Janet's Genealogy Blog

Geni: Posting Genealogy data and photos free

I read an enjoyable article in the New York Times on Saturday: Latest Genealogy Tools Create a Need to Know. This article talks about the latest genealogy powertool: DNA testing and also covered a number of genealogy websites.

It talked about leading sites like Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com and Onegreatfamily.com.

I'm not using any of these, but got more interested in another site they mentioned, geni.com, that looks to be the most innovative of the bunch. It's a combo family-tree-making and social networking site devoted to sharing genealogy data amongst members of the same tree (heads up: the family trees cannot be made available to the general public except by taking screenshots and posting them).

Geni doesn't allow importing GED files as yet. It can export them but that doesn't help you get a tree going in their software. So, I typed in about 80 entries and had a good time putting in only names first so I could get a visual family tree up in a hurry. Each person in the tree has, by default, visible arrows pointing up, down and sideways with choices for adding parents, children, siblings and spouses. These make it superquick to get up and running.

Each person box has room for a photo. You can click the empty photo box and be prompted to upload a photo for that person. What I liked about it is that I could fool around and get over 20 photos of key family members up populating my tree with great dispatch and no hassle.

I already have a more extensive tree online produced with the aid of my MacFamilyTree software. It has photos. But, Geni has photo albums too and is live. Where MyFamilyTree needs to create a new family tree set of web pages each time, Geni allows data entry using Ajax technology so it is easy and fairly quick data entry.

If all Geni had was the data entry and free photos and whatnot, it would be a decent site to consider. But, what makes it more interesting to me is that it is designed to allow multiple members of your extended family to share information and details about various members of the family tree. You can enter email addresses for yourself and others. And other members of your tree can enter their own details. Messages and photos can be exchanged.

Right now, this is a solo venture. No one else is yet involved. Maybe it will be one more promising social-network web project that doesn't go anywhere. But, genealogy seems like such a great fit with social networking, so it is worth a try.

Please comment here if you've tried your own Geni or other online genealogy site. I would love to hear what you've experienced and learned.

My Portland, OR Genealogy Trip Journal, Part 1

Well, I finally made the trip. It was much more limited than planned, but I think you might find it interesting to see what happened and what I learned. I've been wanting to travel up to Portland for a while now because I have the death certificate of my great grand-father, Adalaska Frakes, on my Mom's side that says he was buried in Aloha, OR - a suburb of Portland near Beaverton. So, the stars aligned and I found a gap in my schedule that I could take if I was willing to drive up there.

Driving wasn't bad -- except for the heat. Most of the way the temperatures were above 90 degrees. I don't have air conditioning because I live in the amazingly moderate climate of the Bay Area. I might change my mind on the next car after this trip! It's so much less energy-draining to drive with moderate temperatures. And I'm a temperature wimp living in the Bay Area. If the thermometer rises above 80, I start sweating and moaning.

Anyway, I made it all the way up to Eugene on my first day. Leaving around 10:45 am and arriving in Eugene around 4 pm. I stopped in Ashland for a nice break plus a couple quicker gas/snack breaks. I drove about 500 miles that first day. After breakfast at Starbucks the following morning, it was on to Portland where I stayed at the excellent and affordable La Quinta in the Northwest industrial part of Portland.

La Quinta was great with free wi-fi, clean and attractive accomodations, friendly staff and close (2 miles) from the really fun and hip NW 23rd St neighborhood with great restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores and a vast variety of shops. After freshening up and resting up in my room for awhile in the afternoon and hooking up with one of my best friends from my college days at Portland State, I drove to the Northern end of 23rd and walked all the way up to Burnside and back. Scored a great prawn burrito along the way which I ate voraciously when I got back to my room around 9 pm.

Saturday I had free for genealogy pursuits. It was about 93 degrees but I managed to research on the internet and then go looking at burial sites in Aloha and environs. Around 5 pm, I was lying under a tree at Hillsboro's biggest cemetary. I spent about 45 minutes resting and chatting with my housemate as she tried to locate my ggf's death certificate - yep, I didn't manage to find it before leaving on the trip. She couldn't find it, so I just strolled the grounds and probably covered 2/3rds of the gravestones. No luck but it was a lot of fun looking and photographing old gravestones. You would be surprised the sense of anticipation you get. Any collector will like this kind of thing -- the prospect of snaring a photo of the tombstone keeps you going.

There's lots more to this story, so stay tuned. You might want to subscribe to my RSS feed if you haven't done so yet. Three quarters of the journey is ahead. By the way, the photo above is a high rez scan of my grandmother. One of the fruits of my labors yet to be described.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, port, travel

Genealogy Trip Planned

No dates or anything yet. That's the major missing ingredient. But, I would like to go:

North from SF to Medford where I have a 65-year-old cousin whose Mom (my Dad's sister) died and must have a bunch of old photos and keepsakes to look through.

Then in Portland, my great-grandfather was buried in nearby Aloha, so I want to find his gravestone and photograph it and see if there's some other info at the cemetary.

Then my Mom was born in Elgin, Oregon, so I would like to go to the county courthouse there and see what I can find.

And my grandfather, Leonard Frakes died in Seattle and I could research that.

This kind of travel really is fun. The exploration and detective work is hard to beat! Hopefully, I can recruit trip-mates to go with me to these places.

Besides putting this trip in my calendar, I should probably be doing some preliminary long-distance research to get the ball rolling. According to Long-Distance Genealogy, you can save an incredible amount of time and get a lot better results if you've made some contacts and even set up appointments in advance.

It's hard for me to be that planful, but perhaps saying it here will get me to try sending some letters of inquiry. The book gives you a bunch of actual sample letters to use. It's really good.

(See more progress on "Take at least 1 genealogy research trip this year" at 43 Things...)

5 Golden Rules at About worth reading

I found this nice little short article by Kimberly Powell over at About Genealogy. Good stuff. Especially the reminder about collateral ancestors. OK, you should read the whole thing but the five rules in brief are:

1. Do not assume.
2. Do Your Own Research.
3. Treat Brothers and Sisters as Equals.
4. One Source Doesn't Equal Proof.
5. Share the Wealth.

Each has links to additional detail but the article itself is short and sweet. Enjoy.

MacFamilyTree 4.06 Charts now interactive

I just downloaded MacFamilyTree 4.06 and the new version's charts have navigation icons on each person to get to their summary, edit their record or go to parents or children. When you click the icons, they zoom out to a larger size. Very slick!

You can choose between color schemes.

This proves to me that:

OnlyMac is serious about making MacFamilyTree a great product

The good looks we are seeing now are just the beginning of an on-going effort to make genealogy beautiful!

MacFamilyTree 4 Charts Dazzle

These are my grandparents on my Mom's side and their parents. I was happily using Reunion 8 to track my family tree until I got a look at the beautiful charts that MacFamilyTree 4 produces. Wow!

Besides this kind of charting, you get instant web pages. If you have web space somewhere including .Mac, you can get your data up on the web fast! Here's my first attempt. Each person's name can be clicked to zoom into their information in detail like this 50% screen shot:

MacFamilyTree 4 feels like a young program. In fact it is. It's been built from scratch for the Mac OS X platform. It uses all the built-in capabilities of X like image resizing. There's a little slider that lets you view charts at any size with instantaneous and smooth expansion and contraction as you move the slider.

Being young, it has its moments but also has rough spots here and there. I'm guessing that you can learn your way around the rough spots and do great with it - and it's only $45. I recommend that you pop open the help right away because they give you a few getting started tips that will help you avoid a couple of the rough spots.

Right now this is the *fun* genealogy program and Reunion 8 is the *serious* genealogy program for Mac. I'll be using both for a while because fun is a priority for me. MacFamilyTree uses the GED 5.5 format rather than a proprietary data format. There may be some limitations to that, but it's also nice to know that everything you do in the program can be exported to GED format. Reunion 8 can export to GED as well but since that format isn't it's native format, you can't be sure everything will be exported.

I've entered about 40 records into MacFamilyTree and I must say that it's faster to enter into Reunion 8. But then, part of that is that I'm used to Reunion. And part is that Reunion has a few more data entry aids. It might make sense for me to enter data into Reunion and then export it periodically into MacFamilyTree when I want to print charts or post an updated family tree to my website.

Introducing Janet's Genealogy Blog

Hello there. Welcome to my genealogy den! I've just recently acquired the genealogy bug after a brief flirtation eight years ago. I'm really into it. This isn't my first blog - it's my fourth. Maybe you've seen my Tech Ronin blog.

This whole new bout of genealogy passion started shortly after I bought my Zire 72 in May. I was looking around for cool software to put on my Zire and found a little program called MyRoots. I promptly downloaded the demo, tried it and then bought the full version. I have never had my genealogy data in my hand - always with me - before. How fun!

I dug out some of my old files and entered a lot of my genealogy data into my Zire, person by person. I probably entered 50 people over the next few days. I could enter a lot of it by memory whenever I had a few minutes here and there waiting for something else to happen.

I started searching the Net for family members and information and hit upon a Frakes (my Mom's maiden name) who is a major Frakes researcher and had posted 5000 Frakes census records online. Well, being a database expert, I couldn't resist copying the text file, massaging it and importing it into FileMaker. What a bonanza of information!!! I'll be writing soon about the little FileMaker database I made out of it to help me browse through the data quickly. But I digress...

Getting the 5000 Frakes census records and connecting with George Frakes was just the shot in the arm I needed to take things to the next level with my budding genealogy hobby. George subsequently sent me a great big family tree print out showing me what he knew about my Frakes ancestors.

Entering this abundance of data on my Zire wasn't going to work and I wanted to work with photos. I needed to buy a desktop genealogy program. I had used Reunion 4 and 5 back in the 90's, so upgraded to Reunion 8 which runs on OS X for about $70. I downloaded a free utility for MyRoots that let me export the data in MyRoots into a GED file - the standard data format for genealogy programs. I imported my existing data and have been entering data like crazy since then. Right now I have a total of 289 people in there.

I got my old photos out and started scanning and putting some of them into Reunion. I printed some family trees and sent one plus some scanned photos to my 82-year-old uncle, Roy Frakes whose already told me a juicy story about my great grandmother. I've bought about 5 books on genealogy and am generally having a great time. This hobby is a great one to share with my 88-year-old father who loves to look at old family photos and reminisce about herding cattle while riding his horse Rex on his family farm in Montana.

Here's what I think about genealogy so far. For someone like me who likes to learn, *collect* things and play with computers, it's awesome. To do genealogy *right*, you've got to learn a lot of geography and history. I'm collecting maps and local histories of the various places my ancestors have lived. That's a lot of places when you've got 289 and counting spread over three centuries.

If that weren't enough, this all ties in with my interest in social networking. This hobby gives me instant and very interesting conversation material for all my living relatives plus every amateur and professional genealogist out there. I'm hoping you'll join me and start by writing a little comment to say hi, ask a question or express your thoughts.