[Ldsoss] Alternate way of searching genealogy...

[Steven H. McCown]

I thought about GPS.  Land patents are very detailed and would lend
themselves nicely to a GPS-survey translation.  

'Near' can take on a number of meanings.  Regarding US Census information,
'near' often (but not always) means written on a nearby entry or page.  In
the old days, the census taker would travel by foot/horse/wagon and simply
go from one neighbor to the next -- kind of like missionaries...  Given
that, people with 'nearby' census entries stood a good chance of knowing one
another.  

Regarding the GPS cords, do you have a reference of who has done this?

Still, I think that painting a picture of each individual will potentially
have more value.  For example, did they serve in the same military unit?
Did someone in the unit have a journal?  We're they in politics?  Did they
run a store?  Did they go to church?  Own a company?  Did they travel a lot
... where?  Did they go to court/jail?  Even family lore and hearsay can
point you in the right direction -- or not...

These are the types of questions that a traditional genealogist would ask.
Much of that information is currently documented in random notes and
scribblings.  IOW, it is only useful to the writer and a few readers.  I
have used all of these types of questions in my own manual searches.  The
question is can we gather and store such attributes in a reliable fashion?
I guess that depends on the quality of the data miner and volunteers.

Thanks,

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Hltn [mailto:russellhltn at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2007 11:45 PM
To: steven.mccown at gmail.com; LDS Open Source Software
Subject: Re: [Ldsoss] Alternate way of searching genealogy...

I think the key to what you are asking is to somehow code the location
of these places such that the computer can work out "near" and
"neighbor".  Not a trivial exercises.

It's tempting to use GPS coordinates, since they are reasonably stable
over time and different histories.  Some of the hard work of
translating old descriptions into GPS-friendly coordinates have
already been done by surveyors - no need to re-invent the wheel.

That still leaves the question of "what is near"?  What might be "next
door" back in the farm house days can be a few blocks away in modern
urban sprawl for the same exact location.

Solving this would be a great leap forward, but the solution appears
to be non-trivial.