Hello, Everyone. Thank you to Sylvia for the minutes. Even if you were at the meeting, you will want to read on. The minutes are followed by a note from me about the various study groups and mini-groups that are meeting. Also, Judy B sent along some links for sources she learned about at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. That is at the end.
FERNDALE GENIES
MEETING MINUTES
DATE: 1/18/2021
IN ATTENDANCE: Barbara B; Judy B; Linda B; Judith C; Elizabeth
D; Frank & Margie B; Rick; Sherry; Suzie P; Bill R; David R; Judy S; Peggy
V; Sylvia W, Margie C
CHECK INS
Barbara B has been purging paper files. She is
interested in participating in a mini group studying German ancestry. Barbara
also mentioned that her brother asked her who was their maternal grandmother
and what happened to her, leading her to think about this branch of the family
for research so she can share results with her brother.
Judy B shared her experience with the Salt Lake
Institute of Genealogy (SLIG), which offers research courses every January.
Although expensive, Judy feels the courses are well worth it and she learns a
lot. This year’s was via Zoom. SLIG offers about 9-12 five-day courses on
different topics. They are very intensive with top instructors. The course Judy choose was about using
digital archives and university digital collections. She feels it is an amazing
experience, each course offering 20 hours of intensive work with a professional
genealogist. Judy shared resources we should not overlook:
The Digital Public Library of America
The Library of Congress –(especially the free Newspaper
Collection called Chronicling America)
Local museums – digital collections
Local history societies
Google Books
Judy provided additional information after the meeting shown
at the bottom of the minutes. These are
places to look for collections, not ancestors.
Linda B attended Judith’s small group on Family
Search and felt she learned a lot. On the website, she found someone had
entered incorrect information about her family. Correcting it and writing her
justification helped her think more about this branch of the family. Family
Search’s tree is a universal tree, meaning anyone can add/subtract people and
information. Linda loves the historical context of ancestors. She found a book
on immigrants farming in Wisconsin in which social, cultural, and political
influences are discussed, giving her a new perspective on her ancestors. She
continues to work on the story of the sea captain in one line of her family
tree.
Sherry is working on her DNA, learning to use DNA
Painter. She prefers Ancestry to My Heritage for the technical side of things
and is busy working with tree triangulation of her DNA matches.
Suzie continues to work on her family stories by
transcribing an extensive collection of family letters. In one letter she found
her grandmother’s experience of immigration from Germany. She would like to
digitize her letters to preserve them and to give her sister a copy. It’s also
good to preserve original source documents as much as possible, to be able to
see how the author wrote – handwriting, spelling, etc. Suzie has organized her
collections by dividing them according to her ancestors and her husband’s
ancestors. Reading and transcribing them will be next.
Elizabeth D reported that the Family Search Mini
Group helped her solve a research problem. Overall, she doesn’t like Family
Search, the tree access and use, etc. She was excited to find a book on a
branch of her family in Alabama via WorldCat which she received through
inter-library loan. She was disappointed
that it did not reveal where the ancestral couple she was researching
originated from as she had hoped it would. She intends to keep mining the book
for more information and tips about this family.
Margie B‘s goal is to go through all her
photographs. She is separating hers and Frank’s. She wants to identify and
organize them.
Frank’s brother tested at AncestryDNA so Frank can
look there for more close cousin matches. He says he then looks them up on
Google where he can get phone numbers and call them directly.
Peggy has had trouble using Newspapers with Firefox.
She is unable to access them and wants to know if using Google Chrome would be
better. The general consensus of our group was that both can be difficult when
accessing Newspapers. Peggy would also like to explore My Heritage Genetic
Communities.
Rick’s Ancestry subscription is about to run out. He
is trying to decide if he should maybe drop it for a month or so and work on
organizing the information he currently has on his trees. If he rejoins in a
couple of months, he may be able to take advantage of holiday sale or discount
offers and then can add any new documents and information Ancestry will have
found for his trees. Rick is continuing to look for links between him and his
DNA matches to see where they share ancestors.
Bill R is working on digitizing films and photos of
many older formats. He offered to help
anyone with this.
David R is continuing to research his maternal grandmother’s
biological family. While doing this, he had a “eureka moment” where he wondered
if his grandfather had maybe had an affair. David is also using Ancestry ThruLines
to build his family down to the present. He would like to know how to change
trees so he can attach another branch of his family to ThruLines. He can change
trees in the Settings on the DNA Home Page.
If you change the attached tree, it may take a few days to get new
ThruLines.
Margie C is most interested in people and
stories. We have heard about her niece
who was unknown until recently because Margie’s brother was killed in an
airplane crash when the niece was small and they were unable to locate her
because they didn’t know her mother’s name. They found her and had a large family reunion.
Fast forward. Recently her sister found the
brother’s marriage certificate and a letter from him in her attic. This find answered so many questions for the
niece and Margie’s poignant telling of the story was emotional for us.
Sylvia W has discovered My Heritage’s updated Genetic
Communities. Anyone who signed up before 2018 is grandfathered in for this
update. Otherwise, if DNA was uploaded from a different site it will cost $29
to access GC. Anyone purchasing a full membership will automatically get it.
This feature takes the genetic maps that previously identified ethnic heritage,
and drills down to allowing a viewer to see locations – even towns and rural
areas – where your DNA has been located historically. These maps go back in
50-year increments as far back as 1600. These are shown as “heat maps” where
genetics relevant to you have small to large “blobs” of color that indicate the
location. Explanations can be found in the My Heritage Blog for this. Sylvia is
finding surprising historical roots in Scotland and other areas over time. She
is choosing to begin as far back in time as possible and in the most remote
locations, as these provide smaller populations that are living in one location
before migration to other areas. She researches the area and surnames common in
the area. Then she goes to her DNA matches in Ancestry and puts in either the
surnames or location to see how many of her Ancestry matches have ancestors in
that location. The results have been surprising, and Sylvia continues to trace
the names/dates/locations to see if she can find out which line of her family
may have lived there and when.
From Judith
I received a message from Cheryl, our DNA angel. She
is suggesting “a good book about investigative genetic genealogy”, The
Chester Creek Murders by Nathan Dylan Goodwin. Goodwin, based in Britain, is arguably the
most popular and prominent genealogy novelist worldwide. Not in the library, but there is a Kindle
version. You could use Elizabeth’s trick
of requesting the library to get it.
I am swimming in small groups. First, the DNA Study Group has about a dozen
members. We aim to meet once a month and
work on our own during the month.
Members are writing up the case they are working on so others can give
suggestions. Others can be included by
emailing me. It’s OK just to receive
some emails about DNA and listen to see if you are interested in trying some
new strategies.
The smallest groups, with no more than three members and myself,
I call “mini-groups.” These have grown out of topics that come up at our
monthly meetings. There was a single
session on Family Search which worked out some problems and is over. Another Mini-group is working on DNA tools.
At this meeting, several people were interested in a
mini-group on German Genealogy. I
started a waiting list. I may be able to
form up that group in February. You will
need to write a research question, try to find the village your ancestor came
from, and provide a writeup to the other members. It just needs to say where you are now. The next step will be locating the place on a
map and making a brief location guide for research in that area. I’m not trying to scare you. You will need to do these things for others
in the group to help you.
Email
from Judy B: Here
are a few more links which I meant to mention to the group for some digitized
collections from state & university libraries.
Access to photographs,
Pennsylvania German fraktur and manuscripts, maps, and a map overlay tool free
of charge.
More than 200,000
items from institutions across the state of South Carolina. The new
Collection Discovery Tool <https://scmemory.org/browse/discover/> provides searches by media type, time
period, institution, topic, or country.
General resources,
many from Rare Book & Manuscript Archive Collection
Remember, you are
searching the catalogs of the collections, not individuals.
