24 March 2024, by Sherri Mastrangelo A local historical association member has been adding a picture of their adorable cat to the historical photos they post on Facebook, as the official Palo Alto Historical Association, without any mention that the photos have been edited. Did anyone notice? And should we care? Palo Alto, California, established 1894, is located south of San Francisco, on the bay area peninsula. It is the self-declared “birthplace of Silicon Valley”, as the founding location of many well-known tech companies, and is home to Stanford University. On their homepage, pahistory.or ..read more

27 January 2024, by Sherri Mastrangelo Today’s reader question is: “What does “do7” mean on this record from 1749?” In this book of U.S. Dutch Reformed Church Records from Albany, New York (as found on Ancestry.com, linked below) from the mid 18th century, there are pages of baptism records. There are three handwritten columns per page. The first column has the infant’s name, and a date. The second has the parent’s names, and the third has the names of the witnesses. In place of some of the surnames is an abbreviation that appears to be “dol” with the “o” character raised superscript and the l ..read more

6 January 2024 by Sherri Mastrangelo Let’s take the ideas and concepts from certain computer science algorithms, break them down into simpler terms to understand them better, and learn how we can apply them to our genealogy research. No tech skills or coding required! In fact, you may already utilize some of these methods without even recognizing them. The first algorithm we’ll discuss is called a “Binary Search”. A binary search reduces the search to half at each step, to save time. Think of it as “divide and conquer”. If you’ve ever tried to go to a certain page number in a book, say you are ..read more

28 September, 2023 by Sherri Mastrangelo I’m not sure how “new” this feature is, but I just discovered it and have been playing around with it all afternoon! This is a great new way to search historical maps. The David Rumsey Map Collection, (davidrumsey.com) is an immensely valuable resource with over 125, 000 and counting historical maps and images digitized online for free public viewing. Someday I’ll do a post on all the amazing features of this website, but for now I’ll encourage you to visit and explore - and limit today’s post to the new “search by Text-on-Maps” tool. This feature is u ..read more

11 May 2023, by Sherri Mastrangelo From 1963 through 1971, the Social Security Administration published several volumes of “America’s Centenarians: Reports of Interviews with Social Security Beneficiaries Who Have Lived to 100”. Interviews were conducted across the country, over a few years, by the staff of various social security district offices whom followed a series of 22 prompts. Questions such as “What is the earliest thing you remember?”, “What was the most exciting event in your own life?”, and “Do you have any ambition you have not yet realized?” can give great context to your ancesto ..read more

11 March, 2023 by Sherri Mastrangelo After a short time on a waitlist, I gained access to Microsoft’s Bing AI last night, which refers to itself simply as “Bing”. This Bing AI uses a newer version of GPT-3. It has access to web results from the Bing search engine, whereas ChatGPT is limited. Bing can also get up-to-date information, whereas ChatGPT has access up to 2021. (See my previous blog post: “Can you use ChatGPT for genealogy research”, 20 January, 2023) Furthermore, ChatGPT only supports English while Bing can support other languages including Japanese, Spanish, French, German (to swit ..read more

What do the handwritten numbers on death certificates mean, and why would we need them? Cause of Death / ICD Code Meaning We usually see these codes in the “cause of death” section. Sometimes there are two numbers, related to the primary and secondary causes. These alpha-numerical codes from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), now published by the World Health Organization (WHO), are used by the government agencies when calculating mortality and morbidity statistics, and to maintain a standard of medical terminology throughout the world. The WHO also takes this information to c ..read more

20 January, 2023, by Sherri Mastrangelo ChatGPT is a dialogue and search tool launched by OpenAI this past November, 2022, that is currently free for everyone to try. It is an AI program, or Artificial Intelligence model, that they have trained to understand humans. It’s like having a conversation with a search engine like Google, but instead of a list of websites returned after your query that you then have to browse, you get an immediate response with the information you needed. You can even follow up on your original question, because this AI will remember what you were talking about.  ..read more

8 January 2023, by Sherri Mastrangelo In a recent episode of Finding Your Roots on PBS, actor Edward Norton (Glass Onion, Fight Club) discovered his family lore was true: his 12th great-grandmother was in fact Pocahontas. Inspired by this episode, I’m sharing what you need to know, along with the sources you’ll need, to discover your possible connection to the Native American icon. Though she only had one confirmed child, it’s estimated that more than 100,000 people are descended from her - are you one of them? Born about 1596, Pocahontas, whose given name was “Matoaka”, is known today throug ..read more

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the future of the internet and how it will impact our daily lives. Some see this future as a shared 3D virtual reality world. Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), is pushing this concept he calls the “metaverse”, as his own company is one of several racing to develop the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (EX) technology behind it. We’ve already seen some of the same artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that will build the metaverse reach through to genealogy with MyHeritage’s “Deep Nostaliga” a ..read more