Archive | 2014

GEDmatch: A free website to compare and analyze your DNA results

Feb18

GEDmatch.com is a tremendous free membership website for analyzing your DNA data. Although I have previously blogged about the terrific ancestry composition tools at GEDmatch, I never did a step by step tutorial.
GEDmatchLarge

So I am pleased to announce that Barton Lewis from the DNA-NEWBIE list has contributed the documentation he wrote for his family to the downloads area of this website. Thank you Barton!

I added lots of pictures and we worked together on the presentation and wording. Let us know if you find it useful and what else we should add to it.

Help index Obituaries in as little as 20 minutes a week

Feb9

KittyandPirate

Family Search has launched a massive indexing of obituaries project that needs citizen helpers. They had a very clever promotion at Rootstech – “Dead men tell no tales but their Obituaries do!” – with a pirate who strode about getting his picture taken with anyone who wanted to do that. That’s me with him in the picture on the left. Then they had prizes at their booth.

So the url for working on the indexing project is – https://familysearch.org/indexing/ – this one is fun! Please join in.

Making Genealogy Interfaces More Engaging, a Rootstech Talk

Feb8

Charles Knutson, a professor at BYU, had a very enticing title for his talk, “Genealogy Meets Angry Birds: Making Interfaces More Addictive.” You can see how I picked the presentations to attend … by catchy title.

Play is part of being human and a mammal. All mammals play. Playing develops our skills in a safe environment. It’s great fun to run from a dragon in a game but in real life getting burned while you scramble over the gold would not be fun at all.

So why is genealogy like doing taxes for most people and not more like playing? In a game like angry birds, you know what you have accomplished so far and what your goals are. Genealogy programs do not save your place nor do they set your goals. They are just tools to manage your data and do not engage you the way a game does.

In a quick display of numerical scale he mentioned that there are 2.7 million paying ancestry.com members which sounded impressive until he pointed out that there are 2 billion Angry Birds players …

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Getting Cousins to Test, a Rootstech Talk

Feb7

I really love the title Blaine Bettinger, the Genetic Genealogist, used for his talk -“Begging for Spit” …
Blainebettinger-300x300
Having test results from my two second cousins has been extremely useful for narrowing down which family line new matches are related on. So I would really like to get  more cousins to test.

Blaine suggests using these three Es to guide you:

EDUCATE
ENGAGE
EXPEDITE

When discussing each of these, he stressed that you do not want to overwhelm your contact. That means no three page emails filled with technical terms! Make your request specific, short, and to the point. Make it visual and informative.

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Searching the Norwegian Digital Archives, a Rootstech Talk

Feb6

UPDATE 13 DEC 2020- the archives have a new look and new site at: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/en/

Many of us Norwegian-American researchers have been complaining about the new archives and its search function. So I went to the talk by Finn Karlsen of the Digitalarkivet hoping to gain a better understanding. Of course the first thing he told us was that the old archive would die at the end of March as would the links we might have been using in our trees to reference data there. This is not news as we have been hearing it for a while.

After listening to him I thought I understood what I had been doing wrong with my searches at the new digital archive site – I had not understand how to correctly use wildcards there. Apparently the asterisk * wildcard can only be used at the beginning or end of a word, not in the middle. Also the pipe character | can be used as an OR.

Finn of course made it look easy with his examples of searching. He promises to have his presentation posted at his website [UPDATE 13-DEC-2020: site no longer available]

The simple search example he gave in his talk was

Bernh* nes*|næss*

So I tried that at home and got this:

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