Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
“Working from the known to the unknown” is advice often given to beginning genealogists. The premise is that it is best to begin family history research with the individuals about whom you know something, using what is known about those individuals to connect them to earlier people in their family. It’s a valid piece of […]
Working with the DNA of the relatives the researcher “knows all about” can increase their analytical skills so they are better able to work with the families about which they know less. After connecting on FamilyTreeDNA, I located a descendant (called LR for this discussion) of my 5th great-grandfather, Harm Oltmans Roben (died in 1819) […]
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 […]
