Family History Experiences at the "Who Do You Think You Are Conference" in London, May 2008

We had some great family history moments at the Who Do You Think You Are conference in London on May 2-4, 2008. Many of the attendees to the conference were new to doing their family history research. Many of them were inspired by the Who Do You Think You Are TV show and wanted to know more about their own family histories. That TV show does a great job of showing that everyone has a rich family history and now everyone wants to know more about their own family history. I am looking forward to the American version of that TV show that is supposedly coming soon to our country.

You can see the look in someone’s eyes or in their expressions when you have found a major breakthrough in their family history. There were many experiences that I witnessed in our booth at the conference. It is so exciting when people have that “Ah-ha” moment and make a valuable connection with their past. I will recount a few of these that I got to see.

The first one is one of the more exciting break- throughs that I have seen first -hand. This was when a nice lady was inquiring about her grandfather. She knew her grandfather’s name and that was about it. I typed the name into the ‘global search box’ on the front page of WorldVitalRecors.com. Frequently I have no idea what the results will be, especially if the surname is rare. In this case there were not that many results for “John” and “Kyberd”. The UK census had great multi-generational information for the Kyberd family. However, the results from one of our great Quintin Publication databases showed the true power of the large and rapidly growing collection that we have on WorldVitalRecords.com. In the book titled “East Anglian Pedigrees” we hit the jackpot, so to speak. There was a type of pedigree chart on page 130 of that book that had the entire Kyberd family tree dating back to the 1500s. This chart had husband, wife, and children’s names along with birth, Baptism, Marriage, and Death dates along with geographic locations. This single search found information that would have taken a life time to discover any other way. The look in the eyes of this delighted family history research changed from shock and amazement to profound gratitude to whoever had worked the many hours to compile such a great resource for them.
(http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/SingleIndexIndView.aspx?ix=qcd521_EastAnglianPedigrees&hpp=1&rf=*,z*&qt=i&java=NO&highlight=kyberd,john&zpage=136#centerapplet)
Another example was of husband and wife and their teen-aged daughter that were trying to find out more about their family tree. The husband knew the name of his grandmother and her approximate birth location and birth year. After searching for her, we found once again the multi-generational family information available in the UK Census. To his delight and amazement, he found that his name “Jonathan” was also shared by his great-grandfather which he had never been told. For him to realize that he was named after his great-grandfather gave him a new connection with his past and the desire to know more about him.

Another curious example was by 2 sisters that wanted to learn more about their grandfather. He was a famous chef at a prestigious hotel in London. I guess that he was famous like a Wolfgang Puck and hat quite the reputation that the family enjoyed. However, he was born in Switzerland and I know that we have a very small (but growing) Swiss collection on our site. However, we typed his name into the global search box and found 2 instances of him in the Ellis Island collection. The sisters looked puzzled and said that can’t be him because he lived here in England. He did not immigrate to the US. So we clicked through to the links for more information. It turned out that as a young man their grand-father had been the chef on the 2nd largest passenger ship behind the Titanic. I guess that after the Titanic sunk, the ship that their grand-father worked on was the largest in the world. He had been the chef and had to register each time his ship dropped off passengers at Ellis Island and he went a-shore to look around. They then began discussing what it meant for him and his career that he had learned his art as a chef on a luxury ship.

One of the things that I learned at the conference in London is how much the world is really connected. We had some trepidation about how well our collection of billions of names and thousands of databases would be receive in the UK. Even though our non-US collection is growing rapidly it is still just a portion of our U.S. collection. U.S. Data is typically much easier to acquire that international data. However, almost every one of the hundreds that came to our booth had a reason to search for data in the UK and in the rest of the world especially the US, Canada, and Australia. To prove this point, a nice lady said that her entire extended family lives in the UK. She has done most of the genealogy for these relatives. However, she said “My grandfather had 2 brothers. One immigrated to Australia and one to America.” I know nothing about what became of them so I need your web service find about them and their families.

I love genealogy and family history. I love helping others find out more about their own family. This labor of love provides such great emotional pay off for those that feel the desire to learn more about their family history.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

I used this graphic in my presentation entitled "Innovations in Genealogy and Family History."

I thought it would be funny to display this pedigree chart and have the audience figure out the word game.

It didn't take too long and someone yelled out "Necessity is the Mother of Invention."

FamilyLink.com at the St. George "My Ancestors Found" Expo Feb 8-9 '08

FamilyLink.com, Inc. and WorldVitalRecords.com had a memorable event at the St. George "My Ancestors Found" Conf. Feb 8-9, 2008.


This was a great winter time get away for us from Northern Utah. When we left Provo it was snowing! We arrived in St. George to beautiful spring like weather. It was warm but had recently snowed on the beautiful red rock mountains above St. George. The colors of Red, White, and Blue were very vivid. The sky was clear and cobalt blue.

One of the first people that I ran into after we got there was Dear Myrtle. I gave her a big hug and thanked her for her designation of WorldVitalRecords.com as the BEST Database Site. She did this in her BEST of the Internet for Genealogists Award on 3 Feb 2008. I later had a chance to sit down and visit with her in her booth.

This was the first conference that we had our new booth. I sure like how it looks and how it represents our company and products. The booth is fairly quick and easy to set up and it down. This is Amy and Ryan setting up the booth.

The new booth turned out to be a hit. It was always a busy beehive of activity. We had numerous compliments on the form and function of the booth, even from my friends at Ancestry.com. We had so much traffic to our booth that we have decided to double out booth space from 10x10 to 20x10 for next years conference.

We had our new video playing non-stop on a projector in our booth. Our video touches people in a way that they can relate to. As I watch people that are viewing the video, they are all nodding their heads to indicate that they have the same feeling about doing their family history research. RootsTV has uploaded the video to their site. So our WorldVitalRecords.com video is now on YouTube and RootsTV.

We had numerous opportunities for FamilyLink representatives to speak to large groups of genealogy enthusiasts. Yvette Arts, Jason McGowan, and I addressed large crowds.











Now that we have over 25,000 subscribers to WorldVitalRecords.com and over 50,000 members on FamilyLink.com, and over 2 million users four Facebook applications such as "We're Related" and "Family Groups" everyone seems to know who we are. I spoke with a lady that she was one of our first members and she talked with me at last year's St. George expo and requested that we add several new features. We have since added those features to our web sites and she thanked me for listening.

Probably due to our increased profile in the industry and our success at putting 6,000 databases with 1 billion names on line, we now have a steady stream of organizations and individuals that want to license their content to us. In the early days of our company (last year) it was sometimes a tough sell to get content owners to license their content to us. This is good news to our subscribers as our content pipeline is growing and flowing.

As a sponsor of the St. George "My Ancestors Found" Expo and CD syllabus, we will be able to make the electronic syllabus available for our users as a reference on WorldVitalRecords.com. Watch our newsletter for when we announce upcoming content on our site.

New videos of testimonials for WorldVitalRecords.com

We have recently completed a video that contains testimonials about WorldVitalRecords.com. I sure appreciate the cameo appearances by Susan Black and Leland Meitzler.

We now have this video on the front page of our web site and are using it in various campaigns. There are currently 2 versions of the video a longer 5 minute version and a shorter 2 minute version. We may release a much longer version that includes many more testimonials and more time from each interview. We have quite a few testimonials, success stories, and endorsements by our partners and subscribers on video, but we limited this release to just a few for the sake of time.

We have made the decision to use the YouTube resources to distribute this video instead of hosting it and streaming it from our servers. I have blogged before about the benefits of YouTube for distributing marketing materials and we are tracking the results to see if it meets our needs.

WVR mentioned prominently in the 3 of top 4 Gen. News Stories of '07

World Vital Records (and FamilyLink.com) is mentioned prominently in 3 of the top 4 Genealogy news stories of 2007 as reported by Family Tree Magazine. The other top 4 story "Record Digitization Accelerates" is something that we are actively involved in, but we did not get mentioned by name.

We appreciated this recognition as we feel that it indicates our leadership and innovation are changing and improving family history and genealogy.

www.familytreemagazine.com/insider/PermaLink,guid,550a49eb-2aa2-4da7-a2e3-051d308a2971.aspx

Wednesday, January 02, 2008
10 Biggest Genealogy News Stories in 2007
Posted by Diane Haddad


Here are the top genealogy developments of 2007… at least in our humble opinion.

Competition comes back
For a few years there, after industry leader MyFamily.com (now The Generations Network) purchased second-place Genealogy.com in 2003, industry competition ebbed and online innovation slowed. Today The Generations Network is still the giant, but the growth of relative newcomers including World Vital Records and Footnote, plus FamilySearch’s records-digitization initiatives, are keeping the genealogy business on its toes.

Records digitization accelerates
In October, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced it was teaming up with FamilySearch to digitize case files of approved pension applications from widows of Civil War Union soldiers. That’s part of an even bigger arrangement that has FamilySearch volunteers stationed at NARA to scan all kinds of records. Footnote also has agreements to digitize NARA records, and FamilySearch has mobilized thousands of volunteers to index scanned records.

Partnerships proliferate
Organizations are joining forces right and left. World Vital Records, which launched in 2006, has built its genealogy database largely through partnership agreements. That site, Footnote, ProQuest and the Godfrey Library announced in May they’d provide access at FamilySearch’s Family History Centers. Nonprofit libraries and archives, including NARA, are using partnerships to increase records access without blowing their budgets.

Social networking explodes
As contributing editor Rick Crume points out in his January 2008 Family Tree Magazine social networking guide, Web 2.0 has allowed sites to be more interactive than ever. In addition to the popularity of photo- and family-history-sharing sites such as Geni and Amiglia, and genealogy networking sites such as FamilyLink and WeRelate, database sites such as FindMyPast have added social networking features.

Another great success story from WorldVitalRecords.com

We love to keep track of the many success stories that our customs have when working with the ever-growing collection of databases on WorldVitalRecords.com.

There are 2 that I repeat to others when they ask about how things are going at WorldVitalRecords.com.

The first of many examples that I use happened at the FGS conference in Ft. Wayne Indiana this past August. A nice lady from one of the large state genealogy societies came by the World Vital Records booth. She said that she has a rate name in her family that she uses to see how complete a genealogy site's databases are. The rare name that she uses for this test is "Frink." She said that in most other genealogy database sites, she finds very little useful information about the Frink family.

I typed then surname "Frink" into our global search and even I was amazed by the search result. The top search result in the Family Histories was a small database that is part of the Quintin collection entitled "Records From the Bible of Eliza Gold Frink, Brunswick County, North Carolina." This small database contained 18 pages from the 1832 family bible of Eliza Frink. These pages contained the pedigree charts and family name lists for 8 generations of the Frink family! She had never heard of Eliza Frink, but she immediately recognized some of the names on those pages from the Frink Family Bible. This was a gold mine of family history research for her.

The next example of an amazing success on WorldVitalRecords.com happened just this week. We had a prospective business partner from Seattle that came to Provo to visit with us. She was not that familiar with our site or with genealogy database sites in general. I explained what we did and how our business model worked. I wanted to give her an example of some of the databases that we had on our site. I asked her where her family was from. I navigated to the state of Washington to see all of the data that we had for Washington state. I scrolled down through the roughly 50 databases that we have that pertain to Washington state. About halfway down the list, she saw the Deer Park Tribune and the Deer Park Union newspapers. These are part of the SmallTownPapers® collection that we have on WorldVitalRecords.com.

She exclaimed, "that is where I am from." She then began to browse through the newspaper and found where both her husband and herself were listed as being on the honor roll in their high school. Both of us were amazed by her quick find. We printed off the newspaper pages so that she could take them back to Seattle to show to her husband. She quickly gained an understanding of the power of the ever-growing database collection on WorldVitalRecords.com.

Decreased cost of doing business, especially disk storage

In preparation for a presentation that I am doing today at the BYU Genealogy and Family History, I have done some research on the reduced costs of modern technology businesses. One of the distinct advantages that WorldVitalRecords is enjoying is the reduced cost of doing business over our more established competitors.

These cost reductions include not just hardware such as disk space, RAM, and CPU speed (MIPS) but also the cost reduction of using open source operating systems and applications such as search engines. Linux and Lucene are two of examples of open source OS and applications that we use.

The cost comparison between a server operating system (OS), such as XP Server, and Linux incalculable because you will get a “divide by zero” error. Linux, the denominator in the equation, is free. Plug the cost of any serious server OS prior to LINUX into the equation and the can see this cost is zero. So the practical reduction in business costs is $X down to $0.

The cost reduction of disk storage space is spectacular and almost as dramatic. This price reduction has been fairly constant since the 1950s. I found this great chart that shows the dramatic decline in costs: www.berghell.com/whitepapers/Projecting%20the%20Cost%20of%20Magnetic%20Storage%20Over%20the%20Next%2010%20years.pdf.

The term Terabyte, which means one thousand Gigabytes, first entered my vocabulary in the early 1990s. It was use to describe the size of the Library of Congress. That was difficult for me to fathom. At that time gigabyte (a thousand megabytes) was still almost too big to understand as well.

At that time, I still had a hard rive on my personal computer that was measured in megabytes. And it took me 6 months to save money to buy that 19 megabyte hard drive. Before that, the first hard drive that I had easy access to was a mere 5 megabyte drive. That was all you could get on an IBM XT in 1983. Before that, PCs only had floppy drives that were measured in hundreds of kilobytes.

To illustrate the size and scope of these changes in costs and capacity, I recently purchased a 4 gigabyte “postage stamp size” SD chip for my Treo. That paper thin chip has 200 times capacity than my first 19 megabyte hard drive. That hard drive was about the size a shoe box AND made an annoying high-pitched whine AND put off enough heat to heat my office in the winter.

Back to the point of this BLOG, ten years ago, when Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org were scaling up to store census images, the cost per Terabyte for Hardware RAID (redundant and self correcting storage) had a cost of USD $110,772. During the past 10 years that number has fallen to USD $505. This is the equivalent cost of 2 quarters compared to a hundred dollar bill.

This means that now that WorldVitalRecords.com is scaling up to store the thousands of databases that we are adding at a rapid rate we can buy storage space for less than 1/2 of 1%. This amazing cost reduction allows us to buy new, high-speed hard drives for less than then carrying cost and maintenance of the hard drives of the past.

The timing of our company launch gives us a cost advantage of these recent price reductions. This is just one of the reasons that we can offer a much lower priced membership than our older and more established competition.

Internet connection types for WorldVitalRecords.com users

I need to blog about technology much more than I do. There are great nuggets of technology details that cross my desk every day that I need to share. I have the goal of blogging about technology at least once a week, if not more.

As part of our research at WorldVitalRecords.com we need to know how fast our users connect to the internet. This allows us to provide the best user experience based on environment that our users have.

80.7% of our users have a high speed connection versus 89.5% of all internet users. 18.7% of our users use a dial-up modem for their internet connections. Only 9.9% of total internet user use a dial up connection.

High speed connections allow for richer multimedia usage such as flash and video. High speed also allows for large downloads such as audio or ebook downloads. And over 80% of our members can support that. But we need to ensure a quality user experience for the 20% of our users that have a dial up connection.