Family Pursuit Announces the Release of Private Family Trees

Renee's note: The following press release is from Family Pursuit. I just signed up for a private tree and look forward to learning more about the site. My sister-in-law wants to begin to do genealogy and I think this is the best avenue for us to share our information and work on the database at the same time. I will keep you informed of our progress.


All the major problems have been worked out, so now it’s time for a press release! We announced the following today:

Provo, Utah, Jan. 14 - Family Pursuit, a leader in online collaborative genealogy research tools, today announced the release of Private Family Trees. Designed specifically for collaboration, this unique wiki-based website is now available for private use for the genealogist who is looking for a better way to work with others. Family Pursuit’s private family trees allow researchers to share not only conclusions, but their ongoing research, sources, extractions and theories with those invited to join the trees. They are the perfect solution for sharing research with the entire family, interacting with other family genealogists, or working within a family organization or one-name study.

Some of the collaborative tools available for private family trees include:

• Inviting an unlimited number of family members to join a private tree
• Organizing and sharing ongoing genealogy research
• Creating and assigning tasks
• Sharing research logs and extractions
• Adding living individuals
• Keeping all information about living and deceased individuals private
• Involving and mentoring family members
• Participating in family discussions
• Receiving notifications of changes made by tree users
• Rolling back and forth any change made by any user
• Advanced merging and unmerging
  

Along with these new private trees, Family Pursuit continues to offer its Community Tree which has been created for genealogists to share research with the genealogy community to reduce duplicate efforts, accelerate research, and network and connect with distant relatives.

“We have found that many genealogists feel more comfortable working privately with those they already know. A Private Family Tree offers this security,” said Mike Martineau, founder of Family Pursuit. “When genealogists feel confident in their research conclusions, they will be able to easily copy their conclusions to the Community Tree for others to view and add to. A Private Family Tree also allows the inexperienced genealogist to be privately mentored by more knowledgeable relatives. We are excited to offer a bridge between those who are overwhelmed by the amount of research and those who want to help but don’t know how. We look forward to continuing our progress in developing these important tools, and being a part of bringing more people into the work.”

About Family Pursuit

Started in 2004, Family Pursuit, a Provo, Utah company, provides web-based applications to accelerate family history work by providing a framework for genealogy researchers to work together in their efforts and to easily share their ideas, theories, research and conclusions. Family Pursuit enables genealogy enthusiasts to involve family members who have never engaged in family history work, bringing families together in sharing the rewarding experience of researching, exploring, and creating a personal understanding of their heritage. Visit www.familypursuit.com for more information.

1911 census of England and Wales

Renee's note: The following was written by a good friend, Henry Mantall, in England. He is doing a fantastic job indexing and I asked him to give us a little insight into the project.

1911 census (document references RG14 and RG780 form a large collection occupying 2 kilometres of shelving at the National Archives. It consists of 8 million householder schedules and a further 38,000 enumerator summary books and is estimated to contain 36 million individuals living in England and Wales in April 1911

The digital collection when complete will create 18 million digital images, roughly 14 times the 1901 census.

Unlike the earlier collections of enumerators schedules (1841-1901) you will view the householder schedule completed in many cases by your own ancestor.

Householders are asked to provide the length of their marriage and how many children in total, how many alive and how many dead. Unlike previous census, enumerators have space to tallyor record their data and are required to use coloured ink. This makes the earlier problems of obliteration by overwriting rare in my experience of beta test images. The digital image quality is high and downloaded jpg enables magnification so entries are legible.

Prior to the September quarter of 1911 registration of Births in England and Wales did not require the mother’s maiden name to be recorded.

The 1991 census is a precise genealogical tool which points to:

Year of marriage (with no enumerator rounding )

The total family size and disclosure of deceased children, which is unprecedented..

The discovery of deceased children requires family historians to devise a research strategy to identify previously unknown children.

My personal strategy is to examine the known family group on a timeline from date of marriage and consider potential earlier births/deaths predating the marriage. Where significant gaps are found between children, which might permit pregnancy and live birth I search for deaths. I do this both through FreeBMD.org.uk and where available the UKBMD.org.uk index of primary registration in local registration district within the county. London registration districts for common surnames represent particular challenges where the surname is numerous. I request searches at local register office to try to identify the correct parent. If a death is identified the registrar is often able to identify a registered birth. It helps if the family are resident in only one registration district! It should be borne in mind that year of birth and year of registration may be some years apart and a death certificate may be male/female for an unnamed child. Each quarterly index also has male/female registrations without surname which need to be considered too (these are available on microfiche or microfilm or online image collections if you look at the pages following Z.)

One potential difficulty with the 1911 census is the national boycott called by the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

Women were called to boycott the census as a means of peaceful protest by holding parties on the evening of the census absenting them from home. Until the census is completely available it is difficult to estimate the size of boycott. In beta testing I have found mother and daughters absent from home as anticipated due to the known and recorded role of mother in the Movement. Images record write in protests from women(and men) The scale of this problem is difficult to estimate.

The 1911 census is exclusively available through findmypast.com and its dedicated website www.1911.co.uk which has a good deal of information about the project. And what information is being withheld until 2012. the project will be made available online in 2009. At the conclusion of the beta test more than 50% of English Counties are completely available mostly in the South of England. For those awaiting Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and the populous cities of Lancashire Yorkshire and the North East there is the message “coming soon”. Welsh counties will follow completion of the English collection.

Update: The 1911 census went public Jan 12, 2009, www.1911census.co.uk
Additional counties of Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire and West Riding of Yorkshire have been added (along with others) greatly expanding the cities in the collection. Some search facilities are off to protect the server from overwhelming demand.

FamilySearch Wiki

There is a little known project going on over at FamilySearch Labs, it's called the Research Wiki. Some of you might be familiar with it by another name FamilySearch Wiki. I have attended several presentations on the FamilySearch Wiki, the last being just last week at the UVPAFUG monthly meeting. This little article about them is way over due!

If you go the the FamilySearch Wiki website at https://wiki.familysearch.org you will find the best description of what it is: "Free family history research advice for the community, by the community".

The wiki has been set up to gather information on localities, where to find records, who to contact, etc., it is not for actual genealogies or family information. You wouldn't find your great-grandfather's birth date there, but rather it is the place for posting information about doing actual genealogy research. Think of it as an encyclopedia for genealogists.

This will replace the old 'Research Guidance', simply put, all that information is static, and much of it is actually rather stale, as in some cases addresses changed, locations that records are at were moved, etc., so a wiki is the best way to get the latest information on repositories, research strategies, etc., out to everyone.

The beauty of it is that all the information can be updated at any time by any user. Information will be kept current and fresh. The big process now is getting actual materials into the wiki. Much has been done, but it's now time to contribute the knowledge you have gained from your own personal experience in doing research with others.

I received this call for help from the FamilySearch Wiki team yesterday.

Dear FamilySearch Wiki member,

Here's a quick note to tell you about a project being developed by the FamilySearch Wiki community: the Maryland Barn Raising. A wiki barn raising is a short, focused community effort to create or revise content relating to a single topic such as "genealogical research in Maryland." During this barn raising, we will revise the Maryland Portal and all the Topics pages it links to. At the end of the barn raising, the wiki will contain information about all the latest and best records to use to find Maryland ancestors.

The wiki community needs your help to make this effort a success! We'd love it if you would pitch in and contribute a few edits to the Maryland pages. You don't need to be a Maryland expert to contribute, but experts are certainly welcome! To see a list of pages we plan to update and also a list of simple tasks that non-experts can do, take a look at our Maryland Barn Raising Tasks page at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Maryland_Barn_Raising_Tasks

This first barn raising is proving to be a lot of fun, and we're learning things that will be foundational to barn raisings for other areas of the world. Hope to see you soon on the wiki!

Sincerely,

Michael Ritchey
Community & Content Coordinator
Community Services Team
FamilySearch.org

The community, and that means you, have been invited to help build the wiki. The barn raising has begun. So, bring your dictionaries and grammar books with you, if that is your specialty. If you have actual experience in Maryland research then bring your brains. Your talents are needed and the party is just getting started. Hope to see you there.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!

How will I live without Google Notebook.

What am I going to do now? I just organized my genealogy to-do list for the year and Google Notebook was a part of it. I am in shock and distraught over the demise of Google Notebook. I can't tell you how I feel after reading the following blog article:

Stopping development on Google Notebook
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 6:30 PM
Posted by Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Google Notebook

At Google, we're constantly working to innovate and improve our products so people can easily find and manage information. At times though, we have to decide where to focus our efforts and which technologies we expect will yield the most benefit to users in the long run.

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

If you haven't used Notebook in the past, we invite you to explore the other Google products that offer Notebook-like functionality. Here are a few examples, all of which are being actively improved and should meet your needs:

• SearchWiki - We recently launched a feature on Search that will let you re-rank, comment, and personalize your search results. This is useful when you've found some results on Google Search that were really perfect for your query. You can read about how to use SearchWiki in this blog post.
  

• Google Docs - If you're trying to jot down some quick notes, or create a document that you can share with others, check out Google Docs.
  

• Tasks in Gmail - For a lightweight way to generate a todo list or keep track of things, we recently launched Tasks in Gmail Labs.
  

• Google Bookmarks - For a tool that can help you remember web pages that you liked and access them easily, take a look at Google Bookmarks. You can even add labels to your bookmarks to better organize and revisit them.
  

While it's hard for us to make this announcement we believe it's the right decision for our users in the long run. And we're excited about all the new ideas we have for Docs, SearchWiki, Bookmarks and other products.

I don't feel Google's options to replace it will totally work for me. Since I already have a Google Notebook I can always still use it, but I feel it is just a matter of time before they don't support it any more. I need some options.

I don't want Evernote because I want a hierarchical list and not tags. Google Notebook gave me the option to have many different notebooks and then break them down into sections. It was so easy and quick to move around in. There are definite places to use tags and lists and I want both options. Besides, I think I would outgrow the free version really quick. I don't want to be at the mercy of a subscription and run the risk of loosing all my notes.

I guess I could always stay with TreePad, it's just that the information is not available online. At least you can make ebooks of my TreePad files to read on the flash drive, but you can't edit them once they are created. To bad TreePad doesn't run off a flash drive.

It appears I need some time to mourn the loss of Google Notebook. There has to be another options I just don't know what yet. If you know of an option for me pass it along, I would love to consider it.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!