Ancestry.com – Page 5 – GenealogyAtHeart.com

National DNA Day

On April 25, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick’s article, “The Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” was published in Nature.1 Thus began the DNA revolution.

In honor of that anniversary, Thomas MacEntee has deemed April 25th as DNA Day and other organizations have come forward to offer sales and specials that may be of interest to you (Think of this as a genealogist’s own President’s Day sale!)

Ancestry.com’s price is $79.00. The offer ends April 26th. AncestryCanada price is 30% off ; AncestryUK is 25% off

MyHeritage is also offering kits for $79.00 but will bundle a kit with a subscription for even greater savings.

23 and Me is offering free shipping on their $99.00 autosomal kit with 10% off an additional kit

FamilyTreeDNA is offering Family Finder kits for $59.00

The last time these prices were this low was during the 2016 Holiday shopping season.

1 Watson, James D., and Francis Crick. “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” Nature 171, 4356 (25 April 1953): 737-738.

Saving Your Gedcom

Spring is just around the corner and at the top of your “to do” list, make sure you backup a copy of your gedcom. Yesterday, while hubby and I were painting away as the home renovations continue, I got a call from a former Client I had done some consulting work regarding his Irish ancestry. He called to thank me for making this year’s St. Patrick’s Day even more memorable as I had pointed him in directions that saved him time and money.

I had also recommended that he always save his Ancestry.com tree in another location and we had discussed several options. Why do I recommend that? I’m definitely not trying to start a malicious rumor here as I believe there is no problem at all with Ancestry.com but in this crazy world, you just never know. I’m a planner (and a little paranoid) so I think about the what ifs in life – what if I can’t pay for the service any longer, what if they get hacked and I can’t access my lifelong work, what if they get sold and the service becomes deplorable? (On a side note, my hubby thinks this is a little irrational and he’s probably right. I say some people fear immigrants and I fear losing mine!) So my concern led me to find alternatives for my trees.

My Client decided to download the free standard edition of Legacy Family Tree but he had difficulty following my Ancestry.com download instructions. I talked him through it remotely and understand why he had a problem which you, dear reader, may also encounter.

If you’re new to this process it’s quite simple, just follow these steps:
Log on to Ancestry.com
Click “Trees” on the Ribbon and scroll and click on “Create & Manage Trees”
Click “Manage Tree”
Under “Manage Tree” in the green box on the left, click “Download your gedcom file”

Be patient, it may take some time, depending on the size of your tree.
Once downloaded, if you open the file it will be gibberish so you must install a program that can read a gedcom. You have several options; I’ve listed those that I’ve used that allow you to save the program to your own computer and/or place in your own Cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) so you have complete control over the data:
Legacy Family Tree – free with the standard edition; small cost for a program that does more.
Rootsmagic – small cost and by mid-April it will sink with Ancestry.com
Family Tree Maker – small cost, used to synch with Ancestry.com but I experienced problems; supposedly works now.

Or, you can join another organization like Ancestry.com and save your tree there. I’ve used My Heritage as an alternative.

There are lots more options that I’m not familiar with – for a review of the opinion based Top 10 click here.

I haven’t done this but am exploring these as other options some day:
Familysearch – free, however, you are donating your tree to their genealogical community and although it is a backup, you don’t control it any longer. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and follow the directions under “Contribute Your Research”
Wiki Tree – free, however, when I tried to upload several years ago my tree was too large for them. Haven’t checked back to see if their system will take it.

Whatever you choose is your personal decision but you have to select one so you can access your data.

Here’s where my Client got stuck – on Ancestry.com, step 4 above, he clicked “Download Tips” and got information on deleting his tree so he panicked and stopped. That was wise as you DON’T WANT TO DELETE THE TREE!!!! Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

When I click on download instructions I get the following:

“If the “File Download” window does not appear and Windows automatically downloads a text file:
Right click on the “Download your GEDCOM file” button.
Select “Save Target As…”
A “Save As” dialog box will display. Select a location for the file that you will be able to find later, such as “Desktop.” Then give the file a name and click on Save.”

He didn’t need to follow the 3 steps above. Once he clicked “Download your gedcom file” he was able to successfully save it to his hard drive. He selected to install the free Legacy Family Tree program and I listened as he followed the Legacy prompts and uploaded the gedcom. He was quite happy when it was finished.

You’ll be really happy, too, when you know you’re hard work is safe and accessible. Personally, I think sitting on my derriere to download and upload a gedcom is the easiest spring cleanup to do!

We’re Related – What to Do if Your Tree is Too Large for the New Ancestry.com Ap

Recently I wrote about my inability to get “We’re Related” – the new Ancestry.com ap working. Every time I tried to switch my Main Tree to yes I’d get an error message. I surmised that it was because my tree was too large and I’m still going with that theory. I figured out a work around and if you’re interested, here’s what to do:

I created a new database in RootsMagic7 (Click File – New) and made the file name: Lori’s Lines. You name yours whatever you want! I disabled WebHints and clicked “I know where the file is.”
Next I dragged myself from my Main Tree gedcom that was already uploaded in RootsMagic to the click person location. A pop up asks what you want to drag and drop and I selected “Ancestors of myself.”
On this new database, I then went to File – Export and unchecked LDS information, addresses, multimedia, note formatting and extra details because I wanted to make the new gedcom as concise as possible. I clicked “Privatize living people” and then clicked ok. I saved the gedcom on my desktop.
Clicking on the ribbon “TREES” on Ancestry.com, I used the drop down menu to click “Create & Manage New Trees.” At the bottom, I clicked “Upload a Gedcom file.” I chose the file sitting on my desktop and named the tree the same as the Gedcom. I also made the tree private. Why? Because I only want people to use my Main Tree on Ancestry and not this subset tree. Back in the day, I had several lines separated and when people would email me, I never knew which tree they were referring to. I will never be doing anything with this newly uploaded tree other than using it for the ap so I also went to settings and made sure I turned off the hints. I DO NOT want more email telling me they found something! (Personally, I’m really tired of seeing the “Direct Bloodline” and pics of red crosses. To me, those aren’t hints and I wish there was a way to filter that stuff out.) Then I clicked the little box that I accept the submission.
You’re almost done! Now, open the We’re Related ap on your phone. (If you haven’t downloaded it go to Google Play Store on Android or whatever you do on IPhone and install it). I then selected the newly uploaded tree – “Lori’s Lines” and slid the no to yes. I selected myself as the person in my tree. It stays on and works!

I decided to do the same for my husband’s lines and followed the same process above. I did have to select myself as him on We’re Related because I wasn’t an available choice. Remember, I had pruned these new Gedcoms to bare basics -on my tree only my direct ancestors so our marriage, siblings and children weren’t imported. Can’t wait to get in a crowd and try it out!

Test Driving MyHeritage.com and Making an Amazing Find!

I had a free account with MyHeritage but I was never a subscriber until recently when a 50% discount offer was made for members of the National Genealogical Society. I believe the discount is now offered for a limited time to everyone – check it out here. I decided to give it a try and I immediately scaled a brick wall on my Duer line that I’ve recently been researching. Here’s how I did it…

I downloaded my gedcom from Ancestry.com to my home computer and then uploaded to MyHeritage. My tree is large so I received an email from MyHeritage once it had been loaded and was ready to go. The following day I went on the site and it was easy to upload a site photo (I used my Genealogy At Heart logo that I keep jpg’d in Dropbox and my Google+ pic, added a blurb about what my research interests are and what I’m currently investigating. I happened to write that my brick wall was to determine the link between John Duer and his purported son, Thomas. Thomas died in 1829 intestate and John, in 1831, with a will that omitted Thomas, understandably since he was deceased, but did not include any of Thomas’ children. That wouldn’t have been odd, however, John did include a grandson who lived out of the Trumbull County, Ohio area, who was the son of one of John’s deceased daughters. Why include a grandson that lived in another state and not the grandchildren that lived next door? Hmm.

I have researched probate, land and court records, cemetery records, tried to find Bible and church records, obituaries, collateral lines, biographies, area histories, and contacted area genealogical societies and libraries but found nothing. The census and tax lists just aren’t helpful since they do not show relationships that far back.

I put the research aside for a month but it’s been gnawing at me. I originally made the connection of John and Thomas through the work of Edgar Duer Whitley, a gentleman who had found me on the internet 6 years ago from a Rootsweb posting I had made in the early 2000’s. My tree proved lineage to Thomas but I couldn’t go farther back. His tree showed lineage to Thomas’ son John who had a daughter, Maria, that I’m descended from. Edgar emailed me and kindly sent me an electronic copy of all his years of sleuthing. He never had a citation, though, of how Thomas and John were related. Shortly after he emailed me he no longer responded to my emails. He was quite up in age and I figured he was deceased. Thus, I couldn’t know how he knew that Thomas was the son of John.

I would love to tell you that MyHeritage found the answer super quickly but that didn’t happen. I actually didn’t receive any Record or Smart Matches from them. I assume that’s because my uploaded tree is well sourced.

I decided to snoop around their Family Trees located under the Research category. I entered birth and death location and death year info for Thomas Duer. A number of trees popped up with displays similarly to Ancestry.com. I clicked on the first one and didn’t find anything exciting. The citations were all from Ancestry trees. Ugh!

Then things got interesting – I clicked on Thomas’ wife Hannah as the tree owner had her listed as Hannah Preston. I had her listed as Hannah Byrd. When I went to Hannah’s page I discovered that she had remarried to a James Preston in September 1831 in Trumbull County, Ohio. How had I missed that? Interestingly, here’s how the marriage license is written:

“Ohio, County Marriages, 1789-2013,” database with images, Family Search (https://familysearch.org: 21 Nov 2016), Trumbull>Marriage licenses 1828-1839 vol 2>image 55 of 181; county courthouses, Ohio.

Notice the right side records Hannah’s surname as “Dewer” but in the body of the text as “Duer.” The record is indexed by Dewer so I never found it. The tree owner had found it because he was descended from James Preston. Putting in “James Preston” in the FamilySearch.org search form would have brought it up.

How do I know that the Hannah Duer is the wife of Thomas. There was only one other Hannah Duer living in the country in 1831 and she was 10 years old, residing in Pennsylvania. My Hannah and James were both born in New Jersey in 1775. James’ first wife died in 1829 in childbirth with twins shortly after Hannah’s husband, Thomas, died. Both had young children in the home so it makes sense they would have blended their families.

I went back to Ancestry.com, Familysearch.org and Rootsweb’s World Connect Project, to see if other’s had this information. Nope! Only the one tree on MyHeritage. For me, this was definitely worth the price.

It looks like the marriage didn’t last long which could explain why no one else has the information on their trees. By 1840, James was living with the children from his first wife and Hannah was living with one of her children as the tick mark in the age category for a female most likely is for her. That age tick mark is lacking on James’ record. In 1850, the couple remained separated per the census records. Hannah’s tombstone notes her first husband’s name, Duer. James lies next to his first wife. It appears that this was a relationship that both sides wanted to forget. This could also explain why Hannah’s first husband’s purported father, John, omitted her from his will written in 1830. I’m now searching for a divorce record. This story just gets more interesting with every find! I’m very happy to have found this information that quickly with MyHeritage’s site. Once I’m done with my Duer’s I’ll be searching their site for other clues on additional lines. Happy Hunting!

DNA Lab Analysis – The Accuracy is Questioned

Recently I attended a workshop by Dick Eastman on Cloud Computing provided by my local genealogy society. Dick spoke briefly, a lunch break was given and then the workshop resumed. Although his information was interesting, it was the side conversations I overheard during lunch that piqued my interest.

I need to offer a disclaimer first – one of my children is employed by a large laboratory in the U.S. and part of the job responsibility is to trouble shoot and then correct problems that individual labs are encountering. The troubleshooting my child does is regarding equipment and not results. To my knowledge, none of that organization’s business is in DNA analysis. Even so, this proud momma often hears from family and friends who got results back that there must have been some mistake – how could whatever level that was being measured be so high, etc. It was with this background that I brought to eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table…

A woman was explaining that she had recently had her DNA results returned and she wasn’t matching with anyone in her family. She is unmarried and has no children so none of them tested. Her parents are deceased and she had no siblings. By matching, she was referring to cousins. A man at the table conjectured the lab had made a mistake and mixed up the samples. Another attendee reported that his results matched with his children, siblings and first cousins but not with relatives from 3 generations back. He, too, originally thought the lab had erred. Then a match occurred with a surname which he was not familiar. He thought he had somehow missed that line in his research so he went back over his records and low and behold, discovered that the matching surname lived in the same boarding house as his 2x’s great grandmother. Hmm. And yes, great grandma was married to who he had assumed was his great grandfather at the time. There went all of his research on that great grandpa’s line!

Could a lab make a mistake? Absolutely! The likelihood, though, is not as great with the processes and procedures that are in place as is the entanglement of human relationships.

The following day I was reading a list serv to which I belong and an individual had posted how she had inadvertently given a female DNA test kit to a male relative. The lab caught it and asked for clarification.

My advice if your returned results give you unexpected findings – get the test redone at another site. Prices are dropping for the holidays so the cost is negligible. There are “rumors” that Ancestry will run a special beginning November 25th for $69.00 to beat the FTDNA price of $79.00. I don’t have that in writing so check around on the 25th to see what happens.

When the test results are returned, if they’re similar, well, you know you need to explore other lines to determine who’s the daddy. If they are not the same, I’d contact the lab and share your findings. You’d probably get your money refunded if the lab made the error and an offer for another test as a thank you for letting them know there is a quality control problem. Personally, I’m betting on the relationships and not the lab as the culprit.

Family Tree Maker’s Fall Newsletter Makes Me Feel Vindicated!

Well, well, I’m feeling pretty righteous! I recently received the Fall Newsletter (which, BTW, is the ONLY newsletter that Family Tree Maker has emailed to me this year so it correctly should be labeled as the “First Fall Newsletter” since Software MacKiev bought the rights for the Microsoft version which is what I formerly used.)

The newsletter was designed to notify the public that they are running behind and don’t have the synch ready as they had earlier stated would occur before the end of 2016. Okay, glitches happen and I am pleased that the organization is taking ownership that they will not be able to meet their self imposed deadline.

IMHO, this is a major step forward. I’ve been blogging for quite a while about my frustration with FTM not syching with my large Ancestry.com tree. Every time I called customer service they would blame Ancestry. I’d call Ancestry and they’d tell me to call FTM. I’d wait a day or two and try again as I was hoping whoever was on duty would have the knowledge to assist me. I posted for help, too but no one seemed to know what the problem was. The only “help” I ever received was twice when I was emailed a useless pdf that supposedly would get the synch back but that never worked, either. The final time I called, the rep tried to tell me I couldn’t follow instructions. So much for service! That was the day I switched to Legacy Family Tree’s standard edition.

But back to the newsletter… I quote, “…So, should you get the latest build right now then? Well, it depends. The improvements are mostly in stability and performance. So if FTM is crashing or has slowed to a crawl with large trees, then have at it. ” Finally, they admit that the product doesn’t work well with large trees! Now it’s official who owned the problem and I don’t blame Ancestry.com one bit for cutting the prior company owners’ off last December. What a nightmare it must have been for Ancestry staff to have to take all those calls from unhappy FTM users! I also give kudos to Ancestry’s staff for handling the calls I made to them in a professional manner.

I tried to link to the newsletter but I don’t see it posted on their website so I’m providing the link to sign up to their Mailing List instead.

I would like to see FTM offer a goodwill gesture by providing the new version for free to anyone with a large tree to make up for the wasted time and lack of support. FTM could determine the size of the tree for the offer. For now, that’s the only way I’d be back.

Ancestry’s New Connection Ap

I downloaded Ancestry.com’s new ap “We’re Related” on October 25th. The first day I couldn’t get it to stop loading the “Who are you?” page. I tried several times in the following week and always time out getting the “Error communicating with server, please try later. Error getting trees. We seem to be having trouble pulling up the roots.” Cute but annoying.
I’m not sure if it’s because my tree is so large or if there is some other issue on their end. I travel a great deal and thought it would be neat to find others who might be related to me. Definitely don’t use this if you don’t want your gps coordinates known!

Citation Dilemma – Attributing Parent Marriage Info on a Child’s Ancestry Page

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 22 Sep 2016.

About a month ago I was contacted by an Ancestry user who inquired the following: “How could George Mitchell Long marry Sarah Ford in 1807 in Tennessee when he wasn’t born until 1849?”

Excellent question! I went to my tree and checked the birth and death dates for the couple and their child and didn’t see that I had an error so I suspected my tree was confused with another; that was my reply.

Yesterday, I received a more detailed response which brings up an excellent point. Under sources, I had saved for George Mitchell Long (Jr.) his parents’ marriage record. It does not show under Facts, of course, since the marriage took place before George Jr. was born. The record does not show Jr. or Sr. either since the Sr. hadn’t yet had a son so there was no Jr. at the time of the marriage.

Why did I have the parents info on the son’s page? I put the record there so when I write kinship determinations I can pull everything from one page. I can understand how this would confuse someone looking at my tree and assuming I had the wrong information for that person’s page, though.

I do this a lot, too! I’m thinking about how the Social Security info provides kinship and I save to both the parents and their child. That is clearer since it shows the relationship that a parents marriage alone does not do.

I don’t know if there’s a better work around – if you know of one please let me know! I’ve requested that Ancestry add a feature like the shoebox to the Facts page so extraneous information could be saved and retrieved easily but I’m not holding my breath on that.

Originally, I put info that I just described under the Notes feature but I had to move it out because I was working on some lines with other family members and they couldn’t see the Notes section – it’s only visible to the owner. For awhile, I then added it as a Comment but I wasn’t scrolling down and was missing my own comments. I see that now a click on comments on the toolbar brings the comments to the right side for viewing so maybe I should go back to using that.

I’d appreciate your thoughts and suggestion…

Love Those Records Found Online? Here’s How You Can Keep Them Coming!

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 10 July 2016.

Remember the days when you had to physically go to a location to find a record? Or contact someone who lived close to where you needed to hunt and HOPE they would respond via snail mail? And plan for months to get some ancestor hunting in when on a vacation or business trip?

Seems like years ago but it wasn’t. How far we’ve come in this fast pace world with having information available at our fingertips whenever and wherever we are.

I’m not sure where the source of the statistic that I keep seeing that claims that about 10% of all records are posted online. Whatever the number, I think we can all agree that the benefits of surfing in the comfort of our home far outweighs the small costs we might have to pay to “belong” to an organization to access the records.

But being greedy, I want more! I long for the day that I can click on any link on Familysearch.org and instantly bring up a filmstrip. Wow – not having to order, wait (and wait and wait because my local peeps always forget to let me know that the filmstrip arrived), drive to thel library by rearranging my schedule to match when they have volunteers on staff, trying to unspool the film when I find what I want to take to the machine that prints a copy, playing with the copy to lighten/darken/enlarge/shrink, saving to my thumbdrive because their internet is sporadic and I can’t save to the cloud, cleaning up my workspace and then driving home again. Not fun!

I’ve found four ways that you can help get more records online and this can all be done from your home! It’s very simple, it’s fun and there’s no cost to you. Just follow the steps below:

Get cozy in front of whatever device you prefer – desktop, laptop, tablet – your choice!
Click one of the 4 options below and follow their directions

Family Search Indexing – between July 15-17th

Decoding Civil War Telegrams

Purple Hearts Reunited

World Archives Project from Ancestry

3. Feel good that you have contributed!

Over the holiday last weekend I happily indexed Civil War telegrams. For transcriptions, the handwriting was fairly clear and the input method was a breeze. I used to index for Ancestry but haven’t recently. I’m not sure if they still offer a discount if you indexed x number of records but they used to. Check with them and see – it could save you money on your subscription renewal. I plan to help out Family Search and the purple hearts group in the near future. Working on my “On The Clock” portfolio took up a lot of my time over the past year so I didn’t have much free time to spend volunteering. I’m planning on scheduling time in the near future though, as I believe it’s important to help get more records online. Together, we can increase that 10% online and that’s helpful to everyone!

Genea Wishes- Wouldn’t it be nice if these genealogy tools were available…

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 29 June 2016.

Was looking over some hints on Ancestry the other day and thought – wow, wouldn’t it be great if:

You could designate your guesses in some way – perhaps a color like yellow for caution – meaning that I’m not really sure yet and just checking this out so please don’t put it as fact in your tree. I realize that this is most relevant for people like me who make their trees public so that others won’t just grab the guess as true. Those that have their tree private, though, could also benefit as it would allow them to see what areas needed more analysis.

Use color to separate lines – make my Duers’ blue and my Leiningers’ green and my Koss’ purple, for example. Then, when I was looking at a descendant I could easily identify their lineage. I know there is supposed to be the actual connection listed but mine comes and goes:

See, it’s missing. It should say relationship unknown but it says nothing. Kate’s line does not link to my known lines as the connection was somewhere across the pond and hasn’t been rediscovered yet. I don’t know why sometimes it displays and sometimes it doesn’t. I would add that to my wish list, too – get it to work consistently!

A way to copy and paste a line to make a new tree while leaving the line in the original tree. Several years ago I had several trees and it made me crazy! People would contact me about dear so and so and I had to hunt through all the trees to figure out who they were referring to because no one ever said, “I found so and so in your Main tree.” When I asked there where they found it they would say, “online.” So, I entered everything together. Actually, I merged it when the old Family Tree Maker worked. It wasn’t perfect but it was fairly quick. Now I’d like to do the opposite, take my Landfairs, for example, and just work on that line for a bit and then merge it back to the original tree. This would also be nice if a distant relative wanted just their line.

All of this got me thinking of photos. There are some people I would just love to have a picture of and after searching high and low still can’t find one. There needs to be a vehicle to find those wanted photos. I know about DeadFred. That’s nice but I’m thinking more of a posting of a request for the photo and not that I found this picture. In DeadFred, if I enter Harbaugh I get 3 photos of Alburmah Harbaugh which is interesting because I’ve updated all the Harbaughs known to be in the US since Cooprider and Cooprider did it in 1947 and he wasn’t one of them any Harbaugh source has found This validates what I already knew – my tree is incomplete. Since genealogy is always a work in progress that doesn’t phase me. But back to pictures…

I’d like a place where you can post that you want a photo, not just that you found a photo, which is what most of Cyndi’s list links are. It would be even nicer if it had an ap so that lost photos, say from an antique shop, can be plugged in to see if someone is seeking that picture. Granted, most of those photos have no identifying info. My own family was really awful about documenting their photo’s, too. But if there was identifying info, the requester could be emailed or texted of where the photo is and can arrange to make the connection. That’s a win-win for everyone – the store owner makes a sale, the finder feels awesome about doing a good deed and the requester gets the photo he/she wants! Any ideas or suggestions about this please let me know – might be an area I work on once I finally submit that BCG portfolio.