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Post by librarylady on Feb 14, 2017 20:03:21 GMT
You add in the family members for whom you have knowledge/information.
If the person is still living, do NOT put in a real birthday--unless you have it set to private. This is to throw up a road block to identity thieves.
My sister has our family tree set to private, and one must get the password to be able to browse it.
Sometimes, a person unknown to you, might be searching for the missing information in that person's family tree. --perhaps it is a long lost cousin for example. He/she might be looking and the only information he/she has is your mother's maiden name --he/she could put that name in on ancestry.com and then find the family tree you have uploaded. The two of you connect and "presto" you have the names and connection to other branches of your family tree.
If you know the names of any aunts/uncles/cousins, put them in your tree. If you don't know birth info, that is OK. Perhaps you will get lucky and someone will be looking for you.
There is a web site: findagrave.com You might get dates from a headstone to help you.
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Post by disneypal on Feb 14, 2017 20:10:26 GMT
You are doing it right - add your name, then your parents (attached to you), then their parents - add aunts/uncles/cousins and any info that you know. Eventually you will get a "leaf" in the corner of someone's name, that means you have a hint - but you need to check it out, view the documents and such to ensure the information is correct. Don't necessarily go by other people's trees (when they are given as a hint) - they can be helpful but other people's trees may not be accurate.
Also, the latest census that has been released is 1940 so if someone is born after that (especially if they are still living), it may be difficult to find information. There are other sites that you can search on....such as familysearch.org (which is also a free site)
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Post by workingclassdog on Feb 14, 2017 20:16:40 GMT
I want to do the free trial as well, but holding off as long as possible so I can make good use of it!! I have slowly been building our family tree, so until I come to the end of my information I am waiting to get that free month and try to use it as much as possible.
I have a question (sorry to highjack) but my sister did the DNA thing, can I link that to my stuff???
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Post by Darcy Collins on Feb 14, 2017 20:22:14 GMT
You add in the family members for whom you have knowledge/information. If the person is still living, do NOT put in a real birthday--unless you have it set to private. This is to throw up a road block to identity thieves. My sister has our family tree set to private, and one must get the password to be able to browse it. Sometimes, a person unknown to you, might be searching for the missing information in that person's family tree. --perhaps it is a long lost cousin for example. He/she might be looking and the only information he/she has is your mother's maiden name --he/she could put that name in on ancestry.com and then find the family tree you have uploaded. The two of you connect and "presto" you have the names and connection to other branches of your family tree. If you know the names of any aunts/uncles/cousins, put them in your tree. If you don't know birth info, that is OK. Perhaps you will get lucky and someone will be looking for you. There is a web site: findagrave.com You might get dates from a headstone to help you. FYI ancestry.com does not display any information about living people (it assumes any person with a birth date less than 100 years old is living unless a date of death is included. Even for a public tree is shows as private - no name or other information.
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Post by librarylady on Feb 14, 2017 20:23:12 GMT
One of the DNA sites can be linked to ancestry.com, but I am not sure on the other DNA sites.
One of my friends found her birth family through the DNA link. The DNA told her that xxx was her sister. Her birth sister knew that a missing sibling was "out there" and did the tests in hopes of finding the sister who had been adopted--and it worked.
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Post by ntsf on Feb 14, 2017 20:28:09 GMT
check out the instructional videos that are on the site. they will give you guidance on how to start.. and dealing with issues.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 20:45:41 GMT
You add in the family members for whom you have knowledge/information. If the person is still living, do NOT put in a real birthday--unless you have it set to private. This is to throw up a road block to identity thieves. My sister has our family tree set to private, and one must get the password to be able to browse it. Sometimes, a person unknown to you, might be searching for the missing information in that person's family tree. --perhaps it is a long lost cousin for example. He/she might be looking and the only information he/she has is your mother's maiden name --he/she could put that name in on ancestry.com and then find the family tree you have uploaded. The two of you connect and "presto" you have the names and connection to other branches of your family tree. If you know the names of any aunts/uncles/cousins, put them in your tree. If you don't know birth info, that is OK. Perhaps you will get lucky and someone will be looking for you. There is a web site: findagrave.com You might get dates from a headstone to help you. Set all living people as living and they should automatically be marked private. I wouldn't put wrong birth dates because that's just gonna mess you up in the long run. I routinely see people who have marked living people as dead on public trees and that means that I can see all the information that has been entered for that person. You can set your tree to private and the information is still searchable unless you specifically mark it not to be. If you put a photo of Grandma on her private page on your private tree and haven't checked for it to be unsearchable, if someone enters your grandmother's name in the search box, one of the results will be that on your private tree you have a photo attached to her. I didn't know that and I started getting a lot of requests to see photos of all these different people on my tree - only I didn't have photos of them. I had headstone photos I found elsewhere on the net (without permission to share with others), newspaper clippings, etc. It took a while to learn to make everything unsearchable and I haven't had it happen since. Enter women by their maiden names and search engines will also look for surnames of any spouses you attach to them.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 20:49:59 GMT
check out the instructional videos that are on the site. they will give you guidance on how to start.. and dealing with issues. Go to YouTube and search for Ancestry. You should see their logo in the results. They have excellent videos. Also, legacy.familytreewebinars.com have fantastic videos. They have free live webinars every Wednesday and the videos are free for about a week. You can get a one month to one year subscription and be able to see any of their 400+ videos at your leisure.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 20:57:07 GMT
One of the DNA sites can be linked to ancestry.com, but I am not sure on the other DNA sites. One of my friends found her birth family through the DNA link. The DNA told her that xxx was her sister. Her birth sister knew that a missing sibling was "out there" and did the tests in hopes of finding the sister who had been adopted--and it worked. You can link your Ancestry DNA test to someone in your tree at Ancestry. For best results, link to the correct person on a public tree. I have a very slim public tree for this reason. (My real working trees are private.) DO NOT link your results to your mother..... or to your ancestor who lived in 1600. (People do.) You will get a long list of people you share DNA with. Each one will have a link to their tree information where you can find out how much DNA you both share and a list of people both of you share DNA with at the 4th cousin level or closer. If your information is attached to a public tree, ancestry's computers can help identify common ancestors. The computers miss a lot, but they catch a lot you would miss. I think you can only see all of the results when you have a current paid subscription and recently, I can't access this area at all through Chrome, only through Edge. You can upload your Ancestry results to GedMatch.
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Post by Darcy Collins on Feb 14, 2017 21:01:45 GMT
My biggest advice to be very, very careful what information you pull in from other trees. It's really easy to just start adding information including parents and siblings to your tree. You then find out that there's absolutely no documentation to substantiate who the parents are. I pretty much had to start my husband's tree over again as I had the mistaken idea that those relationships were verified - or at least credible. If you stick with it for any length of time, you'll find 90% of the trees on ancestry are undocumented and a good 70% are pure fiction.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 21:03:49 GMT
I want to do the free trial as well, but holding off as long as possible so I can make good use of it!! I have slowly been building our family tree, so until I come to the end of my information I am waiting to get that free month and try to use it as much as possible. I have a question (sorry to highjack) but my sister did the DNA thing, can I link that to my stuff??? If you become the administer of her DNA information, you can link it to your tree. If you have a tree and invite her in to be an active editor, I believe she may be able to attach her results to your tree, but you can only attach results to one tree at a time.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 21:13:38 GMT
My biggest advice to be very, very careful what information you pull in from other trees. It's really easy to just start adding information including parents and siblings to your tree. You then find out that there's absolutely no documentation to substantiate who the parents are. I pretty much had to start my husband's tree over again as I had the mistaken idea that those relationships were verified - or at least credible. If you stick with it for any length of time, you'll find 90% of the trees on ancestry are undocumented and a good 70% are pure fiction. I think this varies widely. I said I have working trees. This is where I add information from other trees. I'll add people and then see what documents I can find to back up what I've found. (I do that immediately.) If you refresh the page on a new person several times, you will probably begin getting leaf hints. Then, I'll click on the search box (which does a really good general search) and pay attention to census and city directory results. After that, I like to click family tress on the left side of the general search page for that person where I can usually see more trees than any hints will refer to. After that, I may begin looking in the Card Catalog for more specific databases. You can find a LOT of information in a very short time. You want it to tell a story that makes sense. Old newspaper articles tie things together better than any other resource. When you find a known ancestor in the newspaper and they are at a family gathering with other family members named, you have a challenge to figure out who all these people are and how they are related to each other and to you. It's pretty great when you do figure it out!
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Deleted
Posts: 0
May 18, 2024 20:56:07 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Feb 14, 2017 21:21:54 GMT
You can set your tree to private and the information is still searchable unless you specifically mark it not to be. If you put a photo of Grandma on her private page on your private tree and haven't checked for it to be unsearchable, if someone enters your grandmother's name in the search box, one of the results will be that on your private tree you have a photo attached to her. How do you set it to private? I have my account set to private, but I can't seem to find any other place where I can choose to make information private?
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Post by Darcy Collins on Feb 14, 2017 21:26:48 GMT
My biggest advice to be very, very careful what information you pull in from other trees. It's really easy to just start adding information including parents and siblings to your tree. You then find out that there's absolutely no documentation to substantiate who the parents are. I pretty much had to start my husband's tree over again as I had the mistaken idea that those relationships were verified - or at least credible. If you stick with it for any length of time, you'll find 90% of the trees on ancestry are undocumented and a good 70% are pure fiction. I think this varies widely. I said I have working trees. This is where I add information from other trees. I'll add people and then see what documents I can find to back up what I've found. (I do that immediately.) If you refresh the page on a new person several times, you will probably begin getting leaf hints. Then, I'll click on the search box (which does a really good general search) and pay attention to census and city directory results. After that, I like to click family tress on the left side of the general search page for that person where I can usually see more trees than any hints will refer to. After that, I may begin looking in the Card Catalog for more specific databases. You can find a LOT of information in a very short time. You want it to tell a story that makes sense. Old newspaper articles tie things together better than any other resource. When you find a known ancestor in the newspaper and they are at a family gathering with other family members named, you have a challenge to figure out who all these people are and how they are related to each other and to you. It's pretty great when you do figure it out! I'm sure it varies widely and it sounds like you do a good job of trying to verify information. I think the biggest issue is for trees that go back more than 3-4 generations - when you get beyond the time period where you actually know the individuals. There's a tendency for someone to see green leaf showing that ancestry found their relative on an old census record - Ancestry is purely looking at the information provided and trying to find matches. So it's EXTREMELY common for the John Davis born in 1820 in Tennessee to generate a John Davis in Tennessee on the 1850 census is not your relative. That is a CLUE (which I'm sure you know as you've been doing it for a while). Way, way too many people think it's a fact and they just determined who John Davis' parents and siblings are. I have been doing this for a long, long time now - and with a tree of over 7000 people - I run into whole lot of garbage trees. I was shocked for a while when I noticed how many people were connecting their relative to a particular census or other document that I KNEW was for a different family - hell sometimes they try and "correct" the transcript - but it isn't wrong, they have the wrong family and just want to make the information fit. I'm not surprised any more - I'm very, very skeptical.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 21:32:10 GMT
FindAGrave is a fantastic source. It is now owned by Ancestry, so some of your leaves will be links to the FindAGrave site. About FindAGrave ------ The memorial pages are all done by individuals. I have created and maintain some, but there are people who have hundreds of thousands of memorials. Typically, they are the ones who have gone through local cemeteries and/or local obituaries to make sure as many people as possible have at least something in memory of them. Obviously, someone who is doing an enormous general uploading is not going to have as much information as someone like me who patiently ties family together with active and correct links to their pages. Some people include documents, such as obits or even death certificates (I do not.) and a great many memorials include the headstone photo. Anyone can upload a photo to a memorial page, so it's not unusual for a headstone photo to suddenly pop up on a page you may have created. Most people who have memorials welcome additional information. There is an edit button on every memorial page where you can make corrections and send them in for the person who maintains the page to check and OK.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 21:53:08 GMT
I'm sure it varies widely and it sounds like you do a good job of trying to verify information. I think the biggest issue is for trees that go back more than 3-4 generations - when you get beyond the time period where you actually know the individuals. There's a tendency for someone to see green leaf showing that ancestry found their relative on an old census record - Ancestry is purely looking at the information provided and trying to find matches. So it's EXTREMELY common for the John Davis born in 1820 in Tennessee to generate a John Davis in Tennessee on the 1850 census is not your relative. That is a CLUE (which I'm sure you know as you've been doing it for a while). Way, way too many people think it's a fact and they just determined who John Davis' parents and siblings are. I have been doing this for a long, long time now - and with a tree of over 7000 people - I run into whole lot of garbage trees. I was shocked for a while when I noticed how many people were connecting their relative to a particular census or other document that I KNEW was for a different family - hell sometimes they try and "correct" the transcript - but it isn't wrong, they have the wrong family and just want to make the information fit. I'm not surprised any more - I'm very, very skeptical. The tree I've been spending the most time in now has over 68,000 people. That sounds obscene, but it's not. I have a broad base for a community from the 1680's onward as well as several generations for DNA matches for 3 separate people. There's no way all that information should be on a public tree, but it's absolutely fantastic on a private working tree. Anyway, back to how badly people mangle things on their public trees..... On my FindAGrave memorials, I create a very simple and easy to read list of connections to other people. Father: Mother: Spouse(s): Children: Siblings: And I try to have active links to as many of those people as possible, even creating new pages for them if they don't already have one. I have seen my pages screen-captured and added to people's galleries. My headstone shots (that I took) have popped up in my hints. AND with all of that...... people take my information and record it all wrong in their public trees! Their trees then pop up as hints for my people. What they have doesn't even make any sense whatsoever. SMH. BUT - if you were to go their trees and see the information that they have, you could take that information and really apply it well to your own tree. The biggest caution I have here is to be VERY careful what you attach from a mobile device. You can't always open that document to see if it makes sense for the person and it's very easy to just attach what is suggested without knowing for sure. The biggest problems happen when there are multiple people with the same name. They don't even have to have lived in the same century or area for the hints to get mixed up, but until you open the document, you can't always readily see that.
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Post by Darcy Collins on Feb 14, 2017 22:03:05 GMT
The tree I've been spending the most time in now has over 68,000 people. That sounds obscene, but it's not. I have a broad base for a community from the 1680's onward as well as several generations for DNA matches for 3 separate people. There's no way all that information should be on a public tree, but it's absolutely fantastic on a private working tree. .... That's crazy! I'm actually in the pruning phase. In the early days, particularly when I found out how useful a sibling or cousin could be to find documentation, I would just continue a line as long as I had good documentation. It just starts to get unwieldy and I'm spending too much time verifying information for some 5th cousin 18 times removed. Now if it's not 3 clicks from a direct blood ancestor, I don't add you to the tree - although sometimes it's really, really hard when you're staring at someone's birth certificate that popped up. I still need to go back and chop off some branches that are just too far removed..
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 22:08:57 GMT
You can set your tree to private and the information is still searchable unless you specifically mark it not to be. If you put a photo of Grandma on her private page on your private tree and haven't checked for it to be unsearchable, if someone enters your grandmother's name in the search box, one of the results will be that on your private tree you have a photo attached to her. How do you set it to private? I have my account set to private, but I can't seem to find any other place where I can choose to make information private? I'm not sure at the moment how to do it from the main page.... a place I rarely go. So, I'll tell you how to do it from any person's page. Go up to the level of buttons directly under the address bar and click on TREES. Go down the menu to Create & Manage Trees and click on that. You will have a list of all the trees you have. You can invite people to a tree, see an overview of that tree, and manage that tree from here. Click on the Manage Tree button. At the top of that page are Tree Settings. Click on PRIVACY SETTINGS. You can make your tree public or private. Under the Private setting, there is a box you can check that will prevent your tree from being found in searches. If you don't check that box, even if your tree is private, it can turn up on a search on Google. (Ask me how I found that out. --- Answer - I Googled a name and my tree came up.)
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 22:19:44 GMT
The tree I've been spending the most time in now has over 68,000 people. That sounds obscene, but it's not. I have a broad base for a community from the 1680's onward as well as several generations for DNA matches for 3 separate people. There's no way all that information should be on a public tree, but it's absolutely fantastic on a private working tree. .... That's crazy! I'm actually in the pruning phase. In the early days, particularly when I found out how useful a sibling or cousin could be to find documentation, I would just continue a line as long as I had good documentation. It just starts to get unwieldy and I'm spending too much time verifying information for some 5th cousin 18 times removed. Now if it's not 3 clicks from a direct blood ancestor, I don't add you to the tree - although sometimes it's really, really hard when you're staring at someone's birth certificate that popped up. I still need to go back and chop off some branches that are just too far removed.. I have another tree on my own computer for that. While much of my ancestry has been very well documented for a very long time, most of my father's has not. I've had to extend my radius to find information and be able to put it into context. We have extremely long (ridiculously long) generations and I'm still struggling to find any information on my great-grandmother since she lived and died before births and deaths were routinely recorded by the state. Especially when names are repeated through a family, sometimes you have to really spread it out to figure out which James bought the plot that your grandparents are buried in and how they are they related. By searching other relatives and their neighbors, and their churches or other organizations, that's often the only way left to find out anything at all about the person you're trying to learn about. And then, the lives of those people become as engrossing as a novel and you read just a little bit more just because. :-)
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Post by mollycoddle on Feb 14, 2017 22:19:47 GMT
I only join Ancestry in the summer, when I have time to devote to it. I always had a lot of luck with census info.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 22:21:36 GMT
Also.... I may be in research mode for writing a book. I haven't decided yet.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 14, 2017 22:32:47 GMT
Thanks for all the chatter, ladies! Yikes! This looks like it could become very complicated! LOL! I will definitely look more into it all this weekend. I wish we get a month's free trial period instead of just 14 days. But I suppose by day 14, I'll know for sure if I want to continue on with the paid subscription. I signed up for all the packages...the newspaper one and something called 3 fold. I think there is a 4th something too. Thanks again! Fold 3 is a military addition. Much of the military information that could be most useful to you at this point is probably already included in the basic Ancestry subscription. There is an additional rate if you want records from other countries. Whatever you decide, it would be a great idea if you download the documents you find that you are most interested in. They will remain attached to your people, but you can only view them on the Ancestry viewer with a currently paid subscription.
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PLurker
Prolific Pea
Posts: 9,744
Location: Behind the Cheddar Curtain
Jun 28, 2014 3:48:49 GMT
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Post by PLurker on Feb 14, 2017 22:40:16 GMT
DD wanted and got the DNA test. She just got it back so this is very timely. Thanks for all the great info.
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Deleted
Posts: 0
May 18, 2024 20:56:07 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Feb 14, 2017 23:46:39 GMT
How do you set it to private? I have my account set to private, but I can't seem to find any other place where I can choose to make information private? I'm not sure at the moment how to do it from the main page.... a place I rarely go. So, I'll tell you how to do it from any person's page. Go up to the level of buttons directly under the address bar and click on TREES. Go down the menu to Create & Manage Trees and click on that. You will have a list of all the trees you have. You can invite people to a tree, see an overview of that tree, and manage that tree from here. Click on the Manage Tree button. At the top of that page are Tree Settings. Click on PRIVACY SETTINGS. You can make your tree public or private. Under the Private setting, there is a box you can check that will prevent your tree from being found in searches. If you don't check that box, even if your tree is private, it can turn up on a search on Google. (Ask me how I found that out. --- Answer - I Googled a name and my tree came up.) Thank you!!! That sure was buried in there. The tree was set to private, but like you said, the search option wasn't. Thanks for your help!
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Post by myboysnme on Feb 15, 2017 0:10:26 GMT
Please do not put in wrong dates. This can cause confusion for decades to come. Anyone currently living or shown as living is private - it cannnot be seen even if your tree is public.
My tree is public. I want to share my information. I want to help others find information. Private trees are frustrating for avid hobbyist genealogists like me.
I mean I understand when you just want to do it for yourself, but likely before long you will want to have photos other people have and documents and information and you will get this from those of us who have shared our trees.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 15, 2017 0:12:45 GMT
Fold 3 is a military addition. Much of the military information that could be most useful to you at this point is probably already included in the basic Ancestry subscription. There is an additional rate if you want records from other countries.Whatever you decide, it would be a great idea if you download the documents you find that you are most interested in. They will remain attached to your people, but you can only view them on the Ancestry viewer with a currently paid subscription. Ok, so I would need to pay even more if I want information from Canada? I'm pretty sure that is where most of my dad's family is from. It's an additional service with a name like world or global -- sorry I can't check easily at the moment. You can get links from using Ancestry on a free basis or paid subscription to records from other countries, but you can't read them without paying. (You can see your tree and the things you upload without paying.) I'm not sure how many Canadian records are available without the additional subscription. As with every other database, it varies and there may be some for free. I just don't know. I haven't had much luck with my Canadian searches, but that's because of the era and the person I'm researching. It's a brick wall there for me, but that says nothing about what you will be able to find for your family. Canada has some pretty impressive records.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 15, 2017 0:17:43 GMT
Please do not put in wrong dates. This can cause confusion for decades to come. Anyone currently living or shown as living is private - it cannnot be seen even if your tree is public. My tree is public. I want to share my information. I want to help others find information. Private trees are frustrating for avid hobbyist genealogists like me. I mean I understand when you just want to do it for yourself, but likely before long you will want to have photos other people have and documents and information and you will get this from those of us who have shared our trees. I agree about the dates! I have a very stripped down public tree at the moment. My goal is to have a very full public tree for all the younger generation to be able to find. Which is another reason my tree is so big. I have a lot of info on family not directly related to me for other family members. I just need to work it until it is worth something when they go looking.
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Post by myboysnme on Feb 15, 2017 0:25:39 GMT
Please do not put in wrong dates. This can cause confusion for decades to come. Anyone currently living or shown as living is private - it cannnot be seen even if your tree is public. My tree is public. I want to share my information. I want to help others find information. Private trees are frustrating for avid hobbyist genealogists like me. I mean I understand when you just want to do it for yourself, but likely before long you will want to have photos other people have and documents and information and you will get this from those of us who have shared our trees. I agree about the dates! I have a very stripped down public tree at the moment. My goal is to have a very full public tree for all the younger generation to be able to find. Which is another reason my tree is so big. I have a lot of info on family not directly related to me for other family members. I just need to work it until it is worth something when they go looking. Me too! My tree has thousands of people who are not related to me except for somewhere along the way someone is their family married someone in my family. I have 12,500 people on my public tree and sometimes I click on 'how is this person related to me' and Ancestry.com practically goes into cardiac arrest trying to process that, haha!
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Sue
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,234
Location: SE of Portland, Oregon
Jun 26, 2014 18:42:33 GMT
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Post by Sue on Feb 15, 2017 1:01:51 GMT
I am another one who has kept family trees that extend into lateral branches (cousins etc.) and I am so happy that I've done this. I did my DNA through Ancestry nearly 2 years ago and I've worked extensively with my findings to firm up family ties that I've been unable to document through existing records. Many of my ancestors lived in New York state, for example, and New York, I've found, was one of the worst for keeping records in the 1700 and 1800's. Because I have researched many cousin lines I've been able to see in my DNA results that I share common DNA with many of them though I might lack documentation. But don't get me wrong, I still look for that lacking documentation but through DNA matches to distant cousins I know I'm looking in the right places.
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Post by leftturnonly on Feb 15, 2017 2:40:51 GMT
I am another one who has kept family trees that extend into lateral branches (cousins etc.) and I am so happy that I've done this. I did my DNA through Ancestry nearly 2 years ago and I've worked extensively with my findings to firm up family ties that I've been unable to document through existing records. Many of my ancestors lived in New York state, for example, and New York, I've found, was one of the worst for keeping records in the 1700 and 1800's. Because I have researched many cousin lines I've been able to see in my DNA results that I share common DNA with many of them though I might lack documentation. But don't get me wrong, I still look for that lacking documentation but through DNA matches to distant cousins I know I'm looking in the right places. It's called FAN - Friends, Associates and Neighbors. Sometimes the only record of someone is when they witnessed their neighbor's child's baptism and you won't see it if you don't check in on the neighbors. There's another very real phenomenon that I've learned by trying to tie a whole host of DNA matches to my tree.... groups of family groups moved together as they settled new frontiers. These families tended to intermarry and were very closely involved in each other's lives. They witnessed each other's marriages and last wills. Their properties bordered each other's. And... they moved on together as a group, always seeming to leave a few behind at each step along their path to go on to be leaders in those communities that they formed. Because of that, my ancestors are somehow tied in with Daniel Boone's family and probably Abraham Lincoln's as well. Crazy, no? Suddenly I can see how my ancestors' descendants were in Kentucky with my late husband's direct ancestors. I didn't know anything about his Kentucky ancestors. What I had began in Kentucky, but now, I have a whole lot better context of how these people came to be in Kentucky when they did and more about what their lives were like. I began copying Quaker birth and marriage records for a very specific area my family settled in, and it's been absolutely invaluable. When I see certain surnames in other people's trees or in documents, I check my records and BOOM! There they are. Because the population was so limited, these families intermarried for generations. Their ancestors turn out to be my ancestors as well. I don't know how many DNA matches I have figured out that I am related to 5,6,7, or more different ways. That means that our latest common ancestors were often much further back than our % of common DNA would imply, since there was definitely some "Founding Effect" going on in the population. (Meaning that certain DNA segments became so common that they were passed along from both mother and father for several generations.) Why is this important? I'm looking for my great grandmother. I know a great many of my American ancestors and a great many other ancestors I know were in another country when I believe her ancestors were in America. That means that I only have so many open lines on my overall pedigree chart, and many of these belong to her ancestors. If I didn't spend more time on these wider circles of relations, I could easily conclude that some of the ancestors that are common to quite a few of my DNA matches are her ancestors also (because they lived at the correct time to be in those slots) when their ancestors are in reality descendants of ancestors that are further back in time and definitely belong to the ancestral families of a different great grandparent. My father, my cousins and I have looked for information on this grandmother for the past 30 years. I have no choice but to continue to expand where I look if I'm ever to find anything.
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