Friday, February 27, 2015

More Information About MooseRoots.com

I wrote MooseRoots Is a New Genealogy Research Engine yesterday - it's a new, FREE, US-based (at this time), genealogy research service (meaning it searches for records).

I had some questions about the product, so I emailed my contact at MooseRoots, David Schmidt, and he quickly responded to my queries with:

Q1)  Please describe MooseRoots - what is its purpose, how much does it cost?  What is your income stream? 

MooseRoots is a tool that helps genealogists of all walks uncover and explore their heritage, with  more than 1 billion birth, marriage, death, census, grave, and military records,  including U.S. and international collections that aren't available on other genealogy websites. Additionally, MooseRoots offers users compelling contextual “snapshots” from their ancestors’ lives by visualizing interesting ancillary data, such as their family structure and origin, the meaning and popularity of their name, information about the town and time in which they lived, etc. Finally, we allow users to take any visualization they see on our pages and copy and paste them directly into their blogs and articles just like a YouTube video. I have included some example codes below that would be interesting to include in this post.

MooseRoots is a 100% free website that is supported by ads. 

Q2)  You have a number of genealogy databases, some of them from FamilySearch and other free websites.  Do you have agreements with FamilySearch (and other providers) to display index results and record images? 

We have an agreement with FamilySearch to display index results for ~550 million index results. At the end of June 2015, we will have access to record images. We also have a number of partnerships with other data providers that vary in terms depending on the agreement. 

Q3)   Do you have a list of available databases?  How often do you add content?  What is the plan for adding content?  

Yes, a list of the available databases can by viewed by visiting genealogy-collections.mooseroots.com. From there, you can see what collections are currently available as well as years covered and number of records in each collection. We are always working to expand our database and are adding new data from a variety of collections as frequently as possibly. We are currently in the process of expanding our vitals record. The release date of these new records is TBD.

I have included one of David's example visualizations code - for Abraham Lincoln's family in 1860 - below:


The "See more details" link on the image above takes the user to the record summary.

Thank you to David for the quick responses and details.

I used the link for http://genealogy-collections.mooseroots.com/ and saw the list of 71 collections (note that the Census records for 1790-1940 are all in one collection):


Each collection on the list above tells you the record type, the year range covered, and the number of records in the database.

I clicked on the Social Security Death Index collection and saw (two screens):




The collection page provides information about the collection.  The collection description is:

"This database is provided by the Social Security Administration (SSA). It contains 92,554,687 Death Records in the United States that occurred between 1936 and 2014. Additional records are added on a monthly basis. It may also be called the Death Master File (DMF).The information below is included with each record:"

By clicking the record image, I can embed the graph into my blog post by copying and pasting the widget code into my Blogger editor:


How cool is that!  I love it.

We will have to see how much additional content - record collections, record images, etc. - that MooseRoots adds over time.  I hope that they add content on a regular basis based on their agreements with database providers.

As I noted in the first post, this is still a website with limited genealogy resources, but it is FREE and relatively easy to use.  Users do need to narrow their search terms - putting "John Smith" into the search field and expecting your specific John Smith to appear at the top of the list is unrealistic.  Adding additional information - such as a birth year and birth place - will reduce the volume of results and focus the results on the search target.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/02/more-information-about-mooserootscom.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really interesting technology, the embeddable chart is so cool!. Thanks for sharing, please keep us updated on MooseRoots!

Anonymous said...

Really interesting stuff, the embeddable charts are so cool! Thanks for sharing, please keep us updated with MooseRoots!

Anonymous said...

IDENTITY THIEVES! Mooseroots.com and findthedata.com is a fraudulent website that steals your identity and also for identity thieves to steal. I have sent numerous requests to both websites to request removal of my private information, marriage/divorce records, etc..and those requests have been ignored! Some of us do not want out private information exposed to the public, therefore, I have filed a complaint and reported these websites to the proper authorities, FTC, FBI and State Attorney General. I've already done my research on mooseroots.com and findthedata.com and have turned that over to the proper authorities along with many complaints including mine.

Dawn_Homemade said...

Hi, nice blog you have here. I found it searching for info on whether Mooseroots is legit. What is concerning is I found it while googling a living person and it brought up the birth record of a minor. If you re-examine the site again, maybe you can look at that scope of the info they share.

Joe said...

Mooseroots website says it is no longer available. Do you have any information about why that is?