Monday, February 12, 2018

Monday Genea-Pourri - 12 February 2018

Here are some of my family history and genealogy related activities over the past week:

1)  My major research effort over the last week has been to find George W. Seaver's parents names.  I got a clue from the Veterans Home record - an aunt named Lucinda M. Fields, which means she is a sister of one of George's parents, probably his mother.  From the three available census records, I know that George's father was born in New Hampshire, his mother was born in Vermont, and George was born in Wisconsin, but enlisted at age 18 in the Union Army in Massachusetts.  Do far, I have had no success in finding George's parents.


2)  I attended the San Diego Genealogical Society program on Saturday, 10 February which featured Jean Wilcox Hibben.  Jean discussed Farmers and research tools to learn about them.  She noted that American farms were usually individual farms, with farmers working only for themselves, as opposed to collective farms in Europe which used hired laborers or serfs.  She sang two songs too.  I left after the first talk.

3)  I wrote, edited and published the February 2018 monthly Newsletter for the Chula Vista Genealogical Society, completing my 9th year in this task.  Our Librarian, Wanda (Alexander) Brock, died in January of cancer, and will be greatly missed.  



4)  Linda and I drove up to Huntington Beach on Sunday morning to see Tami and James and the grandkids.  We had lunch, saw Lauren perform her role as Oliver Hix in The Music Man in a community playhouse, which was fun.  Audrey showed off her cheers, and Charlie was cute and fun.  The Whitings were there too for the play and dinner.  After dinner, we drove back and were home by 8 p.m.  I posted photos of the kids on Facebook.

5)  Today's Mondays with Myrt webinar highlighted: Pat Kuhn's grandson's ancestor Leonard Reedy, my George W. Seaver newspaper articles and records, Valerie Lair's AncestryDNA Playing Card, the BBC article on English pronunciation traits in America, Ancestry'com's new home page, how to save email and paper correspondence, and more.  I had to leave after 60 minutes.  

6)  I have 255 Shared Ancestors on my AncestryDNA list (I had 263 last week), 728 4th cousins or closer (up from 716 last week), 626 pages (over 31,300 matches with at least 5 cM) (was 615 pages last week) of  matches.  I have 10 matches that are third cousins or closer, and 84 matches with 34 cM (0.5%) or more.  My highest match has 779 cM (11.5%), and is one of my first cousins.  I have 14 DNA Circles (no change for weeks). There were no new close matches (3rd cousin or closer).  Very few of the new matches have an Ancestry Member Tree.

7)  I have 2,692 DNA Matches on MyHeritage (up from 2,570 last week) with at least 8 cM (0.1%), with 19 matches with more than 34 cM (0.5%) or more (was 17 last week).  The highest match is 184 cM (2.5%).  Most of my close matches have very small trees with no common ancestors shown.

8)  I have 1,125 DNA Relatives on 23andMe (down from 1,142 last week) who share at least 0.10% with me.  Of these, only 1 shares 1.0% or more, and 36 share 0.50% or more (was 35 last week), with the highest match being 1.54%.  I struggle to find out anything about most of these testers.

9)  I have 2,383 autosomal DNA Matches on FamilyTreeDNA (up from 2,343) who share 0.25% (18 cM) or more, with the highest match being 96 cM (1.42%).  I have 12 who share at least 1.0% (68 cM) with me, and 1,313 who share at least 0.50% (34 cM) or more (was 1263 last week) with me.  I have had better luck finding shared ancestors here with a few of these testers.

10) There were almost daily sessions working in RootsMagic to update FamilySearch Family Tree profiles for Seaver families and other ancestral families, with occasional additions to the RootsMagic profiles. I have matched 22,480 of my persons with FSFT.  I now have 49,623 persons in my RootsMagic file.   I TreeShare almost every night.  There were also several sessions in Ancestry Hints to add content and source citations for the new RootsMagic profile additions.   I've fallen behind on the Record Hints with 57,169 waiting to be resolved, but I'm working on them.  Every time I add something to RootsMagic and TreeShare, the Hints multiply.  



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Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

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