Join us for a web developers' hack day

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:02:31 GMT

Over the weekend of 24 and 25 March, The National Archives is holding its first hack day. We will be opening up the archives to web developers and designers to encourage them to gather and exchange ideas and make use of The National Archives' data and documents.

Deceased Online adds First NW England Region to Database

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

The following announcement was written by Deceased Online:

First region in Northwest England on UK’s only burial records database

Cheshire West and Chester Council has become the first local authority in England’s Northwest to make all its burial and cremation records available through Deceased Online, the UK’s only database website dedicated to statutory burial and cremation records.

From 9th February local residents, family historians and genealogy researchers worldwide will be able to trace their ancestors via the website www.deceasedonline.com

The Council manages five cemeteries as well as Chester Crematorium in Blacon. Records for the crematorium and Blacon, Overpool, Neston and Wharton cemeteries will be available on-line from 9th February. The records from Overleigh cemetery will be made available in two phases, more modern records (from 1953) will be available in February and all other records in late Spring. In total, there are 185,000 burials and cremations.

Users will be able to search by name of deceased, date of death, and location of a grave or cremation records free of charge. If relevant records are found, the on-line user has the option to purchase, for a modest fee, access to grave details and scans of burial registers to view, print and/or download.

The scans provide details such as full names, the deceased’s address details, age, parish and grave reference and in some cases the occupation of the deceased. The burial records will also provide details of all those buried within graves, helping researchers to establish other family links, as well as grave number references, useful in locating and identifying graves.

The Council’s Executive Member for Community and Environment, Councillor Lynn Riley said of the project: “This is an exciting development, not only for local residents but for the global community of family historians. Adding the Council records to a national database will make them accessible to everyone, at any time and from any part of the world.”

Jamie Burges-Lumsden from Deceased Online said: “We are delighted to be working with Cheshire West and Chester Council. By adding their records to the database we are able to link areas across the UK and provide information to those searching ancestral roots. We already have thousands of on-line users and we hope that they will find the additional records of great interest and benefit.

“We are set to add many more records soon with more areas across northern England, Scotland, Wales, London and other parts of the UK. Our unique database continues to grow”, explains Burges-Lumsden.

For further information please visit www.deceasedonline.com or contact: Richard Gray on 020 8891 0512 or 07768 022100; email Richard@rgcmarketing.co.uk.

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RootsTech Wrap-up

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:20:07 +0000

Saturday was the third and final day of RootsTech 2012. The third day was a continuation of the first and second days. Great presentations were made and the Exhibitors Hall was as busy as ever.

The first session of the morning featured a focus on the RootsTech Contest Winners. The third place winner turned out to be two winners in a tie: the "20 Minute Genealogist" created by a team at the BYU Computer Science Department and "Facetree" by Ellie Rasmus. Second place was awarded to Brooke Schreier Ganz for "LeafSeek."

The grand prize winner was Jimmy Zimmerman with "NoteFuser."

All of these applications qualify as winners. You can view more about the winning applications by clicking on the highlighted terms above.

The keynote speech of the day was delivered by Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com, accompanied by four of his colleagues from the company. The phrase that stuck in my mind was near the beginning when Tim referred to "this ridiculously successful conference." Indeed, that was true. Ridiculous or not, RootsTech 2012 was very successful.

I never obtained the final attendance numbers but it probably was about 4,400 to 4,500 attendees. Not bad for a genealogy conference!

Much discussion about the operations of Ancestry.com followed, especially the abnormal load placed on the Ancestry.com servers the previous evening during the first episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?"

I have written several times about the growth of mobile applications for use in genealogy. The Ancestry.com executives seemed to verify the predictions:

The Ancestry.com app for smartphones has been downloaded 2 million times
Smartphone users have contributed 2 million hints to Ancestry.com
1 million photos have been uploaded from mobile devices
a high percentage of the mobile users do not use traditional access from desktop or laptop computers to access Ancestry.com
12% of all visits to Ancestry.com are by mobile devices
Designing apps to display information on tiny screens forces the web designers to squeeze focused information into a tiny screen. As a result, the designers must focus on what is most important to display on the first screen with supplementary info on secondary screens. As a result, Ancestry.com probably will build many new products on mobile access first, then later expand the products to larger screen devices. The result will be a focus on placing the most important info on a less-cluttered first screen.
Genealogy has typically been a solitary pursuit within the family. The wave of the future, especially with the use of mobile devices, will encourage collaboration within the family.
Ancestry. com presently employs about 300 software engineers with plans to add another 80 this year. Recruiting is a major focus of the company.

The Ancestry.com executives also gave a peek into the future:

City directories with more than 10 million images are now available on Ancestry.com. In the past, these directories have been difficult to find and difficult to search. Semantic extraction has always been a problem in semi-structured content, such as city directories. There has been no easy way to differentiate between names of people, place names, street names, advertisements on the page, and other content. However, the Ancestry.com engineers have found intelligent methods to extract different types of information from the City Directories. The changes are already partially implemented with the remainder of the changes to be added in the coming months.
Ancestry.com has already indexed half a billion records and those records are already online on Ancestry.com. The list will soon be expanded with obituaries and other content.
Census records - The engineers at Ancestry.com found that new users had great difficulty understanding the data presented in census records. A high percentage of new users never scrolled to see the right side of the census page where all the details are. The new viewer highlights an individual in one color and all other family members are highlighted in a different color. All other entries on the page remain in monochrome. The software to properly detect the appropriate lines turned out to be rather complex, especially in pages that are faded, torn, or otherwise difficult to read. The new viewer software is presently in use on the 1911 U.K. census and 1930 U.S. census and will be rolled out to all census products. Present implementation is to be considered "version 1.0" with additional improvements to be added in coming months.

Tim Sullivan added some other comments that I thought were worthwhile. This is not an exact quote, as I can't type that fast, but it is close to Tim's words:

Please be patient with us. We are constantly working on improving things. At any given moment, things might be a bit buggy or in change. But give us your feedback and then be patient while we make improvements and add bug fixes and the result will be that we will all benefit.

The goal is to create a frictionless user experience. No online site today is "frictionless" and it will not be easy to do in the near future, but that is always the long-term goal. We want to allow people to ignore the process and to focus on the information instead of the mechanics involved.

All in all, Tim's words made a lot of common sense. The entire keynote session was an interesting insight into the company's plans and motivations.

The remainder of the day continued in much the same manner as the previous two days. One possible exception is that the Exhibits Hall appeared to be a bit busier and noisier than before as most attendees realized it was "today or never." The vendors I talked with all seemed to be happy with sales.

All in all, the final day of RootsTech 2012 seemed to be as successful as the previous two days. I saw a lot of smiling attendees.

One final announcement was made: Next year's RootsTech conference wil b held about a month later in the year: RootsTech 2012 will be held March 21 though 23. If you would like to attend a great conference, mark your calendar now.

Your chance to shape the new archive standard

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:02:34 GMT

The online platform that brings together stakeholders from across the UK to debate and create the new Archives Accreditation standard is now live. Find out what everyone is talking about and contribute your views and expertise in our new platform.

Disruption to online services on 7 February

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:02:27 GMT

You may experience interruptions to our online services on the morning of Tuesday 7 February.

More records featured in 'Bomber Boys'

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:02:53 GMT