App Creates Walking Talking Avatars of Dead Relatives

An app called With Me is being developed in South Korea which allows individuals to create avatars of deceased relatives, then take selfies with the avatar. AI (Artificial Intelligence) also allows them to have conversations with the avatar via video.

The avatars recognize emotions and can mimic facial expressions so if an individual were to blow a kiss towards the avatar, it will turn and bestow a kiss to the individual. 

As a genealogist, in some ways this sounds a bit intriguing to me. However the avatars are not created in the likeness of the deceased relative but instead are based on 3D scanning done of the living individual and other family members.

This does mean that one could be a proactive user by having Grandmother or Grandfather or another older relative scanned while they are living. Their avatar would then be created and the living relative would have instant access to dear Grandma after she passes on.

I'm torn between thinking this is a very cool idea and feeling like it might be taking AI a bit too far. However I don't agree with some journalists who are calling this a "creepy app". I do think it's intriguing! What do you think?

Watch the video about this new app at App creates selfies with avatars of dead relatives

Credit: Image is a screenshot from the video at bbc.com

I Love This! AGS Laser Projection Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard

I just bought a new toy. It's a virtual keyboard and I love it! I can text much easier now from my iPhone, and this little device slips easily into my purse for when I'm not at home. It weighs 5 ounces and is only 2 x 2.8 x 2.8 inches in size!

After reading reviews of different brands, I bought the AGS Laser Projection Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard

It works on an Iphone, Ipad, Smartphone and Tablets

Right now it's on sale for $39.90, regularly $169.99!  

Here's some details from the Amazon page:

• Easily pair laser projection keyboard & mouse for your Iphone, Ipad, Smartphone, laptop or tablets
• For devices with bluetooth, operation systems: Windows, iOS, Android, Mac OS
• English QWERTY keyboard layout

And here's mine in action! The cord is just for charging. I set it up on a wooden TV tray and it worked just great.

If you are in Canada you have to buy it from Amazon.ca and it will cost you $59.99 Canadian. Use this link  AGS Wireless Laser Projection Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard & Mouse for Iphone, Ipad, Smartphone and Tablets 

Americans can purchase it for $39.99 U.S. by using this link: AGS Laser Projection Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard

I am having a lot of fun with my new toy.  

Sharing Memories Week 17: One Ringy Dingy Two Ringy Dingy

Sharing Memories is a series of weekly prompts to help all genealogists (including me!) with writing up memories of our ancestors and our childhood. 

We all love to find a diary or letters written by great grandma or grandpa where they talk about their lives and share their memories. Think how excited one of your descendants will be to read about your memories and your stories! These stories will be lost after a few generations unless we preserve them. And what better way than in a weekly themed post. 

This week's prompt is Telephones! That's right. Telephones and their use have changed greatly over the years. What kind of phone did you have in your home as a child? Did you have one phone in every room? Did you have to dial through the operator or did you have a rotary dial phone? Remember party lines? Maybe your family had one of those. 

We had one rotary dial phone in our kitchen. We kids didn't use it to call friends and chat. If we wanted to get together with a friend, we walked to their house and knocked on their door. Phones were for serious things - emergencies for the most part. 

Every Christmas my Grandmother would come to our home and my mom and dad would have a pre-arranged phone call to England so she could talk to her sister. Yep - pre-arranged. You couldn't just pick up the phone and dial England! You had to get the operator to set it all up ahead of time then you waited. The operator would ring you when your call was ready. I remember the excitement and anticipation of waiting in the living room while Grandma waited anxiously in the kitchen for the phone to ring. We all thought it was quite amazing that someone in Canada could talk to someone in England.

It's so different now isnt' it? Click open Skype on your computer and have a video call with someone anywhere in the world. Text or Vox user Voxer PPT pretty much anywhere in the world on your cell phone. I love technology!

Preserving Paper Treaures: Step 3 Ready To Create & Store

This is Step 3 of preserving your family ephemera. Yesterday I talked about sorting and organizing all those family papers into piles (See Preserving Paper Treasures: Step 2 Sorting & Organizing)

We're going to talk about paper Pile #1 and Pile #2 today. These consisted of your  most important and valuable papers and documents. To refresh memories, Pile #1 consists of your most valuable ORIGINAL documents that you are not ever going to throw out or see ruined.There is probably a strong emotional attachment to most items in this pile.

WHERE DO I STORE PAPERS FROM PILE #1?

Pile #1 is easy to deal with. You want to preserve these items intact for future generations. You are never going to throw them out or alter them in any way. You have digitized the papers but you need to do something with the actual documents. Here are my suggestions:

SMALL DECORATIVE BOX
 

Keep the treasured documents and papers in a small decorative box, one that is likely to be passed on down through the family after I'm gone. It's small enough that it is probably never going to be used for something else. You might want to add a family chart or note describing the contents of the box. See Passing on Your Family Genealogy Treasures to a Descendant

Remember my huge blanket box full of papers? That would almost certainly result in someone at some time in the future dumping the papers and using the box for storage of blankets or towels or some other household item. But the small antique box I use looks important enough to not be trashed and isn't big enough to store much more than the documents I've placed in it. 

Update January 20, 2014: Please see  Oops I goofed! A Correction re Preserving Paper Treasures for a caveat and correction

ACID FREE BINDER STORAGE You can also place the documents and papers from Pile #1 into acid free sleeves and keep in an archival binder or box. The idea is to keep them in something that will protect them from deteriorating and maximize the chance that they will still be in your family 100 years from now.  Whatever method you use, the papers from Pile #1 are intact and tucked away safely. And you have digital copies you can print to create something nice. (more on that after we talk about Pile #2)
   
 WHAT DO I DO WITH PAPERS FROM PILE #2?   Pile #2 is where you put papers that have meaning for you but are not as important or unique as Pile #1. You would like to see these documents survive and be passed on in the family but they do not have the same emotional attachment for you.  

Pile #2 is where you can be a bit more flexible. Remember this is the pile that contains items you didn't mind altering, keeping in mind that you have digital copies as a backup.   Before I get to what you should do with Pile #2, let me show you some ways to create some nice items from both piles that you can pass on to other family members.

CREATE BOOKS FROM YOUR DIGITAL COPIES

Shutterfly Book Example Page with scanned document

You've scanned and digitized all the items in both piles. This is where I take my digital copies and create books in Shutterfly. See my YouTube Video Tutorial on Using Shutterfly. You can use any self-publishing service such as Blurb or Lulu or, for those in the USA, MyCanvas.

The benefit of creating a coffee table sized book (30 pages or less) is that it looks professional and therefore important enough to keep and you can have multiple copies printed. This means you can give copies to family members and thus maximize your chances that at least one of those copies will survive in the future.

Shutterfly keeps your original book which means you can have copies printed at any time. Blurb has restrictions on how long they will store your book so be sure to read any restrictions before starting your book.

But what to do if you don't want to create a self-published book? Perhaps you don't want to undertake such a big project. Maybe you've never used Shutterfly or any self-publishing service and the task seems daunting. Perhaps it is just too expensive for your budget. That's okay because I have another solution for you.

MAKE A SCRAPBOOK

Trip Scrapbook I created for grandchildren

Consider creating an old-fashioned scrapbook. If you've been lucky enough to inherit a scrapbook that your mom or grandmother kept, you know the kind I mean. Or perhaps you kept one as a teenager - many of us gals glued in tickets from our first prom or a ribbon from a corsage given to us by a  boyfriend.

You can purchase acid-free scrapbook paper to create a lovely book that can be passed on to someone in the family. As you create your scrapbook remember that you are not going to use the original documents in Pile #1. Instead you will use copies. You've scanned them all so it will be easy to print copies on good quality paper. You can cut those copies up and glue them in your book. Using copies allows you to create more than one scrapbook.

Pile #2 is where you have more flexibility because you can use the originals. The papers in this pile can be cut up or altered and used in your scrapbooks. These documents don't have to be handled as carefully as those in Pile #1. You are still preserving these papers for future descendants in book format. Glue them into a scrapbook. Cut them up and create a collage. The sky's the limit because you have digital copies and you can always print more. If you're going to make more than one scrapbook you have copies of the  papers in Pile #2.

I know that professional archivists will be gasping in horror at the thought of cutting up or using the originals from Pile #2 in a scrapbook but we are preserving them and creating a way to view them and enjoy them.

YOUR SCRAPBOOK - FANCY OR PLAIN?

Your scrapbook can be as simple or as elaborate as you want. You can create fancy borders, add stickers or designs and be very creative or not, as you see fit. Remember your scrapbook does not have to be a work of art. The goal is to achieve a way of keeping these family papers together in a format that can be passed on.

Since your goal is to maximize the chances that this scrapbook will survive and be passed on, you need to put more thought and time into creating the outside cover. The nicer and more professional the cover of your scrapbook looks, the more likely it will be treasured and preserved and given to yet another generation. My husband has a saying "If it looks like junk it will be treated like junk. If it looks important it will be treated with reverence."

ARCHIVAL BINDERS

Archival Binder Box

If creating a scrapbook or a self-published book seems too daunting or time-consuming you might choose to place your original documents from both piles in an archival binder to pass on to a family member at some point.

THE GOALS

Whatever method you choose, there are 3 goals:

1. To preserve the documents
2. To pass them on to other family members
3. To be able to enjoy the documents yourself in an easy-to-use manner

THERE'S MORE!
You probably think this is the last post in this series. But guess what? We've talked about how to preserve, share and enjoy your ancestors' treasured paper records. But we haven't talked about you and your life and your documents! If you have descendants they are going to want to know about you, their ancestor. So keep watching this space for a new series on making sure you are keeping and preserving records about your life as well as the lives of your ancestors.

Preserving Paper Treasures: Step 2 Sorting & Organizing

Yesterday I talked about Step 1 of preserving your paper treasures as well as digitizing them.  Or as Eric commented on the post yesterday "Digitize it, but don't trash it!" If you missed the first post, please see Preserving Paper Treasures: What's New Today is Obsolete Tomorrow

Today I'm going to show you how to handle all those tubs, filing cabinets and blanket boxes full of unsorted miscellaneous ephemera. Because you and I both know that we genealogists are savers. We save copies of documents we find. We save great-grandma's bill for flowers dated 1889. We save Grandpa's love letter to Grandma from WW1.

Let me preface this blog post with saying that I am not including photos in this tutorial. That's a different subject with it's own issues but I'll talk about preserving your most precious photos in a future blog post. 

The problem is that it is extremely unlikely that anyone in the future will want to digitize all those papers. So we must do that now. But if we want to maximize the chances that the originals will still be in the family 100 years from now we have to go beyond digitization. 

Trust me, no one will want to keep a huge blanket box full of papers. It will be used for some other purpose or sold and the contents tossed out. But I have a few suggestions for how best to ensure that your family papers survive for many more generations to come. 


DIGITIZE FIRST!  
First you must scan and digitize all of these papers. Save the scans to your computer, to a cloud service (or several cloud services), burn them to a CD ROM, put copies on a flash drive or an external hard drive and share them with family members. 

CRITERIA FOR SORTING DOCUMENTS

Now you must sort those papers. If you're like me that is difficult. They are all treasures to me. But sorting is necessary and you will need to make 3 piles based on the importance or value of each document. The criteria for creating these 3 piles will differ from person to person but let me quickly define my criteria. 

For me personally I determine a document's "value" or importance based on:

a) the age of the document. The older the document is, the more valuable it is to me. My great-great-grandmother's receipt for bolts of cloth she bought in 1857 is a valuable document in my mind

b) the amount of information or story the document holds. The story it holds is not the same as the number of words, it is the detail within and how it sets my ancestor in history. For example a military discharge certificate tells a huge story about my  grandfather even though there are very few words on it.

c) how unique the document is. In other words if I have my mother's report card from 1922 that might be difficult or impossible to get from any other source. It is a one-of-a-kind document and is thus valuable.

ORGANIZING DOCUMENTS INTO PILES
 

Determine your criteria for prioritizing your documents and then you're ready to sort into your 3 piles.

Pile #1 consists of your most valuable ORIGINAL documents that you are not ever going to throw out or see ruined. I stressed original because this is not where you put copies of images of census records that you found online. Instead these would be such items as that WW1 love letter from Grandpa to Grandma, your uncle's military discharge papers, your dad's death certificate, or your grandmother's baptism record. You probably have a strong emotional attachment to items in this pile and you likely feel they are of historical importance.

Pile #2 This is where you put papers that have meaning for you but are not as important or unique as Pile #1. You would like to see these documents survive and be passed on in the family but they do not have the same emotional pull for you.


This pile might include such things as a newspaper clipping from Grandma's scrapbook, or Christmas cards that were sent to an ancestor from one of their friends. Perhaps there is a Valentine's card from Grandpa to Grandma with only his signature.  In other words these are items that you find interesting or your parents or grandparents treasured but they don't carry the same weight in your mind as the items in Pile #1. This is a very personal decision as to what is most important or valuable and what is of lessor importance.

Pile #3 is the toss pile. For me personally there is a good chance there will be nothing in this pile! I should purge but I will have a difficult time doing so. But the more papers you have in your possession the more ruthless you will need to be. If you can bring yourself to create this pile, please do. To show you how difficult a toss pile is for me, I have a ticket stub for a dance that my mother had in her possessions. I don't know the story behind this ticket. I don't know when the dance took place. I don't know why my mother kept it. So it has no meaning, no story behind it. I should toss it. But I doubt I will. 

You may also wish to consider creating a 4th Pile. Pile #4 consists of original documents that you are willing to pass on to other family members right now. If you aren't prepared to do this or there is no one in your family who is ready or willing to accept some of the items, that's fine. But consider doing this as it will reduce the stress on family who may be left to decide who gets what after you are gone. 

As an example you can see in my photos above that I have a serviette (napkin) from my brother's first wedding in the 1950s. It has the names of the bride and groom and the date of the wedding so it holds important details. I don't really want that napkin but perhaps one of his children would like to take over as guardian and keeper! As well I have two birth announcements for two of my nieces.  They include photos of each baby at birth, plus details of time of birth, weight, size, parents' names etc. Those notices aren't important for me to keep any longer and I think it is time to put them in Pile #4 then pop them in envelopes and mail to my nieces. 

In my next blog post I will talk about what we're going to do with Pile #1 and Pile #2 in order to maximize our chances that those papers will still be in the family 100 years from now. 

You can follow these upcoming blog posts by choosing the topic "Preserving Paper Treasures" from the right hand side bar.

Preserving Paper Treasures: What's New Today is Obsolete Tomorrow

Obsolete floppy discs

See that pile of floppy discs beside my laptop? That's called obsolete technology. I haven't got a computer or laptop that will read them. 

I could, with a great deal of effort, get my hands on something that would allow me to look through those discs and extract any information I might want to keep. But I won't. That's way too much work and time and effort!

And this is but one example of outdated technology. At the time didn't we all figure we could digitize our documents, create our files and save them until we wanted/needed them? But that is what happens with the rapid advance of technology. We end up with important data that can't be read in 5, 10, 15 or more years from when we created it.

As genealogists we save documents, whether original or copies. We need that marriage license of our great-grandparents. We treasure the original 1918 bill for Grandpa Bob's funeral. The push is on to digitize them, to go paperless. But let's be realistic! Will we be able to read or access those treasured digitized items in 10 years or 20 years time? 

Sure we saved a copy on our harddrive but computers crash and data is lost. We saved a copy to the Cloud, that was good wasn't it? But we have zero control over cloud services and they may disappear overnight, or there could be a catastrophic failure and saved data is lost. We have copies on CDs and flash drives and external hard drives and we've shared some of those with family. We're covered, right? Wrong. CDs and flash drives might not be readable in the future, just as those little floppy discs are unreadable to most of us.

Even if the cloud with our digitized documents is still there, if you are no longer around, is there anyone in your family who knows your password or has the technical skills to get to it? 

So what's a genealogist to do? Well, first of all you should absolutely digitize your papers  and photos and save them in every spot you can think of! The more backups the better. But don't be too quick to throw out those paper originals! 

Blanket Box of Ephemera

But where do you keep them? How do you ensure they get saved and passed on to future generations? I keep mine in a very large antique blanket box. It's about 2 feet by 3 feet and is used as a coffee table. It's full of paper documents. 

But I know that at some point in the future someone (most likely one of my grandson's wives, or a granddaughter) will almost certainly look at that blanket box and think "Hmmmm I could store a lot of bedding in here! And what's with these papers? Holy cow, do we really need to give up good storage space for my husband's great grandmother's driver's licence or her marriage certificate?" And his grandpa's death certificate!!??"    

And the papers I have treasured and saved for future generations will be tossed. So what do we do? How do we get the maximum chances that our paper ephemera will be kept by future generations?

In the next few blog posts I'm going to show you several different plans for preserving these paper documents and treasures such as Great Grandmother Harriet's baptism certificate or Great uncle Syd's military discharge papers.

You can follow these upcoming blog posts by choosing the topic "Preserving Paper Treasures" from the right hand side bar.

Olive Tree Genealogy Interviewed on HackGenealogy!

I am thrilled and honoured to have been interviewed on HackGenealogy. If you ever wanted to know about my technology and my genealogy thoughts, now's your chance. 

Head on over to HackGenealogy for a peek into my life.  You can also read my 5 tips for genealogists. 

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for allowing me to be part of his new website which he describes as being 

"... about sharing technology resources, discussing our personal interactions with technology, and moving the entire genealogy community forward in terms of how it embraces technology."

Record Matching - a New Technology from MyHeritage

The following Press Release was received by Olive Tree Genealogy. This looks really promising!

MyHeritage releases breakthrough Record Matching technology for family history

Discoveries made easy: Millions of MyHeritage users to automatically receive relevant newspaper clippings and historical records, adding color to their family history

PROVO, Utah & LONDON & TEL AVIV, Israel – September 19, 2012: MyHeritage, the world’s largest family network, today announced the release of Record Matching, an innovative new technology set to change the face of the family history market. Record Matching will help millions of families learn more about their past by automatically discovering relevant historical records and newspaper articles dating back 300 years.

Record Matching is the next generation of family history exploration. It saves time by automating online research for users’ family trees, breaking through “brick walls” for dedicated genealogists, and giving beginners a significant boost with their family tree research. It works by comparing more than one billion profiles in family trees created by MyHeritage users to more than four billion historical records, to find relevant matches. It’s the only service of its kind to automatically research newspaper articles, books and other free text content through semantic analysis, to find articles that can shed light on the actual lives, personalities and achievements of one’s ancestors.  The Internet has helped bring family history to mainstream audiences, by allowing some of the research traditionally done in libraries and archives to be done online. Record Matching now simplifies online research by conducting it automatically.

Supporting 38 languages, MyHeritage has become the trusted home on the web for families worldwide wishing to explore their family history, share memories and stay connected. In addition to its expertise on collaborative family tree building, over the past year MyHeritage has positioned itself as a leading provider of historical records. Record Matching is an add-on feature for SuperSearch, the search engine for historical records successfully released by MyHeritage in June 2012.

MyHeritage Founder and CEO, Gilad Japhet, said: “Record Matching is a family history discovery maker and time saver, designed to delight both dedicated family historians and people with a casual interest in their ancestry. Over the past year we’ve expanded our consumer offering by complementing our social family tree network with a substantial amount of historical content. Record Matching now ties these two assets together, adding exciting new value for our users and giving us a unique edge in the family history market. It’s a significant step towards realizing our goal of bringing family history to the masses.” 

Record Matching utilizes the current global pool of more than four billion records on MyHeritage, including strong collections in the USA, UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada, with more content being added daily for additional countries. Users can receive birth, marriage and divorce documents, gravestone photos, death, burial and census information, military, immigration and other types of records in their Record Matches. More information about the lives of relatives and ancestors can be revealed in Record Matches from the world’s largest historical newspaper collection licensed to MyHeritage (currently about 120 million pages dating back to the 18th century), books and other free text materials. Record Matches also cover the 1930 and 1940 US census records and the content from MyHeritage-owned family history websites, WorldVitalRecords and FamilyLink. 

Developed in-house by MyHeritage engineers and family history experts, Record Matching technology is designed to mimic the work of a family historian as much as possible, finding matches that a human would consider plausible, and ruling out matches that a researcher would consider as incorrect. Based on multiple genealogical algorithms that match information in the record (names, dates, facts, relationships, etc.) to the information in the family tree, semantic analysis, statistical engines and a false positive prevention sub-system, Record Matching provides a high degree of accuracy without sacrificing flexibility. Through its use of massive computational resources and systematic approach of comparing every person to every record, Record Matching makes discoveries that many users would not have the time or luck to find on their own.

Record Matching technology augments MyHeritage’s flagship Smart Matching™ technology that compares family trees to other family trees. The two technologies work together in a cycle that constantly pushes forward the users' knowledge of their family history. MyHeritage users will receive weekly email updates of their new Record Matches. On the MyHeritage.com website, all Record Matches found are consolidated in one interactive report, where users can conveniently review, filter, sort, confirm and reject their matches.

Record Matching has flexible phonetic and multilingual capabilities when researching names, covering many possible synonyms, different spellings and international variations.  Record Matches have an individual confidence score and can be viewed by person or by data collection. Additional features, such as saving information from Record Matches into online family trees, creating references and source citations and displaying real-time matches whenever a new person is added into the tree, will be added before the end of 2012.

As of today, Record Matching will run periodically for every user who has a family tree on MyHeritage. Record Matches found will be displayed for free as a shortened extract. For full access to the historical records delivered by Record Matches, MyHeritage offers affordable data subscription plans and pay-as-you-go credits which are also good for use on SuperSearch, the MyHeritage search engine for historical records. In complimentary collections under license, such as Ellis Island and Find-A-Grave, MyHeritage users will enjoy full access to the Record Matches for free. Family tree enthusiasts interested in receiving Record Matches are welcome to sign up for free at MyHeritage, import their family tree or build a new one using the site’s friendly tools, and receive their matches in less than 24 hours.

New iPhone 4S Arrived Safely!

My new iPhone 4S with lime-green bumper guard

Today is an exciting technology day! My new iPhone 4S arrived this morning and I'm heading off soon to my service provider to have them activate my SIM card.

I'm going to have fun trying out the new SIRI capabilities on the iPhone 4S and am super excited about it! Since I'm upgrading from a 3GS to the 4S there are lots of new features for me.

Like Facetime. A front facing camera... and I'm sure much more.

To add to this day of pleasure, my new computer arrived this morning and my local tech guy came and spent 3 hours setting it up, adding a different more powerful router, re-doing my network system and making sure all my networked computers and devices were co-operating with one another.

Now it's up to me to learn Windows 7 - my new OS! Hmmm which to tackle first? My iPhone or my new computer. Oh sheesh it's a no-brainer - my iPhone 4S of course! Please send coffee and donuts if I don't surface by supper time.....

Tech Granny & The Tech Savvy Genealogists' Meme

Over on Geniaus, there's a new Meme called The Tech Savvy Genealogists' Meme. It's kind of intriguing, especially if you read other blogger's responses! So here's mine (my husband calls me Tech Granny hence the name in the title


Jill's 50 items are great but I took the liberty of adding one more... my final count? 45/50 on Jill's Meme, 46/51 on mine


The list should be annotated in the following manner:
 
Things you have already done or found: bold face type
Things you would like to do or find: italicize (colour optional)
Things you haven’t done or found and don’t care to: plain type

Feel free to add extra comments in brackets after each item


Which of these apply to you?

1. Own an Android or Windows tablet or an iPad
2. Use a tablet or iPad for genealogy related purposes
3. Have used Skype to for genealogy purposes
4. Have used a camera to capture images in a library/archives/ancestor's home
5. Use a genealogy software program on your computer to manage your family tree
6. Have a Twitter account
7. Tweet daily
8. Have a genealogy blog
9. Have more then one genealogy blog
10. Have lectured/presented to a genealogy group on a technology topic (I  have done this TWICE in public and many times over the internet. I hate speaking in public so turn down more requests than I accept)
11. Currently an active member of Genealogy Wise
12. Have a Facebook Account
13. Have connected with genealogists via Facebook
14. Maintain a genealogy related Facebook Page
15. Maintain a blog or website for a genealogy society
16. Have submitted text corrections online to Ancestry, Trove or a similar site
17. Have registered a domain name
18. Post regularly to Google+
19. Have a blog listed on Geneabloggers
20. Have transcribed/indexed records for FamilySearch or a similar project (aha, a trick question! I've transcribed hundreds of old records for OliveTreeGenealogy.com website. I guess that counts as a YES?)
21. Own a Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner or hand-held scanner
22. Can code a webpage in .html
23. Own a smartphone
24. Have a personal subscription to one or more paid genealogy databases
25. Use a digital voice recorder to record genealogy lectures
26. Have contributed to a genealogy blog carnival
27. Use Chrome as a Browser (I've used Chrome but prefer Firefox)
28. Have participated in a genealogy webinar
29. Have taken a DNA test for genealogy purposes
30. Have a personal genealogy website
31. Have found mention of an ancestor in an online newspaper archive
32. Have tweeted during a genealogy lecture
33. Have scanned your hardcopy genealogy files  (this would take a lifetime to scan everything! I have scanned documents but not my written work)
34. Use an RSS Reader to follow genealogy news and blogs
35. Have uploaded a gedcom file to a site like Geni, MyHeritage or Ancestry (Sorry, I'll never do this. I know how but I won't do it)
36. Own a netbook (Hmmm since we have 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, a MacBookAir, an HP laptop, and 3 computers in the house I don't think I need a netbook!)
37. Use a computer/tablet/smartphone to take genealogy lecture notes
38. Have a profile on LinkedIn that mentions your genealogy habit
39. Have developed a genealogy software program, app or widget (I wish I knew how!)
40. Have listened to a genealogy podcast online
41. Have downloaded genealogy podcasts for later listening
42. Backup your files to a portable hard drive
43. Have a copy of your genealogy files stored offsite
44. Know about Rootstech (yep I was an official blogger for RootsTech2011 and was invited again for 2012)
    
45. Have listened to a Blogtalk radio session about genealogy
46. Use Dropbox, SugarSync or other service to save documents in the cloud
47. Schedule regular email backups
48. Have contriibuted to the Familysearch Wiki
49. Have scanned and tagged your genealogy photographs
50. Have published a genealogy book in an online/digital format (I've published many genealogy books but not in online or digital format and have no plans to do so in the future)

and adding one more...

51. Have tried and reviewed iPhone or iPad apps at the developers' request

What Did We Do Before the Internet?

One of my friends posted a one line status update today on Facebook. It was a rhetorical question "What did we do before the Internet!" but it got me thinking. What DID we do before the Internet and Social Media?

I don't know about you, but I wrote lots and lots of letters. Snail mail letters. I wrote personal letters to family and friends - page after page of news of what was happening in my life and asking about theirs. I wrote letters responding to queries in genealogical magazines. And then I waited eagerly for the replies. Hearing the mailman drop letters through my front door mail slot was my bright spot of each day during the week. If I saw the return address of a friend or relative, or even better a large manilla envelope from a name I didn't recognize I would refrain from tearing the envelopes open. Instead it became a daily ritual - make a cup of tea then sit down on the couch and slowly open each letter (prolonging the anticipation much like I do at Christmas when opening presents). I'd spend an hour sometimes reading and re-reading what I'd received.

Part of me misses those days! Now I correspond via email - and my emails are usually succint, to the point and don't give too much personal information just in case I hit the wrong email return address! There's pros to email correspondence. It's fast. And it's efficient - no wasted words, no "Dear so and so" just gttting to the point.

In 1993 I joined a BBS system. I dialed long-distance to Toronto to connect to their BBS (I can't recall the name) to read messages from other genealogists. It was thrilling! Using DOS I could post messages either on the message board or privately to other users. It took a minimum of 2 days for those messages to be posted and replies made. But it was expensive.

After a few months I discovered there was a local BBS that could link up with many other BBS systems all over N. America. I was quick to join. It seems very archaic now but I had to drive out to a nearby town  and see the Administrator to find out how to link in to his system. Once I joined in, I had free dialup as it was a local number. But now I had to wait 4 days minimum for messages and private mail to go out and replies come back.

That early BBS system was another highlight of my daily routine. I was hooked! I can't recall specifics but I know I managed to log into Compu-Serve and join message rooms. I think I remember using FidoNet. It was all great fun and seemed very very high-tech. Then a friend I'd "met" in a Compu-Serve room twisted my arm to try out this new thing called Windows. He claimed I'd never go back to DOS again.

And that really was my first time on the Internet. I think it was 1994 but can't remember for sure. Websites were battleship grey with black text. There were mostly libraries and archives websites, Rootsweb didn't exist, Ancestry.com wasn't around and none of the big sites we are used to were in existence.  I think Mosaic was the browser I used.

I remember I signed up for Internet connection in  the fall. I didn't think too much of it the first few weeks. I got lost trying to find things. I ended up in places like a library in Norway when trying to look for genealogy rooms (sites). I decided to give it 3 months and if things didn't improve I was cancelling my service. It took a few months but I finally kind of got the hang of it. I could find some genealogy sites and check them out. But there wasn't much there!

It was costing me a fortune as my internet connection was through Toronto (long distance). But then a local entrepeneur set up a service called Bconnex. I was the first person in town to join. 

in late 1995, a friend convinced me to start my own website.  Olive Tree Genealogy was born. It didn't have a domain name of its own. It was just a tilde site off my bconnex connection and had only  a tiny bit of storage. In February 1996 I joined the fledgling Rootsweb.com servers, being one of their first sites.

What else did we do before the Internet? We played games - cards, Scrabble, Monopoly... I still play Scrabble but I play it online through Facebook. I don't play in real time - my brother takes his turn, my sister takes her, and I take mine. Sometimes it takes an entire day before we have all taken our turns. There is little interaction, occasionally one of us will post brief message.

What else did we do before the Internet? If we went out to a restaurant we talked. We laughed, we socialized. Now we take peeks at Facebook and Twitter on our iPhones or Blackberries.

What else? We used to go to stores and shop. We interacted with sales clerks, and sometimes with other customers. We touched and tried the items we were considering buying. Now we can go online and with a few clicks our shopping is done. Often our purchases arrive the next day.

Those of us doing genealogy research went far afield - to local museums, archives and libraries. We  slogged through microfilm, reel after reel, screen after screen. Nothing was indexed and finding an ancestor in a census record meant looking at one page after the next, reading every name until that magic moment when an ancestor's name jumped off the page at us. It was a lot of fun, especially if you had a friend or spouse with you. Now we go to a website, use the search engine to type in an ancestor's name and bingo - with any luck, there he or she is. Yes, it's fast and it's efficient, but is it as much fun?

Don't get me wrong. I love the internet! I love technology. I love the speed of genealogy research online. I love connecting with family and friends on social media sites like Facebook. But there are things I miss about pre-internet.

I miss the sound of the mailman dropping that long-anticipated mail through my front door slot.

I miss long newsy letters from long-distance friends and family.

Most of all I miss the feeling of accomplishment and excitement after slogging through endless reels of microfilm  and finding an ancestor.

I have a few wishes and hopes concerning the new world we are in:

My hope is that no genealogist thinks all research can be done online!

My hope is that we all put our phones away for that hour or two over dinner.

My hope is that we make time for simple pleasures that take place with one on one interactions in the real world. 

But no, I wouldn't want to give up the Internet or my iPhone, Ipad, MacBookAir, Jambox and other delights! But I will make time in my life for more simple, non-technological pleasures too.

What I Do - Sometimes Right, Sometimes Not So Right

Thomas, on the Geneabloggers blog, posted an interesting Meme. I've been enjoying reading the contributions of other bloggers who are joining in on this and decided to add my own information.

Thomas explains his Meme as "I feel the knowledge that it can impart and share with the community is important. The meme: called What I Do and you basically list what you use in terms of technology to either run your genealogy business or pursue your family history as a hobby."

I found this out a few days ago, in asking for suggestions for a good program to create family albums. My readers had tons of ideas, some were for programs I didn't even know existed!

Thomas has categories to fill out (you can see them on his blog) but I'm going to describe my setup. It's somewhat chaotic, cluttered and oddly put together but it suits us. I say us because both my husband and I work from home. I am quite sure that there is a more streamlined, efficient and technologically savy way for us to run our small businesses and work on our genealogy hobbies but this is how we manage:

My workstation consists of a computer with a 22" flat screen monitor. I need the big monitor for my vision problems and it's also great for having two browsers open side by side while I'm working. I'm a Windows XP Professional user and my computer is an Intel Pentium 4CPU 3.00GHz 3.00GHz 1.00GB of RAM (I have no idea what that means but that is what it says in the General Tab of my System Properties)

I use an HP Color Laser Jet CP3525 printer (extremely fast, prints double sided) and an HP Scanjet 8300 as my scanner. I'm also networked to my laptop which is set up as a static workstation in our upstairs TV room. That laptop station has an external flat screen monitor and keyboard as well as wireless mouse. I don't like the wireless mouse and switched back to cabled mouse on my main computer.

Because we live in the country (surrounded by forest) and cannot get cable, I could not get wireless internet, or cable internet, satellite or anything other than dialup until last year. Then I found something called a Portable Modem. It's amazing, it provides us with wireless high speed internet with a consistent speed of 54Mbps. I think it works well for us because we're on a hill with a fairly direct line of sight to one of the cell phone towers that the signal uses. As long as the little plug in modem is in our front window, it gets 4 out of the 5 bars (lights) indicating strength and good signal. Apparently it doesn't work well for most people, so for once we got lucky. Our home sits in some kind of dead zone where generally nothing works well!

In fact our address doesn't even exist, applying for a credit card or signing up for Internet services is a time-consuming frustrating process. We are always told "Hmm that address is not showing on my system as valid". Yeah. We know. GPS systems and Google Earth can't find us either. But that's what our little green emergency sign says, and that's what we were given as our mailing address by the township and that's where our mail gets delivered.

I have another computer workstation in our basement. It consists of a rather old computer that has all my files and programs that I need for writing and compiling my smaller books. It's connected to a smaller Color LaserJet printer for use when I want to run off a few copies. For bigger projects I use my main workstation printer and computer. In that room we also have my bookbinding machine and my microfiche reader.

For working on the go, I have an Ipad with 3G capablity. I'm never far from my 3GS Iphone although I'd dearly love the new 4G. I installed the 4G OS on my Iphone and love it. All of our computers have network cards so we can connect to the Internet via our Wireless Router and Portable Modem anywhere in the house.

For backups I have an external hard drive which I can quickly plug into a USB port. That brings me to one of my favourite pieces of equipment that I just discovered this year! It's a silly little Logitech USB port attached to a cable which plugs into any USB port on my computer. That means I can plug it into the BACK port (which is almost impossible for me to access) and leave the available docking end (at the end of the cable) on my desk, front and center. Then when I want to connect my Iphone, Ipad, Ipod or camera cables, bingo, the connection is right in front of me.

I also have a thumb drive for transferring files between my hubby's computer, or the basement workstation computer and my main computer.

My eBook Reader of choice is the Ipad - where I installed both the free Kindle reader and the Ibooks reader. My music player is an Ipod and I have an attachment for the car which allows the Ipod to be heard externally. It's a rather tinny for my ears though.

I use three browsers - Internet Explorer 8, Firefox and Chrome. IE8 is my favourite but it often glitches. So I use each version for different sites. Firefox is for accessing Facebook, as IE always crashes for me!

My social media sites are Twitter and Facebook. You can find me on Facebook as http://www.facebook.com/olivetreegenealogy and on Twitter as LorineMS. Tweetdeck is my choice for keeping up with Facebook and Twitter posts, and for updating my own. I read all my news sites(CNN, National Post, BBC News, Mashable, All Things Digital) on my Ipad using Pulse (a news reader)

My blogging platform is Blogger and I use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet my blog post titles to Twitter and then on to Facebook. It all sounds high tech but in reality I'm very low tech!

Hmmm okay Thomas also asked about our software - I use WS_FTP to upload files to my websites but I also use ACE FTP3 to upload. I've tried Coffee Cup but don't like it.

WORD for Windows is still my editor of choice for writing my articles and books. I love Picasa for photo organization and I am learning to use Scribus for a DeskTop Publishing Program. Another program I love but which is very very old and actually discontinued, is Picture It! for creating photo albums.

Almost forgot, I use Skype for chat and video phone calls (although I prefer the video to be one-way, that is not showing ME in my housecoat or lazing-around-the-house clothes!), and I use AOL Instant Messenger as well as Windows Live Messenger for chats. I use Facebook Chat if forced to but I detest it.

Emails - oh boy I have dozens! Most are set up on Gmail which I like except for the automatic threading of messages and lumping those with the same title into one big pile. I also use Pegasus Mail which is my absolute favourite. I can't imagine organizing the sheer volume of my genealogy mail without it. I'm administrator of dozens of mailing lists and message boards, also host of several GenWeb sites and I have to have a powerful email program that allows me to do pretty much anything I want!

Phew! It's a long list, and I'm sure I've forgotten something. But it gives an idea of the chaotic setup I use to function daily online in my personal and my business lives.

Thanks to Thomas for thinking of this Meme as reading what others are using is very helpful to me! I often feel like I'm sitting in a vacuum with no one to talk to about what the latest piece of technology is, or what program works best or....

So this is kind of like virtual brainstorming and that's something I love doing