Earlier today I noticed something troubling on Mocavo.com, a genealogy search engine recently purchased by FindMyPast.com.  When you click “Search,” the second link in their navigation, you get to a critical marketing page (left) with screenshots showing how their search engine works.  The portion of the page outlined in red is reproduced below exactly as it I downloaded it from their site.

Notice the second listing, which reads, “We all know that Wagner, in his ‘Judenthum in der Musik’ thought Meyerbeer was a clever charlatan”:

Reading this quote, you might think little of it.  Who are these people?  Blah blah German I can’t read.  And, oh, how quaint that one dead guy called another a clever charlatan!

Would you be surprised to learn that this sample search result references one of the most important and well-known examples of German anti-Semitism leading up to the Nazi period?

• This Wagner is Richard Wagner, a famous opera composer (you probably know his “Ride of the Valkyries”), who was also a notorious anti-Semite.  After his death, his music and ideas inspired the Nazis.
• Meyerbeer is Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Jewish opera composer whose works were wildly popular in their time, but largely forgotten today.  Meyerbeer was an early mentor of Wagner’s, supporting him both musically and financially, but Wagner later turned on him, launching anti-Semitic attacks that were so accepted that Meyerbeer’s music stopped being performed.
• Das Judentum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music) is a hateful essay Wagner wrote, attacking Jews in general and Meyerbeer in particular.  It is a seminal work of German anti-Semitism, containing statements that some consider to recommend annihilating the Jews.

All of this information is well-known to historians of this period, as well as musicologists.  The quote in the Mocavo image — “[This leading anti-Semite] in his [notoriously anti-Semitic essay] thought [a once-famous Jewish man whose reputation he destroyed] was a clever charlatan” — is factual; it repeats one of the milder criticisms Wagner lodged against Meyerbeer.  But now that you know its context — who these people were, the historical and cultural background to this insult, and most importantly, the legacy of this enmity — you see that the casual reference to this nasty bit of history is, well, strange for a cheerful product tour meant to tempt you into a free trial.

I am not saying that Mocavo holds or promotes anti-Semitic beliefs for including this image; repeating that someone once said something doesn’t mean that they agree with it.  What I am saying is that Mocavo clearly has no idea what they posted prominently on their site.  Otherwise, why would they have knowingly given attention to a statement of hate in an age where we still struggle with that hate?  Nor am I saying that Mocavo should remove this article from their database; on the contrary, I am glad they made it easier for everyone to learn about this period.  But there’s a time and a place for grappling with unpleasant history, and I‘m sure if they had known what this record meant, they would have organized their sales pitch around anything else from their enormous database other than a casual reference to proto-Nazi sentiments!  Having worked for Internet companies all my adult life, I know how many levels of people are involved in creating, approving, launching, and testing important marketing pages like this one.  This surprising image means that at many levels of their genealogy company, not a single person was at all curious about what this search result meant.

And that’s the larger lesson for all of us:  How often do we, too, miss references to bygone personalities and events?  Even when the records provide context for our ancestor’s life, how often do we fail to research the nuances to understand everything that the record is telling us about times gone by?  Clues for the circumstances of our ancestors’ experiences are all around us — hiding in plain sight like this Wagner quote — if only we would exercise our own curiosity to pick them out and investigate what they mean.

Update:

Movaco wrote to me to address my concerns.

We have already removed that image and will find a more appropriate example of search results very soon.

Let me also confirm that you are right to assert that Mocavo does not hold or promote anti-Semitic beliefs, and that we would never intentionally give undue attention to such hateful works.

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Have you heard about Heartbleed?  It’s a recently-discovered security flaw in the encryption software two-thirds of all websites use to protect your data.  This problem isn’t one of those fake-outs where your crazy friend posts something alarmist on Facebook that Snopes easily proves is ridiculous.  This time it really is as bad as your crazy friend says it is.  “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” wrote cryptography expert Bruce Schneier.

As users there’s not much that we can do except wait for our favorite websites to upgrade their software to the fixed version.  Once they do, the recommendation is to change your password on all the web sites that were affected (here is a list of popular ones here is a better list being updated regularly).  That’s annoying and tedious, of course, but it’s the only way to be sure.

After ensuring that Treelines is not vulnerable to the Heartbleed vulnerability, I’ve gone through the major genealogy sites that use encryption software using a publicly available tool to see how the rest are faring.  The good news is that the sites all pass!  This tool also assesses the overall quality of the security measures each site uses to protect your data.  Here there is a wide range of grades, including two F’s by popular sites!

* n/a means that the site does not use encryption software to protect the data you submit to it. It’s true that the sites marked n/a do not take credit card information, but it has been long accepted as the best practice that any time a user signs up or logs into a site, their information should be encrypted. If you use the same password on the sites marked n/a as you do on other websites, then a malicious person could lift your information from the one site and try it out on others where you do make purchases. It’s unlikely, but it is possible. (Sorry if I sound like your crazy friend on Facebook now!)

** Thank you to these companies, who improved their security after this post was published.

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Me during my archaeology days. Genealogy is a lot less dirty (though I lost my great tan). #TBT

Have you seen the #TBT hashtag around the Internet?  It refers to Throwback Thursday, a weekly social media ritual where people post old photographs of themselves to their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Tumblr accounts.  Like most memes, it started amongst the younger set, but I’ve been amazed to see over the past year not only how it’s grown on Facebook to include even people in their 60s and 70s like my parents, but also how it has served as a jumping off point for great conversations about family history.  My mother and one of my cousins never miss a chance to post pictures of their now-grown kids as children, and I have one cousin in particular who takes #TBT so seriously that she’ll message us days in advance to let us know when she’s dug out a particularly good picture she doesn’t want us to miss.  The fabulous photos she posts always kick off long conversations with relatives sharing their memories of our family’s past.

A favorite #TBT showing my mother (the flasher) with her cousins.  Three of these kids (including the one who appears to have wet himself) were tagged in this picture when it was posted to Facebook, and they started a wonderful conversation with their children reminiscing about times gone by.

Thanks to Throwback Thursday I’m getting to see old photographs I would have never seen and to overhear family history conversations that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, but the best part is — I’m not the one kicking off these conversations!

Fifty years before Facebook, my family had a club! (Source: Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion, 1/14/1955)

When it comes to engaging your relatives in genealogy conversations, the trick is to approach them where they already are in ways that will feel familiar to them.   Tech industry watchers may lament the future for Facebook now that it’s become so multigenerational, but for those of us who are our families’ designated historians, it means that where we’ll find our relatives is Facebook, and what they’re doing there is looking at our pictures, commenting on them, and especially if they’re older, connecting with people from their past they don’t see otherwise.  More importantly, they’re also already posting their own pictures to Facebook.  In short, every aspect of Throwback Thursday is something already happening naturally with recent pictures.  You just need to shift the focus, from time-to-time, to the past!

Sixty years ago when my father’s family lived in the same place, they could organize monthly get-togethers and a newsletter, but today when there are hundreds of us with our pictures and memories scattered all over the world, Facebook is the easiest gathering place we have, and Throwback Thursday is the perfect way to take advantage of the virtual proximity to gently prod your family into a trip down memory lane.  If you’re not yet on the #TBT bandwagon, why don’t you give it a try?  Post an evocative photograph or a fascinating record, tag the family members most likely to be interested, and see what conversation develops.  Maybe you can even get #TBT to catch on so well in your family circle that in the future, it’s you commenting on one of your relative’s posts!

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Here is my grandfather with his parents in the 1940 census.  What do you think his mother’s name is?

Ancestry says it is Jillie, but I know it is Tillie, my namesake.  Amusing, right?  In fact, Ancestry is so sure of its reading that it listed two Jillies on this one page alone!

As is now well-known, Ancestry relied upon vendors in China, Bangladesh, and the Philippines to index the 1940 census in just four months, finishing Friday (vs. 9.5 months for 1930).  Unfortunately, not only are the indexers not native speakers of American English, the majority aren’t even native readers of the Roman alphabet.  Comparisons of Ancestry’s outsourced index with the slower FamilySearch volunteer effort conclude exactly what you would expect — 23% vs. 12% inaccuracy on Carringer, Seaver, and McKnew in California; 12% vs. 2% on Alonzo in Utah.

The foreign indexers were trained via handwriting samples with mixed success.  The Palmer-style script most 1940 census-takers used shows that capital J’s and T’s look quite different (unless you confuse script with block letters, which this census-taker clearly was not using).  Better training might have caught this error.

Beba is a real name–so sayeth Ancestry!

But no amount of training can fix the underlying problem:  a lack of cultural awareness.  Lifelong Americans know that Tillie is an old-fashioned name, and Jillie at best a rare, modern nickname.  This aggregation of name data proves the name Tillie was extremely popular in my ggm’s day (she was born c. 1890).  Jillie, on the other hand, never appears, Jill doesn’t come into use until the 1920s, and Jillian the 1960s.

Even had the indexers cross-referenced such data, they would still fail on unusual and foreign names.  There’s just no substitute for a lifetime of passively absorbing a culture’s naming conventions.  Even FamilySearch’s American indexers do a poor job indexing the New York City records of my Eastern European ancestors, because cultural familiarization happens on a much smaller scale than country or language. Names that are obvious to me frequently confound their amazingly generous volunteers.

So, the problem isn’t as simple as outsourcing vs. on-shoring.   The bigger issue:  in neither case — Ancestry or FamilySearch — does the makeup of the indexers match the ethnic diversity of the people whose names they’re deciphering.  Ancestry wanted low cost/fast turn-around, and FamilySearch the speediest volunteer recruitment, but in both cases they were short-sighted:  a shoddy index doesn’t convert casual visitors, since bad search results discourage newbies and frustrate experts. My cousin abandoned her free trial after Ancestry didn’t return our great-grandmother, Fannie Yorker (found under Marker — enumeration district address searching is tedious!).  And I never use FamilySearch because time and again I get misses where I get hits elsewhere.

Until our indexing methodologies are more culturally aware, we aren’t going to raise our success metrics across the board.  The increasingly diverse community of genealogists needs its indexing organizations to brainstorm substitutes for our own instinctual familiarity with our communities’ naming trends.

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