Friday Update

Not having the greatest of months, but I do have a lot to share today.

I: Ancestry.com and Footnote.com
I saw the news about Ancestry.com acquiring the parent company of Footnote.com. I'm not a fan of Ancestry.com for several reasons.

1 - I don't like how they've set themselves up as the monopoly company online for genealogical records. Yes, I know it makes finding the records easier, but what if they suddenly fail? Are all those records going to disappear into the ether? It worries me.

2 - I dislike any company that insists on getting your card number for a "free" account. If it's a free account, they don't need it. If it's an option to store it after you have an account, that's different. But making it necessary to have an account at all really rubs me the wrong way.

3 - They are not the actual repositories of these records (yes, I get that this seems to speak to point one, but it really doesn't, because many of the sites they've taken over have been subsumed by the larger site, so the actual online access to the record is only through Ancestry any longer. So if they crash, that record is no longer available online.). As such, I have a hard time paying a third party to get a record that I can get some other way, if not online.

4 - Their records are far more limited than their ads would have you believe. This isn't something I know by personal experience of the site, but more personal experience of the American genealogical community at large. They, like any other American site, tend to focus more on American records than anything else, which does me no good when most of my ancestors weren't here in America. So why should I pay for something that will be of almost no help? And how can I be sure it will, if I can't access the records freely enough to know there's something in there worth paying for?

Thank god that they won't be able to take over FamilySearch.org or JewishGen, because I like having the variety of choice, and not having to pay unless I see something I know will be worth buying.

II: Who Do You Think You Are?
I enjoyed this show when it started last year here in the states, but for the constant Ancestry.com ads in the show and between segments of the show (see rant above), but the stories didn't feel like they spoke at all to the searches I was doing for my own family. Most seemed to focus on "being American," which was hard for me to relate to, given my recent foreign ancestry. I enjoyed the show, and I look forward to future episodes, but there just felt like a disconnect there for me.

So my husband got me the first five seasons of the UK version. I have never been so enthralled. Even when they didn't connect to my tree in some way, they felt less nationalistic than the US counterpart, and some of the stories got so close to my own as to make me tear up. They still haven't really covered Welsh genealogy to my satisfaction, but the stories they have covered have been amazingly varied.

I can't wait to see the most recent two seasons.

III: Personal genealogy pursuits
Posted about my Brick Walls today over at Oh, Spusch. An update on how I'm doing with the first three I posted about a few months back, and an addition of a fourth line that causes me trouble.

Got a new Genealogy program from my folks for my birthday: The Master Genealogist. I've been slowly importing my family tree from scratch, starting with what I'm sure I knew when I started my search, then going through all the versions of the family trees I have on paper and adding in new information from those. It's slow going, but I think in the long run it'll be worth it. I expected to have more trouble with the program, because I've heard how hard it can be to deal with, but I've only had a few minor problems so far. And I love that it keeps track of actual twin births.

And I seem to have narrowed down the town for my great-grandfather's birth in Galicia: Sedziszow.

IV: Follow Friday
Lots of links to share:
Family Tree Folk posted about uncontaminated Viking DNA found at a Viking dig site.
Genealogy's star posted about Identity Theft and Genealogy.
Adventures in Genealogy posted a great article on the origin of Surnames.
Layers of the Onion wrote about Basics for Beginning Genealogists (which are pretty good for those of us who've not really given it a lot of thought, too).
The JewishGen Blog did an article on natural disasters that our ancestors might have witnessed or been affected by in some way. Part one - Part two
And there will be a new book coming out about Anne Frank and her family, including many more sources beyond her journal.
And last but not least, there is a new project out there called the Restore the Ancestors Project that is hoping to create an archive specifically about the slave plantations of South Carolina in order to provide a database for those looking for their slave ancestors. A great project, and I hope they have great success with it. I'd love to see more of the same in other states.

That's everything for today. No events from my family tree this week. Hope everyone out there is doing well.