Month: February 2018

Picturing Some of My DNA Matches

There’s a cousin match on AncestryDNA that I am trying to figure out. I think he’s probably connected to me through my great-great-grandparents, John Michael and Franciska (Bieger) Trautvetter. But I’m not certain. For illustration purposes, I’ve called this match Raymond. Raymond and I have three shared matches: Brad Peggy Ryan I can’t figure these people […]

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Newspapers.com Lets You Know if You’ve Already Clipped That Reference

Keeping track of things that have already been located in newspaper search results can be a challenge–particularly if repeated searches of the same newspapers are warranted due to spelling errors, OCR difficulties with hard-to-read text, etc. Sometimes one finds the same thing over and over again. Newspapers.com lets users “clip” images that contain items of interest. […]

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He’s Not James for very Long

There’s no family Bible and there’s no birth certificate for James William Rampley who was born in Hancock County, Illinois, on 5 August 1868. It’s too early for a civil record of an Illinois birth and he apparently never had a need for a delayed birth certificate. If there was a family Bible in which […]

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Emmar’s Descendant Has Done A DNA Test and Thinking About What It Means

It’s only one test. While the submitter and I are both third great-grandsons of Clark and Mary (Dingman) Sargent, it’s important not to get too excited about a match. Finding one other relative can help with some DNA sorting, but there are limitations. To begin with, even though we are 4th cousins, the amount of […]

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Soundex and Sounds Alike Still Not Working At Ancestry.com–What Gives?

We can only speak for the 1860 census (I’ve not had time to search others), but it appears that the search at  Ancestry.com is still not working correctly. Frautvetter and Frautfetter are Soundex equivalent and certainly sound alike, but broad-based searches for Frautvetter and Frautfetter result in different hits as evidenced by the screen shots which […]

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Finally Understanding an Administrator

Sometimes it takes a while to figure things out. For years I had known that Julius Biermann was the administrator of the 1860-1870 era estate settlement of Michael Trautvetter in Hancock County, Illinois. Michael died without any descendants and his intestate probate was key in understanding the sibling relationship between members of that family who […]

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