Erica Joy (@EricaJoy) joins Ashley McNamara (@ashleymcnamara) to share her not-so-secret personal mission: making genealogy information open, queryable, and easily parsable. She shares a bit about why this is so critical, common challenges, and tips for re-building your own family tree - or using open data to uncover whatever the information you need for your personal mission.

In summary: you'll learn what open data is, where existing datasets fall short, and a few ways to get involved and start applying to your projects.

00:54 What is open data?

02:40 Tips for others researching their family history

04:00 Challenges with open data sets

Explore open source at Microsoft

Free Azure trial

Download US Census dataset :https://www.census.gov/data/datasets.html

Check out Internet Archive: https://archive.org/

Erica's favorite open source genealogy tools and services:

The Brantley Association Southampton Project: An excellent example of what data could be available for every county. 

Reclaim The Records: A non-profit working to put historical/genealogical data sets in the public domain.

BlackProGen: A group of professional genealogists who research and document African American families.