AI generated by Pixlr 30 November 2024 The Tingle Don't you love that moment in your research when you realize, that YES, you were right when you went out on a limb, and found something not in other public trees? And then, when you find that some of the supporting research work ahead has already been done? O f course you soon also realize that that means you are probably related to this family in multiple ways, which is why some of the work has been completed. Filling In The Map Or is that just me who forgets research from a year or more ago? This is the mixed blessing of pedigree collapse [intermarriage in small communities], FAN research [ f amily, friends, a ssociates, n eighbors], and tracking down DNA matches [people with whom you share significant sized DNA segments]! I dare you to add intriguing DNA matches to your tree, and figure out how you connect. There are so many rewards to taking the chance. One of them is revisiting old research. Tool Kit With this Burnett line, I ...

Who provides the most value? DNA testing and Beyond As researchers, we have many choices in DNA tests and genealogy websites. Given that both time and money are limited, what strategies and choices help us best reach our research goals? As always, "it depends." Most of my analysis is based on American costs and services, and family history based in Colonial America, Canada and northern Europe. Your needs and circumstances might be different. Ancestry.com is the Behemoth Ancestry's DNA database is as large as all the other testing companies and sites combined . So, most everyone who can afford DNA testing should prioritize Ancestry testing of as many older relatives as possible. Help them set up their accounts; if they are not interested in using their findings for research, have them assign you to manage their kits. Connect their DNA data to their profile in your Ancestry tree as soon as results come in, and begin adding their matches to your tree, along with DNA fact sou...

Your Research Question Equals the Size of the Puzzle As usual, when trying to think of what to write about, something prompts the writer; and for me that is often what I've been recently working on. These days, I'm puzzling over my DNA matches tracing back to my third-great-grandparents, George Henry and Martha Willis McBee. Thrulines ®  at Ancestry.com has been a useful map from my ancestors to the matches.  The Map Is Not The Territory But  ThruLines®  are not "True" lines. They are created by algorithms from Ancestry user trees including our own; all trees are imperfect, including ours. The same process creates  The Theory of Family Relativity™  at MyHeritage. Neither tool  reveals all the details we might wish about living people, so they leave us with work to do. Fortunately, I began my research to understand my family and find living cousins, so I've been "building down" for many years. When DNA became a useful new record source, I was already pa...

Backup icon by ByLUTFI GANI AL ACHMAD You can find articles everywhere that computer users might read, urging us all to back up our trees, our files, our DNA matches, etc.  One of our members recently brought this up in our Genealogy Chat after discussing the future of the genealogy DNA industry, which is slowing, thus making  less money for  the companies offering these services.   Back Up Your Tree If they did not back them up, Ancestry.com Y and mtDNA testers lost access to their test results and matches  as of September 30, 2014 . So there are examples of this happening before.  All of the genealogy tree-building sites offer a way to back up your bare-bones tree via a GEDCOM, which is a simple text file. If you also want to download your images and other records, you will need instead to"sync" your files using a desktop genealogy application which uploads to and downloads from the online trees. Your DNA Guide has an article comparing what is o...

  Sometimes I focus on a single person or family, and lose the larger context. A recent discussion in our Tech User Group opened my eyes to this, and shows me that our focus must remain on finding the stories of our families, and then passing along those stories so that our history lives on. SKCGS is here to help you use whatever you need to find those stories, and to help you tell them. Tree Completeness One way to begin to do this is to look at your overall tree, and one way to do that is with a fan chart. As I look at my tree, I'm a bit behind filling in some of the lines here on FamilySearch Family Tree! I need to fill in my Swedish great-grandmother's grandfather, at least. That's the big gap on the upper left. I believe I can do that soon. The gap to the upper right is in my focus family for the next few years, in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, aided by DNA evidence, so these women are not forgotten.  Who Were Your People? To pull back even further, who wer...

Wikimedia Commons [Valorie] Sometimes finding just one new fact, or one new resource, turns into an overwhelming flood of information. This blog is in response to a phone call from MaryLynn, who said, "I blame it all on Alexis!" Alexis recently offered  lookups in a book she discovered on her book shelf, in response to MaryLynn's blog about surveying our shelves to see what treasures we already have! [MaryLynn]  For more than twenty years I have been content to accept that my 2 great grandfather John Gamble was born about 1798 in South Carolina, information from the 1850 census for Huntington County, Indiana.  Occasionally I would have a mild curiosity about further information but I am not so foolhardy that I would search the 1800 census for a 2 year old boy. So, when Alexis mentioned that she had a book that listed petitions for land from the South Carolina Council, I asked her to look for the Gamble surname, figuring she would either find none or so many that I ...

6 generations of McBees, Willises and Smiths Don't Forget to Check GEDmatch While continuing to build the trees of my McBee DNA matches, I thought about two parts of GEDmatch that allow me to search for my mother's matches, even though she died years before autosomal testing was available. Both of the tools featured here are "Tier 1" tools, which means you need to pay for a month or more to use them.  GEDmatch - Free and Paid My mother's kit, LX517332, is a "Lazarus" kit which I created from the kits of my sister and myself, my father, me mom's brother, and all the cousins I could persuade to upload to GEDmatch. The reason my father's kit is part of the construction is that GEDmatch compares his data to that of my sister and me, and removes our matches to him, which leaves the DNA that we inherited from her. Even after my Tier 1 membership is over, I still have my mom's kit, along with my "super kit" which combines all of my autosom...