SLCC Genealogy Course -- Blogging Project

Tonight I started on my Blogging Project. First I went to the Utah Genealogical Society web site. I logged in, because I am a member, and went to the archives of the virtual chapter meetings. I watched the February virtual chapter meeting (webinar) called Using Tools and Organization for Creating a Valuable Family History Blog presented by James L. Tanner, author of the Genealogy's Star blog. He gave this same presentation at RootsTech 2014 a few weeks before the UGA Virtual Chapter meeting on Thursday February 6, 2014. I attended the RootsTech presentation and was very impressed. I wanted to hear it again and I am glad that I did. It "used up" 1 1/2 hours of my 6 hours. :) There was an excellent syllabus for the RootsTech presentation which I downloaded and printed from the RootsTech 2014 web site. The presentation was number RT 1061.
Here are some things I considered as I watched the presentation tonight. 
Why do I want to have a blog? It is a rather major time commitment, so I need to know why. What are my goals? I want to share my research and information. I want to preserve my family history. I want to preserve my research methodology and sources and citations for those who will come after me. I want to create a valuable resource that I can use. All these things are important to me, so that is why I want to create a better blog.
I considered adding more ways to share my blog and several add-ins and gadgets that I can implement on my blog. I definitely want to have a Google search function. And I definitely want to have the index function. I want to look for a newer more attractive template.
Before I heard James Tanner's presentation I was considering switching to WordPress and a paid site. I thought it would be more professional. But now I can see that he is doing a wonderful job with Blogger and so are several other top 40 Genealogy blogs. Blogger is quite a bit easier for me to use, because I am familiar with it. I have also used WordPress, but I have much more to learn about it. And Blogger is free!
James Tanner also made the point that if you write your blog posts in Microsoft Word there is a lot more formatting. Writing in the blog itself is simpler and even easier to make into a book. In fact, James Tanner recommends a blog as a good first step to writing a book. 

SLCC Genealogy 1000 Course: Preserving the Past and Present Project Approval

For my Midterm Project for the Preserving the Past and Present Module I was required to submit a proposal for a six-hour(at least) project that will be something I really want to do for my family. 
Here is what I wrote for the proposal. Ihave identified three things that I could do for this six-hour project that I am going to do any way. The unit Preserving the Past and Present has been very stimulating!

1. Interview my 92-year-old mother. However, she has been in the hospital the last week , so I need to take interviewing her more slowly than I could do for an assignment for this class. But I have already approached her and started an outline of what we need to do to help her write her personal history.
2. Organize my photographs. I purchased a guide book for Picasa from Geeks on Tour and am going to learn how to use the program. The author Chris Guld has lots of online videos about using Picasa that I want to study.
3. This is the one that I want to do first for this class. I want to work on my family history blog. I created the blog http://jhdfamilyhistory.blogspot.com in 2008. Ironically I started it (and then backed off of it) when I was called to be ward family history consultant. I thought it would be a good place to share family history information and instruction with ward members. But when I advertised it, I was instructed by the bishopric that we were to have no blogs or websites other than official church websites. (In the meantime members of the church have been encouraged to establish an online presence in multiple ways. That is the ironic part.)

When I attended RootsTech 2014 I went to the session about blogs by James Tanner and was motivated to start writing more. I have been following his blog Genealogy Star and am amazed by how prolific a writer he is. I plan on watching the UGA video of his presentation on the same subject for more ideas on blogging. (I am a UGA member, so I have access to the archives.) He stressed that if you insist on perfection, you will not be writing very much. So I need to lower my standards and write more frequently. I am also impressed with ReNee Zamora’s blog and how she writes about her genealogy class assignments. I am thinking that if I do the same, my research processes will be well-documented for those researchers in my family who come after me.

 I also like the idea of a blog just because I can save the instructional things I learn from classes, from books, from webinars and from Internet sources in a place where I can find them. So, this is my proposal. Spend at least six hours writing posts for http://jhdfamilyhistory.blogspot.com. Use my notes from RootsTech 2014 and share what I learned, include links to online resources for many of these classes. I think I can write at least 12 posts on the subject of RootsTech. Then I want to start writing about class assignments, like Renee. I am probably not going to write about past assignments. I will just start where I am.

My Instructor approved my project proposal. One of her comments was "It will become kind of a "notebook" of sorts for you to keep track of genealogy resources. Make sure you add the box that makes it searchable." What a good suggestion! I am thinking of lots of improvements that I can make to this blog. I am excited to get started on this project.

Ancestry Insider Writes about Migration of Sources from New Family Search to Family Tree

Yesterday on the Ancestry Insider blog there was more information about the migration of sources from New Family Search to Family Tree. This is another perspective on what the The Ancestor Files blog reported about this. Apparently the sources data is "corrupted" because there are ten fields for sources in New Family Search and three fields in Family Tree. Also, the sources are being placed in user source boxes. I will have to check my source box and see if there is any thing there that I need to attach to my people in Family Tree.
I was encouraged to read that this is a new round of migration which started in February and was expected to last about six weeks. So maybe it is almost over now. Regardless of what FamilySearch is doing it is incumbent upon me to add sources to my people in Family Tree and to have good citations for these sources.

Is this what has been happening in my Family Tree at FamilySearch?

It seems like when I check my "watch list" at FamilySearch's Family Tree every week that there are a lot of changes being made by FamilySearch. I was horrified to read in the blog The Ancestor Files that "information" is being migrated from New Family Search to Family Tree and that the source information is being corrupted.
I agree with Amy Tanner Thiriot that unless this stops, FamilySearch Family Tree will not be a place for serious genealogists. This will be very sad, since so many of us have trusted FamilySearch as a place for us to preserve our hard work and our family history forever. My resolve to keep my own records in ever more detail and to back it up in multiple locations is strengthened even more.

Family Stories and Oral Histories

I greatly enjoyed this segment from the BYU show Ancestors about how one person learned so much about her family. Fabiana Chiu told her story about visiting Peru with her Chinese parents and showed many photographs and heirlooms.
Bill Zimmerman author of How to Tape Instant Oral Biographies: Recording Your Family's Life Story Using Sound and Sight was also interviewed and shared information of how to conduct oral interviews. Living family members are our greatest genealogical resource.
The episodes of the KBYU TV  PBS show Ancestors are available at http://www.byub.org/ancestors/.

Does Genealogy Research Need to Change to Make it "Fun" for Youth?

Today I read James Tanner's post in his excellent Genealogy Star blog titled

Is Genealogy Broken? If so, can it be fixed? I highly recommend this blog post and all of James Tanner's posts. I agree with his sentiments in this post. I like this statement found in his last paragraph:  "What we do need is a realization by those who would fix the genealogical community that they cannot throw away the old product. Doing historical research is mostly a very solitary, demanding, intellectually stimulating, intensive, engrossing, overwhelmingly difficult and very academic discipline. It cannot be sugar-coated for broad public consumption."  The more I learn about research the more I realize how demanding it can be. I am trying hard to focus on what I need to learn and to do my research systematically, step by step. I do hope that some of my children and grandchildren will eventually show an interest in continuing my efforts. I do not expect that they all will. What I do hope for all my children and grandchildren is that they will feel connected to our family and that being part of our family will be important to them. And I hope that they will have critical thinking skills and a desire to seek for the truth in everything in life. I don't think that they need to be "a genealogist" for this to happen.

Online Family Trees Versus Personal Software Family Trees -- Lesson # 8 Assignment Genealogy 1000 Salt Lake Community College

Discuss the benefits and the drawbacks of Online Family Trees like Family Tree and Ancestry Tree and Personal Family Tree Software like Roots Magic, Ancestral Quest or Legacy. Can we use just one or the other? Why or why not?

Re: Online Family Trees. I have quite a bit of experience with FamilySearch Family Tree and its predecessor New Family Search. I have IOUS’s in my ancestry, individuals of unusual size, and this has been very frustrating. There have been some “pedigree wars” with one branch of my family, where someone would change Henry Rollins to John Porter Rollins and then someone else would change it back and then the other person or persons would reverse the change and back and forth. It has been actually kind of funny, like the good fairies in Sleeping Beauty changing Aurora’s dress from pink to blue and back again. Even with all the frustration I have experienced with these FamilySearch products I am thankful that we have them available. They are constantly getting better and are great for collaborating with others.

 I also have limited experience with family trees on Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com. I think I would like to discuss MyHeritage.com for this assignment.

A year ago I attended RootsTech and we were offered a free six-month membership My Heritage in exchange for submitting a GEDCOM file. So I submitted my father’s large GEDCOM file and got my free membership. I renewed the subscription after the six-months, so I have had it about a year. The motto of My Heritage is “Do your genealogy while you sleep” because the program is constantly comparing your tree to other trees and advising you when there are record matches or new information. I get frequent emails advising of new matches. My father had over 400 first cousins (because of polygamy) and this generation has mostly died off. Many of the matches are advising me of obituaries or Find a Grave or Billion Grave records matching the names in my father’s GEDCOM. So My Heritage has essentially updated the GEDCOM file. I still need to enter the information, the sources and citations into my own record, however.

I think that online trees are wonderful for preliminary research. They are a good first place to look. The family trees are particularly valuable if they have sources. Just last Sunday my daughter-in-law asked me how to research one of her ancestors.  All she knew was the name. So we looked online. Searches on both FamilySearch Family Tree and in Ancestry.com Family Tree led us to several census records, a civil war record and a photograph. So now she knows a lot more about this individual and she has leads to research and to verify in Iowa, Ohio, Illinois and Virginia

Re: Personal Family Tree Software. I have had the most experience with Legacy because I won the software a few years ago on a radio show. I recently purchased the updated version Legacy 8.0. It has many nice features. When I was doing the assignment about using census records as sources I went to Legacy to print out blank census forms and used them to complete the assignment. It was very handy. However, Legacy is probably more complicated to use than some of the others. I have had some experience with Ancestral Quest and probably it is the best for those people who are transitioning from using PAF (Personal Ancestral File). And I have been learning RootsMagic in this class, of course.

I definitely believe that we need to use both online family trees and personal software. I cringed when I heard about someone who threw away all their personal family records because “now it is all on New Family Search!”  Things do not stay the same at the FamilySearch family trees. Others can and do make changes and sometimes things are lost. Never put any information or photos or stories or documents on FamilySearch without keeping your own files. The other online trees are not subject to being changed as much by others, but these other web sites might not be permanent and data could also be lost. Another drawback to online trees might be the loss of privacy. And someone could copy your information and publish it as their own work. Do not put anything on the Internet if you do not want to give away the rights to it. You will have to weigh the benefits of sharing against the possibility of plagiarism. And in the interest of accuracy you might not want to “publish” information on the Internet until you are sure it is reasonably correct information. It is very valuable to keep your records in personal software on your computer, so you can work with it and use it to help you as you make discoveries and develop conclusions.