Ancestry.com - love it or hate it

Ancestry.com can be a real pain, and it's cordially hated by a lot of people--including, occasionally, me.

However, it is occasionally worth the price of membership. It was Ancestry that helped me piece together the Meyer family--all 12 of them--by acquiring and publishing ships' passenger registries.

The most recent coup is in their new collection of Missouri records. So far I've found images of marriage licenses or certificates for 15 relatives, including some of the people I've done the most work on and spent a lot of time wondering about. One is as early as 1853. It's been a thrill to see these people's names written down--handwriting seems so much more personal than type, don't you think? And this is just the beginning.

Okay, it's not complete. Although the marriage record database says it's through 2002, I haven't found any marriages I'm looking for after about 1880.

Still. If asked, I'd suggest a subscription is probably worth it, at least for 3 or 4 or 6 months. Even one of the free trial subscriptions--they're easy enough to end. I've never had any trouble with calling and having one cancelled. The census material alone is invaluable, and you just never know what the heck you're going to find in the other databases. You have to be very cautious about accepting family tree information submitted by other members--extremely cautious--but they can give you a place to start, good clues, and sometimes some actual information, like a will or a story of some kind. I've even found pictures of Judge John Megown and his family--the Judge being my gg-grand-uncle and his bevy of 11 children my first cousins 3x removed. That was exciting, putting faces to names, esp. since I haven't many photos on that side of my family. The Megown family photo also includes his parents, of the Pennsylvania Megown and McCready clans, and the judge's wife is holding a painting of what I guess must be her father. (And my sincere heartfelt thanks to Ron Evans, who posted them.)

Thoughts on Software: My Heritage Family Tree Builder

I've been downloading free genealogy programs, looking for one I like. The one I use now is FamilyTree Maker v. 16, a commercial offshoot of the free Ancestry Family Tree, which was a GOOD program. FTM v. 16 is good, I like it--among other reason because it's an Ancestry.com program, so if you have a subscription it's easy to run searches. But it has failings, including not being able to print out a list of places. My tree has about 5300 names on it at the moment--what can I say, I get carried away and include a lot of side-branches!--and I can't always remember who's from where, which might be useful, if you find out one family has been in the same place as another, or, for instance, the *time* a family was in a certain place helps you link up historically (like the group of Musicks, Shacklefords, and Newsoms who relocated to Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century).

So I got Map My Family Tree, and what a disappointment that's been. I just haven't been able to get it to do anything I want it to do, and I'm pretty darn good with software, usually.

I also ordered Family Tree Maker 2008, which I have ranted about in a previous post. I was never able to get it to reocgnize that I was, indeed, hooked up to the Internet, in fact that I was online at that very moment. And the reviews I've read of it are almost 100% negative, so it may be just as well.

Okay. So I ran across a free download called My Heritage Family Tree Builder, which can be downloaded from www.myheritage.com. I found myheritage.com when I read somewhere that they have a face recognition program, which I hope to be able to write about sometime in the future. It was a smooth download and installation, no problems. As you begin to set up you have a choice of 17 languages to work in.

The basic page is, I think, kind of messy, or jr. high, or something, but that could be because I'm used to the no-frills AFT/FTM pages. Male and female entries are color-coded, and you can pick the colors you want to use, and there are a number of other options to dress the working page up or down.

It's very easy to load pictures, and you can indicate which picture you would like to have come up with each person's main entry. You can also link or "associate" pictures with "person," "fact of person," "virtual cemetery of person," "family," and "fact of family." Person and Family are fairly self-explanatory, and I suppose "fact of person" could be, for instance, a birthday, and "fact of family" could be a wedding. I think it may be helpful to link a photo to the individual as well as the individual's birth family and married-into family, but initially I found it difficult to locate the families, since they're listed by ID number rather than family name. I did finally figure out that you can sort alphabetically by husband's surname or wife's surname (I'm not at all shy about pushing buttons to see what will happen!), which helps.

Overall, I would say navigation is easy and fairly intuitive, though, because of all the frippery, moving from one person to another isn't quite as smooth and easy as on FTM, at least on my computer.

There is a research feature which I have yet to find very helpful, but it does include many more sites than just Ancestry. There is a Smart Match feature which is only useable if you put your tree on the MyHeritage site, so I can't report on how that works.

It has the usual complement of reports: Family Group Sheets, Ancestors, Descendants. My favorite is not so useful, but is more fun: the Relationship Report, which starts with the obvious ("Alexander Richard Brown is the father of John Hales Brown") and goes to the esoteric
("Robert Bransford is a cousin of the wife of a brother of a grandfather of the wife of John Hales Brown"). This is the kind of thing on which I could happily spend hours for no particular reason--just the enjoyment of seeing how the various puzzle pieces fit together. Also it's a kind of "small world" effect. John Hales Brown's Relationship Report was 93 pages long (no, I didn't print it out!), and while there were a few people who were not related to him, there were far more who were, though it wasn't spelled out ("Elizabeth Schaldtl is related to John Hales Brown [16 steps]").

There is a Timeline report which has potential. It doesn't include military service, but it does include births, deaths, and marriages, including dates and places, so you can track the movement a family.

Charts include the usual: Ancestor (vertical or horizontal), Descendant (vertical or horizontal), Fan, with lots of styles and options to make them as fun and fancy or sober and professional as you want.

There's a feature that will make you a book in pdf format which is kind of neat--it does all the indexing for you, and includes photos and sections for family trees, notes, and sources--but again, it left out military service, and there are some syntactical oddities (example: "In 1959 he was educated (1 year college)"). The book report feature can be upgraded to a paid version, The Complete Genealogical Reporter v. 2008.1 ($27.95, http://www.tcgr.bufton.org/tcgrpurc.htm). As is, it looks pretty impressive, and if you're more judicious about your notes than I am, it would make quite a nice book to give to family members.

All in all, for a free program, you get quite a lot (although still no place report). I don't know if I'll ever use it as my main working program, but it's certainly a flexible and good-looking option.

A different part of the swamp

Well, I'm in a real mess now, and this time I can't blame it on the Agees.

I've got a Lucy Herold married to a James Hardin in Randolph Co., MO. Problem is, I can't figure out whether she's married to James W., son of Colden Hardin and Margaret Jones., b. 1840, or James H., son of Benjamin Hardin and Sarah Hubbard, b. 1841. (Yes, Colden and Benjamin are brothers, sons of James Hardin and Sarah Williams.)

Plus, I have a Frederick John Brandt, who appears to be the son of Charles H. Brandt and Mary Feaker, b. 1868, and a Frederick W. Brandt, who seems to be the son of Herman Brandt and Christine Karff, also b. 1868. One of them--I think Frederick W.--married Nellie Musick, niece of my great-grandfather John Smith Musick II. There are a bunch of Brandts living in Chariton Co. in the last half of the 19th century, obviously related to judge from the naming patterns (2 Fredericks, 4 Charleses, 3 Williams).

I think I have them figured out, but it's going to take a while to untangle the James Hardins.

Kinda cool

My great-grandfather William Butler Ensor had a younger sister named Georgia. Georgia's first husband was William Ansel Boone, whose great-great-grandfather was Edward Boone, younger brother of the famous Kentucky pioneer Daniel Boone.

Okay, it's pretty tenuous, but I still think it's kind of cool.

Yikes

I keep running across suicides in my family. Sometimes not in the direct line, but brothers or sisters. I'm going to start keeping a list because I've got so many people in the database right now, I can't put my finger directly on the others when I stumble across one and think "Holy shi*t, there's another one!" And it's not exactly anything that you can get FTM to do a search on. And that's mostly after death certificates started being kept; who knows how many others there were before that?

Right now there are 6 I can think of right off--3 self-inflicted gunshot wounds and 3 hangings.

Kinda creepy.

*S*P*L*A*S*H*!

Into the Swamp!

Okay, so last night I was doing some backtracking on Hardins, trying to fill in some blanks, and while letting FTM v.16 do a search, who should pop up but--Ella M. AGEE of Chariton Co., MO, married to a Hardin.

Who, I asked, the heck is Ella M? So I ran a check and found she's the granddaughter of Powhattan Agee, and my 4th cousin 2x removed. She married Samuel Buckner Hardin.

So, having identified Ella, I set out to identify Samuel. Samuel turns out to be the son of Charles Buckner Hardin and Lunette Mosby.

Wait a minute, I said--Mosby. MosbyMosbyMosby. That's really familiar. Ran a check--and found that somewhere in the 1780s, Susannah Mosby married a Colonel Lipscomb. Their daughter Nancy Lipscomb was the second wife of Joseph B. Agee, a grandson of Matthieu ("The Immigrant") Agee, and is the 1st cousin 2x removed of Lunette Mosby Hardin.

Powhattan is the gg-grandson of Matthieu, through Joseph's older brother John.

I tried to sketch it out because it's a lot easier if you can look at the relationships, but the vertical lines disappeared when I published the post, darn it. My printer here isn't working, but I'll see if I can print the chart out, then scan it in as a photo, and insert it that way.

Future Chart Here

I'm not 100% positive on the Mosby dates, but census and death certificate verify the Hardins and Lunette, and the Agee line is pretty thoroughly researched. I haven't tracked Charles B. Hardin back yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be a descendant of Mark Hardin/Hardouin, who was, like Matthieu Agee, a French Huguenot immigrant. I don't *think* my Hardin line descends from Mark Hardin, but I'm still trying to learn if the Benjamin Hardin line is English and separate from the French Mark Hardin line.

The reason I keep up my subscription to Ancestry

They're arrogant and obnoxious, but they have stuff you just can't find anywhere else.

After my story about Charles Boston yesterday, I decided to just for the heck of it have Family Tree Maker do a search for him, and gosh darn golly if he didn't show up in the new Passport Application database!! With a picture, no less!!

In one swell foop, I discovered that yes, the older man pictured yesterday is indeed Charles Boston, and the woman in the picture with him (not included in the blog) was indeed his wife, Mary Scott, a native of Galveston, Texas. I discovered his middle name was Edgar, that he'd actually been born in 1871 (not 1872), and that he'd been living and working in Mexico between about 1909 and 1917 as an electrician for a British-owned mining company. In 1917 he was living in El Oro, Mexico.

I still don't know when or where he died, but I consider this brick wall to have been blown to smithereens, thanks to Ancestry. It drives me crazy, but--I'd never ever have found any of this out on my own.