Like pretty much everyone else who's into genealogy I have been following the wave of new shows already shown on TV or coming soon to a screen near you. I have a few comments and wanted to share my thoughts with my readers.

Faces of America - I was very excited about this show, but overall I am a bit disappointed. I am not sure that the format of cutting a slice in time and then connecting the different stories to it is very appealing to me. I would probably prefer to go deeper than wider. The show is well done, but barely scratches the surface of what is possible to research. I guess PBS was trying to get wider appeal to its audience of non-genea-nuts.

I watched the first two episodes with my wife, who is a non-nut. I am not sure she was 'that' interested. Some historical facts are absolutely mind-boggling and could have been more throughly presented. For example, the fact that on one hand allied forces were liberating Jewish survivors from Nazi concentration camps compared with the incarceration in concentration camps of American citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent would have been interesting. How could something like this happen? How is it possible that this took place in America?

In any case, I like the historical aspect of the show, but as I've read elsewhere, I would have liked more meat on the bones. How were these resources located? How were these 'Book of Life' volumes put together, how long did it take and how much did it cost? Maybe that's just my curiousity...

The Generations Project - This is a fantastic show! The host is terrific and the filmed segments really show how any person can have an interesting ancestry. I would have liked to see a little more of the research, but perhaps that would have caused the show to be a little dull. I love this show and I think everyone reading this should tune in and watch it.

Who Do You Think You Are? - I am really looking forward to this show. I think that doing an episode on each celebrity is a better format than 'Faces' and will allow the viewer to follow the storyline better. It looks to have the most polished production as well, but that probably comes with a much higher price tag.

I will probably have more to say once WDYTYA starts. But so far, I love the new genealogy themed shows that are starting to sprout everywhere. Enjoy!

I've been going over old census entries to see if I can find new clues as well as cite my sources properly. While this is somewhat tedious, I've already found a lot of information I've overlooked in the past. Here's an interesting example, the 1930 US Census for my wife's great-grandfather Saul Hytowitz and his family. Here's the interesting bit:



These are the columns 25-31 that deal with occupation, employment and veterans. I couldn't figure out what his occupation was from the handwriting although I can clearly see he worked in the shoe industry. Luckily, I ran across a blog post on Ancestories that had a link to a website that details the instructions for the census enumerators. And then I found this:

217. Distinguish a traveling salesman from a salesman in a store; the former should be reported as a commercial traveler.

I knew he was a shoe salesman because I found that out in the 1930 Pittsburgh City Directory and other sources:



But I didn't know he was a travelling shoe salesman. And guess what? His son Joe does the exact same thing.

A few other interesting things:

1. The city directory shows Saul owning the house on Straka Street with his children renting space there. The 1930 census says he's the one renting the house for $73 a month. I wonder which one is right. I wonder if he bought the house sometime during the year.
2. I just noticed that Saul's parents, Jacob and Rose are also in the city directory. Didn't see that before.
3. The veterans section of the census shows that Saul was a veteran and served in World War I. His son Joe was also a veteran. I need to figure out how to get their service records. I didn't notice that before either.

UPDATE: Steve Morse has a great little page that deciphers the occupation codes in the 1930 Census. I entered 4290 and got 'Commercial travelers' in 'Retail store or retail trade'.

I saw the great 2010 Census ad on the SuperBowl last night and that gave me a great idea. First, check out the ad:



So anyway, that got me thinking. I don't really remember filling out a census form or talking to anyone in 2000. I think I got something in the mail, but not confident that I filled it out or mailed it in. I know I will be a lot more prepared this time around in 2010.

So my idea is to save my 2010 Census info in my genealogical database. And maybe even ask all living relatives in the tree to send me a copy of their forms. This way I will be 72 years ahead of the curve. And when I eventually pass this burden on to someone else, they won't have to wait until 2082 to see who we were and what we did. I can do the same thing every decade. Imagine my great-grandson's surprise when he is handed an antique flash drive that includes every census the family has taken in the past 70 years...

If you want to know what the 10 questions that will be asked, you can check out the interactive form guide here.

My question about doing this is - is it legal? From the 2010 Census site I got the following:

Census information is protected by law, and everyone who works for the census must swear that they will never disclose any personal information. Penalties for any employee who might share that information are severe: up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. By law, the Census Bureau can’t share your information with anyone — including other federal agencies and law enforcement. Your information is safe.

But does that mean I can't share my own information or ask relatives to send me their forms? I don't think so. Obviously if it's in a genealogical database that is not properly protected, this information might leak and cause all sorts of issues for some people, but the same can be said about all the info I already have about living relatives, right?

What do you think of this idea? Isn't it a great way to get a lot of information about your current living relatives that you might already know? I didn't see any question that might seem to personal.

Let me know in the comments!

I am not sure what the appeal is with the awful show called Jersey Shore, but I guess MTV has to air something since they don't show videos any more. So the whole Snooki phenomenon has gone insane and with it a couple of sites that let you download a PNG file of the orange one where you can insert her into other images (site 1, site 2).

I decided to have a little fun and add Snooki to some historical images. If you decide to make your own, post a link in the comments!

I can't believe I overlooked this resource. The Internet Archive is such a great research tool with so many family histories scanned in full and other terrific resources. So I was very surprised to find 30 (yes, that's thirty!) Atlanta City Directories on the site. The earliest is 1867, two years after the end of the civil war. The latest is 1923.

The beauty of this resource is that you can download the entire books to your hard drive in searchable PDF format or you can browse it online and run searches.

Here's the link to the "Atlanta City Directory" search I ran. Enjoy!

Most of the Atlanta City Directory information I have comes from the Fulton County Public Library. I have not been able to locate anything online except for one or two copies. Footnote doesn't have any and every time I searched Ancestry.com I found only 1889-1890 and the Strangers' Guide:



I get the above results when I enter "Atlanta Directory" in the keyword search in the card catalog.

So imagine my surprise when I got some hits that led me to other years. When I tried to find these specific results in the card catalog I couldn't. So I tried a different way. I decided to filter the catalog this way:



Same results including something that has nothing to do with Atlanta, the "Baronia anglica concentrata, or, A concentrated account of all the baronies commonly called baronies in fee." Whatever.

So this time, after I filtered by 'Directories & Member Lists' I chose the first option in the list which was 'U.S. City Directories' which has over 6 million records. The search on this screen is useless and if anyone knows how to get good results from it, I'm all ears. When I tried to search for 'Tuggle' in 'Atlanta' with an exact match I got no results. When I turned off the exact matches for 'Atlanta' I got 2,766 results starting with New York. So that's a complete waste of time.

On the right hand side of the screen you have the option to browse the collection, and that's done through another set of filters. And here's where you can find all the directories from 1877-1890 and one for 1948-1949:



From here it's easy to get to the correct year, but then you lose the ability to search that specific volume. So you have to browse through it and load all the images until you get to the right page. This is a terrible way to go through a City Directory because you can miss so much important information like the street listing or the business section.

I even tried to copy and paste the titles into the title and keyword search boxes in the card catalog but obviously that didn't work. The good news is that these are fairly good scans and I don't believe I had anything prior to 1887 at the library.

I wonder how many other important titles I've been missing on Ancestry.com because they are impossible to find in an easy way. Why do they hide these titles in this way?

I wanted to post this to give some folks an idea of the frustration you can expect when dealing with some free OCR tools. I try to use OCR (optical character recognition) to transcribe information from images I find mostly in online resources but sometimes also ones I scan or photograph. There are some extremely 'clean' resources out there that have been scanned in high-res and will look great in any OCR tool. But there are some awful scans out there as well. Let's run through an example.

In my last post I wrote about the obituary of Sarah Tuggle. I found the scan of the obit from 1883 on Ancestry.com and knew right away that this will not be an easy one to convert to text:


First of all, for some reason, Ancestry.com has recently started downloading images in PNG format. While this is a great format and is a close second to TIF, not many OCR applications can read it, so you have to convert it with some other tool. Luckily the basic Microsoft Office Picture Manager will do that in no time. But as you can see, the image is in extremely bad shape.

I tried first with PaperPort, which is a document organization tool that came with my DocuPen (an excellent handheld pen-sized scanner). PaperPort has a terrific OCR tool which works quickly and almost flawlessly when you deal with a good source image. But this is what I got with PaperPort:

sale.
.1 -d— of na
o~ueru~~ e siw rr.'i~'~:~ ~r ove.n~w a..n ne.. .eror..o

Close, right? That was the original PNG. Then I tried the converted JPG:

of a.. riu~~n r~ui:.
aim . .~ me .~ aor nee
wu r~
~:~~ ° .«ac.o

Not much better. I also have an OCR tool that came with my terrific HP OfficeJet Pro 8500. But I can never get it to work on images that were not scanned at a high DPI and it is clunky and not very user-friendly. I tried it anyway and just got frustrated some more.

Then I remembered that I had a great free OCR tool somewhere in the 70GB hard drive of my computer, but since I haven't used it in a while I couldn't remember what it was called and couldn't find it anywhere. So I went to look for some good OCR tool online. And there are a lot of those out there.

SimpleOCR looked promising but it couldn't convert the file at all. I tried another good image and it had a lot of errors anyway. The interesting feature was that it allowed you to chose from a drop-down list what word you want to use when it was not 100% sure what it scanned. Also, it has a 14-day trial for handwriting recognition but you have to teach the system how you write and go through a whole training exercise. That might come in handy some day.

Another free program that intrigued me was TopOCR. The interesting thing here is that it is intended for photo capture with cameras of at least 3 mega-pixel. I was sure it would be able to handle some bad scans but this is what I got:

A Adds Ads, Am, Carob Beef ~e, Bulb Or Err. PIU~DeJ Tugger

dled ~uddonl7 ye~lerd~^r at Me r~ld~ ace of h

46ugbler, Art. Plorco llf Inure, on Butler~l~eL 8,

nob * try dlnner *ad wry ~ppuenllr troll, 81 o^lr~n~d & IlUle ox ~^lll0~ d~, howe~ot, Al . dl^cd league -liar TV ~~ ~~

It basically found only one word right - Butler. So this was not going to work. It is a very quick tool though and let's you edit the outcome in a side-by-side view next to the original:


When I tried a good image I got pretty good results. But my problem is not with good images, it's the crappy ones I need help with.

So finally I found the program I had been using before. Obviously it's called FreeOCR. Doh! It also let's you view side-by-side with the original and open the recognized text in MS Word. I can't seem to get a screenshot of this application for some reason but here is what I got when I ran it:

A lnddan Death.
In. Earnh Tuggln, wits nt Hr. Plukncy Tuggle.
dlcd suddnnly yesterdny at the ruldcnce cl her
daughter, Mr:. Plame Mlm, nn llutlaralrael. Shu
aw s Imm dinner and wu nppu-entlr wall. Sha
rnmulnmnij A lime ou smlug clown, however, and
dlud \».|‘un; any cue could mach her. _

The recognition wasn't great, but it was the closest I could get. And there was no difference between PNG and JPG either. When I ran better scans through FreeOCR it did great too. And it's free!

Do you have a favorite OCR program (free or not)? I'd love to hear from some of you in the comments.