Taking Genealogy to the Common Person

Pioneer Day

2011-07-22T14:20:00.001-07:00

I'm very excited about Pioneer Day this Sunday. I suspect it is a more prominent holiday in Utah than other parts of the US. It certainly rivals the 4th of July celebration around here. In honor of Pioneer Day I was excited to see this new Pioneer Collection pulled together on WorldVitalRecords.com.

I went looking for some of my pioneer ancestors and quickly found this photo of Henry Grow (architect of the Tabernacle on Temple Square). While the collection has some great data sets that will be of interest to those with ancestors that were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it also has wonderful information about pioneers throughout the US regardless of their religious affiliation.

You can search nearly 14 million names in the Pioneer Collection.

Here are some of the highlights in the collection:

I'd love to hear of any success stories you have searching the collection.

Enjoy your search and have a happy Pioneer Day!

Rare Opportunity to Experience Echo Canyon

2011-06-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

If you have mormon pioneer ancestors that came to Utah by handcart or wagon, you need to go on the Echo Canyon Tour being sponsored by the Mormon Trails Chapter of the Utah Genealogical Association.

The tour will be Saturday, June 18th. John Eldredge will be the guide for this tour. Mr. Eldredge has written the book, “The Illustrated Emigrant’s Guide,” a booklet written for the 2005 Oregon California Trails Association Convention. You will find Eldredge’s historical knowledge remarkable and appreciate his ability to tell about the artefacts among the ledges and emigrant trail.

Watch the Echo Canyon Tour video or go to the Utah Genealogical Association website to register and get more info.

Product Review: Genealogy At a Glance

2011-01-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

From time to time someone will send me something in hopes that I'll provide a review of it on my blog. I've been a little slow to do that (ok, so I've never really done that) but I've decided to give it a shot. I've also decided to be very honest in my perspective. Here goes...

Last night when I got home from the office I had a package from Genealogical.com waiting for me. Inside were two nicely laminated 8 1/2" X 11" bifold Genealogy at Glance guides. The first was Genealogy at a Glance: Scottish Research by David Dobson. The second, Genealogy at a Glance: French-Canadian Research by Denise R. Larson.

The Genealogy at a Glance series is intended to provide succinct review of the critical information to keep in mind when performing research on ancestors from are particular part of the world. They are quick reads, just 4 pages, that are somewhat reminiscent of restaurant menus. In both the Scottish Genealogy Research and French-Canadian Genealogy Research aids, the authors did a great job distilling the pertinent details into consumable chunks of information. I was able to review the information in a matter of minutes and come away feeling like if I were to embark into researching ancestors from either location I would know where to begin. If you're someone that prefers printed materials and is interested in Scottish or French-Canadian research these might be very helpful for you. I could also imagine that these would be very helpful in a library setting or for a family history center that wanted to provide quick information for people starting into a new area of research.

It did seem like the format and approach to providing the information assumed at least a basic understanding of how to do genealogy. If you're just getting started, you'll probably need more help than one of these sheets can give you. If you're experienced with genealogy but inexperienced with the nuances of a new location the information is exactly what you'll need.

For me however, this particular approach is not a good fit. I'm a very technology oriented person. The chances of me packing these sheets around with me is fairly low. Put the same content into a mobile format - say an iPhone or iPad app and you'd have a product I'd be interested in.

In summary, if you're an experienced genealogist but are new to Scottish or French-Canadian research and you like or don't mind the physical format, these are probably worth the low investment. These would also be a nice add to any library or Family History Center.

Family History Entrepreuners

2010-01-26T12:06:00.000-08:00

I recently received an e-mail from a web magazine I hadn't heard of before, Mormon Entrepreneur. Their latest edition spot lights members of the LDS Church that are entrepreneurs in the family history space. I enjoyed reading the articles and as a member of the LDS Church love the concept behind the magazine.

Here's a snippet from them introducing this issue:

Mormon Entrepreneur has published their latest issue on Family History entrepreneurs. Published online every other month, Mormon Entrepreneur seeks to engage aspiring entrepreneurs through the stories of successful entrepreneurs. The result is a community of entrepreneurs engaged in each others success. In this issue, Alan Eaton (OneGreatFamily.com), Janet Hovorka (Generation Maps), John Vilburn (Ohana Software), Paul Allen (FamilyLink.com), and Russ Wilding (Footnote.com) are highlighted. Learn about about OneGreatFamily's latest project OneClickTempleTrip.com. Ask yourself, “Would I do Family History work if it took only one click to find a family member that I could take to the temple?" Read their stories online at http://mormonentrepreneur.net. Enjoy.

Genealogy Questions Answered in 6 Minutes

2009-05-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

How many times when you’re stuck on a genealogy problem have you thought to yourself, “I’m sure someone out there knows the answer to this question.” If you could just ask the right person a quick question it would save you a ton of time. Well over at FamilySearch we’ve been kicking around some ideas of how we might help people with this experience. This past Wednesday I was thinking about how much I’d like to find the death certificate for a particular ancestor when the thought struck me, “I’m sure someone out there knows the answer to this question.” The question for me was, how do I find the death certificate for Warren Dodge, who died about 1888 in Barton County, Kansas?

Well I decided to try a little experiment. What if I could throw that question out to a large audience. Would they respond? Would they answer my question? Here’s what happened.

6 May 11:47am I posed my question on Twitter. Twitter automatically put my tweet on Facebook as well.

11:53am - 1st response comes in via Twitter
12:04pm - 2nd response via Twitter
12:04pm - 3rd response via Twitter
12:14pm - 4th response via Facebook
12:31pm - 5th response via Facebook
12:51pm - 6th response via Facebook
4:14pm - 7th response via Twitter

Here are images of the Twitter and Facebook responses.

The first response was within 6 minutes! The last response was less than 6 hours later. All responses were accurate and helpful. As a result of the information provided I went to the Barton County genealogical society website and discovered that the county did not have death certificates that early and the state (as my online experts indicated) did not keep death certificates until 1911. I did not waste any more time looking for a death certificate but rather changed my focus to probate records. I called the Barton County records office and asked if they had a probate record for Warren Dodge who died there in the 1880s. Without even putting me on hold, she looked it up confirmed they had it and is sending me a copy of the whole file. Wow! That was a terrific experience.

Oh, by the way. The folks that offered answers on twitter are not people that I know personally. One of the responders on Facebook is an old friend I haven't seen for nearly 20 years. The other Facebook responder is a relative that I frequently collaborate with on genealogy stuff.

The future of computers in genealogy

2009-04-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

Imagine where this could take us...

Timetoast takes a turn at timelines

2009-04-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

I came across another time line tool today. My first thought was "really, another time line?" Then I thought, "surely they must know there are some good time lines out there..." This was followed quickly by "then they must think they have something unique...". Luckily, I keep a stash of artifacts and data about several ancestors so I can check this stuff out really fast. So I quickly made the time line below.

As with all time lines I've seen, it doesn't deal well with fuzzy dates that are common in genealogy (abt. 1850, etc.). I was also a let down to see that they didn't have a way to zoom or otherwise manipulate artifacts. Many genealogical artifacts are boring thumbnail-style and really require a lot of zoom to read. Aside from that, this was really fast and in about 10 minutes I had created a time line, shared it on my facebook profile, and embedded it in my blog. Nice work Timetoast.

Conceptual Overview of Genealogical Research

2009-03-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

In the past I've been critical of the design of the currently available genealogy software tools. In fact, I just went back and re-read a couple of my posts and realized that at times I come across quite critical. This is not my intention and I feel badly about that. I’ve made some very direct statements like, “…one of my basic beliefs as I've analyzed the genealogy space over the last 4 years or so is that sound design, including a solid understanding of the information architecture of genealogy is largely missing in the software tools that are in the market today.” I think I was going for passionate with that one but probably came across as arrogant.

What really got me thinking about this was a statement by Shoebox Genealogy asserting that PAF was still the best genealogy program out there in spite of its faults. That honestly set me back on my heels. I really respect the thoughts of Shoebox Genealogy so I couldn’t just write off that statement. I spent some time creating a concept map of PAF and much to my surprise, discovered that the concept map of PAF is really quite good. It has no concept of supporting collaboration in a meaningful way but as for its ability to support the individual work of someone trying to record the conclusions of their research it is pretty sound. The biggest flaws with PAF are that it has no concept of a hypothesis or theory, the integration of digital sources was an after-thought and suffers because of it, and it doesn’t help the user with the research process. I’m sure there are other holes, but these are just top of mind. I also noticed that some of the key concepts I thought were lacking in PAF were actually there, I had just never found them before because the user interface obscured or hid them.

So what are the key concepts that should be supported by a genealogy program? With the help of some co-workers, I put together a concept map about genealogical research. A concept map is a simple, but powerful, way to capture and communicate knowledge about a topic. The map identifies nouns (concepts) and shows how they are related through verbs. Here is a PDF of the concept map. The video below is a guided tour through the concept map. I’d really appreciate your insight and feedback on the concept map.

Genealogy Today

2009-02-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to find a way to quickly communicate the basic challenges of genealogy to others. I thought I'd try kind of a white board approach to it. This is The first portion of a longer video. The entire video presents a quick overview of what genealogy is, what some of the common challenges are for those getting started and proposes a future solution - 'The FamilySearch Way'. I've cut out the last part - 'The FamilySearch Way'. So sorry, I'm not tipping my hat yet about what's coming after new FamilySearch. I'd be curious in your feedback on the first two parts of the video. Does it hit home for you? Are there some major issues that should have been included in a high-level overview of this nature but were not?

The Popularity of Genealogy: Why Dick Eastman is Wrong

2009-02-20T10:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Dick Eastman posted an interesting article about the popularity of genealogy. His summation:

I will suggest that genealogy is indeed a very popular activity among Americans. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, people are actively looking for their family heritage. However, that number pales in comparison to some other personal interests that I have mentioned.

As proof points he contrasts some indicators of interest in genealogy to indicators of interest in other popular activities like sports. He rightly (and convincingly) points out that if the interest in genealogy is so high (Time Magazine reported it as one of the four most popular activities on the Internet in 1999) then there should be other indicators like money spent, magazine subscriptions or attendance at conventions. He points out that the dollars spent on genealogy pale in comparison to the billions spent on sports. Where for example is the Sports Illustrated of genealogy? Why are there so few attendees at the National Genealogical Society conference but 40,000+ at a Star Trek convention?

Well to be truthful, Dick is right. The number of people sufficiently interested in genealogy (as offered in the current magazines, trade shows, etc.) is quite low compared to other major hobbies. So how do you account for the difference between Time Magazine and Dick Eastman? Did Time get it wrong and Dick get it right? There is a simple explanation and here it is:

Interest < Barriers to Adoption

There is no question, in my opinion, that the majority of people in America (and I suspect on this planet) do have a strong interest in knowing more about their ancestry. However the effort required in order to satisfy that interest is currently too high for most people. Try this test on a random friend. Tell them that you have found a picture of their 3rd Great Grandpa and you think there are some striking similarities. Ask them if they’d like to see it. What do you think the response rate would be? Pretty high.

Then tell that friend that to see it they have to pay you $350, create a research plan, keep a research log, spend countless hours scanning through microfilm, become an expert on the Palatine Migration, learn to read ancient German and walk across a bed of hot coals barefoot while carrying an elephant in one hand. The number of positive responses goes down slightly.

People are interested in their ancestors. They aren’t interested in becoming genealogist or in running a gauntlet to satisfy that interest. The creators of genealogy magazines, conferences and the industry as a whole have focused on delivering something that is of interest to those that are willing to run the gauntlet. For example, Elizabeth Shown Mills excellent reference, Evidence Explained, while impressive in detail and thud factor, is not going to be on the coffee table of the average American. I’m sure this wasn’t her intention. To the average person it makes the gauntlet that much more overwhelming. To those that are willing to run the gauntlet it is an essential reference.

I believe we are getting close to a tipping point on the equation. Imagine what would happen if the equation changed.

Interest > Barriers to Adoption

There has been a flurry of activity in the industry recently trying to make genealogy accessible to the masses. For example, both Geni.com and FamilyLink’s We’re Related Facebook application have millions of subscribers. I suspect that ‘serious’ genealogists don’t consider these very relevant – especially We’re Related. They are extremely relevant to me. They have successfully created something that allows the average person with an interest in genealogy to start playing. There is however still a gap between the ordinary person’s desire to know about their ancestors in a rich, accurate and easy way and what these applications offer.

What will it take to deliver an experience that is accessible to the average person but can still help them discover their ancestors in a genealogically sound manner without requiring them to become a genealogist? Here’s an extremely high level list. Just making progress on these four items would take us past the tipping point.

Make the most relevant historical records viewable and searchable online. FamilySearch and The Generations Network (and many others) are actively working on this.
Remove inhibitors to collaboration. Geni.com and FamilyLink are making progress on this by integrating social networking concepts with genealogy. Their efforts aren’t a complete solution but a good start.
The system knows how to do genealogy so the user doesn’t have to. I think there are three major areas of focus on this one: 1) The system needs to be able to help the user decide what to do 2) the system must be able to identify and execute a research strategy 3) the system must be able to help the user perform meaningful analysis of evidence without the user having to know how to analyze evidence (I believe this is the hardest one).
Integrate item two and three above so that the system can take the complex work process of genealogy, divide it into discreet tasks and spread those tasks across large numbers of users (based on their interest, resources and skill) and coordinate the final outcome into ‘completed’ genealogical research.

While these are hard tasks, they are not impossible tasks. They are hard on the order of a decade or two. The tipping point however is within five years. When that happens there are hundreds of millions of people with an interest in their ancestors that will be able to have a meaningful experience without having to walk on hot coals or carry elephants.

Information Architect?

2008-10-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the IDEA 2008 Conference which was held in Chicago, Illinois. One of the interesting things about this conference was that while many people were there to discuss the field of Information Architecture, no one seemed to feel confident in there ability to articulate what Information Architecture is. After spending several days interacting in workshops and listening to lectures, it is clear that there is high value in what these people were talking about but it was difficult to carve out Information Architecture as a separate and meaningful discipline from Design. If anything Information Architecture is the core of sound design. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to have good design, you must do the things that the Information Architects were discussing at this conference but if you did just the things the Information Architects were discussing you would not necessarily end up with a good design.

You may be wondering right about now why I've chosen to ramble on about this on my genealogy blog. Well one of my basic beliefs as I've analyzed the genealogy space over the last 4 years or so is that sound design, including a solid understanding of the information architecture of genealogy is largely missing in the software tools that are in the market today. I hope to delve into this more over the coming weeks.

Wanna know what's happening in your tree?

2008-06-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

We've been playing around with different ways to keep tabs on what's happening in your tree on the FamilySearch pilot program at new.familysearch.org. A common request and often dreamed of feature is to be able to do simple things like see a list of everyone in my tree. This is somewhat of a challenging request in the pilot system as the definition of your tree is ambiguous. You connect into the common tree which is shared by many users. Knowing where your tree stops and starts is not a discreet question.

We have considered allowing users to define a scope of interest which we could monitor and report on. Imagine you'd like to know who in your tree has been updated recently, or who has multiple parents, or who has sources, etc., etc. You could define a scope of interest for example assume I'm working on my Brewster line. I go over to Sarah Augusta Brewster and tell the system I want to define a scope of interest starting at Sarah and going back 5 generations and down 2 generations at each generation. The system would then report to me about activity in this portion of the tree.

We took this concept a step further and hooked it up to a technology called RSS which basically allowed us to run a report against a scope of interest and pipe it out using RSS to any number of news readers. Here's a snapshot of the feed from my tree in Google Reader.

You can click on any of the items and it takes you to the person in the tree. I shared this list with my sister, who is an avid genealogist, and she immediately began using it as a punch list of things to do on our tree. I then got new things on my list indicating that people in the tree had been updated. You can imagine how useful this would be to keep tabs on people in the tree and see who is updating them. Before you get too excited about this, remember, this was just a quick demo we hacked together to show the concept. It is not ready for prime time.

SimpatiGo

2008-05-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

I saw an interesting mashup today - SimpatiGo.com. It is kind of a walking tour wiki. You can put in the begin and end points of your journey and it will give you a customized walking tour which gives you directions and lists all of the interesting sites along the way. The novel part of their concept is doing this wiki-style which means anyone can add their own points of interest. I went in and added a few points of interest in downtown Salt Lake and quickly had a walking tour past Temple Square.

I'm assuming they will also let you edit points of interest in the future. The usability isn't quite where it needs to be for broad acceptance but the concept is interesting.

You may wonder why I put this on my genealogy blog. Well, I can think of all kinds of interesting applications in the world of genealogy. For example, who wouldn't want to take a walking tour of the places where their ancestors lived? You could also take a similar concept and create walking tours through your family. For example, many applications can calculate the relationship between two people in a pedigree, imagine if part of that calculation also walked you through the relationship and highlighted interesting tidbits and artifacts that supported or accented the path between the two people. That would be cool!

Find a Grave and the Super Sleuths

2008-04-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently pointed me to the findagrave.com website. I registered and volunteered to find graves in cemeteries near my home. Once I find a grave, I take pictures of the headstone and upload it to the site. The site seems to facilitate this volunteer headstone service fairly well. Last weekend I 'claimed' my first three assignments. I decided to see if my 3 older children would be interested in this activity. After all, what could be more fun for an 11yr old boy, and 9 and 7yr old girls?

Ok, so I needed a strategy to get the kids interested in the project. My idea, ask them to help me solve a mystery. The girls are totally captivated with Nancy Drew and my oldest son doesn't leave his bedroom in the morning without a magnifying glass. As soon as the word mystery crested my lips they ran to get their detective notepads, magnifying glasses, and various other mystery-solving paraphernalia. I gave them the clues: name, birth date, death date, plot number. As we approached the cemetery they put their sleuthing brains together and determined that based on the death date the grave was probably in the upper, older, part of the cemetery. They noticed numbers painted on the roads that they figured out were way points for plot numbers and within five minutes had found the first headstone.

My super sleuths found 2 of the 3 grave stones last weekend. The third seems to be buried or missing. They're heading out on their bikes later today to find 3 more and get pictures. They are excited about helping other people do family history through their small acts of services.

FamilySearch Training Wiki?

2008-03-31T14:36:00.000-07:00

As the new FamilySearch system continues to be rolled out around the world, the demand for training materials is growing. I've seen several great presentations created by people in the community that were tasked with training a group of people on the new system. A colleague (Tim Cross) and I were talking about this and he mused that it would be wonderful if there were a FamilySearch Training Wiki or some site where the community could come together and pool there knowledge, tools, slideshows, etc. that they use for training. A site like this would be a tremendous resource. This is not an 'official' effort by FamilySearch, just an interesting idea two guys talked through around the water cooler (OK so it was really in IM...). Anyone feel like giving this a go?

Source Centric Prototype

2008-02-22T11:57:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about concepts of source-centric genealogy. I've written in the past about how most family history applications tend to put the emphasis on the conclusions drawn and not the sources found. Of course they allow you to add a source citation and perhaps even include an image, but the heart of the experience (screen realestate, prominence, features, etc.) is about the conclusions. The paradox is that the heart of the matter really is the evidence.

We've built a prototype to try and make evidence more central to the experience. It has been interesting to see the reactions of different customer segments to the prototype. The professional genealogists love having the evidence right there. Those who have never done genealogy don't really care about the subtleties of evidence but are thrilled to see images of original documents about their ancestors.

One of the really interesting things in the reactions to the prototype was how people felt about different sources of information. You see, the prototype works against the new FamilySearch. The new FamilySearch contains basically all of the lineage-linked data sets in the possession of FamilySearch. This includes Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, International Genealogical Index, and many other lesser-known data sets. As we built the new FamilySearch we combined all of these data sets into one system. Where we had extremely high confidence that people were the same, we combined the records together into one person (OK, actually the computers did this for us). We did this in a non-destructive way. You could think of it like putting all of the people that were the same into one folder. You can pull out the individual people or you can look at the whole folder as one person.

Anyway, the reason for all of that background is the prototype basically starts with the new FamilySearch and displays the information as conclusions with sources rather than people combined together. When we showed this to people (especially those more experienced with genealogy) they really bristled at the trees but loved the sources. Here's some screen shots.

The nice thing about the way this is working out is that even though this kind of displays things separated out again, the new FamilySearch effort creates a mapping for us between people and the system and all of the other information in the system. That means when you start out, you already have a tree pieced together and you can see the sources and trees that were used to do it.

This is kind of a ramble but if it sparks any thoughts I'd love to hear them.

Mashups with FamilySearch

2007-11-02T18:49:00.000-07:00

This is just a short post, I'll write more later. I just wanted to show the world the first step toward a new world where you can build mashups with data from the new FamilySearch. Click one of the links in the iframe below to load data about a person in the new FamilySearch. This particular sample is not really pretty but let your imagination start working on all of the powerful things you (at least the developers out there) could do with this type of access to the new FamilySearch.

More on Source-Centricity: Conclusions, Artifacts, and Evidence

2007-06-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

Conclusions, Artifacts, and Evidence
We've been prototyping a flow for the Life Browser which allows users to create a person, add conclusions about that person, add artifacts about that person, and identify the artifacts that are supporting evidence for these conclusion. In this approach there are three basic types of data 1) Conclusions 2) Artifacts 3) Evidence.

Conclusions: These are basically what people believe to be the vital information about a person (birth, marriage, death, relationships, etc.).

Artifacts: A digital representation of something relating to a person's life. It consists of metadata which describes the artifact and provides source citation information; and may contain images, video, audio, or text. Artifacts are also of a particular type: picture, record, story, video, audio, personal knowledge.

Evidence: Evidence is the linkage of an artifact to one or more conclusions. It contains the linkage between the conclusion(s) and the artifact and a note explaining the linkage (optional).

One of the current shortcomings is we haven't determined how to represent a conclusion which is a hypothesis and may or may not have evidence to support the hypothesis.

Evidence of Relationships
On a related note, for some time we've wanted to be more explicit in identifying evidence that supports relationships. I haven't seen any tools that do this. Have I missed something? For example, it is one thing to have evidence that 1 Jan 1900 is the birth date and quite another to have evidence that Jack and Jill are the parents of Bob. Most tools however only allow you to cite the source of the birth event but not the source of the relationship information (which may be the same or a separate source). We're starting to play with a prototype that lets you explicitly identify evidence of relationships.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas to share that might help us out with our prototyping? Please share.

Source-Centricity

2007-06-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

Ex Nihilo?
Years ago I worked on a project using ethnographic research methodologies to study the life cycle of the creative process of knowledge workers. One of the primary take aways from this research was that there is no ex nihilo creation (ex nihilo is Latin for out of nothing). I'm not sure why we got hung up on the Latin phraseology. The point is that every 'new' creation or discovery is always built from something, it never comes out of nothing.

Genealogy is the same way. There is always some piece of evidence or source material which leads us to draw a conclusion about an ancestor. Some of you may wish to argue the no ex nihilo creation principle based on the grounds that you've seen many conclusions that appear to have come out of nothing but technically even those have come from somewhere. For many reasons, keeping track of this evidence is a core requirement to successful genealogical reasearch.

Warning, I'm about to make a critical comment. Please don't take offense.

It would seem that the genealogy industry or rather, those that provide tools to the genealogical community have fallen short on this requirement. I have yet to see a system that accurately maps the relationship between genealogical evidence and conclusions based upon that evidence and does it in a way that assures integrity (you should not be able to add, edit, or heaven forbid share conclusions without accurately associating the evidence). Nor have I seen a system for tracking evidence that is sufficiently intuitive and usable that it does not require staunch discipline to use. There is of course a reason for this. It is complex and hard. I don't believe it is impossible. In fact, it seems like a medium-hard problem.

While I can't offer statistics on this, I can say that the overwhelming majority of lineage-linked pedigrees submitted to the Church do not have source citations. I doubt this is a surprise to you. Why is this the case? Sure people pass around GEDCOMs, download pedigrees, etc. but this is just a proliferation of the problem, not the root of the problem. I believe the root of the problem is that the tools used to organize our family history do not offer a usable tool set for tracking evidence. The user interfaces and data models do not accurately represent the reality of the relationship between the evidence and the conclusions. They have totally missed the boat on what the user needs to accomplish in this manner. They have built square pegs for round-holed problems and users have been forcing the pegs through the hole ever since. The process is so hard as to prevent anyone but the most diligent from doing it. I am acquainted with many skilled genealogists that have given up on this process and simply file their evidence and notes into their filing cabinet.

I want to throw down the gauntlet. The manufacturers of these tools need to step up to the plate and solve this problem. We hope to take our first stab at this as part of our continued efforts on the Life Browser prototype on the FamilySearch Labs site. I'm sure we'll experience many failures before we get it right.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this issue. Have I missed some great tool out there? Does someone have a solution already? Have I finally gone completely off the deep end? I know these aren't mutually exlusive questions but please, share your thoughts.

Family History Technology Workshop '07

2007-03-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the 2007 Family History Technology Workshop hosted at BYU. Joe Martel from our team gave a presentation about FamilySearch Labs and the Pedigree Viewer. Joe did a great job and the presentation was well received.

We also had a table where we gave demos of the Pedigree Viewer and the Life Browser (not yet linked to the labs site but coming very soon). I thought the responses to the demos and the FamilySearch Labs concept were interesting. People were very fond of the applications but were amazed (and pleased) at the level of openness on the labs site. One gentleman that stopped to talk commented how for years the Church would go dark and then just release something. He felt the labs concept a strong and refreshing break from this approach.

Several developers asked about the possibility of getting their hands on the code for the Pedigree Viewer. We're definitely open to that. We just need to work out the logistics.

There were a couple of really strong highlights for me this year. If you missed the workshop, you'll want to check these out when the presentations become available.

Gordon Clarke's presentation at lunch about the FamilySearch Affiliates program, APIs, and building a community of developers. If you're a developer the content of this presentation will be refreshing news.
The Millenium CD. A group of researchers at BYU have invented a CD that will store for a thousand years without the data turning to mush. They believe that within a few years these disks will be the same cost as regular CDs/DVDs. We may finally have a digital counterpart to paper for preservation.
John Finlay, Neumont U., and phpGEDView (PGV). This was a great presentation about their efforts to add a collaborative research assistant to PGV. Very good work. I really, really like their approach. Their UI leaves much to be desired but their approach is very solid.

Automatic Source Citations & Zotero

2007-02-28T10:27:00.000-08:00

A colleague just pointed me to zotero.org as an interesting approach to handling source citations. While they don't seem to have turned their attention toward genealogy, their approach looks promising for taking us closer to automatic source citations.

Zotero is an open source project sponsored by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. You install a plug-in to your browser and then when you're looking at something you want to cite you just click the icon in your address bar. It handles multiple citations on the same page, allows you to edit citations, add notes, attach files, take a snapshot of the content or just point to it. Check out their demo.

For this all to work the site needs to have the citation information available in a form that zotero understands. Rather than force you to use their specification their architecture allows you to create your own translator that maps your citation format to zotero and then it just works. I'd love to see some of the major online genealogical repositories invest the small amount of work required to support zotero. At the same time vendors of record managers and other family history applications could integrate with zotero and the automatic source citation problem is solved.

Geni and Tech Talks

2007-01-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

If you're reading this blog, you're probably in the loop enough to have already seen the Geni.com beta site. If you haven't seen it yet, it is definitely worth a look. It is basically a web 2.0 app for building a centralized pedigree for everyone. In that sense, it is similar in nature to what other players like the LDS Church, Ancestry.com, and OneGreatFamily.com have been working on. It does seem to be fundamentally different however in that they have done a great job of incorporating social networking and viral marketing concepts into the site. The site is also focused on living people to start with. They've done a good job with the usability. It is definitely designed for ordinary people. I found it interesting that they chose to write their site in Flash. We made the same choice for the work we've been doing on FamilySearchLabs.org. Our decision was driven by our belief that the end user experience would need to be very rich including lots of multimedia, animation, etc. I would guess that the guys at Geni.com chose Flash for this same reason.

On another note, the LDS Church CIO, Joel Dehlin, recently sponsored the first LDS Tech Talks. The basic idea is to provide a forum where those that are technically minded can interact with the Church on technology issues. They are trying to leverage the large community of people out there that are anxious to contribute their talents to improve the Church's technology. Read more about it at the LDS Tech website or on Joel Dehlin's blog. I wasn't able to go to the tech talks but my inbox has been flooded with all of the buzz and positive feedback it caused.

SnapGenie Meets Genealogy

2007-01-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with the beta of the new MyFamily.com site. One of the interesting tools there is a feature that let's you narrate your way through a stack of images. It does a pretty good job of making it easy to recreate the experience of thumbing through a stack of pictures with your friends and family. I wondered how it would work to thumb through a stack of artifacts about an ancestor. Here's a really quick example.

Please upgrade to a browser that will support IFrames.

I think if the application had a way for me to zoom in on my ancestors name or something else of interest in the records (like Microsoft PhotoStory) it might not be a bad way to share the information.

Check out the MyFamily.com beta. It is free and has some interesting elements.

Interesting Thoughts

2006-12-21T14:23:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of years we've been thinking that Genealogy and Web 2.0 were made for each other. Here's an interesting post on the O-Reilly Radar blog about genealogy and Web 2.0.

A colleague brought the effectiveui (www.effectiveui.com) site to my attention. There are some really interesting concepts in their UI that we hope to play with as we start making our push toward a more interesting timeline.

Timelines

2006-12-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

Timelines can be an interesting way to help people understand their genealogy. In the past year I've come across several interesting efforts to build community sites which use a timeline metaphor. Dandelife.com and OurStory.com are two interesting examples. These sites are both focused on building timelines surrounding stories and events happening today and in the very recent past (from a user's own memories). BBC has also done some interesting timelines. Two that I think are extremely interesting from a design perspective are Timeline: Persecution and Genocide Under the Nazis 1933 - 1945 and Kings and Queens Through Time.

One of the focus areas for some prototyping we plan to do in the near future is an effort to allow users to explore timelines of their ancestors that combine a richness of data into an easy to understand format. This is really hard to do. To give you an idea, here is the type of content we'd like to pull together automatically for any random ancestor a user would like to learn about.

Genealogical events and associated records for an individual
Genealogical events and associated records for an individual's family (parents, siblings, spouse, children)
Modern day and historic maps showing the geographic locations of these events (think Google Earth or Google Maps)
Historical events that would have impacted people in that place and time
Historical events that might not have impacted the person but which have impacted their ancestors
Historical texture (fashion, sports, transportation, entertainment, etc.) throughout the ancestor's life

What would you like to see in a timeline like this?

Have you seen any interesting timelines that would be worth looking at before we start?

Large Format Printing

2006-11-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking recently about how much more context the Super Duper Zim Zam Zoom Pedigree Viewer provides (see www.familysearchlabs.org for more details). I never get tired of zooming all the way out to see the whole tree. I do however get tired of not being able to see who anyone is when it is zoomed all of the way out. While the viewer is a definite improvement, I don't think I'd be happy unless I had a monitor 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide. Then I could see my whole family tree and still be able to read the names and details of the individuals.

Well, I don't have an 8' X 8' monitor nor do I see one in my near future. I do however have a 7' X 4' Generation Map from GenerationMaps.com. I love it. If you haven't checked out a Generation Map you should. You will gain a whole new perspective on your family tree.

I took my first Generation Map to a family reunion two summers ago. There were about 50 family members there of which myself and one other do genealogy. I nailed it to a tree in the middle of our campground to see what would happen. Everyone gathered around to see the chart and ask questions. People were captivated by the ability to see so much of our heritage at once.

I also hung it on my kitchen wall for a month or so (much to my wife's dismay). Several times a week I would see the children gathered around it just reading names and looking at where we came from.

Go to www.generationmaps.com and take a look at their working charts to learn more about this unique large format view of your family.

Ancestry.com's New Tools

2006-11-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

This past September MyFamily, Inc. announced the release of new family tree building tools. I’ve finally found the time to do a really quick (I mean really quick) write up on some of the functionality. It is clearly a step toward making family history accessible to ordinary people. Let me recap the basic experience I recently had as I took another look at the offering.

I put on my ordinary person hat and went to the site. I knew that there was some new tree building tool that would let me attach family artifacts to my tree, I just couldn’t find it. I had to take off my ordinary person hat to find the feature set which is located under the MyAncestry tab. The first thing I tried to do (which is probably not an ordinary person thing) was upload one of my GEDCOM files. For the life of me I couldn’t get the system to accept the file. I kept getting an error saying that it was an invalid GEDCOM file. The ordinary person in me was confused because I didn’t know what the error meant. The non-ordinary person in me was frustrated because I was feeding it the most plain GEDCOM file known to man which I’ve tested on nearly every system known to man and it was failing. This ended up being a good thing as it forced me to put my ordinary person hat back on and go down a different path.

The path I chose (which is more likely to be an ordinary person path) was to create a family tree. I found the wizard-style flow of the creation process to be straightforward and on target with the ordinary person side of me. I did step slightly out of the ordinary person (OP) persona and entered information on my paternal grandfather and his parents rather than myself. I did this for two reasons: 1) I didn’t want to put information about me on the site 2) I suspected the system would have a much easier time finding information about my grandpa and his parents (all deceased) than about me and my parents (all living).

The wizard captured information about my grandpa and his parents and then took me to a pedigree view of the family (nowhere near as cool as the Super Duper Zim Zam Zoom Pedigree Viewer). When I got to the pedigree a pop-up instructed me that the twitching green leaf was an indicator that the system had found records of trees that might be about my family. I was excited to see that I had leaves in my pedigree.

I clicked on the leaf and saw that the system had found both trees and records. I chose to look at the records. I was pleased to find several records in a list of about 8 that were about my grandpa. I thought the flow of viewing records and then choosing to add them to my tree was pretty good. I did notice a few black holes in the flow that would have frustrated OPs. I loved that once I accepted a matching record I could choose how I wanted the transcribed data from the record to be reflected in my tree, the record cited itself (hooray!!) , and kept a link so that I can easily get to it from my tree.

I also took a look at some matching trees and grafted one into the line. The process was straightforward and the ability to choose how many generations to graft was a good compromise between being too granular to be functional and just stuffing the whole tree in.

I added a picture of grandpa's dad and even wrote a quick story about him. I found myself wishing that I could write a story about the picture or just include pictures in the story. The similarity between the flows for adding pictures and stories to a person and the prototypes that we've worked on over the past 18 months was uncanny. The flows were nearly identical and at times word usage and icons were also identical. That's not to say that either group was peaking at each others stuff, rather that we've both been studying the same problems and working toward very similar solutions.

Overall I found that the experience was conceptually on target and quite good for a first release. The timeline on the person page is somewhat lackluster and the overall feature set while not quite ready for OPs is a huge step in the right direction. The biggest weaknesses:

No help from the system in determining whether a matching tree or record is actually the right one. This is a huge issue. OPs need substantial help in making this determination. A set of visualization tools needs to be offered which allows the user to accurately make the decision without having to become a researcher.
Access to the functionality is through the wrong door. Ancestry.com has done a great job at catering to the crowd from hobbyists to professional genealogists. Coming to Ancestry.com is a banquet for this group but a yawn or a nightmare for OPs. I would think that once the feature set is refined to where it really meets the needs of OPs the right door in is probably through a refreshed MyFamily.com.
More could be done to increase the social networking opportunities within the tools. For example, as soon as I finish writing a story ask me if I want to share it with someone or if there is someone that can add more to the story.

Deodat's Descendants

2006-10-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

One of my ongoing efforts in my own genealogical research has been a descendancy project. I've been trying to find all of the descendants of Deodat Brewster and Lois Drury (my GGGGGGGParents). Yesterday we added a descendancy view capability to the FamilySearch Labs site and used a portion of Deodat's descendancy as a sample file to look at. Take a look and let us know what you think.

I was thrilled the first time I pulled up Deodat's descendancy in the viewer and started looking around at (what seem like) familiar friends. I don't know why more people don't do descendancy research. Pursuing ancestors is a very 'western' approach to genealogy. There are many cultures around the world that have a hard time thinking of genealogy outside of the descendancy of an honored ancestor. After all, it doesn't start from me and go back, it starts from them and comes down.

Nothing Like Real Users

2006-10-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

Wow, I love the 'labs' concept! 13 days ago we made the FamilySearch Labs site available. Since then the tool has processed about 3,000 pedigrees. We've received lots of feedback from real users on what they love and hate about the experience. Because of the volume and quality of the feedback we were able to quickly isolate and resolve usability issues.

We borrowed the idea from Google Labs to see if we could create an environment where we get user interaction with software substantially earlier in the development process. In the past we've often done paper prototyping to show concepts and task flows to users and get their feedback. Paper prototypes are good at helping you understand if you have the right elements on a page but don't do much to tell you if what your application will be useable. The labs approach has given us a whole new capability in useability testing.

While the labs experience has been a great success, it still doesn't remove the need for first hand observation of users. Here's an example. After we had resolved most of the major issues with the Smart Pedigree Viewer (thanks to Ben Crowther for the name) we decided to go and do some live observation. I spent some time at my favorite family history center watching people use the viewer. In twenty minutes I picked up a handful of usability issues that we never could have discovered without first hand observation. On the other hand, the amount of time we had to spend doing live observation to attain our currently level of useability was substantially reduced.

So what do I like about the labs site:

Speed: We can change the application, put it on the site, and know if our new features sink or swim within a few hours.
Audience: We've had users from all around the world looking at the application. This is critical for an application that will have an international reach.
Cost: As you can imagine, gathering feedback on an application from several thousand users would be extremely expensive and virtually impossible. The cost to do this through the Labs site is trivial.
Open: The labs culture of letting the users have a peak behind the curtain and sharing often imperfect software early and often creates an openness in communication between the developers and the users that I've never seen before.
Motivation: Working in an environment that allows you to 'publish' your work every couple of days (or more often) is extremely motivating to the development team. It is exciting to get the newest thing into the hands of users.
Community: Bringing the end user into the process helps us all feel like we're on the same team. It creates a sense of community. Everyone is invested in the outcome.

I could go on, but the point I'm making is that there is substantial value in the 'labs' concept. I HIGHLY recommend this approach to anyone developing consumer software. I know that some organizations will feel they can't be this open because their competitor will come look at the site too. My response: I believe speed, agility, openness, and community will beat fixed-length secrecy any day. They're going to see your product sooner or later.

FamilySearch (TM) Labs

2006-10-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago I posted an image of my pedigree in a smart pedigree viewer we've been working on. Many people expressed an interest in playing with the viewer using their own data. We've just made a new website available (FamilySearch Labs) to showcase interesting new technology we're working on. The first project on the site is our smart pedigree viewer. It allows you to upload your own GEDCOM and view it or view one of our sample files. Go check it out at www.familysearchlabs.org and be sure to use the feedback link on the site to tell us what you think.

My Data or Our Data?

2006-10-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

One of the ongoing debates in the genealogy industry is over who owns the data. This question has been analyzed in a number of ways including the legal/copyright angle. What's more interesting to me is how average people feel about the data they come across and piece together about their ancestors.

In some ways this debate reminds me of a favorite game my two oldest kids used to play whenever riding in the car. One would start the volley by saying: "He's my Dad!" The other would retort, "No, he's my Dad!" They would continue until the object of their debate became so enraged he ended the game for them (much to their dismay). After this they usually started another game: "I'm a boy!" "I'm a girl!" "Well, I'm a boy!" Those were the days.

At times I feel the same frustration over the debate on ownership of genealogical information. Here's a different way to look at the problem. Let's not talk about dead people, let's consider living people. Imagine that you have grandchildren (may be a stretch for some of you). Suppose that one of your grandchildren was digging through your filing cabinet and found your birth certificate. For some reason they didn't want to share it with the other grandchildren. Imagine another of your grandchildren really wanted a copy of the birth certificate so after some bargaining paid grandchild number 1 for a copy of the birth certificate with an agreement that he wouldn't show it to anybody else.

I know there are some gaping holes in the analogy but I do wonder how our ancestors feel about some of our strange attitudes toward the facts of their lives. The biggest hole in the analogy is that I do believe there can be a reasonable value exchange when one party has gone to some effort and expense to make information about our ancestors more easily available. The fee however should be for the service of making it accessible, not for the information. The information (in my opinion) is community property.

I've just put my kevlar vest on, I'm ready to post this, let the debate begin.

Scratch Pads

2006-09-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

In the past I've blogged about the need for a scratch pad to assist in genealogical research. It is near impossible to do family history without some type of scratch pad to write down clues, organize your thoughts, do date math, build a timeline, draw a hypothetical pedigree, some potential sources I've found, etc. It would be great if these scratch pads could be persisted in the context of my current research.

Recently a colleague pointed me to an implementation of a scratch pad that is a good example of what could be implemented in a family history application. The scratch pad is implemented off to the right side of the search interface for MSN's Live Search. You can hide or show the scratch pad, drag search results onto the scratch pad and create groups of search results on a scratch pad. The next time you come back you can easily see the items you put on the scratch pad. Clicking on one of the items loads it in the main frame of the window.

There are many features you would want to add to make this useable for genealogy. For starters, the ability to add notes to the items on the scratch pad and to associate scratch pad items with people in your pedigree.

Take a look for yourself: http://search.msn.com/images/results.aspx#imagesize=all&q=pac-man

Not Just a Spot on a Pedigree

2006-09-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

I believe when ordinary people think of genealogy a mental image of a pedigree chart with some names, dates, and places comes to mind. Average people aren't heavily engaged by this. If they don't know who the people are, they aren't likely to care. What is the magic blend of genealogical data and other artifacts from a person's life that changes them from a spot on a pedigree to a real person in the mind of their descendants?

I tried an experiment recently. I wanted to tell the story of an ancestor of mine with enough fidelity that a group of people, with no relationship to her, would come away realizing that she was not just a spot on a pedigree, she was a real person. I had 5 minutes to do it. That's not a lot of time to help them care about my ancestor. At the same time, it is an eternity to try and keep a group of people focused on a 'spot in a pedigree'. I decided to create a video that would highlight a few quick artifacts of her life. My objective was to have the group make the jump from 'spot on a pedigree' to 'real person' without saying a word. I've included the video below. Those of you that are not members of the LDS Church will notice that the video has strong LDS overtones.

A Better Pedigree

2006-09-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

As I think about pedigrees, there is a short list of things I wish I could do. Many of them are influenced by applications like Google maps. For example, I wish that I could easily zoom in and out of my pedigree. All the way out would show my whole tree, all the way in would show a person or two. Then I wish I could just drag the pedigree to where I want to be rather than clicking and jumping a generation at a time.

Well, recently for a prototype we've been working on, we had to create a flash-based pedigree. We thought that rather than just do a knock-off of every pedigree out there, we'd try to implement some of these features. We determined it would take about the same time either way so we went for it. We learned some really interesting things.

1) There is a cool factor about being able to navigate a pedigree like this.
2) It is meaningful on multiple levels to be able to see your whole pedigree.
3) This pedigree seems to provide better context.
4) Interesting information can be communicated at a glance. For example, when my pedigree is all of the way zoomed out it is easy to see that I have a couple of holes in my 6th generation. This may be a logical starting point for some research.

Here is a screenshot of my pedigree all of the way zoomed out.

(Click for a larger view)

If you count you can see 54 generations (a cousin of mine hooked up to a royalty line that I left in for testing purposes...). You can't really see in the screenshot but as you mouse over people their ancestors all light up in one color and their descendants all line up in another color. If you click on a person their details pop up. We're considering putting this up on a server where people can play with it. Anyone interested?

Survey Results

2006-09-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone that participated in the survey. There were a total of 64 responses. I've included the results below. I'd be curious about your interpretation of the results.

Here are the questions and their responses. Click on the thumbnails to see detailed responses.

1. What country and state do you live in?
Just less than half of the respondents live in Utah.

2. Do you know your grandparents' siblings?
We tend to know some of our grandparents' siblings.

3. Do you know your grandparents' cousins?
We tend not to know our grandparents' cousins.

4. Do you know your parents' cousins?
We tend to know some of our parents' cousins.

5. Do you know your cousins?
We tend to know our cousins.

6. Do you know your nieces and nephews?
We tend to know all of our nieces and nephews.

7. Do you know the children of your nieces and nephews?
We tend to know the children of our nieces and nephews. (Although most respondents don't have nieces or nephews with children)

8. Do you know the children of your cousins?
We tend to know the children of our cousins.

9. Which of the following items have been obstacles in forming relationships with your relatives?
Almost 86% of respondents indicate that geographic distance has been an obstacle in forming relationships with relatives.

How Well do You Know Your Relatives?

2006-08-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

Over the last week we've been discussing what I call the 'family reunion effect'. If you've ever been to a family reunion which included people beyond your parents posterity, you've probably experienced it. You meet someone you don't know. You suspect they are related to you - after all, you're at the same family reunion. You quickly figure out how you are related.

There is something about being together with people that you think you're related to that makes you want to know who your common ancestors are. Interacting with your living relatives creates a natural draw toward your common ancestors. It is often a natural entry point to doing (or atleast discussing) family history. This 'family reunion effect' has made us want to know more about how people interact with their relatives and if there are natural ways in which this interaction can be used to introduce family history activities. As a starting point I put together a quick survey trying to see if there are common boundaries to which relatives we know. Please take a moment and fill out the survey. I'll share the results on the blog.

Click here to take survey

Feel free to invite others to participate in the survey.

Trust Model

2006-05-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Have you ever used an application that violated your trust? Maybe it didn’t save something when you thought it should have or maybe you unexpectedly came across you and all of your living relatives in some online pedigree. One of the subtleties to successful applications is not breaking the user’s trust model. There are numerous ways in which the current array of family history tools violates people’s trust.

As family history applications become increasingly more collaborative in nature one of the primary issues to be considered has to do with sharing data. Using large brush strokes I can describe the trust model that users expect with regard to collaborating on their family history. Users tend to break their data down into three large chunks: my stuff, my shared stuff, and my published/public stuff. Notice that in all three cases they view it as my stuff. The difference is in who they are allowing to see their stuff. If the user were to encounter an application that doesn’t support this model they are likely to either abandon the tool or augment it. For example, if they used a tool that immediately published all of their work to the world, they would likely not use the tool. Instead, they would keep all of their stuff and their shared stuff someplace else until they were ready to publish. If they didn’t realize the tool was going to immediately publish and they used it, they would likely feel so burned by the experience that they would never come back.

The challenge to this is that fundamentally if people will share sooner they will make faster progress on their family history. They will more quickly find others working on the same problems that may already have the answer or can at least offer help. So how do we build a new generation of family history tools that support the user’s trust model but also encourage the user to share and publish sooner? Here are four ideas.

Help the user always feel like it is their stuff. They own it. If they share it with you always allow them to get it back.
Provide at least the three mental buckets: my stuff, my shared stuff, and my published/public stuff. This does not imply complex access control systems. The simplest form can be stuff that only I can see, stuff that people on my shared list can see, and stuff everyone can see. More and more I find complex grouping concepts in sharing to be too much for ordinary people. I really like the way Flickr.com has implemented this. Here is a snapshot of their access control.
Allow the flow of the program to encourage people to move their data from my stuff to my shared stuff to my published/public stuff as quickly as possible. Offer carrots to do it. For example, an application might look at my stuff and compare it to someone else’s stuff and then notify me that it looks like someone else is working on really similar stuff and ask if I’d like to contact that user and share some of my stuff.
Allow the user to say “I think” or “Maybe” about their conclusions. This is an area of functionality that is tempting to make overly complex. You could build a whole feature set around analyzing the quality of evidence, a surety schema, etc., etc. Ordinary people are likely to be driven off by this. One simple way to implement this might be to have a flag or button associated with fields that indicate that the conclusion is really a hypothesis of sorts. This would allow the user to share their work in progress with others without losing that important piece of metadata “I think”. Systems could also be more cautious about how they propagate things marked with an “I think” flag.

In summary…

If an application doesn’t support the user’s trust model they won’t use it.
The user definitely has a trust model around collaboration.
We need to support the user’s trust model while facilitating faster, more frequent collaboration.

Family History Technology Workshop

2006-04-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

This past March the 6th annual Family History Technology Workshop was held at Brigham Young University. I've been waiting for the presentations to be posted online so that I could offer some commentary about some of the topics discussed at the conference and reference the presentations. The slides for each of the presentations referenced below can found here.

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google
There was a lot of great content in Peter’s Key Note address Thursday morning. The thing that stuck out the most in my mind was the philosophy of recall versus precision when searching a data set. The basic philosophy Peter presented seemed to be that when you are dealing with sufficiently large quantities of data your recall (as a percentage of the total data set) can be low and precision extremely high.

Matthew Smith and Christophe Giraud-Carrier – Genealogical Implicit Affinity Network
Matthew presented their work on a Genealogical Implicit Affinity Network. This was totally cool. They took GEDCOM files and mined them for affinities between interesting data points, some examples offered were relationships, naming patterns and occupations. The results were presented as hyperbolic tree-like affinity diagrams. I think there is something in this that with some refinement would help ordinary people to have a greater interest and appreciation for their ancestors, not to mention the practical value of the data in research. I was so fascinated that with their presentation that a few weeks ago we visited them in their lab to have a follow on conversation. I hope to do a separate blog posting specific to this. If you’d like to find out more about their work visit the data mining lab website.

Shane Hathaway and the Touchstone Team – The Bit Mountain Research Project
Shane gave a great presentation on what it takes to build an 18 petabyte system that can be preserved long-term.18 petabytes is the projected storage capacity that will be required overtime for the new family history system the Church is developing. This is an area where the Church’s needs appear to be ahead of the industry’s capability. The paper submitted for this session (as with the other sessions) contains much more information than what could be presented in the 20 minute time slot. It describes the use of forward error correction in a distributed file system to deliver a ‘self-healing’ data store for applications.

Dallan Quass – Identifying Genealogical Content on the Web
Dallan is heading up a non-profit organization called the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy. He presented some research about their efforts to determine the best way to search for genealogical information on the web. Finding a more effective way to search the web for genealogical data is key to making genealogy more palatable for ordinary people. I’m excited by the work Dallan’s organization is doing. You can learn more about this and other efforts at WeRelate.org.

Grant Skousen – Family Finder Prototype
Grant presented an overview of a software prototype designed to help ordinary people (read: have never done genealogy) find their ancestors. The results of the research were promising. This project is one that I became involved with near the end. It has been extremely valuable in helping to shape thoughts around what it takes to help ordinary people to family history. I hope to do a future posting offering more insight into the research. For now, be sure to review this presentation.

Randy Wilson – High-Level View of a Source-Centric Genealogical Model
Randy presented a conceptual framework for a system that would change genealogy from an unbounded task to a finite effort. I believe Randy’s proposal is on target and that such a system must be created as the foundation of an effort to make genealogy work for the ordinary person. One of the primary points of frustration to those that contemplate finding their ancestors is knowing what has already been done and knowing where to start. Randy’s paper and slides are definitely worth reviewing.

What Do Ordinary People Want?

2006-04-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

There have been some great discussions going on in the comments of this blog and through other forums. John Vilburn recently expressed well the fundamental purpose of this blog. John said:

Making genealogy engaging for the common person requires a broader vision. A big part of that is using technology to make genealogy easier. But the more important question is "What makes genealogy engaging to someone who has no experience?"

That really is the core of the problem my team is dealing with every day. It sounds simple but it is a monumental challenge. It is hard for people who think that the status quo experience with genealogy is interesting to understand what it would take for the rest of the world to share our sentiment. So what is it that will capture the interest of ordinary people? How do you take that interest and convert it into actions that will successfully find ancestors without the interest waning? Here are some interesting things we’ve learned about what gets and keeps the interest of ordinary people.

Sharing pictures, records, maps, audio clips and other artifacts of their family. Ordinary people love to see pictures of their ancestors, the records of their lives and any other artifact related to an ancestor. In some ways this is like scrapbooking. As they look at these items they are trying to get a sense of the ancestor’s life journey. They are trying to find the parallels between themselves and their roots. Even items which aren’t directly about their family but are from the same place or time can add meaningful texture.
Stories. Ordinary people are interested in stories about their family. Again, they seem to be trying to appreciate the life of the ancestor. Learning about the ancestor somehow helps them understand themselves better. It boosts their self-worth to realize that their ancestor did something great, funny, unique or just survived. While stories that relate directly to an ancestor are most meaningful, some stories that are about others in similar places, times and events are also meaningful. Stories add texture.
A sense of community. This is an area we are just starting to explore. There seems to be something appealing to ordinary people in just knowing that others are interested in the same people, stories, pictures, times and places and being able to communicate with them. The ability to see who else is interested is powerful.
A sense of relation. Ordinary people seem to like knowing how they are related to others (both living and deceased). They aren’t very good at figuring this out themselves but are interested in the information when it is offered.
Immediacy. Ordinary people (at least in 1st world countries) have an expectation of immediacy. They don’t want to search for a picture or record of an ancestor, find out where it is and then write a letter to request a copy or wait 3 weeks for a microfilm to come in. If they can’t see something immediately they aren’t likely to be interested.
Short bursts of time. You have a matter of seconds to convince someone coming to a website that they’ve come to the right place. Once you’ve got them to stay on your home page you have a few more seconds for them to determine how to access what they’re looking for. If you’re lucky they’ll give you two tries to produce the desired result. Once they’re convinced that the desired results are available you may get them to give you 5 or 10 minutes of their time. I point this out not because I think all genealogy experiences are web-based but because it shows how sensitive ordinary people are to succeeding in short bursts of time. Ordinary people need to get something meaningful done in 10 minutes or less. When they come back to the activity later they need to be able to pick up where they left off without losing any time.
Don’t want to be trained. Ordinary people (varies slightly by culture) don’t want to read the manual and don’t want to take a class. We cannot rely on manuals or training to get ordinary people involved.
Don’t like to feel stupid. Ordinary people don’t like to feel stupid (as it turns out this isn’t limited to ordinary people). There are some classic examples of this but one that is fairly ubiquitous is search. There are lots of ways to stump people with search: complex search forms; pages and pages of ambiguous results; and my favorite, 0 results.

Please comment and add to the list of things that would interest ordinary people.

Making Genealogy Accessible

2006-04-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

The predominant approach of those trying to help novices engage in genealogy is to attempt to train them to do research. There are some that are extremely skilled in this area and have made a substantial contribution to the ranks of genealogy hobbyists and credentialed genealogists. There will always be a need for those with the rare talent of helping someone along the path toward sound genealogical research.

Last summer Ancestry.com issued a press release indicating that according to a recent poll, 73% of Americans are interested in discovering their family history. Most of us have seen similar studies before. In the context of taking genealogy to common people, the question could be asked, “How do we get 73% of Americans to participate meaningfully in family history?” It is probably not feasible to get them all through a genealogy class or paired with a great mentor. It also seems that a relatively small percentage of those interested in their ancestors are able to do genealogical research. This is not a derogatory comment about average intellect but a recognition that there are many factors beyond cognitive skills which prevent people from doing genealogical research.

So if the intention is to take genealogy to common people, how can it be done? The philosophy behind this blog is not to attempt to turn 73% of Americans into researchers. Rather, it is to encourage innovation that makes the experience of genealogy substantially easier and more engaging than it is today. Make it so that individuals don’t have to become researchers in order to have success finding their family history. Simplify genealogy for researchers or those that want to become researchers as much as possible.

This will require technology to do much of the heavy lifting for the uninitiated. There are many examples that could be drawn upon to illustrate this type of shift. Some that we are all familiar with include:

the shift from paying a telegraph operator to send a message for you to picking up the phone and calling someone
the shift from professional typists to ubiquitous e-mail
the shift from professional photography to point and shoot to digital cameras

One of the most interesting things about these shifts from a domain of experts toward pervasive use is the increasing rate at which they happen. Some recent shifts that are happening quickly but not yet complete:

blogging
video editing
podcasting

We are not attempting to teach 73% of Americans to be genealogists. We are attempting to make genealogy accessible to 73% of Americans.

Raising the Bar for Record Managers

2006-03-29T14:14:00.000-08:00

Most people that get involved with genealogy today use a family history application called a record manager to store and navigate lineage-linked genealogical information. There are many to choose from. Some of the more common are Personal Ancestral File (PAF), Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree, AncestralQuest, RootsMagic and the Master Genealogist. There are also a range of online record managers like phpGedView, The Next Generation and PedigreeSoft which in some respects are more cumbersome than the traditional desktop applications but offer the advantage of ease of sharing and collaboration.

While these applications are very effective at organizing lineage-linked data, the user experience and complexity is on par with filing your taxes (my apologies to the makers of these products, I know most of them and hope they don’t take offense at this observation).

There have been a couple of interesting advances in the space over the last few years. Notably, the move toward online record managers (phpGedView,) and research guidance (Legacy 6) definitely show promise. So in the spirit of taking genealogy to common people, here is my top ten list of what it would take to raise the bar for record managers.

Top 10 Innovations Needed in Record Managers

Living memory interview – I have personally done usability testing and observed ordinary people taking 30 minutes to an hour to figure out how to enter themselves and their parents into a record manager. When someone starts fresh in a record manager why isn’t one of the options to start a new file from what I know? This option would lead the user through a nice wizard-like living memory interview.

Path to me – Once you browse a few generations it is impossible to tell which path leads back to me. Isn’t there a simple way to add this bit of information to the UI?

Maps, maps, maps – Google Maps, Google Earth, open APIs, need I say more? Maybe not but I will. Users need current and historical maps for research. Seeing a historical map helps me feel connected to my ancestors. Overlaying data on maps is interesting. For example, migration patterns on maps, plotting the events of an ancestors life on a map, showing the overland trail they used to come west, showing the plat map of the town they lived in. Showing everyone with the first name of Deodat living in the US in 1850 census.

Context – Users need lots of context to hold their interest, keep oriented, and to aid in research. Maps (as mentioned above), history (as mentioned in a previous article - record managers really need to integrate with WeRelate.org), historical texture (music of the time, clothes of the time, the price of gas) and anything else you can think of.

Clue Pad/Scratch Pad – This ties back to the need for context. Users need a scratch pad to keep their clues on. The scratch pad needs to let them get back to the clue in context of their pedigree and the source information they were evaluating. It also needs to let them model simple things like: “The wife of John Smith is either Mary Jones or Mary Johnson,” and still keep them in context of the clues that led them to this theory.

Automatic source citations – There has been a lot of dialog on this blog about self-citing Internet sources. Record managers must support this functionality moving forward.

Improved match analysis – I’m not talking about the underlying algorithms (although they are an area of constant improvement). I’m talking about the user interface. How can a novice reliably and consistently make decisions about possible matches in 30 seconds or less? Here are some rough concepts we’ve played with to try and figure this out. They still need lots of work but show how match analysis can be much more than the status quo screens in most record managers.

Interesting Charts – Lines and boxes were cool when dot matrix printers were the rage. Rounded corners had their day as well. Give me a chart that I can put on my wall and my kids, relatives, friends, anyone who walks in the door will notice and want to look at and not mistake it for an electrical diagram. Add historical texture to the charts, themed backgrounds, etc.

Source citation wizard – While I strongly advocate self-citing sources for online content, the reality is we will need to deal with manual source citations for a long time. Let’s build a simple wizard, similar to CitationMachine.net to make it drop-dead simple to cite a source.

Personal Research Assistant/Research guidance – Legacy 6 is moving in the right direction but their feature set works better for advanced genealogists and not ordinary people. Take a look at Grant Skousen’s Family Finder presentation from the BYU Family History Technology Workshop (should be posted in a week or so) to get a feel for how to deliver this for the uninitiated.

I'd be happy to engage in a deeper conversation of how to take record managers to the next level. Add your comments or e-mail me (lawyerdc@ldschurch.org).

Give Me Context

2006-03-24T16:22:00.000-08:00

Last summer I spent some time conducting user testing of a software prototype designed to help ordinary people find their ancestors. There was an overview of this prototype and the results of our testing presented at the recent Family History Technology Workshop held at BYU a couple of weeks ago. Definitely worth checking out the slides and abstract information when it comes online. One of the things that really stood out in the testing was the amount of context a user required to be able to do genealogical research. Here is a quote from one of the users while looking at a census record which exemplifies the problem, "I need a map, a calculator and a really smart person at my side [to understand this census record]."

Here are a few pieces of context that users seem to always need in view in order to understand family history:

Maps (current and historical)

History (local, national, world)

Timeline

Pedigree

I've seen some interesting mashups trying to put one or more of these pieces of context together. For example, the following two sites have interesting mashups with google maps: www.linkr.org, www.linkr.org/temples. Of these important elements of context, history and historical maps are particularly hard to deliver dynamically in the context of family history. I believe it is due to the lack of an easily searchable and addressable collection of content. Wouldn't it be great if there was a public domain data set with a rich API for searching and distributing this type of content in context? Perhaps this is something that the guys at WeRelate.org can take on. Simply link the history and historical maps to their location authority, make the data elements addressable with sufficient granularity and provide an API. Oh yeah, and get a bunch of people to help populate the content.

Embedded Citation Examples

2006-03-21T10:38:00.000-08:00

I have seen a few examples of embedded citations in the past few weeks. I would love to get a more complete list of good examples of sites that already have embedded citations. If you are aware of them please leave a comment with some links to exampls sites or send me an e-mail, lawyerdc@ldschurch.org.

One site that comes to mind is fact monster. They have a simple implementation with a link at the bottom of each page that opens a pop-up with the citation detail. Follow this link and look at the bottom of the page for the button.

A co-worker (thanks Steve) also sent me information about a NISO standard called OpenURL 1.0 (Z39.88-2004) which has come out of the library information community as a means to embed citation metadata in webpages. More detail can be found at the OpenURL COinS website.

Genealogical Embedded Citation Standard 0.1 (Strawman)

2006-03-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Michael Nelson and Derek Maude for taking a first whack at what the structure for a genealogical embedded citation standard might be. The following structure is intended to be compatible with GEDCOM and the upcoming FamilySearch Family Tree. It could easily be implemented in XML or a microformat. There are some outstanding questions that Michael and Derek pose which follow this quick strawman proposal. Please review and share your thoughts through the comments link below or by e-mailing me (lawyerdc@ldschurch.org).

Looking for more information on Genealogical Embedded Citations? See the March 3rd article, Self-citing Internet Sources

Nested list of genealogical embedded citation elements

citation
     url
     film-number
     sheet-number
     page-number
     frame-number
     call-number
     book-number
     image-number
     record-number
     batch-number
     serial-number
     date-recorded
     certainty
     comment
     source
         url
         title
         author
         abbreviation
         publication-info
         description
         time-period
         locality
         language
         film-number
         call-number
         batch-number
         comment
         repository
             name
             address
             phone
             email
             url
             comment

Just in case your browser doesn't like the way I've chosen to try and indent I've included a text description of the hierarchy at the bottom of the page.

Some questions to consider
1. Other formats have the ability to include the actual text. Is this necessary given the application?

2. Should there be a "provider" field for sources?

3. Should there be a "source-type" field for, say, stating the source is a census record?

4. Should this citation embedded in a page represent a citiation for that page or for the original record?

5. We included a description field and a comment field in the source. Is that necessary?

6. Should there be an "agency" field to include what organization originally created the record?

Text Description of Hierarchy
'Citation' is level 1 in the hierarchy. It contains the following level 2 elements: url, film-number, sheet-number, page-number, frame-number, call-number, book-number, image-number, record-number, batch-number, serial-number, date-recorded, certainty, comment, source.

The level 2 element 'source' contains the following level 3 elements: url, title, author, abbreviation, publication-info, description, time-period, locality, language, film-number, call-number, batch-number, comment, repository.

The level 3 element 'repository' contains the following level 4 elements: name, address, phone, email, url, comment.

Engaging Ordinary People

2006-03-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

Before diving further into technology and feature threads perhaps a foundation for the need to engage ordinary people in family history should be presented..

Why Take Genealogy to the Common Person?
Imagine a world where average people have a strong understanding of their heritage; the legacy and values of their ancestors; and interactions with others are in the context of their relationships – this guy sitting across the table from me is my 3rd cousin. Understanding our heritage and relationships brings more meaning and stability to life.

Interestingly, a high percentage of adults (estimates vary from 65-85%) have a desire to know more about their ancestors. There seems to be an innate desire to understand our heritage yet most people that go down this path are quickly overwhelmed by the obstacles. The end result is that while the majority of adults in the world are interested in the domain of family history at some level, very few are able to contribute productively to the effort of mapping the family of man. How might the world be different if the efforts of all the people interested in their roots could be harnessed and channeled to contribute more meaningfully toward the overall challenge of mapping our common family tree?

Finding and Adding an Ancestor to a Pedigree is REALLY Hard

The reality of the world today is that for ordinary people finding and adding a name to their pedigree is very difficult. The challenges inherent to finding a name can be categorized into three areas: logistic and technical hurdles, varied life circumstances, and the reality that today’s tools don’t offer an engaging experience. These problem areas will be described in more detail in future posts. Solving these problems is a matter of answering the following questions:

How do we remove logistic, technology, knowledge, skill, & economic barriers?

How do we let ordinary people in a broad range of life circumstances contribute meaningfully?

How do we deliver an experience that is inviting, interesting, and fulfilling?

Engaging Ordinary People

The diagram above represents a conceptual model for how to harness the efforts of ordinary people. It involves offering a broad range of activities that are inter-related. Each activity is meaningful in and of itself while contributing to the overall effort of a common family tree. Activities toward the top of the list are likely to have broader participation than those at the bottom of the list. As long as an activity adds to the overall effort of building our common heritage, it belongs on the list. The Web 2.0 philosophies and related technologies play very nicely into such a model.

Please offer your feedback on the ‘Engagement Model’ by adding comments to this post. Do you think this model has the potential to harness the combined efforts of millions?

Self-citing Internet Sources

2006-03-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

Nearly every genealogical tool or service provider has at one time or other thought of how much better the world would be if there were a way to automatically cite the source of genealogical data on the Internet. Then they quickly get discouraged at the idea as they think of the level of industry cooperation that would be required to make it happen.

There are some isolated cases of self-citing sources. For example, PAF Insight Manager (OhanaSoftware) is a very popular tool among LDS genealogists. The tool has the ability to automatically cite sources of information obtained from the FamilySearch website. I'm sure there are other similar implementations of which I'm not currently aware. At the present time there does not seem to be a defacto standard for how to do this.

I don't think this is rocket science. We don't need some Automatic Citation Encapsulation (ACE) protocol. We simply need to agree upon a way to embed citation details into a web page. The citation detail doesn't neccessarily need to be viewable to the user. Any time an Internet-based source is cited, the tool or service can simply look at the citation details on the web page and
appropriately cite the source for the user. In fact, the embedded citation block could be as simple as the following:

<Embedded Citation Block>
Super Cool Online Internet Source Which Links Me to Adam
Published on Some Day
Found on Some Page
Random Text
</Embedded Citation Block>

There are a lot of extremely smart people that will look at the above example and immediately see that additional tags could be added to impose some type of taxonomy on the citation. Even if the embedded citation block was never more sophisticated than what is proposed above, it would be substantially better than the ad hoc citations of the masses that don't have degrees in library science.

The efficiency of an embedded citation block may be be questioned. After all, if an application is just trying to get the data in the citation block, why impose the overhead of serving up the rest of the web page? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have a service or simply a URL which only delivers the citation details without this overhead? There is some validity to this concern and the the approaches of embedding a citation block in the web page and offering a specific citation service or URL for obtaining just the citation details aren't mutually exclusive. I prefer the embedded citation block approach. It seems easier to implement. Anyone that can create a web page can create an embedded citation block.

So here's the rally cry. Let's get together and define an embedded citation block standard. Let's keep it as simple as possible to start and see if we can't get a few of the more popular online content providers and tool vendors to implement it. Send me your comments. FamilySearch can easily implement this approach into the system we are building to deliver digitized microfilm. How would you like to see this implemented?