Wanna know what's happening in your tree?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.