Ancestry.com – Page 7 – GenealogyAtHeart.com

12+ More Genealogical Gems to Use

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 20 Dec 2015.

Last post was my 12 most favorite free genealogy sites and today is my 12 favorite paid sites. I have placed these in alphabetical order and not by preference:

1. Ancestry.com – since they own just about everything in the genealogical world it’s very hard not to subscribe to them. I do have issues with their new website, phantom hints, relationship help that comes and goes, removal of records and not adding new databases but for now, I still use them. Just learned there is an AARP discount and I will be going after that when I renew in 2 months. Complete access is $389.00 per year. OUCH!

2, Association of Professional Genealogists – “an international organization dedicated to supporting those engaged in the business of genealogy through advocacy, collaboration, education, and the promotion of high ethical standards.” Subscribers are $45.00 annually, Professional Members $100.00. Well worth it for the webinars, journal and eNewsletter! Additionally, members get discounts to many paid sites.

3, Board for Certification of Genealogists – Even if you have no desire to become a Certified Genealogist this site is valuable! Check out the Skillbuilding, Work Samples and Genealogy Standards which are free. If you decide to become certified, the cost is $75.00 initially, followed by $300.00 when your portfolio is submitted (1 year deadline).

4. FindMyPast.com – Similar to Ancestry with different records. Cost varies depending on plan purchased. I got a year free due to being a member the National Genealogical Society but it would have cost me $99.95. Since I’ve had trouble uploading my tree I won’t be purchasing this anytime soon but it was nice for a year.

5. Fold3.com – an ancestry.com owned site, currently I’m not a member but I join periodically. For military history it’s a must have. If you’re an ancestry member it’s currently $39.95 a year – half the regular price. So maybe, I’ll upgrade….

6. JStor – is a digital library with books and journals (about 1700) that are intellectual in nature. Many libraries and educational institutions are members so check out if you get an alumni password. If not, some access is free (but not much) and you can purchase an article if you have to, cost varies.

7. New England Historicand Genealogical Society – the database, AmericanAncestors.org is free, however, if you are planning to visit the library in Boston, it is not free. This is a nonprofit organization that also offers research assistance (for an additional fee but discounted), an awesome magazine, journal, weekly email update and seminars. Well worth it for $89.95 a year.

8. National Genealogical Society – the journal, the magazine, the conference, the discounts, the store – wow, that’s a lot of genealogy goodness. Annual membership is $65.00.

9, Radaris – the place to find the living! “Radaris is a universal people directory and an information indexing system about people.” Trying to find long lost cousin Joe – this site will help. If you just want a report it will cost .95. Premium memberships can cost up to $49.95 per MONTH. I only purchase a report if I’m desperate as I usually can find people through other methods – Facebook, Linkedin, etc.

10, Spokeo – a more inexpensive way to find the missing – A 6 month membership is $4.95 per month. They do offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee that I’ve never tried so I can’t attest to what that offer is. I don’t currently belong to this, either, but I’ve gleaned info from this site to help me locate free information in the past.

11 Your Local Genealogy Society – because you need to hang out with people who get excited about your finds. Mine offers trainings and research help for novices. Cost is $17.00 a year.

12. Your State Genealogy Society – or whichever state your ancestors’ resided. My state offers a wonderful journal, newsletter, links to sites around my state, posting for help and webinars. For $25.00 a year it’s the best deal around!

Bonus – The sites mentioned above are not the only for pay genealogy sites around but the ones I use the most. Every couple of years I join newspaperarchive.com but until they add some new newspapers, I’ve maxed them out. I would highly recommend them, though, if you haven’t ever been a member.

Yikes! I totaled the amount and I’ve spent $776.85 this year. Guess when I retire Ancestry will be accessed only from the library.

Genealogy At Heart – A New Website

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 8 Dec 2015.

I’m heading out to the west coast for a conference but wanted to let you all to know I’ve developed a website to contain my blogs in one handy dandy spot – you can now access it at www.genealogyatheart.com. All blog posts will be listed under Family Stories/Genealogy Hints.

Genealogy is expensive so I will also post any special offers I discover there under the tab “Specials to Share.”

Besides genealogy, I love traveling, architecture and visiting historical sites so I’ll be posting some pics of places I recently visited so check out the tab “On the Road Again.” It may give you an idea of where you want to explore your family’s past.

If you’d like more information about an older posting or have suggestions/ideas for the future simply email me from the About Lori page. I look forward to hearing from you!

If you are a Family Tree Maker user synching with Ancestry.com and just learned that Ancestry is discontinuing the agreement soon, you may be looking for a new software program. I’m not making any money off this but here’s my advice – check out these GENEALOGY PROGRAMS . Once you’ve decided which you’re going to use, go to Ancestry.com and click on Trees – Create and Manage Trees on the ribbon. Then click on “Manage Tree.” On the right hand side, click EXPORT TREE in the green box. It may take some time but when it’s ready, click the new green box DOWLOAD YOUR GEDCOM FILE. You may have difficulty doing that as sometimes it doesn’t want to work. If so, click “download tips” and alternative directions are given.

I saw the zillions of negative comments by FTM users on Ancestry’s blog and for the life of me, can’t understand why Ancestry didn’t give clear directions in the announcement on how to save your work as a gedcom. I feel very badly for those unhappy people thinking that they have lost years of work when they haven’t. The only thing they can’t do is have their work saved both on Ancestry and on their hard drive at the same time. Personally, they need to be saving in another location, too, because, if their hard drive crashes and they can’t get on Ancestry, then they have a huge problem. I use the free Dropbox.com cloud to also save my gedcom in Legacy. That way, I can log on to DROPBOX anywhere and access my tree, in addition to using Ancestry if I’m not on my main computer.

Seriously, you should be exporting your tree at least once a month if you’re a heavy user as if something happens to Ancestry your citations are gone! Notice I said citation and not records. You cannot download all of your records when you download the gedcom. You will be downloading the citation of what record was found but not the picture of the actual record. For example: You’ve saved the 1880 US Federal Census for your great grandpa to your Ancestry tree. When you download the gedcom it will show that the census record was what you referenced, or cited, for the 1880 residence. If you want the actual picture of the census page you will have to download it to your hard drive. That is time consuming but important. I haven’t done that for most of my lines but plan on beginning that process soon.

Now, back to the download directions – Once you’ve exported you will have to import the saved file, called a gedcom, to whatever program you’ll be using. I like Legacy because 1) the Standard version is free and that gave me a good idea if it was a program I could easily use and 2) their support is very good. They are friendly on the phone and they have an email group that you can subscribe to for free that you can post queries to and the software engineers answer. Amazing! I never got that kind of response from Family Tree Maker and when the synch between Ancestry and FTM stopped working, I decided to move to something else. Now I’m really glad I did!

I ended up purchasing the Deluxe Legacy version six months after downloading the free Standard version and the updates have all been free since then, too. The program has a lot of bells and whistles I haven’t even begun to delve into but plan to do so when my Board of Certified Genealogy portfolio is done. I also have made a New Year’s Resolution that I will stop saving records to my Ancestry tree and just save directly to Legacy. It’s another adjustment but then I’ll have all the records (pictures) even if Ancestry becomes cost prohibitive or stops making some records available, which has already happened to me.

Hope this has helped!

Ancestry Site Changes – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 7 Jun 2015.

I mentioned briefly in my last blog about the changes to Ancestry.com. There’s always an adaption period when there is a site revision but I’m really having difficulty with this “new and improved” version, more than with previous updates.

Back on February 19^th, Ancestry announced on their blogsite that the site was in the process of beta testing improvements. Ancestry.com noted that their design team had 3 underlying principles – Make it beautiful, usable, and delightful. (IMHO, I don’t think they reached any of their principles.)

I didn’t sign up at the time to be a part of the members who could check out the changes. Last week I received the following email:

“If you haven’t heard (or seen), we’ve made some huge changes to the Ancestry website. But the “New Ancestry” is much more than a new look. It’s new features that help you tell stories as remarkable as the people who lived them.
It’s the new LifeStory that turns the facts in your ancestor’s life into a narrative timeline, like a biography.
It’s Historical Insights that let you walk a mile (or two) in your ancestor’s shoes.
It’s a new media gallery that puts all your records and pictures in one place.
It’s a streamlined design that’s easier to use—on your desktop or mobile devices.
It’s your family story, reinvented.

Can the new Ancestry really do all that? See for yourself. All the research and information you have now will be on the new Ancestry.”

Let me be clear that I do appreciate THE EFFORT that went into the improvement. A major revision is never easy. Here’s what I think they got right: I love the Life Story view for several reasons. I believe that it will hook many more individuals to genealogy who have difficulty with putting the bits and pieces of records all together to understand one of their ancestor’s lives. I shared Life Story with my husband who supports my work but never caught the genealogy bug. He said the inclusion of pictures and the narrative was “captivating.” He especially liked the Historical Insights feature that adds local/national events to an ancestor’s timeline. I can see this as a benefit in drawing in younger users, too, who may have learned about an event, like the Civil War, but have difficulty in how the event connects to a direct line relative. The pictures and facts together are powerful. Kudos to the genius’ who came up with this concept!

I also really like the Media Gallery that places all of my uploaded pictures and records side by side for easy viewing. I wish they would further refine this feature to include a drop and drag so that I could move the pictures around and place them in chronological order as I’ve added as I’ve discovered and it makes me crazy that they aren’t in order.

Matching records to the timeline is also beneficial and if used correctly, may even give the site more validity as critics frequently express their frustration over unsourced or poorly sourced (citing a tree that originally cited a different tree). I wish there was a way to fix all my poorly cited sources from my baby stage of genealogy. For example, I sourced ALOT of my Leininger, Long and Harbaugh families from various family history texts. I made the source name as “Text” and not the actual book’s name because several versions of Ancestry ago, citations weren’t as easy to add. I would like a way to quickly change the word “Text” to the correct title.

So Ancestry got a lot right in the New Ancestry but here’s where I disagree with the design team meeting their principles…

Usable

From my desktop computer I am often not able to access my tree at all using Internet Explorer and at times, not even with Chrome or Firefox:

From my Kindle, accessing from the web, I get this view but the links don’t work. You can see all the links I tried as they are in a different color:

From my Kindle, accessing via the downloaded ap I do get my tree but it is not easy to maneuver. Note that you can no longer click an arrow on the right margin to move the tree back further generations. Now you must make several clicks to move to a previous generation (click on the person then click to view the tree again).

From my laptop, using Chrome or Firefox, I can use the site and get this view. See the arrows on the right that still allow me to move back generations quickly:

Clearly, the design team failed in making the site useable on different devices. Maybe they were rushed by the news that Ancestry is on the auction block. I don’t know but I hope they get the Kindle site working as I love using my Kindle when I research away from home for the portability, lightness of the device and various features I can quickly access (photo, notes, internet, etc.)

Beautiful

Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but I don’t think the site is beautiful at all. As seen above, the color scheme is drab. Although the above pic doesn’t clearly show the contrast, the bright pink and blue against the pastel pink and blue when there is no picture is not attractive. Maybe the design team thought that would be a good way to alert the user that a picture is needed but it just looks out of place to me. And seriously, have we not moved beyond gender stereotyping of girls in pink and boys in blue? With the current color scheme I’d rather see white and light gray.

Delightful

Huh? Delightful, according to Word’s Thesaurus, means pleasant, charming, lovely, wonderful, enjoyable, amusing, agreeable, enchanting, delicious. None of these adjectives would I use to describe the revision. Maybe innovative as no one else has the Life Story and record matching features that are absolutely awesome.

I hope the tech team can quickly fix the glitches. I also hope that Ancestry can be expediently acquired by a group who cares about genealogy so that it can continue to operate, grow and provide the services that we’re paying for at a reasonable price

Specials to Share!

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com 29 Apr 2015.

I had planned to write about my decision to obtain Certified Genealogist status but this week I discovered 3 special offers so I’ve revised my plan to let you know what I found.

DEAL #1

If you aren’t a Legacy member, you may not know that you can take advantage of their webinars; some cost, some are permanently free and others free for just a limited time.

For a list of their archived webinars visit:http://www.familytreewebinars.com/archived_webinars.php

I’m not a member of Legacy so I only watch the free ones. I first learned about the webinars when I signed up for their weekly email newsletter after I purchased Legacy software last Christmas as a present to myself. I ended up with Legacy because I was so frustrated with Family Tree Maker (FTM). My extremely large public “Main Tree” on Ancestry.com stopped synching with my desktop FTM last May. I called FTM customer service and they blamed Ancestry. Called Ancestry and they blamed FTM. This went on for several weeks. I did what everyone does when you call a call center and can’t get help – hang up, wait a few minutes and call again with the hope you’ll get someone more knowledgeable. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, either. FTM reps did sent me a useless email with instructions several times but it didn’t fix the problem. Next I posted on the Ancestry Message Boards asking for advice. Surprise, surprise, discovered from the Message Board that I wasn’t alone with the problem so I began to explore other family tree software options. Looking at them seriously made me start pining for my old PAF from Family Search! Since that’s no longer available, for a temporary fix, I downloaded Legacy’s free family tree standard software

https://www.legacyfamilytree.com/DownloadLegacy.asp#Download

and was happy that it could quickly save my Ancestry tree. I liked that it also gave me an error report. I just wanted a product that would serve as a backup on my desktop in case I couldn’t sign on to Ancestry but the more I used Legacy, the more I liked it so I decided to buy the latest version. I haven’t really explored all of its features yet which is on my to-do list. I am trying to download my Ancestry tree monthly and save it to Legacy. After a weekend thumb drive disaster, it’s something I really will make time to do on the first of every month (Famous Last Words!) but that’s another story…

On Monday I listened to the passionate webinar presentation by Bernice Alexander Bennett regarding her volunteer work at the National Archives and took the challenge she mentioned. No spoilers here – this is a must listen to training offered through May 1^st!on Legacy so sign on for the 1 hour class “United States Colored Troops Civil War Widow’s Pension Applications: Tell the Story.”

DEAL #2

The second special offer with a limited time is that Fold3’s Civil War records are FREE for the month of April. If you aren’t a paid member then you’ll really want to check this out by Thursday, April 30^th at 11:59 PM! You’ll have to register your email at

http://www.fold3.com/

but it’s well worth it. I stayed up way too late last night but got all of my “close” Civil War records saved to honor the 150 years since the war ended. This included my great great grandfather Ferdinand Kable (Ohio Infantry Unit 29 Company A), 2 times great uncles Thomas, Prosser, and Mark Duer, (Ohio 99^th Infantry Regiment, Company F), my husband’s great great grandfather Samuel August Samuelson (Indiana Infantry Unit 73), and 2 times great uncle Thomas Charles Thompson (Illinois 1^st Light Artillery Battery). I also saved records for several coworkers whom I’m working on their trees for my Certified Genealogist portfolio.

Then I got totally side tracked and looked up the War of 1812 pension records for my 3^rd great grandmother, Mary Polly Dennis Hodge Adams Elder Search. Yep, GGGGrandma outlived 4 husbands. Her first husband, John Hodge, died in combat and she was left in 1813 with twin boys in the Ohio wilderness. And to think I thought childcare was a nightmare when my kids were small; I can’t even imagine what she went through! Her second husband, Edward Adams, whom I’m descended from, died in 1822 leaving GGGGram with 5 kids. She then married Owen Elder and after a 6^th child, became a widow again in1830. The pension records were under her last husband, William Search’s name. Someday I plan on writing more about the hunt for Mary and her family.

DEAL # 3

Got an email from our friends at geneablogger about an Ancestry.com contest to win a 6 month US Discovery Ancestry membership. I don’t know what happens if you win and you’re already an Ancestry member – I figure I’ll do a pay it forward and give it away or negotiate with them for a discount. If you’re interested first go to

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1440336180/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1440336180&linkCode=as2&tag=geneabloggers-20&linkId=A7V4AIHNDL6WSJ3D

and click on “Look inside” on the right hand side of your screen. You want to go to the back of the book and write down the LAST PAGE NUMBER. Then, enter the contest:
http://www.geneabloggers.com/giveaways/win-6month-ancestrycom-membership/?lucky=7964
Simplest entry I’ve ever participated in but I did like Ancestry’s former October contests where you tried to use your research skills to discover the answers. Never won but sure had fun! Hint, Hint, Ancestry – do it again!

Next time, really, I’ll be writing about the reason I decided to go for the gold standard of genealogy – Certified Genealogist.

Becoming a Certified Genealogist – An Update

A FABULOUS FIND of 15 Jan 2016

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com 13 Jan 2016

The clock is still ticking and now that we’re in the new year I’ve got less than 10 months to submit my portfolio requirements. I actually accomplished way more than I thought I would during the holidays. My family kids me that I must be channeling the dead. I don’t know about that but I certainly had some awesome finds that propelled me forward. Here’s where I am and what I have to do:

1. Preliminary application was submitted in October 2015 – DONE

2. Signing the Genealogist’s Code – that’s easy!

3. Background Resume – completed but needs to be reviewed and possibly updated right before submission – Almost Done

4. Document Work – BCG Supplied and Applicant Supplied. All transcribed and written, just need to review and make a final edit. – Almost Done

5. Research Report prepared for another person – started this in late December. This was unexpected but I loved the hunt so decided to switch what I originally had planned to submit that was already finished. Completed the newly started report on December 31st and gave it to client on January 4th – DONE

6. Case Study – used a client’s second report I was working on instead of what I had originally thought I was going to do. I finished it over the holidays with some wonderful documents that simply showed up! Wish I could share this with you – a real twist and turn type of case. – Almost Done (haven’t given it to client yet but have appointment scheduled)

7. Kinship Determination KDP- have a great start but didn’t work on it much in the past month. I’m still assembling documents and my problem is I don’t live anywhere close to the areas that the family lived. I’m planning on a trip in March to one of the states but that still leaves me with a hole on the east coast and I wasn’t planning on being close to that area until July. So, it’ll be slow going with this item. I figure, unless a miracle occurs, I won’t be done with this until September and will just make the deadline but who knows? I put the rest of the requirements together in a much quicker time period than I planned so maybe this will come together, too. KDP 1/3 Done

In hindsight, I’m glad that I had a skeletal idea of what I would be submitting before I actually committed to the process. I’m also thankful that I took the webinar about what certification entails so I had clear expectations of what was expected.

Here’s an update on my 2 past blogs regarding Ancestry.com and member family tree’s that reported a co-worker’s mother as deceased when she isn’t – I received an email from Ancestry staff on Monday directing me to have the deceased email them with her request to correct the records and to provide Ancestry with the URL’s of the trees. I pulled the URL info and included it with the forwarded email to my co-worker who sent it off to her mom. I was impressed that Ancestry responded so quickly, especially after the phone conversations I had with their support staff. I didn’t think there was going to be any resolution! I’m also very pleased that Ancestry stayed true to their confidentiality statement and understood how the problem impacted the affected family. Kudos to Ancestry!