Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Finding solace in my ancestors

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This is a very difficult week. Witnessing police brutality and civil unrest layered on top of the fear, uncertainty and loss surrounding the global pandemic feels almost unbearable for me, and I am in a relatively comfortable situation of great safety.

Thanks to the most recent 30 x 30 challenge, at least I’m spending some focused and productive time on my genealogy research. That is a wonderful respite from the worry. One of the things I love most about genealogy research is learning about my ancestors’ lives and what they experienced. That feels particularly useful right now.

Going through this current time of difficulty (which for me in my privileged life has led to emotional, but not physical, pain) makes me feel even closer to my ancestors. When I research my Civil War soldier ancestors and their families, for instance, it’s hard to imagine what they went through. A country divided in war is virtually incomprehensible.

I don’t know how my ancestors who lived during that time bore the emotional pain and physical difficulties of the Civil War (as well as the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras). But those who survived did bear it. They had to. And I take strength in that.

Layered on top of all of this is the knowledge that systems of oppression benefited my white ancestors, even when their lives were difficult. This is particularly informative right now in the context of the civil unrest. I know these systems have benefited me as well, even if I don’t consciously participate in them.

I will continue with my daily genealogy research as I look for ways to feel less helpless and more useful right now. I am grateful for the solace it provides.

I trust my tree. Do you?

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When I first dipped my toe into genealogy research around 20 years ago, I went online and found Family Search and Ancestry. I subscribed to Ancestry, printed out some five-generation pedigree charts and started writing down what I found, by hand. I collected names and dates and quickly went back many generations. I still remember what a thrill it was.

I made many mistakes back then. The biggest was probably that I didn’t write down a single source. The second biggest was that I didn’t apply a critical eye to anything. I didn’t check any sources, let alone create source citations. I just wrote down the information as I found it.

Of course, before long I started finding information that contradicted what I’d written in my pedigree charts. And, because I lacked sources, I couldn’t verify anything. I came to the realization that I couldn’t trust my tree. And that’s when I became overwhelmed and threw in the towel.

Fast forward to 2011 when I decided to try again. This time I realized that my handwritten pedigree charts were useful only as clues. I downloaded some genealogy software (I chose Reunion) and started with myself as the base of my tree. And I slowly started to grow my tree. I made two vows to myself:

  1. No person would be added to the tree unless I had a strong evidence they belonged there.
  2. Only facts supported by sources would be added to the tree.

As a result, my research is much slower paced than it was back in that first attempt. And it’s also much more satisfying. I love that everything on my tree is based on a source. And if I do find contradictory information I can easily compare the sources and come up with a conclusion.

For me, being able to trust my research, as it’s displayed on my tree, is everything. Do you trust your tree? Or do you have some weak branches?

If you can’t trust your tree or you don’t know if it’s trustworthy, you can do a couple of things to try to remedy that.

  • You could do a genealogy do-over. Thomas MacEntee over at Abundant Genealogy started a popular Genealogy Do Over program a few years back. He outlines his 12 steps for a Genealogy Do-Over at www.genealogydoover.com. He also offers a workbook for a do-over on that site.
  • You could go through your tree and make sure that every fact there is supported by a source. If it isn’t, you have a research question to solve! I would suggest marking the unsourced “facts” somehow so that it’s easy for you to add sources (and then remove the mark). Be sure and keep track of the facts you need to verify.
  • You could check all your sources to make sure they’re cited sufficiently and that you’ve picked all the meat off the bones. I started doing systematically going through my source documents that in 2016 (but stalled out). And then in 2018, I started going back through my source documents to make sure that I had collected all the information I could from each source. That process is ongoing.

I went from having a wildly inaccurate family tree to one that I feel confident about. That’s made all the difference in how I feel about my hobby.

MyHeritage offering free photo colorization

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When I was at RootsTech, MyHeritage had a booth where they were colorizing old black-and-white photos for people. The booth was always swamped with people. I wasn’t one of the people who stood in line for this service because the whole idea of colorizing old photos just didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on my objection, exactly. But I’m curious what readers of this blog think.

Today, I thought I’d blog about it, so decided to upload a couple of photos to try it out for a spin.

At left (at the top of this post) is a photo of my 2nd great grandparents, Samuel Vorce Wheeler (1852-1937) and Elizabeth Jane (Jennie) Nebergall Wheeler (1857-1933), taken in 1926 on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. MyHeritage allows you to see your colorized and original photos side by side in one photo. You can move the dividing line back and forth and watch the photo change. That happens at the MyHeritage website–for the purposes of this post I took a screenshot. The photos you download (like those below) do not have the divider.

Here’s a photo of the Arthur Brown-Rhoda Wheeler family. (Rhoda is the daughter of Samuel and Jennie.) That’s my grandfather, Crawford Brown (1906-1996), on the far left with the dark striped shirt. I think the photo was taken around 1916. The top photo is the original that I uploaded. (I took a photo of the print with my phone, transferred it to my computer, and uploaded it.) Beneath is the colorized version.

I have to admit I find the colorized version more eye-catching. But it doesn’t feel like a 1916 photo, does it?

It’s incredibly simple to upload the photo to the MyHeritage site (just drag and drop). The colorizing takes seconds. There’s no charge. With a click, you can download the colorized version and/or a comparison photo that contains both images.

It’s amazing, but I’m still not sure quite what to think about it. I do know that I’m not going to include the colorized versions among my genealogy documents–they’re purely for fun.

Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?

NGS moves to virtual for its May 2020 conference

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I feel so fortunate that the RootsTech conference was held in February, just prior to the COVID-19 crisis’s grip on the world. The National Genealogical Society wasn’t so lucky with its conference, which was to be held, like RootsTech, at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City. The NGS conference was scheduled for May 20 to 23, 2020.

Today, NGS announced that the 2020 conference will be virtual. The plan, as explained on their website, is for a full day of NGS Live! on May 20, from 11 am to 7 pm eastern. “In addition, streaming access to many more sessions will be available starting in July.” The conference organizers promise more updates as they become available.

To me, this seems like a smart approach and it’s better than canceling the conference. (RootsTech announced last month that its planned November 2020 conference in London is being postponed for a year. But that announcement came less than a month after the conference was announced, so the planning was in its early stages.) I’m sure it was a very difficult decision for the conference organizers and that it will be a logistical challenge.

I was to have attended the conference of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals in early April and that conference was canceled entirely. I’m happy for the NGS registrants that there will be some type of conference next month.

These are interesting times, aren’t they?