A modern-day equivalent of a barn raising, only for 21st century genealogists.

1. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Dick Eastman
April 19, 2014

2. Today’s handouts and slides are
available at:
http://www.eogn.com/handouts/sourcing

3. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Genealogists have labored alone for years,
often in silence.
These “lone wolf” efforts have frustrated
many. In fact, we didn’t learn from our
ancestors. They were often better than we
are at collaboration:

4. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View

5. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Collaboration is often the key to success!
In old-fashioned barn raisings held by our
ancestors, a group of individuals came
together, bringing with them a variety of
skills sets, and dedicated themselves to
building a barn in a short period of time.

6. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Our ancestors traded with each other,
buying and selling land, labor, seed, cattle,
and the like. Despite traditions of
independence, self-sufficiency, and refusal
to incur debt to one another, community
barn raisings and other cooperative
projects were a part of life.
Why can’t we do the same?

7. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
What types of crowd sourcing do we see or
can we look forward to in genealogy?
Indexing of the 1940 Census images by
volunteers.
Building the FamilySearch Research Wiki
with almost 67,000 individual articles.

8. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
How about sharing family trees on
FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage,
WeRelate, and dozens of other web sites?

9. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Today, we don’t call it “barn raising.”
We call it “crowd sourcing.”
crowd·sourc·ing: to utilize (labor,
information, etc.) contributed by the
general public to (a project), often via the
Internet and without compensation.
– Dictionary.com

10. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining
needed services, ideas, or content by
soliciting contributions from a large group
of people, and especially from an online
community, rather than from traditional
employees or suppliers.
- Wikipedia

11. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Crowdsourcing Your Brick Walls was the
topic of Drew Smith’s presentation at
RootsTech 2014, and his message was
clear: using crowdsourcing to solve a
genealogical problem is like putting a
message in a bottle and sending it out to
sea. One never knows when the right
person will come along and assist in
breaking down that genealogical brick
wall.

12. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Isn’t this barn raising in the 21st century?

13. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
• Genealogists have traditionally used:
• Mailing lists
• Message boards
• Groups/Communities, primarily on social
networking sites

14. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
• Now we have:
• Record extraction projects (1940 U.S.
census)
• FamilySearch’s Obituary Digitization Project
• Wikis

15. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
1940
Census
Extraction
Project

16. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
FamilySearch’s Obituary Digitization Project

17. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View

18. Sourcing and Collaboration:
Other Wikis

19. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View

20. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View

21. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View

22. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View

23. Summary
Crowdsourcing is
today’s genealogy
barnraising: “Help
your neighbor and
he will help you.”

24. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
How about accuracy?

25. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
Some people place "unverified information
on the Internet”
Some of it contains fairy tales!
Shouldn’t that be banned?

26. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
I believe in verification of every bit of
information I obtain.
I don't care if a fact came from the Internet,
from a book, or even from an original
record. I still want to verify every bit of
information I read.

27. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
I always look to see who reported the
information or who wrote the book I am
reading. Even if I recognize the author as
being a leading genealogy expert, I still
want to verify the claim independently. I
don't believe anyone.

28. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
So you think I would be against unsourced,
unverified information on the Internet?
Wrong!

29. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
When I am looking for genealogy
information about my ancestors, I want to
see EVERYTHING. I want to see the
sourced information, the unsourced
information, the verbal claims from
someone's Aunt Lydia, and even the
guesswork.

30. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
I want to see every hint and every bit of
guesswork. I want to know what everyone
else is thinking. I am hoping that
someone, somewhere has an idea that I
have haven't thought of so far.

31. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
When I read someone else's guesswork or
facts, I'll check them out and I will ask
questions, but I still want all the hints.
The proof is always up to me, regardless of
where I found the claimed information.

32. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
I am a big fan of group collaboration. Some
people call that "crowd sourcing.”
Such crowd sourcing will often be wrong,
but it almost always includes some clues
that I have not seen or thought of
previously. Those can be valuable clues.

33. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
What I do see is an education problem.
A lot of newcomers will believe "I saw it on
the Internet so it must be true."
That is a problem.

34. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
We should encourage our newcomers to
document their sources and to include that
documentation when posting information
online.
Of course, this is not a one-time effort.

37. Sourcing and Collaboration:
a Genealogist's View
I still never automatically discard something
simply because it is unsourced. I never
look down my nose at any online
genealogy claim, regardless of the source
of information. I do, however, maintain a
healthy skepticism.

38. Summary
 Crowdsourcing through formal and
informal methods (mailing lists, message
boards, and online groups/communities)
can be an excellent way to solve brick wall
challenges. Crowdsourcing in its many
forms continues to be the heart of the
genealogical community.

39. Summary
 Then verify the claims for yourself.

40. What will the next year bring?
Stay tuned!
http://www.eogn.com

41. Today’s handouts and slides are
available at:
http://www.eogn.com/handouts/sourcing