Keeping my mailing list emails out of gmail’s spam folder

May6

The other day I found dozens of emails from my various genealogy and DNA mailing lists in my spam folder.  This was most annoying. In many email programs you can put email addresses on a “white list” so that they do not go to spam. With Gmail you need to use the filter function to make sure that emails from your lists never go to spam. Here’s how.

FIlterThese

  1. Open a message from the mailing list
  2. Click on the More button above the emails to get a menu with “Filter messages like these” and click on that.
  3. Another box will come up with the sending email or words that identify this message type

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The new Y tree at Family Tree DNA and our Munson R-P312 Y

May2

MunsonNewYThe new Y tree released this past week by Family Tree DNA has dropped all those horrible long names like R1b1b1a1 and replaced them with the main Y  haplogroup followed by the terminal SNP. This had long been suggested as a better nomenclature. The downside is that you have to look at a chart to see how an R-P311 might be related to an R-P312 but it is worth it for the simplification of the name. Although I think we R1b’s are used to being different from the R1a’s and I would prefer that we were R1b-P312

The new Y tree combines the research of Family Tree DNA and the Genographic project.  The press release and its highlights are published on Emily Aulicino’s blog:

http://genealem-geneticgenealogy.blogspot.com/2014/04/family-tree-dna-2014-y-dna-haplogroup.html

and Debbie Kennett’s blog goes into deeper details:

http://cruwys.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-new-2014-y-dna-haplotree-has-arrived.html

 

But what does this mean for us R1b Munsons? Are we Scottish or Germanic? Where did our earliest known paternal line ancestor, Mons Knutson Titland  1665-1725 , who farmed a little north of Bergen, come from? Does our Y DNA tell us?
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Celebrating DNA day!

Apr25

DNA Double HelixSixty-one years ago today according to the Wikipedia article on DNA Day,  “James Watson,Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and colleagues published papers in the journal Nature on the structure of DNA.” As I am sure you all know, understanding the double helix nature of DNA was a major break through, paving the way for the multitude of amazing discoveries since.

Fellow blogger and genealogy junkie Sue Griffith has detailed the DNA day sales on her blog so I won’t repeat that information here.

So how to celebrate? I know, blow off work and spend the day doing my personal genetic genealogy when not in the garden 🙂

 

My Guacomole aka Avocado Butter

Apr22

GuacmoleWknifeMy guacamole is really an avocado butter which I spread on my bread or toast when I make myself a sandwich.

The key ingredients are avocado, garlic, lemon juice, green onions, and a dash of tabasco sauce. I make guacamole without any tomato or peppers because I try not to eat nightshade plants (arthritis issue, another story…).

This time of year my Fuerte avocados have the perfect oil count for this and a silky smooth butter-like texture.


Ingredients:

  • 2 ripe avocados
  • 1 medium lemon
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1 scallion or green onion
  • dash of tabasco sauce (to taste)
  • dash of salt (to taste)

 

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Translating Farm Books Using a Norwegian OCR program

Apr22

NorwegianOCR
When I scan in documents I use a product called PaperPort for my Optical Character Reader (OCR – turns images of words into text that can be edited in a word processor) but it does not know about Norwegian characters.  So it has been a lot of work for me to clean up the result of a Norwegian scan in order to use Google Translate on it. Needless to say, I was delighted to read that there is an online OCR program for Norwegian!   Jim Bergquist, a fellow subscriber to the rootsweb Norway list, posted the step by step process to that group for translating farm book entries using this tool and he has given me permission to rephrase his method on this blog. Here it is:

  1. Crop the text part of your scanned image and save as a separate image file. Make sure to do a multi-column pages one column at a time.
  2. Go to http://www.i2ocr.com/free-online-norwegian-ocr . This is an online Optical Character Recognition tool. You don’t have to download or install any software.
  3. Instructions at the bottom tell you to:
    1. Click the “File” radio button. Press “Select Image”. Use the file box to navigater to where you put the image on your computer.
    2. Leave the language in Norwegian.
    3. Enter the two numbers or words separated by a space. These are used to prevent automated robots from using the site for hours.
    4. Press “Extract Text.”
  4. Three buttons will appear at the bottom of the screen and the extracted text will be in the left hand box (see example below).
    • Download, to put it on your own computer (a good choice).
    • Translate, I haven’t used – it may send it as-is to Google Translate. However, OCR usually requires some corrections to be made, so you should look at the result and correct it before trying to translate.
    • Edit in Google Docs, if you are familiar with working on documents in the cloud.
    • Of course you can just cut and paste the text in the left hand box over to your word processor instead of any of the above options, which is what I did.
  5. When you have corrected any OCR errors in the file, select the text and paste it into Google Translate.

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