I got my RootsMagic 4 Book in the mail about a week ago (you can still get it for $10). It is a very easy read especially if you already know what you're doing in RM4. Unfortunately, I am coming to the realization that I need to clean up my database. This will consist of a few steps:
1. Properly cite my sources. Rather than start merging and changing existing sources I am going to do it all over. Mainly because I want to use the handy multi-person source options. But also because many of my sources are either missing or not formatted correctly. I also want to classify these sources properly. This will be extremely time consuming but it must be done and I believe it will help me become much stronger when it comes to proof standards.
2. Organize my media files. I have a system, but I don't think it is a good one. I have saved a few posted with great recommendations and will start migrating my files to a new structure as I rebuild my database.
3. Focus on direct ancestors. My database was created from merging several trees and so I have people in it that are extremely distant relatives. I don't think they will make the cut in my new database as I will focus mainly on direct ancestors and their families.
4. Organize peripheral information. By this I mean I need to catalog and store documents, pictures and other memorabilia. I also want to properly archive correspondence that contains information I need to enter in the database and have been putting off for a while.
How does this sound? Any suggestions?
As you may have read on other blogs, MyHeritage came out with a new version of Family Tree Builder today. I downloaded it and tried it out. There are a lot of things I like and a few I am a bit confused about.
There's a new Premium version of FTB3 that costs. Now this might be a little confusing, so try to follow along. When I first saw the word Premium, I immediately thought it had to do with the naming of the account types on the MyHeritage website. They have Basic, Premium and PremiumPlus site accounts. You might think that someone with a Premium or PremiumPlus account will automatically gain access to all the new features, but it doesn't look like it right now. I am still trying to figure that one out.
So what are these premium features? Here's a screenshot of what they are:
The most important one in my opinion is the ability to merge SmartMatches:
Now the free version has basic SmartMatching, but the real power is the ability to grab information from another tree and merge into your own. This poses a few issues and I have yet to try out this feature fully, but my biggest concern is whether or not you can see if the new information you are about to merge is sourced properly and what is the quality of that source.
My previous issue with SmartMatches was that they were unmanageable. What I mean by that is that in my tree of almost 10K people I had no way to filter out the important people I wanted to find matches for. You can navigate through the tree and look for the little green circle, but when you're at the SmartMatch page you are basically faced with a long list that gets truncated at some point.
I know MyHeritage has been working on improving this functionality and indeed I was able to find some people who had a single match, which I couldn't see before. I really want to get my hands on the full functionality and see what else has been enhanced. Currently I'm waiting for the site to process my tree and give me the basic results. So I'll need to give an update later.
The next big deal is the SmartResearch feature:
What are these 100 most important genealogy site on the internet? I tried to find more info in FAQs and on the site but I couldn't. I am very curious to see what the results are. I already love the regular research engine they have with about 1400 sites, so this could be a great improvement.
I'm not so sure what the next one is though. Is this just a big chart of everyone related to me? It's called the All-In-One Chart:
I'm not sure what the big deal is here. I can get that in several ways from other sources (I think). If you look at your family tree on the MyHeritage website you see a very limited view, so this might be the expansion of this limited view.
And the last one is a nice-to-have in my book:
I have rarely seen people loading videos or documents before. And documents usually come in some sort of scanned format. So does this allow loading PDF files instead of JPG files? I guess I'll have to try it out and see.
This might sound like I am critical of MyHeritage or the functionality that FTB3 offers. I am not. I am extremely excited about these new developments and some of these features are fantastic. Let me tell you about a few other fantastic features you may not know about:
1) Photo Tagging. This has been one of my favorite tools so far. Not just because I can load an entire photo and say who's who (you can do that in many other sites including Facebook and Geni). The real beauty is that the software identifies faces in the photo and then tries to match them to other faces you already have in your albums. This has allowed me to figure out who some obscure people were that I had no way to identify before! It even gives you a percentage for the match. An identical picture of the person is 100% and you can determine how good or bad of a match you want the filter to be. I found photos of my grandmother that were decades apart and where at around 65%. I found a picture of my grandmother's sister that had a 75% match to my grandmother! This is truly a fantastic tool.
2) Name Translations. There's a feature hiding inside FTB that lets you translate all the names in your database to another language. This might not be important to some people, but when your ancestors came from Eastern Europe and had Hebrew/Polish/Yiddish names - this can be the difference between no clue and an amazing discovery.
3) I really love how sleek the site is. You can see these guys have put a lot of thought and hard work into making this a truly easy experience for the users. One of my biggest gripes with Geni is that it is horribly slow. Just loading the homepage takes forever and a lot of times it just freezes on you. Another thing that drives me nuts is how slow it is to update when something happens. MyHeritage has great response times and looks great.
4) FTB and the site are both very easy to use to build a family tree. The reason I downloaded it in the first place was that it looked easy to use and offered a lot of features and functionality.
The only thing is - I haven't found anyone from my side of the family on MyHeritage. I originally found one of my father's second cousins, but he didn't really have a tree. I also found my wife's niece, but she only had herself and her parents. I know MyHeritage boasts 27M users and 300M people, but I am not sure how active these users are and how big their tress are. I mean, simple math will tell us that each user has 11 people in the tree. That's siblings, parents and grandparents.
The other problem is switching your family network to a different site. I have a lot of people in my tree on Geni. How do I make them all switch after trying hard to make them join Geni in the first place.
One of the reasons I have so many people in my Geni tree is that they have the excellent tree-merge feature. You find family members and invite them to your tree and voila, your trees are merged (with some merge issue resolution here and there). That's hard to beat.
I am glad that there is competition out there because in the end, we the consumers and end-users benefit from the resulting innovation. If you are new to genealogy and are just starting out with your research I would definitely recommend that you download FTB3 and start building you tree there. And publish it to a Basic MyHeritage website account which allows you to have up to 500 people in your tree for free. A Premium account allows up to 2500 and is only $1.95 per month right now (50% off deal). I think that's a great deal.
I am quickly understanding that proper source citations are extremely important. Not only to allow you to backtrack and find the source of the information you are using, but also to allow fellow researchers to connect the dots when they run into something you claim is true.
When I started out building our family tree, I mostly used oral interviews and some research that my mother-in-law did for my wife a few years ago. But then I started adding information from other sources, especially online. Pretty quickly I was making a big mess of it. I needed a better system.
One of the things I noticed on Ancestry.com is that it allows you to attach a record to your online tree. What that does is put all the proper sources and citations with that record and makes it very easy to tag a whole family. For example, if you have one family member that you find in the census you can add that record to this person as well as to his entire family (depending on the census year, some older census records will only attach to a single person).
But I don't use my online tree as my primary database. It just doesn't have the breadth of features I get with RootsMagic. And worse of all, I can't just merge new information from one to the other easily. So I decided to just use the online tree for source gathering. Here's the process:
1) I create a new tree on Ancestry.com named after the home person.
2) I start researching online and adding sources and citations.
3) I expand the tree and use the 'hints' that the site uses to try to link to other records.
4) I add whole families, making sure to keep adding all sources.
5) Once I reach a point where I feel I have enough to transfer offline I export a GEDCOM from the online tree.
6) I load this GEDCOM into a new database in RootsMagic.
7) I arrange this new database, getting rid of all the duplicates.
8) I merge this database into my master file.
9) I make sure all the sources and citations are in the right places.
10) I delete the old online tree and upload the new organized one back in it's place.
Seems like a lot of work, but using this method I added over 200 people to the Brannon side of the family in my main tree, all with the proper sources and citations.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Are there easier methods to add so much source information?
7/29/08 - Current family members: 1118 in 330 families.
I am going to recap what I have done so far in the past few weeks since I have embarked on this journey.
First, I read through my sister's roots project and got all fired up. Some of the pages in the project were printouts from Beit Hatfutzot, which is also known as the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. They had basic information about my paternal grandparents' villages in Poland. The two villages are Radzilow and Dolhinov (wow, I just found this site when doing a Google search. There is so much information I have to go through and I have already seen several familiar names!).
From there I jumped over to the Yad Vashem site which is The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. It is the largest and most impressive holocaust museum in the world and is located in Jerusalem. I remember going there when I was younger to do a research project about the Treblinka Concentration Camp. It was a project I did for school and the reason I chose that specific camp was the fact that it only had one purpose - kill as many people as fast as possible. We'll get back to this in a minute..jpg)
I sat at the computer with my mom and we started searching through The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and all of a sudden we both started getting chills. There, in front of our very eyes, were hand written documents (called pages of testimony) filled out by my grandfather's first cousin, Rivka Geiger. To the right you can see the page she filled out about my great-grandfather, Hanoch Meir (Heynoch) Dombek. Rivka and her sister Tamara (Tema) Fruchter were the only close family survivors that my grandfather was able to find in Israel after the war. That's a story I will have to tell in full in a later post.
Anyway, by using the easy functionality of the site I was able to find 58 pages that were filled by Rivka. We were just skimming through them, trying to figure out the names and dates. Most of the testimony is in Yiddish and hard to read, but we slowly figured out who was who. Last night I finally sat down and went through them all and I now have a chart of three generations of the Dombek family that perished in the Shoah (holocaust). I will have a full post about that soon as well. I promise.
I started a quick family tree with some free online software through a link I found on the Beit Hatfutzot site. I won't actually link it here because it has all the details of living relatives. If you want to see it please let me know. I will also figure out a way to post this tree somewhere else.
I spent a few hours with my parents, trying to map out as many relatives as we could think of. The next day my mother and I went to visit my grandmother and I grilled her for over two hours, trying to get as many details as I could.
On my return to the US, I told my wife about my new hobby and asked to see what her mother had put together a few years ago. That pretty much got me started with a big chunk of information on her side. I also found a few people through JewishGen's Family Finder (JGFF) and the Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP) who were nice enough to share some of their research and give me some tips moving forward. I joined Ancestry.com and found a distant relative of my wife's who has over 23K people in his tree. With his help and direction I decided to purchase the RootsMagic Genealogy Software tool. Through Ancestry.com I was able to piece together a lot of information from US Census data from 1840-1930 about the Auth, Wiley and Hytowitz families.
Well, this is becoming quite a long recap of the first few weeks and I already have several posts I promised to write. One of the things I will try to list at the bottom of each post is how many people I currently have in my family project.
7/29/08 - Current family members: 825 in 259 families.
