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- Joined
- Feb 28, 2001
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- 27,186
I've been posting less here for the last several days. One of my cousins corralled me at our last family reunion and asked if I would try to research our family tree. I was going to get around to this anyway, but her request just made it happen sooner.
My wife likes to look at some family-oriented shows on TV including one called "Long Lost Family" about people who were adopted or otherwise separated from their family as an infant or really young child. They wanted to try to find any surviving family members. The two researchers on the show say they use the Ancestry.COM site, so I bit the bullet and joined up.
It is ADDICTIVE.
Not only that, the guys & gals who developed this software at Ancestry.COM really knew what they were doing. The results start piling in once you get enough information for their search software to start finding matching data.
I have taken my family tree through the patrilneal sequence back the the USA Virginia colony from 1650. I have also traced my wife's family back to the late 1690s and early 1700s in Nova Scotia at/around the time (and proper location) for the original displacement of French settlers from the Arcadia region to small settlements in south Louisiana before it became a formal territory (in 1803) - which means her family goes back to the original Cajuns.
The only part that gets tricky is that as the records get older (and more rural in origin), you will see the same name with several different contradictory facts about them. The software presents those as different people. You have to then go back and try to figure out which is the best record and then consolidate the records based on your best guess.
The part that REALLY gets crazy is that some U.S. censuses are based on using a hand-written ledger book in old script written by folks whose handwriting is often impossible to read with certainty.
At the moment, I'm busy reconciling different reports. Based on finding many cases with the same (or similar) names but differently enough spelled to not automatically match, I end up with what appears to be a family who had as many as 26 children. Then I have to sort through the records to see if I can figure out which records to combine.
I am working on census records going back as far as 1790 (the FIRST USA census). The printed censuses didn't start until then 1950s so that's 160 years worth of data that requires both good eyesight and patience. At my age, I find that my less than perfect eyesight leads to diminution of my level of patience, so I have to take a break now and then.
Someone with a wry sense of humor once advised me, "Know thyself. It's the ultimate form of torture." Now I understand what he meant.
My wife likes to look at some family-oriented shows on TV including one called "Long Lost Family" about people who were adopted or otherwise separated from their family as an infant or really young child. They wanted to try to find any surviving family members. The two researchers on the show say they use the Ancestry.COM site, so I bit the bullet and joined up.
It is ADDICTIVE.
Not only that, the guys & gals who developed this software at Ancestry.COM really knew what they were doing. The results start piling in once you get enough information for their search software to start finding matching data.
I have taken my family tree through the patrilneal sequence back the the USA Virginia colony from 1650. I have also traced my wife's family back to the late 1690s and early 1700s in Nova Scotia at/around the time (and proper location) for the original displacement of French settlers from the Arcadia region to small settlements in south Louisiana before it became a formal territory (in 1803) - which means her family goes back to the original Cajuns.
The only part that gets tricky is that as the records get older (and more rural in origin), you will see the same name with several different contradictory facts about them. The software presents those as different people. You have to then go back and try to figure out which is the best record and then consolidate the records based on your best guess.
The part that REALLY gets crazy is that some U.S. censuses are based on using a hand-written ledger book in old script written by folks whose handwriting is often impossible to read with certainty.
At the moment, I'm busy reconciling different reports. Based on finding many cases with the same (or similar) names but differently enough spelled to not automatically match, I end up with what appears to be a family who had as many as 26 children. Then I have to sort through the records to see if I can figure out which records to combine.
I am working on census records going back as far as 1790 (the FIRST USA census). The printed censuses didn't start until then 1950s so that's 160 years worth of data that requires both good eyesight and patience. At my age, I find that my less than perfect eyesight leads to diminution of my level of patience, so I have to take a break now and then.
Someone with a wry sense of humor once advised me, "Know thyself. It's the ultimate form of torture." Now I understand what he meant.
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