Archive | July 2014

IAJGS conference and talking with Greenspan

If this were a financial blog you would assume a different Greenspan than Bennett and in fact they may be related, but since Alan won’t do the DNA test, we may never know. Today at the annual IAJGS conference I spent some time chatting with Bennett in the Exhibition Hall.  I asked him if they could implement a triangulation feature where when two people match me on a specific segment I can check if they match each other on that spot. He said yes but gave me no time frame …

Selfie with Bennett Greenspan

Bennett Greenspan and Kitty Cooper

Bennett Greenspan is the founder of Family Tree DNA, one of the big three in personal DNA testing. This came about because a newly retired Bennett wanted to prove that the possible Argentinian relatives he had found were related when there was no paper trail showing this. He had read about Dr. Michael Hammer’s work with DNA and the cohanim Y chromosome marker and wondered why that sort of test could not be used for his case. Dr. Hammer laughed at him and said something like “If you knew how many crazy genealogists have been calling me … someone really ought to start a company.” The rest, as we say, is history.

Tomorrow at 1:45 Elise Freeman is going to speak about  “Understanding Your DNA Results in the Context of Ashkenazi Ancestry.” I can’t wait to hear her.

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GEDmatch is back up!

GEDmatch.com is back up at last!

GEDmatch.com is the site where you can upload your DNA results from any of the three main companies and compare them to other people’s results uploaded there. I have numerous articles on GEDmatch on this site, just click GEDmatch in the tag cloud on the right or click here. There is also a guide to using GEDmatch in my downloads section.

Also for anyone in the San Diego area, I will be giving a talk on using GEDmatch on the third thursday in August for the Carlsbad group of ISOGG members. More details on that soon.

Having that site back is great news for those of us who love it!

You can now separate your source images from family photos at WikiTree

I am very excited that WikiTree now lets you tag uploaded photos as sources so that you can separate family photos from source material. This makes it easy to look at just one group or the other. I had asked for this feature and am delighted that my request was granted. WikiTreeImageMenuSmllThis was one of the things that I had felt that GENI did better.

I like to upload sources in order to share them with family. Marriage certificates, death certificates, draft cards, emigration lists, among many. One of the things I particularly like about WikiTree is that my relatives do not have to log in to see public information like these documents and family photos.

There is also a very nice feature where you can scroll through all your photos. The pull down menu under “My WikiTree” has an item called images. Click on that and you can look through all the images you have uploaded, ten at a time. Plus at the bottom of that page you can select different ways to sort them. I just used this feature to go through all my images and mark those that are sources as such.

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Celebrating the birthday of the country that took us in

None of my great-grandparents were born in the USA and only one of my grandparents was. Why did my ancestors come here? What does this day mean to us? Does the next generation take the freedoms here for granted? I think I often do, but today I want to celebrate this great country that my immigrant ancestors came to with this blog post about my grandparents and how it happened that they became Americans.

OpaMeetsOma1908smllMy mother was born in Munich, Bavaria (Germany) to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. I was always told that they met at the 1909 automobile club ball in Munich, but I found this picture with the caption 1908 costume ball so I guess they met a year earlier than I had realized.

At the time they met, my grandfather Siegfried was 23 and a medical student from an extremely wealthy Jewish family. My grandmother Fanny was 19, from a middle class family. Her father was a contractor/brick layer who had run away from the seminary he had been sent to in his youth. He read Latin and Greek in his spare time for pleasure and had sent his only daughter to a convent school. She made the dress and headdress that she is wearing in this picture

For my Opa it was love at first sight, but neither family approved. Siggy and Fanny went to concerts, the opera, and hiked together in the Bavarian Alps. The courtship lasted for over nine years. First my Opa had to get his doctorate since his father refused to support a wife and family for him. Then there was World War I where he served as a medical doctor. Additionally Fanny had a small TB spot on her lung so she was sent to a sanitarium and then, before the war, au paired in France and the Isle of Wight, since she was advised not to winter in Munich. Her resulting fluent English (and French) was most useful later on.

When Siegfried’s father, my g-grandfather Josef, was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1917, he finally gave his approval for them to marry, which they did in a civil ceremony a year later. Her parents did not attend. By the way, Josef died from the anesthesia during his operation in 1917, not the cancer.

Because my Opa was Jewish, he was dismissed or rather pensioned off from his Freiberg University professorship in 1933/1934. My grandmother was the one who insisted that they leave Germany; Opa, like many German Jews, thought it would all blow over. My Oma was not willing to risk the lives of her three lovely daughters when the family had many offers from overseas universities.

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