Genealogy

As I recreate my digital tree,  I am trying to be better about sources.  You have heard of my ongoing struggle with sources and citations. This has expanded to grouping into repositories and chunking source text.  Familysearch only being collaborative on dead people draws my attention to verifying people are dead. I find myself looking at cemetery records and   obituaries   . Reporting I like printouts as backups. I also find them easier to review.   (Did I fail to mention the amount of missing bits I found, as I went back to update citations?  Wouldn't it be nice it I could print out a report like I just entered for side by side comparison?)  Clearly I like writing on my printouts too. My recent pain is after typing a lot, is that I have yet to find an easy way to print it out from gramps. The descendant tree is not cited. The sources report is just a dump of some bits: sources and citations, but not repositories or notes (links, academic ci...

I have been re-entering huge amounts of data from a report into GRAMPS recently. I'm struggling to document my sources this time. The repository and the source for the report seemed easy enough  - and single point modifiable if they need tweaking later. I've been putting a citation in for each family and person with a page number. Trying to use that information is a failure. Turns out garbage in garbage out. Revisited this demonstration of pulling in a family search record: Gramps repositories, sources, citations https://youtu.be/oY6nn3Eobb4 In addition to a page number it was repeating the name and event. This seems horribly tedious despite differentiating the citation. I'm watching another video https://youtu.be/Y5hijkAF6eE . You can create your citation, Drag it to your clipboard,  and  drag it to families, individuals, and events. That makes it much easier. I think that leaves me with at least as many references (I am willing to take on events now), but fewer citatio...

 A family member (or maybe more as the text conversation continues) has been helping me update her branch of the family tree by text message! Thanks! In the past I have scribbled on some descendant tree print out (or a napkin) and then updated the tree online and sent a copy. This still happens. Having lost everything with a computer failure, I am starting from scratch. (Yes, I am ignoring familysearch for now. A great many are recent live offspring. Although I have also asked about inlaws I am likely to run into at gatherings. I am keeping the local copy separate as I may try to mangle the local familysearch data.) I have created a new GRAMPS tree for her branch.  The thing that makes today's effort different is trying to record the source information. Looked at  gedcom - Citing a conversation with a living relative - Genealogy & Family History Stack Exchange  for an idea of how to do this. As suggested I added a repository, Personal Collection, and a Source des...

 I have enjoyed a lifelines descendant report with a line per person with birthday death day and marriage date. This contains similar information as in a family historical report in an outline format rather than family lists and an index(In familysearch, it is possible run a series of family reports.) I just figured I'd try something like Report>text>descendant . The form was not compact as I like with multiple line entries and blank lines in between. There were no page numbers. Below I have a paragraph describing documents to help understand the power of the reports. I compared the the contents with an earlier report (details omitted). Broadly it was most of the people considering the limited branch and only dead people limit. Lots of details were not quite the same and death dates were added. Unfortunately children were not displayed in birth order making comparison a bit tougher. Trying the child order issue exposed me to another aspect of Gramps, Addons. https://www.gramp...

 Back to that python script for exporting GEDCOM from familysearch mentioned in an earlier blog https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/GEDCOM GitHub Desktop After following a couple of links one sees it under source control with git. I have never used it with Windows before. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git shows 3 options.  The last, desktop https://desktop.github.com/ , mentions CRLF handling and 64 bit installs. Run the GitHub Desktop installer. Approve permissions. log in. Bonus: my password manager even remembers my credentials from my last job. Luckily my personal email was in the list of for verification. Configure it for URL https://github.com/Linekio/getmyancestors and get errors. :( Failed to execute getStatus: ENOENT Git could not be found at the expected path: 'C:\Users\karen\AppData\Local\GitHubDesktop\app-2.6.3\resources\app\git\cmd\git.exe'. This might be a problem with how the application is packaged, so confirm this folder hasn't ...

What tools do I want to use to track the family tree? This will be an ongoing discussion on several topics. Clearly it is possible to track the tree with paper and pencil. For me a typewriter adds legibility. The computer makes it easy for your reports to reflect small changes, and look at the information in different ways. Given my background, computers is the way to go. After a family gathering with much note taking on the part of my father, I made my first attempt with lifelines running on linux, a free option. The ancestor charts at www.paffendorf.sj.ca.us/Family published in 1999 came from that effort.  Since them we have tried assorted tools including Ancestor, Reunion, and most recently familysearch.  We often transferred person and family information using gedcom. This could be awkward with id's varying, and knowing what information to keep from each side. I am unable to list my computers in detail. I can say my recent mac is unusable and I have not delved into my att...

What is the best way of sharing my geneaolgy progress and questions with friends and family with a minimum effort? Quite frankly it could apply to any subject area. What are my journaling goals? How much do these overlap? Apparently I still don't know. Facebook is a broadcast media that reaches a wide number of people  that may be interested. One of the the things I have enjoyed is responses from people I would not have thought to email. Unfortunately Facebook seems best for short posts that do not need to be found again. Also I don't know anybody that understands which posts a user sees. Additionally most of us users are looking to improve the signal to noise ratio of what we read. One of the ways I attempt do this for my audience is put information in comments under previous posts. This balance  always seems uncertain. Facebook seems better suited for raising awareness with a link,  than the actual content.  Blogger seemed to better fit longer narration and using t...

JCP used to correspond with lots of the family. He'd then write a weekly letter with the highlights of each person/family he'd heard from. He'd then scatter the letter across the family. My earliest memories had him typing  with carbon copies -- only so many copies would fit and each one would be lighter than the previous one. We'd pass the copy between the members of our branch of the family. At some  point he changed to mimeograph. I can remember the smell. We still passed them, but the quality became more even. Was the passing an excuse to get together? ;) Or did we just see each other more? (ignoring the pandemic.) I do not have any copies of the Tattler. I think it would be nice to have a family archive of them. I suspect it would be nice to have images and a text transcriptions. Building an index would be more of a challenge. Could we start it and then automate? What should it include? people, crops, milestones, and?  A down and dirty solution could be to  use...

Costs: While you do not have to pay money to use the site, you do yield all rights to your information  to LDS. Reason to Use with Limitations: Shared tree for collaboration (and hopefully centrally backed up). The basic premise is that all dead people are available to everybody and all live people are private to the an individual. I have not figured out how to use their helper id. I am unaware of having family groups share family info. There are some mechanisms to show who made changes. As a user you can follow individuals, and control text/email notifications on several aspects. It is also possible to get some notifications thru the familysearch app. The tools suggests records for people. It also provides a task list that spans people. This mechanism allows for the entering of data with having to type it all in. liked linking writing in a picture to a person in the tree Reasons not to Use: Giving up rights to your own information. Recommended by folks using Ancestry, a pay for se...

 In late January 2021 a family member (GS), requested I populate a familysearch.org with the family tree connecting the NJ Paffendorfs with the CA Greenwoods. My initial response was to mention I had other priorities, and to point her at a long ago effort sharing  ancestry charts & index  in 1999. However I created an account and checked if some folks had already been entered. I did not take notes, but some at the great grandparent level were. I could look at the person records and send thank you messages to those whose work I appreciated. The hook was these little blue index cards indicating records that might apply. Census records would allow me to pull in spouses and children with a couple clicks each. It was addictive. One person leading to the next. This is great. Official records was something I had barely started before my computer ate my efforts.  Statistics: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/sources/sourceBox 104 https://www.familysearch.org/tree/followi...