During the last several weeks there has been a verbal uprising in the online genealogy community over the demise of Google Reader and the imminent demise of Ancestry.com's "Old Search". Hundreds if not thousands of posts on Social Media and blogs have been written about these two subjects.

I understand that people can be resistant to change, but give me a break. I had used Google Reader for a long time and after 5 minutes of research and 5 minutes of setup - I changed to Feedly and THAT major life problem was solved,

Regarding Old Search, I was a bit more reluctant because I liked it and because I had not used New Search enough to actually allay my concerns with it. So I watched a short tutorial from Ancestry.com about search and read a few things and switched over. Took a little more time and "convincing" but it was done. And everything works just fine. Again another major life crisis was averted.

Now please compare those two insignificant life changes with those that my Great Aunt Ida Mae Williams Fageol faced during her 108 years here on earth. Born in 1884, she lived until 1992. She lived through some HUGE technological and other changes and events that impacted her life - some directly and some indirectly:

• Mass Electrification
• Automobiles
• Airplanes
• Electronics
• Radio
• Television
• Computers
• Telephones
• The Internet

She also survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake where she was displaced after her home was severely damaged. She had family members who served and fortunately survived World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.

Could Aunt Ida have handled the demise of Google Reader and Old Search? With her eyes closed and without breaking a sweat or increasing her heartbeat. And without complaint.

Since I am a newspaper researching fanatic, I am always on the lookout for new and interesting repositories and tools that might assist me with this facet of my genealogy and family history research.

Recently I became aware of a new service, provided by a company in New Zealand, that provides what I like to call a "combo" research methodology for searching multiple newspapers at one time.

I have done several YouTube videos and tutorials about navigating digital newspaper repositories and sites. They all have one thing in common - the site is dedicated more than likely to a U.S. state or Canadian province, with multiple newspapers from that geographical entity.

Elephind takes it one step further and eliminates the geographical boundary - they allow searching of several of these geographically "bounded" repositories at one time. 

Currently they have over 1,000 newspaper titles that they make available for searching. The largest two are from the National Library of Australia (Trove), and the U.S. Library of Congress (Chronicling America), and they include titles from Singapore and New Zealand, as well as other U.S, collections. Certainly you could search each of these sites individually, yet a search of all at one time might be appropriate at times.

I know I will be watching this site as it continues to grow.  If you are interested in different ways to access newspapers, you might want to also. They can be found at www.elephind.com. Also if you visit the site you will be able to discover what an elephind is!

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time researching your ancestors. Also if you are like me - you read a lot of blogs and books and periodicals about genealogy - all with the intention of finding any little tidbit that might further your own research.

In that reading there is often the use of the term "break down the brick wall," or "I have come up against a brick wall," or "I can't go further because I have hit a brick wall."

FULL DISCLOSURE - I hate the term "brick wall." In my view there is only one thing to do when stymied:

So do what I do:

• Revisit or create a more detailed and thought through research plan
• Revisit your own conclusions
• Make sure to incorporate "cluster" or FAN research into your plans
• Research more

...and when you are done with all the above and are still stuck - research even more!

There has been tons written about this subject and you can certainly find out more methods - but it is all about researching more. 

MOST OF ALL

Don't focus on what I consider to be a negative term to take away your positive drive to find what you want to find.

Wow! Hasn't this been an amazing week regarding Marriage Equality? Regardless of how you feel about the topic, it certainly has been a landmark few days. By the way, Thomas MacEntee and Judy Russell have written eloquent pieces about the subject.

It got me thinking though about “Genealogy Equality.”  In the Declaration of Independence it states “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”  Well we know for sure that all genealogists are CREATED equal but they certainly don’t stay that way do they?

For the most part, a genealogist starts out like all of us – with an itch to find out more about our ancestors. Some have a historical bent, others a story bent, and others are trying to ensure that the who’s who of their ancestors is exactly correct.

All that is cool. But I have been reading a lot of folks complaining again and again ad nauseum recently about unsourced or poorly sourced family trees that are on many of the One World tree sites – Ancestry, WikiTree, My Heritage, Geni, etc. And the complaining never seems to end. It goes on and on and on.

Let me propose an analogy. I think you would agree that professional NBA players are at the top of their profession, right? And then there are millions of everyday men who play basketball on the weekends in school yards and some of them are potbellied balding 45 year olds who can't dunk and are just trying to get a bit of a workout and have some fun with their buddies.

Have you ever heard NBA players complain about those 45 year old balding guys and how unskilled they are?

I didn't think so.

Then why the heck are the more experienced genealogists complaining about the lack of skills of less experienced folks? I read about this all the time and it puzzles me.

What does a crappy tree have to do with you? It’s not like you would ever consider merging a crappy tree with your exquisite tree. You have done your research; you have applied the GPS; you have written your citations. Heck, Thomas Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills have looked at your research and documentation and are beaming with pride.

By the way - that guy on the weekend? – he is saying “Please shut up and just let me have some fun, even though I can't dunk or execute a cross-over dribble very well." And he is whispering softly – “I am trying to cite my sources better – I really am.”

I will be the first to admit that I am not an expert in using timelines to display ancestor events for my family history. In 2010 I became interested in incorporating a timeline in my website. So after a few hours research, I settled on xtimeline.com. I tried a few others and found xtimeline to my liking. 

Basically with xtimeline, you enter the events in your own private (or public) timeline on the xtimeline site. Then you can embed the timeline in your own site. As an example, check out my Braunhart Family Timeline.

OOPS - if you are using a smartphone, the timeline will not display. It is done in Flash, so obviously if you are on an iPhone it will not display. But I have an Android phone and it won't display there either. This was recently discovered by me as I don't often view my own website on my phone.

After further research, I discovered that many of the online timeline sites use Flash as well. This is not going to be a timeline site/app comparison discussion, but I have looked at Dipity, and Capzle as well as TimeToast. And there are dozens of others that are available, either for the iPhone, Android, or online via your PC - and many of them are based on Flash.

So the CAUTION is - if your timeline capability is based on Flash and you embed the timeline in your blog/website - you need to make a change - otherwise it will not be supported on mobile. Furthermore - what is the life expectancy of Flash on any platform? Don't get me wrong - I don't have an issue with Flash in general, but it is a technical issue as many vendors are eliminating the use of it.

So what to do? I settled on TimelineJS.  What is it?  From their website:

TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables you to build visually-rich interactive timelines and is available in 40 languages. It can pull in media from different sources and has built in support for: Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more media types are regularly added.

One of the things I like about it beyond the multi-media options, is that it is driven by entering data into a Google spreadsheet. I had my new timeline up and running in about 15 minutes, and after another 15 minutes of tweaks I embedded it into my website (see Braunhart Family Timeline). Fortunately xtimeline had an export capability to a .csv file so I didn't have to retype everything. Oh I still need to populate the new timeline with photos and videos  but it is incredibly easy to do that.


So - be careful out there (to quote an old Hill Street Blues line). Check to see if the timeline on your site is supported on mobile devices. Everyone loves free - as most of these timeline apps are - but will they work long term?

This may be old hat to expert professional genealogy researchers but it is a new discovery for me and that is the HathiTrust Digital Library. It combines the best of Google Books, the Internet Archive and others into one amazing research site.

It began in 2008 as a consortium of several universities and now many institutions are jumping on board. Better yet a quote from the HathiTrust.org website:

"HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections. HathiTrust has quickly expanded to include additional partners and to provide those partners with an easy means to archive their digital content."

The initial focus of the partnership has been on preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections. This includes both in copyright and public domain materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft, as well as through in-house initiatives. The partners aim to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world and develop shared strategies for managing and developing their digital and print holdings in a collaborative way.

The primary community that HathiTrust serves are the members (faculty, students, and users) of its partners libraries, but the materials in HathiTrust are available to all to the extent permitted by law and contracts, providing the published record as a public good to users around the world."
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In late 2012, there were over 10,000,000 volumes available.

What are the benefits?  There were two things that stood out for me immediately:

1. Whereas Google Books often provides just a snippet of information or no preview at all of the material found in a search; with HathiTrust - on several occasions I was able to get full view and a pdf of a single page was easily downloaded (depending on copyright restrictions of course).
2. The website interface is outstanding. Incredibly easy to use with multiple viewing, zooming options etc.

Furthermore - their FAQ and Help sections are very thorough, explaining the "how to use" hints as well as what is available for download and in great detail.

Am I a HathiTrust proponent.  Unequivocally YES! And I am still discovering more.

Give it a try - HATHITRUST.ORG