>> Hi. I'm Erica.
>> I'm Ashley.
>> This is The Open Source Show.
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>> Hi. I'm Ashley McNamara, Developer Advocate.
>> Hi. I'm Erica,
and I do a lot of things.
>> What are you excited about in technology these days?
>> Oh man. I've been a nerd literally all my life.
It's probably a problem.
But right now I am very excited about and passionate
about the application of technology to genealogy research.
That's where I live when I'm not doing my actual job.
My life goal personally is
to reassemble the family trees that slavery tore apart.
I feel like great open datasets and great algorithms,
put together with a little bit of genetic genealogy,
can make great strides in making it happen.
>> Can you tell us a little bit more about what you found there?
Like what is open data first of all?
>> So a quick way to describe
open data is data that's just out there for anybody.
So a large chunk of data about
a specific topic that anybody can use for themselves.
They can either query it online or download it to their computers.
Census databases,
datasets that include like insurance records,
the open data that's out there about
genealogy is just largely images.
So it's technically open,
you can download any set of census records
up to 1940 from the US government for example.
Even if you're looking at a small county,
you're looking at pages,
and pages, and pages.
So it's open in the sense that anybody can download it,
but it's not open in the sense that it is useful for
many people to query and find out interesting things.
I love the idea of being able
to completely open those datasets to make them queryable,
such that we can find out interesting trends,
find families that have maybe shifted around,
just find useful data.
>> Can you tell me a little bit about why that started?
>> My grandfather died.
So I just was doing a family tree,
and then I got more and more into it and I was learning
all these things about my family
and the people who went all over the place.
Over time, it became a really big passion for me.
Just because there are so many people of color in the US,
specifically black people who are descended from
slaves who don't have their family tree.
>> Right.
>> What's interesting for me is that up
and to around the early 1800s,
is when I hit a brick wall.
I wanted to go beyond the brick wall.
>> What are some tips that you would have for
other people who are going through this as well.
>> Look at places that are unusual.
Insurance records is a big one
for people who are descended from slaves,
because they were property, and so they were insured.
Another thing I like to look at
is data from small county court houses.
They have data going back to the early 1800s,
and for my family specifically,
there's a county that they came from in
Virginia called Southampton County.
A person who has a lot of money went and was like, "Hey.
I'm going to digitize all this data for Southampton County."
So wills are there,
there are birth records and you can
find your ancestors there, deeds.
Court records are a big one,
because some people go to court and they get sued,
and they have to give up some of their property.
The problem with that though is that a lot of
these datasets from small county courthouses aren't digitized yet.
They just exist in paper form,
and this is one of the things that keeps me up at night.
One of my fears is that one of these county courthouses
will get blown away in a hurricane and all that data will be gone.
I encourage anybody who is like maybe in a small town,
a small county, go to the courthouse and just be like, "Hey.
So can I just started taking pictures
of your datasets and I'll just
give them to you and then I'll
put them online?" That will be great.
>> There are also some challenges right with open datasets?
>> Yes. Some things aren't queryable.
Like I said about the census records, it's just an image.
Not a lot you can do with just a picture.
Oh, I can find out what the image name is.
Not helpful, you can't find out useful information.
So there's that challenge.
>> As people are diving into open data,
do you have any favorite datasets that you've looked into?
>> I really love the census dataset.
I feel like if it were queryable,
it would illuminate so many different pieces
of information that we just weren't able to see.
Like imagine being able to query the entire census for,
let's say, the 1870 or 1880 census,
and archive.org, the Internet
Archive for folks who don't know what that is,
basically it's archive of everything,
but they do a great job with open datasets.
There are a lot of great open source tools
for genealogy out there.
I'm sure we can put some links around here somewhere.
It's not just like a thing for your grandmother,
there are a lot of innovations that can be made just
using that data and trying to put together that puzzle.
>> I love it. Well, we learned a lot about open data.
>> Yeah we've learned.
>> Thank you so much.
We will provide some links.
>> Yes.
>> Speaking of links, there's other links in here.
But also subscribe, and like, and share,
and all of those other things,
follow us on Twitter, especially.
>> I'm @ EricaJoy.
>> @ashleymcnamara. Just so you know,
we have a bunch of other open-source goodness
on opensource.Microsoft.com.
>> Go there. It's down there somewhere.
>> Thank you for watching.
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