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I trace my family history so I will know whom to blame.

As predicted in last week’s newsletter, this week’s edition of the newsletter is being sent later than normal. Much of this edition was written on board jetliners as I added another 6,000 miles to my frequent flyer mileage total. Several articles were written in a hotel room and in the waiting lounges of airports.

I will mention that the next few editions may also be delayed. This week’s 6,000-mile roundtrip was only a warm-up. In the next six weeks or so I will be traveling many more miles than that. I will be visiting four countries. Sending the newsletter from hotel rooms, including from one third-world country, may prove to be a challenge! Please do not be surprised if an edition is several days late or even skipped entirely.

- 35th Annual Genealogical Jamboree in Pasadena

This week I traveled to the annual Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree and Resource Expo, held this year in Pasadena, California, only a few blocks from the famous Rose Bowl. This was the thirty-fifth annual Genealogical Jamboree to be hosted by the Southern California Genealogical Society, often called the "SCGS."

This was my first opportunity to attend the Genealogical Jamboree, so I cannot properly compare it against previous years’ events. However, attendees and organizers alike told me that it was smaller than those of previous years. I never heard the final attendance numbers, but it looked like 500 or 600 people roaming around the vendors’ exhibits of the Pasadena Westin this year. The Jamboree used to attract 1000 or so attendees a few years ago, but attendance has dropped in recent years.

The lower attendance apparently is a combination of several factors. For one thing, this year’s Jamboree was held in a much smaller facility than those of previous years. In fact, if one thousand people showed up, the place would have been very crowded! Another contributing factor probably was the weather: overcast and cool with frequent rain on Saturday. This was not my mental image of sunny California weather! (The weather back home in Boston reportedly was delightful. I chided my California hosts that I would have to go back to Boston to find nice weather!)

A third factor may be the fact that the conference was held on Friday and Saturday. The bigger Jamborees of a few years ago were weekend affairs, held Saturday and Sunday. However, the organizers told me that the last few weekend affairs also saw attendance dropping. When they switched to a weekday and one weekend day, they saw little effect on attendance. Still, I wonder how many working people skipped the event entirely because they already had to miss half of it due to work conflicts.

Finally, the biggest reason of all may be the fact that attendance seems to be slipping at most of the larger genealogy events. To be sure, there are exceptions, such as last fall’s pleasant surprise at the New England Regional Genealogy Conference. Nonetheless, the average attendance at larger genealogy conferences seems to be dropping every year across the country.

One presentation that deserves special mention is Jana Sloan Broglin's talk on Hookers, Crooks & Kooks. Jana pointed out that everyone has a few black sheep in the family tree, and she gave suggestions about how to find these interesting stories. She described her search for information about a woman who was the madam of a bordello early in the twentieth century. Jana made the presentation while dressed in a 1920s-style "flapper" dress. She had the audience laughing all the time, but I suspect they also learned quite a bit about non-traditional genealogy research techniques. If you have a chance to hear and see Jana talk about this topic at a future conference, I’d suggest that you attend. You will enjoy it.

The Jamboree exhibit hall was crowded in this year’s smaller facility. However, the attendees seemed to be in a buying mood. I talked with a number of vendors; most reported good sales volume after accounting for the lower attendance.

Heritage Creations, publishers of Heritage Quest Magazine and many genealogy books, had a very large booth that filled one end of the exhibit hall. Every time I looked at that booth, there were people buying products. Bruce Buzbee, author of RootsMagic genealogy software, had a double-sized booth. He seemed to have a steady stream of visitors there for two days. However, most of the other large, nationally-recognized genealogy vendors were conspicuously absent.

I spent most of my time working in a booth representing the New England Historic Genealogical Society. My thanks to Ralph Boswell for all his assistance for two days.

One thing struck me as being a bit different from most other conferences that I attend in the U.S.: the average noise level in the exhibit hall seemed high most of the time. It was a busy place! I talked with many attendees, and it was obvious that many came primarily to see the exhibitors’ products. In their minds, the lectures were a secondary interest. A few who were able to attend for only a few hours skipped the lectures entirely, devoting all of their limited time to looking at and buying products.

All in all, I would rate this year’s Genealogy Jamboree as a successful event. I know that I enjoyed it. The other attendees all seemed very pleased with the format, the facility, the speakers, and the exhibitors. The organizers all seemed to be tired late on Saturday, but I noticed that most of them were smiling. They had good reason to do so.

The Southern California Genealogical Society has already reserved a new venue for next year’s Jamboree. The 2005 event will be held at the much larger Burbank Hilton on April 15 and 16. Reportedly, this facility can easily handle one thousand or more attendees. You might want to mark your calendars now. I hope to make the 6,000-mile roundtrip to the Jamboree again next year. Perhaps I will see you there.

The Genealogical Jamboree is not noted as a place for introduction of new products. However, I saw one that I had not seen previously:

One of the more interesting items that I saw at the Genealogical Jamboree was a project sponsored by the Southern California Genealogical Society. The 1890 Project is described as a reconstruction of the lost 1890 U.S. census for Los Angeles County. Experienced U.S. genealogists are aware that almost all records of the 1890 census were destroyed in a fire. The 1890 project is trying to create a "census substitute" by documenting all the people who lived in Los Angeles County in 1890. With census records unavailable, society volunteers are transcribing city directories, tax lists, birth records, names from newspaper articles and advertisements, personal diaries, genealogies, social clubs, church membership lists, and more.

The following is an April 14 announcement from MyFamily.com, the owners of Ancestry.com:

I am delighted to hear about Ancestry.com's efforts to create an accurate online database of the 1901 census for England. The keyword is "accurate."

In fact, the 1901 U.K. census is already available online. However, it has so many errors that it is nearly unusable. QinetiQ, a U.K. government-owned corporation that oversaw the project, was awarded £7 million (roughly $12.6 million U.S. dollars) for the contract to digitize the 1901 census. The government did not get much for its money.

The contract with QinetiQ specified that census enumeration books were to be scanned and the images put online on a pay-as-you-view basis. They were also to be indexed -- a name index for free and a full indexed entry on a pay-as-you-view basis. QinetiQ originally planned to have the indexes created by residents of the British prison system. However, eventually much of the indexing work was actually done in Sri Lanka.

The Federation of Family History Society’s Web site states, "initially 85% of the transcribed data failed to meet the (unspecified) accuracy rate required." The genealogy world is abuzz with humorous tales of the errors. For one thing, it seems that the most popular surname in England in 1891 was "ditto."

The latest announcement from Ancestry.com is heartening. According to company representatives, upon completion, the collection will contain 32.5 million names and will be fully indexed and searchable by name, county, and parish, with search results linking directly to images.

Ancestry.com has extensive experience with placing U.S. census records online. Their indexes have been far more accurate than the effort produced by QinetiQ. I suspect that the same will be true of their U.K. release. What’s more, unlike the online records produced by QinetiQ, the Ancestry.com database will also allow genealogists to view images of the original records.

I suspect this will be a frequent topic of conversation at the Society of Genealogists annual Family History Fair to be held in London on May 1 and 2.

As a privately-held company, MyFamily.com does not publicly publish financial reports. However, we can occasionally get glimpses of the company's latest results, including those of its Ancestry.com subsidiary. Three weeks ago I quoted a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal, MyFamily.com has annual revenues of $100 million per year and has been profitable since the third quarter of 2001. The majority of that revenue is generated by the company's Ancestry.com Web site.

Now an article in The Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper, reports that MyFamily.com has about 750 employees, an increase of about 150 since the beginning of the year. MyFamily.com spokeswoman Mary Dondiego is also quoted as saying, "We will be adding hundreds of jobs in the next few months."

I am often asked, "Which is the best genealogy program?" The only correct answer is, "It all depends upon your needs and interests." However, I thought I would offer some suggestions to help you decide which one is the best program for you, both for Windows and for Macintosh.

The preceding is a "preview" of a Plus Edition-only article. The full article is available only to Plus Edition subscribers. Click on Plus Edition for more information.

If you can already read your e-mail in-box by using a Web browser, you can skip this article. That includes anyone who uses HotMail, Yahoo, MyWay.com, AOL, or a number of other e-mail systems. However, many of us cannot use a Web browser to read e-mail messages. We have to use e-mail programs, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Lotus Notes, Pico, Pegasus, or any of a number of others. These work well when accessing e-mail from our home computers but may be a problem when traveling, especially when traveling without a laptop computer.

For instance, I have several e-mail addresses. When traveling, I can read my primary e-mail in-box if I go to any computer at a friend's house, at a public library, at an Internet café or elsewhere. I simply open Internet Explorer or Netscape and log onto the appropriate mail server. However, my cable modem provider offers an e-mail service that does not have a Web interface. It uses a standard POP3/SMTP or IMAP4 mail interface, not a Web interface. I cannot read that in-box directly by using a Web browser.

Perhaps you have the same restriction: you cannot use a Web browser to read your mail. What can you or I do when traveling? How can we read our e-mail when we do not have access to an e-mail program already configured with the necessary parameters? Luckily, there is an easy answer for most of us. In fact, you and I can read e-mail messages in a normal Web browser, or even on many cell phones and handheld PDA devices if they can browse WAP-enabled sites. (WAP is a protocol that is popular on small screen devices, such as cell phones.) The HotMail, Yahoo, MyWay.com, and AOL members cannot do that!

Arthur Kurzweil is well known in genealogy circles. He is often described as "the foremost Jewish genealogist in the world." He is the author of From Generation to Generation: How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Family History, a book that is the definitive guidebook to the field. He also wrote The Encyclopedia of Jewish Genealogy and My Generations: A Course in Jewish Family History. He is co-founder of the very first Jewish Genealogical Society, established over 25 years ago. A professional writer, Kurzweil's non-genealogy articles have been published by New York Magazine, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, Newsday, and most of the national Jewish periodicals.

The following is an announcement from the Association of Professional Genealogists:

A legacy cookbook dedicated to all the cooks in the Alfred and Mary Pitzen family is a combination of family genealogy, a collection of favorite family recipes, and little pieces of history, pictures, and memories. Teri Pitzen, Mary Pitzen, and Julie (Pitzen) Niess headed the big family project by collecting the information and getting the book produced.

In late 1882, Massachusetts astronomer David Peck Todd traveled to California to photograph the transit of Venus from the summit of Mount Hamilton, where a solar photographic telescope made by the renowned optical firm Alvan Clark & Sons was available. The Lick Observatory was just being built at the time.

In recent months, Lick Observatory employee Anthony Misch discovered a set of 147 photography glass plates showing the transit of Venus in 1882. The photographs were apparently made in sequence, one every few seconds. Misch and William Sheehan have now assembled the still photographs into a Quicktime movie!

Think about it. Thomas Edison didn't get his movie films working until the 1890s. However, you can now view a "movie" on your computer screen of an event that happened in 1882.

You are probably accustomed to seeing Web addresses (URLs) that are long and impossible to type correctly. Another problem that I have discovered is that some Web browsers have difficulties when long URLs are printed in this newsletter. When a URL is more than 60 or 80 characters long, Netscape and Mozilla browsers display abnormally wide pages, forcing the reader to use the horizontal scroll bar to read the entire newsletter. AOL's browser often will not work properly when the AOL member clicks on a lengthy URL that displays over two or more lines. The Opera and Internet Explorer browsers seem to handle long URLs gracefully, however.

If you are writing an article, an e-mail, or a Web page, you should avoid long URLs. Now you can compress

                        to

Which would you prefer?

TinyURL.com was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier. It is also super simple to use. Simply copy-and-paste the long URL into a form on the TinyURL.com Web site, click on a button, and a new, short URL appears within seconds. You can then copy-and-paste that short URL to your Web page, e-mail or genealogy newsletter. You will note that I have used TinyURL.com's addresses several times in this edition of my newsletter.

The PR Budget for this newsletter is $0.00. I rely upon "word of mouse" advertising in which you recommend this newsletter to your friends. This newsletter is a private project of mine, and I have a zero budget for a publicity campaign to get more readers.

Thanks.

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