James Tanner's Blog – October 2010 Archive (11)

In my recent post about statistics for FamilySearch, a comment by Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings

got me thinking about the statistics and terminology used online by all

of those huge records collections, everybody from FamilySearch to

Ancestry.com to the Library of Congress. One of the most influential

books I have ever read is a small 144 page treatise written in 1954

entitled "How to lie with Statistics." Here is the… Continue

In a recent FamilySearch Blog post on 25 October 2010, DiltsGD offered a list of the top ten genealogical repositories.

There is no doubt that the libraries on the list offer huge

genealogical resources, but the most important question for researchers

is how accessible are the collections? What access is there to the vast

stored material? How much of what the library contains is original

source documentation… Continue

Nearly two thousand contributors averaging about 500 new articles a week

go into the FamilySearch Research Wiki. Now linked and integrated into

the Beta.FamilySearch.org

website, the Wiki is accessed through the "Learn" link on the startup

page. Here is a screen shot showing where the link is located:…



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Early sponsors of the upcoming FamilySearch RootsTech Conference

in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 10th through the 12th, 2011 include

Brigham Young University, the New England Historic Genealogical

Society, Ancestry.com, the National Genealogical Society and the

Federation of Genealogical Societies. The conference with bring together

the resources of three other conferences, the Conference on

Computerized Family… Continue

As soon as I got back from Utah and my visit to FamilySearch, I taught

two classes at the Fall Genealogy Workshop of the Family History Society

of Arizona. The conference seemed very well attended but being at a

genealogy conference raises some issues, including whether or not

attending a genealogy class is more entertainment than education. The

classes I taught were on specific software products and it was

interesting that more than a few of the attendees had… Continue

I have made a number of new Blog posts recently while I am here in Utah for the first ever FamilySearch Bloggers Day. Here are a few of the newer ones:

More to Salt Lake than Family History Library
Feedback and Community Support on the Beta FamilySearch.org
Updated version of FamilySearch Indexing

and a few others

Read more...

We had an interesting occurrence this past week or so. On October 5, I

received an E-mail from the New FamilySearch.org Beta Test Team, as

follows:

Dear Member, We are looking for individuals who can participate in evaluating new.familysearch.org before each quarterly update.

We need individuals with different levels of computer skills, family history backgrounds, languages, and new.familysearch.org experience.

We try…

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I had a very well prepared and attentive group of teenage boys in a

genealogy class recently. They all had a Spanish speaking heritage. They

all came prepared to the class with information about their

grandparents who were born in Mexico. With the new records on

FamilySearch's Record Search, we were able to find some of their family

records right online. As I showed them the records we had found, one of

the boys raised his hand and said, "Mr. Tanner, we can't read… Continue

The very recent additions to the Beta FamilySearch.org website prominently features a search link to "FamilySearch Centers." Here is a screen shot showing the link:…



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There are a number of programs called aggregators. These aggregator

programs do all the work for you of going out onto the Internet and

gathering any changes in posts to websites and blogs. Google Reader and

other similar programs are also known as feed aggregators. They may also

be referred to as feed readers, news readers, or rss readers. (RSS

stands for really simple syndication). Aggregators reduce the effort

needed to check a number of blogs or websites for… Continue

Fun is a serious topic. I would hesitate to even do a Google search on

fun with anything else, there would be so many responses. If our society

was judged by our advertisements, fun would be judged to be one of our

most sought after goals. Here are some of the titles of the hits found

by a search on "fun genealogy." (6,470,000 results)



A just for fun genealogy quiz

Fun stuff for genealogists

Genealogy fun time

Genealogy fun

Some favorite fun… Continue