So much for being a monthly newsletter J

Well, it’s been a long while. The previous newsletter was published in December last year, and I had expected to publish this newsletter about February, after the AFFHO conference. However, life intervened – such as having to go back to work as an IT consultant to earn some money to keep supporting this site – and one delay led to another … Perhaps I should add an advanced degree in procrastination to my qualifications!

A lot has happened in the intervening 6 months.

Now over 13M records in the GDB!

The growth of the GDB continues: it now holds just over 13M records. To be precise, the current count is 13,759,871. The number keeps steadily growing, although more slowly now. We suspect that a majority of those who have put their databases on to other sites have also put their databases on to NZGDB (or we have done it for them), and now we’re into the harder work of attracting databases from people who have previously been reluctant to publish on the Internet. Our message of security, that your database can’t be downloaded from the GDB, is starting to be understood, but there are still a lot of people who perceive too much risk in publication.

Perhaps our new “Australasian” site will bring in a new set of Australian databases.

NZGDB on Display at AFFHO

In January the Australasian Federation of Family History Organizations held their conference at Auckland: NZGDB was there, exhibiting alongside the LDS, Ancestry.com, and others. Our stand was one of the busiest. As Dick Eastman said when he interviewed me, “I’ve heard some buzz about this (the GDB) this week”. You can view Dick’s interview with me at , http://www.rootstelevision.com/players/player_conferences3.php?bctid=14348105001&bclid=10538975001

In preparation for the conference we also redeveloped the video guided tour, which had become out of date. In the year since we prepared the original video many features that have been changed, and new features. You can see the current guided tour at http://www.nzgdb.co.nz/help/Videos/A%20Guided%20tour%20to%20the%20GDB/A%20Guided%20tour%20to%20the%20GDB.html. It is a good overview of the philosophy and features of the site.

ANZGDB launched

Since the early days of the colonies there has been a lot of crossover between Australia and New Zealand, and many of our users are ex-pat Kiwis (and a few are ex-pat Aussies). So it seemed logical to extend the site to “Australasia”, and so we have now launched a new URL, www.anzgdb.com, which opens as the “Australasian Genealogy Database”.

At the moment the two sites are identical except for the heading at the top of every page, and the databases that are accessible from either URL are the same. Thus if you add a public record for John DOE with either the www.anzgdb.com or www.nzgdb.co.nz URL, the next search will find him whichever URL the searcher is using. There is potential for site-specific content however, and future developments might see support databases that are shown by default only to one or other audience. For example, one could imagine a shipping, cemetery, or place name database that had different content depending on which site was being used. However all this is in the future, and as always we’ll be guided by user feedback.

What we really need for the Australian site to take off and be as successful as the New Zealand is for a person, or a group within Australia to become involved, partnering with us to extend this to their area. If anybody is interested in this, then we’d love to hear from them.

Development – mainly FamNet

With the necessity to bring in some income, my time to keep developing this site has been very much less than a few months ago when I was working full time on it. Within the GDB itself, there have only been a few minor changes, and, apart from fixing a few errors, about the only improvement people will notice is that the chart facility is now “live”. Now, when you display a chart, you can click any of the cells and you will immediately open the appropriate GDB page. Still on my (ever growing) list is the ability to retrieve further chart data from the chart program itself (instead of having the data emailed to you), improvements in GED processing, and easy scrapbook uploading.

Most of the time available for development has gone into FamNet, and with the support of a small but enthusiastic steering committee, a prototype site for FamNet has been developed.

What is FamNet?

To understand what we are trying to achieve with Famnet, have a look at the Powerpoint presentation at http://www.nzgdb.co.nz/NZFHN/New%20Zealand%20Family%20History%20Network.ppt, You can see the prototype site at www.famnet.org.nz.

The GDB is aimed at individuals, and focuses on secondary data, i.e. research that people have already done into their family histories. In contrast, FamNet is aimed at groups and at primary data. Famnet provides facilities to assist groups, simplifying membership management and communicating with members. These facilities can be added to a group’s own web page or used from FamNet by the group administrator.

Like the GDB, the point of FamNet is to provide the benefits of working together while allowing each group to remain independent. The data remains the property of the contributing group, who are free to remove it, update it, restrict access, and so on. And although users who belong to several FamNet groups have only one profile, so that they need update details such as their email in only one place, membership lists are separate and private to each group.

Membership management and communication is useful, but the site’s real innovations are the tools that it provides to create on line databases. Administrators can create an on line database – of cemetery lists, photo lists, whatever they like - and make it immediately available and searchable on their own web site. They can do this themselves; they do not have to ask me (as administrator) to do it for them, although of course I’m happy to help.

Not only is their database searchable from their own web site, an integrated search lets you know which databases have records of interest to you. For example, searching for “Barnes” in FamNet’s general search tells me that there are 11583 records of Barnes in the GDB, 21 in the GDB’s shipping database, 21 in KYHA’s shipping database (KYHA – the Kiwi Yak Herders association – is a fictitious organization), and one record in KYHA’s funeral homes database.

I can now click “Open” to go to the relevant GDB or KYHA pages to search these databases, without wasting my time searching web sites and databases with nothing of interest.

It will be interesting to see whether this idea is well supported, or whether the present situation where each group’s individual web site and databases remain lost in the web forest, undiscovered by most of the people who would be interested in its information, remains the norm. If the idea is well supported there is tremendous potential for further development of this idea: the prototype and the Powerpoint only scratches the surface of the ideas that we have for providing advanced web services to the family history community.

Lynda’s Lot welcomed aboard

Several weeks ago a post in the Rootsweb (NZ) mailing list alerted us to Lynda’s Lot, http://sites.google.com/site/lyndaslot/ , a web site with (among other things) a list of UK and Irish web sites of interest. NZGDB has long had a database of web sites, currently with almost 4000 web sites listed, and we have been looking for somebody to help us by looking after this, so I made contact with Lynda, and she’d agreed to look after the Useful Web Sites page and to join the FamNet steering committee. Welcome Lynda.

The Useful Web Sites page has been improved, and now appears within NZGDB (and ANZGDB), FamNet, and Lynda’s Lot.

Theft Allegation Proven False

A distraction over the last year has been an allegation that we had “stolen” information from the NZSG’s web site. We first started hearing rumors about this last September, but in spite of repeated requests for information nobody from the society would tell us what the problem was. Instead, a complaint was laid with the police. We were finally able to see the “evidence” at the May meeting of the NZSG council, and we were very quickly able to prove that the information had not in fact been stolen from the society’s web site.

In spite of this proof, there has been no apology from the society, and officers continue to talk of “strengthening the security of the NZSG web site” as if that had been the problem. It’s a great pity that the society didn’t approach us straight away, as this would have been sorted out in days. Instead, the investigation has been time consuming and expensive (lawyers fees), and it seems very sad that the NZSG seemed more interested in denigrating a project that did not have its blessing than working to provide better services to its members.

Robert Barnes,

NZGDB Developer