Thanks Neal - this is great!
Linda Soloski
----- Original Message -----
From: Neal F. Carrier
To: CARRIER-L(a)rootsweb.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 3:54 PM
Subject: [CARRIER] Genealogy search link
Dick Eastman put this info out this week about this site. It's basically a
search engine dedicated to genealogy. I've tried it a bit and seems be pretty
good.
Neal
************************************************************
I spent a lot of time in the Exhibitors' Hall at the recent annual conference
of the U.S. National Genealogical Society. Perhaps the most revolutionary new
service that I found was WeRelate, a free web search engine and wiki for
genealogy.
WeRelate is sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc., a 501c3
non-profit Utah corporation that relies on tax-deductible donations for its
support. The Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc., is a completely
independent organization; it is not affiliated with any other genealogy,
religious, or other group.
WeRelate's stated goal is to make it easy for you to discover and share
information about your ancestors. It seems to have a great beginning.
WeRelate is actually a combination of two separate services that work together
in a synergistic manner. The first service is a great, genealogy-specific web
search engine. It has already indexed 58,000 web sites to include 1,300,000
genealogy sources, 430,000 place names with descriptions, 115,000 names of
ancestors, the entire Family History Library catalog, and more. The search
engine is growing by thousands of new entries per week.
Of course, there are many different search engines available today. What
differentiates the WeRelate search engine from Google, Yahoo, and all the
others is its built-in intelligence about genealogy-specific topics. For
instance, the search mechanism understands location hierarchy. That is,
WeRelate's search engine already knows that Bangor is located in Penobscot
County, which, in turn, is located in Maine, which, in turn, is located in
New England, a term referring to the six states in the northeastern-most part
of the United States of America. In the past, when searching for my
ancestors, I had to specify multiple searches:
EASTMAN in Bangor
EASTMAN in Penobscot County
EASTMAN in Maine
EASTMAN in New England
etc.
The WeRelate search engine simplifies the required searches. If I specify a
search of Eastman in Penobscot County on other search engines, those searches
will not find occurrences of Eastman in Bangor. Normal search engines only
look at the exact words that I specify. If I specify a county name on Google
and other search engines, all I will find is the pages that contain both the
surname and the name of the county. Those searches ignore pages that list the
surname and the name of a town within the county.
In contrast, conducting the same search on WeRelate will automatically find
all the occurrences of Eastman in Bangor, Eastman in Brewer, and Eastman in
Corinth because it knows that all three of those towns are within Penobscot
County. I do not have to conduct separate searches for every town within the
county. Google and the other search engines do not have this level of
intelligence.
WeRelate also does a good job of separating surnames from other words. Unlike
Google and the other search engines, WeRelate generally separates people
named EASTMAN from references to photography, the Kodak Corporation, or the
town of Eastman, Georgia. Generally speaking, references to a surname of
EASTMAN will appear higher in the hits list than will the corporate name or
the name of a town.
The challenge is greater on surnames that are also common English words, such
as Smith, Brown, Green, Church or Town. However, you will often find the
surnames listed higher in the results than other occurrences of the same
word.
The second part of WeRelate is a powerful wiki. It becomes sort of an
encyclopedia of biographies of our ancestors. You contribute information,
creating a separate page for each ancestor. Others may see your work and then
contribute still more information on each ancestor. This collaborative effort
will eventually create hundreds of thousands of pages of information, one
page per individual and each page created by collaborative efforts of
multiple genealogists. Each new visitor may add the scraps of information
that he or she has about a common ancestor. The results of this collaboration
are visible to all.
Any number of people can add information to each page, each of which can
include source citations to original documents that verify their information.
In fact, not only can you add source citations in text form, but you can also
add scanned images of the original sources. For instance, if you state that
your ancestor was mentioned in a tax list of 1765, you can include a scanned
image of the original tax list that shows his name. You can also include
information about where you obtained the image, such as the microfilm number
or book name and page number or the call number of the original document at
some archive. In my mind, that is the best form of source citation!
You can create or modify WeRelate pages about individuals, research sources,
places, surnames, and how-to's. WeRelate's search engine scours users' pages
on this web site as well as 6 million genealogy-focused pages from the rest
of the Web.
The part that I like best is the option to send an e-mail that will notify you
of any changes made to pages that you are monitoring. For instance, if
someone else modifies the page about great-great-grand-dad, you receive an
e-mail notification within a day or so.
Each user is able to use each service as much or as little as he or she
desires. You can use the search engine without ever accessing the wiki pages
or vice-versa. Each is a free-standing service, but the result of using both
appears to be greater than the sum of its individual components.
WeRelate is free and open to all. There are no charges for its use.
I can get very excited about
WeRelate.org. This new online service has the
potential to represent every person who ever left records behind. To be
sure, it will not achieve that goal overnight. However, if thousands of
genealogists get together and pool their knowledge and their records, the
results could be something that few ever imagined even a few short years ago:
an encyclopedia of every person who ever lived and left records behind, each
page containing the results of many genealogists' research as well as images
of original documents and/or citations to where those documents may be found.
WeRelate is sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc., a 501c3
non-profit Utah Corporation that presently consists of two people: computer
scientist Dallan Quass and his wife, attorney Solveig Quass. The Board of
Directors consists of those two plus Ronald Seamons from LDS Philanthropies.
An advisory board to the non-profit corporation consists of those three plus
several others who are well-known as genealogy experts. This is a
high-powered team! Both boards are expected to expand soon as the corporation
and its web site begin to grow.
Funding will be an issue. Private contributions have been used to purchase the
first servers and disk farms that are already installed. However, the funding
is not infinite. Additional donations will be necessary to expand the
capabilities as the service becomes popular. The founders of the Foundation
for On-Line Genealogy hope to keep the service free and open for all users
forever.
WeRelate is in public beta at this time. It is open to all, and the public is
invited to participate. Keep in mind that beta software changes often, and
bugs frequently appear, only to be stomped out as users identify them. You
may even see system outages as new hardware is added to the disk farm already
in use. Frankly, I think that is part of the charm of a beta product. If
WeRelate succeeds as its founders hope, you could someday say, I was there in
the beginning.
If you would like to be in on the ground floor of an exciting new free online
genealogy service that may revolutionize online genealogy, take a look at
http://www.WeRelate.org.
--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.9.2/370 - Release Date: 6/20/2006