GenealogyMedia.com

Google con­tin­ues to offer new fea­tures and prod­ucts that can be of use to geneal­o­gists.

Among the most inter­est­ing recent releas­es is the abil­i­ty to dial cell phones and land lines from with­in G‑Mail using your com­put­er’s speak­ers and micro­phone and Google Voice tech­nol­o­gy. This allows for free long dis­tance calls, at least through 2011. After this year, Google will deter­mine whether to con­tin­ue this as a free ser­vice, or bill for it.

Here are some oth­er recent releas­es:

• Google Instant is Google’s attempt to save you key­strokes by pro­vid­ing instant search results while you type. Google pays atten­tion to the results that mean the most to you, and to oth­ers typ­ing the char­ac­ters you are typ­ing and tries to pro­vide a pre­dic­tive search. The results are uncan­ny, even spooky. See http://www.google.com/instant/ to run an instant search (or, for more infor­ma­tion, see: http://www.google.com/landing/instant/).
• Google Real­time is the com­pa­ny’s attempt to keep peo­ple search­ing at Google, instead of at Bing or Twit­ter, when they are look­ing for up-to-the-sec­ond news, blog posts, and oth­er break­ing news. See http://www.google.com/realtime/ to run a real­time search (or, for more infor­ma­tion, see: http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/).
• Google eBook­store is Google’s long-await­ed entry into sell­ing elec­tron­ic books. It is the largest elec­tron­ic book­store in exis­tence, with 3 mil­lion titles. Books pur­chased or down­loaded for free from the Google eBook­store can be read in Google’s free read­ing soft­ware, on the web, or for the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, Sony, and Nook read­ers. There are many titles of genealog­i­cal inter­est that are in the pub­lic domain and avail­able for free from this store. See: http://books.google.com/ebooks for the store, and the http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/discover-more-than-3-million-google.html for the Google blog entry on the ebook­store.
• Google Ngram View­er. This is per­haps the most inter­est­ing research tool Google has released in a long time. I just men­tioned that they have 3 mil­lion titles in their elec­tron­ic book­store. This is actu­al­ly only one fifth of the titles that they have scanned. All of those 15 mil­lion scanned books have been run through advanced opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion (not per­fect, mind you, but pret­ty good). Two schol­ars at Google have tak­en 500 mil­lion words from 5.2 mil­lion books in Chi­nese, Eng­lish, French, Ger­man, Russ­ian and Span­ish and pro­vid­ed both the raw dataset of phras­es and how often they have been used on a year­ly basis, and a tool for novices to run these kinds of search. See http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ for the search tool, and http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info and http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/find-out-whats-in-word-or-five-with.html for more infor­ma­tion. Geneal­o­gists can use this to see when words came and went in cur­ren­cy, which can help date let­ters and oth­er doc­u­ments.

Google has become quite a behe­moth. Loved and hat­ed at the same time for its pow­er, inno­va­tion, weird insis­tence on the mantra “don’t be evil,” while amass­ing tons of detail about our online activ­i­ties, the books we read, the things we search for, and so on. Despite all of this, for me, these tools are cre­at­ing a new access to infor­ma­tion that would oth­er­wise be inac­ces­si­ble. It’s a net plus.

[Updat­ed 12/25/2010, to cor­rect the exten­sion of Google voice calls from G‑Mail through the end of 2011.]

Over the next five years, we will be observ­ing the sesqui­cen­ten­ni­al of the Civ­il War. On Decem­ber 20, 1860, that is, 150 years ago, this week, for exam­ple, South Car­oli­na seced­ed from the Union, touch­ing off a wave of seces­sions that led to the War itself.

While the war is often described these days as being about “states rights,” of course, it was about states rights to con­tin­ue slav­ery, and the con­cerns in the slave states that the North would abol­ish slav­ery, destroy­ing the econ­o­my that had been built upon the foun­da­tion of the “pecu­liar insti­tu­tion” of chat­tel slav­ery.

This argu­ment has not real­ly end­ed, as the blog post at the New York Times notes (“Danc­ing Around His­to­ry,” New York Times web­site, 20 Decem­ber 2010). There are still those who would cast the Civ­il War, and the seces­sion of the South­ern states, as a strug­gle for states rights, and one that con­tin­ues. But of course, the Con­sti­tu­tion was nev­er the Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion. The Arti­cles had indeed cre­at­ed a loose con­fed­er­a­tion of inde­pen­dent states, one so loose it was not work­able. The sin­gle over-rid­ing point of the Con­sti­tu­tion is the rule of law, and how fair­ness and equal­i­ty would be the cor­ner­stone of the new gov­ern­ment. (The “three fifths of all oth­er per­sons” clause out of the dis­cus­sion for the moment; the irony of that lack of equal­i­ty in the core of the doc­u­ment was not lost on the founders and does not inval­i­date the Con­sti­tu­tion, it was only itself invalid and con­tra­dic­to­ry to the point of the doc­u­ment.) Edward Ball, the author of Slaves in the Fam­i­ly, writes an espe­cial­ly poignant op-ed piece in the New York Times about revi­sion­ist his­to­ry rel­a­tive to seces­sion, slav­ery, and the Civ­il War (“Gone with the Myths,” New York Times, 18 Decem­ber 2010).

If the gov­ern­ment was to be a fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and not a loose con­fed­er­a­tion of states, then the states would have some pow­ers, but not all. And the South­ern states, in join­ing the Unit­ed States had ced­ed some pow­er. That pow­er includ­ed that the Con­gress could enact, the Pres­i­dent sign, and the Pres­i­den­t’s admin­is­tra­tion car­ry out laws. Addi­tion­al­ly, that the Con­sti­tu­tion could be amend­ed.

Those who would say that seces­sion was about states’ rights should take a look at the South Car­olin­ian seces­sion dec­la­ra­tion (“Dec­la­ra­tion of the Imme­di­ate Caus­es Which Induce and Jus­ti­fy the Seces­sion of South Car­oli­na from the Fed­er­al Union”), which says in part:

We affirm that these ends for which this Gov­ern­ment was insti­tut­ed have been defeat­ed, and the Gov­ern­ment itself has been made destruc­tive of them by the action of the non-slave­hold­ing States. Those States have assume the right of decid­ing upon the pro­pri­ety of our domes­tic insti­tu­tions [i.e., slav­ery]; and have denied the rights of prop­er­ty [i.e., slav­ery] estab­lished in fif­teen of the States [i.e., the slave-hold­ing states] and rec­og­nized by the Con­sti­tu­tion [alas, all too true!]; they have denounced as sin­ful the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery; they have per­mit­ted open estab­lish­ment among them of soci­eties, whose avowed object is to dis­turb the peace and to eloign the prop­er­ty of the cit­i­zens of oth­er States [in oth­er words, they have allowed an abo­li­tion­ist move­ment to start and spread]. They have encour­aged and assist­ed thou­sands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incit­ed by emis­saries, books and pic­tures to servile insur­rec­tion.

For twen­ty-five years this agi­ta­tion has been steadi­ly increas­ing, until it has now secured to its aid the pow­er of the com­mon Gov­ern­ment. Observ­ing the forms [empha­sis in the orig­i­nal] of the Con­sti­tu­tion, a sec­tion­al par­ty has found with­in that Arti­cle estab­lish­ing the Exec­u­tive Depart­ment, the means of sub­vert­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion itself. A geo­graph­i­cal line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have unit­ed in the elec­tion of a man to the high office of Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, whose opin­ions and pur­pos­es are hos­tile to slav­ery. He is to be entrust­ed with the admin­is­tra­tion of the com­mon Gov­ern­ment, because he has declared that that “Gov­ern­ment can­not endure per­ma­nent­ly half slave, half free,” and that the pub­lic mind must rest in the belief that slav­ery is in the course of ulti­mate extinc­tion.

While the inten­tions of the South Car­oli­nan “fire eaters” (sup­port­ers of South­ern seces­sion) are clear, this should not be seen as an indict­ment of every indi­vid­ual in the South, espe­cial­ly not of South­ern sol­diers, most of whom were not direct ben­e­fi­cia­ries of plan­ta­tion slav­ery. As ever, sol­diers have fought for a num­ber of rea­sons, includ­ing soci­etal norms, the draft, a sense of duty, and on and on. Indi­vid­u­als were usu­al­ly doing their damn­d­est to do the right thing as they saw it, and not get killed in the process. We can hon­or their sac­ri­fice while not hon­or­ing their cause. How­ev­er, it is at our per­il that we revise his­to­ry in a vain attempt to reha­bil­i­tate our ances­tors. As geneal­o­gists, it is our role to see our fam­i­ly his­to­ry, as I think of it, “his­to­ry at ground lev­el,” with a clear, unbi­ased gaze.

Ancestry.com has post­ed a new search page: http://search.ancestry.com/search/

The search itself does not seem to have changed. I still get some strange results, includ­ing names or locales that seem unre­lat­ed to the search I entered.

What inter­ests me, how­ev­er, is that the map at the bot­tom of this search page leads to a lot of loca­tion-spe­cif­ic data. Ances­try, in a  blog entry enti­tled “Browse the Place Pages,” claims that they have cre­at­ed thou­sands of place pages. As you would expect, these pages include cat­e­go­rized links to record col­lec­tions that relate to the place (such as Cen­sus and Vot­er Lists, Vital Records, Mil­i­tary Records). But they also con­tain links to maps, atlases, and gazetteers; ref­er­ences, dic­tio­nar­ies, and almanacs; and sto­ries, mem­o­ries, and his­to­ries.

The pages also let you focus your nav­i­ga­tion on par­tic­u­lar localites, such as coun­ties with­in a state, and some of these have their own place pages.

The tabs “His­to­ry” and “Resources” pro­vide his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the locale and resources for research­ing in this area. While I will not like­ly stop using Wikipedia for place infor­ma­tion when I research (see the Vir­ginia page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia), this is often a genealog­i­cal­ly spe­cif­ic set of infor­ma­tion that will help while I’m research­ing at Ances­try, and else­where. I wel­come this new locale data.

Fam­il­y­Search, the geneal­o­gy records arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, is busy scan­ning and index­ing the bulk of their 2.6 mil­lion reels of micro­film.

The index­ing process is a col­lab­o­ra­tive “crowd sourc­ing” web project, involv­ing the genealog­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty. In fact, since May, the Fam­il­y­Search web­site has released dig­i­tized and crowd-source indexed genealog­i­cal records con­tain­ing 500 mil­lion names on their beta web­site: http://beta.familysearch.org/.

Index­ing is done through a dou­ble-blind process, where two index­ers inde­pen­dent­ly fill out forms with the index infor­ma­tion. The indexed val­ues are com­pared, and when they match com­plete­ly, they are accept­ed. When there is a dis­crep­an­cy between two index entries, they are sent for arbi­tra­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, if users pass over records with­out index­ing the, Fam­il­y­Search looks at the images to deter­mine if they might need to be scanned again.

If you are inter­est­ed in paric­i­pat­ing, see http://indexing.fsbeta.familysearch.org/

For more infor­ma­tion, read the FAQ: http://indexing.familysearch.org/support/faq.jsf

Fifty-sev­en Irish-Amer­i­can rail­road work­ers sup­pos­ed­ly died of cholera in 1832. It turns out the they may have been mur­dered, per­haps because of fear that they might be car­ry­ing cholera.

Researchers from Immac­u­la­ta Col­lege and Penn­syl­va­nia state and local gov­ern­ments have been over­see­ing an archae­o­log­i­cal dig at the site since 2004. In 2009, they announced that the first two skulls unearthed appeared to have suf­fered from blunt force trau­ma.

The Penn­syl­va­nia his­toric mark­er, vis­i­ble only briefly in the CNN video below, reads:

Duffy’s Cut Mass Grave

Near­by is the mass grave of fifty-sev­en Irish immi­grant work­ers who died in August, 1832, of cholera. They had recent­ly arrived in the Unit­ed States and were employed by a con­struc­tion con­tra­tor named Duffy, for the Philadel­phia and Colum­bia Rail­road. Prej­u­dice against Irish Catholics con­tributed to the denial of care to the work­ers. Their ill­ness and death typ­i­fied the haz­ards faced by many 19th cen­tu­ry immi­grant indus­tri­al work­ers.

Duffy’s Cut is the name of “a stretch of rail­road tracks” near Malvern, Penn­syl­va­nia. Below is the lat­est from CNN.

Dur­ing the FGS Con­fer­ence, Fam­il­y­Search made a con­cert­ed effort to engage peo­ple with their wiki, which is at http://wiki.familysearch.org/. The goal of the Fam­il­y­Search wiki is to build a com­mon loca­tion for research rec­om­men­da­tions.

It has been a while since I looked at the Fam­il­y­Search Wiki.

The site now has more than 40,000 entries. Like any Wiki, espe­cial­ly at the begin­ning stages, there is a wide vari­ety of qual­i­ty, and espe­cial­ly of com­plete­ness. How­ev­er, it is already a very help­ful place to go to find out about research­ing in a new local­i­ty.

I went to the North Car­oli­na Barn Rais­ing (actu­al­ly start­ed in May 2009) and signed up for the North Car­oli­na Archives and Libraries and North Car­oli­na Bib­li­og­ra­phy pages, and I have made some edits. As with any wiki, edit­ing is quick and easy, and can be done in a for­mat-based view or in a wiki code view.

This is com­mu­ni­ty work. Join the com­mu­ni­ty!

Here are a few ran­dom notes from the FGS Con­fer­ence in Knoxville, Ten­nessee.

• Root­sTech Con­fer­ence: Just pri­or to the com­mence­ment of the FGS Con­fer­ence, Fam­il­y­Search announced the Root­sTech Con­fer­ence:

  “Tech­nol­o­gists and geneal­o­gists from around the world will gath­er at the first annu­al Root­sTech Con­fer­ence in Salt Lake City, Utah, Feb­ru­ary 10–12, 2011. The new con­fer­ence, host­ed by Fam­il­y­Search and spon­sored by lead­ing genealog­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions, aims to bring tech­nol­o­gists and geneal­o­gists togeth­er to help deep­en under­stand­ing of cur­rent tech­nolo­gies and dis­cov­er new ideas in apply­ing tech­nol­o­gy to geneal­o­gy. Learn more at rootstech.familysearch.org.”

• Fam­il­y­Search dig­i­ti­za­tion con­tin­ues to deliv­er records from the Fam­il­y­Search vaults, with most of the index­ing done by vol­un­teers. At the time of the NGS Con­fer­ence in May, they announced 300 mil­lion names. In August, they have announced that anoth­er 200 mil­lion names have gone online. The results of this work can be seen at http://beta.familysearch.org/, and by the end of the year should replace the old­er site at www.familysearch.org/.
• Fam­il­y­Search Wiki (http://wiki.familysearch.org/) now con­tains more than 40,000 arti­cles, many writ­ten col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly by vol­un­teers.
• The New Eng­land His­toric Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety (NEHGS) has launched a new web­site, AmericanAncestors.org. The site name reflects the fact that while the NEHGS has a focus on New Eng­land, they have also devel­oped sub­stan­tial data­base hold­ings nation­al­ly, espe­cial­ly in New York, the mid-Atlantic, and in eth­nic top­ics such as Irish and African Amer­i­can research. The new site con­tains all of the NEHGS’s data­bas­es., fea­tures, arti­cles, and resources, and have a very con­tem­po­rary feel about it, with the lat­est in social media inte­gra­tion and blog­ging and inter­ac­tion with users on the site.
• The Fed­er­a­tion of Genealog­i­cal Soci­eties (FGS) is part­ner­ing with the Nation­al Archives to dig­i­tize the War of 1812 pen­sions. Three sam­ple pen­sions, as well as infor­ma­tion on donat­ing for this project are avail­able at www.fgs.org/1812/.

It has been a great con­fer­ence, and there has been a lot of excite­ment in the air.

This evening at the 2010 FGS Con­fer­ence in Knoxville, Ten­nessee, there was an out­ing to the Muse­um of Appalachia.

The muse­um is “a liv­ing his­to­ry muse­um of pio­neer, fron­tier, and ear­ly arti­facts of moun­tain life in the South­ern Appalachi­ans.” It includes a col­lec­tion of build­ings, folk arts and crafts, and music, com­mem­o­rat­ing and extend­ing the life of the moun­tain arts and cul­ture. I had no idea how vast the col­lec­tion would be, nor how affect­ing.

At the heart of the whole enter­prise is John Rice Irwin and his daugh­ter Elaine Irwin Mey­er. John Rice Irwin began col­lect­ing Appalachi­an arti­facts in the 1960s. In 2000, he donat­ed the muse­um and its near­ly 40 struc­tures, to a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion. He and his daugh­ter, as well as For­mer Sen­a­tor Howard Bak­er and three oth­ers, serve as unpaid board mem­bers to direct the edu­ca­tion­al goals of the muse­um.

The muse­um has a stage from which we were treat­ed to excel­lent musi­cian­ship, tongue-in-cheek songs, and humor­ous ban­ter. John Rice Irwin came on stage, and in describ­ing a song about a dis­as­ter in a coal mine, recit­ed a bit of it. When he invit­ed the band to sing it, one of the musi­cians said, “You already sang it.” After which, John Rice Irwin turned to the audi­ence and said, “I’m glad you enjoyed it… We have a smart aleck in the band.…”

It was an enter­tain­ing evening with good food, good music, and it served as a trib­ute to the work of John Rice Irwin to pre­serve Appalachi­an cul­ture. If you are ever in East­ern Ten­nessee, you need to drop in on the Muse­um of Appalachia. Keep an eye out espe­cial­ly for their Ten­nessee Moun­tain Home­com­ing, at the begin­ning of Octo­ber. (In 2010, this will be 8 — 10 Octo­ber.)

Today was the begin­ning of the 2010 Fed­er­a­tion of Genealog­i­cal Soci­eties con­fer­ence in Knoxville, Ten­nessee.

There have been quite a few good lec­tures, and it has got­ten off to a promis­ing start.

What was most pow­er­ful for me was attend­ing the FGS lun­cheon and hear­ing David S. Fer­riero, the 10th Archivist of the Unit­ed States describe the future of the Nation­al Archives. There were minor items, such as the fact that the Nation­al Archives in Wash­ing­ton, DC and Col­lege Park, Mary­land, will have open wi-fi net­works, allow­ing researchers to access the Inter­net. (This will be espe­cial­ly impor­tant for researchers who want to access cloud-com­put­ing appli­ca­tions such as Drop­box and Ever­note.)

More impor­tant­ly, he described the release of the 1940 US Cen­sus. It will be released on 2 April 2012, per the cen­sus statute that requires 72 years to pass before the indi­vid­ual cen­sus records can be released to the pub­lic (92 Stat. 915; Pub­lic Law 95–416; Octo­ber 5, 1978). Because of this stip­u­la­tion, the Nation­al Archives (NARA) is dig­i­tiz­ing the 1940 cen­sus in-house, with­out the par­tic­i­pa­tion of a tech­nol­o­gy part­ner (such as Footnote.com, Ancestry.com, or Fam­il­y­Search, all three of which have a strong work­ing rela­tion­ships with NARA). The 1940 cen­sus is not being micro­filmed; it will only be avail­able dig­i­tal­ly, both on com­put­ers with­in the NARA facil­i­ties in DC and the states, as well as over the Inter­net.

One of the key rea­sons that Fer­riero (pro­nounced like “stereo”, if the first let­ter were an “f”) came to the FGS Con­fer­ence, is that NARA is part­ner­ing with the FGS to dig­i­tize the War of 1812 pen­sion papers, which con­sist of 180,000 files and will include 7.2 mil­lion images when it is com­plet­ed. The FGS is rais­ing the mon­ey from dona­tions. To make a dona­tion, or to learn more, see www.fgs.org/1812.) It will take approx­i­mate­ly fifty cents per image, or $3.7 mil­lion to dig­i­tize the entire col­lec­tion. Fer­riero point­ed out that these pen­sions are among the most accessed items at NARA. Dig­i­tiz­ing them will help pre­serve the doc­u­ments, as they will not be han­dled as much.

The col­lab­o­ra­tion with FGS and with geneal­o­gists in gen­er­al fits well into Fer­riero’s vision of cit­i­zen archivists, as well as into Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s Open Gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tive. He knows quite well, he said, from his expe­ri­ence lead­ing the New York Pub­lic Library, that the users of the col­lec­tions often know more about them that the librar­i­ans and archivists, because the users are delv­ing deep­er into par­tic­u­lar doc­u­ments and record groups, while the archivists need to be more wide-rang­ing in their atten­tions.

The talk was pep­pered with humor, such as the fact that when he met with the admin­is­tra­tors of the region­al facil­i­ties, the admin­is­tra­tor of the JFK Library pulled out of a brief­case a copy of a let­ter the young David Fer­riero wrote to Pres­i­dent Kennedy, ask­ing for more infor­ma­tion on the Peace Corps. (Fer­riero remem­bered being inter­est­ed in the Peace Corps, but not hav­ing writ­ten the let­ter.) Fer­riero said he could see the oth­er admin­is­tra­tors think­ing, “How am I going to I top that?” Of course, oth­er let­ters to pres­i­dents from the pre­co­cious boy that David Fer­riero must have been, have also turned up.

For more about David S. Fer­riero, you might vis­it his blog: blogs.archives.gov/aotus/

I would not be sur­prised if his remarks at the FGS Con­fer­ence end up on “Speech­es and Writ­ings of David S. Fer­riero.”

Vin­cent J. Can­na­to’s Amer­i­can Pas­sage: The His­to­ry of Ellis Island aims to cov­er the whole record­ed his­to­ry of the island. The book starts with the his­to­ry of the island long before any­one thought of it as a way sta­tion for immi­grants.

The Dutch named in Lit­tle Oys­ter Island, as it sat among the oys­ter beds near the Jer­sey shore. He notes that the own­er­ship of the island is unclear between the late 17th cen­tu­ry and 1785, when an adver­tise­ment appeared try­ing to sell the island along with a cou­ple of lots in Man­hat­tan and “a few bar­rels of excel­lent shad and her­rings…” (Kin­dle loca­tion, 482).

By the time of the War of 1812, the island had been acquired by the War Depart­ment as part of the defense of New York har­bor.

Read more