Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
There were 283 digital images that I received from the Mexican War Pension file of Gardner Ramsey. I’m never going to transcribe the entire set of documents. However, taking notes is an excellent idea. As I take those notes, I don’t need to complete a complete citation for every document. The images are numbered sequentially, […]
Excitement about discoveries should never cause us to forget what we know and to put aside reasoning and analysis. One of my closest matches on GedMatch is one with whom I share 50 centimorgans of DNA. That’s a significant amount for me as most of my matches there are more distantly removed than that. In […]
This is the first time I have ever found a relative’s photograph in an archival collection in any library. And a wonderful picture it is. It can be very easy to overlook special collections at regional, college, and university libraries in our ancestral search. Any archival collection has the potential to contain material on a […]
Early registration for my webinar on “Problem-Solving with DNAPainter and GedMatch” ends on 20 November 2018. That’s to give people time to have their data uploaded to GedMatch and be processed. We’ll discuss using these two sites together to analyze, interpret, and make discoveries from their DNA matches. Join us. There’s more details in our […]
I’ve been working on DNA matches at AncestryDNA in an attempt to make discoveries and validate connections on the family of my Irish immigrant ancestors, Samuel and Anne (Murphy) Neill. The natives of Ireland are believed to have been from different parts of Ireland who married in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1864. Samuel had one brother, […]
Sometimes I use the “Suggested Records” at Ancestry.com because sometimes some of them are helpful. And then there are times like this when the “Suggested Records” are virtually impossible to navigate–like this result for James Neill who was living in Ireland in 1911. There is not enough detail so that I can tell which ones […]
I can’t decide if I like the Ancestry.com ads for AncestryDNA with Kelly Ripa or not. My DNA results don’t pinpoint my origins with the precision that Ripa’s apparently did–that’s not a big surprise. That doesn’t really bother me either–advertising is what it is and there are ways to avoid Facebook and television advertisements. I didn’t take […]
I don’t think Joseph Sargeant entertained his cattle in the 21st century sense, but that is the word John Sargent uses in his will to describe his son’s use of John’s property to raise his cattle. At least I really doubt the Sargeant family provided fun and games for their cattle in the early 18th […]
It’s a derivative copy of a derivative copy of Gardner Ramsey’s death certificate. Classification of sources as being either original or derivative sometimes seems like a pedantic activity that takes time away from more immediately gratifying activities. It may be correct to not even refer to “classification of sources” as being gratifying in any sense. […]
