Archive for October, 2010

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I received this news release yesterday via email.  I’m probably breaking the embargo by publishing this, but I think it’s too important not to get it out there.  Please be sure to read ALL the way to the bottom.

Nation’s Top Geneticists and Ethicists Release New Study of Consumer Perceptions of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing and Announce New DTC Testing Guidelines

Leading up to the American Society of Human Genetics 60th Annual Meeting, which will be held November 2-6, 2010 in Washington, D.C., a group of the nation’s top geneticists and ethicists today released the results of a new study analyzing the public’s awareness and use of so-called “direct-to-consumer” genetic testing by companies such as 23andMe, deCODEme, and Pathway Genomics.

The researchers, funded in large part by federal grants, interviewed over 10 people randomly chosen at the entrance to the nearest grocery store and asked them whether they were familiar with one or more of the five DTC genetic testing companies included in the study.  The participants were then asked if they had participated in DTC genetic testing, and whether they might be interested in doing so in the future.  The participants were also asked whether they believed that members of the general public should be allowed to access their own genetic data without the assistance of a physician or genetic counselor.  Finally, to gauge the participant’s understanding of the basic principles of genetics, each was asked to briefly describe in 100 words or less the role of the replication fork in DNA replication.

The results of the study indicate that 100% of the study participants were completely unfamiliar with these DTC testing companies, and none had any experience with DTC testing.  The study also showed that while none were currently interested in performing testing on their own DNA, 90% believed that Americans should be allowed to access their genetic data without the assistance of a physician or genetic counselor.  The results also showed that none of the participants in the study were able to competently explain even the basics of the DNA replication fork.

“Our study shows for the first time that the vast majority of the American public is completely unaware of even the most popular DTC testing companies,” reported Dr. David N. Anderssen, lead geneticist in the study.  “Additionally, the inability of every single one of the study participants to explain one of the most basic aspects of genetics was, quite frankly, very disappointing, again suggesting that people are not equipped to handle genetic information.”

“While 90% of the participants stated that they should be able to access their own genetic information without a physician or geneticist’s assistance, we completely disagree with their opinions and took this opportunity to explain to each one of them just how dangerous their genetic information can be.  We also explained to them that their erroneous opinions and beliefs don’t really matter anyway, since it is the role of certified geneticists and ethicists to determine for America exactly who should access genetic information.”

In light of the findings, Dr. Anderssen noted the group’s newly-issued guidelines on DTC testing: “We’re recommending that all DTC genetic testing companies immediately close up shop, or, alternatively, hire a staff of 25 or more genetic counselors.  We also recommend that Congress immediately make it illegal to even look at an ‘A,’ ‘T,’ ‘G,’ or ‘C’ without a physician or genetic counselor within at least 5 feet; the danger of privacy violations and/or the misunderstanding DTC genetic testing results is just too great to ignore.”

“Indeed, the majority of the group believes that there is no role for genetics in health care, disease risk, genealogy, or anthropology, among other endeavors; the old-fashioned – but always informative – family history is really the only way to go here,” reported the geneticist.  “However, since most of us need these jobs, we decided to approve the use of genetics for disease assessment in the new guidelines.”

Dr. Anderssen noted that the group is continuing to study this emerging area of genetics, and plans to expand the study to 25 more participants from the nearby gas station in the near future.

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(This post is a parody only, meant as criticism of some of the glaring deficiencies in recent studies analyzing DTC claims.  A reasonable person would not interpret this post to contain factual claims, and is within my First Amendment rights (isn’t it sad that I have to write this?)).

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  Some pictures, however, are priceless.

For example, these photos of my grandpa Jerry Ogden (who died when I was too young to have any memory of him) are priceless to me.
 
Our ancestors were living, breathing people. And they left behind visual cues to their lives, like photographs, documents and stories. When you add these details to your tree family, the history you share is more exciting and complete, and it’s a great way to get kids or grandkids interested in learning more.

Sometimes scanning in all those pictures can feel like an overwhelming project, but it can go pretty quickly with a digital camera.  A few months ago while visiting my grandma, I grabbed my camera and quickly photographed a bunch of papers and artifacts from grandpa’s world war II days.
 
It took less than an hour to preserve the whole shoebox.  So go dig out those old boxes of photos and documents and put them somewhere everyone can appreciate them — in your Ancestry.com family tree.

Your family tree can be either public or private, so you can share those family photos and memories with just your relatives, or you can also let everyone enjoy Grandpa’s incredible handlebar mustache.
 

We’ve recently made lots of improvements to make uploading all kinds of media a snap.

It just takes a few simple steps:
 
1.  Click on an ancestor in your family tree.
2.  Click the “upload photos” link in the media gallery.
3.  Select the images you want to add from your computer.
4.  That’s it.

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• British genealogy subscription site FindMyPast.co.uk has
  released a collection of records
  from the Second Anglo-Boer War including details on 260,000 British service
  members and 59,000 war casualties. The database compiles information from more than
  330 sources, and resolves errors and conflicting information in some of those sources.
  The war was fought from 1899 to 1902 between the British Empire and the Dutch-speaking
  inhabitants of the South African Republic (Transvaal Republic) and the Orange Free
  State.

• The latest records added to the free FamilySearch
  Beta site include census records from Ghana (1982 to 1984) and Norway (1875),
  plus the Minnesota state census (1865 and 1905) and marriage records from Arkansas
  (1837 to 1957) and Idaho (1864 to 1950). You
  can see the full list of new records here. 

• The Troy (NY) Irish Genealogical Society has posted the records
  of Italian midwife Alesandra Matera, who practiced in the Troy area during
  the early 1900s. The transcribed records span 1909 to 1923 and document mostly Italian
  births, with some Syrians in later years. You can download
  the transcriptions as PDFs ordered by the father’s, mother’s or child’s last name
  (the transcriptions themselves are in chronological order, but you can use the Bookmarks
  bar in your PDF viewer to see the names in alphabetical order). Originals are in the
  archives of the Rensselaer County
  Historical Society.

• The International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE) 2011 writing
  competition is open to members and—for the first time—non-members of ISFHWE this
  year. Entries are due by Dec. 31, 2010, and you’ll get a discount on the entry fee
  for submissions made before November 30, 2010. See
  the categories, judging guidelines, rules and entry form on ISFHWE’s website.
  

• The River Raisin National Battlefield Park in Monroe, Mich., site of the War
  of 1812 Battle of Frenchtown, has officially become the 393rd park in the National
  Park System. You can learn more about the site on
  the National Park Service website and at RiverRaisinBattlefield.org. 

• The National Archives and Records Administration’s National
  Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis will relocate to a modernized
  $112 million facility in North St. Louis County. It’ll take about 17 months to move
  the 100 million-plus records and 800 workers starting in May 2011. NPRC houses personnel
  records of civilian
  federal employees, as well as military
  service members after about World War I.

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Subscription site Ancestry.ca, the
Canadian sister site to Ancestry.com,
is celebrating All Saints Day by making many
of its historic records from France—roughly 50 million names—free to search from
this Saturday, Oct. 30, to Nov. 1. 

This weekend’s free Ancestry.ca records include:

• Paris, France records, featuring more than 200 years of birth, marriage and death
  records

• Marne, and Saone-et-Loire, France, birth, marriage and death collections, which feature
  vital records spanning nearly 400 years 

• Upper Brittany, France, records collection, including rare immigration and military
  records, as well as vital records dating back to the early 1500s

• Marseilles, France Marriages, 1810-1915, with nearly half a million records

You can see the French records collection and access the free databases (starting
Saturday, Oct. 30) at <ancestry.ca/toussaint>.
(You’ll need to set up a free registration with the site to view your search results.)

All Saints Day, Nov. 1 in Western Christianity, is a celebration of all the saints.
It’s sometimes called All Hallows or Hallowmas. The night before, or “All Hallows
Even,” is believed to provide the origin for the word Halloween.

You’ll
find a French-Canadian genealogy research guide in the June 2006 Family Tree Magazine,
available as a digital download from ShopFamilyTree.com.

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Put a little ha-ha in your Halloween with the funny tombstone photos in our book Grave
Humor, by M.T. Coffin. To quote the FatallyYours.com
book reviewer: “It’ll delight you with its witty jokes, quirky gothic illustrations
and funny photos.” Aw, shucks.

This is my favorite stone—we found this unfortunately named lady in a local cemetery.

(See more funny tombstones from the book—and pictures other folks have submitted—at GraveHumorBook.com.) 

And I love our skull-people alter-egos (that’s me, fourth from left):

You can get even more skull people in our 2011
Grave Humor Desk Calendar. 

Grave
Humor is available from ShopFamilyTree.com. (Until October 31, you can use the
code HISTORY10 to save 15 percent.)

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Why are historical books important to your research? Because your family didn’t live
in a vacuum, says Family Tree Magazine contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson.

I got a sneak peek today at her Historical
Books on the Web webinar (taking place tomorrow, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. Eastern time).
She says that clues you’ll find in books about the history of the places your ancestors
lived include the big events that impacted their lives, what their everyday lives
were like and, when you lose their trail, why or where they might’ve moved.

Some examples of local events you might learn about in historical books:

• 1848 to 1849 cholera epidemic, which killed 4,000 in New York City
• 1888 Children’s Blizzard in the Great Plains (so-called because many children were
  caught unaware in schoolhouses on what had been a relatively warm day)
• 1869 Indian Raids in Kansas
  
• Order No. 11 (a Union Army decree that forced the evacuation of rural areas in four
  western Missouri counties in 1863)
  
• Great Fire of 1846 in Nantucket

You can get started looking for historical books about your ancestral locales by Googling
history of [insert the town name], visiting county pages at USGenWeb,
searching library catalogs (WorldCat is
a good site for doing this) and searching for period books at sites such as Internet
Archive and Making of America.

Nancy will get into detail about what you can find in historical books, and where
and how to find them, in tomorrow’s webinar, Historical
Books on the Web: Millions of Tomes at Your Fingertips. You can register
to attend at ShopFamilyTree.com (you’ll receive our new Discover Your Roots guide
with your registration)—and use the code HISTORY10 for 15 percent off with
our Family History Month storewide sale. 

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Before there was FamilySearch.org, there
was the Family
History Library and its network of FamilySearch
Centers (as the library is starting to call its local Family History Centers).
Patron Services director Don Anderson gave an update on the network during last week’s
Blogger’s Day.

The Family History Library, located in Salt Lake City, started in 1894 with 11 donated
volumes. Today it has the largest genealogy collection in the world, with 330,000
annual visitors and a staff of 700 employees and volunteers.

The library has begun surveying visitors to gauge their satisfaction with their visit.
About 63 percent discover an ancestor they set out to find, and 86 percent would recommend
visiting the library to a friend. The scores are better for patrons who have more
genealogical experience and stay longer in the library—making the biggest area of
opportunity, says Anderson, in helping new researchers.

You can borrow the library’s microfilm and microfiche by going to one of the 4,600
volunteer-run FamilySearch Centers around the country, which receive 6 million visits
a year.

About 100 FamilySearch Centers are added every year, mostly in Latin America (few
are being added in North America). Anderson says FamilySearch is working on a system
that’ll let you go online—rather than visiting an FamilySearch Center to fill out
a request form—to order microfilm for delivery to your FamilySearch Center (folks
in Europe already can do this).

Because the centers are volunteer-run and have different kinds of facilities and resources,
visitors will have varied experiences depending where they live. Anderson says he’d
like to standardize the services offered in various types of FamilySearch Centers.

Also in the works is a plan to give FamilySearch Centers space on FamilySearch.org—perhaps
the Research Wiki—to list hours, classes and what’s in their permanent collections.

Click
here to learn more about visiting your local FamilySearch Center.

See
my Blogger’s Day disclosure in this post.

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One of the most interesting parts of the FamilySearch Blogger Day was a talk by Dan
Lawyer, the guy in charge of what he termed the “big renovation project” that is the FamilySearch.org makeover.

“Genealogy is hard” is a conclusion his team reached after studying how genealogists
were using FamilySearch. Which isn’t news to family historians who’ve done some research,
but Lawyer pointed out three factors that can make it difficult:

• Life circumstances may not allow people the time or other resources needed to do genealogy.
  

• Logistic and technical hurdles, such as getting online and knowing how to use a computer.
  

• The way genealogy is often presented to a newcomer can make it appear not-so-engaging.

Do you agree with these findings? Click Comments at the end of this post to let us
know.

So the goal for the renovated FamilySearch site—which FamilySearch
Beta will become—are:

• Make genealogy easier.

• Make the site suitable for beginners and advanced researchers—so you don’t have to
  be a genealogist to use it, but even advanced researchers will find it useful.

• Facilitate giving and getting research help on the site, as well as learning how to
  research.

Though researchers have been using the beta site for months (as of earlier this week,
it had 35,000 visitors from 17 countries in October alone), it’s still being tweaked.

User input into the site is spurring improvements in features such as, to name some
minor ones: the hard-to-find arrows that let you expand search results (see the tiny
gray triangles on the right side of the screen shot below) and the loooooong Advanced
search panel on the left side of the search results (it continues beyond this screen
shot).

Within the next three to six months, Lawer says, updates will include adjusting search
forms, adding browsing filters, boosting the quality of results, and adding how-to
content. (Interestingly, but not surprising to me, was the finding that new genealogists
don’t look around the site at that how-to content until after they’ve used the search
function.)

The Pedigree Resource File from the current FamilySearch.org will be added to the
beta site’s Family Trees search, which already contains the Ancestral File.

The beta site will probably become the official FamilySearch site sometime between
December and February, Lawyer said. “New” FamilySearch, the online tree-building software
available to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, likely won’t
become part of the site for some time, as developers work out a way to handle conflicts
among different users’ trees for the same lines. 

See
my Bloggers Day disclosure in this post.

Learn more about “classic” FamilySearch and other popular genealogy websites in our
Web Guides digital downloads, available from ShopFamilyTree.com.

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Another Diane—FamilySearch genealogical community services manager Diane Loosle—talked
about the FamilySearch Research
Wiki at last week’s blogger day. The wiki is where where FamilySearch consultants
and other genealogists have contributed articles about genealogy research topics and
related Family History Library holdings (a wiki is a site to which anyone can add
or edit an article).

The wiki, available in Spanish and Swedish in addition to English, has had 5.5 million
page views and 1.25 million unique visitors since its launch in 2008.

Loosle talked about a few special projects, including:

• The Rural
  Records of the Southern United States page, which has information about agricultural
  censuses. 

• The Indians
  of North America page, to which a researcher of American Indian history is posting
  information. 

• Tennessee genealogists beefed up the Tennessee
  pages before the summer’s Federation of Genealogical Conference in Knoxville 

See
more projects here. 

You can use the wiki by typing a search term—such as a place you’re researching, a
war your ancestor fought in, or a type of genealogical record—into the search box
on the home page. You also
can use the Browse by Country link to find articles about your ancestral homeland;
many articles link to related records on the FamilySearch
Beta site or listings in the Family
History Library Catalog.

For help getting started, click the Tour link on the wiki home page.

(See
my blogger’s day disclosure in this post.)

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I’m not exactly sure what it is about these records that fascinates me – they’re simple typed cards with info about death – but the new California Mortuary and Cemetery Records (1801-1932) do just that.

I don’t have any relatives in there, at least not that I know of. But I still wound up spending more time than I care to admit looking at these brief moments in history.

Maybe it’s that the first record I found was of a woman who died in the 1870s of “exhaustion acute melancholia.”

Or the next one I viewed, for a doctor whose grave is now marked with a pine.

But more likely it’s the following two that reeled me in:

 

Each Halloween, my family and I go to the creepiest cemetery in town, where actors portray the dead, telling their stories and offering details about the events that ultimately took them out. Since it’s an old mining town, we hear tales of gun play, brothels, scuffles with the law, mining accidents, cold winters, bar fights and plenty of long-gone diseases.

For me, the California Mortuary and Cemetery Records are almost as great as being at these cemeteries, too – focused on Northern California, casualties of mining days are included as are other hazards faced by the eclectic mix of people California has always attracted. While no actors play the roles on these cards, the details tell the story. See for yourself – even if your family didn’t head west http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2054.