Erica Joy (@EricaJoy) joins Ashley McNamara (@ashleymcnamara) to share her not-so-secret personal mission: making genealogy information open, queryable, and easily parsable. She shares a bit about why this is so critical, common challenges, and tips for re-building your own family tree – or using open data to uncover whatever the information you need for your personal mission.
Explore open source at Microsoft
- Free Azure trial
- Download US Census dataset :https://www.census.gov/data/datasets.html
- Check out Internet Archive: https://archive.org/
Erica’s favorite open source genealogy tools and services:
- The Brantley Association Southampton Project: An excellent example of what data could be available for every county.
- Reclaim The Records: A non-profit working to put historical/genealogical data sets in the public domain.
- BlackProGen: A group of professional genealogists who research and document African American families.