Photo: Spider web with morning dew by  Ivicabrlic , courtesy of Wikimedia Commons The children's book Charlotte's Web came to mind this month, as more and more obituaries appeared in my hints, each adding to the web of information which solved mysteries, one tiny bit of information at a time. In that wonderful story, Charlotte has to work hard to create her web, even learning to read and spell in her effort to help the children save their pet pig.  Sometimes I see a family as a jigsaw puzzle , with really oddly shaped pieces, like a puzzle with a few missing bits. But  weaving a web better describes the work : find and snag the image of the obituary or news article, transcribe and link all the people named, then figure out who was NOT named and why. It's also interesting to see what facts are missing, such as previous marriages and divorce. The author of each obit worked as hard as a politician's speechwriter, stressing what they want remembered, while glossing over wh...

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...