Your Genealogy Matters

The other day we found a box that had been packed when we moved from Ohio to Maryland some four and a half years ago.  As I was unpacking it, I found a thumb drive (USB Jump Drive) that had been in that box for four years. It got me thinking.  Did I even remember it was missing? I received my first computer in 1989.  It was a hand-me-down from someone that I had dated at the time, who worked with computers.  I can't tell you the name of the machine - it was something from a minor manufacturer - except it ran DOS and was really limited, came with a green on black CRT and about the only thing it was good for was word processing, and even at that, was pretty useless. My first REAL computer was in 1992, and it ran Windows. Then came the next computer, and the next, and then a new one approximately every three years. Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 7 and now Windows 10. And those are just the desktops. There were laptops, too - used f...

Remember when you were in junior high, or middle school, and the math teacher gave you a problem to solve:  5+X=8. Any first grade graduate could look at this and know it is three, but if you answer was "3", you got the question wrong with a nasty little note that said "Show work". This chart is a lot like that "Show work" comment.  To know that you understand the foundations of that answer, you need to know how the whole thing works. In the olden days - before computers, like 1978, we used canon law relationship charts , like this one to calculate how one person was related to one and another person. Today, just like in algebra, you push a button and you get your answer.   But how do you know that the computer program got to that answer? It is important that even IF you have a computer, and who doesn't that you understand how this chart works. So let's agree on two basic premises: 1) The chart we are using was written out in a c...

I also ways pride myself on being able to figure out the make model and year of a car - any car - built between 1920 and today. Sometimes, I get a submission and its pretty damn impossible to figure it out, no matter what you do. The picture above is one of those pictures.   And here's why. Before 1913, American cars were pretty simple, and most, not all, looked rather alike.  One best example of the exception were the Ford Model T, cars made by the Franklin Motors Company which were air cooled and needed no radiator. But most cars were "two box" design.  A large box for carrying passengers, and a small box up front for the engine. In 1913 and through 1916, cars evolved as the transition between the two boxes became smoother, one flowing into the other.   Now the car above is a larger, better finished automobile for the era, and its part of that transitional era of 1913-1916.  Let's take another look at what I am talking about. The area in t...

8 AM, Since last night at 10 PM - yes, I am an old man - nothing had changed for me except I was upright and stumbling about like a new born baby mouse trying to get my eyes open, so I could make coffee so I could WAKE UP. 9 AM, Nothing had changed except decision to have a second cup of coffee.  Everything as it was last night on Ancestry. 9:55 AM, checked Ancestry, nothing.  Still 4 tests in processing. 10 AM, JACKPOT.  Had I not needed to reboot my computer, I would have missed it, but there it was "3 Test in Processing."  I greedily make the husband take the dogs outside, even though it is raining and it was my turn to take them out. 10:05 AM, Well my eldest half brother is my half brother.  No surprise there.  The big surprise is our joint DNA only account for seven pages of my 400 pages of matches. 10:35 AM, The DAILY DOUBLE comes in - "2 Tests" in processing. And BTW, no emails from Ancestry to say "Hey - your tests came in." 10:45,...

So I went to RootsTech this year, and this happened: Ancestry had an amazing deal on DNA Kits and sold a boatload of them, with a limit of "five" per person at an amazing discount. And then afterward, a boatload of these tests got used and they all got shipped to Ancestry for processing. Imagine, thousands and thousands of tests all got shipped into Ancestry's DNA processing center, in window of a month.  And this was all on top of the tests from Christmas that were given as gifts that got mailed in and were received, and were already waiting for processing. INTO THIS, four of my tests - three for family, one for a client - sat, waiting for processing. About six weeks into just sitting in receiving, two of my tests plopped into processing.  Not the first one received, but the middle two.  And then, nothing. I mean N-O-T-H-I-N-G. And this concerned me.  Because the first test had been received two weeks before the first one to plop into processing. Bu...

"We always like the way it looked," is all this photo's back said.  A cousin sent me a picture and asked if I had any idea what kind of car this is? I do, and I will tell you what I told her. From the shape of the car, with its steel wheels, its pontoon front and rear fenders, we have the shape of a car that could have been built from 1934 through 1940. What helps us narrow down the year of the car are its single panel, flat windshield - pre-two piece windshields that reigned from the mid thirties through the early 1950s,  its "low pressure" style tires - earlier tires were run at high pressure and had tubes inside the tires, and its raked but "V'd" front grille in front of the radiator.  This helps us narrow down the vehicle to pre-1936. So we have gone from a decade, to six years, to two years. It's headlights, however are the dead give away.  The are bullet shaped, but they are chrome bullet shaped. And the only company tha...

One of the things that is happening as a result of DNA testing for genealogy is that many people are discovering the same thing: their family members were telling ta1es about being part Cherokee. We see this with clients.  We read about in message boards for Genealogy and DNA groups in forums and on sites like Facebook. People are shocked.  They feel betrayed.  They feel vindicated.  They feel as if the results have to be wrong. But the simple truth is that DNA doesn't lie. And like the myth of descending from "two Huguenot brothers " (which is part and parcel of our family narrative) landing in north America was popular in the first half of the 20th Century, the Cherokee ancestor myth has always been popular in the south, but gained momentum in both white and black society throughout the 20 Century.   Why?  Because including this "myth" of Cherokee blood intermarrying into the family had a great deal to do with how the Cherokee people interac...

One of the many things that social media allows us to do with genealogy is share what we know with relative ease with other people of similar interests.   And one of the easiest ways to do just that is through starting a Facebook group.  There are already numerous genealogy groups available - just try searching a key word and see what comes up. But if you don't find what you want, or like, or if you simply want to share your research with family members, its simple as a snap and a click to get a group going. I'm not going to go through all of the steps that you need to go through to get a group up and running.  Facebook support does a wonderful with that. But I do want to write what it means to be an "Administrator" of a Facebook group. As an Administrator - and everyone who establishes a group on Facebook becomes the de facto leader of that group - you have certain power, and with power, comes responsibilities, just like Superhero's.  It's true!...

In this picture we have Mr. & Mrs. Almet Kennedy of Bucyrus, Ohio.  They are "standing in front of our house, with the new car" , and the picture is undated.  Mr. Kennedy's suit is basic, and Mrs. Kennedy's dress doesn't show us a hemline, so it would be difficult to date the picture based on their clothing.  We can see that the trees are green, and the flowers in the planter under the house are mature.  Their house is on the West side of the road, and sun the is coming from the west, but low in the sky.  There are some leaves in the grass.  Taking all of that into consideration, we can guess that this picture is early fall. In the past we've described how we can use the car in the picture to date the photograph.  So what do we look at on the car to date it?  We would normally start at the license plate, but the picture doesn't give us much on that plate except that the plate is very light in color.  The numbers, barely visible lo...

This post is late - sorry for the delay.  I wish I could give you some amazing reason, but it was just life that got in the way. Today, lets look at cars of the 1930's through 1942, when U.S. automobile production "ended for the duration" of WWII. In the 1930's, there are a a few milestone years: 1932, 1934, 1936 and 1939. 1932 is common seen as the "end" of the Classical era in car designs, and the bottom of the depression.   What I mean by classical car design is that until the end of the 1932 model year, cars had been pretty much what they had been all along.  A boxy passenger compartment, mated to an engine box, four bicyclelike fenders over four wheels.  At the front of the engine compartment was an upright radiator. Out back, there was still no semblance of a luggage trunk as we know it, but there could be an actual "trunk" sitting on a metal rack, like this red 1932 Huppmobile.  For all of its beauty, this "Hupp" is a...

Part of being able to identify a car in any family picture means that you have to be able to understand something about the automobile industry, from 1900 to 1980. In those eighty years, American drivers watched cars evolved from trouble prone, limited range mostly open crude machines - and that is exactly what they were in those early days, crude machines -  to very sophisticated, large vehicles with creature comforts.  But lets take a "QUICK" look at how cars evolved by the Automotive decade, from 1900 to 1932 today, because cars have never evolved in sync with calendar year decades, which are off a few years to the calendar. 1890s to 1915 During this era, there were more than 400 companies making automobiles, and they all looked very much like one and other.  The life span of a car company could be six months, or longer, though most were insolvent after the first year of production.  Cars of this vintage were open, meaning that riders were in the elements, us...

I love this picture more than you will ever know. And evidently, others do too - its been shared, published, colorized cropped - this one has been cropped so we can focus on the car better. My great grandmother, Hattie and her sister Ethel, used to make the drive from Ohio, to Florida every year. I have dozens of images of them having a picnic on the beach, all dressed up by today's standards. This picture is not them, although Hattie did own this same make model and year car. First of all, we know somethings about the picture.  So lets review them. 1) We know that this is either a dark blue or a black four door sedan. 2) We can see the dual tailights. 3) We can see the license plate, Ohio, but the year - because of JPG compression, is blocky.  It looks like 1942, but we'll come back to that. 4) We can just see, just to the left of the man's head, the hood detail and the position of the headlight. 5) We can also see that the paint on the car is in good c...

Yesterday I announced that one of the things that I hoped would come out of this blog would be the "Family Car" project, or how pictures with people and cars can help you understand more about what is going on in the picture. So this is family car week, then I'll make Monday's family car day. The image at the top is my cousin Pam - distantly related, but on both sides of my grandfather's parent's family.  Pam died in November 2011, and her mother, Lucille, the next day. What the family was left with was a huge box of family photographs, some identified, some not. We know that Pam in the picture, because we all knew her, sometimes, though, the people in the picture are unfamiliar.  If we look at just what she is wearing, and you didn't know when she was born, most people would see the saddle shoes and think late 1950's or early 1960's.  If we look at the print - a square Kodak color picture, we know its from the 1960's.  And if you do...