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Is there ever too much of a genealogical good thing? For the non-profit Jewish genealogy special interest group (SIG) Gesher Galicia, the answer, for a short time, actually was "yes. " Members of the group had worked hard for years to capture and collate any information about ancestors from the former Austrian province of Galicia, today southeastern Poland and southwestern Ukraine. After the Soviet Union fell and Eastern European archives opened to Western researchers, new information about Galician towns and families began to circulate. Suddenly, Gesher Galicia, through the work and generosity of its members, found itself the keepers of new spreadsheets full of data of all types, sizes and sources-birth records transcribed from the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv; old, out-of-copyright Polish telephone books from library collections; early 20th-century tax records copied from buy cialis online uk the private files of a Chabad rabbi in Ukraine; landsmanshaftn records obtained from the YIVO archives in New York; Holocaust files from Yad Vashem; and more. This influx of new information was wonderful, but almost overwhelming, like a downpour coming after a drought. Clearly the new data sets must be shared, preferably over the Internet, but how? The obvious answer was to turn the various spreadsheets into searchable online databases--a long-awaited All Galicia Database. For various reasons, some technical and some procedural, [buy cialis online uk] simply putting all the data on JewishGen did not work out initially, so the group decided that Gesher Galicia would assemble all the varied source materials as a new stand-alone database, hosted on its own web server. As a web developer and programmer for various major media companies-and a genealogist with mostly Galitzianer ancestors-the job to accomplish this task fell to me. The solution eventually crafted has been online for almost a year now as the backbone behind the new All Galicia Database (AGD), located at , where more than 190, 000 records containing about half a million names are freely accessible to all. It was not enough to simply make a database; however, I decided to make this underlying software available to all, so that others who wanted to create archival records databases would not have the same problems we had faced. I released the code as "open source" meaning that others can edit and change the software as much as they like, to suit their own needs, rather than being restricted by a typical copyright. I also eventually realized that I could not keep referring to the project as "that code thing I built for that database, " and so I named the software "LeafSeek, " as it allows one to search for a leaf on a family tree. I built a new website at www. leafseek. com providing a feature list, basic documentation and installation instructions, a link to download the software, and a blog about the project's progress.
Gesher Galicia wanted to establish a new, stand-alone genealogy database, but could see no obvious way to do it. First we considered Steve Morse's easy-to-use One Step Search Tool creator which could turn Gesher Galicia's individual spreadsheets of data into individual searchable databases. This tool would have been a good choice if only a few data sets existed, but the SIG had more than 40 different data sets, with many more coming steadily, especially once Gesher Galicia's multi-year Cadastral Map and Landowner Records Project began at the archives in Lviv. The SIG would have been left with many different and separate One Step Databases to maintain. Furthermore, some of the individual data sets had multiple surnames or given name fields, and the One Step Search Tool would have created databases in which each potential surname field would have to be searched individually buy cialis online uk, rather than all at once. For example, a single data set of marriage records for one town might include many different family names: the bride's maiden name, the groom's family name, the bride's mother's maiden name, the groom's mother's maiden name, the witnesses' surnames, and so on. The One Step Tool limitations meant that a user would need to search each of these surname fields separately within each individual database-and then search all the other databases as well, one by one.
Eventually, I stumbled across Apache Solr. The Apache Software Foundation is a well-known, non-profit group that nurtures and distributes free, open source software of various types. It is most famous for the Apache HTTP Server, which has been the most popular web server on the Internet for more than 15 years, but it also hosts and cultivates almost 100 other software projects. One of these is an enterprise search platform, a system for building reliable business-grade search solutions, called Solr, which adds extra web-based functionality to an older Java-based Apache project called Lucene. Solr is used primarily by large businesses to search massively large data sets, usually of a company's intranet documents or consumer products. For example, the huge online shoe store Zappos, uses Solr to index its holdings. I also strongly suspected that some of the world 's largest genealogy websites (e. g. , the Mormon/LDS Church's FamilySearch, Ancestry. com, and the British genealogy company brightSolid's new British Newspaper Archive) used Apache Solr or its major component, Lucene, as the backbone for their genealogy search engines-a hunch later verified when I attended the RootsTech conference in February 2012. One of the nicest features of Apache Solr (in addition to the fact that it can handle large data sets with ease) is that it allows for something called "faceted search. " This is a way of seeing what pieces of data are related to the results of a search query, and it allows a user to dig deeper within the results to find the exact bit of needed information. For example, on the Zappos site, when one initiates a general search for something like "brown shoes, " the left side of the screen shows what types of data are connected to the search results thus far. From' there, one may click on the "facets" on the left side of the page, such as "10. 5' (a shoe size) or "casual" (type of shoe) or "$100 and under" (price) to narrow a search for exactly what the user wants. As one adds more "facets" to a search, they are added as values at the top of the screen and can be removed if desired. A buyer could chose to search for the long phrase "brown shoes size 10. 5 casual under $100" in the search box at the very start. but by choosing a general search term instead and then narrowing the search facet by facet, the buyer obtains a much better picture of what is available. For example. certain brands may entirely disappear as options for purchase once the "10. 5" facet is chosen, because most U. S. brands do not manufacture a women's size 10. 5 (they either stop at 10 or else skip up to 11). So for this hypothetical customer and her specific search needs, being able to facet this massive database at "10. 5" is a key feature. Buy cialis online uk the fact that the zappos website offers searches by size saves this customer considerable time and disappointment when shopping for her big feet--and zappos gets more of her business as a result. Similarly, genealogists want the ability to focus on search results exactly tailored to specific needs, especially unusual needs. This is especially important because genealogists often find themselves working from a small amount of known data that may be incomplete. One researcher might want the names of every baby born in town X with a mother named Rivka from town Y, and yet not know basic information such as the baby's surname or year of birth. Perhaps a researcher wants to see a list of every surname that is somehow associated in available records with a different surname that already has been researched in order to find interconnections between families. Or maybe someone just wants the records mentioning Rivka whose original record books are stored in a specific archive location. Database designers cannot know what kind of "slice-and-dice data" a specific researcher might need. A database that could respond to these kinds of unusual problems would be more useful than one that was more traditional-and more limited. Thus, Apache Solr looked like a good fit for the proposed new All Galicia Database. The fact that it was free, open source software certainly did not hurt either. This was not just because "free" meant "the price is right" for a small, non-profit genealogy group, but because "free" in this case also means "free to edit, change, tinker and redistribute, " the "open source" meaning of the term. No one may freely change or redistribute a program such as Microsoft Word, or database "solutions" from many traditional and proprietary software vendors. The danger in using one of these products lies not only in the lack of customization options, but also in the very real possibility that a vendor may go out of business, leaving a lovely new database without any hope of technical support, security updates or new features in the future. Using an open source solution like Solr, that has a vibrant developer community and releases new versions every few months, would help ensure that if I spent the time and effort to use Solr as a genealogy database solution, it would be a little less likely to crumble into uselessness.