Potentially bad news for history and genealogy

Tara Calishain, indefatigable creator and maintainer of ResearchBuzz, reports:

BetaNews: Google loses big ‘right to be forgotten’ case — and it could set an important precedent. “A businessman with an historic criminal conviction has won his case against Google in a ‘right to be forgotten’ lawsuit seeking to remove information about his conviction from search results. The case, heard today in London, could set a precedent and lead to a series of similar cases from other people with spent convictions. The anonymous businessman — known only as NT2 — has a conviction for conspiracy to intercept communications from more than a decade ago and spent six months in prison for the crime.”

I totally recommend that you subscribe, even if (like me) you don't have time to read it all. It's free.

Last year in a luncheon talk I speculated on what genealogy might be like in 2117. It was mostly not a very pretty picture, and so far -- just one year in! -- the following piece of that talk seems to be on target. I suggested that . . .

Profit-driven corporations will fight the good fight against those who claim a “right to be forgotten.” Perhaps the decisive court case will involve Googlecestry vs. the North American Union, when those who advocate such a right to be forgotten will sue to have their role in that fight itself forgotten.

If that case is resolved wrongly, then genealogy could even become an illegal conspiracy. The use of cursive writing could become a code furthering said conspiracy. Somewhere deep in the suburban slums, history books would be furtively traded for images of the “forgotten” presidents. I’m still just enough of a 20^th-century person to think that this might not happen.

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Good news for researchers whose ancestors ever got sick or died of anything

The indispensable newsletter ResearchBuzz alerts us to the existence of the Medical Heritage Library, a free searchable archive of more than 1.7 million pages in more than 3,000 volumes of 336 old public-domain medical journals and reference materials. While researching what it might have meant to die of appendicitis in 1897 -- or what medical people were writing and publishing in 1850 -- don't forget to check their long list of related resources. And don't forget this is history, including many learned articles on long-refuted (if not actually murderous) medical claims and schools of thought.

Methodology Monday with Robots

From Mashable (hat tip to Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz):

"Quarterly corporate earnings reports from the AP will soon be produced through a computer program that is able to take the key numbers from companies' results to create a story of 150 to 300 words, the media company announced in a blog post. . . . The AP isn't the only organization using journobots. The New York Times uses automation for some of its wedding announcements, while Automated Insights also provides recaps for fantasy football matchups. . . . the AP is looking at using automation on 'results stories for lower-audience sports.'"

(I omit mention of TV announcers as they may well already be robots, albeit rather excitable ones.)

The same thing is happening to genealogy, bit by bit, although not in exactly the same ways.

Look for information and a robot may offer you "hints." Some are wildly wrong, some may be helpful.

Enter the resulting data and your genealogy program will produce a "report." Granted, it reads like it was written by robots, but they are getting smarter all the time. And of course the report in any case is only as good as the data on which it is based.

Robots are getting better at distinguishing kinds of text -- for instance, in searching city directories, knowing enough to distinguish the "Jones" in "Ralph Jones" from the "Jones" in "Jones Street." They may be soon reading handwriting, a function that once required a human being, often an astute one.

Interestingly, many stages of automation involve a certain sacrifice of quality, much as cell phones give up in sound quality some of what they gain in portability. Robots make mistakes in indexing that humans would never make. We tolerate these foibles because on balance the robots usually make our lives easier, but the core of genealogy is not something that can be averaged out -- it's either the way things were back then, or it's not.

What's my point? Not to complain. It's just this: Within some lifetimes now begun, advanced genealogy will be the only genealogy requiring human involvement:

• looking in physical places where robots don't know and can't go, either because the materials aren't digitized or because no one thought of "that stuff" as being genealogically relevant;
• distinguishing bogus robotic "hints" from useful ones, and otherwise fixing robotic errors in their output;
• resolving conflicting evidence;
• analyzing and correlating complex collections of evidence properly; and
• writing a coherent and convincing proof argument.

 Have a nice century.

"The Associated Press Now Automates Earnings Stories, No Humans Needed," Mashable (http://mashable.com/2014/06/30/the-associated-press-turns-to-computer-automation-for-corporate-earnings-stories : viewed 1 July 2014).

Photo credit: Neil Milne's photostream, "Cheery Robot Lazer Attack Nail Art" (https://www.flickr.com/photos/borispumps/7184818385 : viewed 1 July 2014), per Creative Commons.

 

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with Robots," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Probing free public domain books for genealogy titles

Snowed in? Still got an internet connection? Tara Calishain's ever-vigilant ResearchBuzz alerted me to "25 sources of free public domain books."

I was curious how they compared, but doing a thorough comparison would exceed both my patience and my free time. So I searched each one using the rather unimaginative search term "Illinois genealogy" (not in quotes, and not correcting for each site's idiosyncratic arrangement of hits). You can compare the top 3 items I found in each. On most of the sites, these search terms produced nothing of interest; but the remaining half dozen are worth some additional effort in searching.

Note that there are overlaps, and Hathi Trust images are found on some of these sites, although it was not included in the list of 25. My top 3 hits there were: Hand-list of American genealogies in the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Ancestors of the Bingham family of Utah; The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois : list of officers and members, together with a record of the service performed by their ancestors in the wars of the Colonies (1897).

Of course, you may find non-genealogy gems on any of these sites.

Not everything I found was free, and not everything was actually in the public domain (snippet views only). Of course, more imaginative or specific searches (surnames, places) may well unearth good results where my crude test didn't. Enjoy!

Project Gutenberg: [none]

Europeana: Genealogical Memoir of the Newcomb Family; Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland 1976.

Digital Public Library of America: Album of genealogy and biography, Cook County, Illinois; Genealogy Osborne family; Genealogy of the Farmer, Cox, and Hopkins families of Fayette County, Illinois.

Internet Archive: "COMMITTEE ON Genealogy and Genealogical Publications, Illinois State Historical Society, Springfield, Ill., Sept. 12, 1908"; Ninety-Second Illinois Volunteers...1862-1865; Album of genealogy and biography, Cook County, Illinois (1899).

Open Library: Genealogical records by DAR Moline, Mary Little Deere Chapter; A list of the genealogical works in the Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield (1914); Illinois Genealogical Research by George Schweitzer.

Feedbooks: [none under free; the following were the top results of books for sale] Ghosthunting Illinois; Genealogy of Nihilism; Genealogy QuickSteps.

Manybooks: [none]

World Public Library: Album of Genealogy and Biography, Cook County, Illinois; Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 11; A Guide to the Cultural Resources in Illinois (1988).

Google Book Search: Album of Genealogy and Biography, Cook County, Illinois (1896); Biographical and Genealogical Record of La Salle County (1900), vol. 2; Hendrickson genealogy, eight generations, England to Illinois before 1840 [snippet view only].

Books Should Be Free: [none]

The Literature Network: [no useful results]

Bartleby: [no results in nonfiction]

DailyLit: [none] 

Read Easily: [none]

LibriVox: [none]

Legamus: [none]

Open Culture: The Poetry of Abraham Lincoln.

Classic Literature Library: [unable to reach site 3 January 2014]


The Online Books Page: Album of Genealogy and Biography, Cook County, Illinois; Genealogy and family history of the Uphams; Genealogy of the descendants of Daniel Upham, Jr., of McHenry, Illinois.

Great Books and Classics: [no search function]

Classic Reader: [none]

Planet Publish: [none]

Classical Chinese Literature: [no search function]

Wolne Lectury (Polish): [none]

Projekti Lonnrot (Finnish and Swedish): [no discernible search function]



Harold Henderson, "Probing free public domain books for genealogy titles," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]
 

 

Milwaukee Marriages 1822-1876 on line

Research Buzz alerts us to a new on-line resource from the Milwaukee Public Library Digital Collections, already well worth a visit: the Milwaukee County Marriage Certificate collection. Here's part of the admirably clear and thorough description:

In the 1960s a box of marriage certificates created between 1822 and 1876 was found at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The box also included some miscellaneous documents pertaining to the marriage such as permission to marry slips, authorizations, and land deeds. The information in these documents include a parent giving permission for an underage child to marry, an affidavit of there being no impediment to marriage, information on the closeness of the blood relationship, and written permission for the clerk to hand the marriage license to a third party for delivery. These documents generally do not have standardized information, but can be quite interesting. Many of these documents were not in very good condition. Research by the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society (MCGS) indicates that most of these certificates are not recorded at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Some of the records appear in the Wisconsin Pre-1907 Marriage Index and some do not.

The certificates and accompanying documents were filmed in 1966. The Milwaukee Public Library owns a set of these microfilmed marriage certificates. In 1999 the MCGS arranged to have the records refilmed, adding location citations. In 2000 MCGS volunteers created alphabetical indexes for bride and for groom. Roger Cobb with Lois Molitor acted as project coordinators. Over 42,000 names were put into the database that produced the indexes. Unfortunately, the original copies that were filmed in 1966 have vanished. . . .

Most of these documents were created in Milwaukee, but there are a few from other locations. The number of certificates created outside of Milwaukee County is minimal.

In short, if you have Milwaukee people, visit this site yesterday!

The Midwest in 1858

ResearchBuzz just made note of some new maps on the David Rumsey Map Collection, which provoked me to look around there. I was especially struck by the regional maps with counties and railroads from an 1858 atlas.

Just go to the Rumsey site and type in "Colton 1858 [your state name here]" minus the quotes and the brackets. I love the unformed counties, but especially the sparseness of the railroad lines. You can see where it would have been comparatively easy for your ancestors to travel, assuming they had the cash and a schedule!

Find your Midwesterners in Pittsburgh

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for pointing out a very interesting subset of genealogically valuable material within the historical gold mine that is Historic Pittsburgh: 125 city directories 1815-1945.

As city directory digitizations go, this is a wonderfully well designed site. Let me count the ways:

* it includes actual images of directory pages, as opposed to error-prone transcriptions.

* it offers a long run of consecutive years, which is required for good research, given that directories often missed people in any given year.

* it keeps pages in their actual sequence, rather than mechanically rearranging them in numerical "order," or even conflating different directories of the same year, as Footnote sometimes unfortunately does.

* it allows searches of ancillary matter such as addresses -- making it possible to find extra residents at a given address, even if the city was too large to have had a criss-cross directory organized by address. So this new format is far more than a mere convenience and travel-saver; it is a powerful research tool.

Right now I'm recalling the long afternoons I spent cranking microfilm following my wife's Boren ancestors in the Pittsburgh directories. They were hard-working but not well off, and they moved every year. Happy New Year, and use this fine resource in good health!

The Civil War as they saw it

"Astounding" is the word the ResearchBuzz newsletter used for a collection of lively 19th-century news sketches now on line. Here's the word straight from the web site of the Becker Collection:

The Becker Archive contains approximately 650 hitherto unexhibited and undocumented drawings by Joseph Becker and his colleagues, nineteenth-century artists who worked as artist-reporters for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly observing, drawing, and sending back for publication images of the Civil War, the construction of the railroads, the laying of the transatlantic cable in Ireland, the Chinese in the West, the Indian wars, the Chicago fire, and numerous other aspects of nineteenth-century American culture.

Those within striking distance of Boston might consider a visit to the McMullen Museum of Art or a purchase of the exhibit's $50 catalog. Otherwise you can browse the on-line material by subject, artist, date, reference number, and location.

Are You Looking for a 1950s Motorcycle Geek?

ResearchBuzz reports that Google Book Search has just the research tool you need to look for a mid-twentieth-century motorcycle enthusiast or dealer, or anybody who might get his or her name in the magazine known first as American Motorcycling (January 1955 to June 1970), then as AMA News (July 1970 to August 1977), and finally as American Motorcyclist (September 1977 to December 2007) -- published from central Ohio by the American Motorcycle (now Motorcyclist) Association.

The first issue on the site is called volume 9, number 1, and the issues for 1980 and 1981 are missing, so perhaps there is more to come. Also I can confirm ResearchBuzz's statement that the search across all issues is wonky. Search within a given issue seems OK. Researchers, let's ride.