Three years' work in three hours: the effect of the Internet on genealogy

This morning I had a dramatic demonstration of the effect of the Internet on genealogical research when I accomplished in three hours what would have taken three years or more 30 years ago.

Someone asked me about an Arthur Knight James, who married my wife's second cousin twice removed, Lilla Ethel Green, in Cape Town in the 1920s. He deserted her and they were divorced after two years, no kids, so I wasn't planning to follow him up. But then I thought why not see what I can find.

My correspondent had sent me his date of birth (1896), and those of his siblings somewhere in the UK, said they came to South Africa early last century.

I went to FamilySearch, and there he was in the 1901 Census, with a sister and both parents. It gives father's year and place of birth, so I find father living with his parents in an earlier census. Find there are three duplicates of the family on FamilySearch, so make a few more checks and merge them. Then come back to the mother. She died in 1906 in Pretoria. FamilySearch has her death notice. It gives the address of her parents, J & E Knight. Her husband has filled in the death notice, under children has written "Nil". He lies. There were at least two, as shown by the 1901 census.

I find her parents at the address given in the death notice -- in the 1911 census. The mother has died, but father is there, with another daughter and a granddaughter, Alice James, a third child to add to the "Nil" on the death notice. Why did her dad lie about her existence?

All that, as I said, took about three hours.

Thirty years ago, to accomplish the same thing, I would have had to travel 65km to Joburg, to the LDS library, where I would have had to pay R25 to order the relevant microfilm from Salt Lake City (assuming I knew which one to order). Then wait three months for it to arrive, and travel back to Joburg to consult it, and scrolling through it to find the record I was looking for might well have taken more than three hours.

And having done that, repeat the whole process for the next film -- pay R25, wait three months, drive 130 km to consult it, and so on the the next film, and the next and the next.

And thirty years ago, when we had to do all that, we thought we had it good.

Go back another 30 years before that, and consulting the 1901 census would have required a 6000 mile flight to London and a visit to the Public Record Office in Portugal Street or somewhere. Oh wait! Back in 1958 the 1901 Census was not available for consultation. Come to think of it, it wasn't in 1988 either.

No, our search back then would have begun and ended in a dank and dingy dungeon under the Palace of Justice in Church Square, where we would have had to go to consult the death notice of Annie Knight James in those days, rather than the air-conditioned reading room of the National Archives of today.

So when you complain that FamilySearch is offline, or the Naairs computer is responding slowly today, just be thankful for resources like FamilySearch, Naairs and FreeBMD, which enabled me to do three years' work in three hours this morning.

The New GRO Searchable Database – AncestorCloud Blog

Until a few months ago, if you wanted access to English birth, marriage and death registrations, you had to buy a certificate, which was expensive. A new scheme mkakes it possible to get PDF copies of the original register entries, at least in the case of births and deaths, and there are also better partial indexes available. The New GRO Searchable Database – AncestorCloud Blog:

During November 2016 the GRO trialled the first of 3 pilot schemes, allowing the purchase and emailing of PDF copies including birth records dated 1837-1934 and death records dated 1837-1957. These copies can only be used for research purposes not for official identification purposes as they are not certified. Marriage certificates were not included in this trial. Phase 2 would pilot the delivery of the PDF records within 3 hours, and phase 3 the delivery of PDF copies of civil registration entries that are not held by GRO in a digital format.

For the indexes

To assist in the ordering process a free online searchable database was also introduced. To access this you must register and login into the GRO website. Unlike the original GRO indexes, which many UK based family history researchers are familiar with, these indexes include the mother’s maiden name for most birth registrations prior to 1911, and ages of death prior to 1860. Both of these will be a huge boost for researchers. Sadly, the birth index only goes up to 1915, although the death index continues to 1957. This means that in order to purchase a PDF copy of a post 1915 birth record, the reference details must be found on the FreeBMD website or other partner databases. There is currently no searchable GRO index for marriages.

The linked arti9cle has useful tips on how to use the sire.

Can you use Pinterest for Genealogy?

I forget why I joined Pinterest -- probably because a friend or family member invited me to do so. I've used it very little, and have never really understood how it works or what it is supposed to do. So I welcomed this article, which is the clearest and most lucid explanation of how it is supposed to work that I have ever seen. Perhaps Pinterest could include it on their site for bewildered newcomers. If, like me, you joined Pinterest without really knowing what it was about, it's worth reading, whether you are into genealogy or not. Can you use Pinterest for Genealogy?:

The real use of Pinterest is that each image is associated with its website of origin. So if you are the type of person that remembers things visually, you can use the pins or individual images as reminders of the content of the original websites. It is also possible to do “research” on Pinterest on a given topic. If you search for a particular topic, the results will show all of the pins relating to that topic. Each of the images is really a link to the website where the image originated, so by clicking on the images you can effectively go directly to that website. In this way, Pinterest becomes just another way of organizing and finding content on the Internet.

If you need a place to store genealogically related websites you encounter on the Internet, you can pin an image from the site and then you will have a visual reminder of the site on your Pinterest board. This may ultimately be more useful for finding content, especially if you are a person who thinks visually. Also, if you run across a photo of family members on the Internet, you can pin the image and not only capture the image, but also a link to the website where you found the image.

From that I would conclude that Pinterest is a kind of visual blog, in the original sense of blog, as a web log, a place where you make a list of web sites you have visited and would like to have a record of so you can visit them again.

I have a blog that I use mainly for that original blogging purpose, Simple Links, and I find it quicker and easier to use than Pinterest.

I have several other blogs, which I use for different purposes rather than as simple web logs -- a couple for observations on the world around me, ideas I want to share and discuss with friends, and also genealogy and family history, where I write up some of our research and discoveries for other family members to read.

I have two family history blogs. There is this one, which, like the Simple Links one, does more or less fulfil the original purpose of a web log -- it is mainly links to web sites that I find interesting or useful for genealogical and historical research, like this article, for example. I publicise this blog a bit more than the Simple Links one because I think that some of the links that interest me may be of interest to other genealogists too.

The second blog, Hayes and Greene Family History, is mainly a sort of research log, recording things we have found and problems we have encountered in the course of our family history research. They are things we like to share with other people, because other family members may be interested in research findings, and others may be able to help with some of the queries. But none of these things seems to be served very well by Pinterest. If I want a log of web sites visited that I may want to visit again, I find my Simple Links blog works better. If it is specifically genealogy web sites I want to record, then I use this blog. But I find Pinterest rather confusing and more complicated to use. Other people's minds may work in that way, but mine doesn't seem to, so I look at Pinterest maybe about once in three months, if that.

If I want a visual record of a web page with some of its content, including pictures, with a link back to the original; site, I find Evernote much better. That still works even if the original web site has disappeared -- you can clip whole artlcles, or even pages, to Evernote.

But if you want to know what Pinterest is supposed to do, this article is pretty good.

The New New FamilySearch: a first look

There have been several changes to the FamilySearch web site over the years. I'll refer to different versions that I will call:

1. the Old FamilySearch
2. the Old New FamilySearch
3. the New New FamilySearch

The Old FamilySearch (1) allowed you to search the IGI, and transcripts of the 1880/1881 US, Canadian and English censuses, and the Ancestral File. It allowed you  to download Gedcom files of what you had found, which was very useful for quick 'n dirty research.

This was updated to the Old New Familysearch (2), which included more records, but lacked the facility for a Gedcom download. Most users did not like it much, and thought that more effort had gone into making the user interface look pretty than making it useful to genealogists.

Now there is a New New FamilySearch (3), and I've been having a quick look at it, and my first impression is that it is much improved. It has been available to LDS Church members for some time, and I gather that they have been beta-testing it, but now it is open to the general public.

The best news is that you can once again download data from it, though it not the raw data like the census transcripts of the old FamilySearch, but rather information in online family trees. To download the data you will need a third-party program, Get My Ancestors from Ohana Software. Get My Ancestors is free, but is also part of a larger program called Family Insight, which costs $US 25.00.

Get My Ancestors is described as follows:

 Get My Ancestors is a stand-alone program that will allow the user to download linked pedigrees from FamilySearch, family tree (aka, new FamilySearch) in a .paf format. Download either a pedigree that starts with you or the pedigree of an ancestor. You indicate the ancestor by entering their personal identifier from FamilySearch family tree. You must be able to register for FamilySearch family tree to successfully use Get My Ancestors. The individual information downloaded is the summary information of basic events: birth christening, death, burial and marriage but not ordinances.

It also doesn't appear to download sources.

In order to get the most out of the New New FamilySearch, you need to create an online family tree. I've found most of the online family tree sites I've looked at distinctly underwhelming, and so I need quite a lot of persuading to get me to do such a thing. I looked at Ancestry.com and its little brother Mundia, at My Heritage, and Geni.com. They all seemed to be clunky, and they seemed encourage the entry of wrong data and make it difficult to correct. Data entry and maintenance was difficult, and the presentation was usually ugly.

The New New FamilySearch is a vast improvement over the others in all these departments, and in addition it is free.

The user interface is less cluttered, and the information is presented in a much easier-to-read way.

It's not perfect by any means, and no doubt as I continue to use it I will discover some flaws, but it's a lot better than anything else I've seen in the way of online family trees.

Like many of the others, it asks you to start with yourself, and enter your parents and other ancestors. As you enter them, it suggests possible ancestors entered by other people, or as part of the source material extracted from church and civil registers, census records and the like. You can add some of these entries as source references to an online tree, but you will not be able to download them with Get My Ancestors.

Another advantage is that you can contact other users directly. If you disagree with the information provided by another user, you can click on their name, and up pops their e-mail address, and you can mail them. In most of the commercial programs you can send an internal message. They say that this to "protect privacy", but the real reason for it is that they want users to keep coming back and to be dependent on them. Yes, you can leave a message, but the person will not get it until they next log into that site, and they might not do so for several days if they are busy, or for several months if they have lost interest, and perhaps not at all if they have forgotten to pay their subscription.

Are there any drawbacks to the New New FamilySearch?

Yes, there are some -- unlike the Old FamilySearch, it won't let you download transcripts of source records, and though you can download data from other family trees, some of which are based on sources, the source record itself is not included in the download.

So though in some ways it as not as good as the Old FamilySearch, it is a lot better than the Old New FamilySearch, and as far as online trees are concerned, it's one of the best I have seen.

This is just a first impression based on a quick look at it. Perhaps I'll have more to say about when I've used it a bit more.

Billion Graves

My daughter, who is something of a fundi and enthusiast on Android smartphones, on hearing that I had recently acquired such a phone, and knowing my interest in genealogy, recommended the following "app":

Participate | Billion Graves:

The BillionGraves Project brings people together by making genealogy records available to the public.

Volunteers use smartphones to take GPS-encoded pictures of headstones in cemeteries, which are then uploaded to the Internet and transcribed for easy searching. The information on the headstones is then made available to the public.

BillionGraves software is free, easy to use, and available for desktop computers and smartphones.

There have been several other similar projects, including Find-a-Grave, and several others including a South African one, initiated by the late Peter Holden, and for which Martin Zoellner and I at one time tried to write some recording software. There is also a current project on Ancestry24.

The thing that sounds good to me about the BillionGraves project is that it uses the GPS facilities of cellphones to pinpoint the location of graves. That was something that caused the biggest difficulty when we were trying to develop software for recording monumental inscriptions - recording the locations of graves. It required describing a cemetery and its location, and if different people recorded information at different cemeteries one might end up with the same cemetery appearing several times in the database under different names.

Another thing I like about BillionGraves is that it has both a photo of the headstone, and an index of the names of people on it, making it searchable.

But I also have some doubts -- is there a way to avoid duplication? Some graves might be recorded several times, and others might be missed and not recorded at all.

I might try this out, but I'd also be interersted in having comments from people who have used BillionGraves and other grave recording software and projects, to learn which they find better and why.

See also Hayes & Greene family history: Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records.

Using to-do lists in genealogical research

I was very surprised to read this recently on Randy Seaver's blog: Genea-Musings: Can I Ever Tame (even manage?) my Genea-Monster?

I have never used the to-do lists in genealogy software. I probably should do that, but I haven't. My mind set was that I would have to print out each to-do list from each of the ancestral families that I wanted to research in the libraries and archives. Of course, if I had checked my RootsMagic program more carefully, I would have seen that they have several types of To-Do lists to use, and they can be printed out either separately or as one general list.

Randy is an experienced genealogist, and so I thought he would have discovered the usefulness of the to-do lists by now.

We use Legacy, and whenever we come across something that we think we should look up, we create a to-do item. These can be related to particular individuals in the database, or they can be general.

In South Africa, most of the things on our to-do list are for the archives, and they are scattered in different depots around the country. The archives indexes, however, are online here. Go ahead, try them. Go to one of the search pages and type in the name of someone you know, you might be surprised, even if you, or they never lived in South Africa. Choose the RSA index for a start.

So if I find an item in the archives relating to a person in my database, I create a to-do entry with the description "Call for", followed by the archives reference. So in the task list I have something like:

Call for MSCE 1216/1965 - Grice, Wilfrid Robert

and in the task description field I have more information from the index, in this case "Grice, Wilfrid Robert, b. Durban, s/s Alice Gladys, b. Laffan, 1965-1966" (the "s/s" means "surviving spouse" - the other possibility is "p/s", meaning "predesceased spouse").

This particular one is in the archives in Pietermaritzburg, so if I am going to visit there, I can print a to-do list for all the things I need to look up there, in priority order, and as I complete them I mark them as completed and change the priority to "Low", so they won't show up in future lists of things to look up there. And I also edit the task line, changing "Call for" to "Seen".

I have found this a very useful tool, and it saves a great deal of time. I go to the archives with a printed list of what I want to look up there, and I print it just before going. When I get there, each new document may have information that leads to new things to look up, so I add them to the to-do list on the laptop computer, or, if they look very interesting, call for those documents then and there.

In the same way, we have looked up references in British newspapers for family members who have married or died in the UK. You can look them up here. We enter them as we find them, while looking at the person in the database. When we went to the UK on holiday (a rare occurrence) we took a list of exactly what we wanted to look up at the Colindale Newspaper Library, and spent a morning there finding useful stuff. The to-do list feature of Legacy made it easy to do.

You can enter something two, five, ten or twenty years in advance of going to the library or archive repository, even if you may think you will never have the opportunity to go there. But if the opportunity does arise, all the things you want to look up are there, ready to be printed.

The only thing that I think could be improved in Legacy's to-do list feature is to have a way of converting a general to-do item to a specific one by linking it to a person. You may find information that links that person to your family, so you add them to the database. But the to-do item showing the document you used is still a "general" one, so there is a possibility that you might look it up twice.

Tuesday's Tip - use FREE Genealogy Forms to Organize your Search

Randy Seaver writes in his blog about using free forms to organise research Genea-Musings: Tuesday's Tip - use FREE Genealogy Forms to Organize your Search

There are several websites with FREE genealogy forms available. for instance:

* Family Tree Magazine (http://www.familytreemagazine.com/info/researchforms) has many different types of forms - including a research calendar, note-taking, online database tracker, repository checklist, research worksheet, correspondence log, article reading list, book reading list, and a book wish list.

and goes on to say

I tend to create my own form in my word processor by using the good ideas of others and adapt them to my needs. In a word processor, I am not limited to a set form length and can add content to whichever field I choose.

I'll add that I go one step further, and instead of using a word processor for that purpose, I use the askSam freeform database.

askSam (Access Stored Knowledge via Symbolic Access Method) lets you create a variety of forms for entering information into a database, but, unlike a word processor, it also lets you search and create reports from them. Well, OK, you can search in a word-processor document, but askSam searches are much more versatile. And you can use askSam to link and organise word-processor documents.

So when I go to the archives to do my research, I make my notes in askSam, and that makes it easy for me to find the notes I've made about particular people or families, and to produce reports on them. This is much more useful than printing paper forms from PDF files, and then forgetting where you've filed the forms that you've filled in.

And no, I'm not employed by askSam to plug their products. I'm just a satisfied user. I've been using askSam for 20 years now to keep track of my research, and I still haven't plumbed the depths of the capabilities of the DOS version that I first started with, much less the latest Windows version (unfortunately there are no plans for Linux or Mac versions).

Among other things I use it for recording tombstone inscriptions, with a photo of the tombstone, a transcription of the inscription, and research notes on it. This makes it easy to find all inscriptions relating to a particular family, or a particular place, sorted in name or date order, if you like.

I'd be interested to know of other genealogists who use askSam -- perhaps we could devise a way of sharing ideas and templates that could help us to make better use of it.

If you haven't heard of askSam before, have a look at their web page, and see if you think it might be useful to you. It can be used for all kinds of research, not just genealogical. I use it for storing notes on books on all kinds of topics, keeping addresses, keeping track of correspondence, phone calls, and all sorts of other things.

Strays databases and indexes

Some family history societies have collected indexes of "strays" - people whose records are found in unexpected places, without any local links. So, for example, someone who died or was buried far from home, or a family that stayed in a place for only a short time and then moved on, would be listed as a stray, and the index might help people in other places with "missing" family members. These societies often have a "strays coordinator" to maintain the index, do lookups and so on. See, for example, here, here and here.

I am involved in a number of genealogy mailing lists hosted by Yahoogroups, and one of the facilities they offer is the creation of databases by members.

I am thinking of creating a database for people to record strays on these sites, and thought I would ask for advice on what to include in such a database, especially from those who may have had some experience of strays indexes.

The Yahoogroups databases are limited to 10 fields, so one needs to give some thought to what should go in them. I am thinking of the following:

1. Name of the principal person (Surname, Firstnames)
2. Date (of record or event, in YYYY-MM-DD format)
3. Place (of record or event)
4. Place of origin of the person (if mentioned)
5. Relations of the person (if mentioned)
6. Source (newspaper, tombstone, church record etc.)
7. Notes (any other information about the person or record)
8. Informant (name of person who entered record, and contact info)
9. Date record entered.

But people who have more experience of strays indexes might have better ideas, and that is what I am soliciting now.

The data from Yahoogroups databases can be downloaded in comma-delimited format, for importing into other databases, spreadsheets etc. It can also be filtered, so that only records meeting certain criteria can be downloaded. This would make it possible to combine data from strays lists in different Yahoo groups into a central database, or to be sent to strays coordinators in various places.

I wonder if there is a coordinator of strays coordinators -- a kind of super coordinator, or if there has been any discussion of standards for strays databases? I have no desire to reinvent the wheel, so if there is such a standard, I'd like the proposed strays databases to adhere to it as closely as possible.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Event-based history and genealogy software for family historians, biographers and others

If you are looking for a lineage-linked genealogy program to keep your family tree and show all your relations, there is a wide choice available. Some, like Legacy and Personal Ancestal File (PAF) are free, others are shareware, and others you have to pay for up front. They all do much the same thing -- they allow you to enter people who are related to one another and show the relationships between them.

What they are not so good for, however, are collecting information about people who you think might be related, but aren't sure of. Lineage linked programs are fairly narrowly genealogical. Family historians often have wider interests, however, and sometimes it is important to show other people who influenced a family -- people like business partners, close friends, bosses and so on. These people are related, though the relationship is not genealogical.

So I think there is a real need for an event-based program to be used as a research tool, not only for genealogists and family historians, but also for general historians, biographers and others. It would differ from lineage-linked genealogy programs in that it would not only include people that were relatives, but friends and acquaintaces, work colleagues, and even enemies. It would be a useful tool for a biographer trying to keep track of the events in the life of their subject, or for someone writing general history as well. It could even be used by detectives tracing the activities of a suspect, or the sequence of events relating to a particular crime or series of crimes.

The main part of the database would be a chronological list of events, with links to people and organisations assocated with these events. The organisations could be both formal and informal groups — a political party, church, club, school, hospital, business firm, trade union, family or any other human group.

The basic outline of the program would look something like this:

The “people” part would not only be for family members, as one finds in lineage-linked genealogy programs, but for non-related people, like friends, work colleagues, teachers, pupils, godparents, acquaintances and so on. Perhaps it could also be useful in testing theories of six degrees of relationship — that we are only six degrees of relationship away from knowing everyone else on earth, and that my wife’s boss’s godmother’s cousin’s penfriend’s vet knows me.

A biographer could use it as a research tool for keeping track of the events in the life of the subject. One kind of early record might be a baptism record, for example. The baptism would be the event, and would link to people who were known to be present -- parents, godparents, and the church minister performing the ceremony, but others who were present as well. The godparents might or might not be genealogically related to the person being baptised, but would be recorded anyway. As information is added to the database, the relationship and influence of that person on the subject can be followed.

It could also be used by fiction writers for keeping track of events and characters in a novel.

A historian using such a program could use it for tracing the history of an organisation and its leaders, and chronologically arranging events in the life of the organisation, with information about the people involved in each event. A literary historian could use it to trace the interrelationships of a school of writers.

I've discussed this with various people, including Dennis Allsopp, the author of two genealogical note-taking and source-recording programs, Genota and Genforms. But this is not quite the same thing as a note-taking program. A note-taking program is for recording evidence rather than conclusions. A lineage-linked program is for recording conclusions (you have concluded that the people you have linked are related) and the evidence that supports those conclusions.

This program would be a research tool for recording both evidence and conclusions. It could be used by genealogist in conjunction with a lineage-linked genealogy program and a note-taking program. It could be used by biographers and historians on its own, or with a note-taking program. It would enable the user to link various pieces of evidence to show relationships between them and suggest conclusions.

My problem is that though I have a fairly good idea of what I want, I'm not a programming fundi, and can't write such a program myself. What it really needs is a group of programmers and researchers who could discuss their research needs, and produce a program that meets those needs.

If you are reading this and feel the need for such a program, there is a forum for discussing it, which you are welcome to join. I've also posted a skeleton of tables in MS Access based on the model above, which you can download to experiment with and comment on.

New FamilySearch

For the last couple of weeks, every time I've gone to look up something on FamilySearch I've been taken to the new site. And almost invariably, after getting the first result from the new site, I scroll down to the bottom of the screen and look for the old version.

Why is that?

The main reason I prefer the old version is that it permits me to download a GEDCOM file of what I find, which can save an awful lot of typing, if the record is one that I was actually looking for.

The second reason is that, for all its faults, the old version was easier to search than the newer one.

On the old one, you could enter a person's name, and the date of an event, which you could specify. If you specified "Birth/Christening" it would find people in the 1881 census of the UK if they were born at roughly the right time. You could narrow it to search in only one country, or in all countries.

The new FamilySearch is far vaguer, and asks for a beginning date and an ending date, without specifying the kind of event. This is too vague, and it's not clear what you should put in the dates - the person's lifespan? Or something narrower? If someone was 50 in the 1851 census, do you specify the dates as 1851, or 1800-1851? If you say 1851, won't you get all the wrong people -- not just people who were around 50 years old, but all people with that name, not matter what their age?

Another problem with it is that it seems to follow the currently fashionable web-design princible of making the screen as difficult to read as possible. Readability must be sacrificed to eyestrain. Use pale grey text on a white background, to make it easy to miss the fact that the text is there at all. FamilySearch is not the only site that has this problem. In one of my WordPress blogs, I'm always editing peoples comments when I want to reply to them. That is because the "Edit" option is legible, but the "Reply" option is only discernible when one peers very closely at the screen.

The advantage of the new FamilySearch is that you can specify not only a country, but a particular place, whether town or province, in the country. This makes it possible to narrow the search, and eliminate some less-likely results, or at least push them down the probability list. But the vagueness of the date/age question seems to undermine this advantage.

Another advantage of the new FamilySearch is that it covers a greater variety of records, but this is vitiated by the fact that there is less that you can do with them when you find them.

I'm all in favour of new and improved versions, but though this one is new, it isn't improved. For every useful new feature added, there is an old useful feature that has been taken away.

Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records

About twenty years ago the Genealogical Society of South Africa had a cemetery documentation project, which I was involved in for a while. The moving spirit behind it was Peter Holden, who was concerned about the deterioration of gravestones, which because of weathering and vandalism were being lost, and their information along with them. There were many farm cemeteries and no one knew where they all were, so he wanted both the graves and cemeteries to be documented.

Martin Zoellner and I worked on a computer program to make it easy for people to enter information on graves and cemeteries, either on a laptop at the cemetery itself, or from notes at home, and these could all be submitted to a central database.

The scheme got bogged down in a debate on whether the documentation should be an index of names and dates only, or a full transcription of the inscriptions. I favoured the full transcription because it wouldn't entail a second trip to the cemetery to get the full inscription later, and by the time one made the second trip it could have deteriorated even more. Eventually I got bored with the debate and lost interest in the scheme, but I know quite a lot of gravestones were recorded, and put on the NAAIRS computer of the Archives. Peter Holden died, and I don't know what happened to it after that.

Now I've come across a scheme that seems to do what I had in mind -- record graves anywhere and everywhere, with volunteers contributing as much as they can.

Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records:

Find Graves.
Find the graves of ancestors, create virtual memorials, add 'virtual flowers' and a note to a loved one's grave, etc.

I know there are several local schemes for recording cemeteries, and some of them are on the web. But with this you don't have to record entire cemeteries, you can just contribute a few graves you have recorded. Of, if you wish, you can contribute bulk transcriptions, and they provide a spreadsheet template that you can download to use for the transcriptions.

Perhaps South African genealogists could take over where Peter Holden left off, and indeed go back over some of the ground to record full transcriptions where only indexes were recorded the first time around. It is something that local genealogical societies could do as a project, or individuals can do in their spare time.

Lost genealogy web sites

It's now a year since Yahoo! closed down Geocites, which was one of the very first social networking sites. It consisted of a series of themed virtual communities where people could build web sites based on particular themes. A lot of people put their family history on Geocities sites, and some of them died, and some forgot about their sites and no longer updated them. Yahoo! took over Geocities, ran it dowen, and then closed it, and some us were worried that a lot of the information there might be lost.

But some sites have archived at least some of what was on Geocities, so it isn't all lost. One of them is Reocities, which managed to salvage quite a lot. Another is Oocities, though ZoneAlarm flags Oocities as suspicious, I'm not sure why. Oocities has saved several family history sites that were on Geocities, including our own. Of course they will never be updated, but what was there has been preserved. And Reocities has done the same.

And there are some other possibilities for searching for lost web pages and other information: Your Growing Tree- Research Adventures & Thoughts:

I started using Archive.org in my job as a paralegal. It has archived versions of websites that I use in patent citations. The other side of Archive.org is that it archives almost anything...for free. I find live concerts from my favorite band here, and more importantly....books with info for my research. For example- If you look up 'History of Butler County' it brings up several books from the 18-1900's that are searchable and downloadable. These books have had a huge amount of information about the one family that I am researching.

So just when you thought all was lost, something may be found.