At a family gathering several years ago, I started brainstorming on ways to innovate in family history software. I was too busy to do anything with the ideas, but was excited about it nonetheless. My ideas were:
- Family history should be more social.
- Family history should be more scientific, based on hard evidence not consensus.
- Family history should happen in the cloud.
- Family history should be more Web 2.0 (or whatever the latest term is for a good-looking, user-friendly website).
For example, I should be able to login to the cloud, upload a scan of my great-great grandmother’s birth certificate, attach it to her record, and share this with whomever I wish. The same should be true for any other data, including photos, stories, anecdotes, etc.
Any aspect of a record’s data not verified by a scanned document should be marked, “Unverified.” Errors abound in family history records. Putting emphasis on original sources is the best way to clean it up.
PAF software circa 1997
In the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time with my nose buried in personal ancestral file (PAF) software, digitizing my parents and grandparents genealogical records. I grew an appreciation then for the massive amount of family history extraction work that has occurred over the years. It is phenomenal how much family history information is available.
I’ve not done much family history work in the last 10 years, consumed by school, family, and startups. But I smiled recently when I saw the news that a new “stealth mode” startup, named youwho, raised $5 million to innovate in family history.
youwho SLC startup
I wish them luck. They’ll need it as they take on the 500-pound ancestry.com gorilla. They’ll also need it as they attempt to make family history more palatable for younger tech savvy segments, who aren’t naturally inclined to consume genealogy. Perhaps the youwho team will find this post and know that I’m “rooting” for them.