The Generations Network Receives Patent for Correlating Genealogy Records

The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com, has been granted a U.S. patent for a "method of consolidating genealogy records [that] includes partitioning the records using at least one index file to form one or more partitions, sorting the records in a partition based on a data element in the records, comparing records within a sort range, based on the comparison, identifying same person records, consolidating information in the same person records, receiving a request from a user to view at least a portion of the consolidated information for a particular group of same person records, and sending a file that includes the portion to the user."

That is a mouthful, but I think it means that the software finds probable matches in a huge database in order to find the same person in more than one entry.

Assigned to The Generations Network Inc., Provo, the patent was granted to Bennett Cookson Jr., Kendall J. Jefferson, Grant Parkinson, Douglas T. Reid, Daren Thayne, all of Orem; Ken Boyer, Cedar Hills; Jerry Collings, American Fork; James Mark Hamilton, Provo; Michael J. Wolfgramm, Pleasant Grove..

The patent was filed on December 29, 2003, and only granted recently, on July 24, 2007. You can find full details of patent number 7,249,129 at http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7249129.html.

Comments

[theKiwi]

Well ya just gotta think that this is yet another thing that just shouldn't be patentable.

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2877

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2575

It seems that every week or two brings another example in the technology arena of a patent being granted for something that has existed for ages, or is just common sense.

How does this differ significantly from the Match and Merge technology built into most current day genealogy software.

Will all of those software companies now have to pay royalties to use anything that resembles this in their software - with the notable exception of Family Treemaker which is owned by this patent holder?

Hmmmmmm

Roger

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

Let me get this striaght ... TGN just got a patent on a method of sorting records and then comparing other records against the sorted list to find a match?

That is just incredible.

If there is any proof needed that our patent system is broken then this is it.

[W. David Samuelsen]

Just wonder if this is an attempt to derail FamilySearch from pushing ahead with their Genesis Project (colloboration with many libraries and private companies getting documents online for free access)?

[M. Daniels]

I am totally disgusted with ANCESTRY.

They have harvested my website and placed it behind their subscribers services without my permission.

They have also cached untold numbers of other sites including ones that have nothing to do with genealogy.

They have harvested www.usgennet.net files and other free genealogy. These sites are copyrighted and should not be cached and used by Ancestry when they are made available free to the public.

Search results also turned up these:

Search results for 1 page descriptions only

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Birthplan.com Birthstories.com Babies Today Baby Daily Breastfeed.com...(6-13-06) Anna Nicole Smith Confirms She's Expecting Baby Anna Nicole Smith has confirmed she is pregnant...

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...Know ThemIncidentally, on Thursday, Al Mohler posted about new Ultrasound technology for viewing babies in 3-D, real time in the womb. We got one of these at 37 weeks. Al Mohler posts about abortion advocates...

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Michael Rosenberg's Quotations List Michael Rosenberg's Quotations List Contact Michael at: msr@casbah.acns.nwu.edu Take me back to loQtus! The Quotations (by subject) AMERICA Too many of us look upon...

Carbon County News Online......Archives Week of March 10, 2005 NEWS Roberts advances, opens State C championship tourney play today By Bill Cenis CCN Publisher The Roberts Rockets boys didnt get the Southern...

I did not copy them all. What does any of this have to do with genealogy?

WHY IS ANCESTRY HARVESTING FREE ONLINE GENEALOGY THAT IS UNDER COPYRIGHTS AND PLACING THE ENTIRE SITE ON THEIR SITE.

Where are the members of the LDS and why would they allowing this kind of conduct.

M. Daniels

[Yuteva]

I personally think this is going to be the biggest impediment yet devised to stem the free flow of data to the thousands of family pages and various genealogy societies. It seems to reflect a lack of understanding of the community they wish to serve and their own clients. Even as a free service, it was not welcome. Using their patent to profit from the thousands of hours of work by the genealogy community across the country is seen as unconscionable by all I have spoken to or heard from. Since your newsletter is widely read, it might be helpful to all to take a poll of how the genealogy community views this effort. I can not believe that Ancestry would wish to see their user base evaporate just for this one toy. The best comment I have heard included:

"What about all the folks who view our 'cached' sites on 'ancestry's site', That is NOT an actual visit to YOUR site, but their site. Volunteers donate materials to YOUR site. Wonder how many potential donors our sites will miss, as folks will just read our hard work on the pay site totally bypassing the actual site the information came from. Is this not just wrong?"

Simple logic should be sufficient to have the management of Ancestry.com understand that the free flow of genealogy is made possible by contributors who will now simply keep the family Bible in the chest along with all their cherished family photos. They may be subscribers to Ancestry.com but they will also withhold their information, freely shared with the genealogy community, simply because it is now being charged for. I will not renew my own subscription and I have been a full member of all services since day one! I do not wish to cease being a paid subscriber but it appears to be the only means to get the message across to those who do not understand their paying users.

I might also add that the links to my own family site that has been 10 years in the making, will no longer be available so their subscribers will only find broken links.

[BBrooks]

This is the most exacting example of piracy I have seen.It is unethical, regardless of any legally issued patent. That patent is on the technology, not the right to use it to pirate materials. I have no problem with links, to any of my websites, but putting them in frames is a different story. most of the links to the "live sites" didn't work, and my material has been online for free all the time.
Do they owe me for the use of it, I would think so.
Needless to say, I won't renew my subscription with them after being a long time customer.

[theKiwi]

Where does one go at Ancestry.com to see what some of the above posts are complaining about - harvested and cached sites, sites in frames etc?

Thanks

Roger

[Dave]

When you file a patent, you typically have to find the least restrictive description that covers your "invention" without covering "prior art". Of course people have been doing "blocking", sorting, scoring and "merging" for some time now. However, if you look at the details of this patent, there are some fairly specific requirements that keep it from covering most of what has gone on up to now (like having to compute a score for the person, father, and mother, then use those three scores to come up with another score). Most genealogical matching does not work exactly like the patent spells out, and so does not infringe on the patent (and, conversely, would not invalidate it). It would be surprising if someone had not already done even the specific thing they are claiming, but most people haven't. I don't tend to like these kinds of patents, either--they serve more as intellectual "claim staking" rather than invention and sharing--but I wouldn't panic about the implications of this one.

[BBrooks]

If you are a subscriber to their paid services, Their latest additions are listed and this one has new beside it-
Internet Biographical Collection -New
http://ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1162
Every thing I have looked at is in frames. The message boards are full of anger over this and webmasters with private domains are pulling their files, this is all across this country.
These were and are all public free to view websites.Easily found with any search engine. They do their customers a dis-service by making this partof their subscription and a great dis-service to the webmasters and domain name owners by using frames.
Many of us will either take down the sites or put something on to keep them from spidering our sites.

[theKiwi]

Well I'm not a subscriber to Ancestry, so a full visit will have to wait until I'm at the local library, but I got enough from that page to find something that made me laugh at the patheticness of all of this...

I did a search for "Houliston". There are two results...

http://www.ancestry.com/search/obit/view.aspx?db=WebBiographies&kw=houliston&pid=135780&url=http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll%3Frank%3d0%26gsfn%3d%26gsln%3dhouliston%26_82000000%3d%26rg_81000001__date%3d%26rs_81000001__date%3d0%26gskw%3d%26prox%3d1%26db%3dwebbiographies%26ti%3d0%26ti.si%3d0%26gss%3dangs-d

is one of them if that URL survives to be viewable by anyone with an Ancestry account. But the page referenced is our Christmas newsletter from 2000 posted here

http://lisaandroger.com/Newsletter2000/index.html

I'm glad I'm not paying Ancestry if the best they can do on one of my elusive ancestor surnames is my own Christmas Newsletter LOL.

I wouldn't mind seeing a screen shot of how they present that if someone can get to view it - eMail it to me at rogerkiwi@aol.com please?

Roger

[FredStar]

I don't understand how this new Internet Biographical Collection is different then any other search engine like google, yahoo or msn all of whom cache the pages that their spiders harvest from the internet. This is a good addition to ancestry.com and it is reasonable to pay because they are filtering the search results so that they display those most relevant to genealogy.

[Valorie Zimmerman]

Good lord, what a lot of kerfuffle about NOTHING. The bot site says: > Why on Earth would anyone pull their information, especially that contributed by third parties? On the other hand, granting a patent for a new search technology is idiotic. One can certainly not blame Ancestry for jumping on the patent bandwagon, since our US Government seems to be run by idiots lately. They want to offer value to their paying customers, and spidering the sites they host for FREE certainly seems natural. They ARE in business to make a profit, after all. Valorie

[W. David Samuelsen]

IBC is not what it is.

It is what some are saying... SELLING access to FREE sites.

IBC spidered the FREE access sites including USGenWeb Archives Project files, and Political Graveyards which is free access as well. I verified this by checking to my horror, Ancestry/TGN's IBC search engine actually requires payment before being allowed to see FREE genealogy sites.

Extreme dishonest, unethical and blatant piracy. Shades of Elias Abodeely!

[Valorie Zimmerman]

Huh, my quote didn't come through. The bot site says: How do I prevent MyFamilyBot from crawling my site? MyFamilyBot supports the internet standard protocols for restricting spiders from crawling web sites. These protocols are described here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

[theKiwi]

> They want to offer value to their paying customers,
>and spidering the sites they host for FREE certainly seems natural

My Christmas newsletter mentioned above is NOT hosted for free by Ancestry - in fact it's hosted BY ME on the very same computer I'm typing this message on - at my expense for the high speed DSL line.

I don't have a problem with Ancestry knowing I've got a web page (hundreds of them actually) that mention the name Houliston (although it certainly is funny that the only one they've got isn't from my online genealogy - see link below) but imagine the uproar there would be if Google were to suddenly start putting all of its linked content inside a frame that left the viewer thinking they were still at google.com, AND they charged for the access to this.

As to the robots thing - now they tell us - had they said before they started, this is what we're going to do, and here's how you can prevent it, that would have been far better than saying now we know your page exists, here's how you can stop us from seeing it in the future.

plink plink

Roger

[Peter Fear]

Actually all they are doing is charging people for using their search engine. It is actually no different from their census search. The census shows the county and state but in order for you to see the town or the record you must be a member. The fact that there is a hit for the search is able to be seen.

Actually the search isn't as specific as some have said, I seached for my relative and got about 6000 hits on Ancestry (John Fear). It gave anything with the name John and the word fear. For example, "John lived in fear of snakes."

If you don't like the fact that Ancestry is charging to give you the link, just copy the info that they give you and paste it into Google, MSN, etc.

[Terria Baynor]

I think all of us that have had our data harvested should join with USGenNet.org in a class action lawsuit against Ancestry. This problem has been going on for some time now. My data was harvested 3 times by individuals that would not answer any emails for them to take the data down. Other data that was shared with me and put on my sites was stolen also. There has been a lot of talk about this for years, yet Ancestry keeps on doing these things and nobody does anything. Is there a way that we can change our web pages and trash Ancestry for selling our free data on the pages they have already harvested? I would be all for some way to tell the people that subscribe to Ancestry how they are being ripped off. Are there any software packages that will prevent the spidering of sites? I would love to know about them!
Thanks!
Terria

[Karin]

My problem is that the information Ancestry.com took from me has errors (which I corrected later) and I can't even correct what they have unless I join.

[Devious Mind]

Here's a devious idea. Give them a piece of your mind by presenting their bot with different content than you present to all other visitors, including many messages stating your copyright of these pages.

[Dick Eastman]

This is an interesting bunch of messages. However, may I play Devil's Advocate for a moment?

What is the difference between Ancestry.com spidering these web sites and placing excerpts on Ancestry.com (available for a fee) versus Google doing the same thing and placing excerpts on Google.com (at no charge)?

If the data is already available on free search engines, I am not sure why there would be an issue with a for-pay site having the same information. Obviously, I would always advise people to use the free search engines first.

- Dick Eastman

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

I have mixed feelings about this.

First, it isn't any different than Google is doing. They cache all the sites the can find and then present search results along with ads to make money. With Ancestry, you pay up front.

As for 'stealing' data. I have long felt that I am not going to post anything that I don't want anyone to take and pass off as their own, without proper attribution. It happens all of the time and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. It's that whole 'information wants to be free' fallacy that is so ingrained into the internet culture.

If someone takes your research and passes it off as their own and it is later found to contain errors ... well, too bad. The people taking your data obviously don't care enough to do their own research, they're probably just name collectors anyway.

So what have we learned from all of this?
1. That Ancestry is a big, money-grubbing company that only cares about its bottom line? No, we already knew this.
2. That Ancestry will take people's hard work and then resell it without their knowledge?. No, let's all think back to World Family Tree disks.
3. That there will be a groundswell revolution that will see thousands of people dropping their Ancestry memberships? I don't think so. There's still a lot of untapped information in there for me.
4. That people will start adding the robots.txt files to their web sites to inhibit caching of sites? I really don't think that many people will take the time or effort to figure out how to do that.
5. That Roger looks pretty good in a kilt? Absolutely. So it wasn't a total loss.

[Susan Daily]

--> M. Daniels wrote "Where are the members of the LDS and why would they allowing this kind of conduct."

People really need to remember that Ancestry.com is NOT affiliated with the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The church cannot risk its not-for-profit status in any manner, and that would include any affiliation with Ancestry, which is a privately owned, for-profit company. (I am not LDS.)

Dick, regarding your question, I know that I just noticed these USGenWeb sites showing up in search results, and I wondered how it was possible. The results clearly said "This information is copyrighted" yet I was still on an Ancestry.com page. (I never clicked on the link, which does bring you right to their web site, no frames.) Clearly, it is just a search engine, but that wasn't my first impression.

[theKiwi]

I'm fine with Ancestry indexing my sites.

What I'm not quite so happy about is the suggestion that they are presented to paying customers in frames. Google does this with images, but not web pages.

Since I'm not an Ancestry customer, except when I'm at the Grand Rapids Public Library I can't check this until I next go there.

But it's surely a no-brainer to think that they'd gain a whole lot more goodwill and far less angst and bad feelings if they allowed the free search to link directly to freely accessible pages without the need to be a paying logged in customer.

If they tried really hard at filtering and sorting their results they could become the Google of genealogy search engines, but from the snippets posted above it seems there's a way to go with that too.

Roger

[Gary]

Ancestry has been using this methodology for a number of years. The patent was applied for back in 2003 and the only thing that has changed recently is the granting of the patent.

Once again the the anti-Ancestry crowd starts firing off comments as if this is some new scheme from Ancestry to steal everyone's family history. Anyone who has ever used Ancestry search has already used this database-sorting methodology.

Right now, in 2007, nothing comes close to matching Ancestry's breadth and depth of information. Yes, Footnote and World Vital Records, among other services, offer information not available on Ancestry, but I subscribe to them AND keep my Ancestry subscription renewed each year. If I'm going to invest considerable time and money documenting my family history, I'm going to upload that information to the site most likely to be around in 10 years and which has the greatest visibility. I, unlike some of the gripers here, don't claim to own my family history and am only concerned that it, along with scanned family photos, be preserved for the next generation.

[Rodney Smith]

Ever since ancestry.com took over genealogy.com I've not been a happy camper with them. They want full control and in today's society no one will stop them. I belonged when it was $50.00 a year but now that they want to get rich over it I refuse to pay them a dime. If I can't get my infornmation free I don't get it, it's that simple and I'm doing quit well without them.