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...

Cleaning is work! Why bother? It's your tree, after all, and you can build it any way you want!  That's true, but most of us want to share our research with others and find cousins to collaborate with! And to do that successfully, we need to clear out duplicate people,  extraneous relationships (such as step-parents who didn't raise the children),  alternative facts (such as a vague "abt. 1882") when we have the precise date of birth, immigration, marriage, or death. Having accurate, clear facts and sources make it possible to tell the story of our ancestors better. And if you are working in an online genealogy site, a clean tree will allow their matching algorithms to get you the best hints to more sources, and more cousin  matches . Best Practices Be sure to list each woman with her birth surname; if you do not not know it, leave it blank. If you know only the married name, link her to a spouse with that surname and if you do not know his forename, lea...

By MaryLynn Strickland In my early days of researching online (from 2001), I made contact with people far and wide through message boards (remember those?)  Once in a while I would encounter someone who inserted her entire family file into a message that went on and on. . . and on.  But usually people would ask, or offer, to share a GEDCOM. What was that?  From the FamilySearch Wiki, it is the acronym for GEenealogical Data COMmunications.  GEDCOM is a data structure created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for storing and exchanging genealogical information so that many different computer programs can use it.  It is identified by the file type “.ged”. (Stay with me here; this technical part is brief!). “The GEDCOM Standard is a technical document written for computer programmers, system developers, and technically sophisticated users.”  The GEDCOM Standard Release 5.5, 2 January 1996 [Revised 10 January 1996]. Copyright © 1987, 1...