Year: 2018

Not a Genealogy Cage Match: Find My Past First Impressions

Posted on by Kathleen

Being Realistic

In order to give Find My Past an honest look, I will be using mostly English ancestors to test it out. I’m going to give the American records a shot, but then I will move on to what I know they excel at… British Records!

Exhibit A: Grandma Gene (Emogene Taylor-Mays-Utter)

Well… I guess I’m just going to eat crow in the very first example. I went into this entry thinking I was going to jump straight to the British records. 

Instead, the hints feature in both my software and their online family tree found the birth and death index entries for my Grandma.  Through a basic search on the website I was also able to find the 1930 and 1940 Census images for her family. 

Here is my favorite!

Her marriage records! Images! Okay, so I had found these through browsing digital folders on FamilySearch. They weren’t indexed at the time. Obviously Find My Past must have an arrangement with FamilySearch to provide indexes to these collections. I’m excited to see which records I haven’t found that are living in Find My Past’s searches. This is a huge deal since a majority of my Mom’s side of the family is from Ohio and Kentucky. Meaning this could save me tons of time in searching manually through a lot of records.

Exhibit B: My Biggest Pet Peeve

I’m not going to be stuck on this for too long but this was really annoying to me. With such large families, having to scroll and scroll and scroll to navigate through the tree was bad. Luckily for me, they do have a pedigree view and a family group view. 

Of the two, the family group view would be the most useful to me. Pedigree is nice to jump back generations, but for those of us who research collateral lines, something to navigate easily through those is vital.

This view was so much better for me! Bigger families do require the dreaded scrolling. I know it’s tough, but I think all the family tree companies could really do with trying to make large families easier to navigate. The best one I’ve seen yet is from Legacy Family Tree software. 

Exhibit C: British Records (William Malthouse)

 

Find My Past has all the hallmarks of research, the UK Census (1841-1911), England & Wales Birth Index (1837-2006), England & Wales Death Index (1837-2007), and England & Wales Marriage Index (1837-2005).  One of my favorite things about Find My Past is that they have a lot of church records for England. There are certain counties that are exclusive to Ancestry and certain ones that are exclusive to Find My Past. It helps to know which ones you need and where to find them.

The Search Function

 

The Search function at Find My Past is definitely one of the better ones. I don’t find myself needing it often, but the include name variants options is very good!

A lot of the records I end up finding is because of using parents names as my main search parameter. Another feature I love is being able to restrict to certain databases. Most genealogy websites do have this feature, but its an important one to have so it’s helpful to mention that it is there.

This is the end for now

I’m not going to drag this out too much more. In conclusion I was surprised that I was able to find so many records for my American ancestors in Kentucky and Ohio. It’s one of those things that’s usually got me running back to Ancestry all the time. This is quite a big deal for me! 

I’ve let this entry wait too long so I’m just going to go ahead and publish it now so I can move forward!

Not a Genealogy Cage Match: MyHeritage First Impressions

Posted on by Kathleen

I just can’t let the cage match idea go! Once something is in my brain, it’s there fermenting for awhile. So I apologize for the terminology. This is definitely not a cage match. This is just me, giving things a chance for once. 

To get a good first impression, I didn’t want to base it solely on working my way up the tree. That means I am using my old file of reasonably documented people to do these tests. I feel like to truly get to know a website, you have to use it a lot and with a variety of different challenges. Otherwise you’ll never really know until way down the line when you actually start finding those things.

First Impression: MyHeritage

To be fair I will say when I first started using MyHeritage a few weeks back, I hated the family tree section. The Family View was really hard to navigate. Note: This was before Pedigree View was added. My screenshots were taken this week and not when I first tried using MyHeritage.

 

As you can see from my screenshot, the wideness of the tree made it really hard to navigate. Especially if I was working on someone not in my direct tree. Since a lot of my families have 5 or more children, I go on genealogy tangents often and this view was just too hard to use. This was a big disadvantage over Ancestry’s easy to navigate Family Tree.

Pedigree View

 

Then MyHeritage added a read only Pedigree view. I was immediately upset that I wasn’t in the first wave of the roll-out. Haha! Then I got it. I won’t lie. After about a week of trying to get used to pedigree view, I went back to trying to use the Family View. It was easier to navigate in Pedigree, but since I was still so new to the site, I just couldn’t figure out what I was doing. I kept trying though, because pedigree view is essential for me and my brain.

Pedigree view is now fully live with edit mode. No more having to go through a thousand clicks (Exaggeration obviously) just to feel like I was getting things done. To be honest though, I don’t think I even use the edit mode now that I am working on merging records hints and smart matches. I imagine I will use this feature much more when I start adding new people to the site. Right now I have a bare minimum just for DNA matches.

The Search is AMAZING

Sorry, not sorry for the use of caps. I can’t help it. I am finding things in records so much easier right now. It makes me so annoyed that I can’t really use them yet because of my Genealogy Do-Over. I am still noting them in my old file but I am trying not to get too involved and it’s killing me!

Exhibit 1: William Redford

I have been searching for William Redford after 1910 for ages. I know he must have passed away. However, without a New Jersey death index available online, I was stuck waiting to save up for a trip to the archives and then searching all years after 1910. 

I have searched all other kinds of records looking for a hint. The best record I have found is the city directories in absence of a death index. William Redford, not being a direct ancestor, might have been relegated to the bottom of a list somewhere without this one search at MyHeritage.

 

A newspaper article! I don’t even remember the last time I found something in a newspaper search on Ancestry! I assumed they have moved most of that business to Newspapers [dot] com which I don’t have a subscription to right now. 

This could just be a lucky case though, so let’s try another example.

Exhibit 2: California Indexes

Ancestry has the California Birth Index, 1905-1995. My Heritage has California Births, 1905-1995. 

They are both just indexes, no images in this set. Ancestry’s collection has 24,592,168 names and MyHeritage has 49,185,281 names in theirs. 

Wait… what? 

That’s right, they have over twice as many names in their index. It’s no wonder I started finding people and quickly once I started looking.

Truth moment: Once I actually knew the name of someone and searched them specifically I was able to find them in the Ancestry database as well. I’m not going to spend a lot of time searching for one name that is only in one database. That’s just a waste of energy. The point being that I found it quicker and easier in one afternoon on MyHeritage than I have in my 15 years as a paying Ancestry customer.

My Favorite Part. Not kidding here.

 

Excuse me if I just geek out right here. This is my favorite part of MyHeritage right now. I have been going through my tree, re-doing everybody in it. Kicking people out and putting different ones in. (Technically not yet, but I’m ready to if the need arises.) This search result page is everything I need in life right now. 

It allows me to switch between census records and birth records with one click. I don’t lose my spot. You have all the collections right there in the sidebar. Other sites if you aren’t in the top collections, you end up having the collection be on a summary page and usually it involves a million clicks (exaggeration). MyHeritage also has the summary page, but they also allow you to select from the sidebar. Before you ask, yes I would rather scroll for the rest of my life than click around forever. It’s just who I am. 

This just feels more efficient to me. I can’t explain it, it feels like their computer geniuses have gone through the site, gathered a bunch of information and handed it to me in an organized notebook that I can just keep open and browse through at my leisure.

Note: Once you click on a record, it does change pages, but those are easily opened to a new tab. 

Part B: Record Detective

 

Once I clicked on the 1910 census record for William it brought me to a separate page for the census. It gives the transcribed information for my guy, source information, a image view of the image with a full screen option, a transcription of the household breakdown and then the Record Detective.

Mr. Record Detective (screenshot above) has some recommended records for me. This feature is comparable to suggested records over at Ancestry. 

The ones for this specific record actually all point to head of household Herbert Redford, my direct ancestor and William’s brother. To be fair though, they were very close in age and William lived with Herbert for most of his life.

Conclusion for the First Impression

I would definitely say there is a learning curve. Once you browse around the site and play with it a bit, it starts feeling a lot more comfortable. I really do feel like the search works better overall than any other site I’ve been using. Not only better, but it’s faster as well. 

I haven’t delved into things like citations or records matches for this entry. This is just my initial impression using a few examples. I will give Find My Past it’s own entry next week. 

Site May be Inaccessible

Posted on by Kathleen
www_slon_pics / Pixabay
Alright folks here’s the deal. Over the last year, I’ve been getting automatically generated emails from my web host company that I’m exceeding my memory. I’ve optimized all my databases regularly, I’ve set up caching on the blog. I’ve done all the things they say to do except move from a shared hosting plan to a virtual private server. This is most likely why I’ve been getting the random 404 error messages. It’s why I keep breaking the website when I try to update and it errors out. I think it’s just time. I’m ready to go and move servers. I’m just not sure if the site will go down or for how long. My hosting was due to renew next week anyway, so this is a good time to try something new! In a perfect world this would be a great time for spring cleaning amongst my domains. Now isn’t the time for that though since my old hosting plan is due to run out. I’m hoping it all can be finished before renewal. I hope to see everyone on the other side of this switch. Hopefully it’s quick and painless!

Breaking the Habit

Posted on by Kathleen

Wait a minute, what kind of habit are we talking about here?

Hold your horses, nothing crazy is going on here. I’m talking about my Ancestry.com habit. Don’t worry this is not an Ancestry bashing post. This isn’t even a post about how disappointed I am in Ancestry. While there are some problems with the website, as a website owner, I’m sympathetic to issues that pop up.

So why are you breaking your Ancestry habit then?

To be upfront, I fully intend to imbibe in my favorite genealogy website later. That’s right I said favorite. It’s my first genealogy love, it’s the one that I learned on. It however… expired on me. I didn’t have the subscription saved up to pay up front for it, so I decided to break my habit. I was not going to go into credit card debt just to keep Ancestry. Aren’t you proud? I’m trying being all grown up and stuff. Ha!

ancestry screenshot

Why are you posting about your Ancestry subscription?

Well, this technically isn’t about Ancestry. You see when I switched from Family Tree Maker to Legacy, I did that because I felt I had no other choice. I made myself only use Legacy. Once I figured it out and got comfortable with it, I don’t even miss the other software. No more switching back and forth. There is just one software for me.

I realized this week that I haven’t been using other sites that I’ve paid for because I’m so comfortable with Ancestry. I’m used to it. It’s easy to just jump on and get to work. I could be missing some great things about other websites and I don’t even know it.

Why pay for the other sites if you love Ancestry so much?

Touché.

Aren’t you all so happy I laugh at myself and talk to myself in these blogs? Anyway, I had gotten a subscription to Find My Past last year at a discounted rate. I was in Florida helping with my newborn niece and nephew. I was in baby zone and I had no time to spend money. There I was on a rare day in Florida sunshine and my brother, sister in law and the babies were out. Then I saw IT. Not the horror movie, but a 50% off sale on one year of Find My Past. I hadn’t spent money in so long and it was so quiet! I grabbed it. I used it for some English research and then forgot about it.

findmypast screen shot

You forgot about it?

That’s right, don’t judge me. I said there were BABIES! Anyway, it wasn’t until I got a notice that my Find My Past subscription was successfully renewed that I remembered. Good job cancelling that auto renew feature! I’m so on top of things sometimes.

So that’s how I got a whole year of Find My Past that I didn’t really mean to get. I’m an adult though and it’s my blunder and I’m going to make the best of it. I mean I paid for it already, I might as well give it a fair chance.

This is where MyHeritage also comes in

Don’t tell us that you forgot about MyHeritage too. Oh no, I did that one a month before Find My Past auto renewed. I again went for a great deal and this one is supposed to be price locked as long as I don’t cancel. That means I now have a year of My Heritage and Find My Past and I’m giving myself that year to get comfortable with them or get so frustrated with them that I make the informed decision to be done with them.

myheritage screen shot

Unfortunately for you guys, you’ll probably be hearing about it. I have no idea how this is going to go. Who doesn’t love a good cage match between two genealogy websites?

Cage Match… Really?

Okay so I’m not a cage match person and I’m not really pitting one against the other. I’m just seeing what each has to offer. Between their databases and their search algorithms, and the user interface. I’m not talking about prettiness. I’m talking about ease of use. How hard is it to actually find things?

How is this going to work?

The great thing is that when I started my Genealogy Do-Over, I didn’t have access to MyHeritage and I didn’t have access to Find my Past until last year when the babies were born.

This means that I’m going to go back through my list on these websites and see if there are any additional records that I can find that weren’t on Ancestry. In my mind most of the basics should all be the same but something should stand out on each site quickly. I can’t wait to see what happens. 

Has anyone out there done the same? Do you have a favorite site of the big ones? (Ancestry, MyHeritage, Find My Past, FamilySearch) Am I missing any?

GDPR and this Website

Posted on by Kathleen
mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

What is the GDPR?

This is a complicated question to just sum up in a little paragraph. Basically the General Data Protection Regulation is a new set of regulations for European Union countries.

You aren’t in the European Union though.

That is right, I am not. However, the internet knows no boundaries and I do have visitors from those countries. Plus, I don’t find it out of line to make sure that everything having to do with your data and my data is on the up and up.

Why are you just talking about this now?

Well, there are a few reasons for that. One, I was trying to figure out what I needed to do to make things in compliance with the laws. As an American blogger who has no links to companies I didn’t think it would be too much.

The other reason was I was waiting until it was all done, so I could say this is what I did and now none of us have to worry!

There must have been an oops in the road, there is always an oops in the road with you.

Of course there was an oops in the road. That is the Moore family motto, “Oops, let’s try that again.” Most times that was immediately following us throwing instruction booklets to the side. “Who needs instructions?”

That was not the case this time. I was trying really hard to do everything right and on time. It just didn’t happen. First of all, I have a paying website gig. Even though it is my uncle, his website had to come first. Once I thought his was ready, I started on mine.

It wasn’t until I started mine that I realized that something is happening with my website. Whether it be my host was overloaded the past week and a half, or the internet itself was, I can’t say. I just know every time I tried to do something, it would error out.

Well, what is going on.

I still don’t know. This site still seems sluggish to me. It still errors out every so often when I try to click a page. The great news is, updating my software and plugins today did not trigger any more *your site has been deleted apocalypses*

Excuse me, what?

Sorry, that was my dramatic emotions coming out. There were times this week that both my websites broke and said that there was nothing there. All while trying to update plugins, post pages, anything really. That

Enough! You’ve rambled, where are we now?

Okay, I’ve made a spiffy new Privacy Policy page. A warning, the page does use most of the suggested language of WordPress right now because I wanted to have something on the site to protect us.

I also added a Cookie notice plugin. So coming to my website the first time should trigger one, hopefully? I don’t know because I clicked accept and now I don’t see it anymore. That’s how cookies work.

The only thing is my plugins. I know that they are an important part of this whole process. They are what is actually collecting data if any. So they need to be dealt with. I’m also thinking that once I deal with them, the sluggish website might take care of itself. So that’s what I will be doing this weekend. Hopefully getting the website back to how I love it.

Oy vey.

Yeah, I hear you. So… Long time no talk! How are you guys? Aren’t we all ready for genealogy ramblings again. I know I am and I have plenty to talk about!