Im age courtesy Unsplash    Online Research – a Book Review I have been reading The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy , by Kimberly Powell. [ 1 ] I hesitated to read the book because the world of online genealogy changes hourly, and I wondered if I would learn anything useful from a book published 17 years ago. I approached it with the idea that much of the information would be out of date, and it is. However, the ideas I can apply to my genealogical research, and suggestions of sources that had not occurred to me have justified the time I have spent reading the book.     Determine Your Goal Even though I have immigrant ancestors, as we all do unless we are indigenous people, I have always been most interested in my ancestors after they came to America. I was surprised to learn that by the time we have worked through 10 generations, we will have discovered more than 1000 direct ancestors. [2 ]  Whenever I am tempted to “jump across the pond”,...

  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...

Weekly Armenian, October 9, 2019 When Alex stopped by the Burien Library GenHelp desk last October, he was very excited to share his news.   Just a few days earlier it had been announced that a city park in Yerevan, Armenia, was being named to honor his great grandmother, Diana Agabeg Apcar. In commemoration of Woman’s History Month in March, here is her powerful story. Diana Agabeg Apcar, a widow with young children and a business to operate in Yokohama, Japan, was very concerned for the welfare of Armenians, her ancestral people.   She rescued refugees from the Armenian Genocide of 1915, arranging transportation to Yokohama, Japan, housing them and arranging their immigration to the United States.   A child of the Diaspora, she had never set foot in Armenia but she was deeply committed to church and her people. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many small countries gained their independence but ther...

There is some scorn directed at FamilySearch Family Tree because it is full of errors and some profiles have no sources, which makes it unreliable. The criticism is fair. I've found errors and unsourced profiles there. I've probably added some back when when I first began. However I find that using FamilySearch Family Tree is critical to my research, and think that I can and should make it better. I hope I can convince you to help. I still have plenty to do, as my fan chart shows: 7 generation fan chart Has it been years since you used FamilySearch? Please try it again soon. These days, there are record hints, improved record search, and millions more indexed records available. Merging duplicate profiles can still be tedious and yet it is worth your time. Duplicates weaken the tree, so clean and improve it, at least in your direct lines. Correctly list family members, relationships, and their presence in various records; you'll thank yourself later. It's ...

Iceland has almost everyone’s family tree in a database accessible for all the country’s approximately 335,000 citizens. Everyone is related and “there is even an Android app to show each Icelandic citizen his or her genealogy, in most cases back to 874 AD.”[1] Many people in Iceland are hobby genealogists. When my guide on a tour of Iceland in 2017 discovered my interest in genealogy, she proudly told me that her grandfather had traced their family’s ancestry to a King of Norway. That would not be unusual because Iceland was settled mostly by Norwegians who may have been seeking new land to farm.  A favorite question when meeting someone new is “Who are your people”? Since almost everyone is related it is common before dating someone new to check to see that you two are not too closely related. The fact that almost everyone is descended from just a few couples has also made Iceland a heaven for those studying genetic diseases. Additionally, the homogeneity of the population has...