Libeau Book Update Project

Presentation by Matt McNabb

Overview

The overall goals

• In order to preserve our knowledge of family history, one of our goals is to create and maintain a digitized tree of all of the known descendants of Joseph Libeau sr.
• Birth, death and marriage dates of descendants and their spouses.
• Biographies and photos.
• With the creation of this tree, the documentation of our history will be secure, and we will have options available to publish and share the knowledge via different forms of publication.

Producing the digital tree

• I propose a two-step process:
• Create a digital tree that exactly reproduces the 2012 book’s content (B/D/M info, biographies and photos)
• Duplicate that tree to make the Forever tree, and apply corrections and updates to the Forever tree.
• By having these two trees:
• we can automatically produce a list of errata from the 2012 book
• Family members can be shown parts of the 2012 book to assist in making new submissions

Storing the digital tree

• The digital tree must be stored in a cloud service:
• So there is no risk of it being lost by accident.
• So that several of us can work on it simultaneously.
• I propose to use an Ancestry.com member tree:
• No subscription is required for people to edit the tree.
• Multiple people can work on the tree simultaneously.
• The tree can be downloaded in GEDcom format for backup and re-use.
• The tree can be made available to the public through Ancestry.com once we are ready to do so.

Inputting the 2012 book

• Cam has scanned the 2012 book. Project volunteers are available to view the pages on our Google Drive.
• Unfortunately, it is not possible to automatically convert the ancestor lists from the book into a digital tree.
• We must create a new digital tree from scratch from those pages: inputting the names, B/D/M dates and locations.
• It is possible to digitize the Biographies using OCR. The digitized biographies shall be stored on our Google Drive as well.
• The page scans are not good enough quality to re-use the photos.

Dividing up the work

• Call for volunteers to “adopt” each chapter of Descendants and enter the data into the Ancestry.com tree
• I will produce a friendly guide on how to do this.
• I will take chapter 809-916 Descendants of Joseph and Mary Ann Libeau.
• I will organize a verification stage to check for data entry errors.

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Submissions for the new book

• We have created a Google Form to gather submissions.
• The responses are saved in the cloud and we can view them at any time.
• The form asks for ancestor details, biography, photos, and has a privacy acknowledgement stage.

Applying the submissions

• As discussed earlier, we must finish the data entry for the 2012 book first.
• Then, we can apply each submission in turn to the Forever tree.
• I will determine where each submission fits in the tree, and assign it to the volunteer for that section.
• The changes can be applied through the same Ancestry.com tree editor.

Privacy of Living People

• Privacy is an important issue in the modern age.
• The Personal Data of living people is covered by privacy laws in many countries, including New Zealand.
• Personal Data includes a person’s name, birth date, birth year, birth place, place of residence, children’s names, spouses’s name, and so on.
• We must not publish Personal Data of living people online unless they have individually consented for us to do so.
• I am unclear on whether we can publish Personal Data of living people in a printed book, unless they have individually consented for us to do so.

Publishing the New Book

• We have not yet decided what form the new book will take.
• In light of the fact that we can publish information online from the Forever Tree about deceased ancestors, perhaps the layout of the new book may change.
• It may reduce publication costs to publish in more than one volume. Another 1000-page book would be expensive.

Topics for Discussion

• Feedback on my earlier digitization proposals.
• Feedback on the submission form. Google Form
• People may need to see a copy of the 2012 book in order to know whether they need to submit corrections or new people. As discussed under Privacy of Living People we must be cautious about distributing electronic scans of the 2012 book. How to handle this?
• Discussion of what form the new book should take.
• Which content to focus on?
• Who will be buying this book and why, given that we can publish much of it online?
• How many volumes?
• How big can each biography be, and should we edit the 2012 biographies in any way?
• Do we have originals for the photos in the 2012 book?