Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

#UTPCruise - Boarded the Celebrity Solstice at 2:30 pm. We had a few hours to get our cabins organized and then headed off for supper. All the Conference participants had a corner of the main dining room in the 6 p.m. session reserved for them, and so it all began.

At 8pm, we met for the “Meet and Greet”. Helen Smith introduced the speakers and asked each to give a short bio. I was called on first and exceeded Helen’s time limit. In all, we’ve got an excellent selection of 11 speakers highlighted with Judy Russell and Paul Blake over the next 18 days.

The next day, we tendered at the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. Most people took a day trip and there were several on my trip with me, and thus began the opportunities to share our genealogical experiences, such as the special features of The Master Genealogist and what software to use to replace it now that it has been retired.

Supper again with the group, which I know will be a daily highlight.

Then Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist gave a very appropriate first talk:

Judy Russell opens the 10th Unlock The Past genealogy cruise #UTPCruise with: "Copyright Law for Genealogists" pic.twitter.com/pP7oUs2CNY

— Louis Kessler (@louiskessler) February 15, 2016

Drinks in the Sky Lounge afterwards, and then off to bed.

#UTPCruise - Cheryl and I arrived in Auckland after 24 hours of travelling leaving -22C temps for +25C and the extra sunshine of the longer days that come with summer.

Auckland in a cosmopolitan city of 1.5 million people, making up one-third the population of New Zealand. The world has homogenized to the point that Auckland is a modern large city like most others with skyscrapers and freeways and recognizable stores and restaurant chains found elsewhere, so you’re never too far away from a Starbucks. It is a beautiful city with grand architecture, old and new, a vibrant downtown with lots of young people, with lots of growth, construction and reconstruction taking place.

Last night, Cheryl and I attended an Unlock the Past pre-cruise dinner at the Historic Tony’s Steakhouse. If followed the Auckland land seminar held that day at the Auckland Library.

Thirteen of us gathered last night at Tony’s Steakhouse including Judy Russell and Paul Blake who were the two speakers for the seminar, Geoff and Marg Doherty and Eric and Rosemary Kopittke and Helen Smith, who will be speakers on the cruise, Alan Phillips, the man in charge, and three ladies who were the organizers from the Library. There were group pictures taken which I’ll link to from here once someone posts one.

Today we board the Celebrity Solstice for the start of what is likely the longest (19 day) genealogy conference ever held with more lectures (72) that one person can attend than any other. I expect it will be a wonderful intimate gathering with lots of time for everyone to get to know everyone else very well.

I will be attempting to blog and even live tweet occasionally during the conference/cruise. I can’t guarantee how much, as it’s dependent on the quality of the wifi on board and my available free time. I am computerless and laptopless and paperless, using only my phone for this trip. My phone app for blog posting is not anything as nice as Live Writer, so blogging will be a bit more challenging. But we’ll see how it goes.

Brian Madsen came through and it was worth the wait. This is the earliest GEDCOM standard yet that has been rediscovered.

Regarding the copyright, I did have an email conversation with Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist in November 2014 about it. Her opinion to me was:

“the Church … distributed its work widely at the time, asking people to use what it was developing. It can’t now stuff the genii back into the bottle just because it isn’t currently continuing work on this. If anything, the fact that it can’t hope to profit in any way from ongoing development adds to the argument that any use of the document today — any copying or reposting — should be considered fair use. “

(and I’m really looking forward to spending time with Judy on our upcoming Unlock the Past Genealogy Cruise – which is only a week away!)

The most interesting part of the standard to me was it allowing the use of short tags or their long tag names.

Some quotes from the standard:

“These documents have been written for computer programmers, user specialists, department management, and system developers in the Family History Department of The Church of Latter-day Saints. These documents expand upon “Genealogical Data Communication: GEDCOM – A Data Format Standard” (last published in version 2.4 on 23 December 1985).”

“DISCLAIMER – GEDCOM is still quite new, and has not been exposed to demanding applications over an extended period. Refinements and enhancements will probably be needed during the next few years, which will affect implementation.”

It had a Source Record format!!!!!!!! Why was this ever removed?????

and a second example:

and a third example:

This is what I’ve been reconstituting in Behold’s Source Details section. I’ve been arguing over the past few years on BetterGEDCOM and FHISO (especially with Tom Wetmore) that this is what’s needed in a new GEDCOM standard (and not persona). Isn’t it ironic that it was in one of the early standards. I ask again, why was it taken out? It could have become the universal method of transferring sources without the need to create conclusions from them.

If you’ve followed long enough to read this far, you deserve to now get to the standard document itself, as supplied by Brian Madsen: GEDCOM 3.0 (7.3 MB)