{"id":435,"date":"2013-07-30T11:44:46","date_gmt":"2013-07-30T18:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=435"},"modified":"2013-12-09T12:36:23","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T20:36:23","slug":"is-our-tree-better-than-my-tree-the-benefits-and-pitfalls-of-collaborative-genealogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=435","title":{"rendered":"Is Our Tree Better Than My Tree? The Benefits and Pitfalls of Collaborative Genealogy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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[Published in\u00a0Avotaynu<\/em>\u00a0XXIX, No. 2, p. 7<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

by E. Randol Schoenberg[1]<\/b><\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Until recently, we began by building our own individual family trees.\u00a0 We started with our parents, siblings, children, spouses and continued to fill in as much as we could.\u00a0 When we reached a branch where we did not know the information, we turned to a relative or searched for records, perhaps even hired a professional genealogist.\u00a0 With time and patience, many of us built nice trees, even large ones, with hundreds or thousands of people.\u00a0 We documented our results with records and photographs.<\/p>\n

Most of us eventually computerized our trees, using programs such as Family Tree Maker or Reunion.\u00a0 We submitted GEDCOM files to Beit Hatufsoth<\/a> or JewishGen\u2019s Family Tree of the Jewish People<\/a> (FTJP).\u00a0 Some of us even published our trees on the Internet or in books.\u00a0 But what we never did was allow someone else to work on our tree.\u00a0 We did not collaborate. \u00a0The tree was ours and no one else\u2019s.\u00a0 It did not grow without our involvement and it did not venture beyond where we wanted to go.<\/p>\n

All that has changed in the past several years with the advent of collaborative genealogy.\u00a0 A product of the connectivity of the Internet, collaborative genealogy allows a number of different people to work together remotely on one connected tree.\u00a0 The result has revolutionized the field of genealogy, and Jewish genealogists have been at the forefront of this new development.\u00a0 Instead of speaking of trees of thousands, we now talk of millions.\u00a0 Instead of starting from scratch, many people are coming to genealogy as a result of an invitation to an existing tree that they are asked to join and help build.<\/p>\n

Separate Collaborative Trees (Ancestry.com, MyHeritage)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Inviting Collaborators to Your Tree.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>A number of collaborative genealogy websites exist to facilitate cooperative tree-building. The most popular genealogy websites, for example Ancestry.com<\/a> and MyHeritage<\/a>, have offered collaborative tree building options to their customers. \u00a0On these sites, users build their own trees (or upload GEDCOM files) and then invite people on the tree to join by entering their e-mail addresses.\u00a0 The invited users can then help to build the tree by adding new profiles and information.\u00a0 The potential for growth is great.\u00a0 Your first cousin shares two grandparents with you.\u00a0 He can add in his other two grandparents and invite cousins from the other side of his family.\u00a0 So can his spouse.\u00a0 In this fashion, the trees start to grow in this fashion in all directions, the only limit being the industry of the invited members.\u00a0 The largest trees of this type generally have fewer than 100,000 profiles.<\/p>\n

Merging Duplicates, Adding Sources, Finding Matches.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>The better sites allow merging of duplicate profiles, so that if a person appears more than once in the tree, the profiles may be joined together seamlessly.\u00a0 This avoids unnecessary duplication of profiles in the tree.\u00a0 Sites such as Ancestry.com and MyHeritage also offer the ability to connect records from their enormous databases to the profiles in the tree, which is a huge bonus for those who like to have their trees well documented.\u00a0 Users also have the ability to search the unconnected trees of other users and contact them to confirm or trade information.\u00a0 The companies even have developed algorithms to detect data matches and suggest them to the customers.\u00a0 Finding these matches allow users to glean new information for their trees.\u00a0 Ancestry recently added a feature to find matches on Facebook to allow users to invite their relatives to the tree through that website.<\/p>\n

Mergeable Collaborative Trees (Geni, WikiTree, WeRelate, FamilySearch)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Finding Relationships.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>The collaborative model was further improved by Geni<\/a>, a California company recently acquired by MyHeritage of Israel. The key innovation was the ability to merge separate trees together. What began as thousands of separate trees has evolved, over time, into one enormous World Family Tree<\/a> of over 70 million profiles, including 2.9 million connected users.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

While many thousands of separate trees still remain on Geni, the real action is in the World Family Tree.\u00a0 A genealogist who can connect to that tree instantly is connected to an enormous web of related profiles.\u00a0 Using Geni\u2019s far-reaching relationship finder, researchers can determine the closest path between two profiles on the tree.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 Because of a computational resource limit, however, the algorithm generally finds profiles that are either direct relatives, or are otherwise no more than twenty steps away (e.g. an uncle\u2019s wife\u2019s cousin\u2019s sister\u2019s nephew).<\/p>\n

Many users find it fun to see how they are connected to famous people in the tree. [4]<\/a> The more popular Jewish ones range from King David<\/a>[5]<\/a> and Rashi<\/a>, to Albert Einstein<\/a> and Jamie Lee Curtis<\/a>.\u00a0 At this point it would be difficult to find a Jewish celebrity whose tree is not already part of Geni\u2019s World Family Tree.<\/p>\n

Curators.<\/i> Geni\u2019s approach has attracted a host of excellent genealogists, eager to build the World Family Tree.\u00a0 About 120 of them have been selected by Geni as volunteer curators, who have been given the ability to resolve disputes, untangle incorrect merges and lock problem profiles.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, about 10 percent of the curators are Jewish<\/a>, with expertise ranging from biblical to modern times, and everything in between.[6]<\/a>\u00a0 The many non-Jewish curators also are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.<\/p>\n

One of the interesting aspects of Geni is the ability to compare the working behaviors of genealogists from all over the world.\u00a0 Some have exhibited incredible feats, adding thousands of profiles, records, sources, photographs and documents, and completing thousands of merges and data conflict resolutions every month. Even those who consider themselves very active and experienced in Jewish genealogy would be quite amazed at what some other people are capable of doing.\u00a0 Each curator brings his or her own expertise and interests to the task.\u00a0 Collaboration allows these genealogists to learn from each other and work as a team to make Geni a better environment for building the World Family Tree.<\/p>\n

Projects.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>Geni also enables users to create projects, allowing close collaboration on specific areas of research by way of project discussions and adding profiles to the project.\u00a0 The Jewish Genealogy Portal<\/a> with several hundred collaborators is an umbrella project with a directory to many of the Jewish projects on Geni.[7]<\/a>\u00a0 Two of the largest are the Auschwitz-Birkenau<\/a> project, with more than 5,000 profiles, and the Jews of Krak\u00f3w<\/a>, with more than 13,600 profiles.[8]<\/a>\u00a0 Geni already has hundreds of significant Jewish projects with more started every day.<\/p>\n

Massive published genealogies have been entered into Geni and indexed in projects.\u00a0 These include Neil Rosenstein\u2019s The Unbroken Chain<\/i><\/a>,[9]<\/a> Malcolm Stern\u2019s First American Jewish Families<\/i><\/a>,[10]<\/a> and Georg Gaugusch\u2019s Wer einmal war<\/i><\/a>.[11]<\/a>\u00a0 While some data from these books may still be missing, the skeleton of the tree is all there and is being improved on daily with information and records not include in the books, such as photos, documents, sources and links to living descendants and relatives, many of whom are Geni users.<\/p>\n

Web Searchable and Crowd-Sourced.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>Although privacy restrictions make the lower parts (with living profiles) less publicly accessible, Geni\u2019s tree most closely resembles a Wikipedia model in that the public portions of the tree are searchable on the Web.\u00a0 This feature distinguishes Geni from all of the other collaborative tree platforms, and has made it a magnet for new users.\u00a0 Because of the large number of users, Geni\u2019s tree is dynamic, not static.\u00a0 It is constantly being changed and improved.<\/p>\n

Working on Geni is like working on an enormous jigsaw puzzle with thousands of other people.\u00a0 You get the advantage of everyone else\u2019s work, and they all get the advantage of yours. With the power of crowd-sourcing, Geni allows genealogists to work together on much larger projects than anyone working alone could ever tackle by himself.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

Drawbacks to Collaboration<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mistakes.<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>With the numerous advantages of collaborative genealogy come some significant drawbacks.\u00a0 Allowing others to access and modify a tree sometimes permits mistakes to creep in.\u00a0 Of course, the same openness also allows users to correct mistakes.\u00a0 Often I hear people complain that they looked at Geni or WikiTree and found mistakes–but that may turn out to be one of the great strengths of these platforms.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only can individuals find the mistakes, they also can fix them–and for everyone.\u00a0 This is the model that Wikipedia used eventually to supersede The World Book<\/i> and Encyclopedia Britannica<\/i>.<\/p>\n

With over one million collaborators correcting and improving the tree, there is simply no doubt that the World Family Tree on Geni is becoming not only the largest, but also the most accurate and well-sourced tree available in most areas.<\/p>\n

Working with Difficult People.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>As with all works in progress, collaborative trees sometimes present difficulties, as, for example, when competing versions of a tree are merged and discrepancies are discovered.\u00a0 Working out the differences with others may be challenging.\u00a0 As every experienced genealogist knows, records often conflict or are unclear.\u00a0 Family stories may turn out to be fabrications.\u00a0 Hidden relationships sometimes reappear.\u00a0 The best collaborative genealogists understand that working together with others means sometimes being open to accepting a different point of view.<\/p>\n

Lack of Privacy.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>One potential drawback of collaborative genealogy, especially on Geni, is that everyone gets to see what you are doing.[13]<\/a>\u00a0 If you like to keep something private, don\u2019t put it on the Internet.\u00a0 Some family histories are better left unpublished, but for most genealogical data, publication on the Internet causes no harm.\u00a0 Some people fear so-called \u201cidentity theft,\u201d but that term is in fact really a misnomer and more of a marketing slogan for companies trying to sell security. What people call \u201cidentity theft\u201d is in fact just garden variety fraud \u2013 either by way of batch theft of customer credit card data from merchants, or fraudulent credit card applications by people who personally know the victim and already have access to his or her personal identification information.\u00a0 As far as I have been able to determine, there has not been even one documented case of fraud involving use of an online family tree.<\/p>\n

The lack of privacy can also have advantages, as it allows others to find connections and assist in building the tree alongside you.\u00a0 There is no better way to make a breakthrough than to make your tree public so that some other relative or genealogist can find it.<\/p>\n

Time and Expense.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>Moving to a collaborative tree can be expensive and time-consuming.\u00a0 Most of the collaborative tree platforms have different levels of membership.\u00a0 Often there is a fee for the service, or for certain aspects of it.\u00a0 Some allow users to start for free, but then charge for added features.\u00a0 Shop around and make sure to pick the price structure that is best for you.\u00a0 Adding a tree to a collaborative platform can be as easy as uploading a GEDCOM file, or as difficult as re-entering all the data by hand.\u00a0 In its early years, Geni grew exponentially by allowing GEDCOM imports, but the imports eventually created so many duplicate profiles, that GEDCOM importing was stopped.\u00a0 People with large trees (more than a few thousand profiles) almost always find that much of the tree is already on another collaborative tree in the database.\u00a0 Often it is better to connect with and join an existing collaborative tree than start one of your own–but the effort needed to enter new data, or sources, by hand may be daunting.\u00a0 Fortunately, it is usually possible to find collaborators to help with data entry.<\/p>\n

Who owns the Tree?<\/i>\u00a0 <\/b>Those who start or join a collaborative tree project on the Web essentially give up ownership of the tree and agree to share it with others (and the company that owns the platform).\u00a0 That means that if the platform disappears, so could all your work. Thus far, we do not see much risk of any of the major collaborative tree projects disappearing.\u00a0 The more likely scenario is exemplified by MyHeritage\u2019s purchase of Geni, as one collaborative platform is acquired by another.\u00a0 The databases created by collaborative genealogists have become very valuable assets, and it seems unlikely that the data ever will disappear completely.\u00a0 Nevertheless, most of the platforms allow at least a limited ability to download a GEDCOM file of some size to protect your work and that of your closer collaborators.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the past decades, Jewish and non-Jewish genealogy has focused on data aggregation rather than tree building.\u00a0 The incredible resources created by JewishGen or JRI-Poland, for example, or with the digitized indexing of the U.S. Census, have tended to make us think of the Internet as only a source of data rather than as a platform to build trees together.\u00a0 Some people are disappointed not to find more information about their own families in the various collaborative trees.\u00a0 When they see a tree that is incomplete, without sources, or lacking the answers they seek, they object and look elsewhere.\u00a0 This misses the point, I think.\u00a0 Genealogy is about the tree and the relationships we all have to one another.\u00a0 Although by now we have learned not to believe FTDNA<\/a> and 23andMe<\/a> when they predict that we\u2019re second cousins with another Jew in their database, we can be certain that there is a connection somewhere, perhaps lying just a few generations beyond where the records stop.<\/p>\n

Collaborative trees are not a substitute for records research; they are the way to structure the results of that research so that it is available for others to build on.\u00a0 This is how knowledge and science advance, with one person working off of and improving the work of another.\u00a0 Without collaborative genealogy, we will all be limited in our focus, able to see only the relatively small web of relationships that we work on by ourselves, and never seeing the majesty of the larger web that includes us all.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> E. Randol Schoenberg, randols@bslaw.net<\/a>, is a board member of JewishGen and the Co-Founder of JewishGen’s Austria-Czech Special Interest Group<\/a>. He moderates the Austria-Czech mailing list and website, and is also the author of the Beginner’s Guide to Austrian-Jewish Genealogy<\/a> and the co-author of Getting Started with Czech-Jewish Genealogy<\/a>. Schoenberg is a volunteer curator on Geni.com, and one of Geni’s most active users, managing about 100,000 profiles\u00a0 Professionally, he is an attorney and serves on the boards of various philanthropic, artistic and educational organizations. He presently serves as President and Acting Executive Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]<\/a> The big trees on WikiTree<\/a>, WeRelate<\/a> and FamilySearch<\/a> are far smaller.\u00a0 WikiTree presently has 5.2 million profiles on its big tree.\u00a0 WeRelate has 2.4 million.\u00a0 The LDS Church recently released its new collaborative Family Tree which has the potential of competing with the others.\u00a0 But it remains to be seen if this or any other platform will be able to catch up with Geni.\u00a0 Geni users are adding new profiles to its World Family Tree at a rate of 7 million per year. See http:\/\/www.geni.com\/worldfamilytree<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3]<\/a> The closest path is the one with the fewest steps between nodes on the tree.\u00a0 Geni shows the closest blood relation, or else the closest connection (ie. cousin to cousin to cousin).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[4]<\/a> It is also fun to see the relationship paths between famous people: \u201cSigmund Freud is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s third cousin once removed’s husband’s sister’s husband’s first cousin’s 1st husband.\u201d or \u201cFranz Kafka is Gustav Mahler’s wife’s husband’s first cousin’s wife’s sister’s husband’s first cousin’s husband’s first cousin’s husband’s first cousin once removed.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, the point is that we are all \u201crelated\u201d in this fashion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]<\/a> Geni tells me that King David is my 94th great-grandfather.\u00a0 Naturally this path requires a number of leaps of faith and the use of undocumented, perhaps mythological genealogies extending through areas well beyond my expertise.\u00a0 My own comfort level does not extend much beyond my 11th great-grandfather Samuel Phoebus L\u00e4mml (Teomim-Munk) (d. 1616 Vienna). But it is interesting to find that the number of generations is at least somewhat plausible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[6]<\/a> Presently, the Jewish curators include:\u00a0 Hatte Blejer, Adam Brown, Yigal Burstein, Ofir Friedman, Kevin Janit, Jaim Harlow, Itai Hermelin, Erica Howton, Shmuel Kam, Pam Karp, Rafi Kornfeld, Itai Meshulam, Malka Mysels, Peter Rohel, Randy Schoenberg, Alisa Sharon, Marco Soria and Marsha Veazey.\u00a0 See http:\/\/www.geni.com\/projects\/Jewish-Genealogy-Curators\/13122<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[7]<\/a> See http:\/\/www.geni.com\/projects\/Jewish-Genealogy-Portal-A-Guide-to-Jewish-Projects-and-Resources-on-Geni\/13121<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[8]<\/a> The Krakow project, http:\/\/www.geni.com\/projects\/Jewish-Families-of-Krak\u00f3w-Poland\/12917<\/a>, spearheaded by curator Pam Karp, is an attempt to move all of the data (70,000 profiles) from Dan Hirschberg\u2019s Krakow website (http:\/\/www.ics.uci.edu\/~dan\/genealogy\/Krakow\/family.html<\/a>) over to Geni, where it can be integrated with the rest of the World Family Tree and can be augmented by the community with records, photos and links to living descendants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[9]<\/a> See http:\/\/www.geni.com\/projects\/The-Unbroken-Chain-by-Neil-Rosenstein\/4064<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[10]<\/a> See http:\/\/www.geni.com\/projects\/First-American-Jewish-Families\/13288<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[11]<\/a> See http:\/\/www.geni.com\/projects\/Prominent-Jewish-Families-of-Vienna-Wer-Einmal-War\/9272<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[12]<\/a> In the field where I do most of my work, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, Geni has allowed us to link together pretty much every Jewish family from that region.\u00a0 The project is enormous and ongoing, but with the wealth of records that are increasingly becoming available, and the number of collaborators working on them, the Austria-Czech-Jewish part of the tree is likely to become the most dense and detailed tree ever created for Jewish families in a particular region.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[13]<\/a> Geni and all the other platforms have varying privacy settings.\u00a0 On Geni, living profiles are set to private and not searchable on the Web.\u00a0 Nevertheless, as a rule of thumb, if you don\u2019t want anyone to make the information public, do not put it on the Web in any fashion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Published in\u00a0Avotaynu\u00a0XXIX, No. 2, p. 7.] by E. Randol Schoenberg[1] Until recently, we began by building our own individual family trees.\u00a0 We started with our parents, siblings, children, spouses and continued to fill in as much as we could.\u00a0 When … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}