In short, publishing on the Internet is doable, as well as enjoyable, but you have to do it thoughtfully. By publishing at least some of your genealogy on the Internet, you can help others looking for the same lines. But don’t get carried away—you want to publish data only on deceased people, or publish only enough data to encourage people to write you with their own data and exchange sources. Don’t publish data on living people.
Success Story: Finding Cousins Across the Ocean
After ten years of getting my genealogy into a computer, I finally got the nerve to “browse the Web,” and to this day I don’t know how I got there, where I was, or how to get back there—but I landed on a website for French genealogists. I can neither read nor speak French. I bravely wrote a query in English: “I don’t read or speak French, but I am looking for living cousins descended from my ancestors ORDENER.” I included a short “tree” with some dates and my e-mail address. Well, within a couple of hours, I heard from an ORDENER cousin living in Paris, France. She did not know she had kin in America and had spent years hunting in genealogy and cemetery records for her great-great-grandfather’s siblings! She had no idea they had come to America in the 1700s and settled in Texas before it was a state of the Union. So, while I traded her hundreds of names of our American family, she gave me her research back to about 1570 France when the name was ORTNER! About four months later, another French cousin found me from that query on the Web. He did not know his cousin in Paris, so I was able to “introduce” him via e-mail. One of them has already come to Florida to meet us! What keeps me going? Well, when I reach a brick wall in one family, I turn to another surname. Looking for living cousins is a little more successful than looking for ancestors, but you have to find the ancestors to know how to go “down the line” to the living distant cousins! Genealogy is somewhat like a giant crossword puzzle—each time you solve a name, you have at least two more to hunt! You never run out of avenues of adventure—ever!
—Patijé Weber Mills Styers
Caveats
In discussing how to begin your genealogy project, we must consider the pitfalls. This chapter has touched briefly on your part in ethics and etiquette, and future chapters will expand on that. We must also consider the ethics of others, however, and be careful.
In the twenty-first century, genealogy is an industry. Entire companies are centered on family history research and resources. Not surprisingly, you will find people willing to take your money and give you little or nothing in return in genealogy, just as in any industry. Many of them started long before online genealogy became popular, and they simply followed when genealogists went online. “Halberts of Ohio” is one notorious example, a company that sold names from a phone book as “genealogy.”
Don’t believe anyone who wants to sell you a coat of arms or a crest for your surname. These are assigned to specific individuals, not general surnames. (Although a crest may be assigned to an entire clan in Ireland—the crest is the part above the shield.) A right to arms can only be established by registering a pedigree in the official records of the College of Arms. This pedigree must show direct male line descent from an ancestor who was granted a letter patent. You can also, under the right circumstances, apply through the College of Arms for a grant of arms for yourself. Grants are made to corporations as well as to individuals. For more details, go the college’s site: www.college-of-arms.gov.uk.
Always check a company’s name and sales pitch against sites that list common genealogy scams. For example, Cyndi Howells keeps on top of myths, lies, and scams in genealogy and has a good set of links to consumer protection sites, should you fall prey to one of them. Cyndi’s List Myths, Hoaxes, and Scams page is at www.cyndislist.com/myths. Kimberly Powell’s How to Identify & Avoid Genealogical Scams page (http://genealogy.about.com/od/basics/tp/scams.htm) gives a good set of steps to follow too.
If you feel you have been scammed, report it to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/.
Wrapping Up
• Record your data faithfully. Back it up faithfully. These two things will save you a world of grief some day.
• To begin your genealogy project, start with yourself and your immediate family, documenting what you know. Look for records for the next generation back by writing for vital records, searching for online records, posting queries, and researching in libraries and courthouses. Gather the information with documentation on where, when, and how you found it. Organize what you have, and look for what’s needed next. Repeat the cycle.
• Beware of scams!
Chapter 2
Software You’ll Need
Online genealogy is simply using new tools to do the same research that always has been required of genealogists. To accomplish online genealogy research, instead of using a photocopier, you might save an image of the document or a searchable Portable Document Format (PDF) file from your scanner. Instead of sending queries in an envelope, you send them by e-mail, post them on forums, or make it your Facebook status. Instead of reading a magazine article on paper, you can read it on your tablet computer. And instead of (or before!) going to the library or courthouse for a document, you can search the card catalog and even the text of whole books from home. In other words, you are doing the same tasks with additional tools.
Please understand—I don’t mean to imply that you won’t ever do things the old-fashioned way again. Of course, you will! But you’ll use these online techniques much more frequently. Often, before you set out to research the traditional way, you will use some online tools to lay the groundwork.
Look Ma, No Wires!
You’ll need to learn about the Internet, software, and techniques for online information exchange to get the most out of the experience. This chapter covers such considerations and the software you might want to use. Of course, it is assumed you have a computer with some connection to the Internet. High-speed connections are best, as so many genealogy resources are now available as online images that take up a lot of bandwidth. Some people use a slow home Internet connection just for checking e-mail and surf the Web at a local library to take advantage of a high-speed connection. The disadvantages to that are obvious: In such a setup, you can only work on your genealogy when the library is open, and you certainly can’t work in your pajamas at the library, which is part of the fun of online genealogy!
Still, there will be days when you do go to the library, and then a laptop or tablet with wireless capabilities can be useful. For example, at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City (and many other libraries), you can now use your laptop computer, smart phone (such as a BlackBerry or iPhone), or tablet (such as an iPad or Nexus) with Wi-Fi wireless networking to check your e-mail, visit genealogy sites, or otherwise surf the Web. You can do all this without connecting any network cables; the wireless networking card in your device will connect via low-power radio waves to the building’s network.
This benefits you and the library in several ways. Often, you will find all of a library’s computers reserved on a busy day, but you can pull out your laptop and use that instead when the library has Wi-Fi network capabilities. The library saves money because it does not need to purchase so many computers, and they don’t have to worry about possible viruses and malware if you have the right protection software on your computer. And, in many local libraries, the card catalog is all online; with a laptop and Wi-Fi, you can search for the book you need, find out if it is on the shelf, and sometimes check out the e-reader version of it for two weeks!
An all-in-one printer with scanning, fax, and printing capabilities could be useful when asking for vital records from a courthouse miles away, so you may still use your phone line for some genealogy chores. A good color inkjet printer, especially an all-in-one that can scan and copy, can help you preserve images of your original documents and primary sources. And there are other choices in hardware.
Back Up Your Data
Hard drives fail or meet with natural disasters
. Sometimes, files will not be transferred properly when you get a new computer. And then there are times when your whole area loses power for days at a time, leaving you with no access to your data. When bad things happen to good computers, backups are the only hope. And bad things always happen.
Most people don’t use a CD burner to back up data any more. The old writable CD-ROMs proved to have problems with stability and over the years became unreadable. Most people now use “the cloud” for their backup, although an external hard drive is the second most popular choice. Please note that they are not mutually exclusive choices: I use both.
“The cloud” is a slang term for using someone else’s hardware to hold your most important files—images, documents, and sound files of your oral history interviews, for example. Several good cloud storage sites such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud are free for up to anywhere from 10 to 20GB, and they all claim to have security features in place to protect your data from prying eyes, hackers, and disasters. On all of the free cloud backup sites, you can pay a yearly fee for more than the minimum storage. You simply sign up for an account on these cloud drives, and the software for that service can be set to do the backup automatically at set time intervals.
Note
On Microsoft Office, now the programs as well as the files themselves are on the cloud. Your computer becomes a dumb terminal running the software that resides on a gigantic mainframe, which also holds the results of your work, be it documents or data. This is just like the old days back in the 1980s, when I first started using computers.
You can also consider it a cloud backup when you upload your data into any of the dozens of online genealogy tree sites, from WikiTree to FamilySearch to Ancestry.com. On any online genealogy site like this, you can also later download your data as a GEDCOM. When you use a site like this for your backup, it, of course, makes your data accessible to others, which can be a good thing. However, if you are not sure enough of your data at the moment to put it out there for all the world to see, or if you prefer to pick and choose who gets to use your research, then storing the backup as a GEDCOM on the previously mentioned cloud drives may be your preference.
Another way to back up your genealogy data is an external hard drive that mirrors your computer’s hard drive. The one I use came with software that will perform a backup automatically every day, week, month, or any other time frame I choose. The software will copy certain folders, file for file, if I want; back up only certain files with extensions such as .ged, .docx, or .xls; or can even make a compressed file of everything, software and all, if I choose that option. An external hard drive has the advantage of being portable. Should you take a trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, for example, you can back up just your genealogy data file and take it with you. You can get a terabyte backup drive for under $100 at this writing, and that is a very small price to pay for peace of mind.
So no matter how you do it, back up!
Note
Have you backed up today? This week? This month?
Software
Once you have your hardware in place and you know how you’re going to connect, you need to look at your software. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) include software as part of the package: the communications software, browser, file transfer program (FTP), e-mail, and other programs you need. The programs you use to access the Web are often called browsers or clients. These programs send commands to other computers, called servers, instructing them to display files and information to you or to run programs for you. The resulting display might be e-mail, a webpage, or a GEDCOM you want to study.
Which Browser Should I Use?
I’m often asked, “Which is the best browser?” In my opinion, this is like asking, “Which is the best car?” It all depends on your taste, habits, and needs. The current leaders in the browser wars are still Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape’s progeny, Mozilla Firefox. Apple’s Safari is catching up, however.
Entire books are devoted to helping you get the most out of Internet Explorer. The major online services and ISPs have lined up with one or the other for their customers to use and install automatically with their software, so you don’t have to do any extra work to use it. Internet Explorer is free, and you get it (whether you like it or not) when you buy a Windows system. It works well with Outlook, Microsoft’s calendar, contacts, and e-mail program.
Firefox is free, has a nice user interface, and is easy to use. It now has a companion e-mail program called Thunderbird. Some sites, you will find, do not look as “clean” in Firefox as they do in Internet Explorer, especially if the site was created with a Microsoft product.
Google’s Chrome browser, which is free, is designed to integrate with Google’s products such as e-mail, calendar, document storage, photo storage, and, of course, web search. Tabs and windows work much the same way.
Apple’s Safari is the default browser for iPhone, iTouch, and Macintosh. Safari’s presentation is much like that of Firefox and Chrome. The status bar and menu bar are hidden by default; you have to click the relevant options to show them. You can make toolbar changes and customizations by clicking the gear icon—another similarity to Chrome. Safari boasts fast performance, a simple user interface, easy bookmarks, pop-up blocking, inline find, tabbed browsing, automatic form filling, built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication), resizable text fields, private browsing, and security.
If you have disability issues, such as macular degeneration or arthritis, there are browsers that magnify the type on a webpage, read the words aloud to you, accept spoken rather than typed commands, and more. Check out www.e-bility.com/links/software.php for a list of pointers to information and some demonstration versions of alternative browsing methods.
Ninite
Whenever you are downloading a general-purpose program such as a browser, a graphics editor, or a media player, it is a good idea to use http://ninite.com. This page (see Figure 2 -1) is simplicity itself, and a great time saver.
FIGURE 2-1. The Ninite site will give you quick, clean, and reliable downloads of browsers, media players and more.
Often, if you download a program from the originator site or an aggregator site, it will come with extra little programs that track you, clog your computer’s memory, and put extra toolbars on your browser. Not all of these are malicious in intent, but their presence will slow your browsing speed and add “spyware” to send information to advertisers and marketers.
On the other hand, Ninite will construct a custom installer with only the programs you need—no spyware, adware, or toolbars added. You go http://ninite.com, choose exactly the ones you want, and then download the installer, which will be called Ninite.exe. You simply click the Ninite.exe file and it installs the clean apps, in default locations, in the latest version. You can keep that Ninite.exe on your desktop and run it occasionally to get the latest versions because it will skip up-to-date apps and only download ones that need to change.
Another advantage: It will skip any reboot requests from installers, use your proxy settings from Internet Explorer, and verify digital signatures or hashes before running anything, so the install is not only clean and virus free, it is really fast.
My advice is to test-drive a few different browsers and see which one suits you best if you don’t like the one that comes with your ISP.
Genealogy Programs
Your most important software will be your genealogy program, which is basically a database program for recording, maintaining, and sharing your data. In shopping around for the right genealogy program for you, consider these factors:
• First and foremost, check the program’s ability to record your sources. If it doesn’t have a way for you to track where and when you found a fact, reject it out of hand. You’ll wind up retracing your steps a thousand times without the ability to instantly retrieve the sources you’ve already used.
• Second in importance, but only slightly second, is the appearance. This may seem trivial,
but it’s not. Most genealogy programs have some sort of metaphor: When you open the program, the screen looks as if you are working on a scrapbook, 3 × 5 cards, or a genealogical chart. Finding one that presents the data in a way that suits your methods is important.
• Third, consider how you output your data. Don’t use anything that can’t output to GEDCOM, which is the standard for all programs. A GEDCOM is a text-only file with the data formatted so that any other program can use it. This is important for comparing your research to others’, but that’s not the only output form for your work. For hard-copy output, think about what you want to create. The output can be simply data; whole books with pictures; or wall charts, a website, iron-on transfers, or even a giant mural for the next reunion. Look for a program that fits your output needs.
Note
Importing and exporting data between programs is often problematic, despite the standard of GEDCOM 5.5. Each software engineer implements that standard slightly differently. For that reason, backing up your data just before importing any other GEDCOM file is critically important!
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