Best Reason to Throw a Party The best excuse to clean your house , I once read, is to ready it for a party . While cleaning house, I thought, is the same true about "writing it up"? Writing the stories of our ancestors and relatives is the culmination of our work. When we know that our place is welcoming to guests, we feel free to celebrate; telling stories of the past unlocks the lives of our families to all who hear them. Writing the stories is t he best excuse to research. Write while researching so that that your thoughts have somewhere to go‒directly into the notes, before they evaporate. Writing soothes the itch in the brain instead of sending us down rabbit holes. Now is a great time to get started writing, in preparation for Family History Month in October . Courtesy of the National Genealogical Society Writing tests our research and thinking It is while writing that holes in the story are exposed, inconsistencies glare, and leaps of logic fall flat. If our analysis...

Generated by Bing Image Creator 2 August 2024 This post is for all of you who do not want to use AI .  If you're hesitant about using AI, you're not alone. Many people are wary of handing their privacy over to a machine. However, AI can be a powerful tool for genealogists, and you may find it more helpful than you first thought. You may have felt the same about spreadsheets and calculators, yet now they are tools in your daily life.  Just as calculators and spreadsheets revolutionized how we handle numbers and budgets, AI chatbots and large language models (LLMs) are transforming our interaction with language and information. So you may eventually use AI to help you do your work in research, document transcription and analysis, writing, research reports, timelines , DNA analysis, emails and other record-keeping. Some can analyze photos and other images or to pull out family connections from a will, and draw a family tree. Of course, you must check the work, as you do your...

A suggested topic for this blog was A Favorite Tool for Research We received a couple of replies which have spurred conversations from our editors.  We hope more of you will submit your favorite tools. From Deborah Wigen-Noble:    My “tool” right now is webinars. The speaker/presenter, the chat (gleaning all kinds of ideas and suggestions from others watching), and the opportunity to ask and have my questions answered - this often leads to more questions . -  Debbi From Annette Weiss:  DNA is my tool ... can't beat the accuracy! I've been able to connect with a long-lost branch of my daily tree, adding over 100 descendants in the past 2 years. - Annette From Kathleen Hanzeli:  This probably sounds silly, but last week, when I was in Boston, I chose to travel light, meaning I left my big camera at home.  I did take my Magic Wand Scanner but it never came out of my bag. Instead, I used my iPhone to scan (the scanning app associated with Evernote) an...

A timeline gets you where you want to go! We've discussed timelines many times here on the blog. Here is one 2-year-old example: The Timeline: Your Guide Through the Twists and Turns of Research . In the latest SKCGS Study Group, working our way through "Research Like A Pro," by Diana Elder, AG with Nicole Dyer. The second chapter is all about how to use a timeline to analyze sources and likely evidence found in those sources.   But how exactly do you create one? And is one way better than another? Elder advocates for a spreadsheet or relational database. While most of us have not yet tried Airtable , the relational database she uses now, I tried creating the spreadsheet from the information I had been collecting in a timeline using Google Sheets. While it was useful as a place to collect the direct links to record images and a good prompt to create source citations, I didn't find it useful to reason out what was happening behind the records.  Here is a snippet of tha...

Why?  Google Drive is free, and available on all of your devices. And you probably already have a Drive and don't know it! I use mine constantly. Why should you use it? For saving from anywhere, and sharing with anyone. Share source images you've found with cousins, share your own documents with others for feedback, and share things with yourself on other devices. You can do this no matter where images or documents come from or what software created them. If you prefer Word to Google Docs but want to be able to get inline comments, just import them to your Drive. Do the same for Excel, or any other software. You can even save to and share from your Drive from your phone or tablet. Don't worry, you can edit and then download in Word or Excel format. Where's My Google Drive? First, how do you find your Drive? Go to Google.com and look up to the right. If you are logged in and have uploaded an image you will see it right next to the matrix of stacked dots. Top right of th...

 Hi folks, if you saw my post last week,  Wikitree, and the Value of Half-Relatives  then you know that I was excited to know that the one DNA segment that my mystery match and I shared was from one shared ancestor, my second great-grandfather Elias Henry Baysinger.  Elias Henry Baysinger 1832-1900 Elias married three times and had 15 children, one of whom died at birth or within days of birth and is buried in the same grave as my second great-grandmother Sarah who was the second wife and mother of ten.  My match descends from the third wife, Lydia, so the shared segment comes only from Elias, and from neither wife.  What can I do with this segment data beyond "painting" it? Gedmatch Free Tools The first tool I used was at Gedmatch , called People who match both kits, or 1 of 2 kits , a free tool. I often use this kit to find out who a mystery match is, because as the ungainly title of the tool says, it creates a list of those kits who match both kits. If s...