Finding Claude and Nadine Dawson

I posted on 27 August about the World War II love letters exchanged between Claude and Nadine Dawson that were saved from the trash compactor here. I wondered if this was a case for the Genealogue readers or the Unclaimed Persons team.

Chris Dunham on The Genealogue posted about the article here, and had one response from fellow genea-blogger Craig Manson. Craig just posted his findings on his own blog, Geneablogie, in An Attempted Act of Genealogical Kindness.

Craig has found death records for Claude and Nadine, 1920 and 1930 census records for Claude, school records for Claude, voter registration records, and tried to identify their children through birth indexes. Read all of Craig's study in his blog post. Craig is pretty close to solving this puzzle, and I hope he gets the recognition he deserves for working hard on it.

Thanks, Craig, for picking up this ball and running with it. Will he get a touchdown? Only time will tell.

Sharon has fun with DNA

Sharon Elliott on the BackTrack blog has a challenging puzzle for her readers to solve. Go read Fun with DNA. It is a good test of logic and knowledge.

Leave a comment to solve the puzzle. I did.

The Severed Arm and Hand Mystery - Video Report

I posted two weeks ago about the Severed Arm and Hand Mystery that my friend, Colleen Fitzpatrick (of Forensic Genealogy fame) was involved in solving, with newspaper links to articles about finding that it belonged to Francis Joseph Van Zandt.

Colleen emailed me today with a link to a video that was on Today at MSNBC. It discusses some of the forensic process, including a picture of the arm and hand. The video runs 2:49 and is here.

However, there is still no information publicly available (that I've seen) about the research process to find relatives for the Y-DNA match.

Traffic statistics for commercial genealogy services

I posted about The Generations Network domain traffic statistics yesterday, and wanted to show the statistics for several other commercial genealogy services.

The web sites I reviewed were:

* http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ (a general genealogy database site)
* http://www.footnote.com/ (a US government related database site)
* http://www.genealogybank.com/ (a newspaper-oriented database site)
* http://www.findmypast.com/ (a United Kingdom genealogy database site)
* http://www.genealogytoday.com (a general genealogy database site)

http://www.alexa.com/ measures Reach (percentage of all Internet users who visit a web site). Here is the Reach for these five web sites:


And here are the page views (in terms of percent of all users: for the sites:

The www.alexa.com data shows that:

* www.worldvitalrecords.com has a three month average Reach of 0.00275% (about 5% of Ancestry.com's Reach).

* www.footnote.com has a three month average Reach of 0.00446% (about 8% of Ancestry.com)

* www.genealogybank.com has a three month average Reach of 0.00058% (about 1% of Ancestry.com)

* www.findmypast.com has a three month average Reach of 0.00132% (about 2.4% of Ancestry.com)

* www.genealogytoday.com has a three month average Reach of 0.00537% (about 10% of Ancestry.com)

The www.quantcast.com page shows, in terms of United States daily visitors per month, is:

The Quantcast monthly traffic estimate for these sites are:

* www.worldvitalrecords.com - 335K US visits and 404K visits worldwide (addicts and regulars are 23% of audience, 51% of visits)

* www.footnote.com - 579K US visits (addicts and regulars are 19% of audience, and 40% of visits)

* www.genealogybank.com - 87K US visits (addicts and regulars are 22% of audience, 52% of visits)

* www.findmypast.com - 24K US visits (addicts and regulars are 21% of audience, 37% of visits)

* www.genealogytoday.com - 300K US visits ( addicts and regulars are 16% of audience, 33% of visits)

For comparison purposes, www.Ancestry.com had 5.0 million US visits, with addicts and regulars 45% of audience and 89% of visits.

It's unfortunate that the www.FindMyPast.com results from Quantcast is for US visits only.

It sure seems to me that none of these commercial genealogy websites have made a significant dent in Ancestry.com's customer base. The graphs show that traffic is essentially stagnant, except when a site offers a free database set or introduces new databases.

Sarah Palin is my cousin too!

Isn't that amazing? I have a distant cousin running on both tickets in the 2008 Presidential election! See here for my cousinhood with Barack Obama.

Robert Battle has an Ancestry of Sarah Palin at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~battle/palin.htm. I checked the list of ancestors, and Sarah (Heath) Palin, present Governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, has a significant New England and Mayflower ancestry (Warren, Howland, Brewster, Tilley and Hopkins) and also has several ancestors in common with me:

* 14590 Richard Warren (1578-1628)
* 14591 Elizabeth Walker (????-1673)

* 15894 Thomas Prence (1600-1673)

Sarah (Heath) Palin is the 11th great-granddaughter of these three people, and I am the 10th great-grandson of them. So that makes Sarah my 10th cousin once removed. How cool is that?

The offer still holds for both of my cousins on the tickets - if you want to come visit me in Chula Vista, I have a guest room waiting. We can talk about our common ancestry.... unless you really care about my political opinions.

FamilyTreeMaker 2009 Improvements

Russell Hannig on the Ancestry.com Blog has just posted about Family Tree Maker 2009 Release with a list of the improvements over FTM 2008.

The list of items added into FTM 2009 includes:

Genealogy Reports

* Register and Ahnentafel simplified reports*
* Data Errors report*

Charts

* Hourglass Chart*
* Horizontal Hourglass Chart*
* Bow Tie Chart*
* 180-Degree Fan Chart*
* Family Tree Chart*

Publishing Functionality

* Ability to show siblings within charts*
* Single-page PDF export from charts*
* Ability to add boxes in charts to a “Marked Box” category and modify box settings for these boxes*

Improved Data Manipulation Tools

* Streamlined data entry from any workspace using a full-featured edit person window*
* Ability to set spouse order (Person menu)*
* Ability to order media items for an individual*
* Find Individual tool (Edit menu)*
* Find Duplicate Individuals tool (Edit menu)*
* Ability to update multiple facts at one time (From Manage Facts or Fact options): change fact types, move description to place or place to description, mark as private*
* Insert foreign language characters into text fields*

Improvements within Research Tools

* Ability to ignore hints*
* Option to delete existing facts in individual and Web merge*
* Inclusion of married names, AKAs, and titles in index*

Improvements to Import

* OLE objects (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF) from previous FTM versions*
* Import previously ignored hints lists*

Improvements to Places

* Track and print your ancestors’ migration paths on interactive maps*
* Places toolbar that allows for researching place names not currently in the file and pinpointing places such as libraries, churches, and courthouses*


COMING SOON

In addition, we are currently working on new features that will be available as part of Family Tree Maker 2009—as soon as they become available:

* Book Building
* Better Ancestry Member Tree Integration
* Improved Relationship Calculator
* Source templates based on Evidence Explained by source expert, Elizabeth Shown Mills
* And many others…

Those improvements look promising - we'll see if they satisfy all of our wants and needs over time. I'm disappointed that the Book Building and Source Templates won't be in the initial FTM 2009 release.

According to this post on the Ancestry.com blog, registered users of FamilyTreeMaker 2008 will be offered a free upgrade to FTM 2009. That's encouraging. I look forward to my invitation to upgrade to FTM 2009! That should be good for another set of Genea-Musings posts, eh?

My sense is that the FamilyTreeMaker team at TGN are making an effort to be sensitive to customers wants, needs and requests, and are adding capabilities as fast as they can proof them. There is a lot more competition now with Legacy Family Tree and RootsMagic than there was even a year ago. Customer satisfaction should be a primary concern of all software companies!

Family Tree Magazine Launches New Website

Family Tree Magazine has launched their new web site - see www.familytreemagazine.com. My first impression is that they have added a LOT of content on this web site, mostly in the form of articles and genealogy forms.

The major headings on the web page are:

* How To - Records, Tips & Techniques, Online Genealogy, Photos & Heirlooms, Save & Share History, Libraries & Archives, and DNA

* Heritage - African-American, English, French, German, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, Scottish and All groups.

* Get Started -- Basic Steps, Genealogy Glossary, Surnames and Interviewing

* Research Toolkit - Free Forms, Cheat Sheets, 101 Best Web Sites, Soundex Generator, Software Guide, Article Index, State Research Guides.

* Blogs - Genealogy Insider, Photo Detective, Now What?

* Community -- Forum, Contribute, Queries

* Audio/Video - Featured Videos, Podcasts

* Shop - Back Issues, CDs, Digital downloads, State Research Guides, FTM Merchandise, Books.

I found many excellent articles, plus some PDFs in the Cheat Sheet section of Research Toolkit - Records Checklist, Timeline of US Immigration Laws, War Service Reference Guide and a Vital Records Chart. I also appreciated the article by Rick Crume on the 50 Genealogy Databases.

At this time, the Software Guide reviews are not available, even though a summary of each program is available here.

This is a great resource for all researchers - it's very easy to use and has a lot of information organized logically and well. Did I mention that most of these resources are FREE? Of course, the Family Tree Magazine itself isn't free, and the State Research Guides are not free.

Traffic statistics for TGN domains

I haven't looked at the traffic statistics for The Generations Network domains (or any others for that matter) for three months. The last check for TGN was on 27 May 2008 here.

Being the curious genea-cat I am, I checked the reach and page views on http://www.alexa.com/ for:

* www.ancestry.com
* www.rootsweb.com
* www.myfamily.com
* www.genealogy.com

Alexa.com measures Reach (percentage of all Internet users who visit a web site).


The daily page views (in terms of percent of all Internet users) were:



The Alexa page for Ancestry.com lists the following statistics:

* 0.057% of all Internet users visited Ancestry.com on 25 August
* 0.055% (average) of all Internet users visited Ancestry.com over the past three months.
* 16.4 page views per user on 25 August
* 15.32 page views per user (average) over the past three months
* Ancestry's rank in the USA is #386 of all web sites

I also checked the daily U.S. visits for the four TGN domains on http://www.quantcast.com/

These are daily visits by U.S. visitors. The Quantcast page for Ancestry.com indicates that the site averages 5.0 million visitors per month (not visits, visitors - in other words, unique users). Other statistics indicate that:

* 4% of the visits are "addicts" that are 48% of the total visits

* 41% of the visits are "regulars" that are 41% of the total visits

* 51% of the visits are "passers-bys" that are 11% of the visits.

The statistics indicate, to me, that:

* Bringing the Rootsweb domain into the Ancestry domain did not appreciably increase the total TGN traffic. For example, in early March, Rootsweb had a reach of 0.04% and Ancestry had 0.03%, and in early August Ancestry had a reach of 0.06% and Rootsweb had a reach of 0.005%.

* The Ancestry traffic is essentially stagnant - it has averaged 700K to 800K visits a day (from Quantcast), and a reach of 0.05% to 0.06% (from Alexa) since April 2008.

* Traffic for www.myfamily.com (about 25% of Ancestry's reach) and www.genealogy.com (about 15% of Ancestry's reach) is essentially constant also.

* The total traffic for all four of TGN's lead domains is about 1.2 million visits daily by U.S. persons.

In a later post, I will determine if other genealogy commercial and free web sites have increased their traffic statistics and market share.

Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 20: Adding Media I

I installed FamilyTreeMaker 2008 in early July and uploaded a large database to see how it worked. I also started a new database to test other program features. Please see the list at the bottom of this post for the earlier posts.

In this post, I want to demonstrate how to add pictures to my database using the Media menu icon in FamilyTreeMaker 2008. For this post, I'm using my great-grandfather, Frank W. Seaver (1852-1922), in my database as a starting point for these posts. Here is the Family screen in the People menu for this family.




When you click on the [Media] icon on the top menu, you get the "Collection" tab on the Media page. There is an index list in the left panel (empty for now). As you can see in the screen below, I have already added two photographs to my media collection. Now I want to add another photograph to the media Collection. I am going to click on the "Add" button in the upper right-hand corner to add another media item (Note that I could have clicked on the "Media" menu item in the second menu row down also):

After clicking on the "Add" button, a "Select media item" box opens and I find the photo that I want to add to my media collection. I highlight it, as shown below:

After clicking on the "Open" button, the photograph is added to my Media Collection. In the right-hand screen panel, I added a Caption, a Date, and a Description of the photograph. Here is the screen shot after I have added that information:

Note that the photograph File Name and File Folder location on my computer are included at the bottom of the right-hand panel. The photographs are stored in a separate Media folder rather than within the FamilyTreeMaker 2008 database.

I haven't added any photographs to my FTM 16 databases, so this was a new experience for me. The process of adding a photograph, adding a caption, date and description are very straight-forward and intuitive. I like the fact that the photographs are in a separate folder.

Previous posts in this series:

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 1: Loading. Installing the program and uploading an existing database file.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 2: Exploring. Looking around the uploaded database file to see what the different views look like.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 3: The Menus. Most of the menus were itemized and described.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 4: Starting a New Tree. I started a new tree and added some people demonstrating the program options to do this.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 5: Adding a Source. I added sources to the Facts that I previously entered.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 6: Adding Children to a Family. I added children to a family.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 7: The Person Menu. I described the items in the Person menu and attached a spouse to a person.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 8: Finding a Person in the database. I described three ways to Find a person.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 9: Places I. I explored the vagaries of the Places icon.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 10: Places II. The different map types are discussed and displayed.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 11: Places III. The method to Resolve many places with standardized place names is explored.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 12: Charts I. Introduction to Charts and examples of pedigree and descendants charts.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 13: Charts II. Examples of Hourglass, Relationships and Vertical Pedigree Charts.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 14: Charts III. Examples of large wall charts created by FTM 2008.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 15: Genealogy Reports. Description and display of Register (descendant) and Ahnentafel (ancestor) Reports.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 16: Person Reports. Description and display of 5 different reports, including Individual Reports and Custom Reports.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 17: Relationship Reports. Description and display of Family Group Sheet, Kinship Report, Marriage Report, Parentage Report, and Outline Descendant Report.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 18: Place Usage Reports. Description and display of the Place Usage report.

* Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Post 19: Source Reports. Description and display of the Source Usage reports.

The next post will continue the series on Media - the photos, audio, video, and document images that you can add to your database.

It pays to post...

Now that I have some time to catch up after my bout with Genealogicus Interruptus, I have been burning down my email list a bit. When they came in over the past two weeks, I've read them and ignored them and hoped to answer them when I found time.

Having a genealogy web site that Google and other search engines can find is great. Mine is presently at www.genealogy.com/users/s/e/a/Randy-Seaver/. The genealogy reports there are essentially unsourced, but they are great finding aids for anybody searching for their ancestors in my genealogy databases. Although I haven't updated these reports in three years, the information is still "good" - well, except for the branches of my family tree that I've lopped off since then and the branches that I've grafted onto my family tree since then. I guess I had better go update them soon! Actually, I had hoped to have my own web site by now, but I haven't gotten a round tuit...

Anyway, the information on my web site and my blogs has generated some email traffic over the past month, to wit:

1) A distant cousin of Linda's saw my web site genealogy report and wrote asking about my McKnew research - she was able to connect her ancestor Martha McKnew to the McKnew information in my database.

2) A distant cousin (?) of mine saw my blog post and inquired about the maiden name of Jerusha, the wife of Burgess Metcalf, a Revolutionary War soldier. We don't know Jerusha's maiden name, unfortunately. I sent her what I knew about the Metcalf line in hopes she can add or correct my information.

3) A distant cousin of mine in England saw my Private Member Tree database on Ancestry.com, and sent a message through Ancestry.com about the Hanny family, whose mother was Maria Richman, a granddaughter of John and Ann (Marshman) Richman of Hilperton, Wiltshire. Maybe he has more information about the Richmans!

4) A Seaver researcher saw my Private Member Tree on Ancestry.com and sent a message through Ancestry.com asking about John Wesley Seaver (1828-????). She apparently can connect this man to the immigrant Robert Seaver (1608-1683) of Roxbury MA, which I have been unable to do.

5) A Buchanan researcher saw my Private Member Tree on Ancestry.com and sent a message through Ancestry.com asking about Sophia Newton (1799-????) who married James Buchanan. I offered to send her a genealogy report about the Newton family in hopes that she can add to it.

This last query sent me off to look again for information about Nathan Newton, Sophia's father. I found that he had married, first, to Anna Brigham, in Marlborough MA, they had three known children, and the family moved to Andover, Oxford County, Maine, where Anna died and Nathan married (2) Dollie Wood and had several more children, including a Lambert Newton. Now my Thomas J. Newton, for whom I do not know the parents, married Sophia (Buck) Brigham, the widow of Lambert Brigham, of Southborough, MA. Notice the names that keep repeating here? That's a clue! The challenge is to connect Lambert Brigham to Anna Brigham, and perhaps that is a family connection for how my Thomas J. Newton "found" my Sophia (Buck) Brigham in about 1833 and married her. I've considered it probable that Thomas J. Newton was the son of either Jacob Newton of Dixfield, Maine or Nathan Newton of Andover, Maine, but I have absolutely no evidence for either consideration.

So - it was a pretty good night - I burned down my email list, I did a little research and thinking about the Newton/Brigham problem, and I helped some other researchers with their research too. I had fun doing it, too! It's great to be back in the research "saddle" again. I'm genea-cited... (as in excited, not source cited, I'm still very imperfect in sourcing).