Genealogy

Post under construction... As the weather gets less inviting, I am willing to spend more time at the computer again. Have not yet reviewed my blog entries from last spring for To Dos. What  sticks out in my mind? Recovering from a computer failure is more than  just finding files, but also the environment to understand them (And cds become unreadable). I have been grateful for every paper report generated. Anybody have a Mac with reunion? Waiting for the pro to be released with an m1 chip. I spent time populating family search with records. I have learned that stuff on the web can change/dissappear.  I should  copy these records out to somewhere I control. I spent time searching the web to prove people were dead. I do not like the gramps sources document to pull the information back out. (Have not tried the variant someone announced this summer.) Also desire a matrix with people/events and level of proof. How does the blogger app not have lists? (cool started draft o...

 A family member stumbled across a file of correspondance with my grandfather and knew that I would be interested in reading them and sharing them with others in the family. :)  I am still wondering what happened to grandpa's archives, which I have found referenced (not just in my head). "Last week, when filing away the past year's Tattlers... We have accumulated six great volumes of our letters and thier replies" -- JCP April 2, 1984 Here it is a nice summer day and I am home in my office. defensively citing rumors of jellies. sigh. Did actually go to bed at a recent hour. Reading about grief and estates seemed like a good stopping point.  (To be fair there were bits that made me smile too.) Besides I was reading ahead. Trying to use my curiosity as a goad to scan the files. Besides part of the fun may be reminiscing with others over things like preserving food, celebrations, ... So how to best take advantage of the short term loan? I do not have a good process in p...

  P1 Population and Housing So far I have focussed on people I know of. I should verify thier ages, birth places, work, industry . I should also see if I can chase down an agriculture questionaire... Ancestry I have discovered shoebox for saving those census entries that I could not tie to the abbreviated tree. I have submitted name changes for the P1 forms I have found of interest. I have added a few since round 1. 1950 census archive.gov I went back and found urls that were more specific to the sheets of interest. I also caught up on the transcriptions for this tool. familysearch Not yet indexed internally. Tried seach ancestry records. Did get results in ancestry with no obvious way to cross link between tools. While there may be ways to deal with it, I happily procrastinate until it is available in a way that does not require it. This broader search criteria may be good for those I have yet to locate. Recording in GRAMPS I asked for help with my GRAMPS issues on discourse . I f...

During the conference, Rootstech 2022 https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/home, there was frequent mention of 1950 census information becoming available to the public April 1, 2022.  A collaboration between familysearch and ancestry with artificial intelligence (AI) to read the images and transcribe them, was  an exciting innovation since the 1940 data became available. My focus was on other things at the time, but it is possible to catch many lectures now. Today I found the most useful search term was 1950, as I did not want to pull in other countries and the titleing was inconsistant.    Lisa Louise Cooke suggests preparation:   https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/5-ways-to-prepare-to-use-the-1950-us-federal-census  Find people in your tree   Get thier addresses  learn the forms and questions https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/questionnaires/1950_1.html  Figure out Enumeration Districts (ED) and f...

 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...

 Last night we had a fine family zoom "talking story" about Thanksgivings past. We talked food, football, and hikes.... I was talking about my grandfather's last two residences when one of the Californians asked, "where are these places?" She had certainly heard of all of the places he had lived. I am afraid I fumbled.  I know roughly how to travel between them and how far it takes by car. I realize the limits of my geography as I think of high points and rivers, farming vs hardwoods vs bulldozed pinelands. What was she looking for? These are the things that keep me up at night. Then I go to the technology that is easier for me to quantify what I know and and things I want to figure out.  (Of course the person who asked the question was on the phone.) Here it is the morning after and I am trying to capture my thoughts for when I have time to get back to it. At the very least, it is time to get my genealogy out of my home's common areas and into the den. Unfo...

A limited time offer for newspapers.com  was publicized from https://genealogybargains.com/ and its related facebook page.  Do Over Let me backtrack a moment. I had found a cheat sheet for citations  that cited the page above. As I had recently "started over" digitally, trying to record sources this time, I found myself intrigued by https://genealogybargains.com/genealogy-do-over-start-here/ I hoped to gain some insight from a professional that actually gave some thought to the subject. It describes 12 steps (and suggests you take a week for each). It had a facebook group. The reason I go through this is to get to my new acronym, BSO. Please bear with my notes and introspection. The sections immediately below are  based on  series of facebook posts as I started going through the material. Like most things genealogy, they are a work in progress. Watch upcoming blogs. Golden rules: I've been working on citing my sources. I see I can do better with dates of my eff...