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Current Mood: moody

six months later: a software update

I've gone back to trying to get along with FamilyTree Maker again. For awhile I've been just using it for backup while working on Ancestry's website and in notes I keep in Apple Pages. However, I dislike writing all my notes in the narrow column offered by Ancestry.com. I've tried various formatting tricks, but it's very light on features. Also, so much clicking around. Apple Pages is fine but then I have my notes in two places. Also, I dislike having to create workarounds because Ancestry won't provide a task list -- which they USED TO PROVIDE but got rid of so they could spam my landing page with unwanted hints. Very form over function, Ancestry.

I also tried using MacFamilyTree. MacFamilyTree is very pretty. However, its Notes field is wayyyy down the page for the focus person, so there's a lot of scrolling. There's the decision of how many notes to use: one giant note for everything? Separate notes for each topic? There are additional note fields attached to the fact fields and citation fields and it's a little confusing about where to record what. Most of all MFT doesn't sync with anything. I did find a unique use for MFT. It has a next-level 3D family tree view that lets you twirl and twist your tree around on your screen. Normally I find this disorienting and ignore it. But when I was trying to find unattached people in my tree, it was easy to twirl the 3D tree around and look for the detached people floating alone in space, and either attach or delete them as necessary. It is nice software, but the way it organizes information isn't the way my brain wants to organize things. Also, I think of all these companies, Synium (MacFamilyTree makers) are the only ones to make other types of software: family trees are not their only focus. And something about the software seems less genealogically informed than the other software. The citations are confusing. The notes are confusing. I think they need more UI testing by genealogy nerds. But don't listen to me -- Apple gave it an "app of the year" award, perhaps hoping people will put on the new Apple view goggles to look at the 3D trees!

So now I am back to Family Tree Maker, because it has useful notes fields with formatting tools and it syncs with Ancestry. Except that since April it is having problems syncing reliably with Ancestry for reasons that are either Ancestry's fault or Russia's fault but certainly not the fault of anyone at MacKiev (owners of FTM). Ahem. Full disclosure: One time I complained about feeling like a beta tester for FTM despite having paid full price -- I said this in a Facebook discussion group for FTM users. The owner/CEO of MacKiev stalked me back to my personal FB page to message me and complain and demand that I delete my comment. I have little faith in the sanity or wisdom of the management of FTM, and let's remember that they inherited/bought the bones of the program from Ancestry and did not develop it from scratch themselves. I understand that they are in the middle of a war zone but while that is unfortunate I still need my software to work. Their chat help desk is usually helpful and always polite, so they've got that going for them.

So I fired up FTM, updated it with the latest update, synced with Ancestry despite the Orange sync weather status, and all went well. Now I'm working directly in FTM and will only sync up to Ancestry going forward. This will make my Ancestry pages look weird but no one is paying me to make Ancestry look nice. So far I really like the big Notes field with bolding and italic and colors and bulletpoints. I also like the non syncing "research" note field that I am using for research logs. I like the to do lists. I think I will be OK so long as I only ever sync in one direction. I guess the worst case scenario is that I just don't sync things, but I have a software design that I get along with. My big learning after several years with FTM on both Mac and Windows is: NEVER try to sync bidirectionally. Pick your work space -- Ancestry or FTM -- and do not change it. Sync up or sync down, never both. Also, do not wait too long to sync. If there is too much data the program chokes and crashes. MacKiev recommends a convoluted process of compacting your database frequently and repeatedly (because I guess their compacting routine is inefficient). None of the other software requires database maintenance. And let's be real, we are talking people's family trees, not giant mainframes of data. Nevertheless, I ritualistically follow the maintenance steps and perhaps you should too. Remember to back up.

Other options I have tried and rejected:

RootsMagic: I can't stand the drip drip drip syncing where you have to approve each change as it happens. It also has an ugly layout.

Legacy: Doesn't have a Mac version, but I used it a decade ago on Windows successfully. It has a free version that I think was all I ever used, but you can pay for more features. Does not sync with anything.

Reunion: Solid program, doesn't sync with anything, extremely outdated interface. Super super support though. You could email those guys and they would email you back your own personalized program the next day with the problem solved. I think they are also the most expensive option. I also liked that it defaults to Mac programs for everything. Those are some hardcore Mac people. I could imagine going back to them if all else fails.

BrothersKeeper: This was the first program I ever used, back in the 90s on MS-DOS. We didn't even have Ancestry then. We just hung out in AOL chatrooms shouting out our surnames and looking for connections. It is still available but I haven't looked at it in decades. Truly old-school website. I have only good memories.

Gramps: I think of this as my retirement program. It looks like a hard uphill slog to figure out how it works with the many "applet plug-ins." Just that phrase turns me off. It does not look attractive. But it is free and open-source and perhaps when I am retired I will have time to play with it. Though likely not.

Links are provided as a convenience and are not endorsements of any particular program, nor are they part of any affiliate scheme. I just thought you might want to look for yourself.

x-posted from my own journal

Current Mood: curious

MacFamilyTree 10

MacFamilyTree 10 is out. I finally, finally gave up on satisfactorily syncing with FamilyTreeMaker, and in fact I've given up the dream of syncing with anything. I've moved all my genealogy stuff to my MacBookAir and use MacFamilyTree there and MobileFamilyTree on my iPad. I research in Ancestry and FamilySearch and other places like usual, but I enter information by hand into my tree if I feel convinced by it. Otherwise I put it in my notes.

Wondering if other people are using MacFamilyTree and have pointers or tips? Or indeed any other procedural advice?

Also hoping to keep this community active. I went through the membership list a while ago and added people to my circle if they'd been posting relatively recently. A lot of members seem to have left DW though.

Free genealogy webinar event: October 21, 2022

The San Angelo Genealogical and Historical Society is hosting a virtual genealogy webinar event tomorrow, Friday, October 21. It's free to view and doesn't require registration.

Here's the presentations:

Deciphering Handwriting in Genealogical Records

Improve, Expand, and Enrich your Family Tree – With Tax Records!

Choosing Genealogy Services & Software

Building and Researching Your Family Tree

Citing Sources Without Stressing Out

Making the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center Your Research Assistant

How to Approach and Solve Brick Wall Problems with DNA

United States Migration Patterns: Why They Left, Where They Went, and the Stories They Left Behind

Signal Boost: Free GRIP Zoom webinars in June & July

GRIP Evening Programs:

DUE TO SPONSOR GENEROSITY, THESE PROGRAMS ARE FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FOR EACH WEEK OF GRIP [Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh] IN PITTSBURGH, PA. We thank them for their sponsorship. Please visit each sponsoring organization’s website for the Zoom program registration link which may be on their home page or an events page. Speaker biographies are available under the Faculty tab.

PRESENTATIONS in 2022 begin at 7 PM EDT (4 PM Pacific) and will be held via Zoom meeting. Pre-Registration is required through the sponsoring organizations’ links below. KEEP THE CONFIRMATION EMAIL that the sign-up generates. This will be the ONLY reminder and contains the link to join the meeting at the appropriate hour. You will need to register for each meeting separately.

The programs start June 20th and run through July 14th. You have to register for each webinar individually with the sponsoring genealogical society; the links can be found on the Evening Programs page.

Speakers and topics:

Rebecca Whitman Koford, CG, CGL. “Research Logs: Write or Regret It!”

Debbie Abbott, Ph.D. “Through the Eyes of a Genealogist: Paul Newman”

CeCe Moore. “Serendipitous Story of John Doe and an Adoptee: Searching for Identity”

Michael Lacopo. “Methods for Identifying the German Origins of American Immigrants”

Karen Stanbary, MA, LCSW, CG®. “It’s All About Respect: Clinical Tips to Manage Uncomfortable Conversations about Surprising DNA Test Results”

Annette Burke Lyttle. “Reconstructing the Lives of Our Farming Ancestors”

David Rencher, AG, CG, FUGA, FIGRS, “An Update on What’s New at FamilySearch and the 1950 Census Indexing Project”

Rich Venezia. “Alien Registrations in America”

Ancestry World Explorer membership: $1 for 3 months

A kind soul posted this discount code link on r/genealogy! Perfect timing for those of us losing Ancestry Library remote access later today.

Original post / coupon seems to be working with almost every account, with people reporting getting a credit/refund on previously purchased subscriptions? However, it MIGHT only work for US accounts.

Signal Boost: San Angelo Genealogical & Historical Society webinar event

San Angelo Genealogical & Historical Society's Genealogy Cornucopia is happening in a few days and is free to attend:

Join us on Oct 15th for an all-day come-and-go virtual event! Featuring eight presentations on DNA, maps, German ancestry, methodology, and more, sessions begin at 10:00 am and continue through the day. This FREE event is open to the public; anyone can attend. Where else can you see a lineup of top speakers and excellent topics like this, for free! Advance registration is required, sign up below. For more information, download the flyer linked below.

Presentation Schedule (but you can watch them in any order you wish):

10:00 – 10:50 am: NARA Mythbusters: Your Family IS in the Archives by Judy G. Russell

11:00 – 11:50 am: Methodology: Using Timelines to Focus Your Research by Susan Ball

12:00 – 1:15 pm: Beginning Genealogy Workshop by Kathy Huber

1:25 – 2:30 pm: So, You’ve Found Your German Town of Origin, Now What? by Teresa Steinkamp McMillin

2:40 – 3:35 pm: Fingerprinting Our Families: Using Ancestral Origins as a Genealogical Research Key by Curt B. Witcher

3:45 – 5:00 pm: Attacking 18th and 19th Century Mysteries with DNA by Blaine Bettinger

5:10 – 6:00 pm: Filling in the Family Stories by Susan Kaufman

6:10 – 7:00 pm: Discover Genealogical Treasure Using Historic U.S. Maps by Hannah Kubacak

Click HERE for a flyer listing the speakers, topics, and times.

Register at this LINK; advance registration is required. You will receive an email a few days prior to October 15th with a link to the event site.

This event sponsored by the Waco McLennan County Library and the Texas State Genealogical Society is part of the Texas Genealogy Network, a state-wide, collaborative Online Genealogy Symposium for family historians

donating family records to a repository

From the Society of American Archivists, Donating Your Personal or Family Records to a Repository:

For millennia, written records have provided essential clues to the past. Through letters, diaries, and unpublished writings of many types, and also through the audible, visual, and electronic records of recent times, researchers have been able to study and understand much about the history of particular families, communities, businesses, and organizations, the history of specific events and broader societal trends, and the history of the United States in general. Letters, emails, diaries, photos, and other material accumulated over the years give vital and unique information regarding your life or the history of your family. These materials obviously matter to you, and they may be important to your community, state, or nation, too. Whether or not members of your family attained a degree of fame, they have contributed to the heritage of a certain place and time. When you donate your personal or family records to a manuscript repository, your family history becomes a part of your community’s collective memory.

I know a lot of older genealogists who worry about their family's documents, since often they're the only ones who're interested in making records/organizing them/taking care of them. Donating collections to a local archive might be a good way to make sure that those records are available for future generations.

Deadline today! US seeking comment on proposed fee hike for immigration records

Dec. 30 is the deadline to submit a comment to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services over a proposed fee hike to access some records, some of which date back more than 100 years and are useful to genealogists.

The USCIS wants to increase the fee for obtaining immigration files by 500%, which means some people would have to pay more than $600 for the documents. The move would affect families of the millions of people who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

From NPR: Tracing Your Family's Roots May Soon Get A Lot More Expensive

Genes Blog Feed

For those interested in UK genealogy, I made myself a Dreamwidth feed for Chris Paton's Genes Blog a while back. He's has a specialist interest in Scottish & Irish research, but it's the best thing I know of to keep up with the family history news, site additions, free access weekends, price changes etc. etc.

https://genes-blog-feed.dreamwidth.org/

(You can just subscribe to it on Dreamwidth like a community.)

Of less general interest but also good, I also made one for this blog, again, by a British family historian, mostly articles on the author's research (often Yorkshire-based) and current genealogical issues: https://pasttopresent-feed.dreamwidth.org/

Research reports

This might be old news but over the weekend I read this article by Elizabeth Shown Mills on using research reports to organize your research. I've been trying to get myself organized to write up the family history I have but I had kind of stalled. So I tried this and ponderous and tedious as it seems, it's really helping. It's giving me a place to put all the loose ends that I need to look up and all the weird little questions. I am trying to do a research report on the family group of every couple in my direct line. At least, that's what I've started. Has anyone else done this or done something similar?

Genetic genealogy and privacy

How have privacy considerations impacted your use of genetic genealogy?

Of course, privacy concerns around genetic information are not new, but lately they've been getting lots of mainstream attention. Here's a small sampling of articles from the past year:

Genome Hackers Show No One's DNA Is Anonymous Anymore

How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations

One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With The FBI

How do you approach the issue of genetic privacy in your research? Have you changed your practices at all in response to recent news? How do you talk with family members about privacy concerns when they are thinking of being tested? What are your privacy best practices when using sites like GEDMatch or FamilyTreeDNA?

ThruLines

So, Ancestry.com has introduced ThruLines in their DNA results section. I really enjoyed working with mine, but there were some weirdnesses, such as useless private links. What do other people think?

He even got a statue of himself.

I had decided to investigate the Knisley lines in our family history and see how many ways it was spelled in the past. Many, many ways is the answer. While investigating, I came across someone who had a lot of public photos on Ancestry. Many were of a statue and plaque so I googled the name. It seems we have a distant cousin who was a war hero from the Boer War. I had no idea Canada sent troops to the Boer War. He even had a statue erected to his honour in his home town of Jarvis Ontario. Jarvis is and was a small farming community in south-western Ontario.

Our distant cousin was Corporal William A Knisley and he was a fifth cousin three times removed. This is a guy who signed up for a mop-up against guerrilla fighters after the end of the first Boer War. In the course of things he rescued an unhorsed comrade under enemy fire, while wounded, and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

When his term ended he returned home to his father’s farm near Jarvis. But apparently things were very dull on the farm and when the chance came to sign up again and return to southern Africa, he leaped at the chance. (I’m inclined to quote Forrest Gump at this point, but that would be unkind, and possibly untrue. I don’t know for sure that William was un-bright.)

Knisley signed up with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles. During a battle, Knisley and five others were separated from their group and tried to make it back to the British base overland. They fought off their enemy for two days and when the Boers pinned them down, managed to hold them off for a third day fighting until they had exhausted their ammunition before they surrendered. Kinsley and another were killed during the fighting.

More details with pictures here.

New Kid

Hi all. New kid here. Old kid to genealogy. New kid to Ancestry and DNA.

Are there any sourcess for Genealogy-related icons? I'm looking for use here as well as Ancestry.

(no subject)

Recently I was corresponding with a new-found third cousin and we were moaning about the difficulties of researching in the western provinces when she provided me with a little story about how her family went west. Short story shorter, " Our line headed out to Manitoba in the same generation as Mary Ann and co (her brother James William and his wife came out - she was on her own, pregnant, with the older children and ended up shipwrecked after a storm on the lake, and gave birth on Manitoulin Island".

When I read that, I shouted, "Wait! I know this story." Which I speedily typed out and sent to her and then I had to dig up the links. I could have just sent her the link to A Little Mystery Solved. It's interesting to see how family stories can be retained by some parts of the family and lost to other parts. At this point, we think maybe Mrs. Morley and kids were on the Manitoulin which wrecked just off Manitoulin Island with only two lives lost. Mind you that was several months before the Asia sank so we aren't sure why they thought Mrs Morley and kids were on the Asia. I did find out where the fourth child came in, I guess that was the paper's subtle way of letting those who knew about the pregnancy know the child had arrived safely.

I just wanted to share this as a follow up to my original post because truly the answers are out. Even the ones to little stories that give the past some texture. (I think this is one of the coolest stories I've had happen while researching my family history.)

Ancestry's 4th of July video

I thought people here might enjoy the video Ancestry made for U.S. Independence Day. Everyone featured in the video is descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

( Embedded video under the cut )

Book rec: The German in America (Bogen, 1852)

Several branches of my family emigrated from Germany to the US, so lately I've been doing some background reading on German history. Today I came across The German in America by F. W. Bogen (link goes to archive.org, where there's a full scan of the book). It's a guidebook for German immigrants published in 1852. The book is in German with a facing-page English translation and contains advice about travel arrangements, learning English, finding work, and adjusting to American ways, as well as the full text of the US Constitution and biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

It's neat to think about the possibility that my ancestors might have used this book or one like it.

Here's my favorite passage:

"If you intend to go to the interior, be not detained either in New-York or in other great cities by Germans residing there. They will tell you stories about bears and wolves, and impenetrable forests, and poisonous swamps, which they say, are in the interior; they will paint before you phantoms of terror of every kind, in order to detain you in the cities. Believe them not! Be not deceived thereby! If you have relations or acquaintances in the interior, who have written you, travel to them. If you were accustomed to a country life in Germany, and like it, a country life in America will please you, as many thousands of your countrymen are very much pleased with it, and are doing very well."

Ancestry DNA Match - Tracking down the Elusive Cousin Match

Back in February, I was notified I had a new match in the first to second cousin range. This is rare. I personally know my first and first once removed cousins, and I know of my second cousins so I was excited. I sent a message off right away. *crickets*

So I (im)patiently wait. And wait. Yesterday I fired off a less enthused message and crossed my fingers. Here is the exchange that took place last night:

Me: Hi my name is L. I sent an email a while back which may have been a little too enthused. I was just so happy to see someone appear on my list of matches that was so closely related. If you would like to discuss this further I would love to hear from you.

SW: Hi my great grandfather is F H.

Me: My grandfather was F H from Ontario. He was married to L L from Muskoka District Ontario. Their children were E, F, C and O. Is this the same family?

SW:Yes. Is your dad C?

Me: Yes. (and now I know roughly who this is) Are you one of D's kid?

SW: Yes. I'm his son.

Me: Is this Wes?

Wes is my brother's grandson. I don't know him personally. Due to family weirdness and a divorce, I've only met my brother a handful of times, and never met his children (all adults) or their kids. But this was just another incident of "small world" that I thought was worth sharing. It could only have happened because of Ancestry.

Random Moments in Family History Research

"Not another Michael Shank!" Said loudly when your collateral relatives and direct ancestors prove themselves yet again, to be sadly lacking in imagination when it comes to naming their children. This is number six in an eighty year time-span. And I'm not counting the variations on the surname. That adds a bunch more to the lot.