Chris Hagerman: Two Face: The Flip Side roller coaster at Six Flags America. CC 3.0 Tactics, Strategies, Plans & Practice I've been researching a lot lately, but not for my book on my mother's McBees, or even my "52 Ancestor" project . Those are not forgotten; just on the back burner for now. Instead, I decided to fill a hole in the tree, which has our grandchild as the base person. When we're all gone, it will be his. Because I knew very little about his mother's father's line, I decided to tackle that. It is 100% Russian Jews and we are using DNA as a major clue to families long separated by migration and other historical events. But there is   a major roadblock: endogamy . Endogamy is  marriage within a specific group as required by custom or law . Jews in the Russian Empire were confined to the "Pale of Settlement" and could not live in cities or large towns. As a result, intermarriage normal in small communities was magnified, and lasted...

  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...