email – GenealogyAtHeart.com

Creepy October – A Website Connection

I had just returned from traveling to Croatia in April when I received the email below:

Hello,

My name is [ ]. I am a Family History consultant. For a few years I have been trying to find the parentage of Joseph Emory DeLong 1814, married to Caroline Patterson about 1844 in Portage, Livingston New York. Joseph had a son named John, before Caroline, with Meritheue.

Could I ask, have you heard of any of these names? Joseph was a Blacksmith, as were his sons with Caroline. John died in the civil war. his mother’s name is unusual but I have not found anything.

I came across this website and to a shot in the dark to enquire.

Definitely, this was a shot in the dark and I was initially confused. The email came to my website email address and not through one of my online tree messages. I hadn’t recalled writing about anyone named DeLong on my blog and the subject of the email, “I have a question about someone in Nunda.” was even more intriguing because I knew where Nunda was located, having written a report last year for a client. That wasn’t anywhere on my website, either. I thought maybe the client had given my email to the writer but no, the message said it was from my website.

I went to the website and looked for a blog I had written about the DeLong family. Nada. I had written about the Long family but they were from Indiana. The name nagged at me so I went back to the research report I had done in 2022 for the Nunda location but no DeLongs were there.

Where had I heard that name? I’m good at remembering surnames from years of researching and I knew something about this name but I couldn’t place what it was. I turned to my Ancestry.com personal tree and discovered that I did, indeed, have a DeLong in my tree. I hadn’t researched her, however, as she had married into my husband’s Harbaugh family. Here’s where it gets weird…

Born in Ohio, she relocated with her parents to the small rural Indiana county where I now live, as did her soon-to-be husband who I had extensively researched because he was part of a surname study I had done in the early 2000s. I didn’t recall he had lived in my current county. They married in the courthouse less than 5 minutes from where I live. Gave me the eebie jeebies!

How did this individual take such a wild shot at emailing me about a name that I didn’t have on my blog and I was able to connect the unique surname to someone in my personal family tree that just happened to live in the community I just moved to? The frequency of that surname in the U.S. is 1:13,755. I have no idea why the writer connected to me but her shot in the dark had a great aim.

Genealogy Tech Tip: Gmail

If you have a gmail account you may have been getting notices from Google over the past few months that their terms are changing June 1^st regarding storage. You may have also gotten information that they would like to “offer” you, for a fee, extra storage space for your photos and emails through Google One.

I have a Dropbox account that I use so I don’t need to be paying for another storage space. I haven’t successfully been able to transfer photos and emails from the gmail account I share with my husband to my desktop to then transfer to my Dropbox account, though I’ve followed online directions. When the emails are on my desktop they appear as an Outlook file but I’m unable to open them, even though I do have an Outlook account.

If you are having the same problem, here’s a temporary work around I discovered.

I like to keep my genealogy business separate from my personal research so my family related genealogy goes to my shared account and my second gmail account was set up to be business only. However, these are difficult times and I’m now combining all of my genealogy in one place. Since I so often blog about my personal research anyway, it only makes sense to keep all my genealogy related correspondence together.

By doing that, I’m freeing up valuable space in my shared gmail account without having to pay for extra storage.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a second email address if you don’t already have one. It’s simple – here’s the directions. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/56256?hl=en

2. Next, go to the email address where you have too many saved messages. In the search bar, type a term that will bring up messages that are similar. Here’s an example; I typed in genealogy Williams because I want every genealogy related item for the Williams surname in my gmail inbox.

1. If you created labels, as I have, then click to open one of them (they are visible on the left side:

When I click into the Genealogy label, I will use that search box which appears under the header as it does on the main inbox page. To keep emails from the same sender or for the same surname, type in a surname, such as Williams or a person’s email address. All of them will appear:

Now click the check box next to the down arrow and checkmarks will appear in all the emails listed below:

On the line where the checkmark next to the down arrow is, click the last icon, 3 dots:

The last option is Forward with Attachments. Click it and all of the check marked emails will be placed in the body of a new email. This can take a few minutes if you are sending many at one time.

In the subject, list the surname and/or who the emails are from. In my picture above, I’ve given an example as I typed Williams from Courtneys. That’s referring to all my Williams surname correspondence that I received from the Courtney family. Then, in the recipient box, type the email address where you will send the message. In my case, I’m sending it to my second gmail account.

It will arrive in your new email inbox as a unit. Just open the email and all the others are attached.

I created a label I called Personal-followed by the surname. This way, I can quickly find all emails sent to me over the years for a particular surname.

Someday, ahh hum, I will go through these as I’m sure there are some gems in there that will spark a new clue to an existing research problem but for now, they are safe and I’m not out any money.

We were at 99% used and by just removing my 12 pages of saved genealogy emails and a few pages of photos has allowed me to be at 90% capacity.

More Tech Safety Suggestion

Last week I blogged about my Evernote account being hacked. I reached out to some tech savvy colleagues for advice and wanted to share something with you that might be helpful.

An IT engineer recommended that I check my email accounts for hacks by visiting https://haveibeenpwned.com

That’s not a typo – it is pwned and not owned!

Enter your email address on the page and click pwned?

I have several email accounts and I entered all of them to check. I was surprised to find that one had been breached. It was a government site from last summer that I use for genealogy research. I changed the password on that site and just to be more secure, changed my email password.

While changing my password I had another “Aha!” moment; I never took the time to really check out my email Security settings. The devices I have connected to the email are shown but I had to pause at the Third-party apps with account access. My bad for not reading the small print and clicking “I accept” when visiting an organization’s website! I had given permission unknowingly to two retail organizations to have access to my calendar and contacts. It was quite easy to disable that! I’ve begun my holiday shopping so after I’m done, I plan on rechecking my email account to see if I somehow give permission for access that is unwarranted.

Just like covid, behind the scene activity to your tech tools can maliciously effect you! Take a few minutes to check it out and stay safe!

Save Those Emails!

At the recent genealogical seminar I attended I met up with a colleague I had not seen since the National Genealogical Society conference in May. We were catching up and he mentioned he was still trying to recover about 13,000 emails that had been lost. That’s a lot of emails! Here’s how it happened:

In our area Verizon used to be one of our internet service providers. In April, Frontier purchased Verizon’s customers. The transition was not seamless; there was much service disruption but it appeared that most of the problems had been corrected. Then, with no warning, my colleague woke up one morning a few weeks ago and discovered that he couldn’t access his Verizon email account. He contacted Frontier who told him they had nothing to do with it and he needed to call Verizon. Verizon told him he was no longer a customer so he no longer had access to his emails.

It’s always difficult changing addresses, whether it’s in the real world or virtually, but it is even more difficult when one is caught unexpectedly. He had received no warning that the account would be terminated. His contract with Verizon was for 2 years and everyone in our area had been informed that Frontier would honor and continue the Verizon contracts through their expiration. I don’t even know how breaching the contract can be legal since he’s still under contract but that’s a whole different issue!

The colleague quickly made a gmail account and then began the arduous task of updating his email address all over the internet. Been there, done that, not fun!

Although hubby and I had a Verizon email account we rarely used it and I don’t think I’ve checked it in the last few years. In fact, I had forwarded the account to our gmail account at least five years ago. I completely missed that the account disappeared.

The wasted time in having to update to the new account, though, wasn’t the most upsetting situation. The loss of all the saved emails was the most devastating. I can only imagine!

Back in the day, like most Americans, we had an AOL account. We continued to use the account well into the 2000’s even though our children loved to poke fun at us old fogies still sticking with AOL. I pointed out I was being a loyal customer. So much for loyalty! About 2010 our account got hacked. We changed passwords. It was hacked again. AOL sent us a rather IMHO nasty email that warned us that our account would be cancelled if we continued to share our passwords with others. Huh?! We hadn’t done that. I was over them so I created a gmail account. Hubby wanted to continue with AOL so he once again changed the password. I spent a weekend updating the new account info to our many online accounts. Over the next few weeks I went through the saved emails and purged. Many, though, were of genealogical significance – notification of a cousin’s marriage, the death of an aunt, graduation dates and connections with long lost relatives who had found postings I had placed on bulletin boards. I forwarded those emails to gmail and placed them in a folder titled Genealogy. A few weeks after I completed the transfers, the account was again hacked. We received the same letter and this time, hubby was through with them. That account is still open and maybe once a year I go on it to see if any long lost relative has rediscovered my original tree on Rootsweb’s World Connect or one of those old bulletin board posts that I can no longer update to provide a newer email address. It hasn’t happened yet but who knows? Mostly I find a thousand junk emails that I delete en mass.

I now save emails that are of value to my computer and to a cloud. This way, if I have to abandon gmail for another email account I haven’t lost anything important. For emails that were of special importance, such as a photo or record attachment, I also attach to my tree, copy and paste the email contents into the citation. I feel very fortunate that my transition was on my own terms. Heed the warning!