James Tanner's Blog

Bulking up Spanish Language Records at Record Search

What is the most widely spoken language in the world, outside of

Chinese? Well, it depends on how and who you count as a native language

speaker. On any list of top languages, Spanish is either number two

behind Chinese or very close to the top. Most estimates put the number

of Spanish speakers in the world at around 329 million. There are

estimated to be over 20 million Spanish speakers in the U.S. alone. See

study by the Summer Institute for Linguistics and other… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 28, 2010 at 5:34pm — No Comments

Looking where the light is

Years ago there was a Bazooka Joe comic where Mort was looking around on

the ground under a street light. Bazooka Joe comes up and asks him what

he is looking for. Mort replies that he lost a quarter. "Where did you

lose it?" Over there! "Why are you looking under the light pole? Because

that is where the light is! This last week at the Mesa Regional Family

History Center I ran into this same problem, looking where the light is.

I was helping one of the patrons… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 27, 2010 at 8:48am — No Comments

RSS Feeds and Splogs -- a legal view

Note: I am a lawyer in Arizona but nothing I say here should be taken as

legal advice particularly about any specific legal issue or problem. If

you need legal advice, please consult a lawyer in the jurisdiction

where you live. I haven't been on TV for many years, but when I was, I

was on TV as a lawyer.

In a recent post John Newmark of TransylvanianDutch

raised a… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 22, 2010 at 7:04pm — No Comments

More than a name

In a recent class at the Mesa Regional Family History Center, I had a

class member ask about one of her ancestors. She indicated that they had

been searching for his parents for a number of years. The first

question I asked was the geographic location of where they were looking?

She answered about a county in an Eastern state. I began a search for

the towns in the county as she continued to give me more information. As

the search progressed, she mentioned more than… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 22, 2010 at 8:42am — No Comments

Waiting for the shoe to drop in New FamilySearch

The last major update to New FamilySearch was in March, 2010. Some time

ago there was a Beta version available to users and recently, a second

Beta version was ready for review. The Beta version was pulled from

availability suddenly last week and so those of us watching New

FamilySearch expected a new version of the program to be released. As

expected, the new release became available over the weekend of June

19-20, 2010. (I always try to put the whole date in my… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 21, 2010 at 8:56am — No Comments

Why is Microsoft Office online for free?

I did a Google search on the word "free" and got 7,500,000,000. That is

about two frees for every man, woman and child on the planet. Some

notable free products on the Internet are Adobe Reader, OpenOffice.org,

Google Earth, … Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 20, 2010 at 10:00pm — No Comments

American Memory

If a pedigree chart were compared to the bones of the body of family

history, the flesh and life of the body would be the stories and history

of the people. But have you ever wondered how your ancestors' speech

sounded? Have you ever explored the American

English Dialect Recordings of The Center for Applied Linguistics

Collection in… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 19, 2010 at 8:11pm — No Comments

Random thoughts on FamilySearch

For the past couple of years, I have been closely following developments

made by FamilySearch to a variety of online products, including New

FamilySearch, FamilySearch.org, the FamilySearch Wiki and several other

websites. For most of that time, FamilySearch has facilitated the

observations by making semi-public announcements about its intentions

and by posting explanations of changes on its websites. Most recently,

that whole system of announcements seems to have… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 18, 2010 at 8:52am — No Comments

Microsoft introduces a free online version of Office

You can now create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents online

with Windows

Live. Once you sign up for Microsoft's online service, you can

access Microsoft's SkyDrive for your new documents. The release of these

free… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 16, 2010 at 8:40pm — No Comments

New FamilySearch Beta Test

A recent announcement from FamilySearch began another round of Beta

Testing of the New FamilySearch program. This particular Beta Test was

aimed at three changes to the program. Quoting from the announcement

E-mail:

We need your feedback on the following changes:

· New Discussions feature. This feature allows users to post and respond to discussions about deceased persons in the new FamilySearch. Users

can share and coordinate information they…

Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 14, 2010 at 5:52pm — No Comments

Finding John Tanner

Sometimes all the computer power in the world cannot help you find the

family history records you are looking for. My Great-great-great

grandfather, John Tanner, is a case in point. My research goal was

really to look for John's great-great-grandfather, William Tanner. But

the search for William eventually lead to direct information about John

Tanner's birth, dates that had been passed down for hundreds of years

and had been the subject of a number of books.… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 13, 2010 at 10:36pm — No Comments

Who owns the genealogy? and Why?

In my last post, I addressed the question of who owns the genealogy?

Ownership of the information is an interesting question. As an example,

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) microfilmed the

Swedish Church records. A copy of the original microfilms is in the

Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Another copy went to the

Swedish National Archives. The Archives then "sold" the rights to these

films to Genline.com. Genline then digitized… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 10, 2010 at 8:18am — 1 Comment

Who owns the genealogy?

During the past few posts, I have been examining who owns the genealogy

companies. What I find is a mixture of huge multinational corporations

and family owned businesses. I did have an ulterior motive in examining

the ownership however, I had several larger issues to discuss and needed

to know a little background before I jumped into the controversial

arena. When you realize the diversity of the ownership of the larger

genealogy companies, you can imagine… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 9, 2010 at 8:43am — No Comments

Who owns the genealogy companies? Part Eight

Down the home stretch on who owns the genealogy companies. This time I

look at MyHeritage.com. Another of

the non-U.S. companies, headquartered in "the beautiful village of Bnei

Atarot, near Tel Aviv, Israel, founded by German Templers in 1902 under

the name of Wilhelma." See MyHeritage. Unlike

some of the other genealogy companies I have recently reviewed,

MyHeritage is… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 7, 2010 at 10:29pm — No Comments

Who owns the genealogy companies? Part Seven

Today I consider Genline.com, this is

the second of the bigger online genealogy businesses located outside of

the United States. It has 18,224,911 images consisting of about 36.1

million pages of Swedish Church records. Genline is located in the

Globen area of metropolitan Stockholm, Sweden. Unless you have a direct

interest in Swedish ancestors, it is unlikely that you have ever even

heard of Genline. Quoting from their… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 7, 2010 at 9:18am — No Comments

What is going on with FamilySearch?

In the not too distant past, I had a lot of news to share about

FamilySearch. There were upgrades to New FamilySearch, new additions to

Record Search and whole lot of other things going on. Recently, things

have apparently, at least from the perspective of an outsider, slowed

down considerably. I thought it might be a good idea to take stock and

evaluate each of the more accessible websites from FamilySearch.

First, let's take a look at the parent… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 6, 2010 at 1:48pm — No Comments

A gold mine in Special Collections

After our adventure in finding Kerlin's Well, I took advantage of the

fact that we were already in Northern Arizona to go to the Northern

Arizona University, Cline Library, Special Collections and Archives

Department. The book with the faded picture of Kerlin's Well was written

by my Great-uncle, George Shepherd Tanner. See Tanner, George S. Henry

Martin Tanner; Joseph City, Arizona Pioneer, Born June 11, 1852, San

Bernardino, California, Died March 21, 1935,… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 4, 2010 at 8:50am — 1 Comment

Last two posts are on Kerlin's Well

In the last post, I told about our trip to Kerlin's Well where my

Great-grandfather carved his name in the rock back in 1877. In the first

picture above you can see the rock and the names. The volcanic rock has

a dark weathered coating over the lighter rock making a perfect surface

for writing names. There are quite few names on the rocks and

surprisingly few modern ones. If you were walking on the plateau above

the canyon, you would not be able to see any portion… Continue

Added by James Tanner on June 3, 2010 at 10:37pm — No Comments

File formats for saving "original" photos -- Part Four

Choosing an image file format for storing original photographs and scans

raises a number of major fundamental issues including most importantly,

the survivability of the format in the long term. The most recent issue

of the Family Tree

magazine has an article on Endangered Sources by Lisa A. Alzo. The article identifies various… Continue

Added by James Tanner on May 29, 2010 at 8:15pm — No Comments

Who owns the genealogy companies? Additional Information

Two items:

First, please notice the links in the sidebar to the individual articles

in each series. I will work at keeping them up to date.

Second:

Ian Tester from findmypast.com left

the following comment:

Just FYI, brightsolid online publishing have also recently acquired the FriendsReunited group, including genesreunited.co.uk which is the number 2 player in the UK market (behind…