Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
A researcher is never finished encountering incorrect transcriptions for a last name. But this one exceeded my expectations: Trutwettcevette for Troutvetter While transcription errors are frustrating, I can usually see how someone read the name incorrectly. I’m not even trying in this case as it’s not worth my time. I’m not even certain how they […]
I struggle with terms and definitions. In this blog post, I muse on “statements.” This is not meant to be an edict, but rather an attempt on my part to work through terminology and definitions in order to make my work as accurate, clear, and consistent, as possible. I’ve only reviewed this blog post twice–so […]
I was quoted several years ago in an article on the FamilySearch blog, “3 Ways to Unravel the Mysteries of Women in Your Family Tree.” Female ancestors present challenges for ways mentioned in the article. Here are few of my female ancestors for whom I was able to locate a great deal of records and where […]
No one lives forever and at some point one needs to decide what the “goals” ‘of their genealogy research are. There are no general right or wrong answers. There are just answers for one individual. For me, I’ve decided that I’m not really interested in tracing all the descendants of any of my umpteenth great-grandparents. […]
Not all of DNA matches have trees, but those that do can keep one aware of reasons why those matches might not make sense. The issue with this match is one that we’ve discussed before here, but some warnings are worth repeating. This match (whose tree is partially shown) is a descendant of Sarke (Fecht) […]
A few reminders based upon personal experience and reality about posting something in a blog or any online forum–genealogy-related or not: You do not know who will read your content. You cannot control how people react to that information. You cannot control where or how people respond to what you posted. No one has to […]
Don’t get me wrong, I like FamilySearch and all the digital images of records they have online. I’m not so impressed with their new tool to help one find digital images of original records that have been placed on their site. According to a post on the FamilySearch site “FamilySearch New Tool Unlocks Data in […]
The genealogy-world is aflutter over MyHeritage’s free photo colorization feature on their website (https://www.myheritage.com/incolor). Color me not really impressed. Personally I’ve never been one to see the value in the colorization of photographs that were originally black and white. The determination of the actual colors appears to be somewhat based upon guesswork and I struggle […]
The phrase “complete relative” is one that I made up because it seems to fit the situation. E. Grass (1886-1935) is related to me in three ways. The relationship is such that when one gets to her great-grandparents every one of her ancestors is one of my ancestors. The reason is fairly simply (or maybe […]
