Well, that definitely describes me. Not only for today, but also for a long time when it comes to the Johnson line of my family tree. I actually need to be more specific, because I have a Johnson line on both my Mom and Dad’s side. Right now I’m talking about my Dad’s side.
Two of my previous blog posts have comments from people who are wondering about my Bartholomew Taylor. They want to know if my Bartholomew is connected to the one they are researching. Their Bartholomew Taylor married a Nancy Dismukes in Georgia in 1819.
04 Nov 2024 Edit: Apparently this post was garbled when backing up and importing to the new URL. I’ve used the Wayback Machine to restore the post the best I can.
Continue reading “Answering Comments: Bartholomew Taylor and Nancy Dismukes”Alert: This is a Long Post!
For the record, this is not my actual "first impression" of Find My Past. I have used it for British research a few times over the last few years. I have not used it on a regular basis. I have received no compensation for this post and expect no compensation. This is my honest opinion.
In order to give Find My Past an honest look, I will be using mostly English ancestors to test it out. I’m going to give the American records a shot, but then I will move on to what I know they excel at… British Records!
ALERT: Long Post!
This is a long blog entry on some of my first impressions on using MyHeritage's website. These opinions are my own. No one asked for them and I decided to give them anyway. I pay the bills around here, so it's all good! No one sponsored this post and I don't expect anything in return for posting this. Just my honest opinion follows.
I just can’t let the cage match idea go! Once something is in my brain, it’s there fermenting for awhile. So I apologize for the terminology. This is definitely not a cage match. This is just me, giving things a chance for once.
To get a good first impression, I didn’t want to base it solely on working my way up the tree. That means I am using my old file of reasonably documented people to do these tests. I feel like to truly get to know a website, you have to use it a lot and with a variety of different challenges. Otherwise you’ll never really know until way down the line when you actually start finding those things.
To be fair I will say when I first started using MyHeritage a few weeks back, I hated the family tree section. The Family View was really hard to navigate. Note: This was before Pedigree View was added. My screenshots were taken this week and not when I first tried using MyHeritage.
As you can see from my screenshot, the wideness of the tree made it really hard to navigate. Especially if I was working on someone not in my direct tree. Since a lot of my families have 5 or more children, I go on genealogy tangents often and this view was just too hard to use. This was a big disadvantage over Ancestry’s easy to navigate Family Tree.
Continue reading “Not a Genealogy Cage Match: MyHeritage First Impressions”Hold your horses, nothing crazy is going on here. I’m talking about my Ancestry.com habit. Don’t worry this is not an Ancestry bashing post. This isn’t even a post about how disappointed I am in Ancestry. While there are some problems with the website, as a website owner, I’m sympathetic to issues that pop up.
To be upfront, I fully intend to imbibe in my favorite genealogy website later. That’s right I said favorite. It’s my first genealogy love, it’s the one that I learned on. It however… expired on me. I didn’t have the subscription saved up to pay up front for it, so I decided to break my habit. I was not going to go into credit card debt just to keep Ancestry. Aren’t you proud? I’m trying being all grown up and stuff. Ha!
Oh boy, sometimes those census records can really throw you for a loop. Sometimes they might even change the entire way you think about a family you are researching. There is never a family that confused me more than the Mays family. Any Mays researcher out there will agree with me. They are hard to pin down! This week I’m going to spotlight Rebecca Mays, for sheer stubbornness!
In the 1850 Census, everything seems fine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. We won’t even go into the fact that I don’t believe I have ever found a document that states William Mays Jr was the son of William Mays Sr. Especially since I know from watching many webinars that sometimes the Sr and Jr were added by enumerators if there was an older and younger man of the same name living near each other. I’ll get to that in my Do-Over when it’s time to stress over that! This census is important because it’s the earliest one that is going to give me ages of the children closest to the birth. This is especially important for Rebecca, who is aged 9 in this census.
Continue reading “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: In the Census (Week 05)”Oh boy! This was a tough one. There are plenty of people in my family tree I’d love to have over from dinner and conversation. Narrowing down my prospects wasn’t easy. I decided to pick someone from my Dad’s side of the tree since I picked Mom’s side last week.
I thought long and hard about how I would interpret the prompt this week. I was going to do the longest living male and female. Then I was going to do the longest married couple. Thinking about all those tempted me to look in my old file, so I decided right then and there I was going to poke around my current Do-Over file and see what jumped out at me.
Continue reading “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Longevity (Week 03)”This is a special treat for those that followed along all those years ago when I posted The Diary of Llewellyn for 3 years. Many will recall midway through the Diary, my Great-Grandpa Bill started showing up with his future wife. One of their favorite activities to do was dance.
In fact, if you search this blog for “we danced” it comes up more than once!
This is one of my favorite photos because 50 years later and you can tell she still loved dancing with him!
It’s time to talk about my DNA matches again. I’ve been immersing myself in my matches. One of the Facebook groups I am a member of told me that the best way to learn about your DNA is to get familiar with your results. That’s what I’ve been focusing on since it’s way too cold to be outside…
Okay, I probably wouldn’t have been outside anyway. It’s never been my thing.
The last time I posted about my DNA, this chart was where I left things. I was going through trying to identify my public tree matches to see what I could tell about them. Everything is listed in my Excel spreadsheet. While I was going through, I also made a point of adding a star and note to each match that I identified. Boy am I glad I did that now. Wait until I show you this!
Continue reading “My DNA Database Status”