My Garden was on Today’s Tour

Dec6

The Lakeside Historic Society Christmas Home Tour was today, Saturday, from 10 am to 2 pm and our home was part of it. You would have seen my garden plus a peek at the house via my sun porch.

View from the sun porch

Bert and Marie Wilkas designed the house and hired a builder to draw up the plans and start construction in 1957. It was completed in 1958. The original address was Route 1, Box 317. It is a one story wood home in the style known as san diego modern in the 50s – extensive use of natural materials, wood, and large glass windows (actually french doors) on the view side.

Marie Wilkas had her real estate office in this house – Eucalyptus Hills Realty. Many of the Eucalyptus Hills properties were sold from that office. We still have her sign.

The rest of this post is a the detailed description of my garden and I am still adding photos. Continue reading →

Cyber Monday Sales for DNA and Genealogy

Nov30

Cyber Monday used to be the day for online sales but most started last Thursday or Friday however I admit that I was too busy with family to pay much attention.

Ancestry’s sales will finish at midnight EST tomorrow, the end of Cyber Monday and they include 20% off AncestryDNA ($79). 11/28-12/1

Family Tree DNA has sales and mystery gifts until the end of December, see Roberta Estes’ post for more details: http://dna-explained.com/2014/11/25/family-tree-dna-holiday-sale-including-mystery-rewards-starts-now/

and Family Tree Magazine has all kinds of holiday sales, with an additional discount that is ending Cyber Monday: http://www.shopfamilytree.com/cyber-monday-deals

Genetic Genealogy Humor from Esto

Nov24

Thanks again to Esto Frigus for permission to use his wonderful cartoons! Click on the comic strip to go to his blog and rate it.

DNA matching changes at Ancestry.com

Nov21

All my favorite bloggers have posted good articles about the changes in the Ancestry.com DNA pages. I have put a list of them at the end of this post.

The improvement in Ancestry’s DNA matching has greatly reduced the total number of matches, which ran into the thousands for many of us. The theory is that their new algorithm has gotten rid of those matches that were unlikely to share a common ancestor in the genealogical time frame. I am hopeful. And the new DNA home page for a person is much nicer looking and more informative as you can see below.

Looking at how my brother with one Jewish grandparent has fared, all his 4^th cousin Jewish matches (dozens of those) are gone. This is probably correct. The few that I have been in contact with are not recently related.

Continue reading →

British Censuses, Probates, and BMD Records at Ancestry.com

Nov17

Sometime in the last year a whole slew of British records from the 1800s, at least for the London area, came online at Ancestry.com – I think it has been that long since I last looked for my UK relatives.

Regina Gundelfinger Gugenheimer

Last night, around midnight, I followed a green leaf for my 3rd-great-aunt Fanny Gugenheimer Mandelbaum, who had moved from Germany to London, fully expecting it to be yet another person who had copied my tree. Instead I found her and her husband David in the 1851 and 1861 London censuses. I had thought that they had no children but there were suddenly two daughters, and one of them married a fellow named Anton Benda and had many descendants in more censuses, 1871, 1881 and 1891 and other records. When I next looked up it was 3:30 a.m… oops.

I have to admire ancestry’s matching algorithm. Most of the hints were spot on and kept me clicking away until the wee hours. After a while some of the Benda descendants started appearing in other trees so I shot off messages to three new people and all three of them answered (very unusual on ancestry)! So far they are all just related by marriage.

Also now I have a surname to look for in our DNA results and in modern London – Benda. It seems to be East European, perhaps Latvian or Hungarian in origin. Not sure if it is Jewish. The Benda descendants seem to have marriage banns published so perhaps they did not stay Jewish.