My neighbors’ macademia nut trees are laden with more nuts than they can use so I googled and found this great Utube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNAtcbz1_N0
Here is the summary of what I learned from all the articles I googled:
Drying the Excess Figs
One thing I truly love about our garden in our new home in the San Diego area (Lakeside) is all the magnificent mature fruit trees
. Fresh figs are my favorite.
Our fig tree pictured on the right must be at least 60 feet tall. See its size compared to my car on the far bottom left.
I had too many figs in the first crop this year and there is an enormous second crop on the tree so I googled around for how to dry figs and decided I liked this link the best:
Building a Color Coded Chromosome Mapping Tool
I am starting work on a web based program that will generate color-coded images of the chromosome segments inherited from your ancestors on an image of all 23 of your chromosomes. Cece Moore has done this by hand and that is the model for what this program will do. Click here for the sample image she posted in her geni.com blog article about autosomal DNA testing
The first release will just take your spreadsheet and make a picture. That spreadsheet will have the same columns as the family inheritance compare at 23andme (or chromosome compare at ftDNA and GEDmatch) plus 3 new columns, side (paternal or maternal), MRCA(s) and optional color choice for each MRCA. Initially 16 ancestors can be plotted. A color palette can be chosen instead of specific colors and that will include a grayscale for the color blind.
So I solicit all your suggestions. I am reposting here some of the thoughts of my fellow DNA-NEWBIE mailing list members, brought to us by ISOGG
Reading Norwegian Churchbooks
My cousin Dick Larkin has put together a wonderful guide to reading Norwegian churchbooks which is now available in our downloads section. It includes many charts, urls, and images of handwriting. Since so many Norwegian records are online at http://arkivverket.no/eng/content/view/full/629 – this is great help in doing genealogical research. While the census records there are transcribed to typewritten entries and easy to use, the church records require pouring through the images of handwritten entries so help or skill is needed to interpret them.
Here are a few excerpts from his guide:
“If you have chosen your parents wisely, your genealogical research will include Norwegian records. Norway has one of the most readily accessible bodies of genealogical data of any country outside the United States; the ‘Kirkeboker’, or churchbooks, are an important part of those data. They are the primary repository of data on births, marriages, and deaths for roughly the period 1670 to 1930, and, best of all, they are online and accessible without cost. Their only real downside is that they can be a challenge to read. This paper will help you overcome that challenge.
and how to figure out which churchbook:
“There are three ways to start: – First and best is to scour your own family records, certificates, Bibles, letters, diaries, and the like, and to inquire of elderly living relatives for clues as to where in Norway your ancestors came from. – Second is to look on Rootsweb (www.rootsweb.ancestry.com) to see if someone else has been researching your family and has posted their family tree data there. – Third is to use theFamilySearch website, but this may or may not be very helpful without at least some other clues. For example, this search lists over 137,000 people named Ole Olsen born in Norway between 1650 and 1930. Two ways to narrow this search are first by date of birth (or other known or closely estimated date); second is by location – at least at the county level. But even narrowing the search to Vest Agder County, and birth years 1800 to 1830 still gives 692 Ole Olsens. Death records in the United States sometimes identify a birth location in Norway; a farm name may give a clue (but a given farm name will likely be found in multiple communities and counties).
[Editor’s note when your ancestors names do not end in -sen or -son they have probably taken their farm name as their surname in this country for example Sande, Hauge, Skjold, and Tveit are all farm names. The familysearch listings for specific counties usually give a list of farm names but these may not be complete so try googling for the farm name with the words farm and norway. For example, googling for “tveit farm norway” turns up farms in at least four different counties.]
We have results from a first cousin
One of my cousins (half Norwegian) on Dad’s side (all Norwegian) just got his results. So I made this chart comparing myself to my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd cousins on Dad’s side. Mind you, the 2nd cousin is on Dad’s paternal side while the third cousin is on his mom’s side.
Kitty’s DNA versus her cousins
My brother’s chart looks very similar except no X match of course. Notice the very large X match I have with my first cousin which would come from his mother and my Dad’s mother, 57.3 cM. Interesting to see this as compared to my Dad ….