Privacy and history: on a collision course?

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Erasing the human experience?

Any regular reader of this blog knows who The Legal Genealogist‘s favorite ancestor is.

Call him a rascal. A rogue. Even a scoundrel. But without my second great grandfather George Washington Cottrell and his misdeeds,1 my family tree would be populated pretty much by farmers, laborers and preachers.

And it’d be downright boring.

The simple fact is that George is the cinnamon on my family’s breakfast toast. He’s the one ancestor I’ve found (so far!) who spices things up. And I am profoundly grateful for him and — even more — for the records that exist documenting his missteps.

Now imagine, for a moment, that George had had a right to clean up his officially recorded act. That instead of leaving records of his brushes with the law, he’d been allowed to require that the records be destroyed or, at a minimum, removed from public access.

Imagine that he’d had, in modern parlance, the right to be forgotten.

That’s the issue being debated these days in the European Union2 and being touted as a direction in which the United States should also move.3 Proponents of a broad right to be forgotten argue that it is so easy for negative information to be posted online, to the detriment of personal privacy, we should be allowed to require that it be deleted — taken down — erased — just as easily.

After all, proponents ask, don’t we all have a right of personal privacy that allows us to have our misdeeds forgotten?

And that poses a dire and direct threat to our history — both personal and communal — and to the right of future generations to know what we did — and why. It is such a threat that archivists in Europe are coming together with petitions and ad campaigns to focus on the flip side of the proponents’ question: “What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?”4

It’s easy to write off the EU proposal for a broad right to be forgotten as addressing nothing more than the photo your college roommate took the time you first discovered that alcohol removed a few inhibitions along with, perhaps, a few more of your clothes than you’d be comfortable showing in public. Or that blog post you wrote five years ago that you no longer agree with.

None of us, I suspect, would disagree that we should be able to get that photo taken down and that we should be able to delete from our own sites the post we ourselves had written.

But consider this set of facts: how about an individual who fails to pay taxes, has a legal execution for the taxes filed against his home, and a newspaper notice is published about the sale of the home to satisfy the tax judgment? Should that person be allowed to require that all references to that be removed from public view — a right to have that be forgotten?

Think that’s far-fetched? There’s a lawsuit going on right now in the European Court of Justice that raises this exact question. The question in the case is posed in these terms:

Regarding the scope of the right of erasure and/or the right to object, in relation to the ‘derecho al olvido’ (the ‘right to be forgotten’) … (do) the rights to erasure and blocking of data … and the right to object … extend to enabling the data subject to address himself to search engines in order to prevent indexing of the information relating to him personally, published on third parties’ web pages, invoking his wish that such information should not be known to internet users when he considers that it might be prejudicial to him or he wishes it to be consigned to oblivion, even though the information in question has been lawfully published by third parties?5

Do we really want someone’s personal sensitivities under this kind of a “right to be forgotten” to erase, or remove from public view or access, this sort of information? Is an individual’s subjective view of what he wants known about himself going to be allowed to override society’s interest in preserving the truth of what our society is and what its individual members have and haven’t done?

And where does the line get drawn between a “right to be forgotten” and the records future generations will need to begin to understand us and our lives today? The fact is, much of what we know about our ancestors and our history comes from the little personal bits and pieces our ancestors left behind. The letters. The diaries. The scraps of paper with marginal notes.

Today, those kinds of records are exactly the kinds of records the EU’s proposed “right to be forgotten” would affect. As explained by Jean-Philippe Legois, president of the Association of French Archivists: “Today, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter — this is the correspondence of the 21st century. If we want to understand the society of today in the future, we have to keep certain traces.”6

As genealogists and family historians, we are all acutely sensitive to protecting and preserving access to the records of the past that we use, and want to continue to use, every day. It’s also part of our responsibility to help protect and preserve access to today’s records for tomorrow’s genealogists and family historians.

We need to keep an eye on this “right to be forgotten.” We all value our privacy, we all want the right to ensure that what is known about us is true.

But making mistakes is part of the human experience. They are what make us what we are. None of us wants to be remembered only for our mistakes. Yet none of us should want to be remembered for something — or as someone — we are not.

 
SOURCES

  1. See generally Judy G. Russell, “Darn it all, George!,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 18 May 2012, and “Oh George… you stinker!,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 9 Jun 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 17 Jun 2013). ↩
  2. See Cherri-Ann Beckles, “Will the Right To Be Forgotten Lead to a Society That Was Forgotten?,” Privacy Perspectives, posted 14 May 2013 (https://www.privacyassociation.org/privacy_perspectives : accessed 17 Jun 2013). ↩
  3. See Brian Montopoli, “Should there be a ‘right to be forgotten’ online?,” CBS News, posted 10 May 2013 (http://www.cbsnews.com : accessed 17 Jun 2013). See also Kate Connolly, “Right to erasure protects people’s freedom to forget the past, says expert,” The Guardian, online edition, posted 4 April 2013 (http://www.guardian.co.uk : accessed 17 Jun 2013). ↩
  4. Eric Pfanner, “Archivists in France Fight a Privacy Initiative,” New York Times, online edition, posted 16 Jun 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com : accessed 17 Jun 2013). ↩
  5. Reference for a preliminary ruling from the Audiencia Nacional (Spain) lodged on 9 March 2012 – Google Spain, S.L., Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González, Case C-131/12, InfoCuria – Case-law of the Court of Justice (http://curia.europa.eu/juris : accessed 17 Jun 2013). ↩
  6. Pfanner, “Archivists in France Fight a Privacy Initiative.” ↩
Posted in Court Cases, Records Access | 5 Comments

The parol

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

The language of the law. Part Latin, part Anglo-Saxon, all confusing.

There’s nothing like a good family fight that ends up in court. If, that is, you can understand the lingo used in the court documents.

There’s almost always genealogical information of value tucked away in the records — in the case of The Legal Genealogist‘s Baker family, information about the offspring of a third great grand-uncle Josiah Baker of Bakersville, Mitchell County, North Carolina. But oy! For a non-lawyer, reading the court file could be painful.

Josiah, who died in Bakersville in 1881, had seven sons — but two (William and David) died in childhood and three (Newton, John and Joseph) died in the Civil War. Only two — Theodore and Charles — survived him. But Newton had had a son before he died,1 and therein lies the tale.

Newton Vance Baker was the son of Josiah’s first-born, Newton A. Baker and his wife Hannah Ledford.2 And in 1884, he sued his Uncle Charles over a land deal.

The court papers indicate that, before his death, Josiah deeded his land to his two surviving sons, Theodore and Charles.3

But, grandson N. Vance Baker claimed, there was a side deal between Josiah the father and Charles the son, who got a bigger piece of land than son Theodore: Charles was to buy a tract of 56 acres of land called the Dogwood Flats, and that land was to go to grandson Vance. The total price was $450, Charles was to pay it off over time, and Charles did “immediately put (Vance) in possession of the … tract … on which he at once began to work and … continued to work thereon ever since, taking and using the profits and proceeds thereof.”4

The hitch was that, by 1884, Charles hadn’t paid the whole purchase price, the seller of the Dogwood Flats was in court trying to get the land back, and Vance was caught in the middle. So he sued.

And, in his suit, he alleged:

Plaintiff is advised that by the terms, in parol, accompanying the deed by the … said Josiah Baker and assented to by the defendant, a trust was created in favor of the plaintiff which attached to the conveyance of the lands to defendant and which a Court clothed with Equitable Jurisdiction can enforce.5

“The terms in parol”? Say what?

Yep. To exactly understand what Vance was arguing, we need to understand yet another of those murky “why-won’t-they-just-speak-English” terms lawyers use.

And this isn’t a case of misspelled parole (with an e). Parol is a different word altogether — and it simply means spoken or oral, “expressed or evidenced by speech only; not expressed by writing; not expressed by sealed instrument.”6

Notice that there are two possibilities in that definition: either the side agreement was entirely verbal, never written down in any way; or that it was “not expressed by sealed instrument.” That’s because “the common law draws only one great line, between things under seal and not under seal.”7

In this particular case, the court papers don’t ever mention any writing, so in context it’s clear that this was one of those “not worth the paper it wasn’t written down on” handshake deals. Had there been any written evidence that the side agreement existed, it would have been one of the exhibits submitted to the court — and there was no such exhibit.

You’ll come across the term in a lot of legal records and court opinions discussing evidence. Other contexts in which it’s common include:

     • Parol arrest. One ordered by a judge or magistrate from the bench, without written complaint or other proceedings, of a person who is present before him, and which is executed on the spot; as in case of breach of the peace in open court.8

     • Parol evidence. Oral or verbal evidence; that which is given by word of mouth; the ordinary kind of evidence, given by witnesses in court.9

     • Parol lease. A lease of real estate not evidenced by writing, but resting in an oral agreement.10

     • Parol promise. A simple contract; a verbal promise.11

And there’s one more that’s a bit different. You may come across a “parol demurrer” in very old court documents. That was a term used in early court cases involving land where one of the parties — usually the defendant — was still a minor. It meant that the case was suspended until the minor came of age.12

And young Vance? The case dragged through the courts for 10 years until it was finally dismissed at Vance’s request in 1894.13 In 1900, he was a boarder in the home of the Taylor family, whose daughter Phoebe became his second wife.14 He died at the age of 81 in Caldwell County, North Carolina, in 1944.15

Doesn’t look like he kept that land at all.

 
SOURCES

  1. Bible Record, Josiah and Julia (McGimsey) Baker Family Bible Records 1749-1912, The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (New York : American Bible Society, 1867); privately held by Louise (Baker) Ferguson, Bakersville, NC; photographed for JG Russell, Feb 2003. Mrs. Ferguson, a great granddaughter of Josiah and Julia, inherited the Bible; the earliest entries are believed to be in the handwriting of Josiah or Julia Baker. ↩
  2. Ibid. ↩
  3. Mitchell County, North Carolina, Original Estate Records: file “Baker, Josiah 1882”; call no. C.R. 066.508.1; North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh; digital images, “North Carolina, Estate Files, 1663-1979,” FamilySearch.org (https://familysearch.org/ : accessed 16 Jun 2013). ↩
  4. Ibid., verified complaint dated 23 Oct 1884. ↩
  5. Ibid. ↩
  6. Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 871, “parol.” ↩
  7. Ibid.,“parol agreements.” ↩
  8. Ibid.,“parol arrest.” ↩
  9. Ibid.,“parol evidence.” ↩
  10. Ibid.,“parol lease.” ↩
  11. Ibid.,“parol promise.” ↩
  12. Ibid.,“parol demurrer.” ↩
  13. Mitchell County, North Carolina, Original Estate Records: file “Baker, Josiah 1882,” order of dismissal June term 1894. ↩
  14. 1900 U.S. census, Mitchell County, NC, Bakersville, population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 89, p. 9A (stamped), dwelling/family 148, Vance Baker; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 16 Jun 2013); citing National Archive microfilm publication T623, roll 1109; imaged from FHL microfilm 1375122. ↩
  15. North Carolina State Board of Health, death certif. no. 2280, Newton Vance Baker, 8 Feb 1944; Bureau of Vital Statistics, Raleigh. ↩
Posted in Court Cases, Legal definitions | 4 Comments

Happy Father’s Day to my brothers

Posted on June 16, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

A tribute to the fathers of my family

For a change of pace this Father’s Day, The Legal Genealogist celebrates the fathers of my generation: my brothers who are fathers.

Evan

My older brother Evan and his daughter, my niece Gina, petting a lion cub in a refuge in South Africa. Gina, one of two children, changed Evan’s life this year by presenting him with his first grandson, Martin. Evan has always said he would never retire because he loves what he does (he’s a family physician). Within 36 hours of Martin’s birth, he told me he wanted to retire and take his grandson fishing. I told him he might want to wait until Martin learns to walk.

Paul

My younger brother Paul and his first two sons Rudi (foreground) and Max (on Paul’s lap). Son Stefan and daughter Katya (who just graduated with honors from Northern Arizona University) round out this family.

Fred

My younger brother Fred with daughter Bobbi, who has made him a grandfather three times over. Sydney, Phoenix and Addyson are coming on strong in our next generation — smart, funny and cute as can be. (Of course.)

Bill

And my youngest brother Bill with his first-born, Dennis, who — like his younger brother Duncan — is my godson. In typical southern-family fashion, Bill’s two boys are the youngest of the cousins, 10 years younger than the next youngest in their generation, which we figure will probably confuse tomorrow’s genealogists.

Happy Father’s Day, guys!

Posted in My family | 5 Comments

Some really Peachy news

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

BIG win in Georgia

There is nothing in this world like spending a night in your own bed after 10 days away — and waking up to news that is not just Good News, it’s downright TERRIFIC.

That’s this Saturday morning for The Legal Genealogist — and the news out of the Peach State is WONDERFUL NEWS for the entire genealogical community.

You ready to smile?

Here goes:

You remember that horrible day in September last year when the Georgia Secretary of State decided that he couldn’t afford to keep the Georgia Archives open — that the two-day-a-week schedule to which the Archives’ hours had already been slashed was still too expensive?1

You remember how the genealogical community banded together and fought it — and fought it — and fought it — and we finally won a victory when control of the Archives was transferred from the Secretary of State to the University of Georgia System?2

But you remember that the budget for the Archives as part of the transfer only had just a little bit more money in it, and it didn’t look like it’d really be enough to make things any better — just keep them from getting worse?3

Well, how about this? The good folks at GeorgiaArchivesMatters — volunteers from the Georgia Genealogical Society — went to a meeting yesterday with Georgia Archives Director Christopher Davidson and here’s what was reported on the GeorgiaArchivesMatters blog:

At today’s Lunch and Learn program, Georgia Archives Director Christopher Davidson announced that the Archives will be adding staff, increasing hours for part-time employees and, yes, opening to the public for two additional days per week.

Here are the highlights:

• Hiring three additional professionals
• Increasing part-time staff hours
• Opening to the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays beginning July 31. Weekly hours will be Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
• Increasing conservation and processing activities of the Archives collections.4

Let me repeat that:

Starting 31 July, the Georgia Archives will be open four days a week, Wednesday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Talk about moving in the right direction!!!

A big THANK YOU to the Georgia Legislature for acting responsibly to conserve and protect this critical repository of priceless records of our common past, to the University of Georgia System for its support of and commitment to the Archives, and to all the genealogists in and out of the State of Georgia for their untiring efforts to save the Georgia Archives for us all.

SOURCES

  1. Judy G. Russell, “Archives and ancestors,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 15 Sep 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 15 Jun 2013). ↩
  2. Vivian Price Saffold, “It’s Official… The Archives is Part of the University System,” Georgia Archives Matters, posted 6 May 2013 (http://georgiaarchivesmatters.org/ : accessed 15 Jun 2013). ↩
  3. Judy G. Russell, “Georgia Archives needs one last push,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 15 Mar 2013 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 15 Jun 2013). ↩
  4. Vivian Price Saffold, “More Good News From the Archives,” Georgia Archives Matters, posted 14 Jun 2013 (http://georgiaarchivesmatters.org/ : accessed 15 Jun 2013). ↩
Posted in General, Records Access | 1 Comment

Our DNA can’t be patented

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Supreme Court says no to Myriad

In the late 1990s, the United States Patent Office issued patents to a Utah company on two human genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes that — if present — cause a significantly elevated risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

The patents gave the company — Myriad Genetics — a monopoly on testing women for the presence of those genes. Armed with its patents, the company went after academic and medical researchers to stop them from trying to test for the genes and jacked the price of its test up to as much as $4,000.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Patent Office was wrong. In its unanimous ruling in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, the Court held that “a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.”1

In other words, nobody can get a patent on genes that occur naturally in your body or mine. And that is Very Good News, indeed.

The Court explained that what Myriad did was discover “the precise location and sequence of what are now known as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.” It went on:

Mutations in these genes can dramatically increase an individual’s risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. The average American woman has a 12- to 13-percent risk of developing breast cancer, but for women with certain genetic mutations, the risk can range between 50 and 80 percent for breast cancer and between 20 and 50 percent for ovarian cancer.2

It reviewed the bottom line in American jurisprudence on the patentability of purely natural phenomena:

We have “long held that …[:] Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable.” … Rather, “‘they are the basic tools of scientific and technological work’” that lie beyond the domain of patent protection. … As the Court has explained, without this exception, there would be considerable danger that the grant of patents would “tie up” the use of such tools and thereby “inhibit future innovation premised upon them.” … This would be at odds with the very point of patents, which exist to promote creation.3

In striking down the Myriad Genetics’ patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, the Court noted that:

It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA. Instead, Myriad’s principal contribution was uncovering the precise location and genetic sequence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes within chromosomes 17 and 13. … Myriad did not create anything. To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.4

The Court was careful to limit its holding to the patent on the genes themselves, and not to the creation of artificial versions of the genetic material in the laboratory. And there’s nothing in the opinion that will stop the Patent Office from issuing a patent on a treatment for a genetic ailment or a particular method of manipulating DNA in order to detect a genetic ailment.

Those activities are useful scientific advances that work to everyone’s advantage and help achieve the purposes of the patent statutes: to promote creation.

However, between this decision yesterday and the decision by the Supreme Court last year in Mayo Medical Labs. v. Prometheus Labs.,5 it’s clear that the Court will not allow companies to use the patent laws to lock up genes or parts of genes occurring in nature nor to claim a monopoly on the mere fact that having gene A results in a higher-than-average risk of condition B.

So what does this all mean for genetic genealogists?

    • First, nobody else owns our DNA — and nobody else can get a patent on it.

    • Second, nobody else can claim an exclusive right to test our DNA.

    • Third, nobody else can tell us that we can’t test a specific part of our DNA that may contain information useful for family history (including family medical history).

    • Fourth, nobody else can tell us that the only way we can test a specific part of our DNA that may contain information useful for family history (including family medical history) is to pay one company a price it can inflate to its heart’s content because there’s no competition.

If you think I’m overstating the case here, read yesterday’s blog post “Supreme Court Decision – Genes Can’t Be Patented” by Roberta Estes at DNA-Explained. She quotes Gene by Gene, parent company of Family Tree DNA, as stating it could do the BRCA1 and BRCA2 testing — and will immediately start doing so through its DNATraits division — for less than one fourth the amount Myriad Genetics has been charging.6

Now I want to repeat what I wrote about this issue last year, because I do have a dog in this hunt and my views on this issue are distinctly biased. I wrote then:

I am a breast cancer survivor. I was faced a few years ago with the question of whether to have a genetic test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that greatly enhance a woman’s chances of developing breast and/or ovarian cancer. Because of a lack of family history and the specific kind of cancer I had, my insurance company was unwilling to pay for the test.

One hitch: Myriad Genetics holds the patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. … Myriad Genetics didn’t create the gene, or change the person’s status or condition, or change the fact that people with BRCA1 or BRCAC2 have an elevated risk of cancer. All it did was patent the connection and say nobody else could test for BRCA1 and BRCA2.

And because of Myriad’s patent — a patent that’s been challenged in the courts for years without final resolution — I couldn’t shop around. I had one choice for the test — Myriad — and the cost would have been more than $4,000.

After consulting with a genetic counselor, I opted not to have the test. But at least, for me, it was an option. If my life had been on the line, I could have found the $4,000. For many women, coming up with that much cash is out of the question, especially in light of all the other costs of cancer treatment.7

It is, therefore, with profound personal as well as genealogical relief that I can say, today, it looks like the Supreme Court is Getting This Right.

At least so far.

 
SOURCES

  1. Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, No. 12–398, slip opinion at 1 (U.S. Supreme Court, 13 June 2013); PDF of opinion available at U.S. Supreme Court website (http://www.supremecourt.gov/ : accessed 13 June 2013). ↩
  2. Ibid. at 4. ↩
  3. Ibid. at 11 (internal citations omitted). ↩
  4. Ibid. at 12. ↩
  5. Mayo Medical Labs. v. Prometheus Labs, No. 10–1150, slip opinion (U.S. Supreme Court, 20 March 2012); PDF of opinion available at U.S. Supreme Court website (http://www.supremecourt.gov/ : accessed 13 June 2013). ↩
  6. Roberta Estes, “Supreme Court Decision – Genes Can’t Be Patented,” DNA eXplained, posted 13 Jun 2013 (http://dna-explained.com/ : accessed 13 Jun 20132). ↩
  7. Judy G. Russell, “A disquieting blend of genes and patents,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 15 Jul 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 13 Jun 2012). ↩
Posted in Court Cases, DNA | 11 Comments

IGHR and primary resources

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Two more resources

About mid-week during an immersive genealogy institute like the Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, students’ brains start to go on overload.

There is so much to learn and so much to share that trying to stay on top of all the information can be overwhelming. And when you’re teaching on top of learning as The Legal Genealogist has been… well… at least I keep writing down notes about cool resources!

And here are two more, both neat ways to get into some of the really underused resources of genealogy — manuscripts and other unpublished materials.

The first is called Repositories of Primary Sources. It’s a website at the University of Idaho compiled by Terry Abraham, Head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Idaho Library:

This site is essentially a Cyndi’s List for primary source materials. It describes itself as a “listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar.”

Materials are organized geographically, and there are category links to:

    • Western United States and Canada
    • Eastern United States and Canada: States and Provinces A-M
    • Eastern United States and Canada: States and Provinces N-Z
    • Latin America and the Caribbean
    • Europe A-M
    • Europe N-Z
    • Asia and the Pacific
    • Africa and the Near East
    • Additional Lists
    • State, Province, Country Index
    • Integrated Index/List

The second is called ArchiveGrid, and it’s another way to get into and find archival records like manuscripts. It’s a service of OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center):

ArchiveGrid describes itself as “a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions,” covering “collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives.” It “provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, making information available about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials (and) contact information for the institutions where the collections are kept.”

Since so much of what we really want to learn about the families we research is hidden away in these primary sources, these are resources I can’t wait to use to see what turns up…

Posted in General, Resources | 8 Comments

IGHR and historical maps

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Research in the South – Day 2

The Legal Genealogist said yesterday that there’s “nothing in the genealogical world to compare to an institute: a week-long intensive immersive experience that is exhilarating, exhausting, entertaining and educational — often all at the same time.”

What I forgot was … time-consuming.

Classes here at the Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, start at 8 a.m. They’re immersive — you’re really focusing on trying to absorb all the new information being thrown your way at a fast and furious pace.

And with the evening sessions — I’m speaking each of the regular evening-session evenings, with The Ethical Genealogist Monday night, A Family For Isabella last night and The ABCs of DNA tonight — the days aren’t over until after 7 p.m.

Then there are all the people you haven’t seen since last year, and all the new friends you have a chance to make, and…

There aren’t enough hours in the days.

So … two quick new resources — new to me, at least.

First, from course coordinator J. Mark Lowe, CG, comes the Historical Census Browser at the University of Virginia Library website. This is a totally cool way to display graphically the demographics of the United States as a whole or any part of it over time.

Here, for example, is a map of the United States showing the concentrations of people living in the United States as of the 1900 census who were born in Germany:

There are lots of ways to use this. For example, you could create maps of just one state and watch the population density change from census to census. Go on and play with it. It’s terrific.

And from instructor Michael Hait comes this link to the Randy Majors version of Historical U.S. County Boundary Maps where you can see the historical county lines overlaying a Google Maps image of any location you choose, and you can add in the courthouses, churches, cemeteries and libraries in the area if you choose.

Here’s an example for the town of Centre, in Cherokee County, Alabama, from which a number of my ancestors hailed. I sure hope the mapping is incomplete. I’d hate to think there weren’t any churches or cemeteries in Cherokee County as of 1880!

Again, go ahead and play with it. You may find out all kinds of neat things about the places you — or your ancestors — called home.

Posted in General, Resources | 8 Comments

IGHR and new resources

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Research in the South – Day 1

There is literally nothing in the genealogical world to compare to an institute: a week-long intensive immersive experience that is exhilarating, exhausting, entertaining and educational — often all at the same time.

Elizabeth Crabtree Wells

And so it is, once again, that The Legal Genealogist is thrilled to be sitting in a classroom at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, whose Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR) is now in its 51st year.1

This is my fourth year at IGHR, which is co-sponsored by the Board for Certification of Genealogists. This year, I’m teaching Copyright for Genealogists in Course 6: Genealogy as a Profession, coordinated by Elissa Scalise Powell, CG, CGL, and presenting three evening lectures on ethics, indirect evidence and DNA.

And… wonder of wonders… I’m getting to learn more about researching my family.

My mother’s kinfolk traveled all over the American south. The only state south of the Mason-Dixon line where I don’t have ancestors (or at least close collaterals) is Florida. And I am having a ball in Research in the South, a course with varying content each year — and this year it’s Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi — all states where I have roots.

The course is coordinated by J. Mark Lowe, CG, who offered some terrific insights into migration patterns in the south, and the instructors yesterday were Deborah Abbott, Ph.D., on Mississippi records, and Elizabeth Crabtree Wells, coordinator of the Special Collection Department of the Samford University Library, on religious records from the South.

I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of the joy of learning for yourself the wonders of the institute experience… but I also wouldn’t dream of not sharing two very neat resources I learned about yesterday.

The first, from Deborah Abbott, is the J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism at the Millsaps College Library in Jackson, Mississippi. If you have a Mississippi circuit-riding preacher in your ancestry the way I do, this is a must-visit location. The records aren’t online, but hey… you wanted an excuse to visit the ancestral homeland, right? This is a good one.

From Liz Wells came some absolute gems that had everybody in the class sitting up and taking note. She showed a series of maps, showing the spread of various religions across the United States. They are from an atlas that was new to me and, from the reactions of others, new to most of the class.

It’s a book called the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, by Charles O. Paullin, edited by John K. Wright, and originally published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the American Geographical Society of New York.2

It was published in 1932, so it’s still under copyright — that means you won’t find it on Google Books.

But you can find it online.

The University of Michigan has digitized the atlas and in all its glory it’s online at the University of Michigan Digital Library.

It’s not all that easy to use — you have to work through the individual pages of the table of contents and/or the index to find the subject matter you want and then open each text page or atlas image (plate) individually. But it’s absolutely worth the effort to see this first class piece of work.

Remember: still in copyright so don’t copy the pages and put ‘em up on your blog or Ancestry or FamilySearch. This is a research reference only.

I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week holds!

 
SOURCES

  1. “Welcome to IGHR,” IGHR-Samford University Library (http://www4.samford.edu/schools/ighr/index.html : accessed 10 Jun 2013). ↩
  2. Charles O. Paullin, John K. Wright (ed.), Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Baltimore : A. Hoen & Co., 1932). ↩
Posted in General, Resources | 7 Comments

A must-have for Georgia researchers

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Nifty little book

The Georgia Constitution of 1777 recognized a grand total of eight counties. By 1800, there were 24. By the end of 1832, there were 89. By 1875, there were 137; by 1924, 161; and by virtue of the consolidation of Milton and Campbell Counties into Fulton County in 1932, the current number stands at 159.1

And, according to a terrific little book by Paul K. Graham, CG, AG, “75 of the state’s counties have suffered 109 events resulting in the loss or severe damage of their courthouse or court offices.”2

Ouch.

For those of us with Georgia ancestors, that hurts.

But better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, and the last thing any genealogist wants to do is set off on a road trip to a courthouse that no longer has the records needed or to write an article saying records weren’t examined because of a courthouse fire that … um, er … never happened.

Either of those horribles is easily prevented. Just get a copy of Graham’s nifty little book Georgia Courthouse Disasters, just recently published.

It lists each and every one of those disasters, in alphabetical and in chronological orders, and provides a vignette of the type (or types) of disaster in each county and when each occurred — together with citations to the original sources of the information used to compile the.

One small example, for Toombs County:

Early in the morning of November 21, 1917, the Toombs County courthouse at Lyons was completely destroyed. The county was only twelve years old. Its records were safe in vaults.
“Courthouse is Destroyed,” Macon Daily Telegraph, November 22, 1917, p. 14.3

Perhaps the single most useful feature to the book beyond the simple utility of a one-stop source for record loss caused by disasters are the maps showing the impacts of record losses.

Remember that today’s counties are smaller than the original counties were and so a record loss in, say, Dooly County in 1847 impacted records covering land that today is in Wilcox, Turner, Lee, Crisp and Macon Counties as well as what is today Dooly County.4

The book is only 63 pages, 68 with the index, a neatly bound paperback in a size that’s easy to use and convenient to carry. It’s available from Amazon.com as a paperback for $5.39 or as a Kindle book for $2.99.

A must-have for Georgia researchers.

Highly recommended.

 
SOURCES

Note: The Legal Genealogist was given a copy of the book for review purposes.

  1. For the 1777 constitution, see Article IV, Georgia Constitution of 1777, GeorgiaInfo (http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu : accessed 4 June 2013). For the creation of counties after 1777, see generally Ed Jackson, “A Brief History of Georgia Counties,” GeorgiaInfo (http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu : accessed 4 June 2013). ↩
  2. Paul K. Graham, CG, AG, Georgia Courthouse Disasters (Decatur, Ga. : Genealogy Co., 2013), 1. ↩
  3. Ibid., 53. ↩
  4. See ibid., 28. ↩
Posted in General, Resources | 8 Comments

DNA: news from Burbank

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Transfers and interfaces

So there were two big topics of discussion dealing with DNA at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree that ends today in Burbank. One was changes — updates, interface upgrades and promises of further changes — at AncestryDNA, and the other was good news for people tired of waiting for updates, upgrades and changes at AncestryDNA.

These all have to do with autosomal DNA testing — the kind of testing that works across genders and helps you find cousins to work with to fill in information about your common family tree.1

FTDNA now takes AncestryDNA transfers

The immediate news of use to everyone who has tested with AncestryDNA is that Family Tree DNA can now accepted transfers of raw data from the AncestryDNA testing — and that the price is a phenomenal $49 for one week only, through June 14. Even better, that price, announced at Jamboree, also applies to transfers from 23andMe.

Now let’s be clear: when I say transfer, I don’t mean you’re taking your information away from AncestryDNA or 23andMe if that’s where you tested first. You’re not transferring it in that sense. What you’re doing is downloading a copy of your raw data from the company where you tested and uploading it to another company to be included in its database.

What that gives you, first and foremost, is a better chance at more and better matches. If you’re an adoptee or someone with a lot of brick walls, you don’t want to miss a critical match at company A just because you’ve tested with company B. Just as it’s random chance whether you and a cousin share enough DNA in common to show up as a match, it may also be random chance whether you test at the same company.

So you’re simply taking the test results — a simple text file full of your genetic code data — and adding them to another database so you can fish for cousins in another pond.

What it also gives you, if you’ve only tested with AncestryDNA, is a vastly better interface right now. We’ll talk about the changes AncestryDNA is about to make to its interface in a minute, but even with those changes you’ll still find more and better tools to work with at Family Tree DNA today.

At Family Tree DNA, there are almost unlimited ways to sort through your matches. You can sort by the suggested relationship, the total amount of DNA you and a match have in common, the length of the longest unbroken segment of DNA you and a match have in common, whether you and a match both have a common surname reported in your profiles.

But perhaps the most useful sorting is the ability to identify, quickly and easily, every person you and one of your matches both match: the people you both match in common. And, on occasion, you may want to know who the matches are that you have but that another match of yours does not share. Both of those are options with Family Tree DNA.

There are other tools available in the Family Tree DNA interface that you may find useful, including the ability to see where on which chromosomes the segments are that you and a match share. And there’s the much easier system for contacting your matches: you get the email addresses of your matches (or, in some cases, those who administer the results for one or more matches).

Even if the interface options don’t float your boat, just the ability to see who you match who may only have tested at Family Tree DNA is well worth the $49.

And no, before you ask, I don’t get a thing from Family Tree DNA for saying so.

Changes at AncestryDNA

At Jamboree, AncestryDNA demonstrated interface changes it plans to roll out in the very near future. Once those changes go live, you won’t need to use a third party tool any more2 merely to find matches where you and the match both have a common surname in your family tree.

By simply entering a surname into the name field of the soon-to-be-coming search box, you will be able to see only those people you match you have that surname in their trees. And by entering a place into a location search field, you’ll be able to see only those people whose family tree information includes someone born in that location.

The interface retains the sort options available now — sorting by relationship, by the date the match results were posted, and by whether there is a shaky-leaf hint because someone in your online family tree matches someone in your match’s online family tree.

But the interface will not include one option available now: the slider that lets you eliminate from the results you’re looking at all of those real outlier results reported as distant cousins using confidence levels called “moderate confidence,” “low confidence” and “very low confidence.”

AncestryDNA’s vice president for genomics and bioinformatics, Dr. Catherine Ball, noted that there is a very significant chance — stated candidly and clearly by AncestryDNA on the results page — that these matches are false positives — people who actually are not related to you at all. She added that AncestryDNA had chosen to report them as possibilities to give its customers as much data as possible and as many potential cousins as possible to work with.

AncestryDNA has not disclosed how it designates matches as moderate, low or very low confidence, and many genetic genealogists have appreciated the ability to simply turn off those hundreds and often thousands of matches-that-may-not-be-matches-at-all. It would be very useful to have the slider return, both to limit the number of overall matches we have to deal with at a time and to quickly isolate those with common surnames or birth locations who might be the best candidates for a real match.

AncestryDNA’s Dr. Ken Chahine and Dr. Ball both said they understood the desire for more and better tools to work with the underlying raw data but did not think adding a chromosome browser was the way they wanted to proceed. Essentially, they said Ancestry was working on what we might think of as building a better DNA mousetrap. Neither gave real hints as to what form that might take or the time frame in which it might occur.

And they said AncestryDNA would be rolling out a new refinement or revision of the admixture analysis later in 2013. It’s expected to address (and to revise downwards) the unusually high percentages of Scandinavian ancestry reported among people with British Isles ancestors.

  1. See generally Judy G. Russell, “Autosomal DNA testing,” National Genealogical Society Magazine, October-December 2011, 38-43. ↩
  2. See Judy G. Russell, “blog post title,” The Legal Genealogist, posted date (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed date). ↩
Posted in DNA | 11 Comments