NZGDB Newsletter #12, June 2008
In this newsletter:
-
Extra
Credits for Scrapbook Items
Attaching
Scrapbook Items to Several Records.
Scrapbook
Count now included in the search grid
Dick Eastman’s Online Genealogy
Newsletter
Introduction
This month’s newsletter sees a change in
style. For the first time this
newsletter is not simply from the NZGDB developer (Robert), but includes an
introduction to Tony, the NZGDB data manager, and so the newsletter is no
longer entirely about software changes.
Of course, a section on software changes continues to be an important
part of the newsletter as the system continues to rapidly evolve, and so this
newsletter starts, as usual, with the “Software Changes” section, but also an
article from Tony introduces him, and talks about the work of the NZGDB
Datamanager.
In future we’d love to be able to include
contributed articles also. If you have
information to share – whether “How to ….”,
the results of your historical research, or anything else of interest to
the genealogy community, then we’d love to include it in this newsletter.
Now, on with the newsletter, starting as usual
with “Software Changes”
Software Changes
Front Page Revised
Have a look at www.nzgdb.co.nz and you’ll see the most obvious
change: the front page has been
re-designed to emphasize the theme “Find your Family/Tell your Story”. Of course many people come to NZGDB to
search for information about their ancestors, but feedback over the past
several months has made it obvious that for many people the real value
of NZGDB is that it is a great place to tell your story: to publish your
family tree, preserving it for the future, yet without loosing control as you
do when you simply submit your GED to the large overseas sites that allow it to
be downloaded. To many of our users
NZGDB’s most important value is that it is an archive, allowing them to publish
and preserve all their research, including notes and photos.
A part of telling your story is establishing
who your ancestors were, and many genealogists take delight in pushing their
tree back further and further, and extending it out with cousins and cousins of
cousins. Some trees have thousands of
entries. The largest in NZGDB has over
466 thousand records, and at 118,230 records Tony’s tree is only the 4th
largest. We have 42 trees with over
20,000 names. Others go back a long
way: we have 200 trees recording births before 1000.
For other genealogists, including me (Robert),
the priority is learning as much as possible about closer ancestors, and
ensuring that the stories of these ancestors are written down before they are
lost forever. Thus Mary (my wife) and I
don’t spend much time ferreting out more remote ancestors, but we have spent a
lot of time over the last few weeks writing up the stories of her parents, and
we are now moving on to her grandparents.
We want to ensure that our children and grandchildren understand the
people who went before, and the significance of the medals and photos that we
have on our walls. We don’t want our
memories to be lost with us. You can
see the results if you look up PYM, John Alfred(1891-1969) and EDDLESTON,
Ella(1905-1992). A more elaborate
biography can be seen with PYM, Freda Mary(1896-1990), were we have taken a
text biography from the Dictionary of NZ Biography and added photos. This record also has an audio clip.
We’d like to encourage all users who have placed their data on NZGDB to add their scrapbook data also: photos, biographies, family documents, etc. As the logon page now says, “Our dream is that this becomes the place where New Zealanders research and record their family history, that eventually the system will contain a record of every ancestor of every New Zealander, and these records will contain the best information available about their subject.” If we want the records to be the best information available, then we want to encourage you all to upload not just your GED files, but also the associated scrapbook information that brings the bare bones of the GED’s names and dates to life.
A
number of the software changes this month have been designed to encourage this:
-
Extra Credits for Scrapbook Items
A change has been made to increase the subscription
credits for those who have stored scrapbook items. Storing bare GED records earns credits at the rate of a year’s
credit per 2000 people, or about 5 ½ people per day: this rule hasn’t changed. In addition, you are now given a day’s
credit for every scrapbook item added to your records. This applies to all kinds of documents:
pictures, a scanned certificate, biographies and other text, and so on.
Attaching Scrapbook Items to Several
Records.
You often want to attach one item to several GDB
records. For example, in the scrapbook
for PYM, John Alfred(1891-1969) there is a photo “Family 1945”. You want this attached to PYM, John
Alfred(1891-1969), but you’d also like this attached to EDDLESTON,
Ella(1905-1992), and their daughter, PYM, Mary Elizabeth(1942-?). Previously you would have had to “upload”
this three times, and even though the system detected that it was the same
photo and didn’t actually upload a second copy, instead linking to the first
copy uploaded, this was still a bit cumbersome. It is now much easier as there is an easy option to attach the
item to other GDB records. Here’s how
it’s done: -
Open one of your GDB records, and click the
[Update] button, and click the [Scrapbook] button. This opens a page like this, the left side showing the scrapbook
items already uploaded (if any), and the right giving controls for uploading
more. Uploading the item is simple:
first we locate it by either typing it’s path or browsing to find it, then we
give it a title, write whatever notes we want, set the item type, and click
[Upload]. A message appears showing us
that the item has been uploaded, and it appears in the item list: -
You can edit any of the item’s data by
selecting it. For example, on clicking
“Select” for the item that we have just added the upload panel becomes an edit
panel, showing the item’s title and notes (which we can change), a thumbnail if
the item is a picture, and several buttons for various update functions. In the recent software revision two new buttons
have been added, [Link to Family] and [Link to others]
Click [Link to Family] and a grid is displayed
of the subject’s family: parents,
spouse, children, and siblings. These
are the people that are most likely to share scrapbook items with this person:
-
In this case we will click the links EDDLESTON,
Ella(1905-1992) and PYM, Mary Elizabeth(1942-?), as these are the other people
in this photograph. As we click the
links they disappear from the list.
When we are through, we click [Add mode] to return the page to its
normal appearance, ready for uploading another scrapbook item.
[Link to others] functions in the same way,
except that it opens the normal search page and we can find any of our
records. You’d use this for documents
and photos that are linked to people outside the immediate family group.
Scrapbook Count now included in the
search grid
Search rows now include the scrapbook count, or
“score” if you prefer in a column at the right of the search grid. For example, in these results there are two
scrapbook items with PYM, Freda Mary and PYM, Frederick Whiteford, and 3
scrapbook items with PYM, John Alfred(1891-1969). The other rows are records with no scrapbook items. This is a useful way of distinguishing high
quality records: if you have a choice
of several records to look at, start with the ones with scrapbook items. Where
there are several duplicate records, the ones with scrapbook items will appear
first.
Biographies
There is now an option “Search Biographies” on the home page, in the documents section. This is primarily intended to locate scrapbook items identified as biographies, such as “My Father” attached to the record of PYM, John Alfred(1891-1969). However the search will also find biographies listed in the Useful Web Sites and Publications. Currently most of the items that you will find are external web sites: as well as all the biographies in NZGDB, there is an index of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and a number of biographies of South Taranaki women. We’d be interested in extending this list, so if anybody can give us a list of other New Zealand biographies we’d be happy to include them in our index.
Tony Cairns – DataManager
This is
my first article for NZGDB news: I thought it was about time that I introduced
myself.
I am Tony Cairns, NZGDB’s data manager. My role is to manage the data – I seek out databases and add them to the GDB, and deal with issues of “Who owns this record”, How do we resolve differences”, and so on. This leaves Robert free to concentrate on developing the program.
I think the NZGDB and our vision of GDB’s are vital to genealogy in New Zealand, and perhaps further afield. The internet has already revolutionized genealogy, and it is going to become even more important as newer and better services become available, and as the next generation of genealogists, people who have grown up with computers and expect everything to be only a click away, take over from those of us who still remember a world without computers. So do we participate in this future, making it happen the way we want, or will we be a spectator, putting up with the service provided from overseas? I dreamt of a site where I could find all our ancestors, all the dead people of New Zealand if you will. I met Robert through email a few years ago and we started bouncing the idea to and fro, and trying to interest others. It has been exciting to see the way in which the original idea has evolved, growing well beyond my original imaginings.
My interest in genealogy stems from my father’s interest in our ancestors, cousins and family. He had collected all the lines and trees and notes for our family and stored it on paper in longhand in folios, folders and file boxes. A lot of research over 40 years and I inherited as his literary administrator over 40 boxes of family papers. My cousin had inherited another set from her mother and other relatives inherited from their parents. Initially I just went through the hundreds of boxes and slowly built up a digital picture of the family trees.
In the 1990’s my first daughter Lucy was born and I started on her family tree. Back then PC’s were slow, cumbersome and insecure and the net was just a future dream. Most research was by hand, and microfiche was the new storage device. I was one of the lucky ones who went digital immediately – all my records were stored electronically and online at a range of free websites hosted by overseas Genie Giants. The data is still there but it’s hard to maintain, difficult to search and still quite slow to access. All the data I handled was scanned or shot to digital format and loaded onsite or stored on CDs and later DVDs.
The paper war was abating as I donated all Dads’ boxes of files to the Alexander Turnbull Library (inside our National Library). Every few years I gave them an updated digital version though I suspect the gedcoms and Familytreemaker files will become increasingly difficult to access. Lucy’s 125, 000 relatives are easier to find online through NZGDB and the days of wading through paper files will decline once digital data capture is complete. Once everything is on NZGDB it will be highly secure, as there will be two synchronized copies of my data, one on my own computer, and the other on NZGDB. Being in separate cities, this must approach the ultimate in data security.
My day job is a Science Teacher at my local High School teaching
students from Year 9 – 11 the wonders of the universe and the problems of the
planet. I have majored in Biology, Genetics, Sociology and Anthropology and
Cultural studies and bring these diverse interests to genealogy. I think the
future is a mix of Genealogy, Biography, Social and Cultural History informed
with new breakthroughs in DNA Relatives Research and C14 Dating techniques.
GDB now over 6M records!
Another milestone: NZGDB has edged over 6 Million records with the count at 30th June being 6,132,559. Not bad when we had about a tenth of this number a year ago.
What
is the target? It’s
hard to know. 6.1M is rather more than
the number of people currently living in New Zealand (4.8M), and more than the
people living in New Zealand by 1900 (about a million). But what would the number be if we had a
record of every known ancestor of every New Zealander? Of course this would include ancestors who
never lived in New Zealand. And what
about “cousins” who lived elsewhere?
Some of the “New Zealand” tree which have been loaded into NZGDB have a
very tenuous New Zealand connection, and have more Ozzies or Brits than
Kiwis. And the numbers are bulked up by
duplication: for some people there are
half a dozen records, although the average duplication over the whole database
is only 21% (1.2M duplicate links).
So we don’t really know what our target number is. The target is more operational: if you search for one of your ancestors, you
should be able to find them. We still
have a long way to go to reach this goal.
Useful Web Sites
Some time ago we added a feature “Useful Web Sites”. We reasoned that if we took the conventional approach to listing all the web sites of interest to New Zealand genealogists we’d never be able to keep up, so we took a database approach: the page provides a search function, and the ability for anybody to add further sites. A web site can be classified under one or several categories, and can be related to one or several countries, so that by appropriately selecting your search criteria you can quickly find the sites of interest to you. Our hope was that, by allowing anybody to add sites, the list would continue to grow and remain relevant.
People frequently comment on web sites on the various email lists used by genealogists. Where we see such a comment we often record the web site in our Useful Web Sites table. We also add sites that we come across ourselves, so hopefully the database contains more and more useful references. We’ll also feature additions to the Useful Web Sites table in the month in this newsletter.
But the database approach can be equally daunting: if you can’t figure out the right categories or keywords, then you may have difficulty finding the site that contains the information that you want. Does either approach work well when the numbers get large? Our “Useful Web Sites” already contains over 3 ½ thousand entries, although this includes more than 3000 individual biographies. With this number it is difficult to sort out the best way of presenting them, so that you can quickly find the sites that are truly valuable to you. Like all search functions, it works well when you know what you want. Select category “Cemetery”, enter “Gore” into the title (=subject), and click [search] and you immediately find the entry to search the Gore cemetery records. But what if you just know that your ancestor is buried somewhere in Otago? Not so easy.
We’d like some feedback on this function. Do you find it useful? Is it easier to find sites here than in the more conventional approach which classifies them into a fixed hierarchy? The fixed-format approach works well when there are only a few entries, but above 100 there is too much for a single page and you have to start breaking the data into sections; now the user has to navigate their way around a page hierarchy that can make it quite difficult to find what you are looking for if it doesn’t fit clearly into a particular position in the hierarchy.
We could add a rating system, so that users “voted” on which web sites were particularly useful, but we’re not sure how useful this would be unless we had someone dedicated to the task of updating this page. So what we really need for this page to become excellent is: -
Volunteer wanted.
Someone to become the “Pagemaster” of the Useful Web Sites page, seeking out sites of interest to NZ Genealogists and entering them into the page, reviewing the entries there to see that they are classified correctly, suggesting program changes to make this page more useful, and so on. Are you interested in joining the GDB team? We’d love to hear from you.
From the Blogs
We subscribe to a number of mailing lists. These are a good source of items for “Useful Web Sites”: whenever one is mentioned we consider adding it to the list. As well, this is an interesting source of ideas and tips. “From the blogs” will be a regular part of our newsletters from now on, where we will highlight interesting web sites and pages, and other items of interest.
Dick Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter
We have recently subscribed to Dick Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter. (Visit http://blog.eogn.com/ to subscribe). The newsletter is available as a Standard Edition (free) and Plus Edition (requires a subscription)
Among the interesting sites that this has brought to our notice (and we’ve added to our list of useful web sites): -
· The Encyclopaedia of Genealogy is a free wiki[1]-style encyclopaedia of everything about genealogy. From the site’s home page: -
“The Encyclopedia of Genealogy serves as a compendium of genealogical tools and techniques. It provides reference information about everything in genealogy except people. Look to the Encyclopedia of Genealogy to provide explanations of how to look up your family tree, explanations of terms found in genealogy research, including obsolete medical and legal terms. It will describe locations where records may be found. It also will describe how to research Italian, German, Polish, French-Canadian, Jewish, Black, Indian and other ancestors. In short, the Encyclopedia of Genealogy will serve as your standard genealogy reference manual. “
We’ve checked out a few articles. Quality is patchy, to be expected with a wiki, but the wiki approach allows you to improve articles if you have some subject knowledge. Searching is unsophisticated however. I searched for “New Zealand Birth Registration” expecting to find an article about how births have been registered in New Zealand and where to go for further information: instead I got a list of web sites that included the Missouri Birth and Death Records.
· If you have ancestors in County Durham, England, you might like to check out http://www.durhamrecordsonline.com/
· In this article Dick wonders whether those who object to subscription sites “learnt economics at the tooth fairy university”. Needless to say, we share Dick’s view. We would love to be able to offer this site for free, but without sponsorship or support how do we pay its costs? We still haven’t heard a better approach than “Try to make it free to contributors, and charge those who want to look but don’t contribute”. We depend on our subscriptions to keep this site running, and to fund improvements: every cent received, and a lot more besides, go to keep this side growing and improving.
Rootsweb
Another mailing list that we subscribe to is the New Zealand list at Rootsweb.com. This often mentions web sites that we add to our Useful Web Sites tables. From this month’s posts:-
·
http://fhr.kiwicelts.com/Cemeteries/NZ_Cemetery_Map.html. Claims to be “The only
comprehensive list and map of New Zealand Cemeteries”. We don’t know if there are other cemetery
sites that would dispute this claim, but this certainly does seem superb. A good starting point if you know the
locality, although not so good if you only know a name and want to find out
where they are buried.
Genealogy WebsitesGalore
Brian Curran’s newsletters are good value. Email him at websitesgalore@ihug.co.nz to subscribe. We have added several entries to our useful web sites table from this month’s newsletter. One of particular interest to me (Robert), was this: -
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WarEarl.html
This is the complete text of a book “Early
Wellington”, written by Louise Ward and published in 1928. From the book’s introduction: -
“This work is an endeavour on my part to compress into one volume, events that occurred in the New Zealand Company's first settlement in New Zealand between the years of 1839 to 1850, with additional chapters containing a few incidents occurring up to the year 1870.
“Part II. comprises the origin of place and street names.
“The other portions of the book contain a few biographical sketches and
general information.”
Regards,
Robert
Barnes,
NZGDB
Developer
Tony
Cairns,
NZGDB
Data Manager