2013 – Moore-Mays Genealogy

The Absentee Genealogist

Posted on 15-Dec-2013 by Kathleen

First and foremost, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season! No matter what you celebrate I hope you’re able to spend lots of quality time with your families and friends.

I certainly never expected to be absent this long from my blog. However, looking back I usually am during this time of year. My new computer is running just fine, only a few hiccups related to my old hard drives.

Here are the things I’ll be working on as a priority:

Cleaning out all my hard drives and condensing them down. Partially due to the issues I’m experiencing with one of my extra drives. I’ll be backuping them up to CD, flash drive and Dropbox. Lots of work, but it’s long overdue!
Re-syncing my Ancestry Member Tree and my FTM 2014 trees. I’ll be honest, I haven’t touched my family tree since getting the new computer. I even let my memberships lapse again, but this time I’m going to experiment with other methods of getting my data since I used my extra money to purchase a new computer. There are plenty of options out there and I need to focus on what information I already have anyway!
The website. There’s been a lot going on with my website for a few years that I’ve been ignoring. Including an over abundance of domain names and duplicate TNG installations. So I’ve got to do a clean out of not only my personal computer but my internet files also.

I think that’s enough for now! I’m hoping that cleaning out the mess from before and after the computer switch will get my head back in the game. Right now I’m having a hard time making any sense of my files, so anything I can do has to be progress.

Do you have troubles getting back into the swing of things after a break? Any big plans for the holiday? My house is finally decorated so it’s time to relax for us!

The Absentee Genealogist

Posted on 15-Dec-2013 by Kathleen

First and foremost, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season! No matter what you celebrate I hope you’re able to spend lots of quality time with your families and friends.

I certainly never expected to be absent this long from my blog. However, looking back I usually am during this time of year. My new computer is running just fine, only a few hiccups related to my old hard drives.

Here are the things I’ll be working on as a priority:

Cleaning out all my hard drives and condensing them down. Partially due to the issues I’m experiencing with one of my extra drives. I’ll be backuping them up to CD, flash drive and Dropbox. Lots of work, but it’s long overdue!
Re-syncing my Ancestry Member Tree and my FTM 2014 trees. I’ll be honest, I haven’t touched my family tree since getting the new computer. I even let my memberships lapse again, but this time I’m going to experiment with other methods of getting my data since I used my extra money to purchase a new computer. There are plenty of options out there and I need to focus on what information I already have anyway!
The website. There’s been a lot going on with my website for a few years that I’ve been ignoring. Including an over abundance of domain names and duplicate TNG installations. So I’ve got to do a clean out of not only my personal computer but my internet files also.

I think that’s enough for now! I’m hoping that cleaning out the mess from before and after the computer switch will get my head back in the game. Right now I’m having a hard time making any sense of my files, so anything I can do has to be progress.

Do you have troubles getting back into the swing of things after a break? Any big plans for the holiday? My house is finally decorated so it’s time to relax for us!

Happy Almost November!

Posted on 29-Oct-2013 by Kathleen

Wow guys! I sure didn’t expect to be down a whole month from the blog. I had told you about my ordering my new computer, and I was happily still working on my cleaned up files until about 2 weeks before the computer came. Then my old computer committed an unforgivable act. It corrupted my working file. Fortunately for me that was the day my computer was originally scheduled to be delivered. Unfortunately, the computer was delayed twice due to parts being out of stock. I was scared to use my old computer so I just put up my genealogy and worked on quilts. I was very lucky that I had just backed up, so I lost almost no progress. Phew!

Now I have the new computer and it’s wonderful! I didn’t realize how much my computer had slowed down and didn’t work until I had a working one again. The only problem is now I’m faced with the mess I left behind with the old computer. Good news being that I lost zero files.

The Tree Sync inssue — The Tree Sync issue

Being honest with myself tells me that no matter what happened, the second I bought my computer I was going to have to face this issue. No getting around it. After reading the FAQ on Ancestry and thinking out the situation I think I know how I’m going to proceed.

Bottom Line = New Computer means that my Online Tree and FTM file are no longer synced. There isn’t a way to connect the two again except for the options I’m about to outline.

Option 1: Upload FTM file to new Ancestry.com tree

I can upload my current file to Ancestry.com as a brand new tree. I have a few problems with this. #1 being that I’ve had a public tree and people have saved my pictures to their trees. I would like to keep these links between trees in tact. For the collaborators and myself. I like having the links, it’s partly why I went public. I like being able to easily share my images with my spread out extended family. A lot of times I can get the pictures to them faster by just putting them in the tree attached to who they belong to.

Option 2: Download from Ancestry.com to new FTM file.

Option 2 leaves all the links in tact and the only drawback being that all my pretty sources are in a bit of trouble. Still I don’t think it would take much to get these in order. I’m still unsure on how to get the media files back into my organization method without breaking the link. I’ll probably try that a few times with a test tree before fully committing to option 2. This one seems like the most likely way to get back to business for me.

No matter which option I choose, I’ve still been working on my family file cleanup. I’m actually almost done with it. This also throws a kink into Option 2, but I’m debating fixing the 50+ person difference with a merged file.

Oy, tons and tons of decisions to make. I don’t regret the new computer and I can’t wait to be fully operational again.

Moores in 1915, driving me crazy

Posted on 29-Sep-2013 by Kathleen

One of the things I’m doing is trying to find my Moore families in the New York state censuses. It’s not easy because of their commonly used names, but it’s fun looking anyway. I had found William H Moore Jr in 1915 at his usual address in Queens. In 1920, he lives at the same address, but in Brooklyn not Queens. I checked the map at the time and when I did, I completely understood!

The green line you see is the county line. It separates Kings County (Brooklyn) from Queens County. No doubt that border moved itself a bit before finally settling where it is now. Fun fact: That big green area is The Evergreens Cemetery where the Moore family is buried.

1915 census of New York State, Queens County, New York. Evergreen town, New York City AD 03, ED 36, p. 052 (penned), William H Moore; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

The above image shows where I had found William Jr‘s family in Queens in 1915. Just where I knew they would be, living at 47 Crosby Avenue.

This week I was working in Family Tree Maker. Making everything neat and tidy. Really just working on what I can without all my files, since I’m still waiting on the new computer. Imagine my surprise when a little green leaf showed me something a little surprising and informative!

1915 census of New York State, Kings County, New York. Brooklyn AD 22, ED 23, p. 053 (penned), Wm Henry Moore; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

William Jr‘s family was enumerated twice! This isn’t the first time this has happened to someone in my tree. It is the first time I’ve gotten extra information though, which is awesome. This one finally, finally, finally, suggests something I suspected, that the H in both William’s names stands for Henry. It also led me to William Jr‘s brother and business partner John. He is about 5 households up the street in this census.

I made an expensive decision!

Posted on 17-Sep-2013 by Kathleen

I bought a new computer. It’s been on my mind constantly for almost a year now. Lately my computer has been having more and more problems. I’ve fixed it again and again. Finally, I decided I just wanted to go ahead and get the new computer. It’s been over 7 years since I purchased a computer, so it’s going to be a huge upgrade for me!

I’m not going to go into the logistics of it but I made the right computer decision for me. It won’t be here for 2 weeks though. The wait just might kill me! In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do. For the first time ever, I’m going to have a new computer before the old one is beyond saving! This means I can get everything in order on my second hard drive before the new one gets here! Then I can just put my second hard drive into the new computer and have a seamless (hopefully) experience… After the programs I use are installed of course. Unfortunately and fortunately with my ongoing computer problems, I’m an old hat at that part. I’ve had to “re-install” Windows every 6 months for the last few years at least because of a reoccurring problem no tech expert could figure out.

While I’m preparing for that I’m also working with the new Family Tree Maker 2014! One thing I noticed about it right away is that it’s FASTER. Very noticeably faster on my current computer. I used to have to add someone, wait 5 minutes, add a birth date, wait 3 minutes, and so on. I was constantly compacting the file, and I did all the suggestions from Ancestry to make the program move faster, it just didn’t want to cooperate. The new version is lightning fast for me now and I’m making so much progress on my family file cleanup. Which is drawing to a close hopefully by the end of this year! I did have to pause a few lines because it was just out of control, but I’ll make it back to them at the end of the cleanup. I just wanted to feel like I was making forward progress again and those huge families make you feel lost in the 1800s! I’ve made it up to the Applegate line which is already almost done. Which is good because I feel like I’ve been doing this project for years, oh wait, I have! 🙂

I did make a few boo-boos when I was getting everything set up. Nothing completely permanent if I wouldn’t mind taking back some progress made because of the new lightning fast speed. Though the biggest damage was my synced tree on Ancestry.com. That’s currently a mess and I’m working on getting it cleaned up. Had I not already been entrenched in computer issues at the time, I might not have made those mistakes but I can’t take back hitting the unlink button now and they did warn me! So onward without looking backwards. That’s my new motto!

That’s the latest that’s happening here in Maryland. Just thought I’d give you an update on what’s been happening in my progress.