BradPace.com

I was just doing some keyword research and decided to compare what Wordtracker, Microsoft and Google all had to say about some of my major keywords.  Just using the term “genealogy” here is the information they all provided.  Google said that they had they had about 2,740,000 searches for this term last month.  Microsoft said they had 11,000 searches for it.  And Wordtracker predicted 4,700 searches per day for Genealogy accross all search engines (whatever that means) or about 141,000 per month.

So a few observations.  First, genealogists are  249 times more likely to use Google than Microsoft.  I think this shows that most genealogists are used to doing complex and numorous searches and that they greatly prefer Google to Microsoft.  Second, no one claims the wordtracker tool is anyware close with their prediction tool but this is way off.  They might as well use a random number generator . Anyway I think Wordtracker has the same problem as Microsoft for the Genealogy space.  Because they take all their data from 2nd or 3rd tier search engines that no one in the genealogy space would ever use.  Third, Google rules the world!

Lastly it is interesting to note that last month (July) we had a total of 2.8 million searches done on WorldVitalRecords.com (our genealogy search site).  More than Google had for the term Genealogy during the same time frame!  This is comparing apples to oranges but anytime I can feel like we are competing with Google I will take it.

My great grandfather on my father’s, mother’s side (is that the right way to say that) was John Henry Western. Last time I was at my grandmothers house she said she had an audio tape that someone had given her 30 years ago and she had never listened to. It was a tape to tape real (if thats what you call it) and she had no idea what was on it. So I took it and had it digitized at Allens Camera in Provo. It took them a few weeks but for about $30 I had a CD with over 45 minutes of audio. It was very rough sounding with poor sound quality, lots of pops and hisses, and loud and soft parts. About half of it was him singing at a birthday or wedding party. But about 20 minutes was my grandma’s cousin interviewing him. He was 80 at the time.

I put the .wav file into Audacity and cleaned it up. Normalized and equalized it, removed the pops and chopped it into 2 files. One with his speaking part and the other with the singing. Then I saved both as mp3 files to share over the internet with my family. Overall it took about 2 hours to edit the audio. I am far from an audio expert. My biggest problem so far has been how to share this with my family. I cant upload it to facebook and my wordpress will not let me upload an mp3.  Finally I had to upload the mp3 files to my own server and just link to them as a regular link.  There has to be a better way.  I know there is an audio plugin for wordpress I need to check out.

Listen to John Henry Western Sing.  Listen to John Henry talk. (right click to save the file)

The singing was good but I really love the interview part. He talks about when he was a boy and they moved from the Pioche Nevada area to Deseret Utah (outside of Delta). He talks about a few memories and also gives some words of wisdom to his posterity.

I heard about a new web service called Evernote.com on one of my favorite podcasts (this week in tech or TWIT).  The site is still in beta but I wanted to try it out.  I signed up for the beta and within a few hours had an invite in my inbox.  The idea behind evernote is that it is a place to store your “brain” on the internet and then go back and search it later. Their tagline is to remember everything! Upload anything you want to store for later reference.  Images, snipits of text from webpages or emails, text notes, and even audio can be stored on evernote.  One think that made evernote interesting to me is their multiple client strategy.  They have both PC and Mac clients.  As well as a nice pure web interface and firefox plugin. They are also working on blackberry and iphone clients that are coming soon.  This is important because often time you want to access this data from strange places.

The coolest thing about this service is their ability to scan and index all the data that you add as notes.  So if you upload a digital photo of a receipt you can later automatically search for the text in the image and evernote will highlight it on the image.  I am sure there are other online OCR apps but this is the first I have seen that does it well.

My first thought was that this would be a great place to store family history and genealogical data online.  I immediately uploaded a bunch of family history pages I recently scanned at my Grandmother’s home.  This included photos with names, newsletter articles, and pedigree sheets.  About 60 high res images.  I uploaded the images using their PC client and it took about 30 minutes to not only upload the images to the website but to also OCR all the text on the pages.  If I had all my genealogy on this site I could easily search for any person, place or date and Evernote would show me all the documents I have that relate to this person (assuming there is some text associates with the photos).  You can also manually tag images.  Here is a few screenshots of a search I did for my grandfather Elwin (Pace).

Here is a pedigree file where I searched for James Pace. (Yes I do have second cousins in my tree! Paces on 2 sides.)

Here is a photo that shows it does pick up hand written text as well (searched for Paul). (Yes that is me on the right with my oh so hip 70s pants.  I don’t think I was invited to be in the photo).

Now this is in beta, but here are the drawbacks. I did not that the OCR is only about 50-60% accurate.  Surely not good enough for what we do on WVR. There are many places that I thought it should have picked up “Elwin” when I did the search (like the pedigree).  Also it is hard to flip through the results.  They just list every note in order that has your search results.

Next their tagging feature is very week.  Facebook does that best at tagging photos (selecting an area on the photo to tie a tag to) and Evernote just does it at the noto (or photo) level.  Lame!  Also because some of the OCR is not correct I wish I could see how their software sees all the text and be able to fix it or add the text to anything they missed.  So I could know for sure that everything was indexed correctly.  This is a major drawback to this system.

All in all I think this site/software is very cool and as it improves should be very useful.  Just the mobile aspects of this are amazing.  Think about doing price comparisons at the store by just taking photos with your phone and mailing them to Evernote.  Then going back and comparing all the prices and features.  But I think it needs to have better OCR and indexing and a few more features before it is ready to be a serious tool (especially a genealogy tool).

A few weeks ago my boss Paul Allen gave us the mandate to spend 10% of our work time on our own genealogy.  I had been spending some time already doing my family history but this will be a great reason to get more serious about it.  I already have all 4 of my grandparents lines at least back 5 generations.  Although I don’t have full sources and documentation for it all yet.  I don’t have it all plugged into one family tree file with me as the root person yet.  That is one of my first steps.  But I admit that I have been so busy on my normal work tasks I have been working 50-60 hour weeks just trying to keep up.  And I have not started my 10% time.  Maybe I need to create a task in bugzilla and make it a P1 .

Anyway, this last weekend was General Conference for the LDS church and I thought this would be a perfect time to really dig into the project and start it off on the right foot.  On Sunday morning my dad called and asked if me and my family wanted to travel to Delta (Utah) to visit my grandmother Grace Western Pace.  She is pushing 90, has lived alone in her home since my grandpa died 35 years ago, and has failing eye site.  But is very sharp mentally and is in pretty good health.  I thought this visit would be a great chance to get some family history data and to see what she has available. She is not the genealogist of the family but I was supprized to find she had just stacks compiled family histories.  Pedigree charts,   hundreds of family group charts, photos and historical stories.  Literally  thousands of pages of information.  I think much of the genealogy information I already have and was able to get online (who knows when I find the roadblocks there may be something there I can use).  But the photos and all the stories where great info to find.

Anyway I took my laptop and my scanner to digitize some of the info I found.  My first problem, all the family history pages are those really long ones and they dont fit in my scanner.  Who came up this that crazy size page anyway!  So to get all the info I had to scan every page twice.  What a pain.  It also means that I will have time in photoshop pulling out and stitching together the images.  But I was able to get several hundred pages of information scanned.  She did not offer to let me take any of the information even though no one has looked at it in 20 years.  It’s ok, that gives me a reason to visit her more often.

I also installed FamilyTreeMaker 16 and started my tree consolidation project.  I am doing the same project on familylink.com so that I can compare the 2 systems.  I received a free copy of FTM 16 as a gift so I wanted to give it a try. I have found FTM experience to be very poor.  Too many popup windows and I find it hard to use.  Also everytime I run the program I get a Windows popup that reads “this program has known compatibility issues”.  Because I am running Vista I am sure.  Also I cant even view the pedigree view because I keep getting an error that I dont have a default printer setup.  Very frustrating! I also tried to merge feature to merge in my grandparents trees and I could not get the feature to work at all.  It could never find my grandparent to start the merge.  It also gave no tips as to what info it needs to match up a person in my tree to the uploaded merged tree. FamilyLink.com tree builder does not have any merge functionality.  We need to think about that.

One note is that my first question on the FamilyLink.com family tree was “does it have an export feature?”.  I need to have a way to get the information out of the system if I am going to build my tree there.  It does have an export feature and it seems to work well.  But I had a hard time finding it because it is just called “Gedcom” in the menu.  I need to change this to “Export” or something similar.  Also it would be nice if we could export to all the major family tree formats. I will have to run a usability test on the export functionality on Family Link and promote this feature better.

I think this idea of editing a file locally on your PC, then importing it to an online system to share it and edit it online, then exporting it so it can be edited back on the PC is interesting.  I would like to do more research to understand better if genealogists typically do this type of thing.

This is a live blog from the FamilySearch developers conference.  The keynote is given by Ranson Love who is the director of strategic partnerships at FamilySearch.

There is a huge groundswell of genealogy interest in the world and this interest is just in the beginning stages.   The Lord has prepared the world for this work including the open source movement.  Hardware and opens source tools are key to the success of the spread of genealogy on the web.  Also great sets of complex data like wikipedia and google provide solutions to problems that could never have been solved in the past.  Social networking will also be a big boon to the genealogy community.

There is a universal human need for family history.  Everyone wants to know who we are.  Once someone knows that they want to share that information. He mentioned our we’re related success as an example.

What is the killer platform for genealogy?  Open and collaborateive technology.  Open and collaborative. Includes social networking.

There are many challenges to this work.  First the need is worldwide and many of these people do not have technology.  He estimates that there are 70 billion records in the world.  Currently FamilySearch has 6 Billion records and 12 Billion names.  Over half of all children born in the world today have no official record of their existence!  This statistic is getting worse because of the distribution of births in the world. Another problem is that the data in the vault is not owned but governed by 9000 contracts.

FamilySearch can not do it all alone and they need help from partners. They estimate that there are over 10 million genealogists in the world today.  Their vision is they need a global community and free flow of data into open repositories.  Also linked to commercial and non-profit services and richer content is key to their success.  They want partners to succeed because they can reach users who the church cant.  This requires some paridigm shifts.  Moving away from aquiring content but getting access to data.  Also they will not build products any more but  are building platforms.  Moving away from collecting information to sharing information.  Moving away from just a church workforce to a community.  Also they want to develope standards to help the industry.

Key technology components.    New family search creates a collaboration of users and data. In 7 generations that is 127 direct ancestors and 8,319 ancestors of ralated children.  In 10 generations there are 525,311 related ancestors!  Trees provide context to data that many people are interested in. The new family search has increased family history work by 10x in the districts where it has been released.

They have made many advancements in scanning.  Can now digitize an entire roll of film in 20 minutes of processing.  This used to take a live person over 2 hours to complete.  Indexing is then done with double blind entries and then they compare both versions.  This produces quality results.  The farther back in time the harder it is to index because the data is not as organized.  In 2005 they had 800 indexers.  Now they have 160,00 stakes in the US, UK and Germany and includes 120k users and can produce 1.7 million names a day.  They want 300k users in the next 2 years.  They have 3 programs and ways to partner with them:  record access program, web services program, and family history center affiliates.

They are seeing a big change in the attitudes of record custodians over the last few years.  A few years ago they did not want anything to do with digital.  Now they undestand that their data needs to be digital to remain viable and to preserve their records.  FamilySearch is attempting to fill this need and supply what these record custodians need.  They try and do it with no cost to them.

FamilySearch web services contains 2 major areas.  Framily tree and records search.  Both include APIs to collaborate with partners. Need to be able to search any repository and must be able to do a selective copy of relevant data.  Must be able to past the data into desired repository through some type of app.  Must have a persistent link to source to ensure accuracy of the data and lead generation.

They want to build a genealogy ecosystem that includes archives, customers, familysearch, desktop and web app providers and genealogy societies.  All these individual parts need to contribute data into the tree.

I am running an analysis on the top ad banners from several genealogy companies. In case you don’t know, EPC stands for earnings per hundred clicks. This is a measure of their conversion rate and payout and gives affiliates a way to judge programs and ad creative.

Ancestry.co.uk is a 5 star CJ program (payouts of over 20k each month?) with a 3 month epc of $13.68 and a 7 day epc of $2.15. (They have had a huge dip in epc, ie conversion rate, in June for some reason). OneGreatFamily is just a 3 star CJ program (5k in payouts each month?) and has just a $2.74 3 month epc and a $3.77 7 day epc.

Here are Ancestry.co.uk top banners (highest 3 month EPC):

$38 3 month epc and $15 7 day epc. This seems like an ugly banner to me with too many words and not a good call to action. But it is there best performing banner. It could just be the size. It is the only 120×60 they offer.

This one has a $28 3 month epc and is pitching the 1891 census which was hot news. It has good branding and a good call to action.

This one is at $25 and is pitching free access to marriage and death records. Good branding but poor call to action. Good colors.

This is a simple banner targeted at people who know Tony Robinson. It has a $23 epc, is ugly and has a good button.
Here are OneGreatFamily top banners:

This is a strange sized little banner that simply pitches their free trial, shows their branding and has an ok call to action. This has a $16 epc.

This one has no animation, catchy photos, great branding and a great call to action. It has a $15 epc.

Again this one is pitching the free trial and millions of names in their tree. Good branding and poor call to action.

If any of you have input on these banners please let me know.

Search the Social Security Death Index:

Given Name:   Family Name:

Find Your Ancestors in Arizona Given Name:   Family Name:

Find Your Ancestors Given Name:   Family Name:   Place:   Keyword:   Year:   Matching: Exact Soundex Double Metaphone

Search Birth Marriage & Death Records:

Given Name:   Family Name:

Social Security Death Index

You have to check out this new multi-touch screen technology that is demonstrated in this video.

The technology is explained a bit in this article at FastCompany Be sure to watch the video by clicking on the link on the right.

When you see this you cant help but think there are much better ways to interact with a computer. I hear that Microsoft Vista has some of the best voice recognition software yet. Think if you combined multi point touch screens with voice recognition. Heaven!

I especially love the idea of interacting with data this way. Internet and computer searches, graphics design and even things like doing your genealogy. Think of having a virtual tree that you can zoom in and out and rotate in 3D to determine where you are missing data. Just awsome.