Legacy Family Tree Genealogy Software

Ten years ago today I began using Legacy Family Tree Genealogy Software for my main genealogy database.

I think, if I recall correctly, that I started with version 2, and I'm now on Version 7.4, though the latest is Version 7.5.

I had tried Legacy out for a few months first to see how it worked, and to work out the best way of transferring my data. I then had about 8000 records; now I have 17212. I transferred everything to Legacy using GEDCOM, and I've been using it ever since.

Though Legacy is not perfect (no genealogy program is), Legacy meets most of my requirements.

I've usually (until very recently) kept a couple of versions behind the current one. I used Version 2 for a long time before switching to Version 3 (and by then Version 5 was already out). I bought the Deluxe version of Version 5, and used that for a long time, and never used version 6 at all.

Why was that?

The main reason was that each successive version of the program was a lot bigger than the previous one, and thus required a hardware upgrade as well. Many of the features that made it bigger were ones that I didn't need and would not be likely to use.

I liked to transfer my data between my laptop and desktop computers, originally by using a Zip disk, and later by means of a USB flash drive. The laptop I first used had 128Mb of RAM, and could cope with Legacy 2.x, but 3.x was too much for it.

In 2005 I bought a new laptop with 250 Mb of RAM, and then upgraded to Legacy 5. My son bought a new desktop computer, and gave me his old one, which had more memory, and so I got the deluxe version of Legacy 5.

By 2010, however, the laptop was struggling. Though I had not upgraded Legacy, other programs, like the Firefox web browser, upgraded automatically to bigger and more memory-hogging versions. If I wanted to switch from Legacy to Firefox to look up something on the web to add to my to-do list when I visited a library or archive, I could go and make a cup of coffee while it was swapping to disk, and when I came back it was still swapping to disk. The machine took 28 minutes to boot up, and 7 minutes to close down, the hard disk churning the whole time.

In February 2010 the laptop computer was stolen, and I bought a new one that had 2 Gigs of RAM. And later in the year the desktop computer was dying, and I bought a new one of those was well, with more memory. So at last I upgraded to Legacy 7.x, forgoing the deluxe features by doing so.

The first genealogy program I used was one called Roots/M by Commsoft, and it was limited by keeping all its data as well as the program in memory (on an Osborne CP/M machine that had 128K RAM). It was also limited by using single-sided 185K floppy disks.

When the Osborne died, I got an MS DOS machine, in 1987, and found a freeware/shareware program called Family History System (FHS). Actually there were a whole lot of genealogy programs available then, and I tried several of them. FHS seemed the best. Over the years I tried several more programs, some of which I reviewed for magazines, and I took to using several of them at once, because each had some features that the others lacked, usually in being able to produce various kinds of reports.

But I continued to use FHS for my first data entry, and then copied the database to the other programs using GEDCOM. For that purpose FHS had a very good feature that most of the other programs lacked -- it could copy a discrete set of records to GEDCOM. If I added 50 records, when there were 7000 records in the database, then I could copy records 7001-7050 to GEDCOM, and transfer them to the other programs without overwriting the data already there. And I still do that today.

FHS was distributed on the same basis as Legacy. There was a free version, which one could use as long as one wanted, and a deluxe version, with additional features that one could pay for. I'm still using the deluxe version of 1993.

I still use Family History System (FHS) as my program of first entry. When I want to transfer them to Legacy I export the new records to GEDCOM, import the .GED file into PAF 4.0, and then import the PAF 4.0 file to Legacy.

Why not import the GEDCOM file directly to Legacy?

Well I did that once, and found that it scrambled the RINs. But if I use PAF as an intermediate stage, the RINs remain in sync between FHS and Legacy.

So this shows up two shortcomings I see in Legacy.

• Unlike FHS, it is difficult to export a specified range of RINs from Legacy.
• When it imports data from a GEDCOM file, Legacy sometimes scrambles the RINs.

FHS had its own shortcomings, one of which is that it has inadequate provision for recording sources, and also, though it has fields for births and deaths, it does not have fields for baptisms and burials, which, in the case of earlier records, are often the only dates available.

So for a long time I used PAF 2.3, which had a somewhat clunky, but flexible, method of recording sources. It also had an amazing range of add-on programs, which could manipulate the data in several useful ways, including printing the main facts on 3x5" and 4x6" index cards.

That is one of the strange things about software writers. Some of them went to great lengths to make a computer screen look like an index card, and littered the screen with pictures of filing cabinets and paper file folders, which was totally unnecessary, but never thought to enable a computer to easily maintain card file indexes, which is quite easy to do, and very useful. They added unnecessary features, and left out the useful ones. But the PAF add-ons met that need.

But PAF 2.x was not Y2K compatible. It announced an error every time one entered a date after 31 Dec 1999. So that was when I started looking for a replacement, which could keep source records. And back in 2002, Legacy fitted the bill, and still does.

There are still ways in which I think it could be improved.

Apart from the two points mentioned above, about GEDCOM export and import, it would be nice to have a biography field. Yes, there is a notes field, and a research notes field, and one can use the Notes field for a potted biography. But sometimes one wants the notes to contain details that will be condensed in the biography, which one might want to print or report on separately.

Another feature that would be nice would be to be able to print family group reports to an RTF file (at least one other program, Family Tree Legends, can do that). That is useful for sending family group reports to relatives, asking them to add to or correct the information that is already there. Yes, one can send them the family group reports by e-mail as a PDF file, but then they either have to print it out and send the result back by snail mail, or try to scan the result, and send them back as graphics files.

But after 10 years of using it, Legacy is still good, and I haven't exhausted its capabilities yet.

Online scams and genealogy

We all receive e-mail that contains phishing attempts, malware or viruses, and scams of various kinds.

One of the most recent concerns the UK Census, and the UK Office for National Statistics has just issued a warning about such a scam Email Scam:

We are aware that an email entitled 'Population Census: a message to everyone - act now' is being circulated, allegedly in the name of National Statistician, Jil Matheson. This email demands individuals provide further personal information, supposedly for the Census and threatens fines for non-compliance.

This email is a scam and a hoax. It has no connection whatsoever with the National Statistician, the 2011 Census or the Office for National Statistics.

We believe the links in the e-mail could download malware to any computer where the user clicks on the links. This could put your personal data, including financial information, at risk.

One of the resources for protecting yourself from phishing scams and other attempts at online fraud is here: Get Safe Online :: Home

Free Genealogy Forms Downloads

It's always nice to find free stuff, and these forms look as though they could be useful, especially to genealogists in the USA, though some of them might be useful elsewhere as well, or could be adapted for use in other places.

Free Genealogy Forms Downloads:

These free downloadable genealogy forms make finding and organizing ancestry search easy. These forms allow you to carefully copy your ancestor's information and keep that information in your own records. You can also keep track of your research, the data you've collected, records, family trees, family groups and more with these genealogy forms. It's so important to stay organized and keep family search information recorded on templates and genealogy forms. Feel free to download these forms to your computer and print them out at home. Our forms are all professionally designed so you can take them to a professional printer to have them put on heavier paper, or enlarged to make more room for handwriting, or even to make a wall chart.

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.

A convert to family history

Many professional historians look down on family history and genealogy as somehow not being "real" history. For them, political and diplomatic history is all, that the rest is just amateur fluff. At best, many regard genealogy as an "ancillary science", but still not real history.

Here's a story of how a professional historian changed her mind about family history BBC News - A Point of View: A convert to family history:

For several years, my sister Judith has been researching the family history of the Flattos - my father's mother's family - inspired by the boxes of faded family photographs discovered among my parents' possessions, dating from the beginning of the 20th Century, and inscribed with locations ranging from Lodz in Poland to Kyverdale Road in London.

Her attempts to identify and connect the sitters in the photographs has led her deep into genealogy, and obliged her to learn about European history in the early decades of the 20th Century. She has journeyed intrepidly to the ends of the District and Metropolitan Tube lines, to Jewish cemeteries at East Ham, Rainham and Bushey, to read genealogical data off the family gravestones.

I confess that, as a professional historian, I did not always take her efforts seriously - in genealogy, so much depends on guesswork and surmise, so many of the documents defy interpretation. The outcome, I have tended to feel, is bound to be part romance, part sentimentality, the tale of impecunious wanderers, driven from their homes by persecution, then working their way up to respectability in Britain.

It's a fascinating account of how oral history can draw the threads together and make sense of events that are puzzling and apparently unrelated.

Preserving Your Family History Records Digitally

Here's an article with some useful tips on preserving family history records digitally.

Preserving Your Family History Records Digitally: While gathering family history records over the years, you’ve probably been preserving them physically. So why consider preserving them digitally now?

This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of using digital preservation to both augment and enhance the preservation of your family history records. It also presents solutions to the challenges, identifies what types of family history records are suitable for digital preservation, and summarizes what is required to get started archiving digital records.

Untold lives II - the census

Following on from yesterday's post on Untold Lives, last night the census enumerator called. He was scared of our dogs, so gave me the form to fill in, which saves a bit of time anyway, and it always seems such a fruitless exercise, as we are told that the forms will be recycled once statistical information has been abstracted.

In the last couple of months we've been looking quite a lot at UK census information from the 19th century for our family history, and think that the census records tell us quite a lot about "untold lives".

In the 18th century we have Thomas Gray's musings in a country churchyard in England:

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

You can read the whole of Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a country churchyard here.

And a few years ago we visited the UK and in a country churchyard in Cardinham, Cornwall, found the annals of some of my 18th-century ancestors, my seventh great grandparents, William Sandercock (1705-1786) and his wife Mary Verran (1705-1786).

The inscription reads

To memory of William Sandercock who departed this life the 25th day of November 1786 Aged 80 years. And in memory of Mary his wife who died 2nd July 1786 aged 81 years. Morne not for us our children dear Tho here we lie in death We hope in heaven to meet again And there in Christ to rest.

Such were the short and simple annals of the poor in the 18th century.

But in the 20th century, having collected the information about untold lives, we wantonly destroy them. Perhaps one day the descendant of an illegal immigrant, living in a shack in an informal settlement, will want to know where he came from, and the information will have been mashed up, and turned into a percentage.

It makes filling in the census forms seem so futile.

Untold Lives - British Library blog

The British Library has an interesting biographical blog, which may be of interest to family historians: About this blog - Untold Lives:

The British Library’s collections contain stories of people’s lives worldwide, from the dawn of history to the present day. They are told through the written word, images, audio-visual and digital materials. The Untold Lives blog shares those stories, providing fascinating and unusual insights into the past and bringing out from the shadows lives that have been overlooked or forgotten.

We hope to inspire new research and encourage enjoyment, knowledge and understanding of the British Library and its collections. In addition to stories from the past, we give glimpses of the hidden life of the Library and provide information about events and exhibitions. The blog contains many links to act as signposts to research information and online resources that you can explore for work or pleasure.

The British Library is one of the Copyright Libraries for the UK, which means that a copy of every book, journal, magazine etc published in the UK has to be sent there by law, so their holdings are extensive.

At one time it was also a Copyright Library for several Commonwealth countries. Until about 1964, for example, it was one of the six copyright libraries for South Africa. I remember, as an editor of a couple of small student magazines, addressing copies to "The Keeper of Printed Books, British Museum".

What this means is that as a library of record for several countries, its holdings are extensive, and many quite obscure publications, which might otherwise have vanished, may be found there.

Another source of untold lives is the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, which is worth a look if you are interested in African biography.

The importance of historical literacy

The Witness: LAST Thursday the University of KwaZulu-Natal Special Collections Day provided a showcase for the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archive, the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, the Centre for African Literary Studies and, the hosts of the event, the Campbell Collections.

My friend (and cousin-in-law) John Aitchison also spoke on the occasion.

academic and activist John Aitchison, who donated his archive to the APC, spoke on the subject of historical literacy.

Aitchison said that “historical literacy­” in South Africa was currently suffering from the three As — “aphasia, amnesia and aporia”.

Aphasia — a difficulty in remembering (and by extension, speaking) because of some head injury or infection. In historical terms the head injury took the form of the destruction of records during the apartheid period­. There was also little writing and documentation undertaken — “it was dangerous to do so” — resulting in a lack of internal writing on the struggle and hence the dominant record was written by exiles with their own particular ideological and political perspectives.

“We also have a tremendous fight against self-induced amnesia,” said Aitchison regarding the second A. “The often self-service amnesia of whites as well as the tendency to airbrush out the resistance from non-mainline ANC supporters — Nusas and other student protest groups, the Black Consciousness movement, the churches, NGOs, etc.”

Aporia is originally a Greek term denoting an impasse or state of puzzlement, inconsistency, doubt or indecision, another feature of the malaise­ affecting historical literacy. Aitchison said the cure could be found in the special collections and other archives that “different story” documents can be found that cast a new light on our history and deconstruct the new myths appearing about our past.

Historical literacy, according to Aitchison, apart from obviously being based heavily on our normal literacy, requires us to develop the skills to overcome these difficulties of the brutal lack of historical texts, the self-serving erasing of memories about the past, and the difficulty of understanding the “difficult readings” and getting access to them.

Which is why special collections are special.

The full article is well worth reading, as it gives examples of some of the hidden history that can be found.

The Witness: Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives

THE collection includes Alan Paton’s papers, the manuscripts of his poetry and short stories and his correspondence; the archives of the South African Liberal Party; the documents of organisations involved in the struggle against apartheid in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, such as the Black Sash, the Detainees Aid Committee and the Five Freedoms Forum. The Special Collections of the Natal Society, which includes books collected over the past 150 years by the Natal Society, and the O’Brien and Hattersley Collections. The oral history project: ‘Recording the anti-apartheid struggle in KwaZulu-Natal’ recorded interviews with many activists. The centre also houses the Sinomlando Project, the oral history project of the School of Theology.

Website of the Alan Patron Struggle Centre and Archives.

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.

Why don't you SAY something?

One of the enduring mysteries of our family history research has nothing to do with descent, but it remains a puzzle that gets more puzzling with every month that passes.

In addition to our family history blogs, we have a family history Wiki, which we started in the hope of encouraging family members to join in writing the family history.

The site gets about 50-80 visitors a day, most of them from the USA, though most of our family are from other places.

But the mystery is that one page gets more than three times the number of visitors than any of the others. This page is the discussion page for Alfred William Green, and this month so far it has had 90 visitors.

The page that gives information about Alfred William Green, however, has had only 10 visitors. So it seems that no one wants to know anything about Alfred William Green. They are, however, drawn to discuss him. But they don't. Nobody says, or rather writes, a word.

If this was a once-off thing, it perhaps wouldn't be worth remarking on. But it isn't a once-off thing. It is consistent, month after month. The page with least information on it has more visitors than any other page on the site. Yet nobody seems to have anything to say.

Can anyone suggest an explanation for this strange phenomenon?

For what it's worth, Alfred William Green was born in Nova Scotia in 1839 and died in Queensland in 1886. His wife, Henrietta Goote, was born in Turkey in 1842 and died in Australia in 1904. They had seven children, and we'd love to know what happened to them. But we'd also like to know why so many people are interested in discussing him, but never do.

So if you visited the Alfred William Green discussion page before coming here, please leave a comment below to say what you were looking for, and whether or not you found it?

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.

Are genealogy web pages in the public domain?

There has been some discussion in the soc.genealogy.britain newsgroup about genealogy web pages containing details of living people, and this spun off into a discussion about whether such information is in the public domain.

In the course of discussion it emerged that some people have a mistaken understanding of the meaning of "public domain".

When something is in the public domain, it means that it is not, or is no longer, subject to copyright.

One participant in the discussion said that that definition only applied in the USA, and that in the UK "it merely means that something is known to the public or a relevantly significant section of them".

That is a potentially dangerous misunderstanding. A best-selling novel or a currently popular song may be "known to the public or a relevantly significant section of them", but that does NOT mean that it is in the public domain.

See

Top 10 Copyright Myths page from UK Copyright Service.

which says, among other things, that

Everything on the Internet ‘public domain’ and free to use[sic]

This highlights a common misunderstanding about what is meant by ‘public domain’ when referring to copyright work.

A work will fall into the public domain once copyright expires, this will typically be many years after the author’s death.

While work published on the Internet may be publicly accessible, it is certainly not in the public domain.

Putting something on the Internet is not putting it in the public domain.

But, having said that, if you write your family history and publish it, whether on the Internet, in a book, or in any other form, while the wording of the text and your arrangement of the material are copyright (unless you deliberately put them in the public domain), the facts contained within the text are not copyright. If you put in the date and place of your grandfather's birth, and someone includes those facts in their genealogy, there is no breach of copyright. You can't copyright facts.

A historian who writes "The German Army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939" cannot sue another historian who writes the same thing. But if the other historian quotes several pages of the first one's book without acknowledgement, that is a breach of copyright. It is also plagiarism, which is a moral offence rather than a legal one.

If something is in the public domain, you may freely reproduce it, alter it, and sell copies of it.

How do you know if it is in the public domain?

P-10: Copyright Law | Duration Of Copyright:

What happens when copyright expires?

When the term of copyright protection has expired, the work falls into the public domain. This means that the work, has effectively become public property and may be used freely.

It should be stressed that actual duration will vary under national laws, and you should check the laws of individual countries before you attempt to use a work.

Can I claim copyright for a work that has expired?

No, once a work is in the public domain it is available to all. You cannot stop others using the work and you will have no claim to copyright on the work.

That doesn't stop unscrupulous businessmen and their lawyers from trying to claim copyright on things that are in the public domain. Can you imagine the term "tea" being copyright, or a registered trademark, so you have to write "Tea (TM)" every time you use it? One American firm tried it on with roobos tea, a herbal tea that has been used in South Africa for generations. It took a long and expensive court battle to get them to drop their pretensions and acknowledge that it was in the public domain. You can read more about that here. There are some more examples at Notes from underground: Do Americans have any concept of "justice"?.

Things can just as easily go the other way.

Solomon Linda, a South African musician, composed a song Mbube back in 1939. The Disney Corporation used it in their film The Lion King, and claimed that the song was in the public domain. It wasn't. It took a long and expensive court case to get them to pay royalties to Linda's heirs; Linda himself died in poverty, though lots of record companies and others made a lot of money out of his song. And you can read more about that here.

I doubt that anyone is going to make a fortune out of genealogy, but nevertheless, be careful, be very careful, about how you use the term "public domain".

Geni.com Just Got a Whole Lot Worse

Quite a number of genealogy bloggers have commented on this announcement by on-line family tree provider Geni.com, and seeing through the spin, have realised that Geni.com has just got a whole lot worse.

Geni Pro Just Got a Whole Lot Better:

At Geni, our vision is to empower the genealogy community to create the world family tree, the single largest, most accurate, and comprehensive family tree in existence. Thanks to the efforts of our curators and power users, the world family tree is fast approaching 60 million profiles, and is more accurate, better sourced, and has less duplication than ever. And we’re just getting started.

The only surprise is that anyone was surprised.

Something similar happened a few years ago when MyHeritage took over GenCircles, and one can expect the same thing to happen with again other similar sites.

I once wasted two days trying to join Geni.com, and in the end decided that it was fatally flawed, and decided not to bother (if you're interested in the details, you can read about that here Geni.com — a flawed site | Hayes & Greene family history).

You can read some of the comments by other genealogical bloggers here:

• DearMYRTLE's Genealogy Blog: Geni.com didn't ask my opinion
• DearMYRTLE's Genealogy Blog: Official Response from Geni.com
• Genea-Musings: "Geni Pro Just got a Whole Lot Better." But what about Geni Free?
• Genea-Musings: The Geni.com Changes Genea-Blog Compendium

A lot of people join such online family tree sites in the hope of collaborating with others in their genealogical research. But the model on which such sites operate actually hinders cooperation as much as it promotes it.

Consider the kind of thing that happens when people set up such a site. This is not what happened in any particular instance, but is rather the model, and it is the model itself, rather than any particular instance of it, that is flawed.

You start an online family tree site, but you have no data that will bring genealogists to it. So you offer to build people's family trees free and easy. Make it a Facebook "app" that will make it easy for people to invite their family members to join.

Some genealogists are attracted, and contribute their data. Others, who joined just for fun, or out of curiosity, or because they were invited by another family member, join in too. They don't have much to contribute to begin with, but some of them get the genealogy bug and start contributing.

Encourage people to copy from other people's family trees -- this makes it easy to claim statistics for lots of "profiles", though many of them are for the same person copied to lots of different trees, and linked to each tree owner's own ancestors or descendants or relatives, regardless of facts.

Make it even easier by guessing place names, even if the guesses are wrong. If someone types "Richmond" for where old uncle Fred was born, helpfully add that it was "Richmond, Virginia" rather than "Richmond, Yorkshire" or "Richmond-on-Thames" or "Richmond, Natal". By the time the original person has realised that it is wrong and corrected it, it will have been copied to half a dozen other profiles, which can then be added to the statistics of how many profiles are available, because they must be different, since they were born in different places.

Soon you have a lot of data, and you need bigger servers to keep it on, and more and more people are wanting to access it. You also need to hire people to keep the servers running, and by this time it has become a worldwide concern, and so you need shifts of people to keep the servers running day and night. Before you know it there is a large and growing staff who all have to be paid, and since there is now enough data to warrant it, you can now begin charging for access, and limiting the "free" users (who contributed most of the data that enabled you to get going) in ways that you hope will encourage them to pay.

But soon even that is not enough, because many of the "free" users do not sign up, so you have to place even more restrictions upon them, and eventually you begin charging them even to look at the data they themselves have contributed. The restrictions annoy even the paid users, who start losing interest, and instead of coming in faster, the money begins to dry up, so staff have to be laid off, and operations curtailed, and eventually it either closes or is taken over by someone with a similar operation, who buy it for what they see as the greatest assets, the data and the existing user base.

The price paid usually enables the founders of the site to retire, without having to do another day's work in their lives, while the poor suckers who contributed their data to make them rich now find that they no longer have access to their data, and realise too late that they should have kept it in a genealogy program on their own computer, and now they have to start again from scratch.

A fanciful scenario? Perhaps. But compare it with some of the online genealogy sites you know.

In saying this, I'm not saying that online trees are quite useless. They have a lot of uses, but they could be more useful if they operated according to a better model, and one of the things serious genealogists should be doing is giving thought to a better model.

One of the better such sites I know is TribalPages, and I even have my own genealogy on that site. It's not perfect, but it's better than some of the others, and here are some of the things that makes it better.

• It gives links to other sites, which enables people to make direct contact
• It gives a good explanation of how the site operates
• It is under control of the owner

I have set up my tree on TribalPages in such a way that it is easy for people to contact me to collaborate, whether they do so directly or indirectly.

But so far the collaboration I have found in that way is nil.

Several people have asked me for a password to access my tree.

I tell them I only give access to known relations, and so ask them to tell me where they fit into the tree -- which member of the family they think they are related to, and how they are related to that person. I also explain (and it is also explained on the site itself) that I have much more and more up-to-date data than is shown on the tree, which I will share with them when they show me where they fit in, and then I will give them access to the tree.

A couple responded in a way that made clear that they were not known to be connected. Others, however, never responded, and I suspected that they were data leeches. They want to reap the fruits of other people's research, but they don't want to contribute anything of their own, not even the few links that will show how they themselves connect to the tree.

When I look at online trees, and see a connection to my family, I do my best to contact the person who compiled the tree. I don't like taking data without the compiler knowing about it. But it seems that very few people observe such courtesies, and that many online tree sites encourage people to copy without acknowledgement. And some of the people I have tried to contact have not responded. I still acknowledge if I have taken anything from their tree though.

GeneaPress: 1940 Census To Be Free on Ancestry.com

GeneaPress: 1940 Census To Be Free on Ancestry.com: Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, today announced that both the images and indexes to the 1940 U.S. Federal Census will be made free to search, browse, and explore in the United States when this important collection commences streaming onto the website in mid-April 2012.

When complete, more than 3.8 million original document images containing 130 million plus records will be available to search by more than 45 fields, including name, gender, race, street address, county and state, and parents’ places of birth. It will be Ancestry.com’s most comprehensively indexed set of historical records to date.