Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Ancestry DNA updates its ethnicity estimates

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On September 12, Ancestry DNA debuted its “enhanced” ethnicity estimates based on a much larger reference sample (16,000 versus 3,000 reference samples) and improved algorithms. Blaine Bettinger, The Genetic Genealogist, has a great blog post explaining it.

Comparing my own older and newer ethnicity estimates, fewer ethnicities are represented. My percentage Irish/Scottish has gone up and my percentage Scandinavian has gone down (and the Scandinavian countries are now mentioned specifically). If I’m reading it correctly, ethnicities that represented 20% of the estimate are now gone. Interestingly enough, the new estimate much more closely resembles the MyHeritage estimate I received when I transferred my DNA data there recently (free of charge).

Here is a summary of my old estimate, taken from Ancestry’s site today:

And here’s the new estimate:

And, just for kicks, here’s my MyHeritage ethnicity estimate:

If you’ve tested your DNA through Ancestry and haven’t checked your ethnicity estimate in the last week, I encourage you to hop over there and check it out! (And, if you haven’t already, you can transfer your raw DNA to MyHeritage here.)

By the way, I found this support page on Ancestry that explains how to make the most of your ethnicity estimate. It was news to me, so I thought I’d share.

Gene-alogy vs jen-ealogy

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Here’s a something I’ve been wondering about since I started going to genealogy conferences about five years ago:

Why do some people pronounce our favorite pastime with a short e, like JEN-ealogy?

I’ve always pronounced the word with a long “e” as in “gene.” But I’ve heard some esteemed conference speakers pronounce it with a short e, as in “jen.”

The screengrab from Merriam-Webster.com, above, indicates that my pronunciation is the preferred one. And, in fact, if you go to the website and click on the little speaker icon, you’ll hear the word pronounced that way. But the website also points to another alternate pronunciation, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard: jeen-ee-AL-ogy with a short “a”.

So I’ve put together a little poll: How do you say the word?

I’m looking forward to seeing the results!


My pause on searching: Easier said than done

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Just over a week ago, in my post called Searcher vs. researcher, I vowed to get through the backlog of documents I had downloaded but never processed and to do no online searching until the backlog was gone. I’ll confess to you that my resolve not to search dissolved the very first day.

My curiosity about certain things that came up while I was processing my backlogged documents could not be satisfied by merely jotting down a note on my follow-up task list. So I quickly amended the vow I’d made to myself. Now, I try not to do any searching and downloading but when I do, I process the new document during the session in which I download it.

This is working out well. I have managed to resist the temptation to search but every now and then I go for it. (For example, when I’m processing a Washington state marriage certificate and I know that Washington marriage license applications, which have more interesting information, are also easily found.)

Today, in processing an 1880 census, a grandchild appeared living with his widowed grandmother and I need to verify whose parent that grandchild is before I can add the grandchild to my genealogy software and consider the census document processed. That’s going to require a little searching online tomorrow and I’m okay with that.

So far, this backlog-busting project is going well. I’ve reduced my backlog by 25 documents in the last ten days and have 78 documents in my backlog remaining. It’s feeling good!

My evolution from paper to digital

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I just re-read a blog post I wrote on August 12, 2012, just a couple of months after I started this blog, called How I organize my family history research. It outlines how I organized my research back in the day, when I kept everything on paper. If you have all your genealogy documents on paper, you might find it helpful.

What struck me in reading this six years later is that, with the exception of using Reunion software, I no longer do anything I outlined in that article. Wow!

Specifically, I don’t print documents. Therefore I don’t file documents. And I almost never access the documents I printed and filed six years ago. If I wanted to see them and didn’t already have them filed on my hard drive, I would just go online and download them. The exceptions are the few documents I have that were mailed to me. And I scan those whenever I come across them.

Am I better at organizing my genealogy research now than I was in 2012? Not necessarily. I’m a professional organizer and I did a great job of organizing my papers back then. But is my current system better than my 2012 system? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes.

My digital filing system is easier, more convenient and less labor-intensive than my paper filing system was.

If you’re curious about my evolution of paper to digital, check out these posts:

It’s so fun having a blog so that I can look back and see how things have changed over the years. This transition from paper to digital has undoubtedly been a positive change for me!

My electronic file system continued to evolve and in 2021 I published an Orderly Roots Guide called How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow that provides detailed information on how I organize my own genealogy research, which is now 100 percent digital. The downloadable pdf is 37 pages and available for $19.99.

Photo by Tom Woodward via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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