WIKI-GENPAGES-L Archives

Archiver > WIKI-GENPAGES > 2008-01 > 1199208604


From: "GeneJ" <>
Subject: Re: [WIKI-GENPAGES] My Heritage
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 10:30:04 -0700
References: <c5d.2431f3b9.34aaa665@aol.com> <200712312312.lBVNBsRX030663@mail.rootsweb.com> <477ABA48.6350.2E28F9C0@andrew.billinghurst.org><6.2.3.4.2.20080101112734.03193830@pop.mail.yahoo.com>
In-Reply-To: <6.2.3.4.2.20080101112734.03193830@pop.mail.yahoo.com>


Hi Judith:
Somewhere, we must have a genealogy soul mate connection.
In my case, research I contributed to a cousin for the purpose of
collaborating to develop a proof argument became input to her tree and
submitted to WFT. <Ugh> <sigh> It was enough that I "tuned out" for several
years.
Like you, my WC tree is not downloadable as a GEDCOM. I limited descendancy
to four generations to allow it to be more easily read by those who might be
hoping to learn about that family.

It is the form of GEDCOM that I find most disturbing. The form of GEDCOM is
out of date, and it will not be updated. Said another way, it's a little
like trying to access MSWord 2007 features in MSWord for Windows 1.0.

I am always surprised that a thread about a format to replace GEDCOM is not
always present, or at least more active.

>From a genealogical perspective, while I believe WeRelate is the better of
all options, both WC and Ancestry Public Trees do extend the option to third
parties of posting comments to a file. These methods allow users to comment
about errors or continuing information. Any genealogy to which others can
add comments, is, I believe, preferred over other, largely un-sourced
materials, such as WFT which makes up so much of One World Tree, which are
static in the method of reporting information.

Pardon if I too have been a little lax in my description. It's e-mail! -GJ




-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of Jillaine Smith
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 9:47 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [WIKI-GENPAGES] My Heritage

At 06:10 AM 1/1/2008, Andrew Billinghurst wrote:
>Sell? I believe that this is patently untrue for any existing
>Ancestry product. One should be quite careful making such claims
>without being able to offer specific examples or facts.

Andrew, I believe John is referring to are the "World Family Tree"
bundles. There are now 38 volumes of them and they are $59.99 each.
You can get online access to them through genealogy.com (which I
believe is owned by the same company as ancestry.com). The price for
online access is significantly lower ($49.99/year or $9.99/mo).
Genealogy.com also has CD versions of them-- 190 volumes on 38 "super
bundles" -- presumably the same thing at the ancestry.com store.

In older versions of FTM, the user was encouraged, after hitting
certain milestones (like 500 or 1000 records), to submit their data
to the "world family tree". In fact, this is still an option (under
FTM 16, anyway) under the Internet menu: "Contribute your tree to the
World Family Tree"). Back when I was a newbie (with completely kaka
data), I contributed my early "research" results" to the "world
family tree" not realizing-- because the language then and still now
wasn't clear-- that my data would be added to a CD that would then be
sold to others. So somewhere out there is a CD with my data on it
that is really crummy data. It does appear that the company is now
excluding information about living people. But I don't think that was
always the case.

And nowhere in the current description of the WFT CDs does it tell
you that the "source" of all this data is *user-contributed*. (Unlike
Worldconnect which makes that point very clearly.)

So unless you know better, John's point is true: you are encouraged
to submit your data, and it ends up on CDs that the company *sells*.

I do put my GEDCOMs up on WorldConnect-- it's been a life-saver for
me and I've made many great connections as a result. I also set it
not to allow GEDCOM download; if people want my data, they can
contact me (or copy it page by page).

I also believe in putting as much source information on my data as
possible (and the bulk of my time these days is spent cleaning up my
source data). To me, this is what distinguishes good online GEDCOMs
from bad ones. It's the only way for me to know -- or at least
judge-- the quality of the work done.

I also agree that all of us-- including the powers that be at
Ancestry.com (or whatever the name of the current company is)--
should do a much better job of educating each other, especially
newbies, about the importance of sound research. Ancestry.com's (and
RW's) tools make it SO easy to share and to copy, and this aspect is
over-emphasized, resulting in a preponderance of crummy GEDCOMs.

I initially tried using werelate.org -- which is far stronger than
GenWiki -- at least it was a year ago. But I found it was taking too
much of my time to upload and maintain my data. WorldConnect makes it
SO easy. Also, while I admire the standards that werelate.org are
putting into place about naming conventions for places, etc., it
means that I really have to do a lot of clean up to my offline data
before uploading more of it to werelate. And that's what I'm trying
to do. We need more help in this, more tools that help us manage and
make consistent, our existing data.

Maybe it's time for me to take another look at WeRelate, although
frankly, I'd rather spend my time on my own research than learning a
new system.

Respectfully,

Jillaine Smith
Washington DC
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jillaine


-------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to
with the word 'unsubscribe' without the
quotes in the subject and the body of the message

This thread: