Family history research in Namibia

On a recent trip to Namibia we did some family history research, which you can read about here and here. We spent two days in the state archives, which have moved to a spacious new building since our last visit 20 years ago, but did not find much that we didn't already know.

We had arranged to visit the Lutheran Church archives, but the archivist was away, and a retired archivist came over to help but was not able to find anything useful. Where we did find useful material that was new to us was in the library of the Scientific Society of Namibia, which had photocopies of the early Lutheran Church registers, and transcriptions of several more. We were interested mainly in the period 1840-1900, and we did not have time to look at everything properly, and so ended up madly photographing pages of the church registers to look at when we got home.

Once we have sorted out the material we have from this trip, we may possibly try to plan another, and allow more time for looking at the things we were not able to see properly this time.

Two people who were very helpful to us were Werner Hillebrecht of the State Archives, and Gunter von Schumann of the Scientific Society of Namibia (which is open to the public only in the afternoon).

The State Archives has deceased estate files, similar to the South African ones, and are probably the thing that most researchers should begin with. We had dealt with most of these in previous visits, which is why we did not find so much this time. There is a computer index, but, unlike NAAIRS in South Africa, it can't be consulted on line. With an online index you can go to the archives with a list of the records you want to consult, which saves some time. But the Windhoek archives index can only be consulted using terminals in the reading room, which meant that we had to spend 2-3 hours making lists of the things we wanted to look at before getting a chance to look at them. The archives staff were very helpful in showing us how to use the index, and how to order material (requisition forms have to be filled in in duplicate).Not all the material in the archives has been indexed yet, but what has been indexed was useful. Again, you can see some examples of what we found here.


The State Archives only has the older deceased estate files, which means that those for people born after about 1890 can only be found in the office of the Master of the Supreme  Court, and we didn't have enough time to go there.

The Scientific Society is also working on the publication of early written material. Some recent publications have been the papers of Swedish explorers and traders, which had previously been published in Swedish, but are now being translated into English.and republished to make them more accessible.

There is more information about the Scientific Society of Namibia here and here.

There is more information about the State Archives (part of the National Library of Namibia) here.

Racism in South African genealogy

About a week ago someone remarked, on a South African genealogical mailing list, that he had found that some people were compiling "indexes" to some civil registers that had been made available for browsing online, But he had found that those indexes were not complete, and appeared to exclude those with obviously African names, and even those judged to be coloured. He queried this practice, and asked why an index should not be a complete index.

I had not consulted either the indexes or the records themselves, so I cannot say that I know for certain that indexers have been excluding entries on the grounds of perceived race, but I did say that, as a matter of principle, I thought that partial indexes would be worse than useless, particularly if there was no indication that they were partial, and no indication given of the criteria for inclusion or exclusion.

I was rather surprised by the the vehement response on the part of some participants, who saw this as an unfair attack on those who had so unselfishly given their time and energy to providing indexes for the use of researchers, and praised them for what they were doing, and said that they should not be deterred by those who questioned the exclusionary practices. Those who questioned these practices were labelled "grumpies", which seemed to be regarded as a sufficent defence of the practices themselves. It was basically an attempt to evade the issue, thus making it clear that there is a great deal of racism in South African genealogical circles.

The racism has been there for a long ntime.

When I first became seriously interested in genealogy, when I got married in 1974, I joined the Genealogical Society of South Africa (GSSA). It soon became apparent that the main focus of the society was was the genealogy of white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. That was the genealogy of "the South African nation". English-speaking South Africans were very much second-class citizens, and the attitude towards them was rather condescending. Including black South Africans was unthought of and probably unthinkable to those who ran the show. And it seems that those attitudes persist in some genealogical circles in South Africa even today, and they try to justify them by calling those who question them "grumpies".

Perhaps someone could write a doctoral thesis on racism in South African genealogy, and maybe do a comparison with the Nazi Sippenbucher in Germany.

Quite apart from the question or racism, however, there is the problem of being honest (or dishonest) with the historical record. Omitting records in a public index is a form of falsification, as is adding false records, in the way this article describes.


There has been some discussion of that article in the soc.genealogy.britain newsgroup, and one poster there said it didn't matter if the records were falsified because genealogy is "only a hobby".

It may be "only a hobby" to some people, but genealogy is also an ancilliary science of history, and the study of genealogy can reveal a great deal about political, economic and religious history. You want to know why such-and-such a firm in Port Elizabeth exported the products of such and such a town in the Karroo? Because the biggest shopkeeper in that town was the brother-in-law of the owner of the firm in Port Elizabeth. In politics, nepotism is rife and always has been. In religion, you can see missionaries go to a place and start a church, and as it grows, many of the new members are relatives of the first members.

The role of the Msimang family in the growth of Methodism in both Natal and Swaziland is of interest to church historians, and their activities had political and economic repercussions as well. Now if someone decides, on the basis of a personal whim, or racism, to omit members of the Msimang family from a public index, they could mislead historians who are interested in more than just genealogy for its own sake. It's more than "just a hobby".

I once, in the course of a historical research project, interviewed a lot of black Anglican clergy in Zululand, and I asked them about their family history. One of them said to me, "We Zulus think we know a lot about this, but we don't."

I would like to see more South Africans, of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, become interested in genealogy and see that "the South African nation" is indeed a rainbow nation, and if that makes me a "grumpy", then long live grumpiness.

South African archives computers down for a week

Researchers trying to consult the computers that hold the indexes to the South African archives have been greeted with this message since last week:

SITA Inverse Web Proxy Server

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL:
http://www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/sm300dl
The following error was encountered:

Connection Failed

The system returned:

(60) Operation timed out

The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
Your cache administrator is sitasc@sita.co.za. 

The computer systems are used by the archives staff, and by researchers in such topics as history and genealogy, either remotely via the web, or at the archives themselves.

When researchers began reporting that the system was inaccessible last weekend, there were some jokes about civil servants not working at weekends, and people expected the system to be up and running again by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.

When it wasn't, people began looking a bit more closely at this "SITA", and discovered that it is not run by civil servants at all. It seems that a lot of the state's information and computer services have been privatised. SITA's web site tells us

SITA is committed to leveraging Information Technology as a strategic resource for government

SITA was established in 1999 to consolidate and coordinate the State’s information technology resources in order to achieve cost savings through scale, increase delivery capabilities and enhance interoperability.

It also tells us that it is SITA (Pty) Ltd, which means that it has been wholly privatised.

Perhaps it is time for some investigative journalists to start looking into SITA and how it operates, who it is responsible/accountable to, if anyone. Privatising an important strategic resource for government somehow doesn't seem like a good idea.

A family history Wiki -- is it worth it?

For some years now we have had a family history wiki at hayesgreene - home.

We thought that this might be a good way for different members of the family to work collaboratively on the family history, adding family stories and memories. But so far there have been very few contributions from anyone other than me.

It is also sometimes surprising to see what is popular and what isn't.

This month so far most pages have had fewer than 10 page views, but three pages have had 50 or more page views -- those relating to the Bagot family of North Lancashire, the Vause Family, and Frederick Thomas Green.

Though these families are mainly connected with England and southern Africa, most of the visitors to the Wiki come from the USA, though Frederick Thomas Green was a Canadian who came to southern Africa in the 1840s, who made a name for himself as an elephant hunter and explorer in what are now Namibia and Botswana.

But none of these visitors has left a note or a comment, so we don't know what it was they were looking for in visiting the pages, and whether or not they found it.

What strikes me about all this is that people generally seem to use the wrong tools for the job.

Quite a lot of people post interesting and important family history information on social sites like Facebook, where you can never find it again. Facebook is fine for ephemeral stuff, like children on a long car journey saying "Lookit this! Lookit that!" but when you reach your destination, going back to see the horse in a field, that you saw 200 miles back, or the jackal crossing the road, is not really an option. And that is what Facebook is like.

A Wiki, though, seems a good place to record family history information for posterity, or at least for the next few years. If you put it there, you should be able to find it again, at least while the site lasts. Of course one cannot count on Web sites lasting more than a few years, anyway. A lot of people put a lot of genealogy information on Geocities, and look what happened to that, though actually quite a lot of it has been preserved on three different sites now -- Reocities, Oocities and Webring. Webring, like Geocities, was one of those sites taken over by Yahoo! and subsequently abandoned, and revived by those who found it useful and didn't want to see it die. .

So one is never sure how long any web site will last, and even Facebook, though very popular right now, could be eclipsed by the next new thing -- think of what happened to MySpace.

But WikiSpaces (and similar wiki sites) seems to be useful for family history, and you can also download a backup of all your pages, just in case it should disappear. You can't do that with Facebook.

I still hope to see a network of family wikis, interlinked, with cousins contributing to mine, and me contributing to theirs, with links to pages dealing with our common families.

Oh, and you can see the latest updates to our family wiki in the sidebar of this blog.

Transcribing digital images

Have you ever had the problem of trying to transcribe the text on a digital image of a document, and found it a schlepp to switch back and forth between an image viewer and your word processor?

Here's some software that is designed to make the task a bit easier. No, it's not an OCR program. It won't transcribe the text for you. But it will keep the text visible on the screen while you transcribe. Useful for those scanned images of letters or wills that have been sent to you be a cousin halfweay round the world, or things you find on web sites and so on.

JacobBoerema.nl: Transcript: makes transcribing easier:

The basic idea is very simple. Divide the screen in two parts. In the upper half the image is shown and in the lower half you can edit the text. (As this is not an OCR program, the program does not convert the text. You have to do the transcription yourself.) The size of those windows can be changed as you wish.

From within the editor you can move the visible part of the image in many ways using shortcuts. You can also use keys to move to the previHave you ever had the problem of trying to transcribe the text on a ous or next image in the same directory. Besides that it is of course possible to use most of the common editor functions also found in
other editors.

.

Hat-tip to Leslie Ann, who writes about it here Ancestors Live Here: The Transcription of a Will.

I wonder how well it works with digital photos of tombstones?

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.

Index of newspaper transcriptions

Sue McKay transcribed a lot of newspaper material replating to Southern Africa, which can be searched at the sGSSA site here. Now Anton Dil had provided a list of some of the names recroded there, which can be useful so you can know what to search for.

Zambia & Rhodesia Genealogy leads...: A-G Index to Sue Mackay's postings:

We are all indebted to Sue Mackay for her tireless transcribing of newspapers at Kew. I am trying to do my bit by providing a kind of an index to these pages. You can search the EGGSA pages I'm using here, but to use the search engine you have to guess at the name you're looking for. As we all know, names are often not what you imagine they will be - spellings change and there are typos or misspellings. Algorithms like Soundex only go so far to remedying this.

Thanks to Sue and Anton for providing this service to genealogists.

Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900 | Institute of Historical Research

This looks as though it will be a useful resource once it gets going.

Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900 | Institute of Historical Research:

Early modern and nineteenth-century Britain is one of the times and places in history for which the largest number of digital sources is available. These have been created by universities, archives and commercial providers, and are accessed by tens of thousands of individuals each day. But many are under-exploited, and researchers are hampered in the way they use these materials by their distributed nature and the variable forms of tagging and structure present in each resource. Connected Histories provides the next stage in meeting historians’ needs by addressing the requirement to access historical resources in a single, consistent way; and in a manner that moves beyond simple keyword searching to a forensic and semantically-driven approach.

The article goes on to say

Using metadata and other available background information, the project will create a search facility that adapts to each resource (depending on whether and how the data is tagged, and on the text structure) to allow searching across the full range of chosen sources for names, places, and dates, as well as keywords and phrases. Background information about the search results will be delivered to the end user, and a facility to save and export search results for further analysis will also be provided. An online collaborative workspace will allow users to document connections between sources. The search facility will be expandable as new digital resources become available.