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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Does genealogy have a future? Don't ask a journalist.

"The eternal search for our ancestors is reaching its end game," claims the two-year-old on-line magazine The Verge, which covers "the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture."

Senior features editor Laura June dropped in on RootsTech and concluded that, between on-line records and DNA advances, genealogy and genealogists can only go downhill from here. "In the next five to 10 years, it will become increasingly simple to find out who your ancestors were even several generations back, with relatively little effort . . . . It’s not hard to imagine a future where the mysteries most of us have in our ancestral past will simply no longer exist." Uh huh. And when I was a kid it wasn't hard to imagine a future when we would all have personal flying cars.

It's a good article in that it is well-written and long enough to convey multiple points of view. Unfortunately, its length was not put to that use. Instead, it confirmed the author's (and no doubt the magazine's) preconceived view. (Hat tip to Stephanie Hoover, who sparked an ongoing LinkedIn discussion on the subject in the group Genealogical and Historical Research, with the somewhat different headline "Another nail in the coffin of professional genealogists...:?")

June did not quote or mention any of the top genealogists now working -- people who might have challenged her assumption that everything Ancestry.com executives say is gospel. She noticed that the Family History Library is built in the architectural fashion known as modernism, with straight lines and planes and glass and stone. She wants to think that genealogy is about to become equally shiny and clean and well-defined, no more dusty attics or dank basements or old paper that shatters when you touch it. I say, dream on.

The part of genealogy that is going away is the lookup. (The article makes some sense if you think lookups = genealogy.) I recently was hired to go to a remote county in Indiana where the property records had not been microfilmed. That's an anomaly and it will go away. I got my first glimpse of genealogy from my mom's first cousin back in the 1980s, who spent much time sending letters to relatives and typing her results on multiple carbon paper copies in typewriters. She did valuable work but at the end of the day it was a good-sized journal article, nothing more. That world is gone, and few of us miss it.

Genealogy is changing and will change a lot more, but will it become so easy to find any ancestor that genealogy will be as outdated and trivial as a printed table of logarithms? Not likely, for at least five reasons, none of which got any hearing in The Verge:

(1) Most records useful to genealogists are not microfilmed, not digitized, and not indexed. (More records are useful to genealogists than even we can imagine.)

(2) Even if everything were digitized tomorrow, genealogists still need to know how to find the relevant records. One genealogical fact Laura June didn't disclose: often key records in a proof do not name the person of interest.

(3) Much of the "information" Ancestry makes available is in the form of user-supplied family trees, which are notoriously unsourced and error-prone.

(4) Some of the "mysteries we all have in our past" can be solved by better search engines and DNA and shared documentation. But not all. The unchanged facts of genealogy are that records are scarce; they can be hard to understand; they contradict each other; and they confuse each other (common names). It takes first analyzing individual records and then correlating multiple conflicting records. If Laura June talked to anyone who knows this, such as the author of Mastering Genealogical Proof, she kept it out of the article.

(5) As for the fate of professional genealogy, the possibility of doing it yourself (DIY) in any field rarely translates into the universality of DIY. There are plenty of tools on sale to help anyone grow their own garden, or maintain a vast lawn, but last I checked plenty of professional gardeners were working.

None of the above is meant to disparage or minimize the enormous value that FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, and other on-line repositories and search engines have brought to genealogy. (Just ask those of us who were around when they weren't!) It is meant to disparage and minimize popular articles that move straight from preconception to conclusion without finding more than one point of view.



Laura June, "Who am I? Data and DNA answer one of Life's Big Questions," The Verge, 7 May 2013 (http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/7/4258094/who-am-i-data-and-dna-solve-one-of-lifes-big-questions : accessed 10 June 2013).


Harold Henderson, "Does genealogy have a future? Don't ask a journalist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]