Musings on Local History, Genealogy, and Wikipedia

Vetting Ancestry.com Family Trees

2009-05-03T12:12:00.004-04:00

Ancestry.com's interactive family tree database is a nice idea in principle but full of landmines. Researchers make the worst connections, sometimes connecting people born over a hundred years apart and merging children of different families.

I had an email query seeking more information about a listing in my Carr database at Rootsweb for Thomas Story who married Margaret Carr 25 October 1739 in New Jersey.

My information was from this source:
Title: Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey Vol22
Author: William Nelson
Call Number: F133.N42
This book contains the marriage records of New Jersey.
Bibliographic Information: Nelson, William. Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey Vol.22. The Press Pringitn and Publishing Co. New Jersey. 1900.

(Links below are for those with Ancestry memberships.)

I really had nothing but a marriage record, so to find more info on Thomas Story, I tried Ancestry's main search engine, which took me to a matching listing in their family tree collection. It showed Thomas Story and Margaret Carr, both born in 1722, with a daughter Elizabeth Story born 1746 died 13 May 1807 in Cranbury, NJ (Middlesex Co). Elizabeth married William Covenhoven, born 2 March 1742 died 9 May 1803 in Monmouth Co NJ. The database lists a bunch of kids, but Elizabeth, Margaret and Anne, born 1764, 1766, and 1770, respectively, seem most promising as their children.

The Ancestry collection is fraught with perils, though, so caution is warranted. The same database that shows Thomas Story born in 1722 says he died in 1873 (at the impressive age of 152) and that he had a second marriage to a Margaret Storie who died in 1873 in Scotland. Also, Elizabeth's children include both Covenhovens and Conovers for some reason. I picked the Covenhoven girls born in the 1760s (listed above) as likely offspring, but there were also children listed who were born in the 1780s, not to mention a bunch of Conover children.

People make odd connections in that database, so pick through it for possible clues and don't accept the data at face value. You'll have to vet your sources. Proceed carefully.

Time Covers Intellipedia, A-Space

2009-04-09T02:46:00.002-04:00

Time magazine has an article in its current issue that praises Intellipedia and looks down its nose at A-Space, two of the more innovative tools of the US Intelligence Community. Wikipedia for Spies: The CIA Discovers Web 2.0 overemphasizes the value of Intellipedia, IMHO, and underplays the true importance of A-Space, the Facebook for intelligence analysts. Both are quite important as collaboration tools and could each rock the foundations of intelligence analysis, but A-Space is the greater revolution and offers the bigger potential for fundamental change.

GPS Tom-Tomfoolery

2009-03-20T18:23:00.004-04:00

My wife and I recently stayed at the Marriott Towne Place Suites hotel in Erie, Pennsylvania. This comfortable and convenient hotel is situated on the extended property of a major shopping mall, causing all sorts of problems for today's GPS devices. People use GPS devices to find hotels when they're traveling to unfamiliar places, but sometimes these new gizmos take them on a wild ride to nowhere. Luckily I knew where I was going, so I had the opportunity to just play along with dearest Tom Tom. He's led me astray before, so I've learned to relax and enjoy the insanity.

Here's a map of where the hotel is, at least according to Google Maps. You'll note that the marker points to the entrance of Millcreek Mall, while the hotel is in the far northwest corner of the shopping center lot near Zimmerly Road and I-79.

View Larger Map

On this recent trip, Tom Tom took us off I-79 North at Interchange Road and told us to make a right turn. We should have entered directly into the mall at that point, but so be it. As soon as we made the turn, it began trying to figure out how to get us back to that entrance, suggesting a U-turn on a divided highway, then directing us to make our way over poorly paved roads to get back to the divided highway and make an impossible left turn across the divider on a four-lane highway.

We could laugh because I was familiar with the area, but others weren't so lucky. There was a state wrestling competition in town that weekend, so parents with their children were packed in vans and driving across the state and only wanted to get to the hotel and rest for the next day's festivities. And they were also being directed hither and yon by their GPS devices. The clerk at the hotel apologized for what has become a familiar struggle for her customers. The man in line behind me had a slew of wrestlers and family members, all frustrated at the last leg of their journey to this hotel.

So, what's the story here? GPS looks at an address by marking the entrance from a public roadway. Private lands are unfamiliar territory to Tom Tom. If the hotel is deep in private lands, the hotel gets an address based on the nearby road -- in this case Interchange Road -- and the devil is in the details.

Some day the mapping coordinates for these places will be added to the software. But for now you should expect to drive aimlessly about unfamiliar lands on occasion. You can mitigate your frustrations by going the extra step of looking at the satellite imagery of your destination to see if the lay of the land meshes with what Google and Tom Tom have labeled as the final point of your journey.

My daughter successfully overcame this sort of Tom-Tomfoolery the other day while going to visit our sick cat at Sayrebrook Veterinary Hospital in Sayreville, NJ. She happened to recall my blog article some months ago on how very far off the GPS was on the hospital's actual location, so she was undeterred when she was directed at least a mile off course. Somehow Google Maps thinks that 1400 Main Street is 990 Main Street. You can see the hospital in Google Map's street view below. Then look at the street view at bottom to see the jungle where Google Maps and Tom Tom sent my daughter.

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

Web 2.0 Videos

2009-03-12T00:47:00.002-04:00

Here's some videos related to Web 2.0

Web 2.0 - An Intro in 5 Minutes

Web 2.0

Business and the Future of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Filter Failure

US Intelligence and Web 2.0 - Intellipedia and A-Space

Web 2.0 Collaboration Using Wikis Instead of Email

Web 3.0

Old Phones, Encore Une Fois

2009-02-18T22:20:00.006-05:00

I wrote a blog post back in December discussing the problems of doing research in old phone numbers. I heard from the manager of WhereCall.com, who read my post and decided to take on the challenge of determining the location associated with old area codes, exchanges, and/or phone numbers. He added a search engine to his site allowing research into old area codes and exchanges.

Here's how his database works:

If you search the New Jersey area code 201, the search result suggests that the area code could now be 551, 908, 732, 848, 973, or 862. My first phone number in the Matawan area in 1978 had the area code and exchange 201-566. Scott's database suggests four places I might have lived, including Matawan.

Using a New York example, a 212-549 number from the Bronx in the 1970s would now be 718-549. The database results yield five possibilities, most in Manhattan but one in the Bronx.

A search of the oldest area codes for Boston (617), New Jersey (201), Maryland (301), and NYC (212) can yield up to half a dozen possible current locations, but more recent iterations like 908-566 can narrow the search significantly.

What is still lacking is a chronological aspect to the data. I would hope that eventually a search of the area code/exchange 212-549 could be paired with the year 1985 to yield the location Bronx, NY and 201-566 in 1979 could result in the location Matawan, NJ. Or a search of 201 area code might generate a list of the area codes it spawned and when those area codes came into existence. Another challenge?

2009 Anniversaries - Follow Up

2009-02-16T16:49:00.005-05:00

As a follow up to my blog article on 2009 anniversaries, I should point out a few anniversaries that I missed at the time.

50th anniversary of the Day the Music Died. While the anniversary, strictly speaking, memorializes the day Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash, some say that it was the beginning of the end of early rock and roll.
50th anniversary of statehood for Hawaii.
50th anniversary of statehood for Alaska.
30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.
25th anniversary of overcoming the Orwellian destiny foretold in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Or did we?

Darkness Shall Not Prevail

2009-02-16T03:10:00.003-05:00

It seems that life has allocated this week as a time to be reminded of the dark underbelly of the Internet. A friend wrote this week, for example, to advise me that he'd gone through the early stages of getting a Facebook account but got scared off by all the privacy warnings FB put before him during the registration process. He thought he remembered that I have such an account and he just wanted me to know that he'd decided against signing up. I guess we won't be friending one another anytime soon.

Then today I got an email from some folks who've written an article about Wiki hoaxes against the rich and famous. They characterize cyber criminal activity as "blunders" that make Wiki less reliable, less trustworthy. And they are quick to advise the reader that professors don't allow you to quote Wiki because it is so rife with errors. They thought I'd like to share that message with you.

I advocate for FB and Wiki because I believe these technologies advance civilization. I'm sure it is somehow helpful to be reminded of their weaknesses, but such cannot be the whole message. Who is edified by that?

Great Lakes Wiki

2009-02-16T01:23:00.004-05:00

While I was in Erie, Pennsylvania, I met briefly with a small group of environmentalists concerned about Lake Erie. I suggested that they contribute articles to Wikipedia and begin to collaborate with others with similar interests. I told them they could share information online for free that way. I went so far as to establish baseline articles for them, including the Lake Erie Watershed and Lake Erie Basin articles. But each of the articles has had less than a dozen edits by other contributors in more than a year. This approach towards collaboration might have a long horizon, but I doubt it. In the near term it has not prompted sharing. I was beginning to think some folks are just not meant for Wiki. Lo and behold a new wiki project -- The Great Lakes Wiki -- has emerged. Maybe it will be more successful? I hope so. There is much at stake. I wish them well with their Wiki project.

I'd love to see a similar project started here in New Jersey. In my Aberdeen NJ Life blog I just wrote about how my town council is voting on a contract regarding water diversion rights. The council considers the matter routine, probably because the region is fed by an overused aquifer that has been red-flagged by the state DEP for over 20 years.

The Iranian Revolution: Thirty Years

2009-02-08T19:25:00.002-05:00

The Center for Middle East Studies at Rutgers University hosted a major conference this weekend dedicated to an academic review of the thirty years following the Iranian Revolution. There were scholars in attendance from around the world. A friend of mine who is very interested in interfaith issues asked me to join him, and I had a wonderful time.

I provide a summary of only some of the many wonderful speakers below.

Reza Akbari of Freedom House talked about the role of the Guardian Council in Iranian Government. The parliament issues laws, but they have to be found in compliance with Shariya law or they are disallowed. About 40% of the laws that elected officials pass are discarded by this council. Another council exists to try to reconcile disputes between the parliament and the Guardian Council. The whole process is rather disenfranchising.

Kevan Harris of Johns Hopkins University talked about the big role of entitlements in Iranian society. It reminded me a bit of how Social Security is a sacred cow in the US. No one can tinker with entitlements in Iran without getting burned, apparently.

Babak Rahimi delivered a vibrant lecture that included a fascinating discussion of the role of the web in Iranian politics and society.

Sina Mossayeb discussed the intellectual drain (not just a brain drain) that Iranian society has experienced over the past thirty years. (Note that the concept of Iran's brain drain gets its own entry at Wikipedia.)

Trita Parsi, of the National Iranian American Council, gave an interesting lecture on how best for America and Iran to come together to work through their differences. He pointed out that if President Obama can elucidate a substantial endgame to bilateral talks, Iran and the US can likely move forward in small steps with some success. But if there is no ultimate goal in mind and talks proceed only to mitigate tactical problems faced by the US, such as troublesome issues in Iraq and Afghanistan, then Iran is less likely to participate. Parsi believes that Iran's goal is to be recognized as a key player in the Middle East and was burned by the US after helping in Afghanistan after 9/11.

George Sanikidze, of Tbilisi State University, talked about Iran and its relations with the South Caucasus, especially in light of the Russia-Georgia conflict last fall. It was interesting to hear that both Iran and Russia fear NATO enlargement.

Radwan Ziadeh, of Harvard, discussed relations with Syria, breaking up the post-revolutionary period into three ever-warming periods - 1979-1990 (allies), 1990-2000 (friends), 2000-2008 (axis). My impression from how he described the periods in question was that Syria's Hafez al Assad lacked trust of Iran until Khomenei's death and Assad's son, Bashar al Assad, has suffered under Iran's heel ever since his father died.

Be sure to support the center by attending future events you find interesting. This weekend's conference was free. An upcoming comedy night planned for 25 March may involve a fee.

Don't Throw Wiki From The Train

2009-02-06T22:44:00.005-05:00

Back in April 2008, an unregistered Wiki editor vandalized the Irving Gordon article that referred to Patty Page's 1950s hit song Mama From The Train. In an obvious reference to a Danny Devito movie, this editor changed the text to read Throw Mama From The Train. Then he added a rather naughty parenthetical note about Mama for good measure. Amazingly, this and an equally naughty note about Nat King Cole's hit Unforgettable remained uncorrected until today - nine months later. A similar assault on the song article was halted in its tracks in only one minute. (That editor might have caught both edits if he'd checked the user contributions and posted a warning like he was supposed to.)

Turns out that the vandal toyed with only two Wiki articles and, like Snagglepuss, exited Stage Right, never to return. I inaugurated the vandal's assigned Wiki talk page and added a less than subtle warning to behave in the future. If he ever returns to the scene and launches a new campaign against the 1950's or any other topic, he'll soon have tried Wiki's patience and he'll be on the outside looking in.

This all came to my attention because my Fifties music friend from yesterday's article wrote to tell me about this Patti Page disinformation campaign. My friend gets around the Web, but it wasn't always that way. I'm proud of his ability to get around the communications superhighway. But he didn't detect the connivance behind this edit. I saw it right away, mostly because I've got some experience and know how to confirm my suspicions.

My friend lamented the article's deficiencies but then passed an equivocal judgment on Wiki, saying,"See why I'm skeptical about that do-it-yourself portal of knowledge? :-) Though I know it does have lots of useful & accurate material in it. I make use of it myself, but know how to approach it with some caution. There's just not enough editorial supervision to prevent such nonsense as the above being put in."

He knows there can be errors in it, but he uses it anyway, but with a degree of caution. I couldn't have said it better myself.

I found some hope in his closing remarks that suggest he'll someday accept his duty to become a Wiki editor. You might see darkness, but I see some light working its way in. "Guess I should write in a correction, but I doubt that I will. It's not my project. "

URL Dead Zones

2009-02-05T23:59:00.005-05:00

A friend of mine wrote me the other day to complain about a website that talked up the music of the mid-1950's but offered no contact information. My friend shops the web for sheet music and lyrics and he simply couldn't understand why someone would post lyrics without allowing him to write or make a purchase. There had to be some sort of purpose to the page. He wrote to me in frustration.

I visited the site and found that the page had no hyperlinks. Not back to a main page. Not to anywhere. In that sort of case, you need to look at the URL itself to see if you can follow the trail back from a subdirectory to find the root, in other words you want to find some sort of main page.

In this case the URL was: http://www.mtbrook55.com/1955hits.htm

The page my friend and I have been looking at is called 1955hits.htm. The main page is what is left: www.mtbrook55.com. In most cases, the best way to find the identity of the web host, or at least some kind of raison d'etre for the web site, is to visit that main page. Often non-professionals will create pages that don't link back and forth, only one way. A good case for saying, "You can't get there from here!"

Well, actually you can get to the main page. Simply click into the URL window at the end of the URL and backspace through the characters until the subdirectory characters have been removed and all that are left are the characters for the main page URL. There are lots of links there. The whole thing has to do with a class reunion.

The music page turned out to be a dead zone for my friend, who Googled his way onto the page. His visit was out of context. But for class reunion enthusiasts who entered from the main page, the music page was a logical part of a package. (Although the prospective class reunionists might get lost if they don't know how to use the back arrow to to return to the main page.)

In another case, you might land on a cemetery page while doing genealogy research. You can go back one level and visit the main page for the county where that and other cemeteries are found. We're not permitted to visit the next couple of tiers up the subdirectory chain. You have to go all the way back to the root of the website to get another foothold.

Don't expect to easily find your way from the root page back to where you were originally simply by using links found on the root page. Maybe it will be easy, but then again it may be nearly impossible. On this particular page, you can use the search feature to try perusing the US state in question, but it could take you a few hours to get anywhere that way. The special topics search feature is more useful. It lets you check off "cemeteries" and conduct a search for the county and state in question. The best choice in my search results happened to be the list of county cemeteries I was looking for. Whew!

In some cases a website will have orphaned pages that are parked in the domain but aren't linked to anything. Those pages have to be Googled, unless you can find a file directory within the website. I haven't had much luck finding file lists for this article -- maybe they are old technology? I imagine they are out there still, somewhere. If you have a good example, post it as a reply.

If The Shoe Fits

2009-01-17T18:34:00.005-05:00

I just tracked a Carr family back through the England Census from 1901 to 1841 in response to an email query. They were mostly boot makers and shoemakers. When I got back to the 1841 England Census (by subscription), I couldn't make out the occupation listed for the patriarch, James Carr. His job title looked sort of like the word container but it started instead with cord. What could it be?

I went to Wikipedia, of course. I took what I was relatively sure of and used an asterisk to represent the parts I couldn't make out. The asterisk, as in many software programs, will serve as a wild card or place saver. My search for cord*ainer pointed me right away to what I needed. A cordwainer is a shoemaker. The term goes back to the 13th century and led to the formation of the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers two centuries later. These artesans often worked in Cordovan soft leather, thus the name. The English eventually stopped distinguishing between shoe repairmen and shoe makers, so terms like cobbler and cordwainer disappeared.

So when you're stuck in your research because you can't make out a terminology or a name, remember that you can use an asterisk in Wiki to represent the section you can't make out. Like Bedf*shire will point you to Bedfordshire, Bar*illai will give you a list of people with the first name Barzillai, and *ama bin laden will find the notorious Osama bin Laden. (Someone needs to find him, that's for sure. Might as well be you.)

The image of the cordwainer above was found at the Honorable Cordwainers Company website, which provides a formal definition and more information.

Relatives South of the Border

2009-01-11T11:17:00.005-05:00

When you have a surname database posted at Rootsweb WorldConnect instead of your personal family line, you occasionally get emails from people who think you're a newfound cousin because their relatives are in your online file. Once in a great while it truly is a cousin, but most of the time I doublecheck my records and have to write back to explain the surname database concept and how we're not related as far as I know. I always offer to help them with any Carr surname connections they might have that need fleshing out.

By the way, I've noticed that more and more people use the expressions to flesh out and to flush out interchangably. It creeps me out when I hear them used inappropriately. You can flesh out an idea by putting meat on a bare bones concept. Or you can flush out an idea using brainstorming to draw it out. (I'm not sure you ever want to talk about flushing out your relatives, at least not in a genealogical sense. Save that expression for the hors d'oevres table gossip at your next family reunion.) But I digress.

This weekend I had an email suggesting that I was the cousin of a Mexican living in El Paso in the 1930s. Since my roots are mostly English and German, I haven't had much experience searching Hispanic genealogies. After we exchanged some messages and sorted things out a bit (we're not related), I was able to find her ancestor entering the US in the summer of 1918 at the El Paso/Juarez border crossing. I ended up finding him in Ancestry.com's Immigration Service border crossing record images online.

The record (paid subscription only) showed that this man was 23 years old and born in San Julian, Jalisco, Mexico. The form gave his height and the color of his hair and eyes. It provided his wife's name but didn't say whether she was accompanying him. The form asked all sorts of questions regarding his purpose of visit. He wasn't crossing the border for temporary employment but planned to stay in El Paso for a year.

I received a nice note back from this weekend contact after I sent her a summary of what I found. "Wow thanks so much! That is exactly what I was looking for!"

Image found at http://www.bailadoresdebronce.org/dances.html

Sorting Out A Conflict Is Never Easy

2009-01-08T23:31:00.007-05:00

It's always difficult to assign the blame for "starting it" when you're looking at a long-running struggle. If you pick a side in any conflict, you can always latch onto the latest atrocity of the opponent and begin to carry a banner.

I have my favorite in the Gaza struggle, for example, but I don't really know anything. Why do I have an opinion? Because of the media coverage that has come my way. There's no foreign press in Gaza at the moment, so everything I'm seeing is controlled.

If we go back to the June ceasefire, we can assume that all the parties are starting with something of a clean slate. Hamas still had an Israeli prisoner of war that Israel was hoping to have returned, but we have to start somewhere.

It wasn't long after the June ceasefire was signed that Hamas began lobbing missiles into Israel. Two in the first week. Despite calls for retaliation, the Israelis were hoping to get back their captured soldier and instead went to Egypt for further talks with Hamas. (New York Sun)

The June ceasefire got a serious jolt in November when Israel destroyed a tunnel between Gaza and Israel. There were plenty of sparks after that. Hamas had continued to fire rockets into Israel now and then, but the rocket attacks blossomed with three dozen launchings after the tunnel incident. Hamas claimed the tunnel incident was an attempted incursion by the Israelis, while the Israelis saw it as an effort to stop Hamas militants from coming into Israel to kidnap more soldiers. (MSNBC)

This is the Israeli explanation for the tunnel attack back in November:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that while Israel wanted to continue the truce, it could not tolerate tunnel digging.

"When Israel agreed to the truce it didn't agree that while there was calm, Hamas would exploit it to dig tunnels, whether they are for smuggling weapons, for perpetrating attacks or kidnapping soldiers," she said. "Therefore, if it becomes clear that is what's happening, it is the government's responsibility to act."

"The [Tuesday night] operation was necessary in order to preserve Israel security," she continued. "Israel cannot tolerate such blatant violations of the truce." (Jerusalem Post)

Wikipedia says the truce ended a little over a week ago and that the ceasefire was only one part of a longer ongoing struggle. Who's to say the truce didn't end back in June, the week after it began, with the resumption of Hamas rocket fire? Or maybe it ended in November when Israel attacked the tunnel?

You can always find information online, but the truth is rarely in the details. So, the blame game can become complicated pretty quickly. Probably best not to play. David Quigg, a blogger at Huffington Post, wrote a piece that suggests that we not be so quick to cast blame. He's got the right idea.

.... So few of us would be able to face the ghosts of the dead and justify why we cheered on Israel or why we made excuses for Hamas. We should shut up.

Aberdeen NJ Life

2009-01-05T06:46:00.003-05:00

I've just started a new blog that deals with living in and around Aberdeen, New Jersey. The new blog offers me a place to discuss issues that don't precisely fit here in Musings, where I focus on research methods. I expect the new blog will attract a different audience and that's fine. My emphasis here will remain on local history, genealogy, and Wikipedia.

The holidays are over; it's time to get to work.

The historic image of the Matawan Railroad Station is from http://64.106.243.185/matawan/General/RAILROAD%20INFORMATION/

Wiki Roles

2009-01-04T12:14:00.003-05:00

I believe that group collaboration leads only haltingly towards logical structure. That is why the history of the Blagojevich articles mentioned in my previous blog piece can be difficult to follow. Articles tend to become more organized only after many people deliver data and a few people take a stab at sorting things out.

I'd say that Wiki articles are launched by a combination of data providers and data sorters. The providers collect the data and toss the results loosely on the pile, while the sorters pick through the take, order the information, and try to make it flow logically so it is retrievable. (In intelligence, these roles would be labeled collectors and analysts.) The final touches are added by editors, those who pick at the smallest details for accuracy or form or challenge the whole text as irrelevant or biased. They may be text editors fixing sentence structure, source checkers looking to see if the data providers have done their homework, and format stylists who categorize, hyperlink, add or touch up images and maps, and those who otherwise dress up Wiki articles.

Articles that are heavily trafficked by data providers, data sorters, and editors can become very detailed and accurate. They can also be influenced by media coverage, as most of the third party sourcing used in Wiki articles comes from online news sources. Statements may occasionally be marked citation needed, which indicates that the data are unsourced.

While you may not wish to get into the details, you should at least read the Blagojevich article and test its objectivity.

Rod Blagojevich in Wikipedia History

2009-01-03T21:17:00.005-05:00

Sometimes Wikipedians need to make room for all the information that is coming their way. "This town just ain't big enough for the two of us!" the gun slingers used to say to one another. Wiki can be like that.

You'll see a useful example of why some Wiki articles must spawn offspring when I show you the edit history behind the current media circus regarding the Illinois Governor. Wikipedia already had an article on Rod Blagojevich when news of a Federal investigation broke in the news. In fact, there was already a lengthy Controversies section in the governor's article.

The earliest edits to the Blagojevich article to mention the investigation were made soon after the news conference. After all, someone needed to add this important element to Blago's biography. Within hours, that article had a distinct corruption section. (Check out how furious the editing was taking place in the first 24 hours.)

But it was becoming clear that this was going to be a complex news story, so the next morning a wise Wikipedian created a wholly separate article just for the corruption scandal. In six hours, the corruption article had really begun to take shape as Wikipedians scoured the web for more details, by then citing seven good sources. After only twelve hours, the article had three times the detail and sourcing. Presently, the corruption article has multiple sections and sub-sections plus over 80 sources.

Note that the Blagojevich article has a temporary warning across the top of the page:

This article is related to a current event: Rod Blagojevich corruption charges.
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

The corruption article also contains a temporary warning:

This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

These notices are to help remind you to edit the right article in such circumstances. If his biography needs to be modified, edit the article on him. If the scandal story needs updating, edit that article.

Image found at http://www.chicagomag.com/core/pagetools.php?pageid=7444&url=%2FChicago-Magazine%2FFebruary-2008%2FMr-Un-Popularity%2F&mode=print

2009 Anniversaries

2009-01-01T23:27:00.001-05:00

At the start of a new year, you might want to know what events from history will be marked this year. You could always wait for CNN to tell you what happened 50, 100, or 200 years ago, but what if you wanted to check it out yourself by using Wikipedia? How would you do it?

Wikipedia is chock full of dates, so you can use sophisticated category searches to find what you're looking for. You can search a particular year right from the search window. But Wiki categories might be a better option. To move around freely among the years in Wiki categories, click the years category or put Category:Years in the search window. If you happen to be on a year category page, go to the bottom of the page and click the years category. Once you're on the main Years page, you can readily move between centuries using the box at the top, then use the list of years within a century to move about.

So, in our case, click on 1500 in the box on the Years category page. Once you have a list of individual years, select 1509 to see events that will have their 500th anniversary this year. You'll see in 1509 Births that John Calvin was born, certainly a major event that will be celebrated among some Christians this year. Maybe you'll see something in those lists that interests you?

Let's take a look at the Wiki category for the year 1809. Across the top of the page is a convenient time line, which allows you to move between years within the decade 1800-1809, as well as to move one decade either way -- 1790s or 1810s. The 1809 page lists some common subcategories for 200th anniversary events for the coming year.

On the second page of 1809 Births, for example, you will see a listing for Abraham Lincoln, as well as the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
1809 in Law lists the Treaty of Fort Wayne signed September 30th led to Tecumseh's War. Oklahoma State University hosts a site with the text of Indian Affairs:Laws and Treaties, edited by Charles J. Cappler in 1904, which shows the text of the 1809 treaty. (Someone may wish to add the dates of signature and proclamation to the Wiki article.)

I did a similar search of 1009 to see what might be a millenial event this year. (Note that there are fewer and fewer known events the further back in time you go.) You'll see that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was destroyed in 1009 in a local effort to discourage Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Lands at Easter time. This provoked a backlash in Christian Europe that eventually led to the Crusades in 1099. Don't be surprised if current day terrorists seek to mark October 18th, the day that a Fatimid caliph began carrying out the destruction of the memorial to Christ's tomb by hacking down the edifice to its 4th century foundations.

If you want to try some websites other than Wikipedia, try WordPress's IdeasForWriters blog, which lists forthcoming historic events. (I stumbled upon the April 2009 blog page, but you can dig around on the site for other tools.) The British Society for the History of Science also has a 2009 Anniversaries page. NPR's All Things Considered points out that we're coming upon the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe's birth and the 50th anniversary of Alaska's statehood. The Washington Post's Travel Log adds Henry VIII's ascension to the throne and the fall of the Berlin Wall as notable anniversaries in 2009. (The Berlin Wall is categorized in Wiki as a 1989 disestablishment, btw.)

I checked my FIOS system after writing yesterday's blog piece and found that I can set up favorite places. There is a cute little heart on the remote that switches Favorites on and off. Unfortunately, FIOS switches the option off at the drop of a hat for who knows what reason, so I have to keep checking to see whether I am plowing through a thousand channels or just the ones I want to check.

Thanks to all you who read my blog. I wish you the best in the coming year. Have fun and work hard in whatever might be your endeavors. Pursue your genealogies and local histories, and be sure to support Wikipedia.

The artwork above is called Celebration 3 and can be found at http://www.abm-enterprises.net/fractals/celebration3wallpaper.html.

Dueling DVRs

2008-12-31T20:56:00.000-05:00

We switched from cable to Verizon's FIOS for our Internet and TV services back in September. Since FIOS was delivered with its own DVR, we put our Tivo in mothballs and checked out the new technology. So far, we've been disappointed with the FIOS DVR and the service behind it. It pales in comparison to Tivo in so many ways. Here's a partial list of Tivo's qualities and FIOS DVR's shortcomings:

Tivo is more flexible in letting you move around within a show. It allows you to jump through a recording in 15 minute increments or all the way to the end or the beginning using a fast forward or rewind jump feature. It has a smart slow motion feature that FIOS doesn't seem to have. FIOS cannot easily put you 43 minutes into an hour long show.
Tivo has extreme details about the current show -- episode number, episode title, date of first broadcast, stars, special guests, genre, detailed summary, and a list of shows you might like if you like this show. FIOS seems to be adding features to its summary, but it has a long way to go to compete with Tivo's guide.
The Verizon salesman bragged about the signal quality, which would be excellent due to the fiber optic delivery system. He'll have to drop by sometime to see how many times per show I lose segments of video and audio -- whole words are often dropped and little squares of video go black or flicker.
Shows sometimes record for 59 minutes, without explanation, and we lose the exciting conclusion of an episode. Sylar was just about to toss a chair through the glass in Chapter Twelve of the latest Heroes series when FIOS decided to stop recording. Argh!
If someone skips a planned recording or deletes a show, Tivo leaves forensic clues so you can determine the culprit and poison his/her broccoli at dinner. FIOS leaves ne'er a breadcrumb for you to follow. If your show isn't on the list of new shows, it's simply not there. No explanations. It is certainly a simple lifestyle, maybe even peaceful if you can cope with that sort of thing.
Once in a while the FIOS set box stops showing the time, even though I've opted for the time instead of the channel to appear there. To get FIOS to show the time again, I have to opt for channel to appear then go through the motions to select time to appear. I do that about once a week.
The movies in Pay Per View are the lamest ever. I won't test your patience (or your taste) with a list.
The long list of channels is more a burden than a resource. We have tons of channels that are not in use yet. And lots of sports channels, foreign language channels, HBO and Showtime and other premium subscription channels, none of which I receive. I've not discovered a favorite channels feature yet. Fast forwarding through the channels is a hyperdrive experience that leaves you without your bearings.

I had to put the Tivo on the second tv set upstairs. My wife and daughter are disgusted with the FIOS DVR and prefer the features on the Tivo, so they go upstairs to watch tv. I'm all alone because of you, FIOS!

We spent $65 at Best Buy buying a special antenna for my wife's laptop downstairs because the Verizon wireless router is so much weaker than our old Linksys wireless router. My daughter goes to a friend's house to check her email rather than struggle with her laptop, which is so slow now. Maybe FIOS has a thing for laptops? My desktop computer is fast and furious, but it is hooked up with a wire directly to the modem.

The benefit of FIOS is that we get home phone service, Internet, and TV (replaced cable) for a lot less money. We'll see if FIOS will be in our household's future when the contract is up.

All Supermarkets Are Local

2008-12-31T01:02:00.000-05:00

Erie, Pennsylvania has a section of town dedicated to the big-box stores -- places like Staples, Lowe's, Target, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Bob Evans Restaurant, TGI Fridays, and the Tinseltown multiplex movie house. All of them seem to be packed into one place, known locally as Upper Peach.

I'm not sure Erie is all that different in that regard from the other towns along I-80 that I used to pass when I was making regular runs across Pennsylvania while I was at Mercyhurst College on sabbatical for a couple of years. Each town has a clump of those familiar, national stores no matter where you go.

Not so with supermarkets in the United States. Every region I've lived in seems to have its own chain of grocery stores. They're pretty much the same, I guess, but you need a new member card and have to get the feel of the place. Where are the fruit juices? Where do they keep the Shake and Bake anyway? I shopped Quality Markets while in Erie. My brother-in-law lives near a Giant Eagle supermarket in Pittsburgh. Eons ago, my wife and I shopped at Alpha Beta in Monterey, California while I was in school there. Now I shop at Stop and Shop in Aberdeen, New Jersey. Some groceries go out of business, like the Foodtown in downtown Matawan, NJ, but most seem to eke by despite the big-box stores stealing their customers.

We stopped and chatted with the grocery clerk at A&P tonight. Named for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, A&P is closer to home than the other stores in my neighborhood but its freshness pledge is more myth than practice. The clerk thought fondly about the Piggly Wiggly stores she remembered from her days in the South. My wife, who heard rumors of price gouging while volunteering during Gustav and Ike last summer, had less fond memories of that chain.

The local grocery stores still have an edge with customers, I believe. Ultimately, it's like they say of politics: All supermarkets are local. I'm not sure I ever saved any money at the club stores anyway. They offer plenty of savings through bulk sales, but they drain your wallet by luring you into buying a big screen tv or big ticket jewelry items when all you are trying to do is pick up some eggs and milk. "That'll be $800, please." Kah-ching!

Bubble Tea

2008-12-30T01:31:00.000-05:00

My daughter has become a fan of bubble tea over the past year. It's some concoction of tea with tapioca balls floating around the bottom, best I can tell. "It's a fad!" I told her tonight, flat out, but it's apparently the chic thing to do. I'm not convinced.

Anyway, she complained today that she and her friend went looking for Joy Bubble Tea at Menlo Park Mall, but they couldn't find it. While we found a website for the shop, the mall no longer lists it as a vendor.

We tried looking for local bubble tea shops using a zip code and keyword search in MapQuest, but it only found shops with Bubble Tea in the title. My daughter suggested I try Google. "There must be a bubble tea location search engine out there somewhere," she said. I was incredulous. But we soon found Bobafind.com, which allowed us to search for bubble tea shops in NJ. She has a new lease on life.

For those of you who read my recent posting on meticulous sourcing in genealogy, you will want to read Ancestry.com's response. They explain how alternate forms of names can be sourced using their site. It's apparently a bit cumbersome so they plan to work on the mechanism to make sourcing even easier.

My wife and daughter gave me an iPod for Christmas this year. I've got the iPod Classic 6th generation. As one might expect, Wikipedia has articles on the full range of iPods. Wiki even has each of the generations described, including a summary of the benefits and shortcomings of each iteration. I'm not sure it is a good thing for Wikipedia to become Consumer Reports, but maybe it is an inevitable detail that Wikipedians will want to include. In twenty years, maybe no one will care what the difference was between the 5th and 6th generations of my iPod? I hope people have better things on their minds.

Meticulous Sourcing

2008-12-27T10:58:00.000-05:00

I'm of mixed opinions about the sourcing capabilities and overall reliability of submissions to Ancestry.com's Personal Tree. On one hand, an owner can link directly between entries in his/her tree and Ancestry.com sources that support the data in the tree, like census images, military records, or passenger ship manifests. On the other hand, unless I'm mistaken, the system only allows the owner to present one form of a name or date when various sources suggest alternate possibilities.

Let me just say that I am quite pleased with the Carr/King/Rodriguez Family Tree that I found at Ancestry.com But it has a few sourcing problems, which I will use to illustrate my issues with Personal Tree. I don't mean to pick on the poor tree. It's fine. I must also say that some of these links will be by subscription only. Sorry for any inconvenience. (That said, I encourage you to get a subscription to Ancestry.com.)

The tree in question has a listing for Edward Bane Carr born in 1855. If you opt to View details, the tree shows two quills which, when clicked, each indicate that the full name or exact date of birth is sourced to five different censuses. To my mind, this sourcing ought to indicate that the full name and exact dob were derived from these census records, which is not the case. In actuality, the data were found on Edward's gravestone. The census records were routinely less precise, showing a middle initial here and there, various ages, and maybe a month and year of birth.

Seems to me that Ancestry.com doesn't leave a tree owner any alternatives. Ancestry.com encourages the tree owner to pick the best option to display -- best form of a name, best date and place of birth or marriage or death -- and then connect all sourcing to each, whether or not the sources support the portrayed data or vary from what is presented in the tree.

There is no allowance for gray. The census might say Edward B. Carr, or Edward Karr, maybe even Edw.'d Carr, but only the gravestone says Edward Bane Carr. The gravestone might say Edward was born in 1861, but he appears in the 1860 census as five years old. Which date do you present in your tree? Only the one you agree with?

I realize that you can always check the original records by clicking the accompanying hyperlink, a fine feature offered by Ancestry.com, but I feel that a family tree should carry all the variations, right or wrong, and show sources for each. That is a more robust, less misleading method of sourcing. And it is leaves a more clear record for future researchers to see how decisions were made based on conflicting information.

The discovery of serious errors in an online family tree should destroy a researcher's confidence in the entire project. Even minor errors here and there ought to lower one's sense of a tree's reliability. At the very least, occasional errors should throw up red flags and raise questions about sources and methods.

To cite the Carr/King/Rodriguez Family Tree again, Edward's grandfather, John Carr, is shown as being born in Mercer County, Virginia in 1798 and dying in Mercer, Virginia (Loudoun County) in 1874. The place of birth is certainly wrong, while the place of death is very likely incorrect. John lived in Mercer County for many years, based on census records, and he was buried there, but the county wasn't formed until 1837, so he couldn't have been born there. (The troubling issue here is that even if his death certificate said he was born in Mercer County, a bit of research would have exposed that the county didn't even exist in 1798.)

The coincidence of John's dying in a place called Mercer, but in another state and far from where he lived and was buried, makes the place of death seem highly dubious. I suspect that the researcher had a research note saying that John died in Mercer but couldn't find a Mercer County in Virginia in 1874 -- the county became a part of West Virginia in 1863 -- so he/she erroneously picked a city named Mercer in Virginia as the place of death, even though it was far away from where John lived and was buried. While I can't say with certainty that John died in Mercer County, West Virginia, I'm not ready to adopt Loudoun County as his place of death, either. The obvious error with the place of birth causes me to doubt the place of death.

So, what to do? Toss out the baby with the bath? No. The Carr/King/Rodriguez Family Tree is a goldmine of data from an obscure graveyard. I simply advise caution with online trees, whether you are creating one as an owner or using someone else's for research purposes. To be generous, they can be fraught with minor errors and imprecise sourcing. Always sample the data for the accuracy of spelling and data, then decide how much you are willing to rely on it for your research needs.

While researching this piece, I came across the blog Genea-Musings, which also discusses personal trees at Ancestry.com. You might want to have a look.

The Maryland Suburbs of Washington, DC in the 1960's

2008-12-25T18:36:00.000-05:00

In the 1960's, we lived in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. It was hard to differentiate the local news from national events. When Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis, my parents had a two-hour commute home as parts of the District burned. The first thing my dad did was come to pick me up from Boy Scouts.

After Robert Kennedy was killed and his funeral was scheduled for DC, a number of us went down to the railroad tracks to watch the funeral train pass by. I remember watching as the widow stood on a platform at the end of the train and waved to us as we paid our respects.

And there was the campaign stop of Governor George Wallace at the nearby Capital Plaza shopping center. There was a guy selling ice creams, including ices called bomb pops, which some of the kids tossed at Wallace, who was perceived as a racist to many of us even in Maryland. There was a Nazi Party van passing back and forth in the shopping center parking lot probably didn't help with his perception management. It would only be a few campaign stops later that Wallace was shot and seriously wounded in Maryland.

My father took me to a public assembly at the cafeteria of Cooper Lane Elementary School in Landover, Maryland, to sign me up for Cub Scouts when I was about eight years old. Since we lived in a new housing development, there hadn't been a Cub Scout troop there before, so the meeting was organizational in nature. Somehow my dad ended up becoming the cubmaster. During the 1960's, My Cub Scout den mother was the first wife of then Congressman Larry Hogan. Mr Hogan would end up being the first Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to back the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in 1974. My sister came home from the University of Maryland with teargas in her eyes because of ongoing campus protests against the Viet Nam War.

My dad worked as a composite artist at FBI Headquarters. While he worked some of the dicier cases of the 1960's, including the Black Panthers in Chicago, he was always preaching civil rights at home. He attended MLK's March on Washington in 1963. He battled the segregationist policies of his local church. He told me that the elders took a visiting African American couple out to the front porch of the church and gave them a brief lesson in how birds of a feather flock together and sent them away. He was outraged and immediately moved our family to another congregation. One of my father's favorite Christmas songs, one that he carefully explained to me, was "Some Children See Him" as sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

In this time of Christmastide, we should remember that peace on Earth begins with the observance of equal rights, racial equality, civil liberties, and human dignity. Bring compassion to your efforts in all you do, including your research into genealogy and local history.

Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project

2008-12-24T03:00:00.000-05:00

The Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project is a volunteer effort of the RI USGenWeb Project to record for posterity the inscriptions from nearly half a million gravestones. Begun in 1990, the project was nearly three-quarters completed as of 2007. See the project's history for more information.

The project has been a great resource for my Carr surname research. The Carr family line that Edson and Arthur Carr focused on in their books (Edson's Carr Family Records and Arthur's The Carr Book are available by subscription at Ancestry) traces back to the mid-17th century, when Robert and his younger brother Caleb left the Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in Newport. Caleb lived a long life in Rhode Island, owned land, operated a ferry service, and served twice as General Treasurer of Rhode Island and even briefly as Colonial Governor. In a freak mishap, Caleb fell from one of his ferries and drowned.

You'll find Caleb's grave record within the project here. It appears as seen below.

CARR CALEB 1623c - 17 DEC 1695 JM001

The project offers a key to cemetery codes, which explains that JM001 is a special lot where the Colonial Governor is buried in Jamestown. The code description includes the name of the cemetery and its precise location.

JM001 GOV CARR LOT JAMESTOWN EAST SOUTH ROAD ->50 ft. W

Some of the Carrs from this particular line remained in the area, but many moved westward, which in the late 18th and early 19th century meant they moved west to New York, Pennsylvania or maybe Ohio. Some Carrs were in the initial Quaker settlements on the new frontier. Many Carrs prospered as farmers. Some were captured or met their death in Indian attacks.

In what seems today like a misplaced touch of the Wild West, there was a Wyoming Valley in 18th-century eastern Pennsylvania being settled by a Connecticut company. According to a Wilkes-Barre history, "The name Wyoming was derived from a corruption of Maugh-way-wame, a Delaware Indian name for The Large Plains." The State of Wyoming may have gained its name in 1865 from this Pennsylvania region, according to Wikipedia, which adds its own explanation of the derivation of the state's name. "The name Wyoming derives from the Munsee name xwé:wamənk, meaning "at the big river flat," originally applied to the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, made famous by the 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming by Thomas Campbell.^[8]^[9]"

There was always some movement of Carrs between Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. A marked shift of population into Rhode Island's cities in the late 19th century involved people leaving the region's less and less productive farms to accept new factory jobs. Immigrant Carrs came to Rhode Island from Europe to operate the state's many mills and factories. I've noted that many Irish Catholics came to Providence County during this period.

Those who dwelt and died in Rhode Island -- Carrs and others -- can be found in this wonderful database. I encourage you to bookmark the site and use it often.

WikiDump

2008-12-23T09:00:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting blog: The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump. The editor posts summaries of articles that are about to be removed from Wikipedia for notability problems or just being too bizarre for words. There are entries like Penguins in Popular Culture, the sideways bike, and the Extra-Terrestrial Exposure Law. Some are certainly just oddities, like the 100 Greatest Villains, as listed in Wizard magazine's issue 177. And then there's Elizabeth Kucinich, not particularly noteworthy but certainly a charmer.

Brick Walls And Tall Tales

2008-12-22T02:56:00.000-05:00

Recently I overcame a thirty year long genealogical brick wall and traced my father's paternal line back to Ireland. I started this quest in 1978, with relatives passing down the family story that my grandfather was born near Red Bank, New Jersey, the son of a cattle buyer who worked at Fort Monmouth selling meat to the troops. Well, all of a sudden a flood of old records have been making their way to my desktop to prove otherwise. Amazing stuff. Ships' crew records. Foreign birth records. US draft and naturalization records.

The records tell the tale: my grandfather (man in picture, right, with moustache, hands on hips, dark suit) was born in Ireland (he was indeed the son of a cattle buyer), left home circa 1907 and went to sea aboard Anchor Line steamships. In 1910, he landed a job with Panama Canal Steamship and Railroad Co and began making runs between New York and the Canal Zone. Despite the official statements on his kids' birth records that say he was born New Jersey, my grandfather's only connection to the Garden State was a girlfriend who left New York in 1913 and moved with her parents to Ocean Port Avenue in Long Branch.

I suspect my grandfather had his reasons for telling tales. He seems to have been politically active before he left Ireland and might have been afraid for himself and his family. The earliest iterations of the Irish Republican Army formed around 1907.

My most recent find is that my ancestor, Andrew Noble, a horse trainer who was probably born around 1825, is listed in Griffiths Valuation of Ireland. It shows him living on Fort Hill Street in Enniskillen in 1863.

So, when faced with brick walls and tall tales, be persistent and ask the hard questions. Even official records, like birth certificates and the census, can be erroneous. Don't focus too tightly on what you think you know. Keep other options open.

Erie Yacht Club

2008-12-21T01:01:00.000-05:00

One of the WikiProject Erie editors has begun to draft an article on the Erie Yacht Club. Local residents and former and current members of the club may wish to contribute details from old newspaper clippings and local histories that they've collected over the years. Those with personal photographs of the club and some of its more important past members may wish to upload some of those shots to Wikipedia and include them in the article. The county library probably has a clippings folder in the row of metal cabinets between the work tables and the CD collection. Discussion of content has already begun on the article's talk page. Feel free to add content to the article or throw some information on the talk page for editors to feed into the article.

Marinas.com has an excellent set of photographs of the marina. I came across an interesting photograph of the yacht club's lighthouse. There is also an online weather station. Boldt Gallery has some photographs of the club online. Boldt even posted some 1950's video footage of the club at YouTube. The photo in this article is from PicasaWeb and is identified as Karen's Best.

Marshall Poe on Wikipedia

2008-12-18T23:33:00.000-05:00

The historian Marshall Poe wrote an article and a sidebar about Wikipedia in the September 2006 edition of Atlantic Monthly. The Hive is a substantial piece that covers the development of personal online interactions from the open exchange of ideas in discussion boards to peer-to-peer data sharing to actual collaboration in the development of collective content. A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) talks about the struggle within Wikipedia for a level discussion of controversial issues.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz offers an article called Common Knowledge in the August 2006 edition of the same magazine, an overview of Poe's thinking on Wikipedia. (Poe's article contains lots of links to unfamiliar terms, which I won't repeat here.)

You can listen to Andrew Keen's interview of Poe for Politics Central on the occasion of the release of the Atlantic Monthly article. Poe reveals that "The Hive" was initially going to be called Everyone Knows Everything.

According to the Daily Iowan, "Poe makes use of the network potential in his class [He is a history professor at the University of Iowa] by having students update Wikipedia articles about subjects being discussed in class."

In April 2008, Poe participated in the Eastern Michigan University College of Arts and Sciences lecture series Wikipedia: The Democratization of Knowledge or the Triumph of Amateurs?

Poe's MemoryArchive - what he calls The Encyclopedia of Memories -- is surprisingly unWiki, non-collaborative. More of an edited story board. Submissions are made directly to Poe, who edits them and places them in the database. Contributions are then "protected" from further editing. Recent edits -- not that many -- are all attributed to Poe. It's hard to discern when submissions were even made. From my perspective, the march of progress in online collaboration that Poe talked about in The Hive takes a giant step backwards at the MemoryArchive.

When You're Ready

2008-12-18T07:21:00.000-05:00

Commodore George Dewey issued a famous command to Charles Gridley to begin to fire his weapons at the Battle of Manila Bay. Someone changed the quote at Wikipedia today from "Fire when ready, Gridley!" to "Fire when you are ready, Gridley!" Never content to let an edit like that stand unchallenged, I checked Google and found that hits for the "fire when ready" quote outnumber the longer version three-to-one, but Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions actually explains that the "Fire when you are ready" quote is correct but simply not as popular as "Fire when ready". You live and learn.

Red Cross Shelter Still Busy in Londonderry

2008-12-18T06:56:00.000-05:00

My wife's been out of cell phone range all week. She called me the other day from the Londonderry High School, where she's been working at the Red Cross shelter during the ice storm crisis, to let me know she would be out of touch the rest of the week and not to worry. Here's the Union Leader's detailed news from that town as of Wednesday afternoon:

LONDONDERRY, 4:46 p.m. School has been canceled again for Thursday. Residents are watching to see if PSNH does have 95 percent of the town backup by midnight tonight, as the utility had forecast.

Despite the snow and freezing rain falling much of the day, PSNH did not revise its timeline released Monday for the town. However, at 3:30 p.m., large portions of south and west Londonderry remained without electricity.

Town Manager Dave Caron said PSNH had said large portions of south and west Londonderry, including customers on Apollo, Wiley Hill, Peabody, Adams, Fiddlers Ridge, Parmenter, Rebecca, Apple Blossom, Cross, Meadow and Constitution Roads would be active by Thursday, but he had not been told whether that meant just after midnight tonight or later in the day. As of 4 p.m. there were six utility trucks working in town, Caron believed.

Public Works officials managed to plow all roads safely, Caron added, believing that the work that remained in town was for utility trucks to handle.

"There's still a barricade up at Bancroft Road, but I'm pretty sure most roads are open at this point," he said.

Approximately 45 people stayed at the Red Cross shelter at the high school gym Tuesday night, down 20 from the night before. The hot meals offered at the shelter remain highly attended.

Are You In Their Snapshots?

2008-12-17T21:08:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting website called Are You In My Photo? where you can look at other people's old family photographs and help the owners try to identify strangers or forgotten relatives captured in the shots. Click browse and view the collection by categories like military life, life in the 50s, amusement parks, etc. You might just find one of your relatives in the Aleutian Islands posing with his buddies. I came across the site today in Ancestry magazine's Jan/Feb 2009 edition. The site is a bit awkward to peruse, but wouldn't it be interesting to find Aunt Mabel as a WAC kicking up her heels?

Out From the Cold in Manchester

2008-12-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

Red Cross redeployed my wife from Nashua to Manchester, NH, where they have four shelters to help deal with those displaced by the ice storm. 200,000 remain without power in the state. See slide show1 and slide show 2 of ice storm effects.

Comparatively speaking, New Jersey is not as troubled as more northern climes. It's a bit warmer and more carefree. My daughter and I were out to breakfast this morning and the radio was playing "My Favorite Things" as if it were a Christmas carol. As we were discussing the merits of the radio station playing this song from The Sound of Music as if it were a holiday favorite, the Emergency Broadcasting System suddenly interrupted the song with buzzes and tones. Ironic, isn't it, that this song was meant to help you forget about your troubles and think about something nice and here they were displacing the song so we could worry about who knows what on such a nice day? When the test was over and all the statements of what we were to do in an actual emergency, the song was still playing and life went on. We didn't even have to stop eating our omelets.

Red Cross in Nashua

2008-12-15T01:35:00.000-05:00

My wife left in a hurry on Sunday to join a group of Red Cross volunteers heading to Nashua, NH to help run a shelter up there. The Red Cross has 56 shelters in New Hampshire, which has been hit hard by the current ice storm wreaking havoc over the Northeastern US. I suspect she has ended up at Nashua High School South, where a breaking news story says 65 folks are sleeping on cots in the gymnasium. Many NH residents are keeping warm in Red Cross shelters because of the lack of power in their own homes. Most of the deaths so far have been the result of carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty portable heaters in people's residences. The ice storm paralyzed the city of Nashua on Friday, shutting off electricity to more than a quarter million homes and apartments. The shelters provide warmth and food, but they also keep people safe.

Take a moment and support the American Red Cross. Their disaster relief volunteers helped in the 2008 hurricane season, particularly with Gustav and Ike. Local volunteers help victims of house and apartment fires to find temporary housing, often in the middle of the night. Give generously and volunteer if you can. And be supportive of the workers whenever you have the opportunity.

Rootsweb WorldConnect

2008-12-13T18:39:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite links for genealogy research is Rootsweb WorldConnect's Global Search window. It offers separate search fields not only for first name and surname but for the name of parents and spouse. It offers date ranges for birth dates. You can often leave the place of birth blank. WorldConnect doesn't play well with US state abbreviations. You can search by dates of death and marriage. WorldConnect will even let you exclude a database or let you focus on search results that provide you with research notes, sources, or additional generations.

Searching a Distinctive Name
If you're dealing with a distinctive name, the less information you fill into the fields, the better. A search in WorldConnect for Barzillai Carr will yield four hits, so using a possible year of birth would only limit your chances of finding a listing. A Soundex search will give you 61 hits on Barzillai Carr because Barzillai Cary was such a popular name. Soundex doesn't help with the first name, which must be exact. (Barzillai was a minor Biblical figure in the time of King David. The name is routinely misspelled by census enumerators. I have no suggestions on how to search the possible variations. I've seen Barzilla, but many others are out there to trip you up.)

Searching a Name With a Variable First Letter
None of the special search tools at WorldConnect will find Barzillai Kerr when you search for Barzillai Carr because the tools are all oriented to the first letter of the last name. A search for Carr will find Car and a search for Karr will yield Kerr hits.

Searching for a Common Name
A search for James Carr yields over 8,000 hits, so more detail is required. You'll notice that James need only be part of the name to be included. Alexander James Carr, James Edward Carr, and a host of other James Carr names will appear in your results. If you have a full name, middle initial, and hopefully some rough idea of the birthdate, you should try each of these in various combinations and variations when the name is common.

Provide a Full Name:Providing the full name James Edward Carr brings the hits to 83, a mix of Edward James and James Edward Carrs. (James E yields only 68 hits.)

Add a Date Range:Picking a birth date range of twenty years either side of 1875 for a James Edward Carr search yields only 15 hits. (If you look back at the name only (no dob) search results, you will notice that many of the James Edward Carr hits contain no dob at all. It's important to remember that those no dob hits are excluded from the results in a date range search.

Add a Spouse:James Edward Carr with spouse Edith yields only three hits. James Carr with spouse Edith produces 11 hits. If you leave the first name blank and look for any man named Carr married to a woman named Edith, you end up with 295 hits. The top of that list includes men named Carr whose first names are unknown. All of these searches can yield matches between databases.

Recognize WorldConnect's Limitations
You have to recognize the database's limitations. Use your results with caution and cite your sources. Try contacting the submitters to find out more about their information and where they got it. One of the weaknesses of WorldConnect is the shortage of sourcing. If you source your info as being from WorldConnect, it should remind you to seek additional sources in the future.

Categories and Lists

2008-12-11T08:15:00.000-05:00

If you can't quite remember the name of a former mayor of Erie, you can try looking in Wikipedia for a list of mayors or check for a mayors category. A list of anything is typically more complete than a category, which will only contain items about which separate articles have been written. In the case of mayors of Erie, only a few of them are the subject of their own articles.

Categories allow you to follow the topic through more and more generic layers of the concept. In the mayors case, you can go back to mayors of places in Pennsylvania, places in the US, and by country. Or you can trace back by mayors of US cities, which is a subcategory of mayors of cities. The latter gives you mayors of cities from other countries.

You will find the more generic concepts in the category section at the bottom of the page of a category page. As the above example shows, categories can take you along separate trails.

Category pages will offer you lists of actual articles as well as lists of subcategories. They also offer you See Also links.

When you simply cannot remember that old car model's name or former airline, next time try perusing lists or categories instead of a blind search.

My Favorite Restaurants

2008-12-09T08:17:00.000-05:00

Thought I'd take this occasion to mention a couple of my favorite restaurants.

Peekamoose Restaurant is in the Catskills in the small town of Big Indian, NY. Very fine cuisine, rustic decor, and friendly service. We even roasted some marshmallows in a fire pit outside. The home page is rather baffling so I've linked you to the menu.
The Washington Inn in Cape May, NJ is a wonderful dining experience. We stayed a couple of times at the nearby Duke of Windsor Inn and thoroughly enjoyed our stay. We especially enjoy visiting Cape May during Victorian Week in October.

Audit Your Local Points of Interest

2008-12-06T20:50:00.000-05:00

When I got involved in Wikipedia's WikiProjectErie a couple of years ago, one of the tasks for project volunteers was to propose and write new articles about local points of interest. Seems there are always a few local attractions in any community that have yet to be written about. I had a subscription to the Erie Times-News, so I began reading the paper with the eye of a Wiki auditor, looking for feature articles or advertisements that highlighted area attractions. I'd fold the paper back and draw a big pencil circle around articles meriting further research. Many of the places already had articles, but every once in a while I'd find one that needed more work or a topic that hadn't been written about yet. I had an extra bed next to my computer when I was in school and it was littered with such clippings. Each one was a project in itself, requiring additional research in local histories at the county library and the Hammermill Library on the nearby Mercyhurst College campus, so only a small percentage of those articles ever got written.

Another need listed on the WikiProject Erie page was for photographs of local points of interest for inclusion in Wiki articles. Certainly a fun way to contribute to a local Wiki project is to get your digital camera out and take pictures. I found that there were many tourist attractions in town that hadn't been photographed for Wikipedia, so I took advantage of bright, clear days and took many shots that now appear in Wikipedia. I never expected to become a photo contributor, but it's a niche for you shutterbugs out there if you are looking for a way to get involved.

Now that I'm back in Central Jersey, I've been procrastinating a bit about getting involved in the local Wiki projects here. I've been finishing up my thesis and haven't had the time for this hobby, number one. But also I am still attached to the Erie project and have been contemplating additional work in that area when I have the time.

Just before I left the shores of Presque Isle Bay for Raritan Bay, I purchased original copies of Reed's History of Erie County, Pennsylvania (two volumes) and Nelson's Biographical Dictionary (in one volume) so I could continue my research. I also have access to Bates History online, both in transcription and in images. My photo work will have to support local NJ points of interest, but I just might continue my deeper Wiki research in Erie issues, including local biography.

A good place to start if you're interested in augmenting Erie biography at Wiki is to check the list of famous residents of Erie at the Erie Cemetery Association's website and make sure there are articles about each. I created the Erie Cemetery Wiki article and added all the photos that appear there. There are plenty of interesting folks buried in that cemetery and other local cemeteries, so consider joining me in rediscovering some of their lives.

Thundersnow

2008-12-06T01:30:00.000-05:00

Friends back in Erie tell me that there was an episode of thundersnow in November. I found a short video on YouTube that apparently caught the event. We don't get such meteorological wonderment like thundersnow, lake effect snow, and waterspouts down here in Central Jersey.

I noticed while studying at Mercyhurst that the local tv station breaks the winter weather report into smaller increments so the daily snow totals won't upset viewers. The weather announcer at 6pm will say that 2-4" of snow is expected over the next few hours, with higher amounts in the snow belt. Overnight accumulations will be 6-10", tapering off to 4-6" during the morning rush, again with more in the snow belt. That's 12-20" of snow anywhere else, but just another day in Erie. (I'm not sure about that morning rush. There was great concern while I was there that major road construction on 12th Street would tie up the roads. What's all the fuss about? Maybe the locals haven't driven the 5 in LA?)

As for fidelitous: It's no fun being PNGd, but it builds character.

So, Is No One Fidelitous?

2008-12-04T00:23:00.000-05:00

I was working on a school paper the other day and wanted to use the concept of fidelity to describe how accurate or harmonious a rendering of something was to its original. The sentence needed an adjective. But when I typed fidelitous, the spellchecker flashed red. So I went online and checked Wiktionary, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and even the Urban Dictionary. None of them showed an adjective form of the word. (I have to note that there are tons of words under the letter F in the Urban Dictionary.)

I have an account with Wiktionary, which is Wikipedia's collaborative online dictionary. I don't get the sense that the Wiktionary experiment has been all that successful, but I engage in this low impact wordsmith's playground from time to time to see what happens. It's actually not that much fun; it's more of an academic exercise.

If you look at the Fidelity article at Wikipedia, on the right side of the page there is a small box with a link to the Wiktionary entry. That's probably the easiest way to get there. Otherwise, you have to go to the bottom of the Wikipedia main page, where a list of Wiki's sister projects appears, including Wiktionary. (You might want to try Wikiquote or Wikibooks, for example. Or how about Wikispecies?)

Rather than just toss in a new word, why not talk about it? I mean, what do I know about fidelity anyway? (Don't tell my wife) So I added a blurb on the Fidelity discussion page stating my thoughts on the adj form and asked for others to comment. Not surprisingly, I was the first one to venture to launch a discussion topic on that page. And, also not surprising, there hasn't been a nibble yet. But it's only been a few days. I like leaving these issues out there, like seedlings, and I check them once in a while to see if there's been any activity. I posted a discussion item on the Vicar article at Wikipedia a year and a half ago and there's not been a response yet. Patience is a virtue on these more obscure topics.

I eventually looked up fidelitous at Google Books, figuring if it was a real word it would appear in their collection of electronic copies of actual books. I ended up finding 46 hits in books published from the 1920s to the 1960s to today. The more recent books focus on fidelity in gay and bisexual relationships. (I'm not sure whether you can be fidelitious in a bisexual relationship, unless of course the typical relationship is a threesome. If that's the case, Valentine's Day must involve lots of greeting cards and candy.)

Google itself has nearly a thousand hits. There the emphasis switches to audiophiles and their desire for fidelity in sound recordings. And, again, polyamory.

Even if I think fidelity has an adjectival form, I'm still a bit unclear exactly how to make a Wiktionary entry. The precise structure of a dictionary entry isn't for the fainthearted or all that user friendly. So I'll give it a bit more time, I guess. Procrastinate. And hopefully someone else will add the entry or let me know that there simply is no such word and correct the error of my ways. Maybe around Christmastime, if I've not heard otherwise, I'll set my jaw and strive for dictionary perfection.

While I'm on words, I just have to say that I love the fact that Wikipedia has separate articles for fish, fish as food, fish food, and seafood. It even has separate categories for edible fish and seafood dishes. Ah, diversity.

I should mention that in yesterday's post, in which I discussed the US telephone system, I didn't talk at all about international numbers. That is because they can be difficult to get a handle on. They have country codes and city codes instead of codes for states and towns, but their total lengths vary wildly, so breaking them into their component parts can be a challenge. The typical White Pages in a large city has a list of major international country codes with some of the more common city codes included for good measure. For some reason the phone company thinks you also need to know the time difference, so they show something like +6 to let you know that the city is six hours ahead. If you are researching an international number, I'm not sure there are any standard references that break down all the city codes, but Wiki has a decent country codes list.

Research Using Historic Area Codes and Exchanges

2008-12-02T23:32:00.000-05:00

Not many folks pay much attention to historic area codes and telephone exchanges. It's always a pain when your region sub-divides and suddenly you're in a new zone. But who keeps track of all those old zones and does it matter? Maybe the phone company, but I tend to doubt it. Monk is busy solving crime, so don't count on him jotting them down. Wikipedia has some useful basic information about the North American Numbering Plan, but nothing as detailed as is required for research of individual numbers.

So, let's say you come across a home phone number for a research interest in an address book from the early 1970's. The subject of interest had a 212 area code. So now at least you know he lived in Manhattan, right? Wrong. In those days, 212 area code also included Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

New Jersey's 201 area code was the first area code and belonged to the whole state until 609 was assigned to the southern portion of the state. After I moved to the fast-growing central portion of the state in the late 1970s, the need for new phone numbers for a burgeoning population prompted a geographic split and a change of my area code to 908. A need for most Americans to have lots of cell phones and faxes and extra lines resulted in yet another change in my household, to 732.

While my area code (XXX-xxx-xxxx) has changes several times over thirty years, my telephone exchange (xxx-XXX-xxxx) has stayed the same because I've not moved. Actually, even if I had moved from one side of town to the other, I might not have been required to change my number. That's because the exchange would have been the same.

If you check the front of many old White Pages, you will usually find a guide to local exchanges. This guide was provided by the phone company for billing purposes, so a customer could determine which neighborhoods were local calls and which were in-state long distance calls. But this information can also be useful for tagging a place to a phone number. If you have a phone number and a rough idea of when it was in use, you can often discern where that phone account was situated if you have the appropriate telephone directory handy.

But old White Pages are disappearing faster than the polar ice cap. They are bulky and no one needs old phone books anymore because we have CDs and the Internet, right? Public libraries can't afford to store the big books so I'm sure they are simply recycling them. You might be able to research an old name and get a listing, but try doing a bit of research on an old phone number. When you check your sources for former area codes and the location of particular phone exchanges, you will soon see there is little out there.

The issue reminds me of the break up of historic counties as the US expanded, especially in the 19th century. Just like the rapid change of area code boundaries, county borders were amended constantly over many years and I've yet to find the state that has prepared a handy dandy guide that quickly associates towns with their respective counties over time. Newberry's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries would be a promising contribution to our knowledge but it is seemingly very expensive, incomplete, out of print, and not readily available for free to the general public.

Policy Wikis?

2008-12-02T00:09:00.000-05:00

The only worse idea than creating a Wiki to store policy information is to try to collaborate in a policy-oriented Wiki. Hi, my name is Pat, and I am a policy Wiki victim.

Want to make the boss really mad? Add a policy to the Wiki and change some of the elements because they were misspelled in the original. Or think of something that the policy team didn't think of when they drafted the original document six months ago. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Do that one. Extra points for that one.

SharePoint has added a Wiki and managers are out there trying to imagine how to use them. I've heard a few suggest what a wonderful place that would be for noting best practices within the organization and sharing innovations with others. But all of these things get back to the documentation of policy. And you don't want to be getting creative when management already has the reins.

Lesson learned? Web 2.0 isn't for everyone. Watch out for policy Wikis.

The FIFO/LIFO of Surnames in Genealogy

2008-11-22T12:18:00.000-05:00

In accounting, items are depreciated under First In First Out (FIFO) and Last In First Out (LIFO) rules -- your choice, but you have to stick to the method you've chosen or the IRS gets annoyed. Seems to me there is an equivalent rule in genealogy when it comes to the kids' surnames in multiple marriage and/or non-marriage situations.

A woman named Cindi wrote recently. She was born to a single mother and carried her mother's surname at birth. When her mother married the following year, Cindi's step-father adopted her, giving her his surname. When Cindi married, had a child, divorced and remarried, her second husband adopted the daughter from the first and gave the daughter his surname.

So the choice is FIFO or LIFO. Do Cindi and her daughter appear in my Family Treemaker (FTM) database under their birth name with a reference to their adoptive surnames, or do their adoptive names take precedence? I've chosen to display the adoptive names as the names of record, with the birth names as alternates. I'd be curious what others do.

Watershed Moments

2008-11-21T00:36:00.000-05:00

I became interested in watersheds while at school in Erie. One of my classmates was involved in environmental issues and asked how her group might use Wikipedia to promote the welfare of the watershed. I suggested that forming a baseline presence at Wikipedia would allow environmentalists to collaborate on articles and begin to document what they know. I established the framework for articles on the Lake Erie Watershed, the Lake Erie Basin, and the Great Lakes Basin. The environmentalists didn't exactly rush to collaborate, though, so the articles remain roughly as I framed them. The value of the articles is that they provide a place to provide encyclopedic information about pollution derived from runoff, something you just don't find in much detail in articles about rivers and lakes. For example, the articles about Lake Erie and Erie International Airport say nothing about how de-icing of planes could cause chemical runoff that would pollute the lake if the airport didn't mitigate against it, but the watershed article contains the details. Likewise, the article about Presque Isle Downs makes no mention of how the the racino's horse barns must mitigate against eColi runoff into a local creek that feeds into Lake Erie, but the watershed article covers it. The issue of eColi runoff shutting down Presque Isle beaches is a subject that needs to be added. I would hope that environmentalists across the country would begin to use Wikipedia to document runoff issues and other concerns.

Is Ancestry Really a Fox in Rootsweb's Hen House?

2008-11-20T00:53:00.000-05:00

I started out in online genealogy in 1994 by participating in a genealogy discussion board at America Online, which was then a pay service. Family Treemaker soon added an online site, so I tried posting GEDCOM files of my Carr surname data. But the AOL group was just a constant flow of new researchers with shallow questions, and FTM offered no environment for my data, so I took my discussion and online database interests to Rootsweb, a free site with lots of features for genealogists. I joined the CARR_L surname discussion list, which automatically routed me copies of letters from all subscribers. I was a busy participant in the exchange of information for about four years, I guess.

Rootsweb's WorldConnect has been the home for my latest GEDCOM files ever since. WorldConnect offers a place where my research comes to life, displayed for all the world to see. I find that many folks find my research at WorldConnect and write to me with questions, comments, or additional facts. I get email from around the world. And they poke at my family records all around the edges, not just the places I'm focused on. That can have serendipitous results.

When the pay service Ancestry bought Rootsweb in 2000, part of the deal was that Ancestry could display my WorldConnect data for the benefit of Ancestry's paid subscribers for as long as my data enjoyed free display at WorldConnect; if I removed it from Rootsweb, my data would no longer appear within Ancestry either. Copying and keeping or selling my data wasn't allowed. That remains the case today.

There are a number of genealogists out there who vocally resent Ancestry for commercializing Rootsweb. And some fear that Ancestry will without warning shutter their hard work behind a fee service wall one day without their permission. I exchanged a couple of emails in recent days with an official from one of the major free GenWeb-like services. She said most of her ilk have abandoned Rootsweb servers for this very reason.

I don't know whether to believe Ancestry's call for sharing at Rootsweb, or Kimberly's Genealogy Blog's assertions about Ancestry's benign intentions in dropping the distinct Rootsweb URL, or the Ancestry Insider's "independent" commentary about Ancestry's latest attempt to make profits while pushing the volunteer agenda at Rootsweb. Should I believe the Rootsweb public affairs statement about the switch in URLs or the rabid feedback of disgruntled users that can be found after the public statement?

My personal experience with Rootsweb/Ancestry has been great. I keep a free database at WorldConnect that automatically appears as well within Ancestry for its pay subscribers. I have the top of the line Ancestry subscription and use it all the time as an active hobbyist. I routinely view original images of passenger ship manifests, US WWI and WWII draft registration cards, census sheets from three continents, US naturalization cards, and newspapers. I've been around the block and haven't found these images anywhere for free, nor do I expect to.

I'm not much of a fan of the Ancestry end of the WorldConnect GEDCOMs. The display is awkward and users have a tendency to link individuals together who lived in different centuries. What's up with that? I find the data as useless as the old World Family Tree CDs I unfortunately bought from Broderbund in another life. I spent too much on them to toss them in the garbage, but they're worthless. I don't recommend the family trees you might find in Ancestry, but I get queries from users so there's some benefit, I guess.

While I search the web and use free services, I favor Ancestry's one-stop shopping because the various GenWeb sites can be difficult to use because they are not centrally indexed, their tables of contents are uneven in quality of organization, and their depth of contents depends on the interest of volunteers. Looking here and there for something for free when it is readily available for a fee may not be entirely practical in some research situations. It depends on how you value your time. I frequently find gravesite indices for entire counties in rural areas with only a dozen or so names. The names were entered by one volunteer who logged only those deceased of interest to him and his family tree. The GenWeb-like sites work when there are many volunteers, usually in population centers, but sites representing lesser populated regions often languish with the same dozen names year in and year out. The free web offers great promise for those with idealistic dreams and the time to dig through lots of records, but the process can be prohibitively uneven.

Just look at the cemeteries of Wetzel County, West Virginia at Interment.net. Only a few listings in each cemetery. Compare that with the cemeteries of Kanawha County, West Virginia, a much more populated place with many more volunteers.

So, I think Ancestry has capitalist incentives and probably never thinks first about the hobby. Sure, they've made life in Rootsweb's hen house a bit more annoying here and there, but no chickens have been harmed in the making of this firm. A few chickens have run away saying the sky is falling, but there is little evidence of that. As capitalists, Ancestry tries to supply an excellent product and keep resentments down in the community through appeasement and access deals. Rootsweb simply couldn't afford to live, so it was bought by The Man and now some people just can't get over it. Those of you who can afford a membership with Ancestry should consider it and quit griping. They have stuff you can't get for free. Don't kid yourself about the free web. It has lots of stuff, but it isn't effectively pooled and images of original docs are rare. I prioritize my membership at Ancestry, making sure I can afford it by doing without other things. The advertising faced by those who don't have memberships is an unfortunate cost of doing business. Those same ads annoy me; they are everywhere. Suck it up.

Grateful for Honorable Mentions

2008-11-15T18:27:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Erie PA Today, for mentioning my work with Wikiproject Erie in a blurb on 3 November 2008. My work on the Erie parks article at Wikipedia was commented upon favorably at Erie Blogs on 2 October 2007. Always grateful for a bit of recognition.

My Wikipedia photographs of Erie pop up here and there. They're no longer mine as I've contributed them to Wikipedia, but I still get name credit when people use them. The Turtle Island Project website used my pictures on their site, even in a video at You Tube, and my name appears in both. My photos end up at other encyclopedias that use Wikipedia as their feed, including NationMaster (see my photos of the Warner Theatre in Erie), and Brittanica.com (see my picture of the Erie Maritime Museum). Sometimes my image contributions get used in odd ways. Like to complain about zoos. I'm happy to provide the content. You can see a gallery of all my photo contributions to Wiki towards the bottom of my home page there. I encourage you to contribute interesting photos you've taken to Wiki.

Town Equals County (or Counties)

2008-11-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

When you want to research your ancestors who lived in a particular town, you should be thinking right away about finding out which county or counties that town has been a part of over the years. Then explore county-oriented research sites online, like bulletin boards for genealogical queries and databases for vital statistics, cemetery records, land records, wills, and Bible inscriptions. If county records are sparse, turn to regional sites, then state sites.

According to certain shakey late-nineteenth century records, my Carr ancestors might have had their roots in the Manahawkin section of Stafford Township, New Jersey. Manahawkin has been part of Ocean County since 1850, but before that it was in Monmouth County. (Stafford Township was formed out of Shrewsbury Township in 1750.) Since I've been able to trace my Carr line back to Greenwich, New Jersey in Gloucester County, per tax records from the 1780s and Revolutionary War service records, I figure those Carr roots in Manahawkin must predate the Revolution. So, when I research my Carr line, I focus on Monmouth County research sites. I keep Ocean County in mind, however, because queries about a particular town can easily end up in the "wrong" county's bulletin board.

My wife's Pool ancestors (her grandmother's great uncle was US Senator John Pool 1826-1884) lived in Elizabeth City and environs before the Civil War. I did a bit of digging tonight for websites handling Pasquotank County. The USGenWeb Archives has a nice collection of resources. There's USGenNet, which has quite a few useful links. NCGenWeb has some links but looks to be needing volunteers. And NCRoots hasn't quite discovered Pasquotank County yet. (It hedges its bets by including historic Albemarle County, which for four years in the 1660s included present-day Pasquotank County.) Linkpendium might be helpful to some, but as the name implies, it is just a linking service. Maybe if you don't have Google you'll want to keep Linkpendium handy?

Continuing with this Elizabeth City line of discussion: If you want to actually meet other researchers and dig around in records, you might try the Family Research Society of Northeastern North Carolina (FRSNNC), which is based in Elizabeth City. My wife and I visited the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh back in the 1980s. They have a wonderful facility and tons of records. The state archives were loaded on a wagon and hauled to safety before the Yankees burned the town during the Civil War. The place, which has some of the oldest records in the South, is now understandably quite fire resistant. It looks like their online resources might be substantial as well.

Rootsweb has a town search engine. It can be helpful when you need some leads on where to look or if you just want to browse when you've run out of ideas. And if you have no luck with county or regional records, you can always check Rootsweb's State Resources List. Once you click on a state, it takes you to a page with a veritable cornucopia of links. Here's the North Carolina page, for example. If the list is unwieldy, try using Ctl F to search the page for keywords, like a county name or town or surname.

Analysis

2008-11-11T10:55:00.000-05:00

I've been working on and off since February towards changing the Wikipedia article on analysis from a list article -- a roster of Wiki articles that include the word "analysis" -- to an article that actually describes analysis in a variety of fields of study. It seemed to me that a list format in this case was pretty lame and ultimately didn't provide sufficient description of the concept.

I posted my idea on the discussion page back in February 2008 and received a favorable response. As of today there have been over a hundred edits to the article by an assortment of editors. Amazingly, we've had to revert some vandalism from time to time. Hard to figure why anyone would target an article on analysis, but some people have time on their hands.

You can compare the status of the article today (right) versus before I proposed the project (left). The comparison, which is called a diff, isn't always easy to understand, so I'll offer my grim attempt at an explanation. The gray boxes on the right indicate text blocks that haven't been altered from the earlier version. The green boxes on the right are text boxes that have been added/changed, while yellow on the left are ones that have been removed/changed. If a box is new or removed, it will have white space on its left or right. If a box is changed, red text in a green box indicates added text, while red text in a yellow box indicates removed text. Wiki shows a simple example with explanations, but it isn't a very thorough exemplar. For a broader discussion of diffs, see Jonathan D Nolen's blog. (I also came across this interesting what-if piece on the merits of the BBC using diffs to track news editing.)

There's plenty more work to be done on the analysis article if you're interested.

Going to the Movies: Hollywood.com and IMDb

2008-11-06T21:56:00.000-05:00

I am such a research hound that I can't even go to the movies without doing a bit of digging first. My routine is to check the local fare using Hollywood.com to find my local area's movie listings. Hollywood asks for my zip code then automatically gives me the showings within a 15 miles radius, closest first. Rather than bother clicking on the movies and reading Hollywood's lame reviews and customer comments, I just open another window and use IMDb to check out my choices.

BTW -- I use the Groowe Toolbar in Firefox, which lets me quickly toggle between search tools like Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Dictionary.com, Clusty, IMDb and a bunch of others.

The trick with IMDb is to pick a movie and go right to the External Reviews, either on the left under Top Links or at the bottom under Related Links. For comparison, have a look at Zack and Miri Make A Porno at Hollywood.com and IMDb. Hollywood leaves you with little. IMDb maybe has too much information on the main page for a particular movie, and its contributor reviews are only marginally better than Hollywood's, but it offers a nice collection of external reviews. (Watch out for the trailers and clips across the top of the main page of any movie -- they have ads that have to run first. Go to the Top Links on the left and tap the trailers and videos link there. (There are presently five offerings on that page, each the same as the last. Oops! But at least there are no ads that I could find.)

IMDb is of course valuable for its cross-linking database of actors and films. In our current example, Seth Rogen is Zack and Elizabeth Banks is Miriam. (I'd say Ms Banks is associated with the more illustrious list of movies, but neither of them is getting a block of sidewalk yet.)

I have to say, while I'm on the theme of movie reviews and research, that I'm sorely disappointed that At The Movies (the former Ebert and Roeper nee Siskel and Ebert show) has degenerated to a movie promo show. Two thumbs way down for the new show. Lucky I have the Internet to help me out, but what ever happened to sitting on the sofa for my weekly half-hour of film criticism? The show wasn't perfect by any means, but I miss it.

An Audacious Solstice Is Upon Us

2008-11-05T05:54:00.000-05:00

I stayed up late last night to see Obama's acceptance speech, so I'm more than a bit bleary-eyed as I get ready for work today. The sun's still not up on this new day, but the darkness cannot mask that something is different. It feels like Christmas came in the night and I should go downstairs and see if Santa brought gifts. It's an expectation, not that everything is now fixed, but that our journey towards darkness suddenly stopped. The sun halted in its tracks out in the solar system; a kind of solstice reigns over the gears of despair. In the pre-dawn I can feel us drifting to a halt. The screeching of brakes was last night; our bodies are gently shifting with the change as the train settles to a stop and prepares to head a new direction. It is eerie quiet. I know in my head that the weather will get colder for quite a while yet -- the worst is possibly yet to come -- but at least I have the inner assurance that spring will certainly come and with it the rewards of warmth and light. Before last night hope remained elusive. What a wonderful speech in Grant Park! I look forward to the dawn and the look on others' faces as I make my way into the city.

Wikipedia and the Church

2008-11-02T13:39:00.000-05:00

I've done some disparate work on church-related topics at Wikipedia. I did quite a bit of work on the Roman Catholic Diocese of Erie while on sabbatical in Pennsylvania. I wrote an article on the diocese's St Peter Cathedral there, as well as the Catholic Trinity Cemetery. I added to a piece on a local bishop named Tobias Mullen. I also wrote an article about the Jewish temple in Erie.

I tried to get the Presbyterians rolling along by adding articles about the Synod of the Northeast and the Synod of the Trinity, and adding substantially to the article about the Ardmore Presbyterian Church, but so far no Wikyterians or Presbypedians have taken the bait to continue adding articles about individual churches, presbyteries, and synods. They seem happy instead with the meager exposure provided by a simple list, where they each take the quick and easy route of adding an external link to their church website. Hopefully some day they'll realize that Wiki is a great place to build their church histories (and evangelize a bit, too, in the process). (Forward a copy of this blog to your evangelism committee and tell them to get to work.)

BTW: Wiki lacks a good article about vicariates and how they're used in the Catholic church. While working on the Erie Diocese article, I learned that vicariates are subdiocean regional groups. Wiki relegates vicariates to the vicar article, but much more could be done there.

Reunited

2008-10-30T21:43:00.000-04:00

A woman wrote me recently looking for more information about her grandfather, Donald Delos Carr, who was included in my Carr database at Rootsweb. It seems her grandfather became estranged from her part of the family sometime after World War II and her parents had lost track of him. She wanted to find him and any associated relatives. She gave me some details, which I used to do research in Social Security Death Index, newspaper article archives at Ancestry.com, and on the Internet.

She told me he would be 93 years old if he were alive today. And she provided this text related to a military award he received from the Canadians.

CARR, F/O Donald Delos (J23590) - Distinguished Flying Cross - No.428 Squadron - Award effective 2 October 1944 as per London Gazette dated 13 October 1944 and AFRO 2637/44 dated 8 December 1944. Born 1914; home in Fort William, Ontario; enlisted Port Arthur, 5 May 1941. Trained at No.7 BGS (graduated 18 December 1942) and No.4 AOS (graduated 5 February 1943). Commissioned 1943. Decoration sent by registered mail, 13 October 1949. No citation other than "completed...numerous operations against the enemy in the course of which [he has] invariably displayed the utmost fortitude, courage and devotion to duty". DHist file 181.009 D.3260 (RG.24 Vol.20637) has recommendation dated 11 July 1944 when he had flown 38 sorties (233 hours 10 minutes), 22 November 1943 to 21 June 1944. Part of this service with No.405 Squadron and included a crash on return from Berlin (30 January 1944) and aircraft damaged by enemy action (15 February 1944). As Bomb Aimer, this officer has attacked Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart,Ludwigshaven and other targets in France and Germany. Throughout his tour he has shown great steadiness and reliability and a high degree of skill, co-operating well at all times with his crew and giving invaluable aid to the navigator. For being very stead and reliable throughout many operations, I recommend the non-immediate award of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Using Ancestry. I was able to find an Associated Press article dated 16 June 1949 in the Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman that said Donald Carr of Rochester, NY was unable to attend the awards ceremonies in New York the evening before. The article said the Canadian Air Force awarded three Americans with the Canadian government's Distinguished Flying Cross for services rendered during World War II. Fellow recipients were Lewis Ogle and Charles Benton. (See article, below)

I found a likely candidiate for Donald's Social Security Death Index record.

Name: Donald D. Carr
SSN: 066-24-9316
Last Residence: 32907 Palm Bay, Brevard, Florida, United States of America
Born: 26 Sep 1914
Died: 18 Oct 2000
State (Year) SSN issued: New York (Before 1951 )

I told her that it looked like he lived in Palm Bay, FL for a while as there were a number of phone listings there. He had also apparently lived at one time in Ohio. The reference was undated but was probably from the late 1980s or 1990s.

Name: Donald D Carr
Birth Date: Sep 1914
Street address: 270 Brownsfell Dr
City: Columbus
County: Franklin
State: Ohio
Zip Code: 43235
Phone Number: 614
Record Number: 727274956

I came across a nice description of the DFC in Canada. It tells how many Canadians were given the award in each of the major wars, but it doesn't report how many Americans were given the award. And I found a page that describes the No 405 Squadron in which he served. [In case you can't sort out the abbreviations in Donald's write up, he trained at No 7 Bomber and Gunnery School (BGS) and No 4 Air Observer School (AOS).]

The woman checked obituaries with the assistance of a local library in Florida and found the following:

DONALD CARR
PALM BAY -- Donald D. Carr, 86, died Wednesday, October 18, 2000 at Holmes Regional Medical Center. Mr. Carr was born in Savannah, N.Y. He was a pilot for the Royal Air Force, and a navigator for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. He was also a member of the VFW. Survivors include his children, Peter Carr of Valkaria, Susan Otten of Columbus, Ohio, Charles Carr of Rochester, N.Y., Karen Rise of Newark, Del., and Colleen Smith of Raleigh, N.C.; 13 grandchildren; brother, Robert Carr of Savannah, N.Y.; and sisters, Millie Edy of London Ontario, Canada, Martha McCallum of Kingston, Ontario, Canada and Carol Baker of Vestal, N.Y. Memorial services will be at 1 p.m. Saturday, at Fountainhead Memorial Funeral Home in Palm Bay.

The woman who wrote was quite pleased to have reunited her family after many years. She thanked me for listing his name in my database and for helping her out.

Some Popular Databases Lack Capacity for Updates and Corrections

2008-10-26T19:58:00.000-04:00

I'm spoiled by Ancestry's genealogy site, which makes it easy for users to submit corrections to at least some of the indices. In the US Census database, for example, a user can submit a correction to how a name is indexed. The erroneous version remains, but a bubble appears next to it with the submitted correction, which is also searchable by users. Volunteers go through the submissions to make sure there are no nonsense corrections in the pile.

Not so Mapquest. It is woefully unresponsive to its users. And it has countless errors and omissions, so that lack of responsiveness is particularly problematic for all concerned. My nearby pancake house and grocery store are comfortably nestled just to the east of the junction of State Highways 35 and 36 in Keyport, NJ, but Mapquest shows IHOP and Super Stop and Shop blocks away. A quick switch from the Street Map to Aerial Map view shows any local where the shops really are. Not only are the shops in the wrong place on the maps, but the listings themselves are troublesome. Stop and Shop is listed in Union Beach, a town down the road, and IHOP isn't cross referenced as International House of Pancakes, so it stubbornly refuses to appear in the Mapquest search results unless you remember the acronym.

There's nothing I can do to make them update their listings. That's not to say that I can't offer corrections to Mapquest. That's another matter. But, like I said, it makes no difference in the end. I did that months ago with Mapquest regarding Sayrebrook Veterinary Hospital, which is located at the junction of Ernston Road and Main Street (Route 670) in Sayreville, NJ. Mapquest has the hospital -- yes, an emergency hospital -- marked on a vacant lot nearly a mile away near the Garden State Parkway. When I submitted a correction to Mapquest, they wrote back and said it might take a long while for them to do anything about it. They offered a short cut to the process, which involved faxing them a map with an X that marks the spot where the hospital belongs. I jumped through their hoops, but the hospital is still in the wrong place three months or so later.

As another example, as if you needed more, my cardiologist recently had the nerve to relocate to a street that Mapquest doesn' t know exists. That's reasonable enough in the short term, but there are now hundreds of addresses in what is a huge medical office park, complex after complex not mapped. Try the map and directions link at the listing for my cardiologist at Find a Physician. The link goes to the center of town, a default result that leads you nowhere.

I had to use Google to find another business (First Interstate Financial Corp) as my beacon to the new office park. It was considerable time and energy doing research. I landed on the general vicinity using Superpages maps. I still had to call the doctor's office to figure out where they were in relation to the other location, but at least I was in the ballpark.

Superpages understandably had my doctor's former address, which was mapped correctly, and it even had a second listing showing his new address, but, alas, it misrepresented the office site as being south of Monmouth Mall on Industrial Way, far from its correct location miles north. I noticed that Superpages offers a button for corrections right on the map, but who knows if they are any more responsive than Mapquest. I doubt it.

In the end, I suspect that it is relatively easy to create these online maps using bulk data and sell lots of advertising online, but it will be a bear to keep up with all the myriad changes that will ensue over the years. Will they just dump in new data periodically and the hell with the interim changes? Can places like Mapquest keep up? I suspect not. They'd have to let volunteers help and maybe they aren't creative enough to figure out how to manage it? Maybe the new generation of GPS customers -- using Tom-Toms and other devices -- will feed the beast? In the meantime, we're driving in circles looking for breakfast, rushing our sick pets to nowhere fast, wasting our grocery shopping time, and having a heart attack in utter despair as we can't find our doctors.

Planning Boards and the Census

2008-10-10T01:25:00.000-04:00

I've been checking with local planning boards to see if anything can be done about the census designation (Census Designated Place, or CDP) for my town, Cliffwood Beach. I'm working on getting the Census Bureau to adjust the Cliffwood Beach CDP and Laurence Harbor CDP so that they more accurately reflect how Cliffwood Beach is part of two townships (Aberdeen and Old Bridge) and crosses between two counties (Monmouth and Middlesex). I'm of course trying to amend the Cliffwood Beach article at Wikipedia and get a proper map, but that can't be done if the Census Bureau doesn't agree with me. That's not good at all.

Monmouth County's Planning Board has a Research & Special Studies section that deals with the census, mapping, etc. I found a point of contact at the bottom of the page. For Middlesex County, their webpage was less definitive, so I went right to the Contacts List and found who I needed to talk to. I phoned both offices and was well received by each place. Monmouth said that the area is coordinated by the Census Bureau's Philadelphia Office and that nothing could really be done as long as Middlesex continued to define Laurence Harbor CDP to include the portion of Old Bridge that I think is better defined as part of Cliffwood Beach CDP. Middlesex wasn't sure whether a CDP could cross county lines. I'm now on Middlesex's contacts list regarding Census 2010 to include my input on the CDP border definitions. Cool.

American FactFinder is a great site for researching places using the resources of the US Census Bureau. Put a city and state into the search fields and you will get a data page with lots of hyperlinks to maps and data. The "reference map" link will take you to a dragable map of the region that includes the place you searched but a whole lot more information I found I didn't need, while the individual "map" links up and down the data page provide a more clearly defined map of the place you're looking at. Since I was interested in border definitions, the "map" hyperlinks worked best for me.

Documenting Email Correspondence in My Surname Database

2008-10-08T00:34:00.000-04:00

I get lots of genealogy email. The deal I strike with those who write asking for my help with genealogy research is that I am allowed to post their queries and my responses online in my surname research database. If they are concerned about privacy, I edit out their email addresses or their names, whatever. And I edit out particularly sensitive or nonpertinent comments (I hate Aunt Mildred because she always loved my brother best) or exchanges (I've been staying up late doing genealogy lately and that really annoys my dog).

Recently, a woman wrote but added the caveat that I could use the information but not quote her email in any way. This would have put me in the odd position of doing particular research without noting what prompted me to do so. I was unwilling to accept her preconditions and I received a hostile response from the writer. She thought me ungrateful and petty and assured me she'd no longer waste my time with her valuable insights.

I occasionally strike a nerve with correspondents. I still haven't figured out whether some of them just rub me the wrong way, or maybe my responses are subject to my mood or the phase of the moon. I suspect the phase of the moon has something to do with what motivates some persons to write.

Letters have always been difficult to keep private. I have a nearly fifty year old letter between siblings that provides some quite personal insights into the upcoming breakup of a marriage. The letter sternly specifies that the recipient shall destroy the letter immediately after reading it. A cautionary tale, to be sure.

A genealogist must respect others' privacy in a wide array of scenarios -- graveyards, family picnics, family feuds, and sensitive correspondence -- but the need for documenting and archiving the past must be given due consideration as well. As I understand it, the Australians destroy their old census records rather than make them available for researchers. I shudder to think about it.

Research Databases and Tools

2008-09-23T20:34:00.000-04:00

Some of my favorite research databases and tools:

Wikipedia As News Hound And Weather Forecaster

2008-09-02T01:19:00.000-04:00

During Hurricane Gustav I came to realize that Wikipedia has gotten into the "late-breaking news" business. And even into forecasting. And I'm not sure this is a good thing.

My wife is in Louisiana with the Red Cross, so it has been convenient for me to keep up with the hurricane by checking Wikipedia regularly. I always checked both the Current storm information paragraph and the links to the weather service under Forecast, all appearing at the bottom of the article. One visit, though, I noticed that there were a series of reversed edits and I wondered what people were arguing about. So I visited the talk page and found a minor discussion about adding a content disclaimer to the top of the article. In the context of mass evacuations from New Orleans, some Wiki editors wanted to add a box at the top of the page saying that readers shouldn't rely on Wikipedia for evacuation information.

One of the participants in the debate pointed me towards a discussion in the Administrators' noticeboard, where this box argument was going full tilt. Many of the administrators dismissed the idea of adding a warning notice, saying it would lead to specific (and ridiculous) warnings for all sorts of things, like getting a doctor's advice before choosing to get liposuction or to stick beans up your nose. Wikipedia already had a clear risk disclaimer, so what was the point of setting the precedent of adding warning boxes everywhere? The argument was finally resolved by adding a temporary notice that informs readers that they are reading an article about a current tropical cyclone that, while updated frequently, may not include the most current or official information for all areas. The words "may not reflect" are linked to the disclaimer. Once the hurricane is old news, the box will be removed.

While it was nice that they resolved the issue, I wonder if Wiki should be in the business of presenting late-breaking news and weather forecasts to its readership? It is, after all, an encyclopedia, not a newspaper or public bulletin board. If Wikipedia didn't publish "current storm information," maybe there would be no need to worry about readers deciding to stay home and ignore an evacuation order? The details could be added to the article after they occur, like most other articles. One Wiki editor pointed out that a vandal had changed the current strength of the hurricane and this edit somehow remained online for several hours uncorrected, so evacuees could indeed have been misled, he argued. The debate is well reasoned at times and absurd at others, but some of the issues are worth thinking about if you are a Wikipedian.

All in all, I like going to the Wiki home page and finding summaries of current events. But I do wonder what the broader implications are for Wikipedia as the line blurs between the documentation of history and the attempt to purvey news and provide forecasting?

A Wikipedia Article Is Not Your Org's Home Page

2008-08-27T11:57:00.000-04:00

People sometimes forget that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a place to promote an individual, organization, point of view, or cause. The word is dispassionate. As Joe Friday used to say,"Just the facts, ma'am."

For example, Wiki editors will quickly remove your eloquent discussions of the importance of pep rallies at your school or the sizable impact the new chef has had on school lunches. Those sorts of testimonies belong on your school's home page, at MySpace or Facebook, or on a community bulletin board of some sort. Think instead about the school's founding and important turning points -- who, where, when, how, and why? Think about the what -- What does the school teach, how many students, ethnic mix, major legal challenges or public events? What does the school sponsor? Don't slip into team promotions but links to the school's sports conferences and accreditations are appropriate, and championships are often mentioned in such articles. Don't forget famous alumni and prominent teachers or administrators. Provide details about the school's building, renovations, relocations, mergers with other schools, etc. Add a box with information about the name of the school's yearbook, school mascot, principal, etc. Add a photo.

As for advocacy of issues, good pages to read to get a sense of how people struggle between passion and dispassion are the Islamic Terrorism talk page and the Abortion talk pa ge. Just keep in mind that a balanced discussion is difficult because of the biases we each carry along with us. Some pages remain locked in battle, so for those with high-blood pressure it might be best to keep your distance and find something less controversial to assuage your Wiki needs. Again, if you want to advocate for a cause, establish or participate in a web page designed for such advocacy. Facebook groups are a good place to start -- search and you're liable to find a number of advocacy groups where you can post your thoughts. Or you can create your own group. I've done it -- it's easy enough. The Web and Blogosphere are always good places to look. Remember, Elton John fans, Saturday nights are alright for fightin'. But, as Jon Stewart might say, "Wikipedia -- not so much."

Genealogical Support to Wikipedia Articles

2008-08-27T00:28:00.000-04:00

Wikipedians are pushing beyond the edges of current biography. As we widen the scope of our pursuits, Wikipedians are outstripping the ability of biographers to keep up with our many tangential interests. This calls for creative solutions.

Genealogy databases support Wikipedia production quite nicely. Over the past six months or so, I've dug into the US Census, Social Security Death Index, and other databases to find details about individuals about whom little has been written. I've gathered some information about Henry B. Vincent, founder of the Erie Playhouse, using the US Census and other public sources. An article should be forthcoming soon. I've recently helped a couple of folks working diligently to upgrade the Wiki articles on Pennsylvania state parks. Turns out that Maurice K. Goddard is a major figure in the establishment of the park system in Pennsylvania, but no one could find his date of birth. So I used the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) to find his records. (SSDI has him as Maurice V. Goddard for some reason, but the other details all match nicely. What, the USG make a mistake?! Humbug!) For the Colton Point State Park article, the duo of Wikipedians wanted to know more about Henry Colton, for whom the park is named. I found some interesting details about this Williamsport lumberman in the US Census, local newspaper clippings, and a local history. (You can see the results of my digging on the Colton Point State Park discussion page.)

Wiki is a great way to develop local historical biography. Genealogy is a great way to support biographical production. Get creative in your pursuit of the details of your community leaders.

SharePoint Wiki

2008-08-10T21:56:00.000-04:00

I've had an opportunity to try SharePoint's Wiki (SP Wiki) for about two weeks. It is easy to use but utterly featureless. I can only wonder what Microsoft was thinking when they included this no frills item and pretended it was a Web 2.0 collaboration tool. (You can see an SP Wiki online at the University of Missouri's website)

KM Space is quite unhappy with SP Wiki because it doesn't adequately communicate incremental changes to pages like Wikipedia notifications do. I've not tried this yet, but apparently SP Wiki sends you a copy of the entire new page, rather than pointing out specific changes to the text.

Lawrence Liu is tired of hearing complaints about the SP Wiki. Liu says that users should look at SharePoint overall and be amazed at the package and not pick apart its elements which can't compete with separate tools available on the market today. Seems to me he is satisficing (and rude). Liu might as well get used to the unruly hoardes, because we're unhappy with SP Wiki and unlikely to stop complaining. Maybe this is standard fare for Microsoft, to put out a crappy product and say it is a marvel, but I'm truly surprised that anyone would put this out there and say it is a Cadillac. It's a Geo.

Now I'm wondering how I will ever transfer two weeks of input into another product, if my employer will ever add a different Wiki tool to SharePoint.

I'd Rather Be Writing discusses the use of columns to force the use of metatags. It seems cumbersome and not all that successful, from what this blog says. I'm not impressed.

Jackie Bodine briefly ran a SharePoint blog which included a discussion of how to add columns and tables to an SP Wiki. After a month or so she dropped the blog and that was about a year and a half ago. Maybe she recognized that the product was weak and decided it wasn't worth its own blog?

InformationWeek has an October 2007 article announcing that Atlassian, which produces the Wiki product Confluence, was teaming up with Microsoft to make a seamless connector between Confluence and SharePoint. A video embedded at the Classic Scoble Show contains an interview with Atlassian folks who explain many of the interesting features that this connector will provide, including a search engine, personal Web page and blog, and the capability to embed Confluence Wiki pages in SharePoint. Sounds promising. Atlassian has its own blog article about the release.

Of course InfoWorld says you probably already paid a lot of money for Microsoft products, so you might as well make use of the Wiki that is provided for free in SharePoint. Now that's an endorsement.

A Black Mark On the US Census

2008-06-29T11:47:00.000-04:00

I had a genealogy query this week regarding an African American line of the Carr family. It always startles me afresh that I can't find someone in the 1860 census because they were considered property at the time, not people, due to their race. As you go back in time, the census records for African Americans slide over into the 1860 Slave Census, where individual slaves are listed under their owner's name by age and gender only. The query requested the name of Charlie Carr's father. Eleven-year-old Charlie was living with his mother Sarah in the 1870 census in Red River, Arkansas. Charlie and his parents are likely listed among the slaves owned by H A Hawkins of Red River, Arkansas in the 1860 slave census. I'm not sure how to prove it, though. (Photo is of slaves on a plantation in nearby Mississippi during the Civil War)

A link to Wikipedia in all of this? Red River, Arkansas was in Sevier County until 1867, when it joined Little River County. This wasn't noted in the article on Little River County, so I added the text as well as an external link to Arkansas Formation Maps, which shows all of the changes in county designations in the State of Arkansas by year. It is a pressing need for Wikipedians to update all county articles that lack formation information.

Pack Rat

2008-06-04T22:22:00.000-04:00

In many aspects of my life I am a pack rat. I just never know when some stray item might come in handy. I grew up collecting stamps and coins and post cards. Now my genealogy hobby is the enabler, allowing me to keep old books and important family papers and do all sorts of "keeping of old stuff." The whole mess is barely tolerated in my household and I'm often persona non grata because of my hobbies.

Well, anyway, I've recently discovered yet another way to keep old stuff -- on Wikipedia. I'm not the most religious person, but apparently I can now be linked to two Wiki-ish cults: Inclusionism and Eventualism. Oh, my.
* Inclusionists like to hold onto articles and pieces of information because they can imagine a use for them or see no particular harm in keeping them.
* Eventualists like to hold onto info just in case they can find a use for it someday.

The Economist wrote a related article in March 2008 called The Battle for Wikipedia's Soul. It deals specifically with the fight over content between inclusionists and deletionists. The war really rages at times. And I've fired more than my fair share of volleys in support of adding, keeping, preserving.

So, how does this obsession manifest itself in my day-to-day Wiki world? Well, I can say that most airport articles don't suit my packrat nature. Look at London's Heathrow as an example. The gates and airlines are all current, like an airport webpage. Seems to me that someone doing research on airport growth and decline since the beginning of the use of smaller jets and airline hubs would be sorely out of luck if he/she tried to use Wikipedia. Deletionists are careful to quickly remove all signs of former airlines and gates when changes to flight schedules or airline bankruptcies occur. This is true for most articles about airports, which are overseen by WikiProject Airports.

This all came up because someone recently edited the Erie Water Works article to change the source of water for an Erie reservoir. The correcting editor is fixing the encyclopedia article about the current water works, while the article may actually refer to historic information about the sources of water used in Erie. My eventualist tendencies say to preserve the historic information in case a more complex article can be formulated that includes the history of EWW's water sources. I think Wiki is big enough to hold these extra facts and it's always best to proceed cautiously to avoid losing useful information.

Briefly Found Relatives

2008-06-01T21:04:00.000-04:00

Genealogy time and time again offers the chance to bridge the gaps between generations in order to tie up loose ends in a family's history or to fill the hole in a family's heart.

I located my father's long lost aunt through a serendipitous phone call to the funeral home where relatives were preparing for her imminent death. My father and his sister rushed to the aunt's bedside and held her hand in her final hours. She was unconscious, but my father and aunt were quite moved to be able to say some final words to her anyway.

On my wife's side, the family left New York with the coming of the railroads circa 1855 and headed west, half to Bloody Kansas and the other half to Wisconsin. The Wisconsin crew left Fond du Lac and went on to the Dakota Territory, but Yankton proved inhospitable. Half of the Dakota crew went to Oregon while my wife's line amazingly returned east to farm just outside of Washington, DC in the Maryland countryside. Well over a hundred years after the family split up, I located the Oregon and Kansas lines and had some nice family history-filled letters from the matriarch of the Oregon side of the family before she died only a few years later. She lived long enough to see the genealogy I published and to get her own copy.

I found my great aunt just before she died. She wrote that her line had come to the US from Germany but turned around and went back! They left a couple of sons in Buffalo and hopped aboard a ship back to Europe. How do you find out that sort of story except by personal accounts?! My follow up letter was returned by her daughter, with regrets upon the passing of her mother.

I'm hoping to find the descendants of my paternal grandfather's siblings here in New Jersey. Chances are that too much time has passed for me to find an ancient ancestor with all of the answers. I'm just hoping I discover a line with at least one family historian who will understand what is needed.

Persistence in your research is important because time marches on. You may not have the chance you have today to find something out or to mend fences. Dates of death are usually in the realm of history, but once in a while they are tomorrow or next week.

Correspondence

2008-05-30T00:21:00.000-04:00

Snail mail genealogy research is still an important first step in doing a family tree. I do most of my research online these days, either at web sites or by email. But when I first started doing genealogy, the data I needed was too recent to find online. I needed birth, death, and marriage certificates, wills, and deeds, etc. The records were protected by privacy laws and couldn't simply be viewed online. So I learned to send out one or two research queries with envelopes and stamps almost every day. It was ultimately very rewarding when the replies began to roll in, so I kept the letters going out because it was so painful to have to deal with an empty mailbox as I waited and waited for my answers to come with the postman.

When email entered the picture for me around 1994, I tried printing them all out and three-hole punching them for binding. I soon realized that was insanity. The trick was to save keystrokes, so I copied and pasted the emails directly into my genealogy software's notes section. My family tree soon became a repository for all of my genealogy research correspondence. Eventually, as I learned how to post my data online at Rootsweb WorldConnect, I found I could share that correspondence with fellow researchers. I occasionally have to remove all or part of an email because the query includes personal commentary about the family member who always shunned his brother or hated his Aunt Mabel, etc, etc. While I might clip a personal remark here and there, I tended to preserve the quality of the writing itself, which I considered an indicator of reliability. Sloppy spelling or grammar might tell us all something about the correspondent: do you think cousin Flo can accurately transcribe all those dates and places of birth and death when she can't spell geneology or cematery or calvary?

So now my database is chock full of mail I've received over the past fourteen years, as well as data sourced from countless books, census records, etc. And it is all available for view online. I keep a Private file for the original copies of emails that people have asked me to remove from the Internet. I use a simple numbering code to indicate where the original might be found in the Private file, and the Private file listing indicates where the original email is mentioned in the database.

At some point, the Ancestry people will have to consider selling a service that provides for the legacy of digital databases after the death of the owner. I'm sure my wife isn't going to want to resolve the many little details of my genealogy hobby when I die. There's a market in this, Ancestry. Mark my words.

The Pause That Refreshes

2008-05-28T23:42:00.000-04:00

I've unpacked my books and started to get my home office in order for some serious research work again. But there is something about crating up your worldly possessions, moving them, and then unboxing it all that disrupts a researcher's mental flow. It isn't writer's block. My brain's computer is sort of on hibernate,seems to me. Research requires a certain spirit that comes from stability and persistence. I find myself looking around the office, pondering issues of interest, if briefly, and dabbling here and there in genealogy mail and Wiki miscellany, but I just have no will to launch into anything substantial yet. It's probably a syndrome of some sort that affects only researchers who move, and no one has ever bothered to identify it because there's no profit to be made on selling pills to temporarily stalled researchers.

I have several projects on the back burner, but even those will have to wait their turn while I acclimate. I'm certainly not at school any longer. The job and commute are part of the new routine. The ungodly early morning alarm and "My baby takes the mornin' train!" are a bitter pill after my luxurious school schedule. But I'm anxious to get back into research and production. For now, though, I must pause and rejuvenate.

Brick Walls

2008-05-25T16:24:00.000-04:00

Genealogy is not a hobby for the impatient. There is no instant gratification. Answers only come in time, my friends. In my thirty years of genealogy research, the biggest frustration of my fellow hobbyists has been hitting the proverbial "brick wall." This usually means that the researcher has run out of obvious leads and is beginning to gnaw on his/her foot in despair. The necessary lead might take twenty or thirty years to appear, just like you see on the tv show "Cold Case."

In my case, I conducted family interviews and collected birth and death records back in the 1970s and 1980s. I did what additional research I could, even paying a genealogy society in Ireland to check their records. Leads dried up twenty years ago. The wall finally began to break down last year, when Ancestry started posting more passenger ship records from the 20th century. I finally found a slew of crew listings showing my grandfather's brother George as a night watchman aboard United States Lines passenger ships, something I knew from interviews but couldn't document before. Lo and behold, George listed two of his sisters as next of kin, showing married names and addresses! With that information I was able to search the 1930 Federal Census, get names and ages for each sister and their children and find precise birth and death dates using the Social Security Death Index. I used the death records to request free copies of obituaries from a local public library. The obituaries provided another sibling living in Glasgow, Scotland. I've requested a copy of one siblings Social Security application to confirm the siblings' parents' names. After thirty years of searching, I expect to be virtually chasing my line back to Ireland sometime this summer.

In this Information Age, there will eventually be a revelation of much needed data. The trick is in the waiting. If I had put my genealogy work aside, I would have never made the connection I'm about to make. My approach was not to struggle fruitlessly against my brick wall but to develop my genealogy hobby more broadly, always checking on my relatives now and then but not obsessing on them. Carr surname research became my hobby, giving me a reason to stay in the game for many years and not give up hope. I still have a Carr brick wall to overcome, but it will be resolved -- eventually.

The Good of the Many

2008-05-15T11:56:00.000-04:00

While it's an unpaid thrill, it can be a rush to publish an article or image on Wikipedia. But many editors are out there selflessly doing the most mundane editing and checking imaginable. Some of that work has been taken over by "bots," computer programs that scan Wikipedia for errors and vandalism, but those who use Wikipedia regularly owe a great debt to those Wikipedians keeping the encyclopedia up and running. Somehow, Spock's highly enriched statement of devotion to others' well-being comes to mind: The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.

One blogger points out that while 10% of registered Wikipedians (one hundred thousand out of a million) are frequent contributors (publish ten or more articles), the core membership consists of only 0.5% (5,000) of the membership. They are the ones correcting 'hte' to 'the' and reverting stupid remarks on the tuna fish sandwich article. (Yes, there is a tuna fish sandwich article. Leave the poor thing alone!)

So, join Wikipedia to write an article, but stay for a dose of grammar and police work and save the crew from oblivion.

Onesiphorus

2008-05-14T08:36:00.000-04:00

I received a genealogy query the other day that demonstrates a few of my common research processes, so I thought I'd share. Someone had writtten to me eight years ago to provide a clue regarding the descendants of Onesiphorus and Patience (Dow) Page and their daughter Sarah, who married Sanders Carr. The recent query sought original source information from the person who wrote to me years ago.

Many people do genealogy research as part of a family project, often surrounding a death or as a legacy in anticipation of their own eventual demise. An eight year old email query often involves a change in email address, at least. In this case, the researcher seems to have done a number of searches in the 1998-2000 period and stopped. Maybe the copy of the email query sent to that old address will get through, but odds are against it.

So the next best thing is to see if the information provided has some level of quality and makes sense, what they call asset vetting in intelligence work. I quickly found a website with a listing of Salisbury, Massachusetts marriages, including that of Onesiphorus Page to Patience Dow. I also found a genealogy with obvious descendants of Onesiphorus Page and his supposed son-in-law, Sanders Carr:

6-Onesiphorus Page Maxfield (18 May 1808-4 Sep 1874)
sp: Abigail Hurd Cutts (22 Jul 1809-21 Jan 1896)

* 7-Sanders Carr Maxfield (26 Dec 1830-20 Oct 1834)

As long as there aren't a ton of spelling variations, an old name like Onesiphorus can really help narrow your searches. (The census enumerators had a field day with Barzillai Carr's first name!)

While cultures vary, parents may use the surnames or even full names of paternal or maternal ancestors as their children's names, especially if the ancestors were prominent figures in the community. They also may name the first boy and girl after themselves. So don't ignore the obvious clue in a person's name when you are trying to go back a generation or two in the family roots.

Circular Reporting

2008-05-12T21:46:00.000-04:00

I've spent more than my fair share of time on the North Jersey Coast Line trains into and out of New York and Newark over the past thirty years. (The trains leave Manhattan by heading west, so the trains to the shore are said to be westbound, even in Matawan when they are heading southeast. NJ Transit gives you a polite hint by posting signs saying "Eastbound to New York" and "Westbound to Bay Head.") You can take the train to the plane these days, or head to Broadway or Monmouth Park racetrack. NJ Transit does a good job getting a lot of people where they need to go these days.

Friday afternoons in the summer months, though, the outbound trains from New York and Newark are crowded with tourists heading down to the shore, where they stay at rentals and hit the beaches and bars. I remember the young travelers strategizing how they planned to move from one shore town to the next when the one closes its bars an hour earlier than its neighbor. It was all very scientific. And since the party had already started on the train, it was also pretty annoying.

These tourists have come to be known pejoratively among shore residents as Bennys. The origin of the term is obscure, but there is no lack of opinions for what the term means. The New York Times ran a light community article a few years ago and it seems to have taken root as the unquestioned source for the origin of Benny as an acronym for Bayonne - Elizabeth - Newark - New York. A number of sites adopted the definition soon thereafter, so now the Wikipedia article is citing them all as proof of the meaning of the term. No one seems to have bothered to check to see that Bayonne was never a stop on the New York and Long Branch Railroad, the predecessor to the North Jersey Coast Line. Seems more likely to me that the Bay Head terminus, the last stop on the New York line since 1881, makes a much better choice for the Benny acronym. All the more since Bay Head was originally named Bayhead, so a BNY train ticket seems quite probable.

I've just suggested on the Benny talk page that they've gained false confidence in this Bayonne idea due to circular reporting. The publications seem to all use the same source and inappropriately magnify the analytic confidence. After all,the NYT reporter just talked to a few folks in Bradley Beach, probably on the beach or in a bar. It doesn't look like the reporter did any digging for hard evidence in the Asbury Park Press newspaper archives, and who knows if the fact-checkers even bothered to check sources on such a fluff piece.

Circular reporting is a constant threat when doing research. That threat makes careful documentation of sources that much more important. On top of that, one of the sources cited in the Wiki article is a compendium of sources, a sort of bibliography with snippets from the original articles. It is a nice tool but inappropriate as a footnoted source since it has no original content. Some of the links were dead and others traced back to dueling bloggers arguing over third person reporting and what they felt were common customs at the Jersey Shore. Such sources aren't credible or verifiable. Many alternate ideas for what Benny means are out there and probably should be rendered in the Wiki article.

The most annoying train rides are actually the evening rides towards the city, when music fans are heading to a concert at Madison Square Garden. They typically bring a case of beer and roll half-empty cans down the aisles and make a lot of noise. I guess they are for New York City residents the annoying equivalent of what the shore residents have to put up with at the beach. No doubt the city folks have a terse name for these typically disgusting revelers, but it is unlikely to be an obscure acronym.

Curriki and Wiki Curriculum in K-12

2008-05-12T15:14:00.000-04:00

I learned that Wikipedia's Classroom cooperation program is on auto-pilot; schools let them know they are doing projects as a courtesy, for future tracking purposes. Maybe something will come of it later? In the meantime, the blogosphere is discussing the need for curriculum so teachers can use Wiki in the learning process. I was pointed to Curriki, which is apparently developing curriculum, but I don't know much about them yet. Anything that trains young people to become responsible and productive Wikipedians could be a good thing.

Making Magic

2008-05-11T22:15:00.000-04:00

The Erie Times-News ran a front page article on Friday about how a marker was being placed in Griswold Park in honor of Harry Kellar (1849-1922), a famous magician who was born near this downtown Erie park. As part of my WikiProject Erie duties, I routinely watch the local newspaper for stories that might affect Wikipedia's set of articles about the city. Luckily, I didn't have to write an article about Kellar, and it even mentioned that he was born in Erie, but I had to add him to the list of people from Erie article and I had to mention the dedication of the memorial in the list of city parks article.

Putting yourself out there

2008-05-08T21:49:00.001-04:00

One of the benefits of posting your genealogy information online is that you get lots of neat mail. Someone wrote to me today to say her ancestors worked with my grandparents back in 1920 at the Mount Holly Inn in Baltimore, Maryland. (Of course the place burned to the ground in a huge fire in December 1920, but don't be blaming my grandfather, alright? I'm sure he had a decent alibi.) She thanked me for pointing out some sources where she might get a photo of the hotel.

I get mail daily from genealogists around the world seeking more details or asking for help regarding family members they've found in my surname database. A guy in New Zealand wrote me last year because he was writing a book about steamship stewardesses in the South Pacific and was interested in the correspondence my grandfather received from a young lady back in the 1910-1917 period.

Grandpa had a bunch of girlfriends and they all wrote him often. He stashed those love letters away and my aunt somehow got ahold of them and squirreled them away. It wasn't until she died that her sister found the letters and shared them with the rest of us. I hope you find a wonderful little stash of old letters like these and take the time to read and transcribe them. (You'll find links to my grandfather's history and correspondence on my genealogy home page to the right on this page.)

Online genealogy research is a combination of finding sources and putting your data out there for people to find. I encourage you to write a brief history of the family and upload it. Make a simple family tree using Family Treemaker software and upload the data for free to Rootsweb WorldConnect. It will get sucked into the Ancestry pay service database and you'll have both free users of Rootsweb and paid subscribers of Ancestry picking through your ancestors day and night. They'll write to you, so be nice to them and have fun.

The co- words of wiki-world

2008-05-08T17:38:00.000-04:00

About a dozen grad students from Mercyhurst recently became Wikipedians and contributed articles, some of which were highly rated by Wiki editors. I'm presently trying to find out if the school is obliged (or if it would be somehow advantageous) to participate in WikiProject Classroom Coordination. It sounds to me like coordination is voluntary and mainly designed to keep large groups of kids in a computer lab from suddenly descending on Wikipedia. It does provide statistics to Wiki and the school, so maybe it would be useful.

When I find that a topic has no associated article at Wikipedia, I find my topic mentioned in an existing article (or add it) and create an internal link right there. That creates a red-letter link, meaning it's a dead link, doesn't go anywhere. I click the link and compose my article. When I'm done, I check Wiki for other instances of the term and create more internal links to my new article. Someone told me recently that this process requires collaboration. I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe I am supposed to go to the pertinent WikiProject page and suggest the idea? Most times I've been told to just go ahead and write it, so I don't ask anymore. When I'm off-base, and that's happened more than once, the editors flock to my errant article and quickly correct it.

In Wiki-world, cooperation calls for you to assume good faith and to try to work things out when there is disagreement. I've come up against some editors lately who are overly controlling and poor ambassadors of Wiki principles. Such struggles can test your patience. One senior editor I invited to intercede in a dispute had to step away to lick his wounds after slipping into an editing war with the offender. Fighting fire with fire isn't recommended procedure at Wiki. Calm, cool, and collected aren't all co- words in Wiki-world, but they should be.

Geography Bound

2008-05-08T01:25:00.000-04:00

I've been wondering if I should give up my work on Erie, Pennsylvania history because I'm moving away soon? I'm not even from Erie, so maybe my interest is fleeting? I won't have ready access to local research sources and I won't get the daily paper anymore. On the positive side, I've bought a couple of the classic local histories and have access to another one online at the Erie County Historical Society's website. Plus, I know the topic pretty well after researching it for over a year. And I've got friends here.

I'm returning to central New Jersey, whence I came a couple of years ago. I've been at Mercyhurst College getting my master's degree. I've been researching on Wikipedia as a hobby and having a lot of fun. Well, there was the time I tried to take Wiki pictures in front of the local television station. They got pretty upset when I went up to the antennae to try to take an art shot. I mean, it was into the sun and my camera is pretty pathetic, but they were ready to call Homeland Security and all. Geez. It wasn't like I was being secret squirrel about it. I parked right out front and walked up to the building. All of a sudden there was someone beating on the glass and warning me off. Oh, well, Such are the times we live in.

I've finishing what can only be described as an "Old School" experience here in Erie. I never tried to lead streakers to the quad, at least not that I remember, but my twenty-something classmates wonder sometimes as this fifty-plus character in school with them. I took up Facebook and became a maven of Web 2.0. It's been invigorating.

I've been keeping up pretty well with my genealogy email. I have an online database of over 60,000 names and I get quite a bit of mail. It's a surname database dealing with the Carr name. They're not all from my line of Carrs, so the individuals are different races, different countries, and different parts of the US. There's no end in sight to the work involved, and that suits me fine. I love puzzles.

So, welcome to my blog. I figure to talk about my experiences on Wikipedia and in my genealogy research. I'll tell you a bit about myself along the way, but not too much as you're probably not all that interested. Now and then I'll encourage you to get involved with Wikipedia by getting an account and diving in as a new editor. And from time to time I'll tell you to interview your elders and take some notes on your family history for posterity. But I won't nag you.