7 ms·

As someone who got really deep into genealogy during pandemic, this type of thing is all too common. In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to

As someone who got really deep into genealogy during pandemic, this type of thing is all too common. In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to fire. San Francisco lost most of its historical documents in the 1906 earthquake and fires. The UK lost the 1931 census due to fire (and then didn't do one in 1941 because of the war). Millions of European church records have been thrown out. Often times these are the only record that someone existed at all. We are now in an age where things can be easily scanned and archived, but they're are still millions of paper records that only exist in paper form in a filling cabinet somewhere. That being said, genealogy today is 100x earlier than it was even 20 years ago. I have been able to find documents in minutes that took my grandparents years to find because they have been OCRd and are searchable online. However there is still a lot to be learned from old fashioned research, writing letters to and visiting city clerks hoping they may have interesting records about your ancestors. I find genealogy pretty satisfying as a hobby and I recommend it to anyone who likes dipping their toes into multiple disciplines. You can go deep in document recognition, archiving, photo restoration, face identification, genetics/DNA, data models (GEDCOM), writing, community service (lots of archiving roles are volunteers at small governments or libraries). It is great way to connect with relatives, known or unknown, and scratches the problem solving itch for me. It is a hobby/industry where the tools are mostly ancient and there is lots of room for "disruption".

mickdeek86 3y ago
I just spent several weeks in Germany, one of my goals was family history (my father was born in Dusseldorf, his father in Berlin), that whole side is dead now, basically. I had a much easier time in the west (my grandma's birthplace) than in the east, much of which was apparently due to war damage. It also turns out that my naive notion of just walking into the national archives and putting my grimy American fingers all over their paper records was objectionable to the Germans. But at least I made contacts, the archivist basically takes a fee and get back to you in a few months' time.
RainbowFriends 3y ago
For the DIY folks, Webtrees is a halfway decent platform: https://www.webtrees.net/index.php/en/ https://www.webtrees.net/index.php/en/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- stvltvs 3y ago
  Is there a reason to prefer Webtrees over an open source desktop app like Gramps? https://gramps-project.org/ https://gramps-project.org/
  - RainbowFriends 3y ago
    Webtrees is open source, and allows for easy sharing with your family through http: https://github.com/fisharebest/webtrees https://github.com/fisharebest/webtrees
  - asielen 3y ago
    I like the idea behind gramps, but it needs a massive UI/UX overhaul. I don't mind the look and feel but you really have to spend a lot of time with it to figure out how to use it. Things that should be straightforward require multiple levels of menus or windows. It is very powerful though and allows for near infinite configuration.
op00to 3y ago
My birth certificate was scanned on microfilm. I recently requested a copy of my birth certificate since my original was tattered and on its way out, and the new certificate was unreadable. The registrar tried three times to print a new one, and it turns out the microfilm was not exposed correctly and the originals were discarded. They created a special certificate that has both the microfilm image and a “translation” so it’s actually useful.
lqet 3y ago
In southwestern Germany, genealogy usually stops at the Thirty Years' War [0]. Where I come from, the population decline during the war was more than 66% [1]. Most church records were either destroyed in battle, or used as a heat source during the winter. Very often, people just stopped keeping birth records. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Bev%C3%B6lkerkungsr%C3%BCckgang_im_HRRDN_nach_dem_Drei%C3%9Figj%C3%A4hrigen_Krieg.PNG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Bev%C3%B...
puzzledobserver 3y ago
In our own Indian family, family history is mostly an oral tradition. My grandparents and their relatives tell stories of their own relatives, so we know of a mythical great-great-grandfather who was apparently a doctor-on-horseback. My own parents know this history, but to a lesser extent, and given the rise of nuclear families, I am (and I suspect the other relatives of my generation) even less aware of this history. In any case, written records are mostly unavailable. Our personal family history from the pre-1950 period is fading, and most of our history from before the 20th century is lost. We have our own stories to tell, and they'll eventually be forgotten too. It's sad to see older relatives grow frail, forget things, and die, but I've never felt a sense of historical loss. Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies. If feels like we of European descent have all of the genealogical advantages. For most other folks, gleaning their family data seems to vary between brutal and impossible.
  - datameta 3y ago
    Tangentially, I have geneology gaps due to WW2. My great-grandfathers perished defending unknown cities with the Soviet Army. Afaik one was sent to take out tanks with improvized AT weapons at best, the other I know nothing of. During the Battle for Odesa and the following occupation by the Axis forces many records were lost. My grandmother on my dad's side grew up during the occupation. Thankfully my mom's side evacuated (Jewish) potentially due to my maternal great grandmother having been part of the defense as a field doctor and helped organize evacuation via ships. She received medals for her efforts including Order of the Red Star. She was able to get on the last ship to leave. After the war she counted 28 relatives lost due to war or holocaust. Some decades later her nephew made a booklet about the widely extended family tree despite spotty records at best. I know it took many years of research on his part, I should ask where our copy is. That maybe took a dark turn at some point - but I was thinking primarily about how armed conflict has the potential to erase history.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to fire. Yeah. That one was a killer. So much unique info that wasn't in other census. At the other end of the spectrum is the 1950 census which turned out to be disappointingly uninformative.
cm2187 3y ago
In the same spirit, people who have boxes of old photos that have some historical interest either because of their age or persons of interest, should probably upload them on wikimedia. That's probably the best way to preserve them for future generations.
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  I have one better - a box, about 2 ft^3 in volume, of the negatives for every photograph my wife's grandmother took throughout her life. She kept them all in one box, moved with them several times, and only stopped when we got her a digital camera in ~2010. Even then, she didn't like the idea of re-using memory cards, so we just bought small ones in bulk. There were ~100 memory cards in the aforementioned box when I received it; I've since copied them all over to my "family long-term digital storage", which exists in multiple places and in multiple formats. In addition to that, I put them all on USB drives and distributed them to interested family members at a family reunion. Each year they get new thumb drives with whatever new data I've collected over the preceding year. My problem is that I have thousands of negatives and slides, in several formats, and no easy to way scan them in bulk. While there are services out there that do it, all of the ones I've found in the past are both expensive (on the order of ~$0.25-$0.50 per image) and limited in the formats they support. Most only do 35mm negatives and maybe slides. I have 35mm, APS-C, 110, 120, 220, and even a bunch of 2.25" square negatives that I believe are from a Kodak Brownie. I've not found any service that's truly as simple as "send them a box of negatives, get back a link to an S3 bucket with your photos" - and certainly none that are capable of supporting such a wide variety of formats. To this point, I've just been spending a Saturday afternoon here and there scanning them individually, manually, on an old (but good quality) flatbed scanner. I 3D printed some negative holders and hacked together a Python script that looks for the "crop marks" on the holders, crops, straightens them, and drops them into a folder. There's a sidecar plaintext file in that folder that describes the envelope they were in and includes anything that was written on it. There's also an image named "front.jpg" and one named "back.jpg" in each folder that is a simple scan of the envelope. All of the scanned photos are kept in lossless TIFF, which is... unwieldy. At some point I'll probably pick a format with better (lossless) compression for the "originals" and move to that.
xen2xen1 3y ago
There was a large fire in St. Louis, so many people can't trace US military service before 1954 or so.
userbinator 3y ago
The scary thing is that laws like GDPR are going to make things even worse for the future historians.

mickdeek86 3y ago

I just spent several weeks in Germany, one of my goals was family history (my father was born in Dusseldorf, his father in Berlin), that whole side is dead now, basically. I had a much easier time in the west (my grandma's birthplace) than in the east, much of which was apparently due to war damage. It also turns out that my naive notion of just walking into the national archives and putting my grimy American fingers all over their paper records was objectionable to the Germans. But at least I made contacts, the archivist basically takes a fee and get back to you in a few months' time.

RainbowFriends 3y ago

For the DIY folks, Webtrees is a halfway decent platform: https://www.webtrees.net/index.php/en/ https://www.webtrees.net/index.php/en/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stvltvs 3y ago
Is there a reason to prefer Webtrees over an open source desktop app like Gramps? https://gramps-project.org/ https://gramps-project.org/
- RainbowFriends 3y ago
  Webtrees is open source, and allows for easy sharing with your family through http: https://github.com/fisharebest/webtrees https://github.com/fisharebest/webtrees
- asielen 3y ago
  I like the idea behind gramps, but it needs a massive UI/UX overhaul. I don't mind the look and feel but you really have to spend a lot of time with it to figure out how to use it. Things that should be straightforward require multiple levels of menus or windows. It is very powerful though and allows for near infinite configuration.

op00to 3y ago

My birth certificate was scanned on microfilm. I recently requested a copy of my birth certificate since my original was tattered and on its way out, and the new certificate was unreadable. The registrar tried three times to print a new one, and it turns out the microfilm was not exposed correctly and the originals were discarded. They created a special certificate that has both the microfilm image and a “translation” so it’s actually useful.

lqet 3y ago

In southwestern Germany, genealogy usually stops at the Thirty Years' War [0]. Where I come from, the population decline during the war was more than 66% [1]. Most church records were either destroyed in battle, or used as a heat source during the winter. Very often, people just stopped keeping birth records. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Bev%C3%B6lkerkungsr%C3%BCckgang_im_HRRDN_nach_dem_Drei%C3%9Figj%C3%A4hrigen_Krieg.PNG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Bev%C3%B...

puzzledobserver 3y ago

In our own Indian family, family history is mostly an oral tradition. My grandparents and their relatives tell stories of their own relatives, so we know of a mythical great-great-grandfather who was apparently a doctor-on-horseback. My own parents know this history, but to a lesser extent, and given the rise of nuclear families, I am (and I suspect the other relatives of my generation) even less aware of this history. In any case, written records are mostly unavailable. Our personal family history from the pre-1950 period is fading, and most of our history from before the 20th century is lost. We have our own stories to tell, and they'll eventually be forgotten too. It's sad to see older relatives grow frail, forget things, and die, but I've never felt a sense of historical loss. Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies. If feels like we of European descent have all of the genealogical advantages. For most other folks, gleaning their family data seems to vary between brutal and impossible.
- datameta 3y ago
  Tangentially, I have geneology gaps due to WW2. My great-grandfathers perished defending unknown cities with the Soviet Army. Afaik one was sent to take out tanks with improvized AT weapons at best, the other I know nothing of. During the Battle for Odesa and the following occupation by the Axis forces many records were lost. My grandmother on my dad's side grew up during the occupation. Thankfully my mom's side evacuated (Jewish) potentially due to my maternal great grandmother having been part of the defense as a field doctor and helped organize evacuation via ships. She received medals for her efforts including Order of the Red Star. She was able to get on the last ship to leave. After the war she counted 28 relatives lost due to war or holocaust. Some decades later her nephew made a booklet about the widely extended family tree despite spotty records at best. I know it took many years of research on his part, I should ask where our copy is. That maybe took a dark turn at some point - but I was thinking primarily about how armed conflict has the potential to erase history.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

> In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to fire. Yeah. That one was a killer. So much unique info that wasn't in other census. At the other end of the spectrum is the 1950 census which turned out to be disappointingly uninformative.

cm2187 3y ago

In the same spirit, people who have boxes of old photos that have some historical interest either because of their age or persons of interest, should probably upload them on wikimedia. That's probably the best way to preserve them for future generations.

Ancapistani 3y ago
I have one better - a box, about 2 ft^3 in volume, of the negatives for every photograph my wife's grandmother took throughout her life. She kept them all in one box, moved with them several times, and only stopped when we got her a digital camera in ~2010. Even then, she didn't like the idea of re-using memory cards, so we just bought small ones in bulk. There were ~100 memory cards in the aforementioned box when I received it; I've since copied them all over to my "family long-term digital storage", which exists in multiple places and in multiple formats. In addition to that, I put them all on USB drives and distributed them to interested family members at a family reunion. Each year they get new thumb drives with whatever new data I've collected over the preceding year. My problem is that I have thousands of negatives and slides, in several formats, and no easy to way scan them in bulk. While there are services out there that do it, all of the ones I've found in the past are both expensive (on the order of ~$0.25-$0.50 per image) and limited in the formats they support. Most only do 35mm negatives and maybe slides. I have 35mm, APS-C, 110, 120, 220, and even a bunch of 2.25" square negatives that I believe are from a Kodak Brownie. I've not found any service that's truly as simple as "send them a box of negatives, get back a link to an S3 bucket with your photos" - and certainly none that are capable of supporting such a wide variety of formats. To this point, I've just been spending a Saturday afternoon here and there scanning them individually, manually, on an old (but good quality) flatbed scanner. I 3D printed some negative holders and hacked together a Python script that looks for the "crop marks" on the holders, crops, straightens them, and drops them into a folder. There's a sidecar plaintext file in that folder that describes the envelope they were in and includes anything that was written on it. There's also an image named "front.jpg" and one named "back.jpg" in each folder that is a simple scan of the envelope. All of the scanned photos are kept in lossless TIFF, which is... unwieldy. At some point I'll probably pick a format with better (lossless) compression for the "originals" and move to that.

xen2xen1 3y ago

There was a large fire in St. Louis, so many people can't trace US military service before 1954 or so.

userbinator 3y ago

The scary thing is that laws like GDPR are going to make things even worse for the future historians.