Sunday, November 17, 2013

CROWDSOURCING Genealogy

From Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter Oct 24, 2013

CrowdSourcing Genealogy


Listen with webReader
HelpFindingFamilyWould you be willing to pay $5 to have someone send you a picture of your ancestral village, or great grandma's house? One new crowdsourcing project hopes to makes this possible.

As defined by Dictionary.com:
crowd·source
[kroud-sawrs, -sohrs]
verb (used with object), verb (used without object), crowd·sourced, crowd·sourc·ing.
to utilize (labor, information, etc.) contributed by the general public to (a project), often via the Internet and without compensation.
Actually, crowdsourcing has already been used several times in genealogy. Perhaps one of the biggest crowdsourcing projects of all times was the indexing of the 1940 U.S. census in a joint initiative between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Archives.com, FamilySearch.org, findmypast.com, and other leading genealogy organizations. Literally hundreds of thousands of indexers around the world helped create a great resource and make it available to other genealogists. (See https://familysearch.org/blog/en/1940-census/ for details.)

More recently, on September 13–15, crowdsourcing volunteers from around the world joined together with FamilySearch.org to index and arbitrate 134,986 Italian records (approximately 400,000 names). Participants were invited to index and arbitrate over 35,000 Italian records in just 48 hours—slightly more than the previous high. (Details may be found at http://goo.gl/nfZDny.)

Ancestry.com has a similar project underway using volunteer indexers and dozens of local genealogy societies have been using volunteers for years to index local records. The recent Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness was actually a crowdsourcing project, although I don't recall the site's owner as ever using that term. That site went offline following the owner's death and a number of newer web sites have since appeared, each claiming to be a "replacement" for Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. None of the replacements has been as successful as the original, however.

Now Eric Proffitt is organizing a similar project. His project plans to be a bit more formal than the others, including hiring software developers to create specialized software to allow millions of transactions between people doing family history and amateur genealogists.

Eric reports his family recently spent $1,200 hiring a professional genealogist to visit his wife's ancestral village in Ukraine and send pictures to Eric and his family. As a result, the family was able to see the great, great, grandmother's school, learn about cousins who are still alive, and got a feel for the culture of the area. However, the end result was expensive.

Eric writes, "This got us to thinking: what if we could create a place where normal people like you and me could help each other find their families?? For instance, if I wanted a picture of my Keith Family Castle, but couldn't afford to fly to the Scotland, I could post my request and have someone who already lives there take the picture and send it to me for as little as $5!"

Eric Proffitt has now created Crowd-Sourcing Genealogy, an online place where people can connect with other, normal people to access things such as gravestones, church records, marriage licenses etc. without having to travel across the world, or without having to pay $1,000's of dollars will take Family history to a whole new level.

You can read more about this project at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/crowd-sourcing-genealogy or watch the video below or at http://youtu.be/D-y4-J6veH8



Saturday, November 9, 2013

Use Google Books to Get Free Copies of FHL Books



New post on FamilySearch Blog


Use Google Books to Get Free Copies of Pages of 

 Family History Library Books

Earlier this year, FamilySearch announced a free lookup service for genealogy books and microfilm available at the renowned Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The response was overwhelming, 1000s of people contacted us to take advantage of this free service. 
Another way to utilize this service is to start with limited preview Google Books and get us to scan the entire page and email it to you for free. Let's walk through the process.

First, start on Google Books: http://books.google.com/     Search for the name of an ancestor:
 googlebooks2
 Google has scanned millions of books that are both (1) out of copyright and (2) still under copyright. If you happen to find a book that is out of copyright, i.e. published before 1923, you'll usually be able to read the entire book for free online and you do not need to use FamilySearch's free lookup service. 
For books still under copyright, i.e. published since 1923, Google Books often provides a "snippet view" (see below).
googlebooks3
You cannot see the entire book online, only a snippet. 
What do you do if you want to see the entire page, or several pages from the book?  
Our answer -- use FamilySearch's free lookup service.

If you find a reference to your ancestor in pages that cannot be viewed, make a note of the:

1.      Name of the Individual (as it appears in the book)

2.      Book Title

3.      Page Number(s)


Second, check the Family History Library Catalog to see if that book is available in our collection: https://familysearch.org/catalog-search
catalog1
Make a note of the Call Number.
catalog2
Third, if the book is available in our collection, complete our online Photoduplication Request form:
duplicationform
Within a short period of time, you'll receive an email that includes a scanned copy of that page. 
Make up to five requests per person per month. 
Sit back in your recliner, put your feet up, and let us do the work for you.
Nathan W. Murphy | November 4, 2013 at 5:45 am | URL: http://wp.me/p3q0yN-41S