Sorry for the delay

I moved!  Okay it was just across the county line, basically, but after 20 years in one place, it is good to be some where else!  For the last year+, I have done so little with any genealogy or pictures.  Nothing.  Everything got packed away when we were looking for a new place and getting the old one ready to sell.  And it is still packed away since the new place needs to have the lower level completed before I will truly have a whole bedroom to organize everything.  Someday........

(Also we do not have regular internet, just cellular data which is not very fast.)

Why I deleted my Ancestry.com Family Trees

I have had an account with Ancestry.com since Mar 2002, that is 15 years folks.  Some of that time was via a membership and other times not.  My mother did a DNA test through Ancestry.com and she also got one for me, a few months later.  When my mother first got her test results, I was able to see the PUBLIC family trees managed by people who were related to my mother.  A lot of people don't have them but it was nice to have the option to browse DNA matches tree.

A few months later I did my DNA test through Ancestry.com and guess what.  Yep, I couldn't view the family trees from anyone except my own.  When I click on the link, it sends me automatically to a membership screen (see below).  All I wanted to view was a tree that someone created and posted in the public trees.  Why does this require a subscription?  Why does Ancestry think that my research should only be viewed by members?  

Since my DNA results are there, I do still have an account.  But I will not be purchasing a membership anytime soon. Frankly, Ancestry has gotten so huge that even a basic search returns too many results to manage because it includes tons of internet sites as well.  So if you are interested in finding relatives via DNA testing, I would recommend using a different company.

UPDATE: Aug 20th - just found out why my mother could view trees and not me.  Nothing was changed by Ancestry EXCEPT my mother actually bought a membership.  I'm not even sure she knows what that means.  So still would not recommend Ancestry.com DNA.

iFamily for Leopard, Updated!

I think I mentioned in a previous post that iFamily didn't seem to have any updates so I thought I would have to switch programs. Fortunately, this is not true any longer! There is an update available to previous owners so now my program has stopped asking me to check for updates. Frankly, I didn't even care what the updates were, I just wanted the message to stop!

After I updated, I started a new file that would include sourcing for everyone in the file. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be for my mother's side of the family. I actually reached the 4th great-grandfather generation (for my children), at least with names. But I did discover that I don't have my father's birth record so I am not able to go farther on that side until I get a hold of him. I also have nothing added for my husband's family for the exact same reason. Something to work on!

Visiting cemeteries

I have visited two cemeteries this week, one yesterday and one today. And I dragged/bribed my children to come along. They really didn't help a ton but it was nice to have someone there. And they did look for names! My daughter didn't want to look by herself so the two of them looked together.

Yesterday we went to the Beaverdam Cemetery. It was so HOT. I started taking pictures of every stone but that didn't last long with the heat. It doesn't seem like it would be a big deal to just take pictures but yes, it was! I did find most of the graves I wanted and the ones I didn't find might not even have stones. That is part of the organization problem. I probably have a listing from the cemetery records at the library, but not on my computer. Nor linked to my cemetery file. I have visited this cemetery before but it was before I had a digital camera so it was nice to have digital copies to add to my computer records.

I actually have two sets of direct ancestors at this cemetery. The de Vries pair do not have a stone. The only stone from that family is for the daughter who died in 1881. As you can tell from the picture above, the stone is very worn and difficult to read. The girl was named Jantje and she died when she was 20 years old. I haven't looked up a death record for her yet so I am not sure the cause of her death. Her younger brother died about the same age but I don't even have exact dates for him. The two surviving brothers are the ancestors that connect my parents trees.

The other couple are Jan & Jantje Beld. Their stone is also in bad shape but someone had added plaques since the last time I had been out there, about 10 years ago.

Today we went to the Benthiem Cemetery. This was my very first visit there. My direct ancestor, Reijer Sneller, is buried there but doesn't not have a stone. So there wasn't any big discoveries. All the pictures I took were for distant relatives or just very old stones. It was a very nice cemetery but was being mowed so there was a lot of grass clippings to move aside.

I also spent a lot of time adding the pictures and records to Find A Grave. This website is a collection of cemetery records and photos added by anyone who has an interest. It is a great site!

I am trying to decide if I should visit another cemetery tomorrow to make it three in a row or to swing by the library and make some copies from the cemetery records.

Prolific Fathers

Genea-Musings Saturday challenge is to find the most prolific dad in your tree. Well, I couldn't find a way for iFamily for Leopard to pull this out for me so I am going with two prolific brothers. These brothers are the bridge between my parents family tree.

The older brother, Jacob De Vries, is my father's Great-Great grandfather on his mother's side. Jacob and his wife Agnes produced 11 children, 2 of which didn't survive to adulthood. The second brother is Johannes, my mother's Great-Great grandfather on her mother's side. Johannes and his wife Gertrude (pictured above) produced 12 children, 2 of which didn't survive to adulthood.

Happy Father's Day!

Tombstone edition

Well, June started quickly and now is half way done! So I thought I had better post something before the month totally disappeared. I am still working on the information I mentioned in my last post. I was going to spend today doing more lookups but other things have come up. After this posting, I hope to get a little bit done.

Let's look at a tombstone today. Some of my favorites are in the East Holland Cemetery. I especially love the three large ones that mark Aaltje Hellenthal, her husband Jan J and one of their daughters, Cornelia. The picture above is for Aaltje. Not only do I love the size of this stone, but there is a lot of information. It gives her maiden name and her husband's along with her birth and death dates. We also know that her husband died before her and since everything is in Dutch, that shows her heritage as well!

Additionally, I know that Aaltje was my Great-Great Grandmother. She was born in Fillmore Township, Michigan in 1854, married Johannes Naber in 1876 and died in 1919 at the age of 64. She had 6 children. Her oldest Anna died at the age of 22, within a year of giving birth to her first child. Her 2nd child, Johannes lived into adulthood but I don't have an exact date for him. He is not buried in the East Holland Cemetery where most of the others are located. Gertrude is the 3rd child and again, I don't have a lot of information on her. I know that she had three children. The 4th & 5th children were both named Cornelia. The 1st Cornelia died when she was only 2 years old. The second Cornelia died at the age of 19. She is buried next to her parents. The youngest child was Walter, my great-grandfather. Walter lived to the ripe old age of 79 and ran the family farm, which passed to two of his sons.

My SWEET Dutch Genealogy!

I was reading the newest issue of the Family Tree Magazine (August 2010) today and was on page 6, checking out the readers responses. The first one jumped out at me called "Dutch Sweet". This man in Lockport, Ill. (I won't put his name here since I don't know him but you can look in the magazine!) responded back with two websites covering Groningen and Friesland provinces which have SCANNED images of the ledgers recording birth, marriages and deaths! I was so excited! I went to the Friesland site, www.allefriezen.nl, and put in my maiden name since that family came from the Friesland area. WOW! I immediately found my 3rd great grandfather, Gerben Groenhof who died in 1871. I posted the copy I downloaded above. I totally cannot believe I have never heard of these sites before! The other site is www.allegroningers.nl and I feel to overwhelmed by the one document to look for more! (Maybe I will print it out so I can drool over it :) The genealogist work is never done, especially with the greatest invention on earth, the internet!

The Time Capsule

More Saturday Night, Genealogy fun! The new assignment is to go to dMarie Time Capsule Website and look up a day that is relevant to your family tree and then share it.

I am picking May 21st, yesterday, which was my Grandmother's birthday. Gertrude Wilma (Brandt) Naber was born May 21, 1921. The picture posted above is her as a teenager and is a personal favorite.

In 1921, the president was Warren G. Harding with V.P. Calvin Coolage. Bread cost $.10 per loaf and gas was $.26 per gallon. The top book was Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence.

Fresh Start Tree

A "Fresh Start Tree" is starting a new family file with sourcing for EVERY person and event. And, yes, I have contemplated doing this for a long time because I really want to have a clean tree. Today Genea-Musings posted discussing the problems with his tree and how he doesn't really want to start fresh. But he comments about another blogger, Amy Coffin, who did start over. So I went to her blog. (Turns out she is a Librarian also!) She started fresh with a new genealogy software program and went from there.

I really think that my work with Bento will make sourcing a lot easier, if or when I start fresh. I could start right now but I don't have a new genealogy program to use yet. My current program, which I love, is iFamily for Leopard but there isn't going to be any updates unless the program is sold to someone else. It has been over a year and there has been nothing new. But Dick Eastman blogged about a new program called Branches. He was very impressed with it after giving it a test go which makes me excited! But the downside is that there is only a Windows version available. At least there is talk about a Mac version unlike Roots Magic which I would love to use, if I could use it on Mac without running Windows. I don't want to pollute me Mac :)

Who do you think you are?

I LOVE this show: Who do you think you are?! Now I cannot actually watch it when it is on TV since that particular channel (8) is not coming in with my little converter box. But every weekend I can watch the show on-line using Hulu.com. Yes there are commercials but it isn't to bad. I usually let the video load for a bit (by pausing) and then watch it until it hits another slow spot and pause again.

Every episode so far has been very interesting. I love the mix of history and how it wraps around the ancestors being discovered. I love the reactions of the celebrities when they discover something amazing. I love visiting the different libraries and archives, although this part is pretty small. I would like to see more of the background discovery process but they only have 40ish minutes and it has to appeal to non-genealogy people as well.

I hope that we will be able to watch the British version of this show at some point!

Online Backups

I have a lot of information and pictures stored on my laptop computer. I would be lost and devastated if I lost everything on my hard drive. More so now than ever before since I don't even have prints of the last few years of my pictures, just files on my computer. So I have a MacBook which does backups all the time. This is great! If something happened to my hard drive, all would not be lost and I could restore from my backup. But what if something happened to my house and I lost my computer and my backup? This is what has been bugging me for a while.

I listen to the Genealogy Guys podcast and they have mentioned several time that they do online backups with Mozy. So I decided I would give this service a try and signed up for a two year time frame. Mozy would backup my computer when I scheduled it and all would be good. I knew it wouldn't be a fast upload, I do have a lot of information, but I believed it would be a good backup.

But I have been having problems with the backup process. It actually takes DAYS and DAYS for a backup. The first time I ended up stopping the backup because I thought it was stuck. I started it again a few days later and it just kept on going and going. This time I was patient and waited it out, checking periodically on the status. Finally it reached 100% and I thought, "Oh Good! It's almost done!" But no, it kept right on going. It was almost up to 120% when I finally stopped it because I totally do not understand why that happened!

So I ask myself, what can I do to speed up the process? Well, the "easy" answer is to clean up my hard drive. I am not always smart about what file type I saved. I do have a lot of .tiff items. So I have been working on changing those over to .jpg which takes up less space. At least, I have been doing this for everything but my pictures. I still really want those at .tiff but maybe I need to store those on a separate hard drive and just have jpg copies on my computer. Ultimately, this is what I want to do but what a huge project!!!

Organization Update

So I have been working hard(ish) on my files! I have one drawer emptied out, not the smallish drawers either, a very long filing cabinet. What I ended up doing was scanning the obituaries and miscellaneous stuff and filing them by family group.

But I put the internet stuff into folders by site. I already did the Holland Sentinel archives lookups and now I am starting on the GenLias. I have a LOT of dutch ancestors (and their families) so this file is kind of full. (The largest file is actually from a site called Digital Resources of the Netherlands but now I am wondering if I can just use GenLias instead.) Right now I am questioning the dates that are listed since they are labeled Registered. I wonder if the date is actually the event date or the day the event was recorded. Since I haven't been able to find the answer, I am plowing forward with inputting this information into my Bento file and linking to each person.

I do consider the information a primary source since it was recorded at the time of the event. Although I am bothered that the information I am looking at isn't a scanned image but transcribed which does leave room for error. Since I will probably never be able to actually see the documents, I will just have to work with what I have available!

3s of Me

The Genea-Musings posted a little fun 3s of Me questions about genealogy so here are my responses:

* Three genealogical libraries I frequent
1) Herrick District Library
2) Grand Rapids Public Library
3) The Michigan Library

* Three places I've visited on genealogy trips
1) Montcalm County
2) many cemeteries in Ottawa Count
3) Boyne City, Michigan

* Three genealogy societies I belong to (or want to)
I don't belong to any society but I would consider joining the West Michigan or the Holland one

* Three websites that help my research
1) Ancestry.com
2) Genlias.nl
3) Seeking Michigan.org

* Three ancestral graves that I've visited
Okay, I have visited a lot of graves, all of grandparents & great-grandparents plus many many more

* Three ancestral places I want to visit
1) The Netherlands
2) Rhode Island
3) Maine

* Three brickwall ancestors I want to research more
1) Joseph Green, father of Weaver Green (1793-1870)
2) Duncan Livingston's (1856-1945) parents, Hugh & Margaret
3) Ida Cook's (1884-?) parents, William & Jane
(and yes these are all my husband's ancestors)

Genealogy Blogs

There are a lot of great genealogy blogs that will help you learn about what is going on in the field. I actually follow quite a few different blogs so I thought I would add a couple of them here in case anyone is interested. One of the oldest genealogy blogs is Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter. Most of the postings are free to view but there are some that are only for subscribers. I appreciated the news updates as well as some of the more general information that is added. I also really like the MacGenealogist postings. Since I use a mac it is great to get updates about software and other mac related stuff. There are so many that I wouldn't be able to list them all but I might add more to the side bar at some point. If you have a favorite genealogy related blog, put it in the comments!