GenealogyMedia.com

Alphabet Soup for a Monday

I am the web­mas­ter for three genealog­i­cal soci­eties, the North Car­oli­na Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety, the Vir­ginia Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety, and the North Car­oli­na Chap­ter of the APG. I also chair the Tech­nol­o­gy Com­mit­tee of the NGS.

In each of these realms, I find myself empow­ered by open source tech­nol­o­gy, using the LAMP (Lin­ux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) tech­nol­o­gy stack. This is a pow­er­ful suite of free tools that have been devel­oped by vol­un­teers, or in oth­er ways made avail­able for free use. Much of the tech­nol­o­gy involved in these sites is — as is com­mon­ly said, “Free as in ‘Free beer’ and free as in ‘Free speech.’ ”

A key tech­nol­o­gy that I’m using is Joom­la. This is an open source web con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem designed to pro­vide a dynam­ic web­site, chang­ing as con­tent and meta­da­ta is changed in the data­base. It relies on hav­ing LAMP under­neath it, and builds web pages from the files on the Apache Serv­er and the data in the MySQL data­base. While you can have page ele­ments cached if they are fre­quent­ly used, in gen­er­al the pages are deliv­ered by query­ing the data­base when some­one comes to a page, then tak­ing the data and some HTML and styling tem­plates, and assem­bling an HTML page “on the fly.”

I am not the only per­son who uses Joom­la for geneal­o­gy soci­ety web­sites. Among oth­ers, there is the Dal­las Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety, the New Eng­land Chap­ter of the APG, and the Nebras­ka State Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety.

The most recent of the sites that I have put togeth­er is for the Vir­ginia Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety. I launched the VGS beta web­site this morn­ing. There is still a lot more to do with that site, but the look and feel and the core func­tions are avail­able.

In mid Decem­ber, I had updat­ed the method of ship­ping cal­cu­la­tion on both the NCGS site and the VGS site to use the US Postal Ser­vice Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­mer’s Inter­face (API). This allows both sites to pro­vide pric­ing based on what the USPS would actu­al­ly charge to ship, say a book, from one par­tic­u­lar loca­tion to anoth­er. The API takes into con­sid­er­a­tion the weight of the item, whether it is a let­ter or a pack­age, the source and des­ti­na­tion zip codes, etc., then returns a price that the Joom­la site can add han­dling expens­es to, and dis­play to the buy­er.

The share­ware mod­ule to inte­gra­tion the USPS API with Joom­la (from Park­beach Sys­tems) was prob­a­bly the eas­i­est of mod­ules to set up, though it did require a brief call to the USPS to request the accounts be put on the pro­duc­tion serv­er.

This after­noon, a geneal­o­gist who was try­ing to pur­chase one of the books from the North Car­oli­na Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety’s web­site not­ed that they were unable to make a pur­chase. I went over to the site and saw the same symp­toms. I had­n’t changed any­thing since our last order for a ship­ping item (on Decem­ber 31), but I duti­ful­ly spent hours search­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tions for some anom­aly, some tog­gle I had for­got­ten to switch.

Even­tu­al­ly, I need­ed some din­ner and came home to have it. After that break, I came back and start­ed Googling again for USPS API and told Google to sort results based on how recent they were. Up popped a tweet about what was hap­pen­ing, from @floodlight:

USPS decid­ed to update their ship­ping rate API with­out telling any­one. #FAIL http://url.fldweb.com/fyLQ8z

Geneal­o­gy sites, gar­den­ing sites, mom­my-and-me sites, all kinds of web­sites rely on this API, and the USPS decid­ed it was high time that they made sure peo­ple knew that phras­es such as “Pri­or­i­ty Mail” were reg­is­tered trade­marks, so they put the code:

<sup>®</sup>

after every one of their reg­is­tered trade­marks. Since none of the devel­op­ers of inte­gra­tions with the API had account­ed for this, or even knew it was about to hap­pen, and since the USPS API sent the reg­is­tered trade­mark sym­bol as a Uni­code char­ac­ter instead of as HTML com­mands for the char­ac­ter (® or ® or ®) every­one’s USPS inte­gra­tions filled up with junk and failed, some­times in cre­ative ways. Our site sim­ply stopped offer­ing a ship­ping option, though it demand­ed that users choose one …

By the way, the USPS web­site still does not men­tion this issue, though a quick search of the Twit­ter stream will show you it’s still on peo­ple’s minds: http://twitter.com/#!/search/USPS%20API

So, this is how I spent my evening, fret­ting over a prob­lem that did­n’t need to be there in the first place. Folks: Doc­u­ment your APIs, com­mu­ni­cate your pro­posed changes in advance, please.

The good news in all this is that once I real­ized that the API was to blame, and not some mis­con­fig­u­ra­tion of my own doing, I went to the com­pa­ny that pro­vides the API I’m using with Joom­la, and they had already post­ed an updat­ed ver­sion. Both sites are work­ing fine in terms of ship­ping and the USPS ship­ping API.

So now, I can rest. Tomor­row I’m start­ing an Aiki­do class with my step­son, but per­haps I will get more of an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on geneal­o­gy in the evening tomor­row, even with that going on, than I did today. We shall see.

I am not the only geneal­o­gist who has writ­ten a blog entry about goals for the new year.

I thought it might be inter­est­ing to take a quick, and frankly, near­ly ran­dom sur­vey of what oth­er blog­gers and jour­nal­ists have said about their genealog­i­cal plans in the new year, or what your res­o­lu­tions should be …

• Megan Smolenyak writes pas­sion­ate­ly in the Huff­in­g­ton Post about why geneal­o­gists should vol­un­teer to help the Unclaimed Per­sons project. Indeed, the group does impor­tant work, find­ing the fam­i­lies of unclaimed per­sons, and let­ting the author­i­ties dis­creet­ly inform fam­i­ly mem­bers and allow many of them to come to some kind of peace.
• Lisa Alzo writes “Eleven for ’11,” a blog entry about the 11 genealog­i­cal goals she has for the year.
• Emi­ly Baute of the Pub­lic Library of Cincin­nati and Hamil­ton Coun­ty writes on Cincinnati.com about how the pub­lic library can help make your res­o­lu­tions come true. Num­ber 7 on her list is:

LEARN ABOUT YOUR PAST. High­ly trained staff in the Main Library’s Geneal­o­gy & Local His­to­ry Depart­ment is ready and equipped to help the begin­ner and the advanced researcher find a family’s roots. The depart­ment is one of the largest repos­i­to­ries of genealog­i­cal mate­r­i­al in the nation. More infor­ma­tion is avail­able at http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/main/genlocal.html.

• Megan Toth of the Syos­set Patch in Syos­set, New York lists “Learn Some­thing New” as num­ber 4 on her “New Year, New Res­o­lu­tions” list, and the top item under learn some­thing new is “Learn more about your fam­i­ly’s roots at Geneal­o­gy class­es offered at the Syos­set Pub­lic Library on Wednes­day, Jan. 5 at 7 pm.”
• Julie Cahill Tarr writes an orga­nized and thought­ful piece on what she got accom­plished in 2010, and what she would like to do in terms of geneal­o­gy in 2011. It was espe­cial­ly good to see her talk­ing about help­ing “some­one else with their geneal­o­gy.” She also plans to fin­ish her ProG­en study group and … wait for it … “Stop slack­ing on this blog.”
• Randy Seaver writes a volu­mi­nous list of goals for 2011, while acknowl­edg­ing he did­n’t get every­thing done that he would have liked to in 2010. The list is orga­nized into groups: Research, Data Orga­ni­za­tion, Geneal­o­gy Data­base, Edu­ca­tion, Soci­ety Activ­i­ties, Speak­ing and Teach­ing, Writ­ing, and … final­ly Real Life, where he (or is it his wife on his behalf?) agrees to try to lim­it his geneal­o­gy work to 10 hours a day.

What are your goals for the new year?

I have post­ed a com­plete tran­scrip­tion of Lena John­son Schlite­meier’s “His­to­ry of Swan John­son Fam­i­ly of Nance Coun­ty, Nebras­ka (Jan­u­ary 1936).”

The book exists only in the form of a typed MSS in the hands of the fam­i­ly. There are at least two ver­sions; the tran­scrip­tion is of the most com­plete ver­sion, which was giv­en to me and my moth­er by the author’s son in 1997 as we vis­it­ed his farm is Nehawka, Nebras­ka.

Swan John­son (born Sven Jöns­son in Val­by, Kris­tianstad, Swe­den in 1826) mar­ried Kjer­stin Wescelius in 1853. They had six chil­dren in Swe­den, and then, in 1868, with the youngest child less than 6 months of age, they emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States. They lived first in Chica­go, Illi­nois, lat­er on a farm in Bement, Piatt Coun­ty, Illi­nois, and final­ly cross­ing the prairie to farm in Keatsko­toos and Genoa, Nance Coun­ty, Nebras­ka. This book tells a quite detailed sto­ry of three gen­er­a­tions of this fam­i­ly. The author was the eldest child of the eldest child of Swan and Kjer­stin John­son. Lena John­son attend­ed Nebras­ka Wes­leyan and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, receiv­ing a Ph.B. in Edu­ca­tion from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go and an A.B. from Nebras­ka Wes­leyan. She writes well and clear­ly, and though the doc­u­ment is not sourced, most of what I have been able to val­i­date has been sur­pris­ing­ly accu­rate.

I have been eval­u­at­ing Spring­pad, a note tak­ing tool.

It is not real­ly fair, though, to call it that. Spring­pad is more like a Swiss Army knife for the Inter­net. There’s a lot of util­i­ty in small and ele­gant pack­age.

Spring­pad was built to help you quick­ly grab infor­ma­tion from the web, asso­ciate it with oth­er infor­ma­tion, cre­ate and man­age tasks, and so on. There are spe­cif­ic inte­gra­tions with a dozen or more pop­u­lar ser­vices such as Ama­zon, Apple Trail­ers, IMDB, Flickr, and many oth­ers.

The cre­ators also obvi­ous­ly were think­ing of the iPad specif­i­cal­ly and tablets and smart phones more gen­er­al­ly when they named and designed this prod­uct. The user inter­face on the Android is easy to get around, and there are even big but­tons for some things (such as check­ing off a to-do list item) in the web ver­sion.

Where the appli­ca­tion real­ly shines is in find­ing rel­e­vant snip­pets and web links about cur­rent day loca­tions such as restau­rants, but also muse­ums and brick-and-mor­tar stores. The site then orga­nizes the infor­ma­tion and presents it in a clean list fash­ion, or as pins on a Google map, or on a vir­tu­al cork­board of images and stick­ies.

In your set­tings, you can link to Twit­ter, Yahoo, Gmail and Face­book accounts, as well as get an e‑mail address to mail things to if you have some­thing to add to Spring­pad when you are not on their site. There’s also a quick link to import your Deli­cious links. (When Yahoo’s deci­sion to divest itself of Deli­cious, users of the social book­mark­ing site got up-in-arms about it; soft­ware devel­op­ers at Ever­note, Spring­pad, Pin­board and oth­er sites quick­ly post­ed ways to import links from Deli­cious. Ever­note’s method brings every book­mark into a sin­gle note, which is just lame. Pin­board and Spring­pad were more ori­ent­ed to treat­ing the links as inde­pen­dent items.)

Spring­pad is designed to help you con­trol what you share. You can­not cre­ate fine-grained shar­ing con­trols. Items are either shared with every­one on the Inter­net or they are kept pri­vate. This can be con­trolled at the cat­e­go­ry lev­el (book­marks, restau­rants, prod­ucts, recipes, files, busi­ness­es, albums, wine, and so on) or at the lev­el of the indi­vid­ual item.

For Get­ting Things Done (GTD), Spring­pad pro­vides tasks and task lists, but also check lists, pack­ing lists, alarms, shop­ping lists, events, and mile­stones. This looks like it will be very handy: When you add a recipe that the site rec­og­nizes as such, you are lit­er­al­ly one click away from hav­ing a shop­ping list. Since the site syncs your devices, that list is ready to show up on your smart phone.

Spring­pad for geneal­o­gists is very handy as a pow­er­ful task list orga­niz­er, and as a quick way to gath­er in advance what is around the cour­t­house you will be vis­it­ing (the brew­pub, the golf course, the hotel), but it’s almost painful to see how deep the inte­gra­tion is with sites like Yelp and Epi­cu­ri­ous and real­ize that there is no such prod­uct that delves into archives.gov, Rootsweb, Foot­note, and sim­i­lar sites. We still have to search for items one by one on var­i­ous web­sittes, then man­u­al­ly down­load and cat­a­log each find­ing. It’s only a mat­ter of time before some­one takes this lev­el of usabil­i­ty and applies it to the gath­er­ing and orga­niz­ing of his­tor­i­cal data. When that day comes, the irony is that it may make phys­i­cal repos­i­to­ries more impor­tant to the casu­al researcher, because genealog­i­cal data min­ing will pro­ceed faster.

The end of the year gets us all think­ing about how this year went, what went well, what we could be bet­ter about.

As I look toward 2011, I can say that I have had some great learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in 2010. I expect to have sim­i­lar ones in 2011, and even more so.

In 2010, I did the bulk of the work on the NGS Home Study Course. I should be fin­ish­ing that up soon.

I went to the NGS (Salt Lake City) and FGS (Knoxville) con­fer­ences, and will be attend­ing both con­fer­ences, in Charleston, SC and Spring­field, IL respec­tive­ly, in 2011. While I won’t have an NGS con­fer­ence in Salt Lake, I will have an NGS Board Meet­ing there in Feb­ru­ary, and I hope to get in some research hours while I am there.

I went to Sam­ford in 2010, and plan to do so again in 2011. The mad rush for seats will def­i­nite­ly be on when the course reg­is­tra­tion opens up.

I will con­tin­ue to fol­low the trends in cor­po­rate inter­est in geneal­o­gy (Ances­try, Bright­Sol­id), as well as the mass media view of it (NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”).

Where I plan to focus my atten­tion is in genealog­i­cal research trip plan­ning. I am start­ing to gath­er tasks in Ever­note that I can take with me to Salt Lake, the Nation­al Archives and oth­er repos­i­to­ries. Because of the pow­er­ful search and saved search func­tions, I can search for notes along the lines of:

I will also be tak­ing a look at Spring­pad, which seems like a wor­thy com­peti­tor to Ever­note. It has a very appeal­ing user inter­face, has bet­ter con­trol of shar­ing of items, and some fun-look­ing inte­gra­tions with Ama­zon, GoodReads, Apple Trail­ers, IMDB, Fan­dan­go, Net­flix, and so on. When you add some­thing like a book or movie, Spring­pad sug­gests text and links about that item, pre­pop­u­lat­ing every­thing from links to pur­chase tick­ets, to the full cast list of a movie.

There is also inte­gra­tion with Gmail, Twit­ter, Face­book, and Flickr to help you import con­tent in (Flickr) as well as share it. They are set up to receive your Deli­cious tags, since it’s unclear what the future of that pop­u­lar ser­vice will be …

So, I resolve to keep on keep­ing on. To push for­ward into learn­ing more about method­ol­o­gy, and more about the records, the his­to­ry, and the law in the par­tic­u­lar loca­tions (Nebras­ka, West Vir­ginia, Vir­ginia, Swe­den), where I find myself doing research. And I resolve to keep myself open to new advances in tech­nol­o­gy, includ­ing seem­ing­ly styl­is­tic or usabil­i­ty advances, as the enthu­si­asms I have for tools like Ever­note and Tweet­Deck today, may be replaced by Spring­pad or some­thing else tomor­row. And I resolve to strive to main­tain enough dis­tance from the tech­ni­cal tools to avoid mis­tak­ing the tool for the point, which is progress through a “rea­son­ably exhaus­tive search” to come to an under­stand­ing of genealog­i­cal data, to prac­tice what I call “his­to­ry at ground lev­el.”

Hap­py New Year!

As the year ends, I am both clos­ing out an account at Gen­line (now a sub­sidiary of Ances­try), and try­ing out Arkiv Dig­i­tal.

I have found Gen­line to be frus­trat­ing. Some of this, no doubt has to do with the fact that the fam­i­ly is not the eas­i­est to find, with the parish chang­ing names, as I men­tioned yes­ter­day. Some of it, though, is Gen­line’s inter­face and their images. In Gen­line, you select a län (Coun­ty), one or more parish­es, and one or more church record types. The inter­face is com­plete­ly in Eng­lish on the Mac, so at least you don’t strug­gle with rudi­men­ta­ry vocab­u­lary.

Once you run your search, you receive a list of rel­e­vant pages. Each is marked with a Page Type (Nor­mal Page, Reg­is­ter Start, Cov­er of Book, and so on). There are columns for place names and years, but these area all too often blank. (Imag­ine how quick­ly this would be indexed by year if they had an open com­mu­ni­ty sourc­ing mod­el like that at Foot­note! Gen­line is start­ing to exper­i­ment with allow­ing users to anno­tate the images. I hope they con­tin­ue.) On both sites, many if not most of the pages are dis­tin­guished only by their num­ber. Arkiv Dig­i­tal often pro­vides a typed sheet at the begin­ning of a book telling you which page to go to for a par­tic­u­lar year. Even when there isn’t such a rough time index, the pages load about 50% slow­er on Gen­line. (This is not sci­en­tif­ic, but my per­cep­tion is that I was get­ting down­loads from Arkiv Dig­i­tal in few­er than 3 sec­onds and in about 5 sec­onds from Gen­line.)

When you decide to dive in, you have grayscale images that were tak­en from the LDS micro­films. They are ser­vice­able, but do not always have the best con­trast. (Gen­line does pro­vide some tools for adjust­ing bright­ness and con­trast.) Arkiv Dig­i­tal pro­vides clean, new high-con­trast col­or images. I don’t know about you, but if I am going to be read­ing images line by line in 150-year-old Swedish script, I much pre­fer the Arkiv Dig­i­tal prod­uct to that from Gen­line.

Gen­line offers a great fea­ture allow­ing to see where you are in the con­text of the image when you are zoomed in on the image, and might need some per­spec­tive, which I find handy. You can also use it to change how much of the image you want to see by inter­act­ing with this thumb­nail. How­ev­er, I find it per­plex­ing that the search win­dow dis­ap­pears when I want to look at the result. I much pre­fer Arkiv DIg­i­tal’s approach, which uses tabs, like a mod­ern web brows­er.

Then, there is the pric­ing. Archiv Dig­i­tal is 995 SEK (Swedish kro­nor) until Jan­u­ary 9th, or about $146. Gen­line is 1295 SEK, or about $190. Both seem over priced if you com­pare their prices for access to the 24 mil­lion Swedish church records to those for sites like Ances­try ($300 a year for the run of all 6 bil­lion his­tor­i­cal records), or Foot­note ($80 for a year, 72 mil­lion images).

One won­ders what Ances­try intends to do with sites like Gen­line, which (as does Arkiv Dig­i­tal) requires an instal­la­tion of the user, and still remain intense­ly coun­try spe­cif­ic. My hope is that Ances­try is try­ing to build its glob­al brand by focus­ing on com­pet­ing in local mar­kets, where a size­able chunk of the address­able mar­ket is inter­act­ing with oth­er ven­dors than Ances­try. If these prod­ucts can be fold­ed into the Ances­try World Access prod­uct, or as some more rea­son­ably priced add on, I think they have some real oppor­tu­ni­ties. And putting the inno­va­tion engine that is Foot­note into the mix — if Foot­note is allowed to teach Ances­try and all of its brands a trick or two — real­ly makes the new year inter­est­ing in the com­mer­cial ances­tral records mar­ket.

In gen­er­al, Swedish records are easy to find and use. The Swedes start­ed keep­ing detailes records of vital records, but also of migra­tion and emi­gra­tion, from a very ear­ly date. And they have had a long-stand­ing tra­di­tion of paci­fism, mean­ing that com­par­a­tive­ly few records have been burned.

My elu­sive Swedes, how­ev­er.… They told every­one — in my great grand­fa­ther Nels John­son’s fam­i­ly Bible, in the his­to­ry of the fam­i­ly by the eldest daugh­ter (Lena John­son) of the eldest daugh­ter (Both­il­da John­son) of the immi­grants — that they emi­grat­ed from Viby in 1868. (Viby was small then, and is still small now: In 1995 pop­u­la­tion was 936.) There is such a parish, and they were not lying, they were from there.

They just did­n’t think to men­tion that it had changed its name a cou­ple of times:

• After the Gus­tav IV Adolph ascend­ed to the throne of Nor­way and Swe­den in 1792, the name of the parish was changed to  Gus­tav Adolf in his hon­or.
• Anoth­er wrin­kle: from 1681–1856, Viby was asso­ci­at­ed with Rink­a­by, and appar­ent­ly also with Åhus.
• After 1856, Gus­tav Adolf and Rink­a­by become parish­es of the Vil­land Hun­dred.

Clear as mud? Just as one is told com­mon­ly in geneal­o­gy to look to the next coun­ty over, I am search­ing Viby, Gus­tav Adolph, Rink­a­by, and Åhus for my Swedish ances­tors.

I am hav­ing great suc­cess. I am still main­ly in the Gus­tav Adolph papers. (One of the lead­ing Swedish firms for genealog­i­cal records, Arkiv Dig­i­tal is pro­vid­ing free access for a cou­ple of days, end­ing on Decem­ber 30th.)

There is a lot to like about AD: The images are gor­geous new, col­or images, down­load­able as PNGs. (They are also sup­posed to be down­load­able as JPGs, but it does not seem to save the files when I ask for a JPG.) The doc­u­ments are not indexed by name, but AD pro­vides some handy ways into the doc­u­ments based on locale and time­frame, and the images load very quick­ly.

I have been able to locate 8 records of birth or birth and bap­tism, and one mar­riage cer­tifi­cate. The births include:

• Nils Svens­son (my great grand­fa­ther, known in Amer­i­ca as Nels John­son), b. 24 Octo­ber 1863, #7 Viby, [Kris­tianstad län, Swe­den]; bapt. 31 Octo­ber 1863, Viby, [Kris­tianstad län, Swe­den]; son of Sven Jöns­son and Ker­stin Jöns­dot­ter, The god­par­ents were Nils Ander­s­son of #8 (next door) and Kar­na Jöns­dot­ter of #7. (Kar­na is men­tioned in the fam­i­ly his­to­ry as Ker­stin’s sis­ter, who they lat­er helped immi­grate to the U.S.).
• Ker­sti­na Jöns­dot­ter (my great-great grand­moth­er, known in Amer­i­ca as Kjer­stin John­son), b. 6 Novem­ber 1834, in Wiby, [Kris­tianstad län, Swe­den]; daugh­er of Jöns Wes­t­as­sons [fam­i­ly doc­u­ments say “Vester­son” or “Wyscelius”]

I have also found the record of the mar­riage of Kjer­stin and Sven, in 1853, and the birth records of

• Both­il­da (in Amer­i­ca Thil­da) (1854)
• Petr (in Amer­i­ca, Peter) with a sep­a­rate bap­tismal record (1857)
• Jöns (in Amer­i­ca, John) (1860)
• Ingrid (in Amer­i­ca, Ida) (1865), and
• Erik (in Amer­i­ca, Eric) (1868).

That’s just a high­light. There’s more for me to do, even with the records I found, but it is excit­ing to be work­ing with such well pre­served and well pre­sent­ed records. (Thanks Arkiv Dig­i­tal!)

It has been snow­ing here in Raleigh, such that we woke up this Box­ing Day to a good 8 inch­es.

Not long after that, and before the cof­fee was even brewed, the pow­er went out. It was out until mid-after­noon, and the first time the pow­er com­pa­ny pro­vid­ed an esti­mat­ed time to res­o­lu­tion, they said mid­night.

There was­n’t much we could do except ensure that we had long wood­en match­es, so we make cof­fee and what­ev­er else we might want, on the stove.

While we wait­ed to see to see if the pow­er would come on, I picked up the copy of Your Swedish Roots: A Step-By-Step Hand­book by Per Clemensson and Kjell Ander­s­son (Pro­vo: Ances­try Pub­lish­ing, 2004) that I bought about 18 months ago.

Clemensson and Ander­s­son write clear­ly and enter­tain­ing­ly. They pro­vide an excel­lent his­tor­i­cal con­text for the Swedish emi­gra­tion, which saw 1.2 mil­lion Swedes (or 20% of the pop­u­la­tion) leave the coun­try between 1821 and 1930. This made Swe­den the third Euro­pean coun­try in per­cent­age of  pop­u­la­tion to emi­grate to the New World and Ocea­nia (behind Ire­land and Nor­way) (p. 17). There is a very help­ful chart show­ing the scale of the emi­gra­tion from 1850 to 1962, includ­ing re-immi­gra­tion back to Swe­den, and not­ing eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al con­di­tions push­ing peo­ple from Swe­den and draw­ing them to Amer­i­ca (pp. 22–23).

In addi­tion to the his­tor­i­cal back­ground, Clemensson and Ander­s­son pro­vide ori­en­ta­tion to the records of Swe­den, guid­ance to some online resources (pri­mar­i­ly focus­ing on Gen­line, though there are many more sites now).

Their method is to take read­ers step-by-step through sam­ple research with one main fam­i­ly and a cou­ple of oth­er case stud­ies to illus­trate ear­li­er or lat­er research meth­ods, oppor­tu­ni­ties, and chal­lenges. They pro­vide a quick expla­na­tion of Swedish names, includ­ing the patronymic as well as the nature names often tak­en by mil­i­tary men and their fam­i­lies, and the names of the nobil­i­ty.

The book is an excel­lent start­ing point, slight­ly dat­ed in terms of Inter­net access to records, but sound in its rec­om­men­da­tions and meth­ods for get­ting to the home coun­try, when that home coun­try hap­pens to be that snowy land of Swe­den. A per­fect book to pick up on a snow day in Raleigh.

we hope yours was as well.

Look­ing for­ward to 2011, I am plan­ning a sev­er­al talks: two in Raleigh, NC, at the North Car­oli­na Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety Speak­ers Forum on Feb­ru­ary 19th, and three in Charleston, SC, at the Nation­al Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety Con­fer­ence between 11–14 May.

These along with trips to Salt Lake City in Feb­ru­ary (for a Board Meet­ing of the NGS) and to the FGS Con­fer­ence in Spring­field, IL in Sep­tem­ber, promise to make it a busy geneal­o­gy year.

2011 will also bring with it anoth­er sea­son of Exec­u­tive Pro­duc­er Lisa Kudrow’s “Who Do you Think You Are?”, which starts again on Feb­ru­ary 4th at 8 (7 Cen­tral). Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, the new sea­son will include Tim McGraw, Kim Cat­trall, Lionel Richie, Ash­ley Judd, Steve Busce­mi, Vanes­sa Williams, and Rosie O’Don­nell.

The show has been a mixed bless­ing for geneal­o­gists. While it has clear­ly pop­u­lar­ized fam­i­ly his­to­ry research, and shown the trans­for­ma­tive nature of genealog­i­cal rev­e­la­tion. The painstak­ing and time-con­sum­ing research required to unearth many of these rev­e­la­tions is done off cam­era, and most view­ers are sim­ply unaware how much research is involved. A sim­ple title card stat­ing that “x num­ber of hours of genealog­i­cal research went into pro­duc­ing this episode,” would pro­vide the audi­ence with nec­es­sary con­text. Many researchers have received phone calls in the days and weeks after an episode of WDYTYA? ask­ing for “my fam­i­ly tree” to be cre­at­ed either gratis, pron­to, or both.

Still, it is a com­pelling show, and my fam­i­ly and I are look­ing for­ward to the new episodes.

The Allen Coun­ty Library this fall has post­ed a new web­site at http://www.genealogycenter.org/. The site has a num­ber of fea­tures of inter­est.

• There are eight free data­bas­es that you can search simul­ta­ne­ous­ly from their home­page:
  • African Amer­i­can Gate­way — Includes infor­ma­tion on US, Cana­di­an, and Caribbean resources.
  • Fam­i­ly Files and Resources — Six­teen unique fam­i­ly files sub­mit­ted by researchers.
  • Geneal­o­gy Cen­ter Micro­text Cat­a­log — A search­able list of micro­film and micro­fiche avail­able in The Geneal­o­gy Cen­ter of the Allen Coun­ty Pub­lic Library.
  • Indi­ana and Oth­er State Resources — These resources have been con­tributed by researchers. The states includ­ed at this point are Indi­ana (with the bulk of the resources), Illi­nois, Ken­tucky, Mary­land, Mass­a­chu­setts, Michi­gan, Min­neso­ta, Mon­tana, New Hamp­shire, New York, Ohio, Vir­ginia, West Vir­ginia, and Wis­con­sin.
  • Fam­i­ly Bible Records — This appears to be a small (but poten­tial­ly grow­ing) col­lec­tion of records, cur­rent­ly total­ing 12 fam­i­lies.
  • Fort Wayne and Allen Coun­ty Resources — Mar­riage, death, ceme­tery, funer­al home, court records (guardian­ships, appli­ca­tions for nat­u­ral­iza­tions), eth­nic records (African-Amer­i­can, Ger­man), gov­ern­ment, his­to­ry, insti­tu­tion­al, and mil­i­tary records. If you have fam­i­ly from this part of the coun­try, this is an invalu­able resource.
  • Geneal­o­gy Cen­ter Sur­name File — A data­base of researchers who, since 1998, have left pro­vid­ed the Library with their con­tact infor­ma­tion, and infor­ma­tion on the sur­names they are search­ing.
  • Our Mil­i­tary Her­itage — A col­lec­tion of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary records from the colo­nial wars through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• There are a num­ber of guides to par­tic­u­lar top­ics in geneal­o­gy, includ­ing adop­tion, church records, East­ern Euro­pean research, Scot­tish research.
• Geneal­o­gy Gems, the library’s e‑zine, is avail­able for free down­load from its incep­tion in March 2004 through 2009.
• A blog out­lin­ing the new site and the Library.
• There is a form you can use to request copies of arti­cles that are in the PERSI, the Peri­od­i­cal Source Index: http://www.genealogycenter.org/pdf/ArticleRequest.pdf

Well, I could stay here all night mak­ing a com­plete list, but these are some of the high­lights.…

I am look­ing for­ward to delv­ing fur­ther into the site.