Here’s a fun activity.

Jarrett Ross, the @GeneaVlogger today posted a video where he ranks Genealogy Websites.

He uses an interesting site I’ve never seen before called Tiermaker to do this. The site lets you drag and drop genealogy website logos into tiers that can mean whatever you want. The site includes the category “genealogy sites” which has 52 pre-defined logos of some of most popular websites for genealogy.

Jarrett in his 3 hour video goes through the sites one by one and explains how he uses each site and decides where he plans to put them.

My Own Ranking

Jarrett debated how he wanted to rank sites and used a combination of how often he uses the site, how user friendly the website is, and how useful the site is genealogically.

I’m going to rank the sites only on how often I use the site and how useful it is to me personally. Here is how I would place them:

The “S” line for me are the sites I use the most often. The ranking then go A, B, C, D where D are sites that I use but not very often.

My go to site that I use almost every day is MyHeritage. I have a complete subscription with them, and that is where I maintain my family trees. I have their Family Tree Builder software on my desktop which I can sync with my online tree, and I have their MyHeritage app on my phone. MyHeritage has billions of records that give me hints and every day I check for them and I incorporate whatever is correct and useful into my tree.

MyHeritage’s hints include people in the WikiTree, Geni and FamilySearch family trees. So I have free accounts at those sites to view the information there.

I have a site at Ancestry as well which I have some of my tree at. My primary use there is for the records they have that MyHeritage does not, such as Canadian immigration lists, and also family trees of those who I connect to or who I DNA match.

With regards to the the DNA sites, I use Ancestry DNA the most because I have the most matches who I’m related to there, and they also have their Thru Lines. 23andMe is next. MyHeritage DNA, even though I have few matches I know, is useful for its connection to the family trees at MyHeritage. Family Tree DNA and GEDmatch are less useful to me.

The Internet Archive is an amazing site, and I use it all the time to get information from web oages that no longer exist or have changed.

Cyndi’s List is a wonderful site that I should use more often than I do.

You’ll notice I have a lot of popular sites that I never use. My personal genealogy research comes from my and my wife’s ancestors who all immigrated to Canada in the early 1900s from what is now Romania and Ukraine. So sites such as American Ancestors, Find My Past, Fold3, etc., just don’t have anything for me.

A Few Bonus Sites

I custom added these 5 sites to my list because I they are very valuable to me.

MyHeritage uses BillionGraves in its web hints, and I find most of the gravesites I need with that. I rarely use Find A Grave.

BYU TV is important because of the wonderful show Relative Race that they produce. They just finished season 12 and more seasons are expected. Watch Relative Race here.

The next logo is for Tamura Jones’ Modern Software Experience site. Tamura is a genealogy and technology expert, and the best technical articles about GEDCOM and genealogy software can be found there.

I’ve added Microsoft Bing, because the default list only had Google. I use Bing first and only if I don’t find what I want or I need a specialty search, then I go to Google.

Finally, Legacy Family Tree Webinars deserves mention. They have over 2,100 webinars recorded and they are all free when they are first broadcast. I watch several dozen of their webinars every year.

Try It Yourself

The Tiermaker site with the 52 pre-defined genealogy logos ready for you to rank is available here:  https://tiermaker.com/create/genealogy-sites-15434469.

Maybe it isn’t for you, but it likely is for me.

I’m not talking about using DNA to find close family members, e.g. if you are adopted or don’t know who a grandparent is. That’s still a big thing. And I’m not talking about forensic genealogy used for finding killers and solving cold cases. That is still going on in the background to the dismay of many. And there are still many medical reasons why a person might want to do Whole Genome Testing.

I’m talking about my personal use of the DNA information that DNA companies and third parties are providing me.

DNA for Genealogy

I started my use of DNA tests for genealogy fairly early, but not at the beginning. It was 2016 when Judy Russell implored me to get my 93 year old uncle, the last of his generation, DNA tested. I did that using Family Tree DNA, and when he matched a fellow researcher of the family who I knew was a 3rd cousin of mine, it was very exciting.

I followed that up with my own tests at Family Tree DNA, Ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage and LivingDNA, and uploaded my uncle’s DNA to the latter two. I also uploaded my and my uncle’s DNA to GEDmatch, Geni, Geneanet and Borland Genetics.

What did I find that was useful for genealogy?  The ethnicity tests confirmed that I was 100% Ashkenazi. The Y-DNA confirmed that I and my uncle were both from the Levite tribe. The mtDNA test confirmed my mother’s Jewish roots. And the autosomal tests connected me to about 40 different relatives whose exact connection I knew or was able to determine, and hundreds of thousands whose connection I don’t know and cannot determine.

I had one close surprise match, and together we worked to determine our connection. Turned out this was a first cousin once removed whose father was an unknown child of my mother’s brother who was no longer living. This was a fantastic find and I will forever be thankful to my DNA testing for this discovery alone and the friendship that I now have with my new cousin.

DNA Tools

I spent the next few years learning everything I could about DNA and how to get the most out of the test information.

The DNA Testing sites include various tools to help get the most out of their DNA data, including match lists, chromosome browsers, segment data and shared match lists, and both MyHeritage and Ancestry had connections to their family trees that let you see your match’s family tree and even give suggestions (Theory of Family Relativity and Thru Lines) that attempt to connect your and your DNA matches’ trees together.

Other tools and methodologies such as DNA Painter, DNAGedcom, the Leeds Method, various clustering programs, Visual Phasing, Genome Mate Pro (now Genealogy DNA Analysis Tool) and others popped up. I tried them all. I even developed my own tool Double Match Triangulator (DMT) for what I thought would aid segment analysis.

As hard as I tried, none of these tools helped me add any people to my genealogy. Maybe it was the problems of Jewish endogamy, or due to my inability to research more than 5 generations back simply because records don’t exist before 1800 where my ancestors are from in what is now Romania and Ukraine.

For several years, I worked with Terry Lasky, my wife’s third cousin who I was helping with his DNA project. He got about 60 people to DNA test on his and my wife’s Zaslavsky line who were all descendants of maybe 6 siblings or half-siblings or cousins. There were marriages between their children (1st cousins) and other problems such as spouses being siblings. We attempted to use the cM matches between these 60 people to figure out the connections. We had limited success because many of the cM values were surprisingly much higher than they should be, more than endogamy would suggest. We did the best we could, which did not meet our expectations, even after aided by a few records we were lucky enough to acquire.

Of the 60 people, Terry was able to provide me with about 25 segment match files. I used DMT and other analysis techniques to see if that might better help determine the siblings. There was a LOT of data here. I had trouble making headway. Ultimately, I was able to use Visual Phasing on Terry and two of his siblings to determine their grandparents segments. It was only then that I saw how many of the cousins’ matches were falling on the wrong grandparent – a result of endogamy. That was what was making the segment analysis almost impossible.

So despite a lot of time and effort on these analyses, it hasn’t produced that much help with respect to my genealogy.

Other Attempts

I took two Whole Genome Tests, one short reads and one long reads, to see if those would provide me with anything useful. I learned a lot from these and have a number of blog posts about them. But other than some health information which (fortunately for me) wasn’t too interesting, these were not very useful for genealogy.

I uploaded my and my uncle’s raw dna to Borland Genetics. That allowed me to generate parts of my father and mother’s DNA and a few other relatives on my father’s side. But there was really no way to use that to help me with my genealogy.

My YDNA test matches were not helpful in going back because of my 5 generation record limitation as well as the fact that my ancestors only started adopting surnames in the early 1800s. My closest matches have different surnames, come from different countries, and are estimated to be from the 1500s.

The Past Couple of Years

Each year, about 3 or 4 known cousins of mine get a DNA test and show up in my match list at one of the companies, but there’s never anything new to further my research going further back or sideways.

The number of people taking DNA tests each year is still rising, but not nearly as much as it did from 2017 to 2020. See Leah Larkin’s article on DNA tests:

Not only that, but the DNA sites are providing less information than before. 23andMe last month had an issue that caused them to stop making certain data available such as shared matches and segment matches. MyHeritage and Family Tree DNA also eliminated some features and downloads. And Ancestry is shutting down the DNA features of GeneaNet which it acquired last year.

I have just 29 Thru Lines at Ancestry and 2 Theories of Family Relativity at MyHeritage which either are connections I know about, or are wrong.

What’s Next?

Basically, I’m stuck, and really can’t do much more with my DNA test results.

For me, the Golden Age of DNA testing is over. I’ve basically gotten what little I can out of it.

What I really need are more records from Eastern Europe for my genealogy to progress. Some become available from time to time, so there is hope for me.

But I don’t see how DNA is going to help me much going forward.

The GEDCOM Standard was first developed almost 40 years ago as a way to store genealogical data and transfer it between programs. It was developed about the same time the first genealogical software programs were developed.

The early programs developed a basic structure for genealogy, and the standard reflected that. The standard was updated many times mostly to ease its implementation and to transfer additional types of data, but the basic record structure has never really changed.

The standard that is common use now is GEDCOM 5.5.1. It was drafted in 1999 and finalized without changes in 2019. So in 24 years, the standard hasn’t changed. Similarly about 24 years ago, genealogy software had matured to the point where their data structures were set and rarely needed to change. Having the GEDCOM standard to base their data structures on had a lot to do with that.

What is a Standard and what is Good Standard?

A Standard is an agreed-upon document that provides rules or instructions for its intended audience to follow in order to meet the document’s specific purpose.

GEDCOM’s intended audience is mostly genealogy software developers.

GEDCOM’s specific purpose is to facilitate transfer of genealogical data between software.

Most people would agree that a standard is a good standard iff:

1. It has been adopted and is used by most of its intended audience.
2. It is understandable and contains most of what is needed to serve its purpose.
3. It is relatively stable from version to version without requiring major changes.

So is GEDCOM 5.5.1 a good standard?

1. Almost all genealogy software developers today know about the GEDCOM standard and the vast majority use it as a way to share their software’s genealogical data with others or to get its data from other software. - 1 / 1
2. All the rules are there. Genealogy software has been successfully sharing data with other software for 24 years using GEDCOM 5.5.1. - 2 / 2
3. GEDCOM 5.5.1 hasn’t changed at all in 24 years. - 3 / 3

Giving it 3 out of 3, I can’t see why this version of GEDCOM 5.5.1 would not be considered to be a “good” standard.

Data Doesn’t Transfer

GEDCOM is supposed to facilitate data transfer between programs.

If you are using genealogy program XXXX and decide you want to switch to genealogy program YYYY, then you need to transfer your data. So you export your data from XXXX to a GEDCOM 5.5.1 file and you import it from that file into program YYYY. You will likely find that a lot of your data did not transfer.

For the past 15 years, we’ve seen initiatives such as BetterGEDCOM, FHISO, and GEDCOM 7.0 try to improve GEDCOM 5.5.1 to enable much more of the data to transfer. The idea here was that there was something about GEDCOM 5.5.1 that was preventing the data transfer.

I believe this thinking is wrong.

The work I have done have led me to conclude that:

• 5% of data doesn’t transfer because GEDCOM 5.5.1 cannot handle the specific type of data.
• 35% of data doesn’t transfer because the receiving system did not implement the functionality that needs or uses that data, and thus did not have a data structure or table in its database to store it.
• 60% of data doesn’t transfer because the developer did not use the correct GEDCOM 5.5.1 method, or used his own custom tags to do the transfer.

If only 5% of the data not transferring is due to GEDCOM, then the standard is not the problem.

If 35% is due to the receiving system not needing or accepting the data, then no improvements to the standard could fix that.

If 60% is due to developers not making the effort to correctly implement GEDCOM, then more education about the standard is needed.

What Is Not Needed

There is nothing inherently wrong with GEDCOM 5.5.1.  What is not needed is a significant revision to it. What I am referring to of course, is the release of GEDCOM 7.0 two years ago by FamilySearch.

GEDCOM 7.0 is written differently from GEDCOM 5.5.1. It no longer uses the GEDCOM form but uses a Hierarchical container format. Standard Bachus Naur Format (BNF) for defining the syntax is changed to “A Metasyntax for Structure Organization”. Changing the representation of the standard is akin to writing it in a different language. It makes the adoption of the standard by 5.5.1 users unnecessarily more difficult. Programmers do not want something to change just for the sake of change. They want a standard where every change is simple and understandable and meets a need. If it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it.

The selling point of a new standard is for better data transfer. It seems like slim pickings if they are trying to reduce the 5% of the data that does not transfer. Adding new data structures is admirable if they are needed by the majority. But will enabling negative assertions, rich-text notes and “better” multimedia handling be useful if 35% of the systems will not need or accept that data and 60% of them will not follow the rules in using it?

After more than two years, very few genealogy developers have implemented GEDCOM 7.0. Fewer still have implemented the new features that 7.0 added.

There can be many different reasons for this, from technical to practical to the simple idea that they’d rather wait for everyone else to implement it before they spend their time and resources in doing it themselves.

What Is Needed

If you want more of your data to transfer between programs, you won’t get it by creating a new standard for that 5%, and you won’t be able to improve on the 35% that your destination program has not implemented.

The best you can do is to reduce the 60% of the data that is written incorrectly or read incorrectly or written as custom tags which the receiving system cannot understand. For that we need better resources that will help the developer implement the GEDCOM 5.5.1 standard as correctly as possible.

And there are a couple of resources available for that right now.

1. The GEDCOM 5.5.1 Annotated Edition
2. The GEDCOM 5.5.5 Specification

Both are available at: https://www.gedcom.org/gedcom.html

These specs were created in 2019 by Tamura Jones with the input of 9 genealogy software developers, myself included.

The GEDCOM 5.5.1 Annotated Edition takes all the knowledge and experience of these experts and adds them as notes into the original 5.5.1 standard. They explain whatever is not clear and give suggestions as to how to correctly implement GEDCOM.

The GEDCOM 5.5.5 Specification effectively updates the 5.5.1 standard with the notes from the 5.5.1 Annotated Edition and marks items that are no longer of practical use and should be deprecated from the 5.5.1 standard. In this way the 5.5.5 Specification should be used for writing to a GEDCOM file as it is 100% backward compatible to 5.5.1, except for some necessary correction of mistakes in 5.5.1 and relaxation of some length restrictions. 

Further Reading

• Is Perfect GEDCOM Reading and Writing Necessary? (16 Oct 2023)
• Reading GEDCOM – A Guide for Programmers (12 Oct 2023)
• Conflicting Information in GEDCOM (9 Nov 2021)
• Can GEDCOM 7.0 Succeed? (15 Jun 2021)
• GEDCOM 7.0, Official (7 Jun 2021)
• GEDCOM 7.0 (19 Feb 2021)
• The GEDCOM 5.5.5 Initiative and Making It Work (6 Oct 2019)
• Advancing the GEDCOM Standard (26 May 2018)
• Complete Genealogy Data Transfer (8 Jun 2015)
• Is GEDCOM Good For Sources? (7 May 2015)
• The Future of Genealogy – 6 Predictions (7 Apr 2015)
• Standardizing Sources and Citation Templates (27 Aug 2014)
• A Recipe for GEDCOM (3 Aug 2013)
• Nine Necessities in a GEDCOM Replacement (5 Jun 2013)
• Build a BetterGEDCOM or learn GEDCOMBetter? (5 Jan 2011)
• BetterGEDCOM (7 Dec 2010)

Conclusions

Is Updating the GEDCOM Standard Necessary?  I would say no. If anything, a few minor additions to 5.5.1 would be useful, but nothing major.

Moving to GEDCOM 7.0 could be dangerous as it might make data less likely to transfer correctly. Developers do not want to spend time changing their programs to implement features not needed by their own programs.

Available resources such as the 5.5.1 Annotated Edition and the 5.5.5 Specification that better explain how to implement GEDCOM can help developers make their GEDCOM more compatible with others.

Any future work on the GEDCOM standard should strongly discourage the use of user-defined (i.e. custom) tags, or even better, make them illegal.