The end has come

I am retiring the Ancestoring  blog for a couple of reasons. Now that MyHeritage has acquired Legacy,  my job description has changed (for the good) and I will be doing a lot more writing for Legacy News. I think it would be better for me to concentrate my blogging efforts there.

I feel overextended. I am going to give up several things that I am involved in to free up some time for myself and for my family. I am a serious Type A personality but there comes a time when something has got to give. I have been promising to sew a dress for my sweet granddaughter for a month now and the materials are still sitting on my sewing machine so…

I want to thank everyone that has supported the blog over the past five years. I have learned many things along with you as I did the background research for the posts.

I wish all of you the best in your genealogy/family history pursuits.

Sincerely,

Michele

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Sigh…

My dad had an older brother named James Filmore Simmons who was born 29 April 1935 in Lamar County, Mississippi. He died a short three years later on 24 November 1938 of Diphtheria. I am not eligible to get a copy of his birth certificate but one of my uncles was kind enough to write off for it and I now have it in my possession. The problem is Filmore’s death certificate. His death is not on file with the Mississippi Department of Health. I have inquired on three separate occasions over the years hoping that they would find it. My uncle recently contacted the Lamar County Circuit Court and they said that they didn’t know where the local copies of the death records from that time period were but they would contact the former Clerk of the Court to see if he knew.  My uncle just emailed me this…

“The current people at the Lamar County Circuit Clerk's Office checked with the former Clerk and the former Clerk stated that records that old were destroyed years ago. I guess they never expected anyone to ask for them. Since the Circuit Clerk was responsible for notifying the State, I have run into a dead end (no pun intended) and have no other place to look.”

Filmore’s dad (my grandfather) told me that he died of Diphtheria so there’s that but I feel like Filmore’s life is an incomplete story. There was no obituary in the local paper which didn’t surprise me because this was a very poor family in a rural area. The local funeral home that handled the deaths of other family members has no record of Filmore’s death and it is likely he was simply buried by the family. Filmore does have a grave marker though which is something.

Photograph copyright © 2011 Barbara Lee, used with permission

MyHeritage and Legacy

 

By now I am sure you have heard that MyHeritage has acquired Millennia, the parent company of Legacy Family Tree and Legacy Tree Webinars.

Here are the official press releases:

Legacy Family Tree (and an additional FAQ)
MyHeritage

We have been pretty busy during the process so I am just now getting around to announcing it on the blog. As we move forward I will be posting more information and answering any questions that you might have. If you are on Facebook I highly recommend you join our Legacy Users Group page (over 14,000 members strong) which is monitored by some of Legacy staff and some of beta testers and translators. We have been answering everyone’s questions there as well as on our Legacy Users Group Mailing List.

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DNA tip

Ancestry, FTDNA, and MyHeritage have note fields for each of your DNA matches. This is a great way to record when you attempted contact, whether or not they answered you, their GEDmatch number if they have uploaded, MRCA if you have figured it out, etc.

If you want to make contact using Ancestry it will be via an internal message.  The messages are held in a central location and not attached to the individual match so the notes field will help you keep things straight.

FTDNA does not have an internal messaging system and contact is done via email. Again, the notes field helps you keep track of attempts to contact.

MyHeritage has an internal messaging system but the messages are in a central location (like Ancestry) and not tied to the individual matches (like 23andMe). Luckily they too have a notes field.

23andMe does not have a notes field but does has a message box that holds all of the back and forth conversations that is attached to each individual match which is very useful.  You don’t need a notes field.

GEDmatch does not have a notes field.  It would be VERY useful here to know who you have contacted and who you still need to contact.  Contact with matches is done via email. I will be suggesting this to them.

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Keeping track of the unknowns

You can read about who I am trying to keep track of HERE.

I have entered the one known lineage and the three unknown brick wall ancestors into Legacy. Since all of this is speculative at the moment I have made them invisible. Invisible means that if I ever export my file or a part of my file these people will not be included.  They don’t exist anywhere but on my hard drive. Why do I enter them like they are real people even though they are not proven?  Because I can work with them much easier this way.  I can use them to directly sync to FamilySearch* and I can use Legacy’s new hinting feature.  As I learn more things about them I will enter the information including my sources.  I can also add Hashtags to these guys putting them into different groups.  I have a bunch of Hashtags already set up for my DNA projects.  I also add them to location Hashtags.  What I am eventually hoping to find are overlaps which will give me a clue as to which known Simmons groups these guys belong to.  When I first add them I add a special source to every fact.  Since these people are invisible and no one can see them but me this is only to help me keep track of what all I still need to look at and source.  The source looks like this:  DNA Match - Lineage not Confirmed. 

* When I say sync what I mean is I can see what FamilySearch has on this person through Legacy’s direct syncing capability but I don’t have to actually transfer any information.

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