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Archiver > APG > 2007-12 > 1196693958


From: "Barbara J. Mathews" <>
Subject: Re: [APG] TGN/Ancestry patent 7,249,129 issues
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 09:59:18 -0500
References: <47539709.3050101@ancestralmanor.com>


Sharon wrote (snipped):
> If, on the other hand, this patent is really about the process of
> creating "same person" indexes to consolidate various records sources by
> the primary keys of name, birth, death and/or parents for the purposes
> of making it possible to construct potential family trees from many
> large databases by those primary keys, then the claims are really
> limited to a very rudimentary technical approach of indexing various
> database partitions by keys, sequential, iterative sorting, comparisons,
> and rankings by pairs of records.

Yes, all too true. Thank you for taking the time to sort through the patent
by Ancestry and to explain it so clearly. I agree completely with you on the
'rudimentary' aspect of how Ancestry is matching their databases.

I bet if we looked at the Ancestry databases up close, we would find that
very few of these keys were actually filled in for most databases. Such
data, for example, is not available in military service records, book
indexes, etc. In fact, to be quite succinct, would it not be true that these
matches would only be occurring reliably within the various submitted family
trees?

When I do a Search on my personal genealogy database in The Master
Genealogist, the resulting list shows entries in my database by surname,
given name, birth date, death date, father's ID, and mother's ID. Just
yesterday, I was looking through my George Clark's from Milford and could
see who was the child of whom and who was born when. Arguably, Bob Velke has
been using these record keys for many years. Probably most of us have. We've
just done the iterative comparisons in our heads. It borders on the
intuitively obvious for genealogy.

Barbara Mathews

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