obsessed with ancestry.com

I have become obsessed with ancestry.com. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, ancestry.com (which I am going to call AC ) is a family tree research site, which hosts raw historical data records and scanned documents. With a combination of user submitted family information, scanned historical records, a massive relational database and internet access; information that would have taken my grandmother a lifetime to pull together, has taken me less than a month to compile.

AC is a SaaS model where I pay a monthly fee to access the database records. The actual platform – the user interface and application, is secondary to the massive data that AC has digitized and made searchable. My mind boggles at the undertaking - digitizing hundreds of years of millions of records – records commonly found in county file cabinets, yellowing bits of census journals with pen and ink handscript. Optical character recognition (OCR) allows searches against images of the actual documents – I can view my grandparents signature on their marriage license.

My original goal of creating a basic family tree with the view towards getting a better idea of “where am I from” has basically been answered. (Long story short – the four corners of PA, VA, WV, OH before they were states) The more time I spend on the tree, the more engrossing the whole process becomes. I built a base of ancestors back to 1700 (as far back as I care to go). As I searched and added family data from census and other information; I came against misspellings of names, duplicate records for a single ancestor, and changing city, county names (this came into play as the commonwealths become states and the mason-dixon line created WV from VA). As anyone who has created a db from scratch will tell you – data integrity is key (no pun intended!) and an obsession of it's own. I kept an eye to what seemed the most accurate of records.

Of course, as soon as I had my data set, I wanted to play with it. I wanted to do a timeline chart, a chart by birth months, a map of residences; I wanted to see the whole tree in it's splendor. As I mentioned above, AC as an actual application is pretty light with very limited ways to view my data and no reports at all to showcase my records. I began thinking of AC as my system of record and searched for a reporting tool to feed my need for metrics. The common file type for family tree software is GEDCOM and exports as a large text file with keyed records. I couldn't easily export the file to excel or access to create a home-brewed report, so I needed to find software that would integrate and allow me to manipulate my newly-culled family data.

I have downloaded a demo of MacFamily Tree and look forward to testing out the touted reporting tools. Although I have been able to gather this hierarchical net of family data, what I am missing is the narrative – the family stories that truly populate a family tree. Luckily – it looks like I might be able to find some family stories via google books. Isn't technology grand?!