Creating and editing the tree might be free, but Ancestry.com's whole appeal lies in the huge range of data they house, much of it gleaned from public records. I'm not against them charging some for the service of having scanned and indexed that data, and for operating the servers to host it, but in my opinion they're overcharging for that service based on our public data by a fair margin.
Some of the data itself is from the public record, but compiling all of it yourself would be prohibitively expensive. It would take many trips to various libraries, churches, courthouses, etc. in lots of far-flung places in different cities, states, and countries. And that's all before you start indexing, searching, copying, or scanning any records.
Then consider they're hosting all those billions of records, have developed decent software for both building family trees and documenting them with their database of sources, and continually improve their software and increase their database holdings. The only reason they can charge so little is the economy of scale based on their huge userbase.
i dont get why americans are so obsessed with genealogy, ancestry and so on. maybe it is because it is a country of immigrants, and everyone is trying to have an identity extending to their past ?
For me it's mostly just a hobby. I love history to begin with, and my family history is specifically interesting to me personally. Finding out where my ancestors lived, what their lives would have been like, and why they immigrated to America is fascinating to me.
I've read that genealogy is the second most common hobby in America, after gardening. Of course, that depends on how a hobby is defined. I consider reading my favorite hobby. However, for some people, i.e. Mormons, genealogy has religious significance. That's why Salt Lake City, Utah is the biggest destination for many people doing genealogical research.
where i live, in anatolia (turkey), history goes thousands of years past into 8-9000 BC. actually, it was discovered that, the villagers living near the site of a recently discovered mummy that is dated 6500 BC or so (8500 years ago) had 100% exact dna with the mummy. (western anatolia) basically, those people lived there since that time, seasoning all that has happened around those parts.
I've also read that, which really interests me. Don't you find it fascinating that your (or at least some modern Turks) ancestors possibly spoke Hittite or another Indo-European or even Semitic language? I recently paid for a genealogical DNA test, which will tell me more specifically where my ancestors came from. My paternal ancestors immigrated to America from Germany in the 1880s (then Prussia), but there are several clues which point to them actually being ethnically Lithuanian. The area where they lived has been part of Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Germany in just the last few hundred years.
The US census data is delayed by ~70 years so very little info on anything in the past 70 years will come up.
Census records are released 72 years later, to be exact. Also, although the US Census isn't available until then, many state listings of much more recent births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are available.
My biggest complaint is the search functionality often returns way too much data.
Too much data is far more preferable than too little. Back in the old days, before many sources were available online, most searching had to be done by hand, paging through entire paper records until you found a possible match. The earliest online sources were often just indexes to paper records. It made it much easier to find the records, but then you still had to travel to a library, courthouse, church, etc. that might be in another state or even country.
Their search/matching algorithm is quite eager.
The reason the algorithm is so promiscuous is that it's probably using Soundex to match names. That's a good thing though, as I've found some of my ancestors names spelled in lots of different ways.
Hey OP, if all you found was addresses on Ancestry.com, then you're not making any effort to find information. They do have metric boatloads of data of all sorts for your money, but you do have to have a clue about finding it, and make the effort.
Definitely agree, the anonymous reader didn't try very hard. And records for living people are necessarily scarce because of privacy issues.
That said, I do agree Ancestry.com is a pricey service. Check out MyHeritage.com. You can do a free 250-person tree, or add more with payment. The software is a free download and use, and is pretty thorough. The online piece includes the ability to match to other people's trees and import their data to your tree.
Actually, just creating and editing your family tree on Ancestry is completely free. And there's no limit to the number of people, AFAIK. The paid service is just for accessing their database of sources and connecting with other users who might have overlapping family trees.
However the fact that you paid to use Ancestry.com is amazing to me:-) Check out your local library and see if they have a subscription. Also take a look at familysearch.org or even the LDS Family search centers for more resources library.familysearch.org/ (to find your local center).
I pay for ancestry.com because they have a huge database of sources online, and probably the largest number of users out of any other family tree websites. It's much more convenient for me to search and view their literally billions of records from the comfort of my own home than going to my local library or LDS center. If I did that, I'd have to copy their records and scan them myself. Ancestry's already done the legwork for me. Also, since they have so many users, I've connected to several other people doing research along the same family lines, which saved my quite a bit of time.
If I was going to be spending a reasonable amount of time inputting data that I want to access for an extended period of time I would want it to be an open source program. That way you can always get the data out of the program again (possibly with some effort) and you are not stuck with regular upgrade fees for the latest version with the bug fix neeed to make it work with the latest OS version.
But that's really a non-starter with ancestry.com, they let you export your family tree as a GEDCOM file any time you want, which is the de facto standard file format for genealogy.
I agree wholeheartedly! Currently, I use ancestry.com for my main family tree, but regularly download a GEDCOM file and import it into GeneWeb (locally hosted) for offline access. I've tried several other programs, both open source and proprietary, but GeneWeb is my favorite by far. It doesn't make the prettiest family tree website, but it's easy to use and its functionality is great.
Even though the primary developer, Daniel de Rauglaudre, isn't developing it further right now, it has more features than I use regularly, and it's highly customizable. I'm somewhat tempted to learn OCaml, just to be able to modify this software.
I thought it was pretty obvious I was writing figuratively, but I suppose on/. that's not a safe assumption. Also from Wikipedia, Vermont is the 45th largest state in the US, i.e. 44 of the 50 states are larger than Vermont. So comparatively, it will be much easier to wire the state with high-speed internet than most states. It doesn't matter much that Vermont has a low population density, since the distances to cover are tiny compared to most states.
And actually one of the few places in the US where you can get 24 Mbps, Vermont, has a very low population density. It probably helps that VTel is an independent telephone company.
It also probably helps that Vermont's about the size of a postage stamp.
France and Russia were against an invasion, reasoning that the UN investigations showed there wasn't enough evidence to prove Iraq possesed WMD.
I seriously doubt that was their actual reasoning. Both France and Russia had signed oil deals with Saddam's government, probably in violation of the oil-for-food program.
France was threatening with a veto against a security council decision for an invasion (cue the freedom fries), then Bush said he would invade Iraq with or without allied support. Kofi Annan was in a difficult position. The UN wouldn't look good if the strongest country on earth defied it, so the vote typically passed in order to save the UN's image.
I don't think you generally understand the process of Security Council resolutions. Kofi Annan has nothing to do with the deliberations of the UN Security Council. He's the UN Secretary General, who presides over the UN General Assembly, which is the body of all 191 UN member states. The UN Security Council is an independent body of 15 member states, 5 of which are permanent.
Resolution 1441 passed because the 15 individual member states each decided to vote for it. France said they would veto a second resolution giving security council authorization for invading Iraq (after 1441). That's when Bush decided bringing up a 2nd resolution was pointless, given France's refusal to even consider it.
I'm guessing this part must have been painted by the US media as: "the UN isn't powerfull enough to enforce international law" or something, because I see many comments on the net to such a point.
Enforcing international law isn't the UN's job. However, member states often use the UN as a forum to accuse other countries of violating international law. Of course, resolutions passed in the General Assembly are completely non-binding.
The truth is that the US (and some of the members of the security council) delibrately undermine it to protect their interests.
Name me one country that doesn't act in their own interest, and I'll name you a country governed by idiots.
As time has taught us, France, Russia and the UN were wise in hesitating to authorize an invasion and in positioning themeselves against it.
That's debatable.
No WMD were found, showing that Saddam actually wasn't lying about his capabilities to the UN. Now, why was Bush right in invading after all?
First, WMD was only one reason among many. Second, the burden of proof was on Saddam to show Iraq's compliance with resolutions 678, 687, 1441, and others. He clearly didn't do that, and in fact had been actively thwarting the UN inspectors' attempt to check his compliance.
Also, why shouldn't Bush be overthrown? He is clearly dangerous with the military power he posseses.
And you expect me to take you seriously? Overthrown by whom? Just the word overthrown implies an internal revolution. Bush is the duly elected leader of our country. Justification for a revolution would need some very serious grievances that weren't being addressed by other means. That's definitely not the case today.
Dangerous to who? The only leaders who lose any sleep worrying about a possible US invasion don't rightly deserve to be leading in the first place (i.e. Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kim, etc). That doesn't mean I favor invasion, or think it's right in all those cases, but leaders of well-behaved states don't seriously worry about US invasion.
Please don't underestimate my intelligence by answering something lame like he was a dictator that was torturing his people. There are alot of worse dictators around the world, some very good allies to the US. Take a look at Pakistan.:(
Why not, there are ones that will work for free. Isn't that the whole point of this?
No, it's not the point at all. The volunteers translating the documents aren't submitting them back to the government. The whole program is an effort to be more transparent.
Coalition forces have collected millions of documents from the former Iraqi regime. After intelligence analysts give them a cursory reading, they determine if they contain actionable intelligence. If so, they're translated and the information is disseminated to higher authorities, otherwise they're archived. Since there is such a huge number of documents, it's likely many of them would never get translated or released without a program like this. It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
You are still not addressing how Bush has the right to an offensive war with a country half way around the planet over little to no evidence of a threat to anything but Saddams own people or probably his neighbors (even though later on both were proved false).
The war in Iraq was authorized since Saddam didn't comply with several UN Security Council resolutions, the last and most pertinent one being 1441. What are you saying proved false later?
Why was bush right in defying the UN's actions when clearly as we see today, it was the logical way to react?
And that he was buying Yellow Cake, which turned out to be a forged document.
They didn't claim he bought yellow cake, but that he was trying to acquire it from Africa. The famous "16 words" (which were completely factual) in Bush's state of the union address were based on British intelligence, who didn't yet know about the document that later turned out to be forged.
And that he was somehow involved in 9/11 despite there never having been any evidence to support that claim.
But who claimed that? It wasn't used by the administration to justify the war in Iraq.
There were a whole lot of things that were bandied about as to the reasons why they decided to do it. When they finally had no evidence, the line changed to "Oh well, no WMDs, but at least we've removed a dictator."
The resolution passed in congress authorizing the president to use force in Iraq listed several reasons, of which WMD was only one. That WMDs were the most emphasized reason before the war was an unfortunate PR mistake.
Lies. Damned Lies. Statistics. The justification for US foreign policy.
As opposed to your repeated use of straw man arguments?
I fail to see how the term 'open-source' is applicable to a translation. Is the belief that if a number of people contribute to something, that it's open-source?
In the intelligence community, the term open source intelligence (OSINT) is used to differentiate from traditional closed sources like human intelligence (HUMINT), electro-magnetic signals (SIGINT), and satellite and aerial imagery (IMINT). When the typical/.er reads open source, they probably think of open source software (OSS) first.
When are you gun nuts going to learn hwo to read? The Second Amendment states (emphasis mine): "A well regulated Militia, being neseccary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." We no longer maintain militias in the form the framers originally conceived so the Second Amendment is pointless.
The militia does still exist. According to US Code: Title 10, 311, the militia consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Also, you only highlighted the first half of the amendment, let's consider the other half:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The first half states the reason for protecting the right. The second half states the right itself and limits the governments' power with respect to the right. Some gun control advocates argue the Second Amendment is only a collective right, not an individual right. But if you follow their reasoning, it would apply to the First Amendment too.
I heard that joke years ago. The Army and Marine Corps paragraphs have been expanded and sound better. However, the Navy one is changed beyond recognition. In the original version secure the building in Navy-speak meant to ensure all the lights were off, doors were locked, etc.
"Asparagus" is what we now (mainly since the end of World War II) call "sparrow grass": apparently, sparrow grass just wasn't as trendy a name, so it got dropped.
Not quite. Look at the etymology of the English word asparagushere.
Wow, between the unquoted attributes, the tables, and the capitalized tags, that drives the Crazy Pedantic Web Standards Designer part of me up a bloody wall...
I still use HTML 4.01 Transitional to this day because I hate using all lowercase tags. They make it harder to quickly differentiate between content and markup without syntax highlighting.
Pearl Harbor is the only correct American spelling. Harbour would be the English spelling; it's not our fault the founders were functionally illiterate.
You're wrong on two counts.
First, if harbor was being used as a common noun, then it would be spelled harbour in British English. However, since Pearl Harbor is a place name, Harbor is being used as a proper noun, so there is only one correct spelling in the English language, whether American or British.
Second, our founders were notfunctionally illiterate. People in the late 18th and early 19th century were more literate, had much larger vocabularies, and were better read than people today. Spelling wasn't as standardized back then. Some letters from that period have the same word spelled three different ways--in one page--by the same person. Also, many spelling differences between American and British English were not our changes, although color (and by extension harbor) was chosen as a simpler spelling by Daniel Webster. The British used to spell center, theater, civilize and other words the same as American English, but switched to using the French spellings in the 18th century. For more information see this from the Ask A Linguist mailing list.
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Creating and editing the tree might be free, but Ancestry.com's whole appeal lies in the huge range of data they house, much of it gleaned from public records. I'm not against them charging some for the service of having scanned and indexed that data, and for operating the servers to host it, but in my opinion they're overcharging for that service based on our public data by a fair margin.
Some of the data itself is from the public record, but compiling all of it yourself would be prohibitively expensive. It would take many trips to various libraries, churches, courthouses, etc. in lots of far-flung places in different cities, states, and countries. And that's all before you start indexing, searching, copying, or scanning any records.
Then consider they're hosting all those billions of records, have developed decent software for both building family trees and documenting them with their database of sources, and continually improve their software and increase their database holdings. The only reason they can charge so little is the economy of scale based on their huge userbase.
i dont get why americans are so obsessed with genealogy, ancestry and so on. maybe it is because it is a country of immigrants, and everyone is trying to have an identity extending to their past ?
For me it's mostly just a hobby. I love history to begin with, and my family history is specifically interesting to me personally. Finding out where my ancestors lived, what their lives would have been like, and why they immigrated to America is fascinating to me.
I've read that genealogy is the second most common hobby in America, after gardening. Of course, that depends on how a hobby is defined. I consider reading my favorite hobby. However, for some people, i.e. Mormons, genealogy has religious significance. That's why Salt Lake City, Utah is the biggest destination for many people doing genealogical research.
where i live, in anatolia (turkey), history goes thousands of years past into 8-9000 BC. actually, it was discovered that, the villagers living near the site of a recently discovered mummy that is dated 6500 BC or so (8500 years ago) had 100% exact dna with the mummy. (western anatolia) basically, those people lived there since that time, seasoning all that has happened around those parts.
I've also read that, which really interests me. Don't you find it fascinating that your (or at least some modern Turks) ancestors possibly spoke Hittite or another Indo-European or even Semitic language? I recently paid for a genealogical DNA test, which will tell me more specifically where my ancestors came from. My paternal ancestors immigrated to America from Germany in the 1880s (then Prussia), but there are several clues which point to them actually being ethnically Lithuanian. The area where they lived has been part of Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Germany in just the last few hundred years.
Nearly everyone in America is descended from immigrants at some point...
Actually, every person on the planet is descended from immigrants if you go back far enough.
The US census data is delayed by ~70 years so very little info on anything in the past 70 years will come up.
Census records are released 72 years later, to be exact. Also, although the US Census isn't available until then, many state listings of much more recent births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are available.
My biggest complaint is the search functionality often returns way too much data.
Too much data is far more preferable than too little. Back in the old days, before many sources were available online, most searching had to be done by hand, paging through entire paper records until you found a possible match. The earliest online sources were often just indexes to paper records. It made it much easier to find the records, but then you still had to travel to a library, courthouse, church, etc. that might be in another state or even country.
Their search/matching algorithm is quite eager.
The reason the algorithm is so promiscuous is that it's probably using Soundex to match names. That's a good thing though, as I've found some of my ancestors names spelled in lots of different ways.
Hey OP, if all you found was addresses on Ancestry.com, then you're not making any effort to find information. They do have metric boatloads of data of all sorts for your money, but you do have to have a clue about finding it, and make the effort.
Definitely agree, the anonymous reader didn't try very hard. And records for living people are necessarily scarce because of privacy issues.
That said, I do agree Ancestry.com is a pricey service. Check out MyHeritage.com. You can do a free 250-person tree, or add more with payment. The software is a free download and use, and is pretty thorough. The online piece includes the ability to match to other people's trees and import their data to your tree.
Actually, just creating and editing your family tree on Ancestry is completely free. And there's no limit to the number of people, AFAIK. The paid service is just for accessing their database of sources and connecting with other users who might have overlapping family trees.
However the fact that you paid to use Ancestry.com is amazing to me :-) Check out your local library and see if they have a subscription. Also take a look at familysearch.org or even the LDS Family search centers for more resources library.familysearch.org/ (to find your local center).
I pay for ancestry.com because they have a huge database of sources online, and probably the largest number of users out of any other family tree websites. It's much more convenient for me to search and view their literally billions of records from the comfort of my own home than going to my local library or LDS center. If I did that, I'd have to copy their records and scan them myself. Ancestry's already done the legwork for me. Also, since they have so many users, I've connected to several other people doing research along the same family lines, which saved my quite a bit of time.
If I was going to be spending a reasonable amount of time inputting data that I want to access for an extended period of time I would want it to be an open source program. That way you can always get the data out of the program again (possibly with some effort) and you are not stuck with regular upgrade fees for the latest version with the bug fix neeed to make it work with the latest OS version.
But that's really a non-starter with ancestry.com, they let you export your family tree as a GEDCOM file any time you want, which is the de facto standard file format for genealogy.
I agree wholeheartedly! Currently, I use ancestry.com for my main family tree, but regularly download a GEDCOM file and import it into GeneWeb (locally hosted) for offline access. I've tried several other programs, both open source and proprietary, but GeneWeb is my favorite by far. It doesn't make the prettiest family tree website, but it's easy to use and its functionality is great.
Even though the primary developer, Daniel de Rauglaudre, isn't developing it further right now, it has more features than I use regularly, and it's highly customizable. I'm somewhat tempted to learn OCaml, just to be able to modify this software.
I thought it was pretty obvious I was writing figuratively, but I suppose on /. that's not a safe assumption. Also from Wikipedia, Vermont is the 45th largest state in the US, i.e. 44 of the 50 states are larger than Vermont. So comparatively, it will be much easier to wire the state with high-speed internet than most states. It doesn't matter much that Vermont has a low population density, since the distances to cover are tiny compared to most states.
I seriously doubt that was their actual reasoning. Both France and Russia had signed oil deals with Saddam's government, probably in violation of the oil-for-food program.
I don't think you generally understand the process of Security Council resolutions. Kofi Annan has nothing to do with the deliberations of the UN Security Council. He's the UN Secretary General, who presides over the UN General Assembly, which is the body of all 191 UN member states. The UN Security Council is an independent body of 15 member states, 5 of which are permanent.
Resolution 1441 passed because the 15 individual member states each decided to vote for it. France said they would veto a second resolution giving security council authorization for invading Iraq (after 1441). That's when Bush decided bringing up a 2nd resolution was pointless, given France's refusal to even consider it.
Enforcing international law isn't the UN's job. However, member states often use the UN as a forum to accuse other countries of violating international law. Of course, resolutions passed in the General Assembly are completely non-binding.
Name me one country that doesn't act in their own interest, and I'll name you a country governed by idiots.
That's debatable.
First, WMD was only one reason among many. Second, the burden of proof was on Saddam to show Iraq's compliance with resolutions 678, 687, 1441, and others. He clearly didn't do that, and in fact had been actively thwarting the UN inspectors' attempt to check his compliance.
And you expect me to take you seriously? Overthrown by whom? Just the word overthrown implies an internal revolution. Bush is the duly elected leader of our country. Justification for a revolution would need some very serious grievances that weren't being addressed by other means. That's definitely not the case today.
Dangerous to who? The only leaders who lose any sleep worrying about a possible US invasion don't rightly deserve to be leading in the first place (i.e. Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kim, etc). That doesn't mean I favor invasion, or think it's right in all those cases, but leaders of well-behaved states don't seriously worry about US invasion.
Coalition forces have collected millions of documents from the former Iraqi regime. After intelligence analysts give them a cursory reading, they determine if they contain actionable intelligence. If so, they're translated and the information is disseminated to higher authorities, otherwise they're archived. Since there is such a huge number of documents, it's likely many of them would never get translated or released without a program like this. It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
What UN actions did Bush defy?
But who claimed that? It wasn't used by the administration to justify the war in Iraq.
The resolution passed in congress authorizing the president to use force in Iraq listed several reasons, of which WMD was only one. That WMDs were the most emphasized reason before the war was an unfortunate PR mistake.
As opposed to your repeated use of straw man arguments?
Also, you only highlighted the first half of the amendment, let's consider the other half:
The first half states the reason for protecting the right. The second half states the right itself and limits the governments' power with respect to the right. Some gun control advocates argue the Second Amendment is only a collective right, not an individual right. But if you follow their reasoning, it would apply to the First Amendment too.
SciFi has run at least two Firefly marathons in the last month.
I heard that joke years ago. The Army and Marine Corps paragraphs have been expanded and sound better. However, the Navy one is changed beyond recognition. In the original version secure the building in Navy-speak meant to ensure all the lights were off, doors were locked, etc.
First, if harbor was being used as a common noun, then it would be spelled harbour in British English. However, since Pearl Harbor is a place name, Harbor is being used as a proper noun, so there is only one correct spelling in the English language, whether American or British.
Second, our founders were not functionally illiterate. People in the late 18th and early 19th century were more literate, had much larger vocabularies, and were better read than people today. Spelling wasn't as standardized back then. Some letters from that period have the same word spelled three different ways--in one page--by the same person. Also, many spelling differences between American and British English were not our changes, although color (and by extension harbor) was chosen as a simpler spelling by Daniel Webster. The British used to spell center, theater, civilize and other words the same as American English, but switched to using the French spellings in the 18th century. For more information see this from the Ask A Linguist mailing list.
OK, I guess I need to add the caveat that "Pearl Harbor" is the only correct English spelling.