Ireland Reaching Out — Pilot Project — County Clare — Training Programme

Phase 3: Sustainability

Adult and Community Education Centre, Clonroad, Ennis

7:30pm 18 February 2013 and 25 February 2013

by Paddy Waldron

WWW version: http://www.pwaldron.info/IrelandXO/

Checklist of preparations for the session on Monday 25 February 2013:

Before the second session, please make sure that you are a registered user on all of the following websites, by following these links to the relevant registration pages:

1. Ireland Reaching Out
2. Wikipedia
3. FamilySearch
4. Facebook (remember not to allow facebook to trick you into uploading your entire e-mail address book so that it can spam all your contacts).

Please also

1. volunteer as an Ireland Reaching Out parish administrator; and
2. join the Facebook Ireland Reaching Out - Parish admins only group.

Outline:

Introduction

• These sessions will be about using information technology skills, and specifically about using the World Wide Web and social media, to achieve the Ireland Reaching Out objectives.
• The principal objective is to reach out to the parish diaspora, in various ways, including reverse genealogy.
• This objective can be achieved by using and linking to local materials which have already been digitised locally, at county level, or nationally, and by digitising additional local materials.
• It will be assumed that by now participants know WHY reaching out to the parish diaspora is a good idea; now we will learn HOW to find and reach out to them.
• Ireland has a diaspora of an estimated 70 million people.
• Ireland has 2,566 civil parishes.
• If each member of the diaspora has roots in only one Irish civil parish, then the average civil parish has a diaspora of over 27,000 people.
• But most of the diaspora have roots in multiple parishes, so the size of the average parish diaspora may approach 100,000 people.
• The Ireland Reaching Out Reverse Genealogy Guide says almost nothing about ordinary genealogy, but recommends these ten steps:
  1. Search using Google.
  2. Search using Ancestry (Username: dunkellin Password: yesteryears); also rootsweb, geni, curiousfox, etc.
     Sample standard introductory letters/e-mails suggested.
  3. Concentrate initially on the unusual surnames and those specific to the parish.
  4. Talk to all the local people.
  5. Find out who the real local specialists are.
  6. Identify the foreign destinations which were popular with people from your parish.
  7. Find and digitise information in local publications and records, e.g. schools, sports teams, memorial cards.
  8. Organize and disseminate the information collected.
  9. Plan Meet & Greet events or a Week of Welcomes.
  10. Invite those that you have found to attend.

The World Wide Web and Social Media

• There is a thin line between social networking and spam ...
• ... and between the transmission mechanisms used by viral marketing and by harmful computer viruses.
• Don't let social networking websites import your e-mail address book and spam your friends.
• Upcoming events can have a web presence somewhere between these two extremes.
• The Ireland Reaching Out website is based on Drupal, one of many popular content management frameworks, along with WordPress (used by Irish waterways history and Kilrush & District Historical Society), etc.
• The main technical objectives of these sessions are to help you to improve your efficiency and productivity by:
  • making your web searches work better;
  • understanding and creating hyperlinks between web pages;
  • learning some basic keyboard shortcuts;
  • teaching yourself touch typing;
  • etc.

How to share your existing knowledge of your parish

General principles

• Publish or perish!
• What are the best websites on which to share the various types of knowledge that you have?
• Will the website last indefinitely ...
• ... or as long as a book in a library?
• Will the annual subscription be paid indefinitely ...
• ... or dropped as soon as the subscriber dies?
• Will the material be archived in the Wayback Machine?
• Will your intended audience — and Google — be able to find your published material?
• RTFM

Collecting links

• Learn to bookmark useful web pages and develop a logical filing system within your bookmark library.
• Learn to copy and paste the web address/location/uniform resource locator (URL) where you find your online information from the Address Bar (the bar where www.pwaldron.info currently appears as you read this on your screen) to other places:
  • Mozilla Firefox:
    • Ctrl-Shift-B to open and edit Library of bookmarks.
    • Ctrl-D adds the current page to Bookmarks; top-right dropdown arrow allows you to select the folder in which to file it.
    • Right-click on a link to the page or file that you want and select Copy Link Location (keyboard shortcut: A)
    • (Note that in facebook comments there are two links, the top one to the specific page, the one underneath to the website home page.)
    • If the address bar is hidden (one-off fix)
      • Alt key
      • Menu appears
      • View
      • Toolbars
      • tick Navigation toolbar
    • Ctrl-L highlights address; Ctrl-C copies address; hold Alt and keep hitting <Tab> to get to your desired application; Ctrl-V pastes address
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer
    • Organize favorites ... on Favorites menu
    • Alt, Favorites, Add to Favorites adds the current page to Favorites; dropdown to select folder in which to file it.
    • Right-click on a link to the page or file that you want and select Copy Shortcut (no keyboard shortcut?)
    • Address bar always visible (?)
    • Alt-D highlights address; Ctrl-C copies address; hold Alt and keep hitting <Tab> to get to your desired application; Ctrl-V pastes address
  • Google Chrome
    • Ctrl-Shift-O for bookmark manager.
    • Ctrl-D or point-and-click white star at end of address bar to bookmark the current page; dropdown to select folder in which to file it.
    • Right-click on a link to the page or file that you want and select Copy link address (no keyboard shortcut?)
    • Address bar always visible (?)
    • Ctrl-L highlights address; Ctrl-C copies address; hold Alt and keep hitting <Tab> to get to your desired application; Ctrl-V pastes address
• If the website subsequently disappears, or if you find a subsequently changed link on any web page, you may find what you want in the Wayback Machine

Using the Ireland Reaching Out website

• Go to irelandxo.com not irelandxo.org.
• Read the online help.
• Read the FAQs.
• Find your civil parish.
• Most rural Irish parishes have at least three names - parish name, town or village name, and the saint(s) (etc) to whom the church(es) in the parish are dedicated (see Clare Past Forum discussions at http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4488#p7045 and http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4489).
• The parish names used on the website of the Catholic Diocese of Killaloe do not always include the civil parish name., e.g.:
  • Moyarta civil parish is mostly in Carrigaholt Catholic parish;
  • Killone civil parish, with a church at Ballyea, and Clareabbey civil parish are combined in Clarecastle (Clare Abbey) Catholic parish;
  • Cross (Kilballyowen) Catholic parish includes all of Kilballyowen civil parish, plus seven townlands in Moyarta civil parish.
• Spelling variants are common
• e.g. Dysert on the Ireland Reaching Out list is part of Dysart & Ruan on the diocesan list.
• Church parishes can comprise several civil parishes
• e.g. Newmarket-on-Fergus Catholic parish comprises the civil parishes of Kilnasoolagh, Tomfinlough, Bunratty, Drumline, Clonloghan, Kilmaleery and Kilconry (the last-mentioned being missing from the Ireland Reaching Out list).
• Other discrepancies:
  • Clonrush civil parish called Whitegate
  • Ennis and Ennistymon (church parishes) listed in addition to Drumcliff and Kilmanaheen (civil parishes)
• Some people may want to administer two or more closely linked adjoining civil parishes.
• These subtle distinctions are probably the first thing that should be explained on the Ireland Reaching Out parish page.
• To join a parish, click two JOIN buttons; to leave, click MY MEMBERSHIP on the RH menu, then a LEAVE THIS GROUP button, and finally a LEAVE button.
• In the LH My Account menu on many pages, MY GROUPS is a link to the My Parishes page.
• From a parish page:
  • MESSAGE BOARD (the fifth item in the last green horizontal menu) brings you to the Parish Message Board, e.g., http://www.irelandxo.com/node/4817/messages (Kilrush).
  • Message Board (the third item in the RH menu) brings you to the national message board at http://www.irelandxo.com/messages.
• If you have not already done so, then volunteer to become the parish administrator for your parish, using this form.
• You will get an e-mail with lots of information, including the Parish Administrators' Handbook.
• Join the Ireland Reaching Out - Parish admins only group on facebook.
• Every Clare civil parish (81 of them) should have at least five web pages:
  • Ireland Reaching Out — parish administrator can edit;
  • FamilySearch wiki (well hidden on home page, under Learn, but provides a very detailed common template for all parishes) — anyone can edit — make sure to use www.familysearch.org, not beta.familysearch.org, a broken copy;
  • Wikipedia — anyone can edit;
  • Clare County Library — only library staff can edit; and
  • Lewis's Topography — first published in 1837.
• Every Clare Catholic parish should also have a web page on the relevant diocesan website:
  • Killaloe;
  • Limerick (maps); or
  • Galway, Kilmacduagh & Kilfenora.
• Google may reveal other web pages for individual parishes.
• Register with Wikipedia and FamilySearch so that you can edit these pages.
• Start by adding links from the FamilySearch page, the Wikipedia page and the Ireland Reaching Out page for your parish, to each other, and to the pages in Lewis's Topography and on the Clare County Library website.
• FamilySearch is possibly the simplest web page editor, then Wikipedia (see cheat sheet), then Ireland Reaching Out (Drupal), but all three are similar.
• Three ways to look at a web page while editing:
  • WYSIWYG (what the reader will see; mark-up invisible and hard to edit cleanly)
  • Wikitext (what you see really is what you get)
  • HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language, all mark-up visible)
• Objectives of the Ireland Reaching Out parish content include:
  • to invite members of the parish diaspora to introduce themselves via the website
  • to give them some information about the locality
  • to invite them to visit the parish
  • to make sure they will be warmly greeted by the Parish Administrator and the rest of the Meet & Greet team
• So write for the diaspora, who will not be as familiar with Irish life, society, education, religion, administration, sport or politics as locals are.
• Plan and prepare your content offline (with autosave on!).
• If you find a well done parish page which you like, use it as your template.
• Copy and paste the entire text or HTML source and edit (preferably offline) as appropriate.
• Editing your parish page, say http://www.irelandxo.com/group/moyarta-clare:
  • Make sure you are logged in (second small green button at top of page) as Parish Administrator (username: Parish<space>County - ignore warning that the Username is case sensitive, as it is not) and not with the username which you may have registered before volunteering.
  • You will have to remember which of your two accounts you are logged in with, as this is not indicated anywhere on most pages.
  • Now select My Parishes on the RH menu.
  • Then select your parish from the centre menu.
  • Then select EDIT (third item in the second menu from the top). (If you are not logged in as the parish administrator, this EDIT button, between GROUP ACTIVITY and NEWS, will be missing.)
  • Bookmark the page, so that you can get back to it any time in a handful of keystrokes.
  • Enter a description in the second pale green box: 150 characters allowed, but only about the first 80 characters are visible in the Brief Description column at http://www.irelandxo.com/group.
  • Now move on to the MISSION STATEMENT, the main content of the parish home page.
  • Click the second-last icon on the second row of the editing toolbar to maximize the MISSION STATEMENT editing window.
  • Whenever you want to save your work, click the same icon again to minimize the editing window and then click and scroll away down to the very end of the page to get to the dark green SAVE button.
  • You may be asked when saving to confirm that the group is active (this step may be an intermittent bug).
  • Study and experiment with all the icons on the editing toolbar
  • You may find keyboard shortcuts for some of them (e.g. Ctrl-U to underline highlighted text).
  • Leave enough blank lines at the top so that the content begins below the Main Parish Image.
  • To insert a hyperlink:
    • copy the URL, e.g. from your browser address bar;
    • navigate back to the Ireland Reaching Out tab in your browser;
    • highlight the text to be hyperlinked;
    • underline it (Ctrl-U);
    • click the Link button (14th from left on toolbar);
    • paste the URL;
    • click Target tab and (<Tab>N) select New Window (_blank) from dropdown (so readers don't forget to come back to IrelandXO.com from external links);
    • <Tab><Enter> selects OK and saves.
  • Include a link to the Historic 6" OSI map of your parish - and a suggestion like this to help those using browsers not supported by OSI:

    [Technical aside: If clicking on these OSI links does not bring up the relevant point on the map, then right-click on the link to the map, copy the link location/shortcut/link address, open a new browser tab, go to the home page http://maps.osi.ie/ in your new tab, and paste the direct link into the address bar in this new browser tab. Click-through works with Mozilla Firefox under Windows 7 but not for all browsers and operating systems.]

  • To create new sub-pages for the parish (TOWNLANDS, EVENTS, HISTORY, CLUBS, etc., etc.), click the spanner icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window and select the relevant category from the pop-up menu.
  • The same editor can be used to add content to these sub-pages, either when first creating them, or by clicking a pale green EDIT button on the new sub-page later.
  • Townland pages must be added one by one.
  • For each townland, enter Title, Google Maps, Region, Parish, Parish name, copy and paste link to clarelibrary.ie townland page, and Save.
  • This takes approximately a minute per townland, so is extremely tedious.
  • And townland content must still be added.
  • Remember to answer any queries posted on your parish Message Board.
• To add images
  • Note that .tif images can not be uploaded and images larger than 800x800 will be reduced in size.
  • Click the spanner icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window and select Gallery from the pop-up menu, or select Gallery in the drop-down menu in the third column from the left and click CREATE.
  • Add at least the required fields (marked with an *), TITLE, Audience (parish) and Regions Concerned.
  • The title will appear later in a single dropdown menu covering the whole country, so should probably begin with Parish, County:
  • You can SAVE an empty album and try to add images later.
  • Look for the ADD PHOTOS TO YOUR GALLERY link in the bottom menu in the middle part of the page and follow instructions.
  • The instructions say that "files will be uploaded by clicking the "Save" button at the bottom of this page" but the only Save button is near the top of the page.
  • "Please wait ..." appears on screen indefinitely after the images are uploaded; you can ignore this instruction, and click the Next step button.
  • Then you can `Edit Captions'; you have to get this right first time, as there appears no way back to correct errors.
  • You can add a Title (required) and Image description (optional) for each image.
  • These do not seem to ever appear together, so should probably be identical.
  • Click DONE EDITING.
  • You should see "All images have been saved and published".
  • But, despite this, back at http://www.irelandxo.com/group/moyarta-clare/gallery/moyarta-civil-parish-county-clare-sketches-great-famine the message is "No photos have been added to this gallery."
• To embed Google Street View in your parish page (as has been done for, e.g., Moyarta and Portumna):
  • If you are afraid of editing HTML, find someone who isn't to help you!
  • Go to Google Maps and navigate to the snapshot which you would like to appear on your page.
  • Click the Link icon (which looks like two links from a chain).
  • Change the width parameter from 425 to 730 to fit the default width of the IrelandXO page
  • Highlight and copy the HTML code beginning with "<iframe ..."
  • Edit your parish page
  • Instead of clicking the Maximize button, page down and click on "Disable rich-text" which appears immediately below the editing window and which in the language of the Ireland Reaching Out editor means the same thing as "View HTML source" in the language of the vast majority of web browsers and web editors.
  • Paste the HTML code which you have copied at the point in your text where you want the streetview image to appear. Put <p> and </p> tags around it.
• When proof-reading your page, open the editor in one tab and the publicly displayed version of the page in another tab, and switch back and forth.

Sharing family histories

• Build a lineage-linked database of those who have lived in your parish and of the diaspora descended from them.
• Living people may object to being included.
• Use a desktop genealogy program, like Family Tree Maker ...
• ... or start with free software like Personal Ancestral File (PAF: Popular Ancient Freeware - see review) or Ancestral Quest Basics ...
• ... AND use online backup like tribalpages or WorldConnect
• (or vice versa: master copy online and backup offline).
• e.g. pwaldron.tribalpages.com (Access Code required).
• Start with parish registers (if access is available), 1911 census, 1901 census, civil registration (from familysearch.org), etc.

How to build your knowledge of your parish

• Use Google search effectively. Set default to 100 hits per page.
• Search other websites, especially those which Google does not crawl.
• Ask public questions in the appropriate public forums.
• e.g. Clare Past Forum
• Or use the Ireland Reaching Out parish Message Board to ask your own public questions.
• Click Post a Message (the fourth item in the RH menu) to go to http://www.irelandxo.com/node/add/messages and create a message.
• You must also enter MESSAGE TITLE, select Type of Message, select your Audience (parish(es)), enter a CAPTCHA, and then click SAVE at the very bottom of the web page.
• Lots more online forums specific to Clare

How to find the parish diaspora

• I talked about this at the last Clare Roots Society conference
• There are many websites that can help you to locate members of your parish diaspora.
• There is a trade-off between
  • quality of interface, quality of content, user-friendliness, and ease of use; and
  • size of audience.
• ancestry.com (over 2 million paying customers, all interested in genealogy) and facebook.com (over 1 billion active users, at least some interested in genealogy) have both reached critical mass, despite serious shortcomings in content, documentation and technology.
• Online newspaper archives (free in Australia and New Zealand, but often subscription sites in Ireland and the U.S.) can be very helpful.
• e.g. using facebook.com
• Three ways of using facebook to attract your parish diaspora:
  • personal profile (add friends, configurable privacy, timeline, not searchable)
  • e.g. Paddy Waldron
  • pages (likes, completely public, timeline, not searchable)
  • e.g. Kilrush Local History Group or Famine Commemoration Kilrush 2013
  • groups (add members, configurable privacy, newsfeed, searchable)
  • e.g. County Clare Ireland Genealogy
• Using facebook to find your parish diaspora:
  • start with the most unusual name in the family, e.g. from this obituary of George Kunzmann (whose maternal grandfather was my relative Thady McNamara from Craggaknock East, co. Clare)
  • it is easy to find the right Nicole Kunzmann Orecchio or Serena Kunzmann
  • click the About link to see if any relatives are listed
  • click the Friends link to see if any friends with family surnames are listed
  • click the Likes link to see if any interests in Ireland, history, genealogy or related subjects are listed
  • open profiles of likely family members in new tabs until you succeed in putting the family tree together
• e.g. using ancestry.com (IrelandXO username and password):
  • search Family Trees
  • start with Father's Last Name and Mother's Maiden Name
  • use wildcards (*) if there are multiple possible spellings, e.g. Sara* for Sara or Sarah or Saragh
  • search Message Boards
• Begin by approaching someone with an obvious interest in genealogy.

How to attract the parish diaspora

• Spread the word generally in appropriate places.
• This Clare pilot project has already been in the news.
• Identify and track down specific individuals.

Digitising additional local materials

• This is the next step!