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.