NZGDB Newsletter #13, August 2008
In this newsletter:
-
Introducing Robert Barnes –
NZGDB Developer
Open
offer to present on NZGDB
Making
Contact With Other Genealogists
How
do I find out those who share my research interests?
From EOGL: US Records by State
Introduction
Last month we introduced Tony, the NZGDB data
manager. This month we introduce
Robert, the developer, the person that you email when you use the “Contact Us”
link.
There’s not a lot in the Software Changes
section this month. There’s been lots
of activity underneath the surface, but little to show for it externally.
We’re still keen to receive 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.
Introducing
Robert Barnes – NZGDB Developer
Last month Tony introduced himself: this month it’s my turn. Where Tony’s role with NZGDB is looking after the data, my role is more technical. My job is writing the program, making sure the server is running, that the database is securely backed up, and so on. Where Tony is passionate about genealogy and interested in computers, for me it’s the other way around, and I get more excited about finding out new ways to improve the program than finding new data about my relatives. I love the technical challenges of this project, like working out how to provide searches that find the records that you want quickly, how to match duplicate records without giving you heaps of spurious matches as other sites do, providing tools to synchronize or merge your tree with another’s, and so on.
Descended from Wakefield pioneers arriving in Wellington (1841) and New Plymouth (1843), I have deep roots in New Zealand even if this represents only four generations. Like Tony I inherited most of my family tree from my parents, who had written up their family stories in the days when an electric typewriter was advanced technology and the only way of getting information was to sent a letter and wait, and wait, and wait …. Fortunately Mum had a tradition of writing to the relatives (she would have loved the internet!), and I grew up hearing the names of my Tasmanian relatives almost as often as my Barnes and Old relatives living in Taranaki and Wanganui.
At 62 I am semi-retired, after 40 years of working with computers. Mary and I have three daughters and seven grandchildren, all delightful, and we are truly blessed as they all live close to us in Auckland so they frequently visit, we get called on for baby sitting, and so on. Every grandparent’s dream!
NZGDB
Presentations
I will be
giving a presentation to the Wellington Branch on August 27th. So if you are in the Wellington area and
want to meet Tony and me and hear about why we set this site up, and the
directions in which we hope to develop it, please come along: -
Time: 7:30 PM, Wednesday August 27th.
Place: Connolly Hall, Guilford Terrace, Thordon, Wellington.
There is a door
charge of $2. Members and non-members
are all very welcome.
Open
offer to present on NZGDB
I’m happy to
make a presentation about NZGDB anywhere, any time. Within the Auckland area (defined loosely as “I can drive from
Birkenhead, and don’t have to stay overnight”) simply ring or email me, and
we’ll see what can be arranged.
Outside this area, if you are happy to help with travel costs, then I’ll
come and talk to you. I have already
given a number of presentations to NZSG branches, but I’m always willing to go
and speak about my dream for NZGDB.
Software
Changes
There’s not a
lot to say about software changes this month.
I’ve done lots of “system housekeeping”,
essential to allow development to move forward, but with very little new function
that users can see. Most of the actual
changes that you can see are minor things, like: -
·
A
better dialog to allow you to rename a GED when you’ve used a snapshot name,
·
Improved
admin function to look up users with @ in their userid.
Etc.
Are you excited
by these changes? I thought not.
Neither am I. But they have to be done.
As the system grows in complexity there is a huge amount of work in
these background tasks to allow Tony and I to manage the system, and to keep
moving forward without being swamped.
For example I have spent the last three weeks rewriting (for the third
time) the way in which GED files are processed into the system. When I finish this (another two weeks?), you
will see the results in faster GED turnaround, and automatic email notification
when your data has been processed, and I will have set a foundation for some
new and exciting features. But in terms
of what you see as visible function, it’s hardly any change at all.
So since I
can’t talk about new features, let’s spend some time talking about some
features that have been in the software for a long time. One of the most frequently asked questions
that we get asked is “How can I get in touch with other genealogists?
Making
Contact With Other Genealogists
An important function
of NZGDB is to put you in touch with people with common interests: other genealogists who are related to you,
or who are researching parts of your family.
By getting in touch you can compare notes, swapping information so that
you both end up knowing more about your ancestors.
The key to this
is the “Contact Record Owner” link that appears in the left hand column when
you are looking at somebody else’s record.
For example, here I have opened Tony’s record of my grandmother, Hannah
OLD: -
Click the link
and you will usually see something like this: -
Click the
“Email me” link, and your email program (Outlook?) will open with an email
started to the record owner.
Sometimes
however you will see much more than just this email line. In Tony’s case he has provided quite a
detailed profile, and you see a whole page, like this: -
We encourage
record owners to provide a full profile, so that we then communicate with a
person, not just an email address.
However it’s up to you, it’s completely optional. In fact you can even say “No emails” in
which case not even the “email me” line will appear.
By the way, you
don’t need to worry about whether your email and other personal details are
safe in NZGDB! On NZGDB about all you
can do without logging on is to read the help text, for everything else you
have to log on. This is a very
effective barrier to the programs that go through web sites harvesting email
addresses to add to the lists of those annoying people who flood our inboxes
with offers of dubious drugs or pornographic pictures. Only people can get to this information,
programs can’t, so Tony and I (and many other users) regard this as comparable
with putting our names in the phone book.
Of course those who have an unlisted number won’t want to create a
profile either.
How do I
find out those who share my research interests?
You can of
course look up names from your database, and see if records other than your own
are returned. For example, when I look
up Hannah OLD I find my own record and 7 others. I can look up each of these other records to find the names of
others who share my research interests.
However if you
want to know all the genealogists with overlapping interests, it is hardly
practical to do this for each of your records.
For this, you can use information returned on the “Manage my GDB Data”
page. Click this link and you’ll see a
page like this, showing your databases.
Click the
button [Review Duplicates] and a table is produced showing all the other
databases containing records of your people: -
This can be a
great way of finding new relatives. Of
course it only works if you have put your database into NZGDB, allowing it to
find the duplicates for you.
Our duplicate
matching logic is pretty conservative, so if we report a duplicate, then we're
pretty confident that the two records are referring to the same person. The logic compares information about the
subject records, and their parents, and their grandparents, and has to pass a
threshold (10/28) to be accepted as a duplicate. You can't get this score without at least two matching ancestors,
so we miss some true duplicates, but we're happy to have this result rather
than make the reverse error, telling you about "duplicates" that are
in fact different people. When two
identical trees are compared we report about 70-80% duplication, not the 100%
that would be reported if our logic were perfect.
More ways
of getting in touch
Many genealogy
societies, and a few web sites, provide lists of people researching particular
names. Click the name, and you can be
put in touch with the person.
It would be
relatively easy to provide two new functions: -
A.
Search
for a name, => userid’s of genealogists with this name in their trees
B.
Search
for a name, => userid’s of genealogists with this name in their “genealogy
interests” in their profile.
I am not
convinced that this is particularly useful. Whenever I have looked up anybody
looking for a “Barnes” connection I invariably find information about
non-relatives. Thus I think that
function A is better provided by the standard search. Thus search for “Barnes” and you’ll not only find everybody with
“Barnes” people in their trees, you’ll find the actual records, and can make
decisions from the search results about which records are of interest, and
which are irrelevant.
Would function
B provide anything useful? In my
profile I have said that I am interested in “Barnes”, “Wellard”, “Pym” and
“Eddleston”. But these are names in my
tree: you’ll find these records from a standard search. Of course, this argument assumes that the
other genealogist has put their database into NZGDB: it could be argued that it
would be a useful function to provide function B for those genealogists who do
not. But who bothers to create a
profile but doesn’t put their data into the GDB? There is, after all, little point in providing a profile if
nobody is going to try to contact you, which they won’t if your data is not in
the system.
So what do you
think about these ideas? As you can
tell, I’m skeptical, but what really matters is what you think. If I’m wrong and these functions would be
useful, they are not difficult to provide.
We’d love some feedback.
GDB now almost at 7M records!
Actually we did exceed 7M briefly, but then I had a clean out of some duplicate databases and removed about 130,000 records, so we’re back down to 6,870,962. Well we were when I wrote this, but the numbers have started climbing back up again.
On
this basis alone the $25 NZGDB would seem to be
excellent value compared with the price of a CD, but actually this comparison
strongly understates the position!
Each of the 7M records in NZGDB is not just a single fact, but is a
whole collection of facts and relationships, and it would be fairer to compare
the number of facts recorded in NZGDB.
Here are the current database statistics: -
People
6870962
Fact: 31826407
FactDetail 11499859
Fam 2361757
Perhaps we should add the number of INDI, FACT,
FactDetail, and FAM records, giving us a count of about 52.5M records. This total is more comparable with the
record count of a CD, although it is a bit overstated because of duplication,
and the fact that a proportion of the records are private. Even so, NZGDB still represents great value
for $25!
Useful Web Sites
We have continued to monitor traffic on various blogs and, where an interesting web site has been mentioned, we put this into the table that you can access through the “Useful Web Sites” link. Here are a few of the web sites that we’ve added (we don’t have room to list them all).
From EOGL: US Records by State
Genealogists constant pore over old records. Of
course, the biggest provider of old records in the U.S. is the U.S. Government.
The government even maintains a listing of significant record collections
available for genealogists. The list also mentions many state and local
archives. You can view the listing at:
http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/History_Family/State_Genealogy.shtml.
While the listing is online, most of the records
listed are not yet online. Some have been microfilmed, and some of these
records are now appearing on the various online sites: Footnote.com,
WorldVitalRecords.com, Ancestry.com, etc.
From Rootsweb:
New Zealand Yesteryears
http://www.yesteryears.co.nz/index.html is really interesting. Shipping lists, provincial records, and some
general archive material, much of it searchable. This is one of the classiest genealogy sites that we’ve seen.
Australian Public Records Database
http://gov-reports.net/au-search.php?search=gean&title=Genealogy%20Records
Provides searches to “Hundreds of Millions of
records” in the Government Public Records Databases
Images of early maps on the web
http://www.maphistory.info/webimages.html
From Lost Cousins
Australian Archives.
Most Australian records of interest to family
historians are held by the individual states - but the National
Archives of Australia are
digitising many of the records they hold, including those relating to 20th
century immigrants.
Irish records online
The website Ask
About Ireland allows
you to search Griffith's Valuation, compiled between 1847-64, which is regarded
as a census substitute (all of the censuses prior to 1901 were destroyed). And
best of all, it's free!
Access to Archives
Access to Archives is
a collaborative index of about a third of the documents in public record
offices around England and Wales (over ten million records). It can be a useful
pointer towards historical records about individuals or communities, but it is
worth remembering that it isn’t comprehensive.
Regards,
Robert
Barnes,
NZGDB
Developer
Tony
Cairns,
NZGDB
Data Manager