The Misadventures of a Genealogist - Connecting to the past, sharing the journey

The Absentee Genealogist

Posted on December 15, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

First and foremost, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season! No matter what you celebrate I hope you’re able to spend lots of quality time with your families and friends.

I certainly never expected to be absent this long from my blog. However, looking back I usually am during this time of year. My new computer is running just fine, only a few hiccups related to my old hard drives.

Here are the things I’ll be working on as a priority:

Cleaning out all my hard drives and condensing them down. Partially due to the issues I’m experiencing with one of my extra drives. I’ll be backuping them up to CD, flash drive and Dropbox. Lots of work, but it’s long overdue!
Re-syncing my Ancestry Member Tree and my FTM 2014 trees. I’ll be honest, I haven’t touched my family tree since getting the new computer. I even let my memberships lapse again, but this time I’m going to experiment with other methods of getting my data since I used my extra money to purchase a new computer. There are plenty of options out there and I need to focus on what information I already have anyway!
The website. There’s been a lot going on with my website for a few years that I’ve been ignoring. Including an over abundance of domain names and duplicate TNG installations. So I’ve got to do a clean out of not only my personal computer but my internet files also.

I think that’s enough for now! I’m hoping that cleaning out the mess from before and after the computer switch will get my head back in the game. Right now I’m having a hard time making any sense of my files, so anything I can do has to be progress.

Do you have troubles getting back into the swing of things after a break? Any big plans for the holiday? My house is finally decorated so it’s time to relax for us!

Happy Almost November!

Posted on October 29, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

Wow guys! I sure didn’t expect to be down a whole month from the blog. I had told you about my ordering my new computer, and I was happily still working on my cleaned up files until about 2 weeks before the computer came. Then my old computer committed an unforgivable act. It corrupted my working file. Fortunately for me that was the day my computer was originally scheduled to be delivered. Unfortunately, the computer was delayed twice due to parts being out of stock. I was scared to use my old computer so I just put up my genealogy and worked on quilts. I was very lucky that I had just backed up, so I lost almost no progress. Phew!

Now I have the new computer and it’s wonderful! I didn’t realize how much my computer had slowed down and didn’t work until I had a working one again. The only problem is now I’m faced with the mess I left behind with the old computer. Good news being that I lost zero files.

The Tree Sync inssue — The Tree Sync issue

Being honest with myself tells me that no matter what happened, the second I bought my computer I was going to have to face this issue. No getting around it. After reading the FAQ on Ancestry and thinking out the situation I think I know how I’m going to proceed.

Bottom Line = New Computer means that my Online Tree and FTM file are no longer synced. There isn’t a way to connect the two again except for the options I’m about to outline.

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Moores in 1915, driving me crazy

Posted on September 29, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

One of the things I’m doing is trying to find my Moore families in the New York state censuses. It’s not easy because of their commonly used names, but it’s fun looking anyway. I had found William H Moore Jr in 1915 at his usual address in Queens. In 1920, he lives at the same address, but in Brooklyn not Queens. I checked the map at the time and when I did, I completely understood!

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I made an expensive decision!

Posted on September 17, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

I bought a new computer. It’s been on my mind constantly for almost a year now. Lately my computer has been having more and more problems. I’ve fixed it again and again. Finally, I decided I just wanted to go ahead and get the new computer. It’s been over 7 years since I purchased a computer, so it’s going to be a huge upgrade for me!

I’m not going to go into the logistics of it but I made the right computer decision for me. It won’t be here for 2 weeks though. The wait just might kill me! In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do. For the first time ever, I’m going to have a new computer before the old one is beyond saving! This means I can get everything in order on my second hard drive before the new one gets here! Then I can just put my second hard drive into the new computer and have a seamless (hopefully) experience… After the programs I use are installed of course. Unfortunately and fortunately with my ongoing computer problems, I’m an old hat at that part. I’ve had to “re-install” Windows every 6 months for the last few years at least because of a reoccurring problem no tech expert could figure out.

While I’m preparing for that I’m also working with the new Family Tree Maker 2014! One thing I noticed about it right away is that it’s FASTER. Very noticeably faster on my current computer. I used to have to add someone, wait 5 minutes, add a birth date, wait 3 minutes, and so on. I was constantly compacting the file, and I did all the suggestions from Ancestry to make the program move faster, it just didn’t want to cooperate. The new version is lightning fast for me now and I’m making so much progress on my family file cleanup. Which is drawing to a close hopefully by the end of this year! I did have to pause a few lines because it was just out of control, but I’ll make it back to them at the end of the cleanup. I just wanted to feel like I was making forward progress again and those huge families make you feel lost in the 1800s! I’ve made it up to the Applegate line which is already almost done. Which is good because I feel like I’ve been doing this project for years, oh wait, I have! 🙂

I did make a few boo-boos when I was getting everything set up. Nothing completely permanent if I wouldn’t mind taking back some progress made because of the new lightning fast speed. Though the biggest damage was my synced tree on Ancestry.com. That’s currently a mess and I’m working on getting it cleaned up. Had I not already been entrenched in computer issues at the time, I might not have made those mistakes but I can’t take back hitting the unlink button now and they did warn me! So onward without looking backwards. That’s my new motto!

That’s the latest that’s happening here in Maryland. Just thought I’d give you an update on what’s been happening in my progress.

My updated AncestryDNA results are in!

Posted on September 14, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

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!

Mystery Monday: Finding Bell Brodie, Onwards and Upwards

Posted on August 26, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

It’s that time again! I’m truly coming to enjoy spending my Sunday afternoons on the hunt for Bell. Then I can write about it for Monday!

I decided after last week, to just go ahead and search the Canada census in London, Ontario for a Bell Brodie to see what happened. I don’t have an Ancestry World Membership, so I’m making do with the FamilySearch indexes! No problem!

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Mystery Monday: Finding Bell Brodie, Canada edition

Posted on August 19, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

I had a pleasant surprise in my email on Sunday morning. It was from my long lost cousin, Grace. (I love calling her that for some reason :)) I have communicated with Grace over the past few years thanks to my blog bringing us together. We’ve shared a lot of information on our linked Menzies/Love connection over the years. Lucky for me, she had something to add to the mystery of Bell Brodie!

She sent me three different letter transcriptions. Then she suggested that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be looking in London, England for Bell, but London, Ontario, Canada! Before I even consulted anything else having to do with the mystery of where Bell Brodie belonged, I brought out the map.

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Website Changes

Posted on August 17, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

Over the last month, I slowly started making some visual changes to the website. I got rid of all that brown and made the website brighter and more colorful. I was having a hard time getting up the gumption to even work on the site, so I went ahead and applied the TNG theme updates, fixed some bugs, and just went live on that side.

screen cap of new website design — New moore-mays.org site

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Mystery Monday: Finding Bell Brodie part 2

Posted on August 5, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

For the last few weeks, I’ve been jumping around a lot. I’ve been working on a billion things and not anything. Do you do that too? Always busy but never seem to get any one thing done. This weekend, I finally took some time to sit down and re-visit my Bell Brodie mystery. I didn’t expect to take such a big break but it was never far from my mind!

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Taking Things Slowly

Posted on June 26, 2013February 18, 2025 by Kathleen

It’s been a wild few weeks in the Moore household. My recurring injury flared up and I was forced to stay off my feet as much as possible. Then just as I was getting on my feet again, literally, the whole household has come down with all kinds of various illnesses. So of course, this makes me want to do 80 things at one time. Funny how that happens! During all this chaos, I’ve been thinking a lot about my blog and what I want it to be. Mainly, I just want it to be a fun little genealogy blog for myself and whoever else finds it! So I’ll be taking things more slowly. I used to write an article on the spot, proofread it and post it. I’m going to slow down that process a bit, so that I have some time to add in whatever sources/pictures/documents I need to accurately say what it is I’m trying to say. I have a problem in the fact that my brain goes faster then my typing. Sometimes, that really shows!

Family File Cleanup progress as of 6/25/2013. Gosh those blank spaces drive me crazy! Must fill them!

Even though I’ll be blogging differently, I still have my same projects. I’m still working on my Family File Cleanup. I’m still trying to plan my first genealogy road trip, two years later, HA! I’m still consuming as much information I can on the subjects I want to learn, just at a reasonable pace instead of an overwhelming one. My biggest project after my Family File Cleanup is done, is going to be going through my extra hard drive and cleaning it up a lot. There’s a lot of duplicate files and stuff on there. I haven’t been as diligent in some areas of organization as others. I’m even thinking about ordering a new external hard drive that’s separate from my computer. Not until I wrangle my mess though, the mess needs to be fixed before I reward myself.

I’ve also been trying out all kinds of software. I had some extra money in my budget to play with this month. Since that rarely happens, I decided to purchase myself a copy of Legacy 7.5 and Evidentia. I really want to try these programs out and see how good they are. While I’ll try out the full version of Legacy, I have a feeling I’ll still stick to Family Tree Maker. It’s what I learned on, it’s what I feel comfortable in. I still have Roots Magic too, and I love that one too. I know it’s better to pick one and stick with it. I just really enjoy playing with the other software options. Nothing wrong with that! Evidentia interests me because though I’m usually really good at pulling bits of information out of documents, I know I can do better. I just don’t want to get too deep into re-analyzing all my records until the cleanup is done! Then I’ll know I have a strong base to work from. Hopefully, this might help me with the mystery of Bell Brodie also! I’ll be sure to blog about all my trials and errors, just like usual.

So that’s where I’m at now. How are you all doing and what are your summer time goals? Are there any huge projects that you’re coming to an end of?

Disclaimer: None of the links in the post are sponsor links. I’m not making any profit by mentioning these programs. I wasn’t even asked to mention them, I just had good old fashioned curiosity!