CVGS Program Review - "Try to Remember -- Never Forget"

We had 42 attendees at the Chula Vista Genealogical Society monthly program meeting on Saturday, 29 July, including 12 guests.

They came to hear the testimony of Ruth Goldschiedova Sax, now age 89, a Holocaust survivor who was a longtime Chula Vista resident, and now lives at Paradise Village in National City.  Ruth's daughter, Sandra (Sax) Scheller, has written a book about Ruth's life story titled Try to Remember -- Never Forget.

Ruth's life story includes a happy childhood in Brno, Czechoslovakia with her parents Oskar and Erna Goldschmied; the Nazi occupation starting in 1939; transportation to four different Nazi work and concentration camps; suffering and surviving unspeakable indignities at the camps; liberation and walking over 100 km back to her home town with her mother; finding that her father also survived the camps; rebuilding their lives in Brno; corresponding with a distant cousin, Kurt Sax, who went to America before the war; marrying Kurt and coming to America in about 1950; settling in San Diego and starting a family, and happily living together for over 60 years.

Ruth's testimony mainly concerned her experiences from age 11 when her world of education and culture fell apart in March 1939 when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia.  In 1941, the family was transported to Theresienstadt, a work camp where Ruth was forced to grow up quickly.  She was shaved to prevent lice infestation, wrapped her feet in paper to keep them warm in the winter time, and witnessed the death of many other people.  Her father Oskar was separated from them, and Ruth and her mother went to the Terezin camp, and then to Auschwitz.  She faced Dr. Mengele's "live or die" judgment six times.  Near the end of the war, she was in the Oederan camp and made bullets for the Germans.  Finally she and her mother were liberated by the Russian Army, and reunited with her father, a miracle in itself.

Sandra showed and described the dress that Erna wore throughout the camps, a shift with a chalk X and a vertical stripe on the back.  Every week, she would have to bend over and the X and stripe were painted on it again by the Nazis.

Sandra presented a slide show of Ruth's life - from childhood through reuniting with her father to her life in the San Diego area.  Sandy showed several records from the concentration camps, and found her parents' love letters written over several years before their marriage (more than 1,000 of them!), and showed many photographs from the family's life in San Diego.  Today, Ruth and Sandra give presentations about Ruth's life, and are working on a second book about her life.

Sharing this story is a reminder to the world that the Holocaust actually happened and that all of us must act diligently to ensure that this type of atrocity never happens again.  Ruth's is an incredible and inspirational story of horror, survival, recovery, love, family, and success.

A personal note:  Ruth and Kurt Sax were Randy and Linda Seaver's neighbors from 1975 to 2012, when they went into an assisted living facility.  Kurt died in May 2012.  We enjoyed sharing our lives, family events, and many meals, with them.  They are the most positive, loving, kind, polite, generous and happy people we've ever known.

The book, Try to Remember - Never Forget, is available on Amazon in paperback, hardbound and Kindle.

Ruth's grandson, Sam, made 22 short videos with her in 2009 talking about her life experiences - see Behind Ruth's Eyes for the first one.

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Copyright (c) 2017, Randall J. Seaver

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Excellent Video on History of the British Isles

I found this 7.33 minute video of the History of the British Isles: Every Year from Modern Humans onward.


I love stuff like this!  It was fascinating to watch how England finally came together after all of the invasions.

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The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2017/01/excellent-video-on-history-of-british.html

Copyright (c) 2017, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

Genealogy Site Traffic Trends - the other FamilyLink Sites

Being a "numbers guy," I am interested in how genealogy information providers stack up against each other, and what the trends are over a period of time. I last looked at genealogy website traffic in January 2009 in a series of posts.

For this series, I am using the Quantcast statistics because they are easily understandable, and free. There are other websites that measure traffic, and their traffic statistics may be different from Quantcast. To simplify things, I will show only the number of Visits - not Persons, Page Views or other statistics available from Quantcast.

FamilyLink.com has seven web sites identified - I discussed FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com yesterday. Here are the Traffic charts for the other five FamilyLink.com sites.

The first one is www.GenealogyWise.com (a social networking site announced in July):




The second one is www.WebTree.com (a family tree site, still available, but nothing can be added):



The third one is www.WorldHistory.com (a family tree plus history site, still in beta, but available):

The fourth one is www.BigFamilyPhotos.com (a commercial photo printing site, thank you, Tamura Jones, for the lead!):

The fifth one is www.GenSeek.com (the FHL catalog site plus, not launched yet, but available through Facebook):

The traffic summaries, for the last five months (taken directly from the charts), for all of the FamilyLink.com applications is:

* www.FamilyLink.com - monthly US People = 7.1 million, daily Visits = 508,000

* www.WorldVitalRecords.com - monthly People = 123,800, daily Visits = 7,900
* www.GenealogyWise.com - monthly People = 16,800, daily Visits = 1,200

* www.WebTree.com - monthly People = 2,300, daily Visits = 91

* www.WorldHistory.com - monthly People = 9,500 , daily Visits = 1,100

* www.BigFamilyPhotos.com - monthly People = 1,100, daily Visits = NA

* www.GenSeek.com - monthly People = NA, daily Visits = NA

It looks to me that the GenealogyWise traffic is dropping quickly, the WorldHistory site has potential when it comeso ut of beta and is fully operational, WebTree is pretty much petrified, and GenSeek has significant potential if and when it launches.

WorldVitalRecords has lost traffic over the past year, and has only about 2.2% of the monthly People that Ancestry.com has.

FamilyLink.com is the mystery to me. Surely 7 million US people are NOT checking the web site to see if the tree that they put up on We're Related is up on FamilyLink.com yet. How, and why, does FamilyLink get so much traffic? Do they get a hit every time someone, that has the FamilyLink application on their Facebook page, logs on? That's the only thing I can think of to explain the traffic numbers.

First Look at WorldHistory.com - Post 3

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I posted about my first look at the new web site, http://www.worldhistory.com/, in Post 1 and Post 2 of this series. I also posted a link to the WorldHistory short demo videos. I believe that this web site is still under development, so some of the features don't work well or even at all.

This post continues where Post 2 left off. After the failure of the "Add Father" effort, I was back to the "Your Ancestors" page. Since I had added a Biography, I wanted to see if my grandfather's biography showed up in the Search engine. I entered "seaver" in the Search field as shown below:


The Search results showed only one Seaver surname person (even though I have about 100 in my database) - and it's my grandfather:

So I learned that the searchable persons have to have a Biography loaded into the web site. Just being in a database doesn't get you into the Search engine results. The "Your Ancestors" page says:

" If no actual BIO is written about them within a week, their biography page will be removed."

Over the last month or so, I've been clicking on the "Show me the MAP" button on the "Your Ancestors" page and then on the Map page clicking on the "Yes, I would like to Geocode my ancestors" link. The program has geocoded only 715 of my 20,755 persons in my database so far. Every time I click on the link, I get a few more. Here's the screen view when I clicked on it yesterday:

It "automatically" selected the year 1545 and showed me the geocoded persons in my database that lived around that year. It found only 10 persons, and all were geocoded in England and North America as shown above. When I clicked on one of the stick pins in North America, the person and place name appeared in a "balloon."

You can change the Year by clicking on a spot on the Timeline above the map. I clicked around 1710 and got 1707, and the site showed me the set of geocoded persons from my database that were living around that time:

Since they are all in north America, I used the Zoom feature and the "magic hand" to manipulate the map to show Eastern North America, still in 1707:

I clicked on another stick-pin out near Iowa and found that it was for "Marcy Hill (1643), Birth Dorchester, Suffolk, MA baptism." Iowa is a long way from Dorchester. My guess is that the word "baptism" threw off the map function somehow.

On the list of persons in the 1707 list (on the right side of the map), I clicked on Samuel Bigelow and the map changed to show this screen:

On the right of the map, it showed Samuel Bigelow's birth year and place, death year and place, and listed his spouse. On the map, the stick-pin shows his birth and death (essentially the same location in Massachusetts. Notice that there are different color stickpins for Birth, Death, Marriage and Event.

Tonight, I decided to Geocode some more of my ancestors in my database, so I clicked on the "Yes, I would like to geocode my ancestors" link. It did 9 more in about 60 seconds - pretty slow. I shudder to think how long it will take to do the remaining 20,031 of them. I clicked on a year near 1670 and got the list for 1666:

Same problem with the geocoding - the "balloon" for the stick-pin out near Detroit says "Eddy, Abigail (1601), Birth Cranbrook, Kent, England christening." The "christening" may be confusing the web site. Or it's just doing something random. I think it's confused by my "cryptic notes" in some of the location fields. At least, I hope so!

Well, I think that's enough work in this web site for the time being. I've sort of figured out what it can do, and how to navigate and use the site. However, it is not densely populated with events or persons with biographies, and it seems to be fairly slow to geocode persons in my database. My guess is that the site is "not quite ready for prime time" yet.

First Look at WorldHistory.com - Post 2

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I posted about my first look at the new web site, http://www.worldhistory.com/, in Post 1 of this series. This post described the site pages that an unregistered user would see. I also posted a link to the WorldHistory short demo videos. I believe that this web site is still under development, so some of the features don't work well or even at all.

Notwithstanding that, it is useful to go explore what a registered user can do.
In this post I want to start exploring the web site from the registered users point of view. I registered some time ago, and uploaded a GEDCOM file.

Here is the "My Profile" page with my short biography, my picture, my web site, my tags, etc. as submitted:


As a registered user, I wondered what the options for adding content were. I clicked on the "Add content" link at the top of the page and saw:




There are quite a few options here. I'll have to explore it a bit more later.

Since I had uploaded a GEDCOM file some time ago, I clicked on the "Ancestors" link in the menu row below the Search box. The page below tells me how many persons I have in my database on the site and what I can do with them. There is a link to the Map which I'm going to resist in this post, but will deal with in the next post.

Below the text and map, there is an alphabet list for the surnames in my database.



I clicked on the S item and got the first page (of at least 30 pages) of S surnames. I clicked along until I found my grandfather, Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942) on page 10:

I clicked on the link for him, and was able to cut and paste a "biography" into the "About Them" field as shown below:

When that was done, I clicked on "Save New Record" and this page with a map of Leominster, Massachusetts and the biography of my grandfather appeared:

Okay, that's pretty cool. The GEDCOM that I uploaded had this biography in the Notes. Why didn't my Notes go into the biography field when the GEDCOM uploaded? And the site has lost track of the days and months for birth and death. It lists only the years and places.

Scrolling down, I see that I can add Events to this biography, can link to People in their Life, can add Sources and Stories, Artifacts, and Related Projects:

My GEDCOM had Facts for events in his life. And it had the parents, spouse and children for him. Why don't they show up here as "People in their Life?"

Maybe I have the cart before the horse here, and should be patient with the web site. Maybe they want me to attach a Father and Mother (but where is the Spouse(s) and Children links?)? I clicked on the "Add Father" icon and was rewarded with:

Oops - an error message. They obviously have more work to do on the links to family members.

In the next post in this series, we'll look at a Search for a person, and also check out the Maps a bit.

Note that reader "Geolover" had some critical comments about this site in my first post.

Watch the WorldHistory demo videos

I posted my First Look at WorldHistory.com on Saturday morning. I knew that I had seen some videos of how www.WorldHistory.com was going to work, but couldn't find them on my blog archives or on my Favorites list.

It turned out that I was looking in the wrong place - I found the link. It is http://www.worldhistory.com/demo/. The site introduction says:

"Below are videos that demo some the features that will be found on WorldHistory.com. We will be offering Interactive Maps, Timelines, Videos, Geocoded Photos, Museum Artifacts, and Genealogical tools to help you discover history. We connect the dots of history, we connect you to history. We want to compile the entire history of the world on one fun and interactive website. Multiple sources, partners, and YOU provide the content, history provides the story."

There are three short videos (3 to 4 minutes each) on this site for:

* The History Map

* How Content Works

* Your Ancestors

Take a look at these videos when you have a chance. They will provide a much more thorough "tour" of www.worldHistory.com than my screen shots will.

First Look at WorldHistory.com - Post 1

I've been watching the http://www.worldhistory.com/ web site (part of the FamilyLink.com company) add content gradually over the past few months, and now they are broadcasting some of their information to the world on Twitter and Facebook, so I thought that I would post some screen views of the web site.

The "About Us" page says in part):

"What is History? Sounds like a silly question. Think about it. History is comprised of events, people, places, and the sources that tell us the story. Each and every event in history involved a place or multiple places, impacted people directly and indirectly, and took place in a certain moment in time. There are a lot of dots to connect, and we connect those dots. More importantly, we connect you to those dots, we connect you to history."

And...

"...The battle of Gettysburg took place at a certain place and time. We know the famous names associated with the event, but what has often been ignored in history are all the people who made the event possible. We know about General Pickett's charge, but without the confederate soldiers who gave their lives for that charge, what would it be? Should the foot soldier be remembered like the generals? We think so. They are part of the story. Without their story, and unless we connect those dots, it is an incomplete book. WorldHistory allows you to connect people to people, people to events, and your ancestors to events."

From the start, this web site has sounded very ambitious to me, and it will be a very useful site when it has matured. Here is the current home page:



There are eight links to other pages across the top (below the logo and search box). There are three feature boxes near the bottom of the page - to obtain a Timeline of world history for a specific year, to Explore your world using interactive maps, and to Upload your family tree and connect your ancestors to history. We'll look at those in a later post.

In the middle of the page are a timeline for a specific year which lists historical events around a given year (apparently fairly random each time you come to the home page) and an invitation to sign up for a free account on the web site. You have to sign up in order to upload your family tree data.

The first link across the top is to "Map," and when I clicked on it, this screen appeared:

It opened on San Diego where I live (the site must sense where I live, even though I'm not logged into the site), and had some names and places on the left margin and some stick-pins on the map. If you click on the stick-pin, you can see the event or person that it depicts.

The map is powered by Google Maps, and there is a timeline across the top of it. If you click on a year in the Timeline, you can see specific events and people that are depicted on the map. Of course, you can click on the event or person to see the details about them on the site.

Next, I clicked on the "People" link, and the "People in History" page opened:

The list of people shown are "famous people" for all of history, ranked apparently by the frequency of searches on the site. There is a cloud of People Tags on the right margin where you can select specific groups like Artists, African-Americans, Politicians, etc. Another alternative would be to click on a year in the Timeline and see people that lived in that year that are in the database.

There is a Search field above the Timeline, and the user can select from "Famous People" or "Ancestor Data." The "Ancestor Data" seems to be empty right now. The user can select to use or not use the Timeline.

The next link at the top of the page is "Events" which is shown below:

The "Events" page works similarly to the "People" page - the user can enter a term in the Search field or click on a year on the Timeline, and can select from the Event cloud on the right of the screen.

The fourth link at the top of the page goes to the "Artifact" page - and the setup is similar to the "Events" page - a Search field and a Timeline at the top and a list of "Artifact Options" on the right:

The "Timeline" link at the top leads to a page with user-defined Timelines, a Search box at the top and a list of categories on the left side of the screen:

The "Ancestors" link at the top of the page leads to a Sign Up page because I was not logged into the site. If you sign up, then you can upload your family tree database. The site will Geocode your place names so that they can be shown on the map:

We will explore the "Ancestors" link in later posts.

The seventh link at the top is to "Popular" Events or People. The Events are ranked for the current day and the current week:

The eighth link at the top of the page is to "More" which lists things that the World History people would like to add to their web site:

I have worked with this site for awhile now, trying all of the links and the bells and whistles. My impression is that it is very well thought out and navigation is intuitive and easy to learn. It works pretty fast on everything but the "Ancestors" page. My impression is that the "Ancestors" page is not yet fully functional.

http://www.worldhistory.com/ is probably not quite ready for prime time use yet, but it is getting to the point where everything works. I will write future posts when a family tree can be uploaded and exercised.

I think that FamilyLink.com has a winner here. I wonder when it will be available for everyone to upload a GEDCOM and work with it as a research tool?