NZGDB Newsletter #15, December 2008

 

In this newsletter: -

           

Now over 11M records in the GDB! 1

Standards for Sharing Information with Others. 1

Charts improved. 2

Saving and Emailing a Chart 2

Merged Trees. 2

NZGDB Presentations. 3

Improvement to Scrapbook function. 3

Family membership (it’s free!) 4

From the Blogs. 4

 

Now over 11M records in the GDB!

The growth of the GDB continues: it now holds about 11M records.  To be precise, on the 14th December it held 11,625,621.  It would have been more, but we discovered that a series of databases that could have been subject to a copyright claim, so we deleted them, removing about 600,000 records from the database. 

 

It is quite possible that we have over-reacted.   We had obtained the databases from a public source, where there was nothing to alert us to the fact that they had been taken without authorisation, and they were could have been properly in the public domain.  However it is our policy to err on the side of safety, and when it was pointed out to us that these databases could be illegally in the public domain, we removed them immediately. 

 

We will continue to react this way.  But we can’t be expected to react to rumour and innuendo.  If anyone has a problem with NZGDB they should contact us so that we can sort it out promptly.  

 

Copyright is the responsibility of record owners.  In NZGDB’s site conditions, which every user agrees to before being granted access, it says: -

Normal fair-use rules allow brief quotes (with attribution), but you should not publish any copyright information.  Permission is usually freely given for non-commercial uses of copyright information, but it is your responsibility to obtain any necessary permissions.

 

We found these guidelines published by the U.S. National Genealogical Society.

Standards for Sharing Information with Others 

Conscious of the fact that sharing information or data with others, whether through speech, documents or electronic media, is essential to family history research and that it needs continuing support and encouragement, responsible family historians consistently:

·         (recommended by the National Genealogical Society).

Permission is granted to copy or publish this material provided it is reproduced in its entirety, including this notice. Copyright 2001 National Genealogical Society, all rights reserved. National Genealogical Society, 4527 17th Street North, Arlington, VA 22207-2399.

Charts improved

The last newsletter reported that NZGDB could now produce the three most common chart types:  Ancestry, Descendents, and Hourglass.  This facility was released in October, but with warnings that there were problems and that its status was “test use”. During the two months since the last newsletter a number of problems have been fixed, and the charting facility is now more precise in the way that the data is arranged, and the chart program is significantly better. 

 

You’ll have noticed that I don’t say “completed”.  It might never be completed: there is still a lot that can be done, and I continue to have ideas faster than I can implement them, and while charting is certainly a lot better than before I’m sure that errors still remain.  I’d like to develop a wider range of charts, but this has taken a back seat while I work on tree merging.

Saving and Emailing a Chart

The chart program reads a file from NZGDB and displays this as a chart, either on your computer or printer.  One of the requests was for the chart program to be able to produce a chart that you can save, or email to somebody else.  I found a simple way of doing this: simply print the chart to a PDF printer.  Just Google “PDF Printer” to find several options that allow you download free software that acts like a printer as far as any Windows program is concerned, but produces a PDF file as output.  I use PDF995, which you can download from http://www.pdf995.com/.

Merged Trees

Genealogy is awash with duplication.  I start researching my family tree, and creating my own database.  I discover that you have some common ancestry, so we exchange databases and your information is incorporated into my tree, and mine into yours.  Perhaps one or both of us publishes our tree to an Internet site that allows downloading, and now others can incorporate our information into theirs (if we’re lucky, recording where it came from).  In the meantime we’ve moved on, correcting earlier errors, and adding new facts and people.   Before long there are dozens of records of our ancestors out there, some giving good information, most just propagating errors.  Researchers are left to sort out which of these records to believe, but there’s no clear way of telling.  If only the records carried signs “Believe me” or “I am rubbish”. 

 

It has long been an aim of NZGDB to provide tools to manage this duplication and reduce the complexity.  Almost from the beginning NZGDB has automatically detected and linked duplicates, and provided tools to compare records and to synchronize one record with another.  It has also provided facilities to link trees together.  For example, in my record of my grandmother, Hannah OLD, the records of her parents are not my records, but are Mirk Smith’s records.  However the facilities to merge trees were difficult to use.  A fundamental rule is that you can only change your own records, and so to merge our trees I’d programmed a procedure that was a complex duet, you doing part of the job, and me doing part of the job. 

 

This was far too complex, so over the last two months I have radically re-written the logic to merge trees.  It is now far simpler: -

1.                   The tree owners agree about how the tree will be merged: for example, “We’ll keep your records of George BARNES and his family, replacing mine, and linking to my records of his parents, John BARNES/Hannah OLD”).  

2.                   Owner 1 gives Owner 2 permission to update their tree’s link record (e.g. George BARNES)

3.                   Tree owner 2 then opens the merge-and-link page with both records: -

4.                   He then clicks one of two buttons, depending on whether the trees are linked through parent-child relationships, or through a spouse relationship.  In this example he clicks the button for George BARNES: -

5.                   On clicking the [Confirm] button the system makes all the necessary changes, changing the links, and discarding the unwanted duplicates by flagging them as “Discarded”.  Discarded records stay in the database and can be recovered easily, but are not normally seen – in effect, a kind of logical deletion.

 

A few of us have been testing this within our trees.  First we linked my records (user robertb) with   Mirk’s (user mirk562) by connecting my Hannah OLD to her parents, John OLD/Mary Jane KNUCKEY.  Then we linked in my cousin Don’s (dbarnes) by connecting his father, George BARNES, to my John BARNES/Hannah OLD records.  This is the example above.  We continued merging trees with my nephew Paul’s (paulbarnes), and my son-in-law Simon’s (simonf).  Then we linked Mirk’s and Tony’s (tonyc) trees linking Mirk’s Jane OLD to Tony’s record of John DOOLE.  We now have one large tree with more than 133,000 records. 

 

For convenience we’ve renamed the individual databases from “barnes.ged”, etc to a common name, “Merged_001.ged”.  However we still retain our individual rights.  Thus only Mirk can update the mirk562 records, only Don can update the dbarnes records, and so on. All these trees are now linked into a single logical database and we can print reports and charts from the combined database.  For example, a descendents chart of John OLD will include records from Mirk562, robertb, dbarnes, paulbarnes, and simonf.

 

For anybody searching NZGDB we have made a start in reducing duplication.  There are now five fewer Hannah OLD(1860-1939) records, and of course fewer duplicates of other records as well.  There’s still a long way to go, but at least it’s a start. 

 

It is our dream that this is the way we build our trees.  The idea is that we each look after the bits that we really care about, and link to other people’s trees for parts of our tree where we have a less direct interest.  After all, it takes a lot of work to understand a tree and ensure that everything in it is accurate, and most of us can do this only for our direct lines.   By merging trees we are able to combine accuracy with size, getting the advantages of having a very large tree with lots of links, with the advantages of accuracy that come with each of us looking after our immediate families.   The benefits for those of us with merged trees it that we have a much larger tree than before, without the work of maintaining our copy of the records.  This should appeal to people who want good information but don’t need their own copy.  It will not appeal to those who want to claim others’ work as their own, because it is clear that linked records are “your” records, not “my” records, and the tree as a whole is “our” tree, not “my (exclusive)” tree.

 

Tree merging is now far simpler than before, but it can still be a complex processes, as you can see from the Help page giving a full description of tree merging.   If you want to merge your tree with another, feel free to contact us.  We’d love to help, as we want to encourage tree merging.

 

Is tree merging a GDB unique feature?  We think so: as far as we know, no other web site offers facilities that allow you to combine your tree with others, while retaining your ownership over your own records within the combined tree.  Every other site that we know of simply store each family tree individually, not even linking the duplicate records, but leaving the poor user to find their way among the maze of duplicate and misleading information.  But we don’t spend a lot of time looking at other sites, so if anybody knows that we’re wrong we’d like to know of other sites attempting anything similar.

NZGDB Presentations

October was a busy month for presentations, with a weekend in Whangarei, and presentations at Kumeu, Paraparaumu, and Hawera.  Wherever I have given a presentation the interest has been very strong, and there has been appreciative support for the NZGDB concept of easy Internet publication, linked databases, and retaining control of your records.   November has been quiet however, and there are no further presentations scheduled until AFFHO.

Improvement to Scrapbook function

With the trip down to Paraparaumu I spent a few days with my brother in Taranaki.  This was a great opportunity to go through our boxes of family history stuff, identifying photos and documents to be put into the web site and filling in some gaps in our knowledge.  Since then I’ve been busy uploading pictures into the scrapbooks for my people.

 

There is nothing like using your own software to find out what’s wrong with it.  Microsoft calls this “Eating your own dog food”.  As a real user you quickly see faults and problems that should be fixed, as the developer you know how to make these improvements.  

 

An example:  I found that I was often adding a photo ([Update] => [Scrapbook] with several people.  Obviously the photo should be linked to all the family members in the photo, and there are tools to do this very easily ([Link to Family] and [Link to Others]).  However after you’d added the photo the page was reset ready for you to upload another photo, so you had to select the just-added photo for editing before you could attach it to other people.  I have now changed the program so that, following the addition of a scrapbook item, the page automatically goes to edit mode ready for you to link the photo to others.

 

But an even more important improvement came from this experience.

Family membership (it’s free!)

It is now possible to add your family to the list of people who can see your records for free. 

 

Having added all this scrapbook data the obvious next step is to say to my family “Go and have a look – can you add anything?” - but that would have meant that they had to subscribe!   This didn’t seem to be quite in the spirit of NZGDB, a site that is intended to be a place where you can tell your story, sharing all of it with your family while publishing part of it, the public records, to the general genealogy community.   So we have introduced the concept of “Family membership”.   Give an email and a logon will be created for this person (if necessary – they may already be NZGDB members), and they will be able to see your records without having to pay a subscription.  These family memberships do not cost you any extra; they are simply part of your standard subscription (or subscription credit).     

 

To add your family as users who are able to see your records for free, go to “Add or Manage your GDB Data” and click the button [Manage Access]. Enter the email of your family member and click [Grant Access]. 

The system responds with a draft email, and a [Create User] button: -

Click [Create User] and they will be registered as a user in the GDB, with access rights to see all your records (including the living people) without having to pay anything. 

From the Blogs

We continued to monitor traffic on various blogs and, where an interesting web site has been mentioned we put this into our “Useful Web Sites” table.  We’ve been a bit distracted, Robert in particular has had his head filled with the programming complexities of charts and merging, so in the last few months we haven’t done as much with the “Useful Web Sites” as we might have, but even so there have still been a number of additions.  If there’s anybody out there who would like to look after the Useful Web Sites page for us we’d love to welcome you to the GDB team. 

This site was mentioned on the Rootsweb NZ list: -

Public Record Office Victoria, the archives of the State Government of Victoria, holds records from the beginnings of the colonial administration of Victoria in the mid-1830s to today, so its site, at http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/, will be of interest to people with a Victorian connection.

Seasons Greetings.  I hope you have a fantastic family Christmas, and that you’re going to have a really great new year, in spite of the economic doom and gloom. 

 

 

Robert Barnes,

NZGDB Developer

Tony Cairns,

NZGDB Data Manager