[TPD SMILE] "GENEALOGY ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB"

a presentation by Thomas P. Doherty
for the Delaware Days Symposium - 12/6/97



Who needs this stuff?


All I want is an original record.
We are all comfortable with that. Right?
Hey. Just give me a piece of paper and a pen.

OK, but you also need a bottle of ink

550 years ago, that's all you had: paper, pen and ink.

But you didn't necessarily have an original record.
In fact, much of it was copied.

Scribes were paid handsomely to copy and copy they did. Were they perfect? No, they were human. How many of us have ever gone to an archives or courthouse and made a note of our findings only to find out that we wrote down something that really wasn't there? [When I go to such a place I don't write down anything, but I make xerographic copies of everything I read to eliminate that problem.]

The "New" Information Age
But what happened 540 years ago was to dramatically change the lives of succeeding generations. A new technology was invented by a metallurgist from Mainz, Germany. In 1457, Johannes Gutenberg combined the elements of the printing press, metallurgy, new inks and movable type into an efficient system of mass production of books that spawned new information age. This new printing press technology had a huge impact on society:

Today's New Information Age

 Similarly, today and into the 21st century,

the change in the way we deal with information is

the most significant transformation in society
seen since Gutenberg, perhaps since the advent of agriculture,

which converted a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to a community of people.


Now, printed books are being replaced by electronic ones. Information resides in computers, flows on the Internet and is displayed on the World Wide Web. Library catalogs of the world are becoming available electronically and eventually, the full text.

Everyone will have instant access
to the world's common knowledge.


The key technological change that is driving the information revolution is the dramatic lowering of the cost to store and extract information, measured in millions of instructions/second (MIPS). MIPS is cut in half every 18 months [The 1995 Pentium = 4.5 cents/MIPS.] By the 21st century, the cost will be less than a penny.

As a result we will have instant availability of practically cost-free information and an acceleration of applications that rely on the transferring of pictures, audio and video.





But what happened to the scribes?

Most were put out of business by the printing press which did
a much better job of copying at 1/1000 of the price,

but many scribes lingered on:
Human error is no better with computers.

Next



People enter the data into computers and people make mistakes. Even worse some people may even enter the wrong information on purpose. Of course that has always been true; for example, my brother was adopted, but you would never know it by looking at his official birth certificate.

So what are we to do?
We do what we always do - the best we can.
The rules are the same.
Always seek to find the primary record - the one recorded at the time of the event by an honest scribe (or keyboarder).

The one big difference with computer records is that the record is easily changed and almost impossible to detect that a change was made.

Keeping this in mind,
Let's go on a trip on the information highway

Now, if you go to a courthouse, you need the address,
a car, some gas, a map, good roads and some roadsigns.

Once you are there,
the record you want might be there with an index to find it;
or the record might have been
This is where we are on the Web.

Most of the records that exist are not yet on the Web.

Next



But this year has shown phenomenal growth in Web content and activity.
Look for many more records to appear in the future.

What do you need to start?