So now there's a journal.

Is an online genealogy journal needed? I suppose we shall see. I've set up one, Annals of Genealogical Research, which is now ready (I hope) to accept articles. People complain about the weather, but no one does anything about it. Maybe this journal will help change the online genealogical climate a little bit; the climate would surely be improved by more documentation.

If you have some research you would like to publish, you may want to consider using the Annals as one possible method.

What this network needs is a good 5¢ genealogy journal.

There's no good place to publish genealogy research online, it seems to me. Presentation of research includes giving reasoning and analysis of conflicting data, not just giving sources, so using a GEDCOM file is out. It would most likely be lost in cacophony of near-useless GEDCOMs anyway.

You can build a web page, but you have to find a suitable place to post it. That's not so easy, assuming one wants to have the information available over the long term. Do you want to be chained to paying a provider for whatever you consider the long term? What if you'd like your research to outlive your ability to pay, which can be limited by financial or functional ability, interest, or life itself? The many bad links we see testify to problems with this approach.

What free site could you put it on? Do you trust Ancestry.com (MyFamily.com) to keep your Rootsweb page accessible for years or decades? That doesn't seem wise given that it's a profit-seeking organization. With no formal structure to search for it, or to give an unchanging way to reference it (what with URLs clumsy and subject to becoming outdated), such sites don't seem nearly adequate. General free-page hosts like GeoCities seem like an even worse choice.

A relatively scholarly paper might find a good home in an academic research repository, where it would be safe for years and remain accessible. But try to find an appropriate repository. There are a few subject-specific ones, but pretty much only for scientific areas like physics and biology. The others are for members of an academic institution, e.g. for faculty of a university.

You might think that a genealogical society would have established an online journal for the good of genealogy generally. I can't find any such animal. Perhaps those societies are too bound up in bureaucracy or traditional approaches. Perhaps they depend on a paid, printed journal for financial support, and hesitate to provide a free online venue. Whatever the reasons, there seems to be no action from this sector.

With such poor options, I've been thinking of getting an online journal rolling myself. Looking into the mechanics, it seems viable, and at a quite low cost if volunteers run it instead of paid staff. Hosting is a small expense these days, and donations could easily handle it I'd think, at least unless data and traffic became huge. That seems unlikely to happen, because I don't think the hordes of name collectors that flock to Ancestry, Rootsweb, etc. would find much to attract them in a set of research papers.

Uncle Maury --
I've been working on a biographical sketch of my uncle, who has a touch of notability among cartoon fans. Here's a partial draft:

Maurice James Noble was born in 1911 in Spooner, Minnesota, but spent much of his boyhood in New Mexico and Southern California. In the early 1930s he attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and while there the Institute displayed his works in its first one-man show of watercolors. Having to leave Chouinard for financial reasons, he ended up doing design work for a department store.
A Disney scout recruited him about 1934, and he decided to accept the job since it paid $10 per month more than the department store did. Maurice was put to work on backgrounds for the Silly Symphonies cartoon series. At that time the Disney backgrounds were required to be done in transparent watercolor wash, which was difficult technically because correcting a mistake was usually impossible, requiring a full new attempt.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first feature length film Maurice worked on. This was followed by background work on other Disney features, notably the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia. For Dumbo, he was color coordinator and was responsible for the pink elephant scene.
Maurice joined the Disney animators' strike in 1941; it lasted five weeks and became bitter. When he returned after the strike was settled, his office was moved to an ex-broomcloset and he was left without assignments. Soon he was laid off; his career at Disney was at an end.
The outbreak of World War II lead Maurice to enlist in the Army Signal Corps. He was eventually assigned to a small unit headed by Ted Geisel (later to become well known as Dr. Seuss). The unit was based at the Fox studios and under Col. Frank Capra. It worked on posters and booklets, and on a cartoon series called Private Snafu. The unit did the writing, storyboards, and background designs; the cartoon production was contracted out. Warner Brothers won the contract for Private Snafu, and the WB animation director Chuck Jones worked on the series. Following the war Maurice did freelance work in the industry and then took a position doing art for a filmstrip production company in St. Louis.
--- The Warner Brothers Years ---
Maurice remained in St. Louis until 1952, when he was invited to come to Warner Brothers to do cartoon layout for Chuck Jones' group. This was the first time he had done layout, which consists of designing the background environment and, for each shot, the particular viewpoint. The layout drawings and colorations are then used by the background artist (usually Philip DeGuard) to paint the final backgrounds (see Chuck Amuck, p.148 for an example).
At Warner Brothers, Maurice worked with Jones for a decade, over which time they worked on over 60 cartoons. Turning away from the fussy realism of Disney backgrounds, Maurice grew into styles using shape and color to define the space. The graphic look of his backgrounds could vary widely from film to film; he tried to make the backdrop fit the mood of the film. Maurice says:
"I call it stepping into the picture. You look around and say, 'Gee, what's this all about, and does it feel right for this given picture?' And then you go ahead and design from that standpoint."
The Jones unit worked with much of the large stable of Warners characters: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Roadrunner & Coyote. Maurice's wide-open desert landscapes gave the Roadrunner cartoons their characteristic spaciousness. The memorable cartoons Maurice designed at Warners include What's Opera, Doc?(1957), a Bugs Bunny sendup of Wagner's Ring Cycle that has been inducted into the National Film Registry. Maurice's futuristic settings enhance Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953). Other cartoons included the Academy Award nominees From A To Z-Z-Z-Z (1954), High Note (1960), Beep Prepared (1961), Nelly's Folly (1961), and Now Hear This (1962).
In the early 1960s, Maurice started receiving co-director credit on a number of the Jones-unit productions. This reflected his increased involvment in many phases of the creation process beyond just the layouts, pulling things together and ironing out rough spots.
--- After Warners ---
In 1963 Maurice left Warner Brothers and joined Jones at Tower 12 Productions (also called Sib-Tower 12). This new company had a contract with MGM, and eventually became the animation unit of MGM.
The bread-and-butter work for the first couple of years was producing cartoons starring MGM's Tom & Jerry characters, but there were an assortment of other projects. One was The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964), a combined live action & animation feature. Maurice co-directed The Dot and the Line (1965) which won the Oscar for short subject (cartoon). He also designed the 1969 feature The Phantom Tollbooth.
Maurice started working again with Ted Geisel for the first time since the war, doing the design for the TV feature How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). He later did design and layout work on a number of other Dr. Seuss features, first at MGM (Horton Hears a Who (1970)), and then at the DePatie-Freleng studios (e.g. The Cat In The Hat (1971), The Lorax (1972), The Hoober-Bloob Highway (1975)).

I'm thinking of contributing the bio to Wikipedia.

Publishing for the long term

A major thrust of my thinking, some of which has been reflected in earlier posts here, is that there needs to be a good way to publish one's research on the net for the long term.

It's easy enough to publish most anything on the web, but such publishing is very ephemeral. It often stays published for only a few months or a couple of years. There are many reasons for this, such as a provider going out of business or changing its policies, the poster failing to continue supporting his site, whether due to a loss of interest or a change of circumstances, etc. The broken links and outdated web references we all encounter are symptoms of this.

This is a particularly acute problem for family history information. The time between publication of genealogical data and much of its usage is very often measured in years or decades, sometimes centuries. In my own research I have often relied on works a hundred or more years old. In the U.S., there was a relatively large wave of genealogical publication in the 1880 to 1920 period, and the works published then remain significant resources for genealogists today.

The rise of the internet has engendered a similar wave of interest in genealogy, and has lead to much genealogical data and research being posted on the web. Yet the results of all this enthusiasm are beset by inadequate preservation of the research so published. Hosting services are changed, sites reorganized, domain registrations not maintained, site generation software replaced, pages are forgotten and deleted unnoticed, hosting fees not paid, and on and on.

Family history used to be recorded only on flimsy paper pages. Nevertheless, these have survived many decades and our generation benefits. The new electronic memory, wonderfully capable as it is, still makes me wistful for the robustness of paper.

My GMail is great.

I like the gmail interface a good bit. Had it a week and they now will let me invite an additional person. First to leave their name and email in a comment gets a GMail invite.

A useful thing might be to provide "good" GEDCOMs that are associated with good (documented) genealogical articles (and books). The GEDCOM would just cover the people in the article, and would have source entries for them. The sources could either just refer to the article, or perhaps to the sources used in the article but qualified, probably, by reference to the article. For instance, "U.S. Census, ... page 123, according to John Doe, The Doe and Dough Families (1999)".
Who prepares these? Ideally, the author of the article. This makes sense when the article is being published at the same time. It could also be done by the author later. It could be done by anyone willing to do it, but then the question arises as to how acurate it is with respect to the article.

Maybe there just aren't that many people who want to publish documented family history, at least not both for long-term access and for access via the net. Most are just involved in the hunt, I suppose. Leaving markings of the trail for others may not be of interest to them. So maybe the "glaring need" for long term net publishing is in the eye of very few beholders.

There seems to be a real lack of a good place to publish genealogical papers on the internet. There's nothing that I know of like NEHGR, NGSQ, TAG, etc. Yet the net has great possibilities for publishing for small audiences (as shown by blogs). Genealogy is certainly a field where the natural audience for any particular story is small.

Re the "unauthorized posting" theme of the previous item, here's a page talking about it. He recommends that if you want something kept secret, then keep it a secret. The problem is the current lack of experience with modern information spread. As he says:

That this is a divisive issue at this point in time is mostly due to how quickly information can multiply in this new "knowledge age".

A fellow was just complaining in a newsgroup that his GEDCOM was posted onto Ancestry by someone he shared it with. He didn' like that.

Well, GEDCOMs, even more than MP3s and jpegs, get spread around pretty quick these days. Only a few things, active things like viruses, for example, spread faster. They say "information wants to be free" and GEDCOMs demonstrate that very well.

But it does point out a serious conflict, one between the positive aspects of sharing (helpfulness, getting farther, less wasted effort) and the negative aspects (loss of credit for work, "theft" or plagiarism). We really are in need of ways to avoid the negative aspects so that more sharing of genealogy will be encourage.