Love that junk

What do genealogists and software engineers have in common? Neither welcome erroneous data. If a wide-scale collaborative genealogy website hasn't yet been undertaken, perhaps it's because too much planning effort is invested trying to build foolproof systems, checks and balances. Of course somebody who remembers a great-aunt once telling him that his great-great-great grandfather was named John (or something like that) Smith (or Smyth or Schmidt) was born in New York (city or state) sometime after the Civil War finds a John Smith born 1850 in NYC and says that's grandpapa and immediately attaches himself to your carefully researched ancestor. Or someone else shoves aside a supertanker full of facts in his campaign to assert his direct lineage from Thomas Jefferson. A wiki scheme for storing individual genealogical data, with a revision history that allows for restoration to a previous state, could minimize the risks of open access for contributors whose level of care in their research varies widely. Perhaps data fields can be kept loose, permitting the declaration of disputed or alternative dates and facts. But overall, junk data needs to be embraced, that little chaos seen as the strength of a dynamic system, because we're confident that the more people - with their different perspectives, memories and access to sources - who collaborate on restoring an individual's history, the closer we'll come to some truth.

A mockup

I put together a mockup of the ways I'm been thinking a genealogical site using the approaches of social networking sites like Flickr, Facebook or last.fm might work. Genealogy is about making connections, and a site that connects people with shared heritage could make research more rewarding, more fun.

The information that appears on the left of the page would be the same for everyone, whether they're related or not, logged-in or not. Everything on the right would be contextual, dependent on who is looking at the page and their relationship to the subject of the page, and other members who are common ancestors.

Connect Across Generations

Dan Lawyer asked What Do Ordinary People Want? on his blog Taking Genealogy to the Common Person. Among his suggestions is:

A sense of relation. Ordinary people seem to like knowing how they are related to others (both living and deceased). They aren’t very good at figuring this out themselves but are interested in the information when it is offered.

Knowing how you relate to others is the kernel of a social network for genealogy. When I'm logged in, I'd expect to see this information everytime I look at the page of a person within my lines. This person is your grandfather. Or This person is your second cousin twice removed. With maybe a small pedigree chart to illustrate the pathway from myself to who I'm viewing. Somewhere on the page there'd be a list of all the other site members who relate to this individual.

Here's an example. My grandmother's maiden name was Shinn. I was looking through the Beyond blog posts the other day and noticed an ancestor named Pauline Missouri Shinn in one of Ben's pedigree mockups. (My grandmother's father was born in Missouri.) So let's hypothetically say that there's a connection amongst Shinns between Ben and I. I upload my gedcoms to this genealogical social network site and Ben uploads his. Either through some site logic or site members manually making connections the Shinns we each have in common are merged. Now whenever I look at anyone in my Shinn line, Ben's name will appear in the sidebar, and the way he is connected will be stated (say great-great-great nephew twice removed). Both Ben and I can make edits to the information of anyone within the lines we have in common. He may have some privileges to look at members of my line who are marked private to others who are unrelated to the family. If I click on Ben's name I am taken to his page and a pedigree chart will show how my ancestry moves through my mother to my grandmother to her father and his father to the Shinn Ben and I have in common, back down through Ben's line until it reaches him, showing how we're related.

Sometime in the next couple days I'll do a couple mockups to show more clearly what I mean.

One of Dan's readers answers What ordinary people want:

How about not feeling like you are repeating research that has been done ten times before by people who are much more qualified than they are?

Or not feeling like the work you do will be seen by a few and then languish in a basement file cabinet for a few decades before being tossed?

Wikipedia is a very good example of the quality of work you can get out of volunteers simply because they know it will have a wide distribution.

The large social networking site for genealogy would solve some of these concerns, by providing much better access to the research of other distant relatives who have previously researched your ancestors and by providing a much more open home than the basement file cabinet for your work.

What to do with my genealogy Predicament One: Boundaries

My genealogy is specific to myself. Only fifty percent of it applies to my mother, the other half describes - of course - my father's makeup. The next generation, my nieces, have double again my collection of parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, hundreds of ancestors who have no relevance to me. My siblings have my same bloodline, but they're all married with families - they'd probably want a genealogy that is more inclusive of their spouse and the heritage of their children.

Don't make me calculate what percentage Tim DNA drips through cousins and second cousins. However, aren't these the people who I should expect might find interest in the results of research? "Look, there, Jeremiah Jacob, that's your great-granddaddy, and Richard here, that's your great-great-great uncle who struck gold and invented the zipper, and this guy over here, well ignore him because that's the other side of the family, my dad's side, doesn't apply to you, and well, I don't know about your grandmother's sister, interesting story though that may be, because your mother is my mother's sister-in-law, so she's not biologically related to me, and therefore, you know, there's no reason for me to research some auntie on that side of your family."

There's no pedigree, no family tree that I can construct that is anything but specific to me. This was a problem when I first considered putting my research somewhere on the web. Do I leave it as one big tree, do I split it into two branches, my mother's side and my father's, do I move up a generation and split it into four? The Shortts, the McLeans, the Taylors, the Shinns. Would it be worthwhile to second cousins then? They too can split their's into fours, and be thankful for my one-quarter contribution untainted by strangers unconnected to them.

But if the people who make up me, if I as well, are not part of a tree, but just another chain of interconnected individuals, chains crisscrossing all over, each individual finding his way into different chains and connections, then boundaries no longer apply. That's what I'm looking for in a web application, somewhere where I can throw up everyone I know of who makes up me, while lots of other people throw up everyone who makes up them, and hopefully we're going to find that we're made of some of the same people. Hey cousin!

Uncle John

Uncle John never married. Two of his sisters also never married. They lived with him well into adulthood, in an old farmhouse on the land his paternal ancestors first settled when they arrived from Scotland 150 years before. Eventually the sisters took jobs as domestic help in the city, they grew old, they died. Uncle John, also now old, rented out the land and lived off some oil rights. The youngest of five, he was the last person left from the time when the land and the house was active with two or three generations of that family .

John is my father's uncle. My grandmother's brother. When I first began asking questions about family history, I was told I should go see Uncle John and what remained in the farmhouse. My dad's sisters had recently been out there, trying to straighten up the mess, cleaning out the fridge. From the way they talked, I thought he might be some unwashed angry nut, an ogre .

He lived in the kitchen. Sat at a simple wood table, on which a calendar was the most prominent object, crossed out each day as it passed. There was a couch a couple steps from the table, a radio on the table, a small television beside the couch. The washroom was a few steps from his spot. Outside the back door was a late-model truck, which he would drive to the end of his laneway to get his mail.

He wasn't an ogre. My dad talked slightly dismissively of how he'd probably never been fifty miles from the farm, but I liked him. He was quiet, but seemed to have a sense of humour, for an old guy. I might become an old bachelor myself, and I think I saw a little of how I might end.

All the other rooms - the dining room, the upstairs bedroom - were overcome with clutter. Much of it probably hadn't been moved for twenty years or more. In one room there were stacks of yellowed newspapers and Life magazines from whenever people last read Life Magazine. Amongst all this were old religious books, Gaelic bibles, old letters from cousins who went west to Saskatchewan and California, family albums full of photographs, neat stacks of funeral cards, farm expense ledgers. I doubt Uncle John ever looked at any of this. He just wasn't that interested.

It's a treasure of information, but probably not that unusual. Most people who have taken interest in their family history have probably picked up a trunk or two of old papers and photographs and documents. It was all given to me when Uncle John finally had to be moved to the old age home, but I've been moving around and now the collection is split between my mother's and my sister's house. I feel some responsibility not to neglect the collection, but that's what I've been doing with it since I received it probably six years ago.

I'd like to know who the cousins are in the letters. It's a common name - McLean - and McLean married McLean. Are these other McLean's biological cousins or Scottish clan cousins? If biological, which pack of McLeans to they tie into? The letters contain stories that surely would be interesting to the descendents of the writers, but what are the chances of those descendents connecting with me. Maybe those descendents have a stack of letters from my direct ancestors. Some of the funeral cards are from neighbours. I'd like the descendents of those people - if they're interested - to also be able to access the documents I have.

What I'd like to see on the web is some site that assists me in connecting with others who are related to the same ancestors as I, and who are interested in their history. Some way to share what I've collected and learn more of my history from other perspectives. And to do this without all of us endlessly repeating the same drudgery of searching the same documents. I'd like to see genealogy use the web to become a more open, collaborative experience, one that not only traces back but reaches forward from those lines to connect to others. Some sort of social network: Connect Across Generations. So I've set up this blog to explore some of my thoughts, as a potential user of the collaborative genealogical site I'd like to be a member of. Maybe someone can take a couple of my ideas and be inspired to create something that will help make looking for my roots more fun and rewarding.