of organizing work as 2,000 words. Any interruptions will make it count as 1,000. I think that’s fair.

With this word count, dedicating at least one hour per day should work out. I hope to go well over the 50k words by counting this way. At the same time, I still need to get client work done, show up to a lot of write-ins, take care of my house, and do whatever else comes along in a month.

My true goal is to get through all of the records on my computer. This often means doing more research as I’m going, so that takes up even more time. But then I’ll be ready for the next batch of research. I know there’s plenty more for me to do just from the FHL, but I’ve been putting it off with all of this stuff unfinished.

Anyone else writing for NaNoWriMo? I know a lot of other genealogists talk about it. Anyone else ever tried to do genealogy for the month?

What is FamilySearch searching?

Categories: Genealogy
Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 42 seconds
1 Comment

According to FamilySearch, nobody was born in England and Wales between 1888 and 1890.

In an effort to broaden my search for Peter Bernstein, born in England about 1889, I removed one detail after another in the hopes of getting some kind of search result. I was finally fed up and removed everything except the birth year range.

Was nobody born in two countries for three years preceding the census?

If the search algorithm doesn’t use those fields, then maybe it should completely ignore them rather than remove all possible results based on the rest of the information.

On the other hand, when I remove the birth years and get some search results, and FamilySearch tells me to visit the partner site, then FindMyPast tells me:

So, is someone in England scanning it right now so it’ll be there if I try again in 30 minutes?

IAJGS 2014

Categories: Genealogy, IAJGS, SLC 2014
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 32 seconds

IAJGS 2014 is finally over. What a busy time it’s been. As co-chair of the conference, I had a lot of work to do, from overseeing all of my local volunteers in addition to some non-locals, covering for people who didn’t get their job done well, and taking care of a huge job that we didn’t think we’d have to do at all. And most of that took place in the last month.

All in all, the conference went really well. I was impressed by how much some of my local people stepped up. I had already seen some evidence of it, and seen some evidence of problems, but some came through much more than I had expected.

Many people told me how great they thought the conference was going, many thought there were no problems at all. Of course, from behind the scenes, I knew about the problems.

I especially appreciated how many times my co-chair, Hal Bookbinder, and the IAJGS president, Marlis Humphrey, thanked me for all the work I put into it. I’m glad they noticed. That last month before the conference, I got no client work done; too busy with the conference preparations.

I’m not complaining. I was the one who bid on the conference coming to SLC. I volunteered to be co-chair. I put my name on the conference and I had to make sure things were done well. And so I did. I learned a lot about how the IAJGS conference comes about and plenty about where improvements are needed.

I only attended four sessions and I dropped in on a few SIG meetings but never stayed long. Of course, I was in both of my sessions and one that I facilitated. My facilitating job came on Friday. Sadly, the speaker just read her slides, and they had lots of text. She had a great story and it could have been a fantastic presentation, but she skipped past all the genealogy parts of it too quickly, just barely letting us glance at the records she found. I also sat in on Josh Taylor’s session about attracting the younger generation to our societies. It reminded me of things I’ve heard him say before, or I’ve heard elsewhere, or thought of myself, and how much work it will be for me to try to do that without any help from my society members.

I’m really hoping that after all the work they did for this conference, my UJGS members will be willing to step up for our society. So far, they have done little to nothing for the society. But it gets tiring to run a society by yourself, especially after helping to run a whole conference. I hope they aren’t volunteered-out and we can make our society greater than it is. Now that I know they can put in the effort, I really hope they do.

And I look forward to getting back to my normal routine, getting some client work done, blogging more, etc. I have a lot of catching up to do.