Sunday, May 19, 2013

Checking In


Long time, no write.  Thank you to readers and followers who have stuck with me during an online absence that has lasted longer than I thought - my last post was in 2012!

I’m still doing genealogy (just not as much) and still following other blogs.

My research:  Still plugging away on the last family in my “all descendants” research for all of my known great-great grandparents.  Still entering information, one person at a time, in my family trees on Ancestry.  This approach has turned up some interesting information that I hope to write about eventually.  Doing a little bit of transcribing of documents from my 2010 Greenville research trip and hope to write about that as well. Still trying to tabulate and analyze my DNA results from FamilyTree DNA, 23andMe, and Ancestry DNA (see whine #1, below).  

I attended the Fairfax Genealogical Society’s Spring Conference and had a great time.  Continued my “winning streak”:  this time a free book from Arphax Publishers.  Judy Russell, and Dear Myrtle and daughter Carrie were some of the speakers - wonderful presentations!

We are starting to plan a fall vacation in Greenville, South Carolina.  I will do some more research in Greenville and also plan to go over to Anderson County for research.  Not that I have absorbed all of the research I did last time, but I just needed an excuse to get back to the Greenville area.  I also plan to attend the NGS conference in Richmond in 2014.

Some disappointments:

1.  “Tweaking” done by the various DNA companies that results in ... results dropping out, as in, “Oh, this person matched me on the Smith line, but now the Company (Ancestry/FamilyTreeDNA/23andMe) has rejiggered the results and they have disappeared from my list of matches.”  Perhaps the intention really is to fine-tune the matches, but it is pretty difficult to map, calculate, and do statistical studies/spreadsheet comparisons, etc. when the results keep changing.

2.  The disappearance of Google Reader.   I’m sure that plenty of whining has been done on this subject, so I won’t add anything.  Thanks to all who forged ahead, found alternatives and wrote about them.  I have already migrated to Feedly.

I have noticed that I am not alone in my “involuntary” exile, and hope that my fellow bloggers who have also been smacked up side the head by the demands of real life will also be able to return to the blogosphere.