Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 4: Family Information

After downloading Family Tree Builder 4.0 from the MyHeritage website, and uploading a GEDCOM file into the software (see Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 1: A First Look), I started exploring in Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 2: Getting Started. The information about a Person was reviewed in Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 3: Person Information.

In this post, we will see what there is in the way of Family Information. With my grandparents Seaver on the screen in the center position, one way I found to see their marriage information and their children was to click on the "Family" menu item in the top menu row, as shown below:





I clicked on the top line that says "Edit Details:" with the name of the couple. Alternatively, the user can double-click on the Marriage bar (gray in the shot above) below the selected couple and see the "Edit Details" menu.

The "Edit Details" menu for the Family opens, with tabs of Main, Children, Citations, Notes and Facts. There is a button for Photos on this menu also. The "Main" screen is shown below:




The "Main" tab items are names and birth dates for the Husband and Wife, and marriage date, place and status for the couple. The marriage status includes options for Married, Separated, Divorced, Widowed, Engaged, Partners, Friends, Annulled, Unknown, and Others.

The next tab is the "Children" tab, shown below:




This menu has a list of all of the children of the couple in a table format, including Name, Gender, birth Date, and Birth Place. For each child, the information included is Gender, First Name, Last Name, Birth Date, birth Place, and Relationship. The Relationship options are Natural, Adopted or Foster. There are buttons to Add Child, Attach Child, or Detach Child. The button in the bottom right corner enables the user to put the children in date order.

The next tab is the "Citation" tab which could be used for a Marriage source citation, or the Source citation for the marriage could be put under the Facts tab:

The next tab is the "Notes" tab, where the user could write information about the marriage or the family. The "Notes" tab here is similar to that on the "Person Information" menu:

The last tab on the "Edit Details" menu is for "Facts" as shown below:

This "Facts" tab is setup similar to the "Facts" tab for the "Person Information." I have one Fact for this family - the marriage, and I have a Source Citation for it.

I have the same quibbles about the note editing and the source citation quality as discussed in Post 3, so I won't repeat them here.

In the next post, we'll try to create a new family - parents, children, dates, places, sources, etc.

I must say that I'm learning quite a bit myself as I go along here. If I have made any major mistakes in my discussion here, please let me know and I will correct them. I expected this program to be well-executed and it is that.

Interesting and Useful Articles on Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com has a Learning Center here. Included in this center are articles in the Article Archive. These articles go back into the 1990's, but it is difficult to find an article on a specific topic.

It is best to use the Advanced Search field and enter a keyword or an author to find what you're looking for. However, searches for common words like "Census" (433 matches) or "Military" (207 matches) result in too many matches. I've found no easy way to sort them out. The user can narrow a search by using the author or inclusive dates if they are known. There are 1,539 articles in the Ancestry Archive of articles, and 6,403 total in the Article Archive, as of today.

I received the Ancestry Monthly Update newsletter today and there was a link to Tony Macklin's article Ask the Expert: Sorting Through Search Results, published on 11 August. Tony answers the question from a user: "When I try to search for a name I get thousands of results. How do I sort through them all to find out who my ancestor is?”

In the article, Tony describes how the New Search on Ancestry is supposed to work. There are quite a few comments to this article, but most of them are negative - they claim that the search doesn't work the way Tony describes how it should work, and you can hear the frustration in the commenters words.

I'm sympathetic to the commenters frustrations, because I have them too. But I still think that the frustration is misplaced - I think the search problems on Ancestry.com are the result of the enumerations of the data (the actual writing on the census, military, or other record) and the indexing or transcribing of the records.

When I look at Ancestry.com's Search capabilities, I see the most sophisticated search capability in all of genealogy. No other commercial or free database provider includes as much versatility in their search fields (all databases, a collection or a single database; basic or advanced search boxes; many indexed fields; exact vs. ranked search for every field; wild cards; age or year ranges, etc). I do not fault them for the effort and the implementation of their search capabilities.

That said, I still prefer the Old Search, and do mostly Exact Searches with wild cards because the navigation seems easier to me.

Another article that caught my eye was by Jana Lloyd titled Leonis or Lewis? Some Quick Tips for Finding Your Ancestors in the Census, published on 5 August 2007. Jana discusses why there are errors in the census indexes, and some search tips to help you get around them. She uses one of her ancestors as an example.

One thing I noticed was that the Ancestry Article Archive shown that there are zero articles published in August 2009. Tony's article was published 11 August 2009 - why isn't it included in the list? July 2009 also shows zero articles. Jana's article doesn't show up in the August 2007 list of articles either. Whatsup with this? This page also promotes the 24/7 Family History Circle blog which has been inactive for months.

Frankly, if Ancestry.com is going to publish articles like Tony Macklin's, they should also mention it in their Ancestry Weekly Discovery and Ancestry Monthly Update newsletters, at least more than in a sidebar as it was in the email I received. Articles like these should be put on the Ancestry.com blog too - they are worthy!

Found another Devier Lanfear!

I wish that every county had a historical or genealogical society like the Historical Association of South Jefferson, New York. When I visited the area in 2004, I visited this organization and was amazed at how much information they had for the different family surnames of the county. Of course, I was looking for surnames Smith and Bell then, not Lanfear/Lamphear/etc.

I have had little luck finding parents for my Devier Lamphear Smith, but I'm turning over the "rocks" one at a time. After my initial search for Lanfear/Lanphear/etc. families in the census, land and probate records of Jefferson County, I emailed the HASJNY about a month ago asking if they had any information about families with these surname variants. I heard immediately from Debbie quick, and she promised to send me a copy of what she had.

A package came on Wednesday, and I eagerly opened it. There were 12 sheets, mainly family group sheets with information gleaned from Jefferson County residents and material donated by other researchers. All but one page concerned descendants of William and Lydia (--?--) Lanfear, for whom I had very little information.

On one family group sheet was the name Ernest Devier Lanfear, born 8 September 1853 in Erie county, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Walter and Mary Jane (Dodds) Lanfear, and Walter was born in Lorraine, Jefferson County, NY to Orrin and Lucinda (--?--) Lanfear. Orrin was a son of William and Lydia (--?--) Lanfear who settled in Lorraine, Jefferson County in 1804. Even better, the contributor of this information was included on the Family Group Sheet! I will compose a letter and send it off ASAP (doing things the "old fashioned way" with snail mail).

I checked on the WorldConnect family tree database on Rootsweb, and found some information for the Orrin, Walter and Ernest Devier Lanfear families. There appear to be several researchers interested in this family line from William Lanfear, and now I have several more researchers to contact to see if they know anything more about an adopted baby boy in the early 1840s.

Now I see a little light when I peer into the Lanfear cave... but I'm not sure if it's a big train of data coming toward me or just a flicker of hope that may be extinguished because there is no more data.

This certainly counts as part of conducting a reasonably extensive and exhaustive search of all available records and repositories - and not just on the Internet!

Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 3: Person Information

After downloading Family Tree Builder 4.0 from the MyHeritage website, and uploading a GEDCOM file into the software (see Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 1: A First Look), I started exploring in Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 2: Getting Started.

In this post, I want to go through all of the information captured by the program for a specific person. I'll use my grandfather, Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942), for this review. Here is the screen with him as the selected person:

The slide bar on the right of the selected person provides a summary of the information for that person. How do I see the facts, the notes, the sources, etc.? There are two ways to do this:

1) I can go to the "Person" menu item in the top line, and click on "Edit Details: Frederick Walton Seaver" and see the "Edit Details" menu.

2) I can double-click on the selected person and see the "Edit Details" menu.

Here is the "Edit Details" menu for the selected person:

There are eight tabs across the top of the menu box - Main, Info, Physical, contact, Citations, Notes and Facts. The "Main" tab is shown above - and has information about the person's gender, name, email address, birth information and death information (date, place, cause of death, burial place). There is a button to add photographs.

The "Info" tab is shown below:

On this tab, the user can add information about the person's Occupation, Education and Identification (religion, nationality, and title) and the opportunity to privatize the person's information. The user can put in more than one entry for Occupation and Education.

The "Physical" tab is shown below:

On this tab, the user can enter information about the person's height, weight, eye color, hair color, description and medical history.

The next tab is for "Contact" shown below:

The entries on this tab include address, phone number, fax number, email address, web site, and entry date. There is the opportunity to add more than one address.

The "Citation" tab is shown below:

I'm not sure why there is a "Citations" tab for the person. I can understand a "Citations" tab for each Fact for a person's life, but why "Citations?" Anyway, the fields here are for Source, Page, Confidence, Date, Text from Source. There is a button for a Citation Note. All of the Master Sources are in the Source dropdown menu. You can Edit a Master Source or Create a New Source. If you choose one from the list, then you can add information to the other items.

There are no source templates available in this software yet. The user can type in the source information (author, title, publisher, date, etc.) in whatever format they wish.

The "Notes" tab is shown below:

The user can add Note Citations, Add another Note, or "Clear" the Note by clicking on the buttons. Note that there are basic editing functions for these notes - the user cannot bold, italicize, underline, change fonts, change font size or font color, create numbered or bullet lists, etc.

The last tab is the "Facts" tab:

On the "Facts" tab, there is a list of all of the facts created by the user for the person. If you select a Fact (I selected the Birth in the screen above), the details of that Fact are shown blow the list. There are buttons below the Fact information for "Fact Citations," "Fact Notes," "Fact Photos," "New Fact," "Edit Fact," "Delete Fact" and "Arrange by Date."

I have one "Fact Citation" for the Birth Fact, as shown below:

In the Fact Citation tab, the screen shows the Source, the Page, the Confidence, the Date and the Text. The user can select from the "Confidence" dropdown list:

* (not specified)

* Unreliable evidence or estimated data

* Questionable reliability of evidence

* Secondary evidence

* Direct and primary evidence

Note that these are not the customary "Quality" levels described in the Genealogical Proof Standard. At a minimum, there should be fields for Original or Derivative Source, Primary or Secondary Information, and for Direct, Indirect and Negative Evidence. The existing "Confidence" fields in Family Tree Builder 4 combine source, information and evidence terms.

In the next post, we'll look at the Family information that is available for each family.

My impression so far is that Family Tree Builder 4.0 is a fairly complete and useful genealogy software program. The navigation is fairly easy, and the information obtained from a GEDCOM upload seems to be in the right place. I am distressed by the Note editing and Source Citation limitations.

WorldVitalRecords extends FREE access to 18 August

I received an email last night from WorldVitalRecords saying:

"We had such a good response to our "FREE Site Access" promotion that we decided to extend it through August 18th.

"Thank you for your continued support of WorldVitalRecords.com, where you'll find thousands of databases—including birth, death, military, census, and parish records—to help you build your family tree."

They noted that "No Credit Card is Required."

This FREE trial period is an excellent opportunity to determine if you want to subscribe to WorldVitalRecords.

There was also two 50% discount offers for a year's subscription to http://www.wworldvitalrecords.com/:

* World Collection for $59.95 plus a free gift (retail is $119.95)

* US Collection for $19.95 plus a free gift (retail is $39.95)

They obviously want new subscribers to their service. What about existing subscribers? If I want to extend my US Collection subscription, or change to the World Collection, I have to pay the full retail price.

I posted Getting into the FREE WorldVitalRecords.com databases the other day - use it if you need to!

Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 2: Getting Started

After downloading Family Tree Builder 4.0 from the MyHeritage website, and uploading a GEDCOM file into the software (see Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 1: A First Look), I started exploring.

The program opened with the person with ID number 1, who happens to be the third wife of Robert Seaver (1608-1683), for whom I have, and history provides, no name. Here is the starting screen:


Those colors are pretty drab, so I decided to check how to change them to something, um, more fresh. Above the central window with the person boxes, there is a "Styles" button. I clicked on that and explored the settings, and selected a Background color (yellow), then the "Gradient" Style, and the colors for males (lavender) and females (pink), from color palettes:



I clicked "OK" and had a fresher look on the screen:

Now I want to change the Home Person to myself from the third wife with the unknown name. I used the People Index in the left frame and selected myself. I explored a bit (I could use the Help function but that's no fun!) and finally found that if I right-click on a person, that a popup menu provides some options, including "Set as Home Person" under the "Person" item, as shown below:

In the screen above, three generations of ancestors, and three generations of descendants, can be viewed. The user can select one, two or three generations to be shown using the lside scale above the family tree.

There are two major menus for the program, as shown in the screen view above.

* The top row is the classical Windows-type list of File, Edit, View, Person, Famly, Charts, Reports, Favorites, Research, Publishing, Tools and Help.

* The second row, of icons, includes New, Open, Save, Back, Forward, Home, Tree, Photos, Matches, Research, Charts, Reports, Maps, Publish, Premium, Language and Help. Most of those are pretty intuitive. The "Home" icon takes you to your Home Person. The "Tree" icon takes you to the family tree view (as in the screen shot above).

I wanted to see how all of the information from the GEDCOM upload came through,so I wanted to navigate to my grandfather, Frederick W. Seaver (1876-1942). There are two ways to do this. One is to find him in the family tree and click on his name. The user can navigate generation to generation using this method, but it is a bit cumbersome to jump more than three generations back or forward. The horzontal and vertical scroll bars can be used to show persons off the screen view.

The second way, which I chose, was to find him in the People Index in the left panel and click on him:

I noted that the People Index frame can list names in alphabetical order by first name or by last name. The screen above shows it by "First Name." To choose Last Name, just click on the column heading "Last Name." The index can be listed by ID number, First Name, Last Name, Birth Date, Death Date, Relation (distance from the Home Person - I'm guessing it's the number of generations up the ancestors and down the descendants), and Last Modified. You can move the columns around by dragging and dropping. The People Index list can be minimized or maximized or sized by the user. This is a very handy list. I wish that it had spouses listed too - I don't know if items can be added to the Index list or not. I checked the Help function and did not find this ability.

In the next post, I'll explore how to access the information about a person in the database. After that, we'll do some data entry.

August CVGS Research Group Summary

We had 12 members at our August 12th Research Group meeting, and there were many interesting stories and successes. Here's a synopsis:

* Nancy works at the Stein Family Farm, and is researching the family history of the Steins. She has Carl Stein's declaration of intention and naturalization certificate, but cannot figure out when he immigrated. The declaration does not list an immigration date or ship. The census records give different years - 1881, 1885 and 1884. The group suggested searching for a death certificate, an obituary or anniversary newspaper article to determine his birth date and birth place and perhaps the immigration date and ship.

* Phyllis has a problem with Family Tree Maker 16 - it won't print one family line on a pedigree chart even though the person has parents in the database. We suggested that she check to see if the person is identified as a "natural" child to the parents in the People > Other Parents screen.

* Gary received a box of family photos and papers from his father in Michigan. He passed photos around, and articles about an uncle's arrest for shooting melon thieves in the 1940s. He checked some older research and found that one source provided the parents of Solomon Roff and identified Yates County NY as their residence.

* John had some success at Carlsbad Library - he was able to eliminate one of the two William Patricks in NC in the 1760s.

* Randy showed the Dane county WI plat maps and Andrew County MO cemetery book pages he found at Carlsbad. He also discussed the Jefferson County NY Estate Papers for the Lanfear family, and passed the records around. Finally, he told about finding the McKnew house in San Francisco in Google Street Maps and being contacted by second cousins.

* Phyllis wants to distribute an ancestral book to her children and grandchildren. for each person, she is creating a page with their family data, pictures and an obituary. Two grandsons seem interested!

* Jean went to New York City in June and had great luck. She is adopted, and was able to find out the names of her birth parents from marriage records, her own adoption papers from the court, and contacted and met with her mother's sister in Philadelphia and a step-sister too.

* Helen S. said that she found some family records for one of her families in the next-door county.

* Cynthia found a book on Clough family while at Carlsbad Library. It said that one cousin married composer Stephen Foster, and she recalls meeting a Foster descendant who played the piano beautifully when she was a young girl.

* Ruth has traced both sides of her Hayley line back to Jamestown in Virginia. She's working on two family books or pamphlets to share with her family.

* Virginia passed around the Zionsville IN book she received, and is downloading the Demoss surname book from the BYU Family History Archive site.

* Bobbie had a wonderful research vacation in Lake County IL. Two sisters live on the Titus family farm in Fremont township, and she slept in the farmhouse. She made large plastic displays with nine family documents as gifts for her sisters. She came home with many pictures from the area, a plat map showing all of the family holdings in 1881, a picture of great-grandparents obtained from a local museum, and recent newspaper articles about selling one of the Titus farms and property. They are off to Nova Scotia next month for another trip.

This was a really good meeting with many good examples and research successes. It's fun to see our members applying lessons learned to advance their genealogy research.

UPDATED 12 noon: Thomas commented about the McAfee alert and also about the fact that the Family Tree Builder installation process requires unchecking the box that would make MyHeritage.com your home page. Thanks, T!

Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 1: A First Look

MyHeritage.com announced the release of their free software Family Tree Builder 4.0 yesterday. You can read the press release at Dick Eastman's blog here.

You can download the program and see a slide show of the features of Family Tree Builder 4.0 here. The MyHeritage.com blog has an article with more information. The new program features added include:

1) Maps -- Using our maps, you can explore your family's origins, gain a better knowledge of your family, and enjoy all the benefits below:

* Fix place names according to smart suggestions we provide and improve your data
* Map your entire family tree, or any portion of it, or just one individual
* Map birth places, places of residence, other particular facts, or all facts
* See all people, events and photos associated with any particular country or place
* See all places of importance in any person's life, and trace immigration patterns
* Find any place in any language on the map

2) Photo albums -- Organize your photos in albums for your convenience. When you publish your family tree to the web, the album structure is preserved in your family site. This makes it much more convenient to manage very large photo collections. Inside albums, use drag & drop to change the order of photos. Also use drag & drop to copy or move photos between albums. You can even drag photos from Windows into Family Tree Builder in the new version.

3) Slide shows and screen saver -- You can also view slide shows of any photo album that you create or for all photos. In addition, Family Tree Builder now comes with a Screen Saver that shows this slide show for any or all of these albums.

That sounds wonderful, doesn't it? But to utilize all of these neat features, you need a Premium Account at www.MyHeritage.com. I have a Basic Account (250 persons in my family tree, 250 mb of storage, basic smart matching). A Premium account costs $75 per year (2,500 persons, 500 mb storage, enhanced smart matching) and a Premium Plus account costs $119.40 (unlimited persons, unlimited storage, enhanced smart matching).

Family Tree Builder has been promoted as one of the genealogy software packages that can synchronize between the desktop program and the MyHeritage family tree site and create a public or private family website. It is one of the programs that might be able to lead us to the "Genealogy in the Cloud" world.

I downloaded Family Tree Builder 4.0 and installed it on my computer. I got a warning from my McAfee Site Advisor anti-virus software that it might have adware or malware associated with it. I don't know why this happened, but I'm wary, and have contacted MyHeritage about it!

Then I uploaded my master GEDCOM file (38,420 persons, 15,116 families) to the program. It took less than one minute to load this file. Since it was a GEDCOM file, it had no media items associated with the persons in the database. If I use FTB 4.0, I will have to add the Photos myself. However, if I then create a family web site from the desktop software and database, those media items would be uploaded to the family site, according to the MyHeritage news release.

Future posts will cover navigation, data entry, sources, maps, reports and charts as I explore the free version of Family Tree Builder 4 (i.e., without a Premium MyHeritage account).

"New England Ancestors" came today

The Summer 2009 issue (volume 10, number 3) of New England Ancestors, published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, came today and I enjoyed reading the articles about settling western New York.

There are three articles, each with wonderful information for the researcher with ancestors that moved from New England to western New York before 1820 or so. The articles include:

1) "Retracing a Vermont Family's Migration to the Holland Purchase " by Julie Foster Van Camp. Julie has portions of Albro Foster's journal which details the daily travels of his family's journey from Middletown VT to Willink (now Concord), Erie County, NY in 1811. The article adds much historical and local detail.

2) "The Records of the Holland Land Company in Western New York" by Karen E. Livsey. This article describes the transition of the land in western New York from when it was first bought by the Holland Land Company in 1804 until 1835. The records available, and the repositories that have them, are documented in this article.

3) "Genesee Fever: The Lure of Land on the New York Frontier" by Marian Henry. This article described the history of the land in western New York from the Revolutionary War until about 1825.

The cover of the magazine has a great township map of western New York showing all of the counties and townships of the Holland Land Company, the Morris Reserve and the Phelps and Gorham Purchase.

Why do I care about this? My 4th great-grandparents, Amos and Mary (Metcalf) Underhill moved from Piermont, Grafton County, NH to Aurora, Erie County, NY in around 1810. They resided there during the War of 1812 because Amos served in the United States Army during the War.

My best guess is that they traveled much of the same roads or paths, in much the same way - walking and with an ox team pulling a wagon - as Albro Foster and his family did. They probably bought land in Aurora from the Holland Land Company and there are probably records of that purchase. Now I have a lead to follow to find those records, including some FHL microfilm numbers. There are several websites too with some of the information.

I love it when genealogy periodicals provide articles that apply to my own research and that of my colleagues! Articles like this make my membership in NEHGS very worthwhile.

The NEHGS seems to be making a concerted effort to provide more articles on upstate New York. This is logical, since many New England residents migrated to many New York counties after the Revolutionary War.

Do you have western New York ancestors from this time period? If so, you will want to read these articles when your New England Ancestors issue comes to your mailbox, or to a genealogy library near you.

Wordly Wednesday: Family Photographs - Post 67: Gassing Up?

I'm posting old family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

This photograph is from loose pictures found in a box, probably from my grandfather's photo album, that I scanned during Scanfest in February:




Isn't this a great photograph? This is my mother, Betty Virginia Carringer, at about age 4 (so perhaps in 1923) on her toy car, at the neighborhood gas station. The service station man is pretending to put gas into her "New-mobile."

There was a gasoline station on the northwest corner of the block where the Carringer family lived. The station was on the southeast corner of the intersection of 30th Street and Ivy Street in San Diego. The station, and a small auto repair shop, were there when I was a boy in the 1950s, and it is still there today.

My grandfather, Lyle Carringer, probably took this photograph. Did he stage this, or is it spontaneous? My guess is that Lyle had his car serviced at this station regularly and knew the owner and the workers. Therefore, the workers probably knew Betty and were kidding around with Lyle to set up this picture.