Serendipity In My Own Backyard

It is as though our ancestors want to be found. Uncanny coincidence. Olympian luck. Phenomenal fate. Tremendous intuition. Remarkable miracle. We call It, “Serendipity in Genealogy.”

Right in My Own Backyard
   by Joan Byrne

A few years back, I was hunting for information on my elusive Chicago Leinen family. I posted a query on the Leinen message board on RootsWeb and got a reply from a person who was indeed a fellow Leinen descendant. We were both great-great-grandchildren of John Henry Leinen and Mary Clooney, who emigrated from Germany and Ireland (respectively) in the mid-1800s, met in Chicago, and married in 1859.

We were of course thrilled to find each other and exchanged information. She e-mailed, 'Where do you live?' I e-mailed my location (a small town outside of Seattle, Washington) and she quickly fired back, 'You're not going to believe this--so do I!' We couldn't believe the coincidence. She lived ten minutes away, and I drove to her house that very afternoon, where we drank tea, shared news clippings and photos, and filled in gaps in the family history.

We had much in common besides great-great-grandparents: we were both born in Chicago, went to the same small college in Grand Rapids, Michigan (ten years apart, so our paths never crossed), and ended up in the same town in Washington.

Previously published in RootsWeb Review: 26 September 2007, Vol. 10, No. 39.

Family Tree Maker 2012

Ancestry.com has provided me a half-dozen review copies of Family Tree Maker over the years. I’ve not opened a single one. I’ve never had the time to learn or the need to use a desktop product. I’m a big fan of Ancestry Member Trees. My tree lives in the cloud. My scanned documents are (presumably) backed up and kept save by Ancestry.com. My documents are there to be shared with others. (Believe me, plenty of mine are.) My links are attaching Ancestry content to my tree. (I’ve found a dozen-plus book references for one ancestor in addition to the easily found half-dozen record matches.) I’m happy living in the cloud.

Last week I started preparing for my travel to the National Genealogical Society 2012 Conference in Cincinnati, to be held 9-12 May 2012. I decided I’d research my Ohio ancestry while I was in the area. Trouble was, I didn’t know if I had any family in Ohio. Fortunately, I’m a 6th generation member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I practically inherited an 8 generation pedigree… almost totally undocumented. Somewhere in there, there had to be some Ohio research waiting to be done.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could run a query on my Ancestry Member Tree and get a list of all references to Ohio? No can do. For all their advantages, online trees have a big disadvantage. They are immature, with only a handful of years since their births.

Desktop genealogy programs, on the other hand, have been around for many years. The venerable PAF was released in 1984. Family Tree Maker was released in 1989. Feature sets have been growing ever since (despite the occasional software rewrite).

If I had my tree in PAF, I could have used Advanced Focus Filter and easily generated a report of every ancestor with an event in Ohio. But my tree was not in PAF, it was an Ancestry Member Tree. Fortunately, I had heard that the latest version of Family Tree Maker has the capability of synchronizing a desktop tree with an online Ancestry Member Tree.

It was time to try out Family Tree Maker.

I got a review copy, installed it, and accepted the offer to synchronize to my online tree. It was really easy. Within 5 minutes I had all my tree except for the scanned documents. Family Tree Maker (FTM) informed me that I could begin using it while my documents were downloaded in the background. Then I started poking around, trying to locate a way to get my report of Ohio ancestors. As I had feared, there was going to be a learning curve getting used to a desktop genealogy program. Eventually, I gave up and sent an inquiry off to Ancestry.

Meanwhile, the download of my many, many documents continued in the background, probably well into the following day. I don’t know how long it took, but that night, at midnight, my backup script kicked in and started copying the newly downloaded files from my computer to an external drive. Over 20 hours later, I found my backup was still copying files.

It felt pretty good. I had all the original documents up in the cloud on Ancestry. I had copies on my desktop, linked into the correct people in my FTM tree. And I had another copy out on an external drive. Having those extra copies means it is very unlikely that I will every lose all my hard work. It felt very good.

Back to Ohio

Ancestry got back to me with the steps necessary to find all the Ohio connections in my tree. There was no wonder I couldn’t find it. I’ll tell you what they told me, as it is not obvious by any means.

In FTM 2012, go to the “Publish” workspace, along the top of the window. In the Publication Types panel on the left, select “Person Reports.” Then select “Custom Report” in the middle of the screen.

A custom report can include all individuals, or some subset that you choose. In the options panel on the right, set “Individuals to Include” to “Selected Individuals.” In the middle of the “Filter Individuals” dialog box, click on “Filter In… >” .

In the “Filter Individuals By Criteria” dialog box, choose “Other.” In the “Search Where” drop-down list, choose “Any Fact Places.”

Enter the name of the location—“Ohio” in my case—into the Value field. Click OK. The right hand side of the dialog box now displays the list of matching individuals.

Click OK to see the custom report.

Now I have 5 pages of Ohioan ancestors to research and document.

I’ve told you how to get the list of people to research when you take a trip. When it comes time to do so without offending your travelling partners, you’re on your own.

Monday Mailbox: The End of Printer Friendliness

Dear Ancestry Insider,

Enjoy your e-mails so very much.

My big gripe with the 'new' Family Search is that I now cannot print a record that is enlarged enough to read.  Looking through my paper files, back to 2009, I was able to do so.

I am finding the same is true for Ancestry.  They have taken a step backwards.  Both of those sites have taken the fun out of finding and printing my resource information.

Keep up the good work.  I enjoy your humor!

Signed,
Dee

Dear Dee,

You are absolutely correct. Producing a good print of a pedigree or family group chart seems to be impossible on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org.

I think, however, I have found the cause of the problem.

Read on…

Dear Ancestry Insider,

Speaking of getting better results from Ancestry.com, I have “one for the books.” It set me off in such giggles that I've forgotten exactly what search produced such silly results.

Signed,
Ms. Marty Hiatt

Serendipity: It’s a Wonderful World

It is as though our ancestors want to be found. Uncanny coincidences. Olympian luck. Phenomenal fate. Tremendous intuition. Remarkable miracles. We call It, “Serendipity in Genealogy.”

Mark Donaldson shared this tale of serendipity with me:

My Dad died more than 10 years ago and at his funeral we played one of his favorite songs - Louis Armstrong's -  It's a Wonderful World.

My Dad's Mother took my Dad and his brother away from the Donaldson family in Cobalt Ontario to move to Toronto when they were young - so that my Dad never knew his grandfather, whose name he had written down as Soshwood Donaldson. After my Dad died, there was no one for me to ask about the Donaldson family history and it was, at that point, all but lost. Both of my Dad's parents were born in the states (to travelling Canadian parents as it turns out), so I didn't think to look in Canada for Soshwood.

Early searches in on-line chat rooms and some physical searches at the Archives of Ontario (pre-Ancestry.ca/com) still turned up nothing. Eventually I received an email from someone living near Ottawa asking if I meant to be searching for Shos(s)wood Donaldson? (spelled Shoswood or Shosswood on various documents) After a few more emails she sent me an entire history of my Donaldson family's move from Scotland to Canada in the early 1800's and even provided me with pictures of my great-grandfather and his 5 brothers. All of a sudden, I had a family.

I drove to Buckingham Quebec from Toronto to see the town where the family had set up a homestead. As I was driving through the Gatineau Hills, listening to French radio stations - I pushed the search button on the radio and on came Louis Armstrong and - you guessed it It's a Wonderful World. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I physically felt a chill.

I visited the area on the Lievre River, where the family farm was and 'happened' upon the Presbyterian Church graveyard in Buckingham where I felt as though I was being led to a gravesite. Sure enough, in the back corner of the cemetry was the tomestone of George Donaldson (the emigrator) and his wife Elizabeth Shosswood Donaldson.

Call it what you will…

 

Thanks, Mark, for sharing.

Family History Expo Wrap

Tara Bergeson teaches
Family History Consultants

I didn’t get to attend the Family History Consultant training sessions, but I popped in long enough to learn where you can download the handouts.

Go to www.familysearch.org/serve, login, and click on Family History Consultant Conference Presentations—2012 (New).

FamilySearch Digital Book Collection

I also couldn’t attend Dennis Meldrum’s “Family History Online Books: A New Step Forward.” I wrote about the website change a month ago. (See “Changes to FamilySearch.org Website.”) Meldrum is manager of Digital Book Processing at FamilySearch.

The FamilySearch collection of family and local history books keeps growing. The size of the collection has grown to “over 45,000.” The collection contains more than just family histories and local histories. According to Meldrum’s syllabus, it also contains “directories, how-to books on genealogy, genealogy magazines (including some international magazines), medieval books (including histories and pedigrees), and gazetteers.”

Books come from several libraries. (See this page.) For books copied from the Family History Library, a link is present in the Family History Library Catalog. (See this example.)

The website doesn’t seem to include any help on how to search. Meldrum presented wildcards and keywords that affect the search:

• ? is a single character wildcard
• * is a multiple character wildcard
• Use "quote marks" to match an exact phrase
• AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses can be used to create logical expressions

On the drive home from the Expo, I tried to view a book (the example, above). I clicked on the title at 5:36. The blue progress bar crawled agonizingly slow. At 5:39, the bar was less than 25%. I went off and did some text messaging. At 5:42 it was about half way, but I wasn’t going to wait 12 minutes to bring up a book.

The last time I reviewed the site, I registered a complaint with FamilySearch support that book viewing was really slow, much slower than the old BYU site. The response was “I tested a couple books and the browsing experience was fine, the image displayed in an expected time frame.”

What!? Google books doesn’t make me wait that long. Internet Archive doesn’t make me wait that long. BYU didn’t make me wait that long. No online book archive that I have ever used makes me wait that long.

The respondent went on to state that “FamilySearch is only displaying the files, which are hosted by the different digital library” and to suggest that I view the same book at the other library and compare.

Isn’t that what I did to begin with? Didn’t I already compare? Didn’t I find that BYU loading one page was hundreds of times faster than FamilySearch loading hundreds of pages?

I can say one thing… Well, two things, actually. One thing is that the new FamilySearch book viewer stinks.

The second is that support organizations are consistent. This isn’t just a FamilySearch problem, but every multi-tiered support organization I deal with. By the time I contact support, the situation is way beyond what a first tier support person can handle. I get a canned response and the case is closed. I have to reopen and ask to be escalated.

I wish FamilySearch support would track how often a person’s cases required escalation, and to what level. If all my issues require escalation to tier 3, don’t subject me to tiers 1 and 2. Automatically route my issue up.

And while you’re solving the world’s multi-tiered support issues, how about finding a way to let me see a page of a book without waiting over 10 minutes.