On this Friday, before the Monday holidays in the Americas, I was very grateful to Bill Moore and Dr. Mary M. Marshall for their active participation today. Monday is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, and here in the United States, we celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day in many states, and Italian heritage or Columbus Day in others. It was a delight to welcome you all to today’s special Friday Substack live program, previewing next week’s Emma Explores program with Emma - Journeys into Genealogy.
Your generous ❤️ s, restacks, and shares have helped turn this publication into the supportive community we all want to see. Thanks for all you do to be so kind, curious, and creative!
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Next week, in Emma Explores, our intrepid researcher will reveal discoveries from Full-Text Search at FamilySearch.org
Emma interviewed Lucy Reynoldson from FamilySearch a few weeks ago for her marvelous JourneysIntoGenealogy podcast. In that program, she shared the impact of AI, navigation tips for the new user interface and a remarkable tips for using Full Text Search. (Learn more about that episode on Emma’s substack, Journeys into Genealogy.)
In Emma’s next episode for Emma Explores, she’ll share what she discovered while following rabbit trails in her Fonblonque family lines using this Full-Text feature. Emma shares how delighted she was to discover all sorts of details about her family line, lives lived, letters, and more from within the body of Family History books published in the 19th century for related families.
This kind of social history material is gold, yet you’d never find it from indexed publication titles. It’s only from full-text searches of materials themselves that this kind of writing is revealed. To be clear, so far the full-text is covering only printed words, not handwriting, but give it time.
In our discussion of the feature, Emma suggested homework we consider before Thursday’s program.
* Pick a family line (or two) and use that name and other known information such as locations or dates to do a full-text search at FamilySearch. While the feature is available from several locations within the platform, a good place to start is the catalog page:
* www.familysearch.org/en/library/our-catalogs
TIP: Honestly, I just tried it and discovered an extensive descendancy chart for one of my earliest ancestors to arrive in America, Jabez Harger, b. 1642. It was in a family history book for the Cowles family. One search. Unbelievable. I wasn’t even trying.
I can’t wait to hear how well it works for you. By exploring this as homework, you’ll have Emma’s expertise to draw on for tips and advice when you join us on Thursday.
Related: Contributions to Digital Archives
In a related topic, we also discussed various options for sharing family history materials with digital archives. Two we discussed were:
The FamilySearch Library happily accepts the following types of donations:
* Well-organized, typed, bound, and shelf-ready books: multiple-generation family histories, local and county histories, and other genealogically valuable titles.
* For digital donations, books must be submitted in a single PDF file and include a signed Permission to Duplicate Form.
* All materials must exclude information on living persons.
The archive accepts a vast range of media in physical form, though with some restrictions. See the link above for details. More about other kinds of physical donations here.
* Digital uploads — requires registration and login to donate.
The archive accepts the contribution of digital books, audio, and video files that you have the right to share. As a non-profit library, it will provide free storage and access to them. They reserve the right to remove any submitted material and strictly adhere to copyright laws.
Finally, during our conversation, I mentioned a recent interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, with Cindy Cohen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This was on the delightful podcast, How to Fix the Internet. Here is that podcast episode:
I hope all of this is helpful, and I look forward to seeing you on Thursday at our Atlantic-friendly time. Remember to register to get your free Zoom link to join us.
