← The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection
The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection
The Genealogy Guys Podcast #427
00:52:53
News You Can Use and Share! MyHeritage added 123 million historical records in April and May. MyHeritage added millions of Nordic newspaper pages to OldNews.com. RootsMagic has released Version 10 of its award-winning software. Listener Email ...
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:00]
Drew Smith
Foreign.
- [00:11]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
27 of the genealogy Guides Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet. I'm your host Drew Smith and together with co host George G. Morgan, we cover news, tips and solutions for the genealogist community.
- [00:26]
Drew Smith
In this episode, we bring you the.
- [00:27]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
Latest news from MyHeritage. In RootsMagic, George and I share listener email and updates about finding Blaise Farney, learning about Austrian sailors, using DNA to research Jewish ancestors, and distinguishing between two men with the same name in the same place at the same time. The Genealogy Guys podcast is sponsored by MyHeritage, Roots Magic and VividPix. And now on with the show.
- [01:01]
Drew Smith
Cast, I am joined as always by my co host, George G. Morgan. How you doing, George?
- [01:07]
George G. Morgan
I'm doing fine. Welcome everyone. It's nice to have you here with us.
- [01:12]
Drew Smith
It is a great day to have you with us and we've got a little bit of news and some listener email and feedback and whatnot and a few announcements of upcoming things that you'll want to know about. So for sure. And. And what George and I'll be doing in the near future as well.
- [01:28]
George G. Morgan
That's right.
- [01:29]
Drew Smith
So that's the main thing. But let's start with our listener. I mean, excuse me, our news. We start with news and yeah, we'll get to the listener email after the commercial break, but news first. And George, I'll let you start with MyHeritage.
- [01:44]
George G. Morgan
Drew. MyHeritage, as always, is just adding records up. A storm. In the months of April and May of 2024, they added 123 million historical records. And these include Australia's cemetery inscriptions. And there are 1.2 million of those from the year 1802 onwards. Queensland burials. An index of burial records from Queensland, Australia from 1800 onwards. And that's 1.6 million records. Wow. Canada, New Brunswick. Births from 1801 to 1921. There are million 130 records from 1801 to 1921 with images. All of these things so far have images with them. So that's terrific. Canada, New Brunswick. Marriages from 1789 to 1950 with images. That's 1.3 million records. Moving over to the UK. England, Cheshire, Bishop's transcript burials. That's great. 1.167 million records. And those go from 1569 to 1933. That's just amazing stuff. The England Cheshire school registers. This is interesting. Is 1796 to 1909. There over 700,000 records. Italy telephone records. An index of telephone directory records from Italy from the years 2001-2003-2005-2008, 2010 and 2011. And that's 43 million names. That's terrific. Luxembourg telephone directories. And These go from 1997, 2001, 2002 and 2003. There are almost 300,000 records. The Netherlands telephone directories. And here's an index of records for 1997, 2001, 2003, 5 and 11. And that's almost 15 million records there. Nordic newspapers. And we'll talk about that in a minute. That's eleven and a half million records. 1905 Kansas State Census. And this is sure to be of interest to people who had people living in Kansas. And as I said, 1905. And that's a million and a half records. The Kansas State Census for 1915. 1.6 million records. 1925 Kansas State Census. An index of records with images. It's 1.8 million. That's tremendous resource for Kansas researchers. The 1855 Massachusetts state census. That's 1.2 million records from the year 1855. New York City births 1866 to 1909. Drew, you might find a few things there. And that's seven and a half million records. New York City deaths 1866 to 1948 with images. That's 8.89 3,000 records. And we have New York City marriages 1866 to 1949. And. And that index with the index with the images, almost 21 million records. And finally the New York City voter list for 1924 a an index of records with images of for the 1924 election in New York City. That's 1.4 million records. That's just tremendous number of new resources available. And then next, Myheritage, which as you probably know, launched earlier this year facility called OldNews.com and Old News has a tremendous number of newspapers and the collection keeps growing and they have added Nordic newspaper pages and that includes 11.6 million new Nordic newspaper pages.
- [07:36]
Drew Smith
And.
- [07:38]
George G. Morgan
The new content includes historical, local, regional and national newspapers, periodicals and and gazettes from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Greenland and the Faroe Islands with articles dating back to 1666. But most of them are from the 19th century and they are indexed and fully searchable. So these are a tremendous new research. If you're doing Scandinavian and Nordic research, just exciting.
- [08:20]
Drew Smith
The exciting news out of the software ends of genealogy. I think one of them anyway is the announcement of RootsMagic 10. And of course you'll hear again a little bit about this during one of the commercials. But the point is that We've been using RootsMagic 9 for a while. I think it came out right at the beginning of the RootsTech last year. And so and Bruce said that when I talked to him, he said yeah, he's not going to release a new version immediately before a conference like that because it was, you know, they had spent a lot of time getting ready for the conference and on top of that dealing with the software updates. So this one I think was smarter to wait a little while longer, but that's okay and it was worth the wait. RootsMagic 10 is great and it's got some new features. The again, there's no excuse if you haven't used RootsMagic before ever, you can do. There's a free version which covers a lot of the features RootsMagic Essentials. So you should try it. Yep, you would just go to rootsmagic.com but I want to mention a few of the features here because I can't squeeze those into a commercial. Usually there is tracking of family health histories, medical histories in there so that you can more easily generate those family health history reports which are very useful when you are going to see your doctor and particularly a new doctor and they want to know what your family medical health history is. And now you've got a way to document and set that up so they can see it. Exactly. More search facility features including you can set up rules to search for things and create groups dynamically. And so that way you can more easily get to what you're looking for. More data management tools for displaying names for different cultures, moving facts around or copying them between people and sharing facts with multiple people. Because if you have a fact of, let's say a marriage or census record, you do want to be able to share it among more than one person dynamic groups, as I say, to refresh those groups very easily as you add people to see what groups they fall into. And the interface has been simplified a bit with some improved color coding and navigation with color coding, enhanced editing. There's also the help you can get as you are on screens will be more appropriate for the screen you're on. So you can get help for that's context sensitive as it's called, meaning you see it there. And one last. Well, two things that I need to mention. One is the book is out getting the most out of Ruth magic 10 and I know you can get it on Amazon. So it's out there. And I ordered mine and got mine within a couple of days.
- [11:18]
George G. Morgan
George got his, you know, one of our. No. One of Our listeners had said that, and they were in the uk that they could not get the book from Amazon in the uk. And someone else replied that, oh, oh yes, Amazon said the book was not available, but it actually was and it was delivered in two days.
- [11:46]
Drew Smith
Yeah. One of the confusing things about this, the way that works and why that was a little bit confusing was that the Amazon, the book, the RootsMagic 10 book, it's a print on demand, so they don't normally just stock a lot of copies and that's why you might say not available, but it doesn't mean you can't order it because then the command is done to print it and then you get your copy. But I got mine, it's very readable. So the, you know, it's dark and readable and that's not a problem.
- [12:12]
George G. Morgan
But the biggest, if you don't like the, if, if you don't like dealing with, with a book and, and I do, of course, because I, I, I love to go through the table of contents and the index. But remember that the Roots Magic folks have posted videos. Yes. For everything in Roots Magic 10 and you can find those on YouTube or you can go to the rootsmagic.com website and access their videos from there.
- [12:47]
Drew Smith
That's right.
- [12:48]
George G. Morgan
It's awesome.
- [12:50]
Drew Smith
So the last thing, although again I'll probably bring it up again during the commercial break, but is that the pricing is such and at the time this episode of the podcast is coming out, you'll probably have about a week left to get a discounted price whether you are an existing user for as little as $20, if you're an existing RootsMagic user and if you're a new user, 29.95 and that's like prep basically $10 less than what you would pay if after Sunday, July 7th at Midnight Mountain time. And so you need to kind of work fast on this one folks to get your, your discount and it's, it's great. So that's the news out of RootsMagic. Congratulations, Bruce. For a new version we'll be enjoying using that and, and, and giving feedback. One of the things George, that I do, I'm a member of course, as I think you are too are but are the RootsMagic users group on Facebook and they people report bugs. Sometimes they're not bugs, but sometimes they are and they get reported very quickly back to the developers and they get fixed in new versions. So I would not expect significant bugs to be a problem. So that is the news out of RootsMagic that's terrific. And with that, George, if I may, I think we are going to stop and we are going to take a commercial break. You'll hear from some of the same companies and that's the way it happens to work. And after that, yes, we do have some listener email and feedback and good stuff like that there. And more content. Stay with us.
- [14:41]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
Good genealogical research involves collaboration, especially with.
- [14:46]
Drew Smith
Individuals who may have unique expertise, such as with the interpretation of DNA data.
- [14:51]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
MyHeritage now makes it possible for you to take your DNA results and collaborate.
- [14:55]
Drew Smith
With other researchers without having to violate good security practices. For example, it's rarely a good idea to share your account password with others.
- [15:04]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
If your collaborator is already a MyHeritage.
- [15:07]
Drew Smith
User, you can go to Manage DNA.
- [15:09]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
Kits, click the three dots next to.
- [15:11]
Drew Smith
The kit and choose Share DNA Results with a Collaborator. To learn more about what you can do with collaboration and what you are permitting your collaborator to do, visit MyHeritage.com the word 10 is a special word in the English language. It can refer to something that has.
- [15:30]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
The highest rating, and so it's very appropriate that RootsMagic has just released one version 10. It adds such features as helping you to document your DNA matches, trace your family's health history, do searches through your data using defined rules, managing groups that you've created, copying facts between individuals and sharing facts with multiple people, and so much more. You still have time to get RootsMagic 10 at a discount whether or not.
- [15:58]
Drew Smith
You already have an earlier version, and.
- [16:01]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
You can try out RootsMagic for free using RootsMagic Essentials. Learn more at RootsMagic.com.
- [16:10]
Drew Smith
If you are the genealogist in the family, you may be the one who now has all of the accumulated photos of your relatives and ancestors, but those photos and the stories behind them can fade over time if they are not preserved. Don't let your memories fade. Vividpix provides a wide range of products and services for you, the the individual genealogist, as well as for libraries and other organizations trying to preserve the past. You might decide to start with a course designed by professional photo managers that will teach you how to organize your family photo collections. To learn more about this course, go to vivid-pix.com education and click the Learn More button under Printed Photo Organizing Made Easy. Why not make 2024 the year you learn to deal with the family photos you have? Welcome back.
- [17:04]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
You are listening to the Genealogy Guys podcast.
- [17:07]
Drew Smith
And again, yes, sometimes we get updates on previous questions, sometimes multiple over multiple episodes. And this one is from our Friend Jean Danielle and who was researching a Frenchman who had left and was in New York for a period of time. This is where it all started. And he was on a couple of passenger lists back in the 1880s. And the question was, of course, you know, what happened? And so the. The Lewis County Historical Society.
- [17:45]
George G. Morgan
What's a. What's the fellow's name?
- [17:47]
Drew Smith
Oh, the gentleman. Blaze Farney. F A R N Y. So Blaze B L A I S E. Kind of like the famous Blaise Pascal. Yes, Blaze. And so Blaze Farney has. Would. Had written to the Lewis County Historical Society. And this was the interesting response which I want to share from their. The person at that society who said that. Hello. We looked into the name Blaze Farney. That's either F A R N Y or F A R N E Y. Unfortunately, we found no one by that name. It's true that Farney is a common name here. And there's a Farney family book in our research. Church room. Lumbering was a main industry in Krogan. That's C R O G H A N In the late 19th century, agriculture and dairy. Also. I believe the French settled in and around that area earlier than that because they thought the climate would be similar to theirs in France. But it wasn't. The weather is colder and the winters are long with a lot of snow. So many moved on.
- [18:55]
George G. Morgan
I can't blame him.
- [18:56]
Drew Smith
Yes. Since Blaze was born and died in France, is it possible that he did not emigrate here? Maybe he visited or worked for a short time and went back home. He could have traveled by train from New York City to Krogan for a visit. It is over 300 miles. So that was from the Inga from the Lee County Historical Society. And. But she was nice enough. Yeah. To respond a few weeks ago after letting our friend John Daniel know that she would respond. She just couldn't get to it right away. But, and that's the thing, you know, folks, you. When you contact an organization of any type, but particularly maybe a local historical society or somewhat, you don't know how many things they're dealing with ahead of you that, you know, you don't know how many other projects, how many other questions they're trying to answer. So you have to be kind of patient. It may take weeks or a month or two to get back to what you, you know, you asked. And I think here's a great example of a very nice response that someone sent. So I encourage everyone to, you know, go back. You can listen to our previous episodes where we discussed Blaze Farney, and how we talk about the New York historians, that there are historians in all those New York counties and I'm sure other states have something similar. But you can find people. So thank you, by the way, John Daniel, for sharing that particular response, just because I think we all, all of our listeners need to know that there are a lot of great people, helpful people out there in historical societies that will do what they can to help you with your research. George, we're going to go to Austria.
- [20:42]
George G. Morgan
Yeah.
- [20:42]
Drew Smith
All right.
- [20:43]
George G. Morgan
I have an email from Karen K A R I N and Karen writes, hi, I am listening like always here from Europe. You were puzzled about an Australian quote, unquote sailor?
- [20:59]
Drew Smith
No, Austrian.
- [21:01]
George G. Morgan
I'm sorry. Thank you. Austrian. And it starts off the same. The German language has various terms for people working in waterborne shipping, I E seaman, S E E M A N N seafarer, S E E F A R H R E R Schiffer, S C H I F F E R matros M a T R O S E and likely even more regional ones. I suspect that you may not have gotten the nuance right on the translation. Vienna, the capital of Austria, lies on one of the biggest rivers in Europe, the Danao, going all the way down to the Black Sea and passing various other trade major trade hubs in multiple countries. And the other in the other direction goes toward Alm in Germany. Here in Europe, some people live on their ships for years. I suspect the word of the original record may have been matros, which would apply to river shipping and ocean shipping, and that the elusive father may have been one of those people. What's more, some of the shipping people were sort of dynasties, by no means all of them. They intermarried. And I have stood up a list of ship merchants and river skippers published on Ancestry, but but not for Austria, for a river in one of my own research areas. And it's amazing how these these all intertwine. Just my two cents. And that's signed Karen.
- [23:02]
Drew Smith
Well, thanks, Karen.
- [23:03]
George G. Morgan
Thank you for that clarification. That's great.
- [23:06]
Drew Smith
All right, let's another question that relates to European genealogy. And this is from Lisa in Stuart, Florida. Lisa wrote us about a month ago, but we're just able to get to it now. And, and I should add I'm going to add her PS Before I get into the bulk of it, because I think this is cool. Lisa's told us that the Blake Library in Stuart, Florida, is now a familysearch affiliated library. So that means that if you need to want to access those special records that are not available from home on FamilySearch. You can go to the Blake Library in Stuart, Florida and get to the records on their computers because they're an affiliate. Okay, well, let's get to Lisa's actual the bulk of what she wrote about Good morning, Drew and George. I just listened to your podcast in the gym this morning. Gaining genealogical knowledge and getting fit at the same time. A perfect combination. I wanted to say how impressed I was with Kathleen from New Hampshire and how she is researching her mother's paternal grandfather, Georg Sokop S O K O P who was from the Czech Republic as I recall. I believe she said she has been building trees for some of her DNA matches to see if she can find the commonality and that some of these trees are in central Eastern Europe. Her work has inspired me to try to find the maternal grandmother of an English friend of mine who discovered that her mother was adopted when she had her DNA tested. My friend's mother was a difficult woman who was somewhat mysterious about her upbringing in Germany before and during World War II. After her mother's death, my friend Candy wanted to see if she could find some cousins to connect with. That's when we realized she had no matches with the German grandparents my friend knew. Nearly 30% of Candy's ethnicity turned out to be Jewish, as her father was British and had no known Jewish heritage. We realized that Candy's mother must have had one parent who was Jewish. This helped us to understand one possible reason why Candy's mother was so mysterious, if she even knew about her ethnicity. She was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school. Her adopted mother was very strict, possibly to keep her daughter's ethnicity a secret and to protect her from the Nazis. In this journey, we happily found Candy's maternal grandfather's family through DNA matches. He was Jewish and had a son later in life who now lives in Australia. That son is Candy's half uncle. Candy has masses of Jewish matches but very little non Jewish matches on her mother's side that we presume would be related to her biological grandmother. However, there are a few that have turned up, mainly with low centimorgans and some sketchy trees. I don't speak German or Polish, but I do have worldwide ancestry and myheritage accounts. I will try to build a few of these trees and write to the matches to see if we have any luck in possibly identifying at least a family connection and I'll keep you posted. Sincerely, Lisa Lisa, thank you. Yes, we do want to hear how that turned out. I know sometimes it can take days, weeks, months, years to hear back from some of your DNA matches. If you hear back from them. I have some that I will mention at the end of the episode that I hadn't heard back from in a while, so I'll get into that. But yes, Lisa, that's great research, great news. Again, figuring out some of these mysteries. Sometimes DNA can really help you with that.
- [26:42]
George G. Morgan
It's true. George Georgia. Yeah, George Georgia. And I have an email here from from Ray about Georgia records. And Ray says, first and most importantly, I really enjoy the podcast. Secondly, I've been working for years to break through a brick wall on my James line. Ancestry records have my third great grandfather James James conflated with another James James that lived close to the same time. They proposed John James 1785-1870, 76 as his father. But John would have only been 10 years old and his wife would have been single digits when my James James, 1795-1860 was born. The two James James men must have also been related because there are a lot of DNA links. That being said, a lot of people were knitting from the same skein of yarn in middle of South Georgia in the 1800s. On my line, James's son carried the middle name Holiday, which is interesting and could be his mother's family name as there are holidays living in the same area. So far, review of my holiday matches has not yielded any meaningful records. No marriage records are available from the time because the courthouse for that county, of course, burned at some point and all the local records were lost and adjacent counties have not been successful. Any ideas for other avenues?
- [28:41]
Drew Smith
Well, no. I mean, you know, the structure. Well, the thing when you have two men with the same name and they kind of get confused is that's one of the things we often use the fan club for, because one of the, you know, we as genealogists, the way we identify people primarily is through their names. And that's the thing. But because that's. Well, normally those are unique identifiers, but of course they're not always unique identifiers, as you've learned by having two men with the same name. But one thing that still kind of keeps people unique is their fan club. The people they're surrounded by, their, their families, their associates, whether it's friends or other people that they work with, buy things from, sell things to, you know, serve in the same military units, whatever, and of course, their neighbors. So one of the things you may certainly want to do for these men to the degree you can do it is look to identify the fan clubs for each of them. Try to find all the people that you have records for that you know are yours, your James James or maybe the other James James, and figure out who they associate with who, what distant what family members, what associates, what neighbors. And that will help you first of all distinguish the two. The other thing that fan clubs do for you, you've already mentioned Holiday maybe being a mother's name, is that it? The fan club can also help you get back to earlier generations because some of these family members or people that they interact with are actually relatives that you may not realize until you start to research who they are. And so that may get you back to an earlier generation and teach you a few more things. George?
- [30:33]
George G. Morgan
Yeah, I've got a couple of ideas here. First of all, see if you can locate probate records that might include a will that lists other family members, a spouse, children, sons and daughters in law and those and that can help you differentiate between one and another. And if there was property involved. I also urge you to go into property records. There are in various counties you're going to find land and property records, including a grantor index and a grantee index. The grantor index is an index to all of the property records on file, the transactions on file by the name of the person who gave or left or bequeathed property to someone else. And the grantee index is the opposite way. It's the people who receive property, whether they purchased it or inherited it or it was gifted to them. They're going to find that the grantee index will list the names, the name of the person that it came from. So you may be able to establish family links that way. And especially if you find in a probate record that property is being left, that's a sure sign. Go looking for, for land and property records. Tax records are not necessarily going to give you so much, but look for those things. You might also look in the land and property records for dower records where the husband has has made arrangements for his wife to receive property and live on it for the remainder of her life or until she remarries. So that can help you as well.
- [32:52]
Drew Smith
By the way, George and I discovered some years ago that in his files he had a relative who had married a woman whose surname was Hazel and whose father was Darling Hazel. We liked the name and I thought the name sounded familiar. And I looked at my files and found that one of my relatives had married a darling Hazel. And we're talking roughly the same genealogy Area, the place, geographic area. And the thing was, but they weren't the same darling Hazel, even though they had the same name. You would think, oh, that's an unusual name. No two people have that one. I mean James James is kind of an interesting situation. But the it turned out we were able to distinguish them because again, they weren't the same age by about 10 years at least we were able to determine that they were first cousins, they had the same grandfather and grandmother and their grandfather was named Darling Hazel. And so they were both named for their grandfather. And yeah, and so that was where as I said it turned into they were related to each other, the two darling Hazels. But yeah, you might want to work on that and don't neglect even researching the wrong James James a little bit particularly to get back and come back down from his ancestors to see if you link back up to your James James. But again, yeah, it's not much fun when you got a couple of people even with an odd name like that that are. You have to distinguish. George.
- [34:36]
George G. Morgan
One of my, one of my key ancestors that I've researched extensively is Greenberry Holder. And of course I've mentioned him on the, the podcast many times. And you think, oh, that's a pretty unique name. Wrong. He actually, his father had a brother Greenberry Holder, and so, and so my great grandfather was named for him, but there also was another Greenberry Holder who is a descendant of, of my great grandfather's grandfather and that, that Greenberry Holder ended up in Alabama, whereas mine was in Georgia. So yes, I've made some, some interesting turns and, and journeys researching the quote unquote wrong Greenberry Holder. But as you said, Drew, it's a question of, of doing your research, seeing if you can go back what, what I kind of call sidestep genealogy, where you go back a generation and see what you find there in the way of the family unit and then come down those lines and see if you have similarities, same names, that sort of thing.
- [36:03]
Drew Smith
Right.
- [36:04]
George G. Morgan
It can be very revealing.
- [36:06]
Drew Smith
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So George and I, at the time of recording this, two weeks from now, we will be in Columbia, South Carolina.
- [36:17]
George G. Morgan
Yeah.
- [36:17]
Drew Smith
For the annual conference of the South Carolina Genealogical Society. It's held at the state archives on the north, north side of Columbia. It's a two day conference Friday and Saturday. The keynote speaker is Blaine Bettinger, who many of you know from DNA expertise. And so there'll be a number of speakers, some of whom are who live in South Carolina, of course, Blaine and I don't, but I grew up, I grew up there and we're really looking forward to this partially because it then leads into a nice trip app right after George and I'll be visiting my hometown again of Newberry. We were just there for my 50th high school reunion, but we wanted to spend more time. We didn't get the chance to spend very much time there. So this time we're going to spend days so we can visit with family. And don't worry though people, our cats are taken care of. We have a cat sitter, so don't worry.
- [37:12]
George G. Morgan
But I love Newberry. Newberry is so great. And what was, what was very interesting is that the first time that I traveled up with with Drew to Newberry to meet family and, and make some new friends, I got back and I discovered, whoops, I have direct ancestors who lived in Newberry County. And so immediately I started researching those. Yeah.
- [37:49]
Drew Smith
So yeah, by the way, just to mention a few names here, George, and then I'll let you get back to your what you're doing. So we. Greenberry Holder's wife was Ansible Penelope Swords and Ansible Swords ancestors are originally came into Georgia from upstate South Carolina mostly up in the Pendleton district, which is up near Clemson where I went to university.
- [38:12]
George G. Morgan
And what George, the Antebel was was born actually, actually in Alabama.
- [38:23]
Drew Smith
Right. But her parents were from South Carolina and we learned that from the census records that both. That. Yeah, both her and her sister it showed that her, their parents were born in South Carolina even though they were born in Alabama.
- [38:37]
George G. Morgan
And the grand. The grandfather.
- [38:40]
Drew Smith
Yeah. So the Swords family intermarried with a number obviously intermarried with a number of families up in the Pendleton district and that includes modern day Anderson, South Carolina in that area, but which is not just a little bit north of the Edgefield district and also where Newberry district is or was the counties sometimes were called districts back in the 1700s, certain time periods. And that includes the Mitchell family and includes the Satterwhite family. And I went to, I went to school, elementary school and so forth with Satterwhites. So again, that name is fairly common in Newberry. Well, anyway, the, the point is, yes, George is going to take advantage of the time both in Columbia, the state archives and in Newberry at the county courthouse. Right, George?
- [39:33]
George G. Morgan
Yep. Yeah. So in preparation, in preparation for this great trip now, you know, I'm not going to necessarily sit through all of the lectures at the two day conference, but while I'm at the state archives and since I do have Ancestry in there. I'm going to go through the process of identifying people with whom I want to research and then I'll determine research goals for, and record types for each one of those. And then. And so in preparation for that, I've started out in Roots Magic 10 and I just printed a report called who was There. And this report, this is really interesting, you can specify the location. And so I specified not just Newberry County, South Carolina. I did South Carolina itself. And you can specify a year range. A year individually or a range, which I did. And so I, I did that and I generated a report and this is a PDF file and it's actually pretty amazing that I, I ended up with, with this amazing report. The first time I ran it I, I had extended the names and ex and time period and I had a 72 page report. I ran it again and, and took it I think to, to 1870 and this time it was only 60 pages. But what I have done is I have printed off those 60 pages now for my preparation work. Obviously it's like I can't possibly do that by the research in the time that we have allotted there. So what I'm, what I'm doing is I'm going through this report and I will highlight the names of the individual and, and the record types and figure out what people I really want to focus on researching. Then the next step. And I've already started this is going to the Newberry County, South Carolina Courthouse website to see what they have digitized online. And so far that hasn't been quite all that successful. But as I said, I'm just getting started here. I've got a week and a half to do this and But I've also been to the South Carolina State Archives website and I've gone into some of their digitized collections and I'm already thrilled that one of my great, great great grandfathers, John Swords, who fought in the Revolutionary War and died in 1834, I found a transcribed copy of his will and that, that lists his wife's name, it lists children and what they were being given and sons in law as well. So that was pretty neat. The other thing that I, I knew is that for his service in the Revolutionary War, John Swords was paid in bounty land. And so, and I knew that was in the 96 district. And so I went online there at the state archives website and I did a little research and by God I found a plat map for South Carolina for that area. And there actually is a, is a plat map and Description From August of 1789, when he was, he was given his bounty. Land bounding land wasn't necessarily paid right after, right after the, the conflict, but it was a, it was a way of compensating soldiers for their time and their service. So John Swords received that. Now, other places I've gone, in addition to that, I found a military pension file for him, federal military pension file. And I found all sorts of interesting things in that, including his wife filing for an extension after he died. And she had to provide proof of her marriage. She didn't have a marriage certificate or marriage license. So what she did is she went into the family Bible and she tore out the page in the center that has marriages on it. And she submitted that as proof because she had someone had entered her marriage to John Swords. And so she tore that out and she sent that in with her application for continuation of that pension for the widow. And that's been digitized. It's at the National Archives. It's just National Archives Personnel Records Center. And, you know, it's, it's just an amazing thing. But I am excited as can be to be going back to the South Carolina State Archive and this, this report I have is going to give me a great way to identify my, my targets for research and the types of records I'm looking for.
- [46:06]
Drew Smith
Yep.
- [46:08]
George G. Morgan
Drew, unfortunately, you're just going to be, you're just going to be lecturing.
- [46:12]
Drew Smith
Well, a few, not too many. Okay. Another thing that's been keeping me busy in the last week or two, which has been the timing has been interesting. Actually, later today, I'm actually speaking for the, the DNA Special Interest Group for the Southern California Genealogical Society. This was planned many, many, many months ago. So we had no idea that this was going to happen. But some of you know that Ancestry announced some updates to its products, including. And I want to talk about that for just a minute. And you may know, for example, that there's a. If you take a DNA test, but you do not have a subscription to an Ancestry the Ancestry product. So you don't get everything with your DNA unless you do an Ancestry DNA plus type subscription. So it's not as expensive as having a subscription to the records, but it gives you access to some things that you would otherwise not see with your DNA. Now, that's generally true. However, there's a whole nother thing that Ancestry has released, which are called the Pro Tools. And the Ancestry Pro Tools are mostly about your trees. They give you various features to work with your trees on Ancestry. So, so Again, that's an extra cost product. But one of the things that they put into the Pro tools had to do with the shared matches. And this is where things got really, really interesting. One of the things that we like in doing DNA matches is when we match, say you match two different people and you think that those two different people that you match are related to each other, but you have no way of knowing just off the bat, unless they've got nice trees, which often they don't, how they're related to each other, which, by the way, sometimes you need to know to figure out how they're related to you. And so that was the thing, was that now the Shared matches program or the product that Ancestry offers through its Pro tools, let's use it used to be in. Yeah, it's cool. It's just really cool. So I had a bunch of mystery matches and some of these relate to someone I matched back in 2017 who never responded to any messages. Still hasn't. So I have no idea who they are. I messaged them about once every year or so. And then I, I match some other people about a year later and I figured out how they were related. It turned out they were descended from my great uncle, who apparently had a child out of wedlock. Even though my great uncle was married at the time and having kids with his wife, my great uncle also had a child with someone else and they're descended from that person. And then because this mystery person that never responded to me, I did some matching, I did some shared matches and figured out she's related to that group of people, which means she's probably. That's how she's related to me is through a descendant of my great uncle through that. So that solved some mysteries. And I have other clusters of people that I don't know how they're related to me. They don't have trees, and yet they're clearly related to each other. And this is also just really. It's a game changer. It really has changed the way that I look at my Ancestry DNA matches. So if you haven't played with that, you may want to get the Pro Tools and so you could play around with this stuff. This stuff's constantly changing. George, any final thoughts here?
- [50:14]
George G. Morgan
No, I'm just. Since we're on a family subscription here, it's asking me to upgrade to Pro Tools and I don't know if I can.
- [50:24]
Drew Smith
Yeah, I don't. Okay, well, we'll look, we'll talk about that. All right. Well, anyway, there's lots keeping us busy, as you can kind of tell. George and I have been busy over a number over the last month. So thank you for your patience. We are thrilled to have this episode out. You'll probably not hear from us again until after the South Carolina trip, in which case we'll let you know how everything went and I'm sure it'll be great. And but don't forget to email us now. Some of you, by the way, and that's perfectly fine. Some of you notify us, I think through the the podcast page on Facebook and that's fine too. But again, if you like, we like it when you send us email. Send it to genealogyguysmail.com and we look forward to hearing from you because it's your questions, it's your feedback, it's your tips, it's your techniques, it's your ideas for resources, something you've heard from somebody else having an issue. And we love to hear from you as to what you're doing and George and I will try our best to give you an answer. But sometimes our listeners are better at giving answers, you know, things we don't know. So that's fine.
- [51:33]
George G. Morgan
So we, we love, we love to hear these, these follow ups we do from, from listeners to share with the original question posers. That's great.
- [51:47]
Drew Smith
So until our next episode, enjoy your research, have lots of fun and we'll be with you again as soon as we can. Take care, everybody. Bye bye.
- [51:57]
George G. Morgan
Happy hunting, everyone. Take care.