Part of the work of genealogists in this digital age is to scan their old physical material. I’ve got many boxes in the closet and basement as well as binders in my shelves that still need to be gone through and digitized. You can only do this one piece at a time, so it’s a manner of picking a project and working through it. Then going to the next. 4 Binders of Emails One of the boxes I went through had a few dozen loose emails from genealogical correspondence that I had printed and meant to file one day. I was actually surprised to find these, because I had 4 binders of printed emails in my ..read more

It’s been a long time since I blogged about the tools I use on my computer to deal with my photos. Looking back, I had these articles: Jan 2006: Windows 98 to Windows XP On Windows 98, I was using JASC Paint Shop Photo Album 5.  When I got a new computer with Windows XP, JASC had been bought out by Corel. I found that JASC Photo Album continued to work on XP without problem, so I continued to use it. April 2009::Picture Management and Editing in Windows Vista where I talked about my transfer from Windows XP to Vista. On XP, I had tried Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Google Picasa and Corel Ph ..read more

I’ve been a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) for 10 years now, since 2013. I don’t take clients but use my membership to add a bit more credence to my genealogy activities, software development and speaking engagements. Many professional organizations in a variety of fields require a number of hours of Continuing Education. This is some form of learning in order to keep up-to-date with the new trends in your field, or just to brush up on the information you know but have “forgotten” because it’s been so long since you learned or used it. Up to now, I do not remember ..read more

Happy New Year everyone. GenSoftReviews is the website I created in 2009 to allow users to rate and review their genealogy software. The goal was for the site to be like a Tripadvisor for genealogists to allow them to see what others think of the various programs before they buy, and to allow the software developers to get feedback as to what their users like and don’t like about their programs. Each year on January 1st since 2010, I have tabulated the programs that have achieved ratings of at least 4 out of 5. Those programs are displayed on GenSoftReviews a Users Choice Award sticker alongs ..read more

A couple of months ago, Ancestry came out with a new feature called Parental Matches, that shows which parent a DNA match is connected to. My own DNA should be a good test for this. I have 100% endogamy on all my ancestral lines, but my parents are not related according to GEDmatch’s test. Both my parents passed away before I started DNA testing, but I did test my uncle (my father’s brother) at FTDNA and I have some first cousins who tested at Ancestry and other sites, so I can use them for additional comparisons. Ancestry’s Parental Matches stems from the SideView technology introduced about ..read more

Yesterday was the final wrapup of the challenge week at WikiTree to try to add as much as possible to the Mark Cuban @mcuban family tree. Mark Cuban is the the American billionaire who co-founded Broadcast.com and owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He is widely known as one of the sharks on the TV show Shark Tank. The challenge was a whole week, from Dec 1 to Dec 8, where a few dozen people, myself included, worked hard to research Mark’s genealogy and add information on WikiTree to his ancestors and their nuclear families. Wiki Tree Challenges WikiTree has been very innovative i ..read more

I’ve paid my deposit and my wife Cheryl and I will be going on the Find Your Roots on the River Cruise with Blaine Bettinger and Judy Russell from October 17 to 24, 2024 (yes, almost 2 years away), from Amsterdam through Germany to Basel, Switzerland. This is an opportunity no genealogist should miss. With a capacity of only 156 passengers, we’ll be a close-knit group and it will be a delight. Blaine and/or Judy will be giving a talk each day. Blaine and Judy give superb presentations and both have been Keynote speakers at many genealogy conferences around the world. Don’t wait because availa ..read more

In an earlier post, I reviewed the Family Statistics that MyHeritage provides. It pointed out that I had some data that wasn’t correct. So at the end of that post, I ran MyHeritage’s Consistency Checker and it found that my tree of 9,050 people has 492 issues and MyHeritage’s desktop software Family Tree Builder came up with 561 issues. So what are these issues? How many of them are issues that I need to fix, and how many are incorrect diagnoses? What are the differences between the 492 and the 561 issues of the online and desktop software?  Why So Many Issues? Like most genealogists, I ..read more

Michael Kaplan, a user of my Double Match Triangulator program sent me information about how he was using DMT and also asked a number of questions. I thought this conversation would be very good for other DMT users to read. Michael gave me permission to post the relevant parts of his email to me and to give his name. Thank you Michael. Here is what Michael had to say and ask (shown in “quotes”), along with my responses in green. The Dialog, Questions and Answers “I have begun using DMT (on GEDmatch) in earnest.  I now have a total of 161 kits in my B folder, including your kit.  Not ..read more

MyHeritage has just enhanced its Family Statistics feature. See their blog post from yesterday on this. Being a numbers guy, I really like this sort of information. It it interesting, provides great insights and can point to errors that need correction. I believe MyHeritage has one of the best sets of analytics of any program. In this post, I’ll show what they provide for my own family tree at MyHeritage. My Family Tree at MyHeritage Originally, I had just one big tree at MyHeritage. But as I approached 10,000 people in my tree, I decided to split it up. The reason is that MyHeritage’s relati ..read more