ThinkGenealogy

I am taking a few vacation days from work and trading the 80° of Phoenix for the 60° of St. George.  The reason?  To attend the 5th Annual St. George Family History Expo hosted by Family History Expos.com.

I am excited to present first thing on Friday (at 10:00 a.m.) and then to enjoy the rest of the conference. Some of my genealogy friends will be there so it will be great to see them again. And I hope to make some new friends.

So if you recognize me from my picture or attend my presentation, please introduce yourself.  Hope to see you in St. George.

Most have heard some variation of the question:

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

There are various view points as to why the answer could be “yes” or why it could be “no”. One I find interesting is that the tree falling makes a vibration, but it doesn’t become a sound until some creature is close enough to translate those vibrations into sound.

I have been thinking a lot lately about sources — specifically those used in genealogy to help identity our ancestors and further our research.  Let me see if I can process the recent comments on this blog and the APG list and correlate it with my past thinking.

A source is a thing. So it must have a creator (or recorder).

A source contains information. So it must have an informant.

Very often the creator and informant are two different people.

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When was the last time you visited the website for the National Genealogical Society?  If you visit today, you will see a new look.  The site is better organized, looks better, and just feels better.

Stop by and look around.

Thanks again to Twitter for being my news source.  Reunion, a popular genealogy application for the Mac has now been released for the iPhone/iPod Touch.  Reunion for the iPhone has many features including multiple family files, 6-generation overview, family card display, multimedia, and sources.  This is not just a family data viewer, you can edit data in Reunion for iPhone and then sync it with Reunion for Mac.

Here are a few screen shots:

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Posted 38 minutes ago on Twitter:

 ”RM4 is officially code complete.”

http://twitter.com/rootsmagic/status/1225567243

Congratulations Bruce and team!

What started out as a follow-up comment to that left by Michael Hait on the post, Confusion with the Various Definitions of Original Source, got too long for a comment and has turned into this post.

Thank you for contributing to the conversation. Any discussion of sources and their classification as original or derivative is not complete without discussing source provenance. When we trace the incarnations of a source all the way back to the original, we are able to do two things: 1) answer the question “Is there a better source?” and 2) determine independent origin.
Let us take the example of an original census that was microfilmed and then digitized. We are looking at the digital copy and we determine that the image is dark and hard to read in certain areas. We ask ourselves if there is a better source and determine that the problem was likely with the microfilm so if a better source exists it would have to be the original. Let’s say that we are able to consult the original and we can read the problem areas. In this case, the original was the better source.

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