Month: June 2019

One Flower on the Stone

One flower was all I left because it was all I really needed to leave. Life intervened and I was unable to make my cemetery visits in time for Memorial Day. My visit to graves was nearly a month late, but I’ve decided that the timing is not necessarily what’s really important. It’s the visit […]

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Citing What It Does Not Say

This is part of one of the online trees for a relative of mine. I’ve eliminated the name and the precise date of birth because I’m more interested in how Ancestry.com handles citing sources than who this specific individual is whose birth is being cited. I’ve also seen problems like this countless times so I […]

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AncestryDNA Now Extrapolates in the Trees

It was bad enough that AncestryDNA was algorithmically extrapolating ancestors from their seemingly a·mor·phous “Big Tree” in the separate ThruLines section of their DNA analysis site. While Thrulines is decidedly not perfect, if one is aware of its limitations and uses it carefully (with their brain turned on and critical thinking skills engaged), use can […]

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Interviewing Grandma

[reprinted from June of 2003]from the Ancestry Daily News  Michael John Neill – 6/4/2003 Interviewing GrandmaSummer, along with family trips and reunions, is quickly approaching. This week we take a short look at obtaining oral information from relatives. While its accuracy is sometimes questionable, for most of us oral history is a great starting point to […]

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Genealogy Is An Art

I was trained as a mathematician, so on one level the title of this post really bothers me. On the other hand, it is true-at least partially. It is also true that mathematics is an art as well. An art, grounded with rules, laws, theorems, and postulates. But even “art” has rules, rules of color, […]

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