Genealogy

Warning: Work In Progress   I wanted to capture links. In general, I have entered just enough of the familytree into an internet tool, to get the tool to give me information.  Familysearch grew my tree using census records. :) FamilytreeDNA has pushed tree maintenance to MyHeritage.MyHeritage permitted me to upload a gedcom. Now it tells me of smart matches with familysearch and the tree based on the uploaded gedcom, which was scraped 4 up and 4 down from familysearch some time ago, but you have to pay. :(  Ancestry records are payfor/library - I don't really recall setting it up. I "inherited" some family papers, including adoption papers. Since somebody could not find adoption records, they documented the assumption that the name change was unofficial. Found it, attached to the mother in findagrave. I have sent the person an email (it bounced). I forwarded to the owner of the grave. I also put a flower on the grave with a note. Is this something I would think to lo...

When I started on Familysearch, hints were addictive, causing me to add information to people, and people to the tree. About a month ago I realized I had a lot of hints that I had not processed.  (To look at them start at your top page, scroll down to record hints and select view all; or from the same page look at the second menu list row across the top and select hints.) (Another reminder that is becoming annoying with the unfinished attachments - especially when what they want you to attach is “UNKNOWN”.) I started try to knock off a backlog of family hints and remembered why I had not  done some of them: ugly merges, not wanting to step on other people’s toes having attached to their trees, … However I tended to forget what I started looking at, and the truly new ones were getting buried. So I need a research log where I can easily see if I have looked at something before. Goldie May (GM), a chrome extension with familysearch access, seems to fit the bill. I heard about it ...

Events associated with a place Recently I saw a picture of a frozen Barnegat Bay, that had me flashing back to a time with  people driving on the ice and falling thru. I had a range of years it could have been, but not a precice cold snap. So I googled it and found a newspaper article , I found it interesting and  worthy of sharing. (To be fair I have memories of ice skating, an ocean beach fire permit, and assorted other things too.) However the people in the article were not ones I knew, so in GRAMPS I started attaching them to the town my family owned in but never had a residence. Technically it is not even  a town in the article , it is across the bridge near which the one car sank. (BTW this blo wganted to self configure a link instead of using the embed html that newspapers.com offered.) In my mind the further spot  was straight across the bay from our boats and in the range of "stay in sight" to play and was where we took power  boats for gas, so still a...

 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 ...

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...