Month: August 2017

Figure Out As Many DNA Matches As You Can

  The one thing I would do differently in analyzing my AncestryDNA results: keep track from the very start of all those people I “figured out.” Approximately twenty descendants of my great-great-grandparents have tested. Quite a few more are descendants of various ggg-grandparents. I’m not currently using the AncestryDNA results on problems on all of their lines, […]

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AncestryDNA Beginnings Webinar Released

This hour-long presentation covers the basics of working with DNA matches at AncestryDNA, including: ethnicity estimate–briefly communities–briefly circles–briefly matches An overview of working with your matches, interpreting them, understanding them, analyzing them and organizing them is presented. Challenges of working with treeless matches, matches with incomplete trees, people who don’t respond, etc. are also discussed. This […]

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Three Licenses in a Row

  Apparently my kinfolk decided February 1888 was the time to get a marriage license in Hancock County, Illinois. In fact, three consecutive licenses were issued to my aunts and uncles in the latter part of that month. 8967–Feke Johnson (Janssen), sister to my gg-grandfather. 8968–Tonjes Goldenstein, brother to another gg-grandfather. 8969–Anna Goldenstein, sister to […]

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Those People Can Get Married At My House

I’ve been reviewing the digital images of the records Bethany United Church of Christ in Tioga, Hancock County, Illinois, that were recently placed online at FamilySearch. I’ve been reminded of several things while searching these records. Manually reading the records takes time but discoveries can be made. Hermann H. Schildmann and Anna M. L. Luebker were […]

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Relative Precise Certainty

Summarizing too much can lead to incorrect statements. I reviewed the information on my ancestor table and looked at several of the entries, some of which I summarized in order to save space. If we are not careful a summarization may say something that we do not actually mean to say. My 3rd great-grandmother’s entry […]

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Regrouping for my German Research

As mentioned earlier, my German researcher has taken full time employment and is no longer able to continue working on various members of my Trautvetter-Derle families from Thuringen. Now that I’ve decided who will be continuing the research, I decided it’s a good time to take another look at what I’ve had done and where […]

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Ungeneralizing Generalizations Always Helps

Generalizations and assumptions are necessary to sometimes give our research some focus or a point at which to start. But it is important to remember that generalizations (if they appear to be accurate) are not necessarily true all the time–that’s why they are called “generalizations” and not absolute truths.  Researchers can create headaches for themselves […]

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But Their Information is Wrong!

There is no way to avoid it. Wrong information is everywhere. Wrong information is in online “trees.” Wrong information is in blog posts. Wrong information is in online websites. Wrong information is in printed books. Wrong information is in original records. Whenever a document has the potential to be correct it also has the potential […]

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