Archive | January 2016

Will I see you at Rootstech next week?

Jan30

It is almost time for Rootstech 2016, my favorite genealogy conference! Not a surprise that this event suits me since I am a techie who loves doing family history and DNA. Perhaps I also like the fact that it takes place in Salt Lake City next door to the Family History Library, a wonderful genealogy resource. You can find me there on level B1 looking at Norwegian bygdebuks whenever I have a bit of free time.

Speaker BadgeI will be giving a slightly advanced DNA talk late on Friday about how I have used triangulation to solve some of my family’s genealogical questions. Don’t come if you do not know what an autosomal DNA test is. But you will have plenty of chances to learn about genetics and genealogy earlier in the week from other speakers at Rootstech.

Triangulation is an incredibly important tool in the genetic genealogists arsenal. It is our own “proof standard.”  I gave this class for my local DNA group and at the SCGS Jamboree DNA day last year, as I will again this year. This talk does change a little each time and I am always improving the slides. I was very pleased that so many people told me afterwards that they felt they finally understood this difficult concept. Going through a few cases step by step seems to be very helpful for most people. One of the stories I use is how we proved Kristine really is a WOLD cousin which is written up here in my triangulation post.

But there are many other interesting DNA talks by some of my favorite presenters, Bennet Greenspan (founder of Family Tree DNA), Tim Janzen, Diane Southard, and a number of the folk from the Ancestry.com DNA team. Did you notice that 23andme is missing?

If you get to Salt Lake City early, you may want to hear Israel Pickholtz, the author of Endogamy. He is going to give a talk about Jewish DNA on the Tuesday night before the conference for the Utah Jewish Genealogy Society.

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Thank you GENI.com !!

Jan15

Thanks to the collaborative world family tree at GENI.com our long lost second cousins in Germany have been found. Here is that story.

benedict margaret marriage

Margarette and Benedict Reiner on their wedding day in 1889

We knew we had half second cousins somewhere in Bavaria but did not know their surname nor where they lived. The family lore is that my great-grandfather Benedict Reiner was studying to be a priest when he got the daughter of the local innkeeper pregnant. Her family was welcoming but he did not want to be an innkeeper so he ran off to Munich and became a contractor. His illegitimate son from this union came for the occasional visit to Benedict and was called Xavier according to my late mother.

My News Year’s resolution this year was to better learn how to do German genealogy research so I could work on this part of the family. It is the only branch that is not done when you look at the five generation fan chart, so it has been calling to me for a while.

Last week I scanned in a marriage document for Benedict and my great-grandmother that I had found years ago on a microfilm at the LDS family history library. My plan was to upload it to all my online trees and then request some help with checking the translation from my mother over at a facebook group about Bavarian genealogy (thank you Ute). I use many online family trees but I usually start with GENI because it is easy to use and pretty and seems to have more European genealogists than the others. Since I am descended from recent immigrants to the U.S.A. that is an important consideration for me.

GENI has a nice feature that when you are logged in and start typing a name in the search box, it shows you the names that match from your tree or from those people you are following. However if there is a lot of information on your home page when you first arrive, it can be slow to do that. That is why it was not yet responding when I typed in Benedict’s name. So I hit the search button figuring it was an uncommon name thus the regular search it would find him easily and quickly. I was surprised when it found two of them. Curious I clicked the other. He had no dates listed and a different wife and child so perhaps that is why the GENI matching algorithm did not find him.

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