Genealogy

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...

As I make progress scanning in these old letters, I am trying to figure out how to best organize the letters for myself and others within the family My first thought is to organize just sequentially. However I am now wondering if what I see as family newsletters should be separated from the private hand written letters. And what of those few that came from a different family member? I have a bunch of files named by YYYYMMDDdesc. The pictures are on one drive and have Google docs with images and text transcriptions. I had hoped sorting these by name would put them in chronological order. Not sure why that failed. Second of all not all of the letters were dated - since a tilde seemed like a bad idea in a filename I used ish. I tried to guess based on content, or even what the letters before and after were. Sigh. A nice thing about the Google docs, is I have been sharing (comment) with the archive owner, who is appreciative of my effort. Having both images and text seems redundant. For hi...

 Periodically devices die. I seem to have a collection of backup strategies that did not work for assorted reasons. (What do you mean CDs become unreadable?) Yet again a friend (you both know who you are) helped take my old computer apart and pull stuff off my hard drive. But it is more than. An environment that understands the files is also needed. As expected this is going to be a long slow process. Today I bought an upgrade license for Reunion13 and got support to look up my old license to Reunion9. (Time to start keeping records of license numbers.) Opened a copy of the old file, and accepted the option to convert the file format. It then gave an error about missing media files. Woot! This was to be expected and is clearly the next step.  For a small, sample it worked! This enables me to look at the branch in the spotlight this week. So I have a bit of a mess with  4 versions of information: familysearch on internet - built with a bit of knowlege and approximately 20...

 I don't really remember tracking this before, but I found a report with cause of death  of a bunch of family. Conceptually, is it limited to cause of death, or should it include other information the doctor might be interested in and be more of a medical history? In the report I found the information was a short phrase. Might it be more detailed?  Technically it became a question of where should this information be entered, and how do I print it off? Attributes SSN Let me revisit the topic of Social Security Death Indexes (SSDI) as a use case. One of the person attributes available was Social Security Number (SSN). Entering this information there seemed obvious. Then came time to report it.  Attributes different than other information associated with people. By default, GRAMPS lists people by name and birth in the main view. An attribute is not something one might add.  Attributes is one of the things that can be displayed in the gramplet on a per person basis....

Came at the attempt to find out when people died from a different angle. Started looking at US social security death indexes (US SSDI) - focussing on free:  https://www.cyndislist.com/us/social-security/how-to/  (yes there is a link to family search here but I am trying to prove they are dead before moving them over.) https://www.cyndislist.com/us/social-security/ssdi/   http://www.donslist.net/PGHLookups/SSDIM.htm   https://stevemorse.org/ssdi/ssdi.html   Generally searched on first name, last name (married), and birth year using birthdate to confirm the correct entry. I took one that was several days off. Some had no entries. Was what I had in error?  Reporting The list I worked from came from GRAMPS>Tools>Utilities>Verify the Data . There were many "Old age but no death" people. I trimmed it down by setting the maximum age to 110, and then 100, ...  In hindsight, I wish, I had printed a list of people with birth dates, and creat...

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...