Flash Blog Mob

Earlier today I chatted with several other genealogy bloggers online about Ancestry.com's decision to drop their "old search" for the "new search".   After venting our opinions together, we decided that perhaps we should share our opinions through our blogs.   We're calling this our "Flash Blog Mob".  Genealogy bloggers will be joining in all weekend, and I'll be adding their posts to the list down at the bottom of this page.  Before I wrote my post,  I first wrote to the Ancestry.com Facebook page. And then I received this reply:

A message to me from Ancestry.com via their Facebook page…

"Hello Heather, We are consolidating the two search experiences on the site and will be taking features from both our old and new search experiences and add a few new features into a single search experience. As we consolidate, our old search experience will no longer exist as a stand-alone or separate experience. Please feel free to share your thoughts with us regarding the old search here: http://ancstry.me/14A19ik. As a side note, many of the tools you use and are comfortable with in our Old Search experience are currently available in the primary search experience. This article provides more information: http://ancstry.me/14A2F4a"

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This week I was stuck at home waiting for repair people.  Don’t you hate that chore?  Stuck at home, waiting for hours because the repair people won’t give you an exact appointment time.  Then, since of course the appliance is “unfixable”, you end up again waiting all day because the delivery people won’t give you an appointed time for  delivery of the new fridge.  Then the new appliance is a lemon, right out of the box (don’t ask- it’s a long story), so again we have a repair person waiting day, followed by another delivery day when they decide “You need a new fridge”.  Of course I need a new fridge!  I needed one a week ago!

Thus, I was stuck at home.  And I put this time towards learning what’ I’ve avoided for several years.  I learned the ins and outs of Ancestry.com’s “new search”.  Of course, it’s been around for several years so it’s hardly a “new search”.  But I’m a creature of habit, and I like the old one.  I liked being able to search without even looking at what I was doing since I’d been searching this way for ten years (or maybe even more).  I liked the simplicity of not even thinking about it, just getting predictable results.

However, all good things must come to an end.  I was an early adopter of Facebook, using my husband’s MIT email address back in 2005 to see what it was all about.  If you could step back in time to see it then, you wouldn’t recognize it as what you see today as Facebook.  And how many times has it changed since then? It’s changed dozens of times, without any announcements most of the time, and with most of us screaming and complaining.  But we’re all still on Facebook (most of us) and we’ve figured out the ins and outs, and how to make it work for us…

And so, when many people got an email message this week (I still haven’t received mine), it was time to either complain, reflect, submit, or get to work learning the new system.  Things change.  Not just Facebook, and Ancestry, blog readers or genealogy data bases… how many iterations of Windows have you lived through? How many types of word processors have you learned since the 1980s? How many cell phones have you owned in your life? I remember when going online involved dialing the phone and then putting the phone receiver into a cradle and letting it connect with the computer.  ? How many versions of your internet browser have you had since then?

So I got to work.  I learned how to use “new search”.  I learned how to live with it.  As you can see from the message I received from Ancestry above, you can fill out the surveys, give your opinions, “share your thoughts”, but you still have to learn the “new search”.

In the meantime…    I’m not just learning Ancestry.com's "new search",  I'm also seriously learning how to use MyHeritage, FindMyPast, Mocavo and FamilySearch and others.  I’ve bought some premium subscriptions to some of these.  Because if I’m going to be forced to change, it better be worth it.  My kitchen can hold only one fridge at a time, lemon or working model. My computer can hold multiple subscriptions to many databases online.  I can try them all, keep the good ones and drop the lemons. It might mean dropping Ancestry.com for something better.

Disclaimer:  I was not compensated by Ancestry, MyHeritage, FindMyPast or FamilySearch in any way for this blog post. I have purchased my own subscriptions to some of these websites (excluding FamilySearch, which is FREE).  I was given a subscription to Mocavo last year to review, and I still have that gift subscription. I am not an affiliate or vendor for these products.

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Other thoughts from the blogosphere…

Jan Brown at “Cow Hampshire”

http://www.cowhampshireblog.com/2013/06/27/ancestry-com-why-is-a-good-idea-going-the-way-of-the-flash-mob/#more-3654

Carol A. Bowen Stevens "Reflections from the Fence"
http://www.reflectionsfromthefence.com/2013/06/the-2-rant-not-feeling-special-and.html

Bill West “West in New England”

http://westinnewengland.blogspot.com/2013/06/confession-of-genealogical-fuddyduddy.html
and again on July 7th
http://westinnewengland.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-last-word-on-old-search-vs-new-search.html

Thomas MacEntee “GeneaBloggers”

http://geneabloggers.com/ancestrycom-search-functionality-removes-search/

Valerie Craft  “Begin with Craft”

http://beginwithcraft.blogspot.com/2013/06/time-to-suck-it-up-and-say-goodbye-to.html

Randy Seaver "Geneamusings"  27 June
http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/06/ancestrycom-to-retire-old-search.html?showComment=1372361497024
and also 28 June
http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/06/comparing-old-search-and-new-search.html

John Newmark "Transylvanian Dutch"
http://blog.transylvaniandutch.com/2013/06/genealogy-and-tech-google-and-ancestry.html

Dick Eastman "Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter"
June 27
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/06/ancestrycom-to-change-old-search.html
June 28
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/06/follow-up-ancestrycom-to-change-old-search.html
July 2
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/07/a-comment-about-all-the-comments-concerning-ancestrycoms-old-search-versus-new-search.html


And some opinions posted earlier

Michael Hait  “Planting the Seeds” June 2012

http://michaelhait.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/new-search/

Ancestry Insider  13 January 2013
http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/2013/01/ancestrycom-rethinking-new-search.html
and 7 June 2013
http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/2013/06/ancestrycom-revisiting-search.html

Dear Myrtle  23 April 2013
http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2013/04/ancestrycom-wants-us-to-create-trees.html

Manly/Manley Family Tree DNA Project 19 May 2013
http://www.thepetmenagerie.com/dna/?p=2905


and some who posted later....

Liz Loveland "My Adventures in Genealogy"  July 8
http://adventuresingenealogy.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/search-strategies-on-ancestry-com-a-comparison-using-zenas-clement/


And just for fun...

Thomas MacEntee "50 Shades of Genealogy"
http://50shadesofgenealogy.tumblr.com/post/54046629140/when-someone-overreacts-to-the-end-of-old-search-at

Randy Seaver "GeneaMusings"
http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/06/a-tombstone-for-ancestrycom-old-search.html


UPDATE 28 JUNE 2013 by Thomas MacEntee at "Geneabloggers"
a reply from Ancestry.com
http://geneabloggers.com/update-ancestrycom-search-input-needed/

 

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Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Found via the new Mocavo Website for Tombstone Tuesday

I thought I had looked everywhere on the web for the Dominis family, especially for references to two little Dominis girls who died in Schenectady, New York. I knew they were buried there, and I had planned to someday take a road trip to Schenectady, New York to photograph and see the gravesite for myself. The local Schenectady Historical Society gave me only vague information on this cemetery and burial. But via the new Mocavo genealogy website I found a photograph of the grave of one of Captain John and Mary Dominis's daughters.

Mary Elizabeth (1825 - 1838) and Frances Ann Dominis (1829-1842) died in Schenectady whilst their parents were residing in Honolulu, Hawaii. They were under the care of the Yates family, and attending a boarding school. Mrs. Dominis took a voyage to New York and Boston in 1841 - 1842, but apparently arrived too late to see her last surviving daughter alive. It is unknown what the little girls died from. They are both buried in the Yates family plot at the Vale Cemetery.

MARY ELIZABETH DOMINIS

Daughter of

CAPT. JOHN AND MRS DOMINIS

Of Boston Mass

Entered into rest May 9th, 1838

Believing in the Lord Jesus

In the 13th year of her age

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We shall be like him for

We shall see him as he is

This gravestone photograph was posted on the website http://www.newyorkgravestones.org/ . It is not available on the Find A Grave website. All my ancestors are from New England, so I am woefully ignorant of records in other parts of the USA. I would never have found this record on a distant cousin without a little help, and I had not heard of this website. I'm still planning to eventually travel to Schenectady sometime, and now I have a good clue.

I don't know about you, but I plan to run a bunch more ancestral names through Mocavo. It can't hurt! There are thousands of genealogy websites out there, and Google brings up too many hits. It is well worth letting Mocavo sort through the genealogy websites for me. And as more and more websites are added, it will become more valuable. Have you added your favorite genealogy websites to Mocavo?

 Of course, I'll NEVER give up Google!

I posted a story about Mrs. Dominis's trip back to New York and Boston in 1841 in January 2011. http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2011/01/mary-dominis-from-boston-amanuensis.html Mrs. Dominis was my 4x great grandmother's sister. She never returned to her home in Boston, but stayed in Hawaii until her death in 1889.

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Copyright 2011, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Mocavo – The Search Site for Genealogy

Mocavo.com debuted its search engine for genealogists this week. It works by limiting your searches to only genealogy websites on a specific list. This includes genealogy websites, genealogy bulletin boards, and the usual Find-A-Grave, Internet Archive, etc. (see the Mocavo home page for a list), and excludes all other websites. This makes it easier to limit your search to ONLY genealogy websites.

The caveat is that it is a limited search. Even though it is limited to genealogy websites, many popular sites I consider for searching are not included.

For example, I have several names I use for tests when I try a new website. These are the same names I use for Footnote.com or Ancestry.com when I am looking for new additions to their data bases. The first name I always use is “Romanus Emerson”. He was my 4x Great Grandfather, and his name is unusual enough that hits are usually for him, or close relatives. If I Google his name the first few hits are for my own blog, here at Nutfield Genealogy, followed by FamilyTreeMaker.com, hits on Google Books, several eBooks, and a review of my own posts on Romanus Emerson by Kathleen Brandt at her own blog “a3Genealogy”, and the usual other genealogy websites, as well as Boston city documents such as their commissioner’s reports. There were many irrelevant and useless hits, also, when I used Google.

When I did the same search at Mocavo, I was surprised that my own blog and Kathleen Brandt’s blog did not pop up. Considering that Kathleen is a well known professional genealogist who has appeared on the TV series “Who do you think you are?” this was surprising to me. How difficult is it to link to the members of GeneaBloggers? The three websites that did come up were Genforum, FamilyTreeMaker, Internet Archive, and Rootsweb, and each of these was a perfect hit for genealogy information. It was a smaller list of results, but much more accurate results.

My initial conclusions:

1. This will be useful for tracing ancestry in the United States, and possibly elsewhere in the future.

2. This is useful as a limiter for common names, if you wish to “weed out” thousands of hits on other types of websites. If your ancestor has an unusual name, or if you have already searched the bulletin boards and book sites like Internet Archive you might want to stick to Google or Bing.

3. If you want to link to the thousands of possible GeneaBlogs out there, this is not the website for you.

4. There is a way at the bottom of the home page to add my own website, or my own favorite websites to their list of preferred genealogy websites, by clicking on “suggest a website”. I promptly added my own blog and Kathleen’s “a3Genealogy” to the link. I don’t know how long it will take to have it be part of the searches.

5. Currently Mocavo will not search out reference materials, city or town information, historical websites, town histories, images, social networking websites, online vital records databases, and some other databases and websites genealogists use on a regular basis.

6. If you already know the basics about an ancestor (birth, marriage, death, spouse, hometown) then you are ready to move beyond Mocavo to other types of searches to find historical, biographical and personal information.

As long as you understand how Mocavo works, and when to use it, Mocavo could be a useful tool for genealogy research. There are many caveats, and this website has just debuted, so I would stay tuned for possible tweaks to the content. Just for fun I Mocavoed the word Mocavo = Zero hits. When I Googled the word Mocavo = 39,000 hits.

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For more information

Mocavo http://www.mocavo.com/

My blog post last year on using Search engines: http://www.genealogywise.com/profiles/blogs/bing-vs-google-vs-dogpile-for

A review by Dick Eastman on Mocavo http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2011/03/mocavocom-a-genealogy-search-engine.html

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Copyright 2011, Heather Wilkinson Rojo