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Showing posts with the label Thrulines®

The Penny Drops

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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 ...

How Big is Your Puzzle?

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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...