Ancestry Magazine

Could this be true?

My computer screen is glowing with the tantalizing possibility that I might have some of the Scottish brogue and blood I’ve always secretly wished for. Or perhaps I’m the lineal offspring of William Rawling, rector of Great Snoring. I assume he must be some sort of relation, considering my family’s prodigious adenoidal talents.

That’s the frustrating fun of having a family line that stops abruptly in the mid-1700s: I could be related to any of these people whose names are on my screen. It’s a prospect I consider anytime I’m trolling for clues to the elusive, line-ending James Mason Rawlins.

Which leads to another question—just how did all of these Rawlinses land on my computer?

So began my search to determine just what it took to get a Rawlins online, accessible, and findable by me. My first step was to get myself (a Rawlins, nonetheless) invited inside Ancestry.com.

Inside the Records Industry
It starts, I learned, with content strategists like Spencer Woolley, who decide what records are available and, more importantly, what types of documents, artifacts, or other bits of information (in the genealogy field, they’re all “records”) family historians would like to get.

They do this, Spencer says, with teams of trained genealogists who scour possible repositories—government and church archives, periodicals and newspapers, historical and family organizations, libraries—for selections both big and small. At this point, almost anything is up for grabs: say, an 1874 book titled Records of families of the name Rawlins or Rollins, in the United States: in two parts, or the entire British census of 1841.

Each potential record is assigned a value based on factors including name-density (how many people are named in the record?), availability (are there laws prohibiting the record’s release?), and customer needs (is it so obscure that no customer will ever click on it?). If a record scores high enough, a team is dispatched to strike a deal—something that rarely comes overnight.

The result of a successful deal might be a stack of passport applications or ships’ passenger lists, maybe local histories and county land atlases, or centuries-old Chinese family histories (part of a recent ten-year deal with the Shanghi Library for the Jiapu records). Or sometimes fate knocks first: Just last week, Spencer says, an e-mail arrived from a gentleman who has research encompassing 68,000 names, a lifetime’s work, that h e’d like to have placed online.

I didn’t think to ask if one of those names might be Rawlins.

The Factory
Once somebody gets a hand on a gem like Records of families of the name Rawlins or Rollins, in the United States: in two parts, or the 1910 U.S. census, or microfilm of 24 million World War I draft cards, that still doesn’t get these people into my kitchen. Sharing the historical wealth takes a little processing first.

Michael Daniels, Director of Electronic Production, calls the records processing operation at Ancestry.com a factory, which seems fair enough when you consider that the operation produces 3 terabytes of raw, uncompressed images per day—that’s like filling my snazzy, new 250-gig hard drive to crash point every two hours all day long. The factory has more than sixty workers in the home office and another 1,500 off-site doing everything from inventory control and indexing to data entry and paleography—deciphering old handwriting. Incidentally, I realize that if I inherited my handwriting, it’s no wonder we can’t locate James Mason. I once had a store that couldn’t find the film I had turned in for processing until they started looking under B.

Imaging—Pretty as a Picture
After something like Records…:in two parts is checked into inventory (either as a book or a photocopy), the next step is to get it into digital form—a file a computer can read. Imaging manager Jack Reese says this is where technology merges history with the future: ribbon scanners that turn an entire roll of microfilm into a single, long document that can easily be divided into pages; the robotic book scanner that turns pages with its “vacuum” fingers and can scan 2,400 pages an hour (perfect for Records…:in two parts, if it came in as a book that needed to be preserved intact; otherwise, it probably went through OCR computer reading—as part of the 100,000 pages they might do in a day).

This is where the magic takes place, too: UV technology that recovers written information from apparently “blank” pages, or a patented binarization process Ancestry.com uses to clean up murky text.

Extraction/Indexing—Digging out the Good Stuff
Once the Ancestry.com factory has a picture of Records of families of the name Rawlins or Rollins, in the United States: in two parts, the process doesn’t stop. If it did, I’d only be able to search the Rawlins family from my kitchen table like I would a library card catalog—by titles. I’d still have to comb through the entire book myself. And what if Rawlins wasn’t in the title at all?

Fortunately the process doesn’t stop here.

After the techies conjure up the digital documents, indexers like Echo King decide what to “capture.” The key is choosing information from a record that could help a person locate an ancestor. For example, indexers might take name, age, and country of origin from a passenger list, but they might leave out occupation. A probate record may be indexed for names, dates, and places, but not for items willed to descendants.

And finally, the last step—the database is quality checked, corrections are made (a continual process through the help of subscriber-submitted corrections), and it’s put online for me to use.

Which means I can finally sit at my home computer and search Records of families of the name Rawlins or Rollins, in the United States: in two parts for, and find, Thomas, William, Henry, Hugo—even Daniel Webster—or read a funny story about a trial and four Rawlins brothers’ infamous noses.

Or I can type in J-a-m-e-s M-a-s-o-n and get hits in the same record from pages 1, 5, 29, 39, 100. Unfortunately, the term Mason appears in conjunction with Gorges &, Capt. John, Anne, Abigail, and stone, rather than tucked nicely between James and Rawlins, as I’d like it to be. So for James Mason Rawlins, I may have to dig further.

But if there’s no end to looking, there seems to be no end of places to look. Maybe there’s a clue in American Revolutionary War Rejected Pensions, or maybe that’s his son Charles’s 200 acres in Kentucky Land Grants. The “JM Rawlins” listed on the 1860’s Slave Schedule of the 1860 U.S. Census is a little too late for my J.M., but it’s interesting. And I don’t know how Jane or Patty from North Carolina Marriage Bonds might fit in, but the dates are right in the neighborhood. Maybe he had sisters?

Or who knows, I could be onto something right now, right here, at my kitchen table as I click on a James Rawlins who arrived in Annapolis in 1735. I found him in The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614–1775. According to the database description, “Name of ship, crime convicted of, and other information may also be provided…”

Really, where do they find this stuff?

Paul Rawlins is a writer living in Salt Lake City. The whereabouts of his ancestors, however, is another story.