Category: Entertainment

Randy Seaver has a new Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post up! Since all my housework is done for the day and the house is settling down, I decided to jump in on this one and see how it went.

The mission is to list my 16 great-great grandparents with their birth year, their death year, and their lifespan. It should be interesting to see how they vary or if they vary at all. I’m going to list them as they go right down my pedigree, in fact, for fun here is my pedigree. 🙂

You can see their dates up there but I am going to type them anyway.

1. Robert James Moore Sr. (1871-1925) 54 years old.
2. Mary E. Johnson (1873-?) She died between 1910 and 1915, so between 37 and 42 years old.
3. Lewis Thorward (1875-1946) 71 years old.
4. Jennie Viola Love (1876-1960) 84 years old.
5. Herbert Redford (1872-1940) 67 years old.
6. Sarah Ann Sutcliffe (1873-1924) 51 years old. I found her headstone but not her death certificate.
7. John Walter Parkin (1863-?) I think he died between 1905 and 1910, so between 42 and 47 years old.
8. Jennie Featherson (1875-?) I think she died between 1900 and 1905, so between 25 and 30 years old.
9. John Harmon Mays (1842-1927) 84 years old.
10. Celia Slusher (1844-1914) 70 years old.
11. Charles Moyer (1861-1940) 78 years old.
12. Ada May Evans (1873-1925) 52 years old.
13. George Thomas Taylor (1863-1913) 50 years old.
14. Mollie Jane Webb (1867-1931) 64 years old.
15. James William Applegate (1862-1951) 88 years old.
16. Elizabeth West (1870-1938) 68 years old.

The average lifespan is 62 years. The average birth year is 1866 and the average death year is 1933. Very interesting and I see where I need to do a little more work at too!

 

I posted about my AncestryDNA results when they came in last year. Now Ancestry is releasing an update to their DNA Database. I won’t pretend to understand exactly what has changed. Only that instead of analyzing the DNA once, they now do it 40 times!

The Facebook page says this update is on a roll out release. That means not everyone will have it at the same time. I hate that, but I got really lucky. When I went into my results this week, I was able to go into the Ethnicity 2.0 preview! Well, now I’ll share it with you!

Old DNA results from August 2012

My old results gave a very high 70% Scandinavian and 30% Eastern European, both surprised me. The only reason the Eastern European surprised me was because I’ve found a lot of German roots on my father’s side, I was thinking more West than East really. Maybe I just don’t know enough about the region, which is entirely possible!

My new results are much more inline with what I was expecting. Most of my research has led to England and Scotland. I have a little bit of Irish with the Moores, and there is German spread in among my Dad’s New Jersey roots.

Clicking on each of the ethnicities gives you more information about that particular group. I haven’t looked much into it yet but I sure am excited to!

Today has been a very strange day. Now I am wide awake at 11pm and don’t know what to do with myself other then continue on the Cleanup Project. I decided to take some time out for some fun. Saturday Night Genealogy Fun to be exact!

Here are the “rules” as Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings laid them out:

1. Determine how complete your genealogy research is.  For background, read Crista Cowan’s post Family History All Done? What’s Your Number?  For comparison purposes, keep the list to 10 generations with you as the first person.
2. Create a table similar to Crista’s second table, and fill it in however you can (you could create an Ahnentafel (Ancestor Name) list and count the number in each generation, or use some other method).  Tell us how you calculated the numbers.
3. Show us your table, and calculate your “Ancestral Name Number” – what is your percentage of known names to possible names (1,023 for 10 generations).
4. For extra credit (or more SNGF), do more generations and add them to your chart.
5. Post your table, and your “Ancestral Name Number,” on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post.

To get my numbers, I created an Ahnentafel Report in FTM2012 and I counted the ancestors with known surnames. This means I didn’t give myself credit for the females who I don’t know surnames for. I was doing good until I got to my sixth generation back. Then by the time we get to the eighth generation the bottom has completely dropped out of my results.

The biggest reason for the drop off is all 10 of my known paternal 3rd great grandparents (generation 6) are immigrant ancestors. For this reason I’ve run into some challenges on finding some of their parents.

For the extra credit, I decided to see how far back I go and it isn’t much farther and the numbers just get lower! For this report, I also used my Original family file for this report. So these numbers might eventually go down even more or possibly go up!

All in all it was nice to see where I stand. It makes me motivated to get those blanks in the sixth generation filled in.

I’ve been working on a couple posts over the last few days and I’ll be posting one of them a little later today. Until then, I have to share my new Gmail background. I do have a moore-mays.org email setup but for some reason it is a little finicky. When I finally fix that, I’ll probably change my gmail background to something more colorful. In the meantime, I like this little genealogy reminder I get when I check my email.

I am a huge fan of the Who Do You Think You Are? series that was recently canceled by NBC. However, before I was a fan of the NBC show, I was a fan of the British version. It happened for me just like Lisa Kudrow, who saw the British version and fell in love. I’ve been very lucky to be able to view the British version of the show and I’m now here with my top five Who Do You Think You Are? moments. I want the American audience to know exactly what the charm is about the British version. It didn’t matter that I had no idea who 80% of the celebrities were throughout the seasons (or series if you use British terms).

With all my heart, I really wish this show would come to BBC America so that Americans would at least be able to see this really charming, intelligent program. These are in the order that they aired, not in any rank.

Continue reading “The 5 Reasons I want WDYTYA on BBC America” →

I was catching up in Google Reader earlier today and I noticed that Randy Seaver is having the SNGF Genealympics. It all sounds like a lot of fun to me, so I thought I might see how much of it I can fit in. I’ve had a little bit of a break from my Family File Cleanup  recently (notice I have a category now! I just have to go back and fill it. haha.), so I thought this would be a fun way to motivate myself again! Much like the rest of my blogging, I don’t intend to be super serious about this fun project. I think it’s just an awesome motivator to link in with my current Olympic spirit!

My basic goal is to “compete” in as many of the events that Randy posts and the events that were posted during the 2008 GeneaBlogger Group Games.

Today I’m going to try a few of the events:

Continue reading “2012 SNGF Genealympics – I’m Game!” →

Unfortunately I’ve been so caught up in streaming the Olympics or watching the Olympics, that I haven’t had a chance to get the next RMC entry written up. I do have some good news though!

It’s been exactly 4 weeks since the lab received my DNA sample and the results are now in! I’ve got to say I’m really quite shocked.  However, my shocking results have made everyone in the family curious and now we’re all starting up DNA  test funds! For my mother’s side, I still haven’t connected an entry point into America. I just know I’ve traced most of them to Virginia at some point.

My father’s side comes from all different kinds of places so far, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany. So imagine my surprise when none of those places were on my ethnicity results! I’m not an expert on that area of the world, so my next step is obviously to research that part of the world and the places I’m already aware of. I’ve been meaning to study them anyway, this just gives me the motivation to do it!

I have a little fun sometimes, and I look up United States Presidents in the census. Don’t try to tell me you haven’t! In fact, I look up a lot of people in the census, not just presidents. This entry isn’t about them though, it’s about the presidents aspect.

Here are some interesting things I’ve learned about past presidents through the census.

• Even though George Washington didn’t die until 1799 and was president at the time of the 1790 census, I was unable to find him on the census. There were only two George Washingtons that came up in both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch searches. One lived in Massachusetts and the other in South Carolina. I’ll forgive our first president though, he was kind of busy at the time. You know forming a government and a little ol’ place called Washington D.C.

Also, am I the only one out there who wishes they could go back in time and just get a peek at Washington D.C. before all those monuments were built? Or maybe to see the White House and Capitol building but have nothing else be there? How strange would that be?

• Martin van Buren was the eighth president but the first one to appear on the 1850 census, well actually the first president in the chronological list. He was joined in the 1850 census by fourteen other future and current presidents. Including a posthumous Zachary Taylor and his vice president Millard Fillmore.
• A fun fact is if you happen to come across the presidents, there are usually arrows pointing to them in the margins!

Just from the 1850 census (no other outside influences), I learned that two presidents are the sons of ministers, Chester A Arthur and Grover Cleveland. Two presidents listed their post-presidency occupations as farmers: Martin Van Buren and John Tyler. There were many variations of pre-presidency occupations, Lawyer (Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B Hayes), Farmer (James Buchanan), Congressman (Andrew Johnson), and Army (Ulysses S Grant).

This obviously leads me to the 1940 census and what presidents should be on them. If you don’t keep count like me (because I’m weird), there should be eleven, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H W Bush. No president appears for the first time in the 1940 census, but a lot of them are becoming of age. So there should be some interesting details to be had!

The president at the time of the 1940 census was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He happens to be one of my Mom’s favorite presidents. Not because she lived during his time, but because she was always fascinated by him as a person. Some celebrities who could possibly be making their first census appearance are Tom Brokaw, Smokey Robinson, Peter Fonda, and Chuck Norris.

Who do you look for in the census as a guilty pleasure?

This Christmas, my sister got me the greatest gift ever. She didn’t get me a Kindle or an iPad. She got me Story Cubes.

For as long as I can remember, my mind has always been full of crazy stories. Whether it be real ones or imaginary ones. I don’t just ride in a car, I create stories in my head while I ride in a car. You get the idea. So this was kind of a cool, thoughtful gift from my big sister!

The idea is to roll the dice and then create a story involving all of the pictures on the “cubes”. They recommend to start your story with Once Upon a Time…. Where’s the fun in that though? I thought I’d just look at what I got on the cubes and think of how I can relate that picture to an ancestor!

1. The skyscraper/city building. This makes me think of my Great Grandpa William L Moore, who worked for over 30 years in NYC for AT&T as an accountant.
2. The sheep reminds me of my Scottish ancestors, both the Loves and Menzies. I’ve recorded the Loves in Paisley, Scotland for many years. Paisley was a hub for the weaving industry and the birthplace of the Paisley pattern. (Which happens to be one of those things that I’ve always loved.)
3. Pyramid. The pyramid reminds me of Egypt. Which I’m obsessed with. The history of that place! It connects to my family history because one of the Menzies girls married a guy who traveled to Egypt for business regularly.
4. The Parachute. Aviation is HUGE in my father’s side of the family. Not just my father had the aviation bug. I have numerous newspaper articles that congratulate some of my family tree branches on their completion of flight school.
5. The cane reminds me of a very near and dear person. My grandma Emogene Taylor-Mays-Utter and her second husband, Wayne. In the final years of my Grandma’s life, she had dementia. Not alzheimers, but dementia. Dementia is a very tricky business because the person who suffers from it doesn’t lose memories so much as they do their personality switches on a dime. One minute she’d be fine and nice, and the next… well watch out! The cane comes in because her husband carved her a cane from solid oak. On the cane was a section that was carved out for marbles. He told her as long as she had that cane, she’d never lose her marbles. Such a sweet man, he’s dearly missed too.

That leaves me with the fountain, dice, bridge and clock. Right now nothing comes to mind but maybe as I learn more stories something will!