Recent episodes have included:  (1)How Special Interest Groups Can Add to Your Society,(2)If Your Society Folded Today, Would Anyone Care?, (3)Focus on Genealogy Society ByLaws, and (4)Your Society’s Facebook Presence.

In addition to the audio presentation by the speaker, listeners can type questions and add comments on a live chat board.  This often adds additional value to the speaker’s material.

Each episode is archived and can be played back at a later date.  ”My Society” is available as a podcast via  iTunes, as well.

How to listen to FGS Radio

They are also developing a webinar series, Society Management Education Delivered Online.  The first one (“Social Networking for Genealogy Societies“, a presentation by Thomas MacEntee) was held yesterday. FGS members have access to recorded webinars and syllabus materials in the members-only section of the FGS website at Federation of Genealogical Societies – About FGS. For more information see their press release.

The effort to digitize these records began in 1973 and continues today. At the current pace, it is estimated that converting all of the images to a digital format will take  from 6 to 10 years.

FamilySearch also has an ongoing effort to transcribe all of the digital records. Transcription involves having someone type all of the information on an image. They have developed an impressive set of software tools that enable anybody located anywhere in the world to participate in the transcription process. Volunteers download software onto their personal computers and then download a batch of document.

It should take less than an hour for you to type in the information from the images contained in a batch into a custom form that includes help screens to  provide guidance.  The software is designed so that you can stop and resume as many times as you need to without losing any of your work. They allow you to take up to a week to complete a batch before they re-assign it to somebody else.

Every document is transcribed by two different people and the results are compared. Any differences are resolved by a third person to insure accuracy.

It seems that the transcription effort is moving quickly: about 200 million records will be transcribed this year alone. However, at this pace it will still take another 300 years to complete this transcription.

As exciting as this is, I couldn’t help myself from wondering ‘what’s in this for organizations like the DGS?’.   Does it make sense for an organization like ours to stop emphasizing projects like our cemetery transcriptions to shift focus to the FamilySearch transcription project? Given their resources and dedication to preservation and public access to the transcribed records does it make sense not to?

To learn more about the FamilySearch indexing project see http://indexing.familysearch.org

Tony Hanson

Tony Hanson

The ‘Our Military Heritage’ website is available to researchers and genealogists free of charge. The material is organized chronologically by war whenever possible. Within each war or category, materials are organized by type of record and includes biographies, burials, diaries, letters, pension records, posters, service records, photographs, post war activities and linage societies, and unit histories and rosters. The source information is printed material in the public domain, copyright-clear or used with permission of the author.
 
The most exciting news associated with this program is that the Allen County Public Library is soliciting material from private collections. The library is working on a portal to submit the material, but until then the website advises you to contact Curt Witcher (Cwitcher@ACPL.Info) or The Genealogy Center, Attn: Curt Witcher, Allen County Public Library, 900 Library Plaza, Ft. Wayne, IN 46802 if you have any material you would like to share. They will take it as printed, hard copies or as electronic copies. This can be material from your own collection, research files or items you may have which doesn’t belong to your family, but you don’t have the heart to it toss out. The website can be found at the following URL: http://www.genealogycenter.net/military/index.php.

Suzan Younger

I just got back from a session on WeRelate, billed as ‘The Worlds Largest Genealogy Wiki’, and I was really impressed. Their philosophy is to establish a single, publicly available (and publicly changeable) page for every person on the site. Let the argument begin anew…

Yes, the idea of allowing somebody else to change my data seems very un-natural. But I like the idea of somebody else correcting something I have wrong (or adding to what I know) a lot, and that is what is possible on WeRelate.

One of the things I really like is that this idea focuses differences of opinion into a place where they can be discussed (there is Talk tool associated with every page) and either resolved or left to co-exist (it is possible to have multiple dates and/or locations for any given event). All previous versions are maintained for each page, and the identity of the person who makes each change is recorded.

Another of the many things I like about this tool is that just about anything can be a hyper-link to another area of the Wiki or to another site altogether. In addition to pages for people, you can also create a page for a place, a source, a family and for yourself. Actually, a page for yourself is required: it is the only page that cannot be changed by somebody else.

The URL is http://www.werelate.org

Tony Hanson

What is a Wiki? It is a web site with content that can be changed by just about anybody. Wikipedia is probably the best known example of a Wiki.

On the surface this idea seems a little crazy… content created by anybody? How can that be trusted?

Based on the admittedly limited amount of checking I have done on the Family Search site it appears that maybe you can trust what you find. Each page has one or more people who are notified whenever content is added, deleted or changed, and they act as guardians over the information. It is not a perfect system but in this application it seems to be working fairly well.

Don’t just take my word for it: go see for yourself. Start at http://fsbeta.familysearch.org/ and Select Learn at the top of the page. Type something in the Search: box and press the Enter key to see what is available. Or click on Share what you know to learn how to add your own content.

Tony Hanson

I’ll give more details at our September general meeting.

Janet Khashab

Janet Khashab

Sandra Crowley