CIG Notes

February 13, 2003

Notes from the February 13, 2003 meeting of the Rochester Genealogical Society, Computer Interest Group.

The 118th meeting of the CIG was held at 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm at room 262 of Brighton Senior High School, at Twelve Corners in Brighton, NY. There were 31 attendees.

RGS VP/ CIG Roy Thurston opened the meeting with a request for visitor introductions. There was one. Next, he sought reports from RGS officers present. The February 20th meeting of the RGS was described by VP/Programs Jim Swarts. Bob Coomber gave an update on the May trip to Salt Lake City. The CIG Newsletter Writer, Jim Hall repeated his decision to step down from this function in June 2003.

TECH TALK

Roy offered several acronyms for the assembly to decipher: TCP, UDP and ICMP. The definitions are given at the end of these notes.

MAIN PROGRAM:

Larry Lavery, RGS/CIG Program Planning Group member and a retired Xerox Electrical Design Engineer began his presentation on an Introduction to ROOTSWEB. Unfortunately, the tape recorder was unable to collect the verbal description of a very complete outline of the presentation provided by Larry. The Writer sought and Larry gave permission to copy his presentation into these notes. The following outline is best understood using the Roots Web site as a guide. Italicised notes are by Larry.

Goal:
Show you something you didn't know about RootsWeb.

How:
Overview
Quickly review Home page selections
Move across header bar and get into more detail
Focus on search capabilities

Intro
RootsWeb is a co-op for sharing family history
Huge.... easy to get lost or lose your focus
Free Free Free
Financed by Ancestry
Main areas:

Great place to find others researching your family.
Verify data and ask submitters for sources
Downside: You must tolerate Ancestry advertisements.

View and review Home page

Getting Started
Guide to Tracing Family Trees - A good Genealogy 101 class with pointers to other sources.
RootsWeb Review - A weekly E-zine you can subscribe to.
Skip, for now, short cut links to:

Research Templates
Surnames - Searches RootsWeb using surname
United States - Go to NY, Monroe Co., Web Sites, RootsLinks, Marriage bureau records lookup

Tools and Resources
Pointers to other sources; User contributions to RootsLink

Volunteer Projects
Book lookup, Cyndi's List etc. Services provided by volunteers.

Buy or Sell
Ancestry Sales & marketing

-- Now look at RootsWeb header --

Searches
Most search engines support Boolean operators (AND, OR, ANDNOT)
examples:

Each Search engine can produce different results. I suggest trying them all. Here is a list of the most popular:

Family Trees
WorldConnect is a collection of user contributed GEDCOMs. The users own the files and determine permissions such as 'download GEDCOM'. Expect to see individuals duplicated in other users databases.

Passwords required for uploading GEDCOMs and adding Post-em notes. Extensive search capability. Information on individuals born in 1930 or later who have no death date has been purged and the word LIVING will replace the given name.

Icon Field:

WorldConnect reports are in RTF format and can be copied/pasted into email or message boards.

Select individual, demonstrate Index and report generation.

Mailing Lists
Over 26,000 mail lists you can subscribe to.

RootsWeb Review - Weekly e-zine

ROOTS-L - List started in 1987 for anyone interested in genealogy. Covers all topics and locations. Don't want to scan all the messages? Try searching the archives.

Gen-Newbie - List for those new to genealogy research

Surname lists - Huge

State and County lists

International lists

Ethnic lists... etc

You name a list... its probably there.

You have to be subscribed to the list before you can post a message. You will receive every message posted to the list via email (-L) or in a digest (-D).
Mail attachments are not allowed.

Select Monroe County list and demonstrate archive search and archive browse. Threaded search displays message and all replies. Interactive search displays by year and support AND, OR and ANDNOT operators.

Message Boards
Over 180,000 boards indexed by:

Search for boards or browse through them all.
Use simple context search or select Advanced Search to search message context, subject, author, surname etc. The surname field permits efficient search for names like Near, Ing etc. if the poster completed the Surname field.
+Fred means Fred must be in the message, -Smith means the message won't contain Smith.

Wildcards:

Boards contain more than queries. Volunteers have transcribed:

You can be notified by email if any message is posted to a particular board.

-Select Monroe County board and demonstrate search and browse. Show difference between viewing by Date and Thread, collapsed and expanded.

Would you post a query to a mail list or message board?

Web Sites
You may register your genealogy web site with RootsWeb and have them include a link to you, or you may request space on a RootsWeb server for your web pages.

Web pages indexed by:

Passwords
Utility to obtain forgotten passwords, user IDs etc.

Passwords are required when:

Help
Help is where to go when you have a problems or want to read the FAQs.

Includes a link to International character codes you can use in your postings.

Larry was given a well-deserved round of applause, and Roy concluded the meeting.

Definition of Acronyms:

TCP = Transmission Control Protocol. The TCP part of TCP/IP, TCP and UDP(User Datagram Protocol) are the two transport protocols in TCP/IP. TCP ensures that a message is sent accurately and in its entirety. However, for realtime voice and video, there is really no time or reason to correct errors, and UDP is used instead.

UDP = User Datagram Protocol. A protocol within the TCP/IP protocol suite that is used in place of TCP when a reliable delivery is not required. For example, UDP is used for realtime audio and video traffic where lost packets are simply ignored, because there is no time to retransmit. If UDP is used and a reliable delivery is required, packet sequence checking and error notification must be written in the applications.

ICMP = Internet Control Messsage Protocol. A TCP/IP protocol used to send error and control messages. For example, a router uses ICMP to notify the sender that its deatination node is not available. A ping utility sends ICMP echo requests to verify the existence of an IP address.

Jim Hall wishes to thank Larry Lavery for a fine presentation, Paul Blake for preparing the slides for the meeting introduction, and Dick Halsey for preparing the notes for inclusion on the RGS Website.

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