Archive | 2017

Party with Me on Feb. 10 at Rootstech 2017!

Last year’s Rootstech saw the advent of a great new event, the MyHeritage after party on Friday night, with lots of fun games (no I cannot throw a bean bag well) as well as music, karaoke, prizes, food, and drink. A great tension reliever after a hard day focusing on wonderful talks.

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Shipley Munson and A.J.Jacobs on screen and on stage at Rootstech

I have five free party tickets to give out to my readers for this year’s after party on Friday February 10th. Everyone who completes my survey about my blog (click here) will be entered into a random drawing. You can also answer inline after the read more below. In addition, you can choose to do the questionnaire and not enter as well. Winners will be notified by email very soon.

This will be my fourth year at Rootstech and my third year speaking. My topic will again be DNA Triangulation, updated from previous renditions. This is one of my favorite subjects and I love to demonstrate how we used this in my family to confirm a shaky paper trail, as well as ways you can use this technique at the different companies.

Another point of excitement for fellow genetic genealogists is that our own wonderful Cece Moore is doing a keynote speech on Saturday.
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Following an X match in the Etne farm books

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Having just received the Etne, Norway local history books (bygdebuker) for Christmas, I have spent countless hours looking at my ancestors in them. Naturally I have been trying to think of even more ways to use these books.

An idea that came to me was to look at my Dad’s one-to-many X matches at GEDmatch.com and see if I could find a match where I could follow the lines and connect them to Dad’s maternal grandad via those books

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The largest X match he had with an unfamiliar name and email was to *k for 26.8 centimorgans (cMs) and it included a small autosomal match of 6.3 cMs. This seemed promising so I used the user lookup function on my GEDmatch home page and was delighted to see that she had uploaded a GEDCOM.

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The GEDCOM number is clickable from the lookup result and it takes you to a page listing the individual. Of course what you really want is the pedigree to quickly scan for relatives in common and there is a button for that at the top of the page. Better is to use the compare 2 GEDCOMs feature from the home page to compare your match’s GEDCOM to your own. Works great if you both have deep trees but I had no luck with that for *k.

Next I clicked on the pedigree button at the top of her individual listing in the GEDCOM which took me to her pedigree page. Nothing jumped out at me and most of them were from Germany.

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