I thought about GPS. Land patents are very detailed and would lend themselves nicely to a GPS-survey translation.
'Near' can take on a number of meanings. Regarding US Census information, 'near' often (but not always) means written on a nearby entry or page. In the old days, the census taker would travel by foot/horse/wagon and simply go from one neighbor to the next -- kind of like missionaries... Given that, people with 'nearby' census entries stood a good chance of knowing one another. Regarding the GPS cords, do you have a reference of who has done this? Still, I think that painting a picture of each individual will potentially have more value. For example, did they serve in the same military unit? Did someone in the unit have a journal? We're they in politics? Did they run a store? Did they go to church? Own a company? Did they travel a lot ... where? Did they go to court/jail? Even family lore and hearsay can point you in the right direction -- or not... These are the types of questions that a traditional genealogist would ask. Much of that information is currently documented in random notes and scribblings. IOW, it is only useful to the writer and a few readers. I have used all of these types of questions in my own manual searches. The question is can we gather and store such attributes in a reliable fashion? I guess that depends on the quality of the data miner and volunteers. Thanks, Steve -----Original Message----- From: Russell Hltn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2007 11:45 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; LDS Open Source Software Subject: Re: [Ldsoss] Alternate way of searching genealogy... I think the key to what you are asking is to somehow code the location of these places such that the computer can work out "near" and "neighbor". Not a trivial exercises. It's tempting to use GPS coordinates, since they are reasonably stable over time and different histories. Some of the hard work of translating old descriptions into GPS-friendly coordinates have already been done by surveyors - no need to re-invent the wheel. That still leaves the question of "what is near"? What might be "next door" back in the farm house days can be a few blocks away in modern urban sprawl for the same exact location. Solving this would be a great leap forward, but the solution appears to be non-trivial. _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list Ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
