Got a video camera or audio tape recorder?

Grab it and go find your mother, father, grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins and start asking them about their family history.

Record yjem. Edit it if you wish, and then share it, or file it away to be shared in the future. Do it again years later if they’re still around. Collect your families oral histories while you have a chance to do so. It’s worth it.

It may not be easy. You may find it easier to have someone else do the interviewing if the stories don’t just flow. Sometimes it’s easier for a stranger to get people talking, and telling the stories they think they’ve already told family before.

Be prepared to have to be persistent and ask the same question 3 different ways to get more than “my father never talked about much”. Maybe prepare a small script. be sure to ask about each parent, and about their parents, and if they knew anyone else in the extended family, and what they knew about them.

Ask people about themselves, their childhood, their ambitions, their treasured memories and regrets. Most people like to talk about themselves and wont’ stop once you get them started.

In the not too distant past oral history, and perhaps family bibles, were the main way that information passed from generation to generation.

gets embellished and distorted, but asking about the past now may be your only chance to ever find out more about the people just a few generations away from you.And those stories may be more interesting than anything you’ll ever fnid in books, newspapers and records of much older generations.

We tend to take people’s presence in our lives for granted, not wanting to acknowledge that someday they may be gone. And I suspect that most people doing genealogy research tend to overlook the rich oral history carried around by the people in the family tree that are still around.

I’d have a hard time pointing a camera at my dad and I know he’d react differently if I did. I’ve heard most of his stories before, I think, since he tends to repeat them so much over the years. But I’d still like to have them forever, told the way he tells them.

You may not appreciate the value in this now, or ever come to feel a need to watch it again. But someone else you’re related to may find this to be a priceless snapshot of history.

I’m lucky to have 16mm black and white silent films of both my parents in the 1930’s. Apparently camera rentals weren’t uncommon then. The viewfinder was skewed and the adults in one are headless. But having my mother doing Shirley Temple inspired moves and disappearing via a camera magic trick are priceless, as is seeing my father and his brothers at a rural swimming hole.

I feel very lucky to have recordings of my grandfather playing piano, even if he was in his 80’s and arthritic, and even though the recording is on a horrible sounding old cassette. It takes me back to listening to him play piano as a child, and the appreciation of music that this helped spark in my.

I’m lucky that about 23 years ago I took a cassette deck to my great aunt’s house and recorded her talking about family history. She was almost 90 and had a tendency to repeat herself, and it’s likely that some of what she said is wrong. Her brother was my grandfather, and he died about 20 yeas before I was born.

At one point she said she didn’t have a brother. But she went on to tell stories about him. And about her life running a school in the Appalachian mountains during the depression. She told a story about my grandmother, who I also never knew, and when I played that for my father over 20 years later it brought tears to his eyes with a revelation about that day that his brother had never told him.

I should put a clip of Aunt Margaret up here. She was a great oral historian, with a mother who had been around about when the DAR was founded and helped run the local chapter.

About 6 years ago I was on a road trip and interviewing a friend who had a bizarre and complex life, Harvey Job Matusow. I realized I was about 100 miles from my aunt’s house in Maine and called her to tell her I was going to visit.

Aunt Cam had been getting treatments for cancer and had just come home. We weren’t very close but we shared an interest in genealogy and she was the last remaining elder on my mother’s side of the family.

I could tell she didn’t really want me to come visit. But I knew I wasn’t likely to see her again if I did. It wasn’t that I expected her to die 2 months later. I thought she was healthy after her treatments but later I came to realize that she knew she didn’t have long.I was probably a bit rude in telling her I was coming whether she wanted me to or not.

I drove over 200 miles out of my way to see her. I’d never seen the farm she’d lived on for decades and she gave me a tour, sharing the history of the place, and with it, her love of the plants and trees she’d nurtured there.

I asked her if I could videotape her talking about family history and she didn’t want to. She said “it’s all there, on my computer and in my files.” I argued that it was unlikely her grandchildren would ever read the info we’d collected over 3 generations of genealogy research, and that an oral history of her telling the stories would be a better thing to have.

She agreed, reluctantly. I said I only had an hour of tape. She said she didn’t expect us to take more than 20 minutes.

An hour later I had to stop her when the tape stopped. I got wonderful stories about her childhood in a wooded WPA village in the 1930’s and how that sparked a lifelong love of nature. I got awkward stories about her mother’s prudish attitudes, and much much more. I got tales and memories about at least three generations of family, and these weren’t already on paper.

She died about 2 months later. I took copies of the interview to each of my cousins, most of whom I hadn’t seen for many years, and who I also haven’t had much contact with since then. Some of them were also a bit estranged from their rather eccentric mother and were unlikely to have ever had a conversation with her like the one I recorded.
Cam wanted the memorial service to be a celebration of her life. It was done at a local Quaker meeting house and people freely shared memories, but there were awkward moments and it didn’t all come across as celebratory.

Afterwards we returned to her house, where her children faced the uncomfortable task of divvying up her belongings, books and furniture. She had a wooden trunk that supposedly had come over with the family in the 1700s, portraits from late 1800’s and generations of family memorabilia.

My cousins decided to watch the video. I didn’t really want to join them so I worked on backing up her GEDCOM files in the other room.

Soon there was nonstop laughter roaring from the other room. I didn’t think it was that funny and asked what was up.

It turned out that my mother finally had a chance to get the last word in with her big sister. Mom was correcting her stories, calling her on things and saying stuff like “every time she coughs she’s telling stuff that she made up, it didn’t happen that way.”

Everyone there found the interplay between the two sisters hilarious. It gave a sense of what it was like to be in the room with the two of them and the underlying competition that they’d had since childhood. And that broke the otherwise somber mood of that day, and filled it with laughter. To me, that video became the celebration of her life that she’d wanted us to have, and to us, she was there with us that afternoon.

You can’t plan something like that. It happened because of my impulse or intuition.But you can capture some of the oral history from the living elders in your family tree, no matter how old or young they are, and you may regret it later if you don’t take the time to do it now.

Look out Ancestry! The competition is gaining on you fast!

There’s a new genealogy site that I’m quite impressed with that has quickly grown to the point where it’s the third most visited genealogy site online per Alexa.
Right now they’re offering a sale  until Sept 17 with 2 years of access for $49. Even at the normal $49/year its a great deal, and it’s not cheap because it’s lacking in content. They’re adding dozens of  databases weekly, and they even offer full fee access to any new databases for 10 days after they are added - making it well worth checking out  even if you aren’t ready to subscribe. The free content already sold me on a membership.

Browse recently added databases to see the new content and which ones are free. Or go ahead and sign up - they’ve made enough deals to ensure they’ll keep you busy with new data for a lomg time.

While there are  a lot of subscription sites out there this one seems like it has a chance to displace Ancestry.com  from the top site slot, and could force Ancestry to stop charging $299 for their full world collection.

World Vital Records was founded by former Ancestrty founder Paul Allen, who seems openly critical of Ancestry as having priced itself too high since he sold off his interest in the company.

Full WVR access for $49 is bargain compared to $299 for full access at Ancestry.com, and  the recent  moves by TGN/Ancestry with regard to the mess called FTM 2008 and the Internet database collection that alienated many online genealogists suggests Ancestry is arrogantly out of touch with the genealogy community.

The WorldVitalRecords.com two year plan also includes some free software, RootsMagic genealogy software. 

I’m looking for akterntives since family Tree Maker 2008 won’t even import my old FTM file.

Ancestry already convinced me not to renew via their recent actions, so now WVR shines with a ray of hope that says inexpensive alternatives can offer great promise. I’m throwing my support to WVR as a vote of confidence and in the hopes that  it forces a wake up call at TGN/Ancestry and because I’m sure I’ll find a lot by looking in fresh new sources..

WVRis also supposed to have a heavy emphasis on social networking (aka Web 2.0) by helping connect regional researchers to share data.

Geographical context is a great stepping stone to expanding on what you already know and for finding tangential info on your ancestors and how they lived.

Recent deals with Accessible Archives and NewspaperArchive.com have added hundreds of small town newspapers. One with Everton brings valuable books and info with it. I don’t think you’ll find any other genealogy site bringing such a broad range of materials together in one place as quickly as WVR has been growing.

Much like Google Books Search, the Microsoft’s Live Books Search also offers a much overlooked resource for free genealogy searches and free downloadable books in the public domain.

There are a few things Microsoft does better than Google, much as I hate to admit it. They have more accurate OCR conversions that Google Books, from what I’ve seen. And that offers easier cut and paste usage of text from the books, which is a real time saver when using info from these books.

Microsoft offers downloadable PDF files of public domain books that include the text layer so that you can keyword search the files offline and even save the books as text, or just paste parts you want into your databases and web pages.

But Microsoft’s historical offerings are a bit slimmer than Google and the search/web interface is much harder to use to read books online.

And it’s weird, when is the last time you heard anything about Microsoft books? They seemed to get into it as a defensive reaction to Google Books and they’re apparently still working as part of a consortium and are donating public domain books to the Internet Archive project as far as I could tell. I can’t tell if they’re still scanning books.

Try to find Live’s Book Search from the Microsoft Live site. Hello? It’s not even off the More menu like Google hides their books search. It’s not even on the Betas page linked from the More menu. It’s a bit hard to tell if they’re even still actively scanning books, but it’s there, if I search Google for it. Go figure.

It looks like it launched in December 2006 and has had no press since then. And, wow, http://books.live.com gets me there but redirects to a different URL.

But there is content there not found on Google Books and vice versa.

Microsoft’s attention to detail shows. But the interface sucks and it looks like they are hiding it and hoping we’ll forget it’s there less than a year after the beta launched.

At this point it’s still a useful tool and worth doing some genealogy searches on to see what you may find. If you find a useful book download a copy, and get Google Desktop to index it for you so you can search your Microsoft Books locally.

I started to tack on some other thoughts and info on Google and Microsoft’s book search tools on my last post but thought it would be better to break out this part from the news about the new “My Library” tools that Google Books just launched.

If you hadn’t already noticed, Google Books Search has become an incredibly valuable research tool, and one that’s very useful for genealogists. They’re giving away access to the same public domain data other companies are trying to sell us.

They’re constantly adding new books as they continue scanning libraries around the country and many of these are in the public domain and are fully readable and downloadable for free.

Google Books offers a huge library of history and genealogy data that can be keyword searched for free. It also means that books that previously could only be seen by driving to distant libraries or by paying reprint or CD-ROM companies for copies of long out of print books can now be searched from home. Many of these books are not well indexed in printed form but now you can find any name in the book, in theory.
A few weeks ago Google Books added an “Accessibility” feature allowing you to see (and copy) text versions of the book images and this is wonderful.

In practice Google seems a little sloppy in the OCR conversions. How could a title like
PRUNSYLNANIA ARRHINES by MATTHEW S. QUAY - 1876 slip by spell checks? I’ve also found cases where a keyword search found once instance of “Graham” in a book and my reading the book found other instances, or missing pages.

When you click on Google’s Accessibility/text feature you may see that some of the text is garbled but you can easily cut and paste from the text and save a lot of time in transcribing excerpts.

For example, here’s a book of Chester County PA tax records that is just begging to be diced up into USGENWEB/PA Roots/Rootsweb pages for each township. Most of the work already done, it just needs to be copied, reformatted and carefully cross-checked for accuracy.

I had some issues with columns and poor OCR conversions in Google Books last time I checked. The downloadable PDF files didn’t seem to include the OCR text layers and this means they aren’t searchable offline, and aren’t indexed by Google Desktop. But I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.

I’m hoping that as Google adds new books the PDF text layer will be there. I’d also like to see them re-compile the old PDFs, and to use a more consistent file naming system that clearly identifies a book as volume 1, 2 or Series 3, book 9.

While they’re at it they could ad a custom hidden text data table for Google Desktop to compile a “My Desktop Library” index of local PDF Google books sortable by title, author, year, etc. That could easily be exported to be “mashed” into other useful tools.

Which reminds me, how about adding OCR interpretation to Google Desktop’s PDF scanning, Google? You clearly do OCR conversions on the fly for PDF to HTML conversions in Google web searches and it would be nice if my downloaded Google Books library could be indexed locally.

Google Books also offers no way to report problems with specific books. The many books with partial or missing pages and no way to report it other than the feedback comments suggests they just don’t care. I don’t get it. They’ve digitized some of the best libraries in the country but made it look like a rush job. Surely they want to fix the problems. Let us flag them for you.

Google still doesn’t do a great job of clearly identifying editions and books with similar titles and doesn’t include relevant volume info in the search summary snippets or many of the About this Book pages. It really should show volume info on the header with the truncated titles by the author info.

For example, see the many volumes of Pennsylvania Archives that all try to save as the same book title and that don’t clearly state volume and book number in the About this Book pages. There are at least 10 series of these books and over 100 volumes. Try finding the Sixth Series, Volume XII on the search results above. This volume at least includes the series/volume info on the About page so maybe they’ve started adding more info in more recent scans.

Anyway, despite any shortcomings I love Google Books. I suspect they’re going to change our world and the way many of us interact with books. There’s a lot of needles in those haystacks and Google Books Search acts like a magnet to pull them out for you.

I seems like every week or even every few days Google adds some new feature or service that wows me. And this time they added features that do what I asked for in feedback I sent a few weeks ago. I’m sure they were working on it anyway, but it’s like my Christmas came early this year and I got what I wanted.

These features may seem like an obvious advancement but it is revolutionary and radical when it comes to what it represents. This marks a radical shift that will have a broad impact culturally in how people relate to books and use them. I’m sure of it. It adds value to the content. It’s a hugely effective tool to streamline productivity for researchers. and it can make sharing books fun.

It’s the YouTube of Books added as a front end to what has to be the worlds largest virtual library. Electronic books have started growing up to transcend what we can do with printed books. It smells a little like Amazon’s listmania but it throws in full text searches and free b0oks.

Here’s my Google Books “Library“and new custom search engine. I’m not putting the tags or reviews to good use yet. I just got click happy paging through search results building a basic catalog for my interests in Quakers, early colonial Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Delaware and the Carolinas, and England, Scotland, Ireland and Presbyterian history.

In less than a few hours I created a custom genealogy index of over 500 books that I know contain useful info on my ancestors.

In less time than I could do a look-up in a printed book index I can search the full text of over hundreds of books I selected because I know or suspect they are relevant to my research. Sure, I could search thousands more books just going to Google Books, but what I need are more ways to filter the world’s largest library to quickly find relevant results.

Now we have the tools to catalog, reference, review and share what we find in this virtual library.
“My Library” in this case also functions as custom genealogy search engine for me and other people much in the way my Google Custom Search Engine Genealogy search does..

Here’s the Google Books blog post announcing this new personalized library feature, including a critical link to the FAQ that seems to be missing from the “My Library” pages themselves so far.

The FAQ sums it up:

“You can now create personalized libraries on Google Book Search where you can label, review, rate, and of course, full-text search, a customized selection of books. These collections will live online and be accessible anywhere you can log in to your Google account. Once you’ve built a collection, you can share it with friends by sending them a link to your library in Google Book Search. You can even set up RSS feeds with friends so that they’re alerted when you add new books to your collection.”

This is really great news. And really useful.

Anyway, one thing I really wanted was a better way to track if I had already looked at specific books before, and I thought that adding tags, review and social networking along the lines of Amazon lists or YouTube videos would be a great way to open up more functional ways to create and share custom libraries. And that’s exactly what they rolled out with the new feature.You can now add Google’s books to your own library and add tags to help you manage and filter them. And you can add reviews, share links to your book collection, export lists, and best of all, you can search within your library and offer that search feature to others.

Think about this for a minute. This isn’t just a way to share cool videos or recommend books. It’s a way to mine data in public domain books for research, school projects and much more. It’s essentially a way to build custom book search engines along the lines of the Google Customer Search Engine (CSE) web tools they offer.

It would be nice if they’d add the ability to add tags to advanced searches so you can filter better, and to create sub-libraries so I could create multiple libraries of books lists specific to Pennsylvania history, Virginia history, etc. I’m sure we’ll see that eventually. I’d also like to see a way to save “Favorite Searches” and to automate them harvesting new books as they are added to flag them for you.

As it is now it’s a very useful tool and I expect it’s going to catch on quick for bloggers, researchers and academics who want to offer custom book searches.

The export feature opens up use of other tools to do mash-ups, mapping, and custom affiliate linked book lists to Amazon, library searches and much more.

And this isn’t just limited to public domain books. The searches will search indexed content that you many not be able to see the results of other than snippets, and this makes it easier to create lists of books to hunt down in libraries.

Google Book Search effectively trumps traditional library card catalogs by offering rich, full indexes of books that can be searched down to specific words, names and locations even if that info isn’t in the traditional printed index.

It’s starting to feel like we’re really in the 21st century. This can totally change the way we search for info in libraries and bookstores. If publishers can’t see the value in people being able to find their content even if they can’t read it free online then they’re living in the past. Surely this will sell more books even if it’s indexing books that aren’t in the public domain and despite Google giving away more books that you could fit in any single family home.

And now Google adds a way to make sharing books fun and useful and as cool as sharing a link to a video but infinitely more useful. We will see experts on various topics filtering for us to create useful subsets of data we can search.

It doesn’t replace printed books. It makes them easier to find, buy, read and reference.

It took me about 10 minutes to add 137 books specific to Colonial Pennsylvania history and/or specific surnames I’m researching. This becomes a custom search tool for me any anyone else who wants to use it.

The tagging and reviews can take it all a step further. Reviews and tags can be used to annotate books and track and share what we find in them.

If you own or use genealogy database CDs and family Tree Maker software I want to alert you to some potential concerns about the next version of FTM software leaving out CD-ROM support.

I was initially excited about the new Family Tree Maker beta. I rely heavily on FTM for research on Ancestry.com and to maintain my research. On initial look the new sfotware update is a much more than them  minor revisions of the last few versions. It’s a total re-write of the software with a more web based (and Ancestry.com oriented) approach that could really make this an even more useful tool.

But now I’m pretty angry to find that support for reading data CD-ROMs is being dropped from the new FTM.

If you own Family Archive Cds and use family Tree Maker it’s important that you check out the FTM 2008 beta quickly and send feedback to the beta feedback email address. And do it quickly, or you’ll find yourself left out and unable to use your Cds in the future versions of FTM.

There is a discussion group unrelated to the authors of the program where people are discussing teh beta that also may interest you. The list is run by users and intended to cover more geenral technical issues with the software than just the curernt beta release. But this also seems to be the only place where there is a public discussion of the changes we see in the software.  See the FTM-Tech mailing list for more info and discussions of the software, but be aware that the best place to send feedback about the beta is to the beta email address.

There is a free piece of software, the Family Archive Viewer, which allows you to read the CDs, but it doens’t allow you to update info from them into a GEDCOM database. For years the software vendors selling the CDs have encouraged use of Family Tree Maker because it expands the usefulness of the CDs.

So now, after buying FTM because of these recommendations, and being a customer for years who has purchased upgrade 3 times in the last 4 years or so, and after investing hundreds of dollars in reference CD-ROMs — I discovered the next upgrade will obsolete any ability to work directly with thee CDs to insert data into my research.

Stranger still, the parent company that develops the software still sells the database CDs at their Ancestry web store.

It’s not clear if the motivation is just that they are too lazy to provide backwards compatibility in this re-write of why they decided it was ok to leave this out.
The ability to save files readable by previous versions of the software is another complaint on the beta discussion board, FTM-tech, on rootsweb.com. and users such as myself are unable to import some old databases, and there seems to be much debate of handlnig of sources text fields.

It seems likely that this discontinued CD support is motivated by the desire to get customers to subscribe to Ancestry.com instead of buying CDs.

The online databases are great, and Ancestry has become a fairly essential research tool. But I’ve been advised that I will just need to keep an old version of the software if I want to use CDs with my database (and then I can’t write data back and forth between the two easily, apparently). And that just bothers the heck out of me.

I noticed this a few days ago and now found an official announcement at the Google Books Search Blog with the catchy title:

Greater access to public domain works for all users

If you hadn’t already noticed, Google Books is a treasure chest of useful info for genealogy research. There is literally a flood of books coming online on a regular basis, fully text searchable. Many of these are books now in the public domain that have sat in libraries untouched for years. Many of these fully searchable books may not be the kind of book think of for genealogy research, and that makes this all the more valuable as a tool for finding facts in unusual places.

Until now, even if a book was in the public domain you couldn’t do more at Google Books than read it online or download a PDF file. I’ve spent hours trying to re-type text or extract it via OCR for my genealogy research.

Now they’ve added a feature that is designed to make the material more accessible for handicapped users who use text readers. This also makes the material more accessible for use on the Web, in school reports, and for saving text from books into your genealogy program.

I found a useful article at a “how-to” wiki site on an unusual but noble idea — How to Restore an Abandoned Cemetery. Also linked from this page is another article on Visit Old Gravesites for Research Purposes.

A few of my ancestors are buried at old cemeteries that were abandoned or no longer have churches associated with them. One appears to have been well maintained for decades, apparently by another church that took over responsibility for it. Another one was apparently overgrown for years until recovered within the last decade or two. At least one of my ancestors is buried in a small family graveyard that is now on an old farm.

Near where I love is an old cemetery overgrown by woods, tucked away next to a restaurant and off a busy road. I’d noticed it many times and thought about visiting but never got around to it until one foggy morning that I thought would be a good day to take my dog for a walk and to take some photographs.

It turned out to be the perfect day for this — the light fog and drizzling rain added such a mood, and the cemetery seemed quite unusual because of the old trees growing throughout the cemetery, often from old graves.

So I took some moody photographs and posted them to a web page. Some readers there told me a bit more about the history of the place. Apparently this cemetery was long abandoned until a clean up effort about a decade ago. The graves were mostly from an era just after the Civil War and and most belonged to freed slaves and their children. One friend told me she knew the place and found it creepy. I fond it relaxing and had a good feeling from paying my respects to those buried there.

This article offers 10 things you may not know about women’s maiden names that could by useful for genealogy research on women in your family tree.

Interesting news about a partnership between Ancestry.com and Relative Genetics to offer DNA testing and DNA data.

I see this as a good step forward towards larger DNA databasing to connect beyond surname specific projects.

It’s hard to imagine how far genealogy will progress in the coming years as we see more and more records digitized and linked to DNA research. But it’s clear that the whole nature of genealogy is evolving.