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 part

Generated with Bing ImageCreator (AI), March 13, 2024 Where is YOUR Needle, Your Missing Record? Genealogical Proof Standard When we use the GPS (Genealogical Proof Standard) as our guide, we all know that "exhaustive research" can be both tedious and exhausting. Is life long enough to search page by page through all the counties where all the members of a family might have lived, paid taxes, bought, leased or sold property, made a will or died intestate? It is possible that the new Full Text Search at FamilySearch will  eventually  allow us to do just that. It has been estimated that 75% or more of the records at FamilySearch were browsable but not searchable; the only indexes those found in the records themselves. Those records are certainly attainable by using those indexes and browsing to the record of interest, but the process is tedious, often frustrating, and slow. And once found, the record must be read and transcribed to be useful. This new Full Text Search tackles a

FAN Research: Riches Ahead! It isn't all mysteries and adventure; by following the FANs ( F amily, A ssociates & N eighbors), fascinating stories can be unearthed. Families intertwine in the most interesting patterns. Digging in the dirt, as in archaeology, beauty sometimes emerges.  I found an image which reminds me of this family, created centuries ago by the Minoans, now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Isn't it gorgeous? Courtesy of Mark Cartwright, published on 4 September 2017. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Who are these Hamiltons who keep showing up in my tree and my DNA matches? This has been the question I've been asking myself more often lately. So far, no Hamilton ancestors have shown up, but the Hamiltons are the largest portion of my grandfather Harvey McBee' s ancestors' FAN club for four generations. In the screenshot below, you can

AI: Bing Image Creator Generated Changing realities force many of us to consider the future of our genealogical collections. Whether a change in health, a new location or even just downsizing, it can be useful to evaluate what we have now, with an eye to the future. What we can pass along? Plan Ahead First: if you have online trees, create a plan to grant access to interested fellow researchers, even distant cousins. Depending on the website, you may need to add a codicil to your will, or just tell the site whom your successor will be.  Ancestry.com: there are two considerations: your DNA test and your tree(s). It is wise to share your DNA results with a cousin or other relative; no need to wait. Or you can  Assign a Manager .  For overall accounts and trees, there is  Ancestry® Family Plan Memberships .  FamilySearch help file:  How to Connect to a Family Member’s Tree .  B ecause it is a shared tree, a person cannot pass along their FamilySearch account. Ensure that your interested

Citation Needed:March for Science in Washington, DC by Adam Fagen on Flickr Citations! So necessary to our work, and so dreaded. We all know we will thank ourselves later if we write them, but somehow..... don't.  Why do we need them? Of course we want to keep track of what and where we found the source of the information we're using in our research and writing. That is our duty to ourselves.  However, to me, the most important aspect of writing citations is analysis . Analysis What is this record? Who created it, when and where, and who collected and kept it safe? Who was the informant? Did that person have any reason to give less than accurate information?  What am I looking at? Is it a digital copy, digital microfilm, in color, or black and white? Or a paper record from the household or an repository? Is there more to the record? Many cards, for instance, have information on both front and back. Probate files can be many--even hundreds--of pages long. Was that probate page 

FamilySearch Family Tree logo: Wikimedia Commons Why Not? Many of us hesitate to use the FamilySearch Family Tree (FSFT) because we don't have complete control over the profiles of those who've died, nor to whom they are linked. These are valid points. However, if each user carefully links all the important sources to each profile and writes informative "reason statements" when adding them, the profiles are rarely changed. Instead, they are found by other relatives who can attach records and images you may not have access to, such as family photos, Bible records, etc.  The FSFT is different from sites where you can build your own tree, such as Ancestry.com or in software on your own computer or on paper.  World Tree + Records It is a "world tree," where the goal is to have one, and only one profile for each person ever born, linked together as families. Wikitree and Geni are the two other world family trees; together they are smaller than the FSFT, which is