The last person in my RootsMagic file

Posted on 12 January 2013 by

I’m following the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun assignment from geneamusings.com.  I like the random topics he suggests.

1. Go to your family tree database of choice (you know, like RootsMagic, Reunion, Ancestry Member Tree), and determine who the very last person on your list of names is.

I found him.  It is a person who happily is still alive, though, so I can’t publish his name.

2. What do you know about this person based on your research?  It’s OK to do more if you need to – in fact, it’s encouraged!

Based on my research I know absolutely nothing (see next question for why).  I did do enough extra research, though, to determine that he is probably still living.

3. How are you related to this person, and why is s/he in your family tree?

The person is a third-cousin once-removed in-law.  As a refresher from my earlier posting on calculating levels of cousins, his wife and I share a common ancestor.  One of us is four generations down from the ancestor and the other is five.  As it happens, I’m the one at five generations, from Pierre Joseph Lamielle (1792-1841).  The unnamed cousin is in my tree from a mass import of the Lamielle side of my family from a cousin.  I do this kind of thing less than I used to because I like to confirm what I put in my tree, but she is good about sourcing her facts so it has been handy to have the information in RootsMagic.

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Storing your pictures in folders? Consider switching to Picasa or iPhoto.

Posted on 26 December 2012 by

One of the fun parts of genealogy is collecting photos of your family ancestors, and with computers we have a lot of options beyond putting them into photo album books.  For many people this means storing their digital photos in folders on the hard disk, but if you are doing that I’m going to recommend an alternative method, which is to use photo album software such as Picasa (Windows or Mac) or iPhoto (Mac only).

The main benefit of photo album software is tagging, which makes finding and organizing your folders much easier.  The typical way to organize photos in folders is to make a folder hierarchy, with levels such as family, vacation, holidays, etc.  The problem is that a picture can only be categorized one way.  For example, say you have three photos:

  • Uncle Elmer and Aunt Fern taken in front of the house on the family farm in New Hampshire.
  • Uncle Elmer as an infant with his parents on a trip to New Jersey.
  • Aunt Fern marrying Steve in Las Vegas after Uncle Elmer passed away.

There is a lot of information in these photos, but a lot of it gets lost if the pictures are saved in folders on the operating system.  The typical way would be to put them under family, perhaps in an Elmer and Fern folder.  That’s fine, but then what do you do with the following?

  • Buildings: There might be pictures of the house on the family farm with other relatives, but there won’t be a way to search for them.
  • People: Uncle Elmer’s parents might have their own folder, since they are your grandparents.  Where do you then store the picture so that you can find both Elmer and his parents?
  • Locations: What if you want all of the pictures taken in Las Vegas?  People in other folders might have pictures there too.
  • Events: Maybe you want to search for wedding pictures, such as Aunt Fern’s wedding with Steve.  Since the pictures are organized by family members there isn’t a way to search for weddings.

Photo album software such as Picasa and iPhoto solve these problems by allowing you to tag photos.  The concept is that you organize the photos in a general structure, perhaps the one you are already using.  You can then add extra information to each photo in the form of tags.  Here is how you might tag the three photos I mentioned above:

  • Uncle Elmer and Aunt Fern taken in front of the house on the family farm in New Hampshire.
  • Uncle Elmer
  • Aunt Fern
  • Family farm
  • New Hampshire
  • Uncle Elmer as an infant with his parents on a trip to New Jersey.
  • Uncle Elmer
  • Grandpa
  • Grandma
  • New Jersey
  • Aunt Fern marrying Steve in Las Vegas after Uncle Elmer passed away.
  • Aunt Fern
  • Steve
  • Las Vegas
  • Wedding

Now that you have the tags, you can search by any of them, giving you a lot more power over viewing your photos.  Also, you now can’t go wrong on your folder structure, because you can always add more information to your photos with tags.

One big thing to keep in mind is that if you already have your photos laid out how you like in folders then the photo album software will keep that structure, and if you end up not liking the software you can always stop using it and go back to using the folders.  You shouldn’t really need to do this, though.

I’ll give examples of how to tag in future blog postings, but in the meantime give Picasa or iPhoto a try if you are still using folders to organize your pictures.

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Improved CrossOver for running RootsMagic on the Mac

Posted on 12 December 2012 by

CodeWeavers, who makes the CrossOver program for running Windows programs on the Mac, just came out with version 12.  Of special interest to me was the new Mac Driver feature.  This allows CrossOver to run Windows programs without using the X Window system.  As I have mentioned before, there were problems where if a Mac window got on top of a RootsMagic window, clicking on the RootsMagic window would not bring it back to the top.  With the Mac Driver on CrossOver 12 this now works.  All it takes is an easy configuration change.

CodeWeavers is enabling the Mac Driver slowly as they consider it to be an experimental feature.  If you want to try it, though, just do the following:

  1. In CrossOver go to Configure->Manage Bottles.
  2. Pick the bottle running RootsMagic.
  3. Click on the Advanced tab.
  4. Click the box for Enable Experimental Mac Driver
  5. Close the window and start up RootsMagic.  The window behavior should now be normal.

Mac Driver configuration

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Review of Newspapers.com

Posted on 30 November 2012 by

Ancestry recently opened a new site, Newspapers.com.  It is similar to other newspaper sites like GenealogyBank and NewspaperArchive.  So do we gain anything from another newspaper archive site?

Newspapers.com has over 800 newspapers.  For comparison, GenealogyBank claims 6100+ newspapers and NewspaperArchive over 5,000 newspapers.  The free Chronicling America has 801 titles.  So if you are just choosing a service then Newspapers.com is at a disadvantage because of its weaker coverage.

Another source for comparison is Ancestry.com itself, which also has a newspaper archive, in this case with over 1,000 titles.  Looking at a few examples from Ancestry, they don’t have the same set of titles.  There are some overlapping ranges but other things that are just different.  So what’s the point of Newspapers.com?

My theory is that Ancestry is trying to get more subscription sources.  Just as Fold3 could have been pulled into the Ancestry.com database but is kept as a different service, Newspapers.com provides possible new subscriptions.  While Ancestry.com gains from having a huge database, after a while the financial benefits of adding more records diminish.  By putting content in separate web sites, Ancestry gets new revenue streams, both from people who don’t want to pay for Ancestry along with some who want the extra records.

Searching

Newspapers.com lets you search on the following criteria:

  • words
  • place
  • time range
  • when added to database

The word search appears to look for a page with some of the entered words.  Putting more than one word in quotes is supposed to limit the search to words that are next to each other, but in practice it also finds pages where the words are far from each other, if they are all on the page at all.    As an example, a search for “Frances McGovern” included hits for articles about George McGovern with no Frances highlighted at all.  This is annoying at it wastes time giving a lot of non-helpful pages.  For comparison, GenealogyBank does not have the ability to look for exact phrases, but NewspaperArchive does and it works well.  Both of the other services also let you exclude words as well.

A final comparison is cost.  Newspapers.com costs $79.95 a year.  GenealogyBank costs $69.95 a year.  Oddly, I can’t find an annual cost for NewspaperArchive.  I know what I paid but I can’t find the subscription price posted anywhere.

So overall Newspapers.com seems to be a weak way to make some extra money for Ancestry.  It doesn’t have many titles compared to other sites, the search tools are inadequate, and it is more expensive than GenealogyBank.  I can only think of one reason to subscribe, and that is if they are the only service with the newspapers you need.

Posted in Genealogy | Tagged | 7 Comments

A couple of reasons to use Bing maps for genealogy

Posted on 25 November 2012 by

I’ll admit up front that I almost always use Google for searching and maps.  I haven’t done much with Bing, which I see as a me-too product from Microsoft.  One exception, though, when I’m doing genealogy, is Bing maps.  It has two features that are real handy that I’ve been using with Place Details in RootsMagic and with photo identification.

The first nice feature is that when you search for an address Bing Maps gives you the latitude and longitude, just below the address.  You can then copy and paste the values into RootsMagic to get the coordinates for your Place Details.

Place details in RootsMagic after entering the coordinates from Bing Maps.

The other feature I’ll mention from Bing maps is more entertaining and can get you to places Google Street View can’t.  It is the Bird’s eye view.  It uses aerial photographs from an angle so you can see all sides of a building.  You don’t get quite as close as Street View but you can see from any angle you like.  For example, a while back my sister and I were trying to figure out where this picture was taken:

We thought it might be our great-grandfather Charles Menegay, but it’s not a real clear shot of his face and we weren’t sure where it was.  The bridge looked like it could be one of the railroad bridges in the valley just north of downtown Akron, but none of them looked like that nowadays.  My sister found, though, that in the early 1910s Charles worked at the Renner brewery.  Sadly, I had already been there that day and looked at the building from the street but didn’t see anything that clearly looked like the picture.  At home, though, I had an idea and brought up the location in Bing Maps and enabled Bird’s eye view.  I rotated it around so I could see the back of the building that I couldn’t get to that day and saw this:

The windows and doors in the circles area on the Bing picture match the ones seen in the older picture, they have just been bricked over some since then.  This was a huge breakthrough.  It showed where the old picture was taken, and gives us confirmation that the picture is of our great-grandfather without me having to drive back to the facility and go onto private property.

 

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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Posted on 24 November 2012 by

I just found the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun feature on the Geneamusing blog so I thought I’d try it.  Here is this evening’s challenge:

  1. Go to the Baby Name Wizard site and see how popular your name was over the 20th century, and how popular a baby name it is today.  Check out your spouse, your children and your grandchildren (if you have some!) also.
  2. What does your name mean (find out on http://www.babynamewizard.com/baby-name)?
  3. Tell us about it, and show us your graphs, in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a Facbook status or a Google+ Stream post.

1. My first name Beirne isn’t so popular.  It isn’t in the baby name wizard at all:

2. It’s not a surprise that my name wasn’t found.  I’m not the only Beirne, but it is an Irish family name and not very common.  One take on it is that it is a descendant of the Norse name Bjorn.  This theory is also mentioned in the book The Family Beirne by Bryan Patrick Beirne.  It seems to be one of those things that sounds reasonable but lacks actual proof.  In any case, Bjorn means bear, so that’s as close as I can get to a meaning for Beirne.

While the name is rare, I’m not the only Beirne.  The author of the book which became the movie 12 O’Clock High was Beirne Lay, Jr., so there were at least two Beirne’s there.  I’ve also exchanged a few emails with another Beirne.  He also got his name from a family surname.  In America there aren’t a lot of people with the surname Beirne either, though, as it tended to get anglicized to Burns or Byrne, even among my ancestors.  Back in County Roscommon, though, there are lots of Beirnes, which makes the genealogical research tough.

BTW, I don’t know how to properly pronounce Beirne in Irish.  Years ago when I was in Ireland I asked around and got three different pronunciations, including Bernie, the pronunciation I avoid.  I’ve was once told in an email that Beirne rhymes with “learn” rather than “burn”, but in my flat American accent I say both the same, so I’m still stumped.

I’ll add an extra, a picture of my farthest back known Beirne ancestor, Bernard Beirne (1833-1916).

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Working around window problems in RootsMagic on the Mac

Posted on 24 November 2012 by

Yesterday I mentioned how I only have one problem with RootsMagic on the Mac, and that is that if the RootsMagic windows get buried under windows from other applications then there isn’t an easy way to get RootsMagic back to the top to work on.  You have to move the other application windows out of the way, which is a nuisance.

This finally annoyed me enough that I came up with a workaround today.  I still don’t have a way to bring the RootsMagic window to the top, but I remembered the Spaces feature of Mac OS.  This lets me put RootsMagic on its own desktop, so that then nothing is there to interfere.

Here is how to get RootsMagic on its own desktop (based on Mountain Lion):

  1. Bring up Mission Control, either from the Dock or by hitting F3/Fn F3.
  2. The top row of the screen has your desktops.  Move the mouse pointer up there and an extra desktop icon will appear on the upper right of your screen.  Click on this to add a new desktop.
  3. Make sure RootsMagic isn’t running.
  4. Move to your new desktop.  You have several ways to get there.  You can swipe three fingers across your trackpad until you get to the desktop or go to Mission Control and select the desktop.
  5. Start up RootsMagic.

RootsMagic will now have a desktop to itself.  If entering data, you might want to be able to see your browser or the Preview program at the same time.  If so, reduce the size of RootsMagic on the screen, go to Mission Control, and drag the application to the Rootsmagic desktop.

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RootsMagic 6 Review

Posted on 23 November 2012 by

RootsMagic 6 was recently released.  It’s not a major overhaul but it adds a variety of new features.

Installation on a Mac

I run RootsMagic on my Mac inside CrossOver, a program that lets you run Windows programs without installing Windows.  RootsMagic 5 is supported, but version 6 is still too new for that.  I didn’t want to overwrite RootsMagic 5 yet so I installed 6 in its own Crossover bottle, using the RootsMagic 5 installer from Crossover.  I just pointed it to the new file that I had downloaded and changed the 5s to 6s in the names of things.

RootsMagic 6 runs as well as RootsMagic 5 in Crossover.  I haven’t seen any new problems and the main old problem remains, which is that clicking on a RootsMagic window that is under Mac application windows does not bring the RootsMagic window to the top.  I can live with that, though.

New Features

Tree Publishing

The biggest new feature is tree publishing.  You can now publish your tree at http://my.rootsmagic.com straight from RootsMagic.  You do this from Internet->Publish Online.  If you don’t have an account you will create one there, and then set up your project.  You can select who will go on the tree using the usual export selector, which allows you to focus on someone and pick their ancestors or descendants, among other methods.  You also get questions about what to do with living people and private records.  You then publish it to the site, where it will appear at http://my.rootsmagic.com/account-name.

At first I was sort of blasé about this feature, as there are lots of places to post my tree, but they have done a good job of making a nice looking page.  The layout is clean and uncluttered and it is easy to navigate around, all the way down to the sources.  I think it looks better than the RootsMagic program, of course without most of the functionality.

When publishing the page there is not an option to make it public or private, and my first impression was that the page would be out there for the public.  It turns out, though, that the page is basically private.  RootsMagic does not maintain a directory of its pages and it is out of view from Google and other search engines.  It is hidden enough that RootsMagic is looking into ways to make the contents searchable for people who actually do want their tree broadly visible.

Finally, the tree publishing does not have the synchronization features of Family Tree Maker.  If you want to update your tree you will need to select the people and upload again and overwrite the old tree.  Synchronization would be a nice feature for the future, but this is a very good first version of tree sharing.

Live Timeline View

The Live Timeline View allows you to edit the items while viewing the timeline along with adding and deleting them.  This is billed as allowing you to correct your data while viewing it in the context of other family members.  I guess this is nice, but corrections should be driven more by one’s information sources rather than other data.  If you see something obvious, though, like someone being born 100 years after their parents died, you may be able to fix it.

Find Everywhere

I actually purchased the upgrade last night just for this feature.  I may get to visit Ionia County, Michigan soon and wanted to find all my records for the county.  It turns out that the search in RootsMagic 5 would have been sufficient, but Find Everywhere does expand the search scope.  The existing find lets you search through the main information fields for a given record type but does not look in notes, sources, citations, and the like.  Find Everywhere searches through all those other fields and gives you links to the actual records.  This can be handy, but I wish it also searched through the main record fields so that everything appears in one place.

WebTags

WebTags is the new feature that puzzled me the most.  What it does is let you add a web link to a person, source, citation, place or research log item.  It’s sort of like saving bookmarks in RootsMagic instead of your browser.  Storing links about a person right with their record is more convenient that using bookmarks in your web browser.  In the sample below I linked to the person’s WeRelate.org page.

So far, though, the feature seems less useful for links for types of data other than people.  I assigned a link to a place, but to see it I had to go to the place list, find the place, and then drill down to the details where there the WebTags appeared.  There really isn’t anyplace else to put a WebTag for a place so I suppose this makes sense, but I’m not usually navigating through the place list so this seemed like a bit of work to me.  If you do more work on your places than I do, though, this could be a helpful feature.

I created a WebTag for a citation, but did not readily find how to get to it later on.  It turns out that the button is on the Detail Text tab for the citation.  In any case, for sources, citations, and research logs, I’d prefer that RootsMagic search for URLs in the text and turn them into links rather than putting that work on the user to create WebTags.  I’m also surprised that WebTags aren’t available for To-do list entries, to make it easier for someone to get to their work when they start their task, although I’d prefer that RootsMagic detect URLs for those too.

Along with entering a WebTag manually like I did below, you can also create one on the fly from your WebSearch results.  When you get to the page you want you hit Add WebTag and associate it with the person, place, etc.

BTW, I’m hoping this does not get used by people for lazy sourcing.  RootsMagic has a very nice system for creating sources and citations so WebTags should just be considered an additional convenience.

CountyCheck Explorer

The CountyCheck Explorer lets you search for a county for historical information.  RootsMagic will tell you when the county was created, what counties it was created from, what counties split off from it, and what it belongs to.  It also includes links to online info and maps.  The online info sent me to the FamilySearch wiki and the online map button took me to the county maps at Newberry.org.  So while one could just skip this feature and go to the wiki or Newberry.org, it gives you a quick way to see the county formation history and the links are handy.

Conclusions

So, am I glad I upgraded?  None of these are killer features for me, unlike things like the research log in RootsMagic 5, but I can see myself using the CountyCheck Explorer and the Find Anywhere features.  I may even use WebTags, at least for people and maybe places.  I usually get upgrades anyhow because I want to make sure I get bug fixes, so this gave me some extra features.

If you want to learn more there is also a webinar about the new features.  At 76 minutes I haven’t gone through it yet but will if I get a chance.

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Determining parents through nearby deeds

Posted on 18 November 2012 by

Yesterday I went to the APG Discussion Group meeting at the Akron Public Library.  The group meets monthly to discuss an article from the NGS Quarterly.  This is a good way to learn to better read journal articles and to learn some new techniques.

In preparation for the meeting we are to read the article three or four times.  The first time is a general read-through.  The second time we are to focus on the general argument and the sources used.  This lets us see if the assertions are based on reliable information, and it can also give ideas for new types of sources to use in our own work.  The third time through we focus on the logic of what the author is trying to say.  The fourth reading is for determining if the logic is correct and paying lots of attention to details.  I made it through three readings this time.

Yesterday’s article was “”Beginning at a Black Oak…”: Hachenberger Evidence from a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Neighborhood Reconstruction”.  It takes a different approach to solving a genealogical problem, in this case the identity of the father of Anna Maria Hollinger, wife of George Hachenberger.  The authors had a likely father in mind, but there were enough other possible Hollingers in the area that they could not make assumptions.  They knew that a Nicholas Hollinger owned land in Donegal Township and that George Hachenberger later willed land to his children, but did not have a location for George’s land.  No deed was publicly available showing George’s ownership, so the authors took a different approach.

In the original states, along with Texas and Hawaii, land is measured by a technique called metes and bounds.  The property lines are described based on visible landmarks like rivers and trees.  To provide a bit more detail deeds will sometimes list who are the owners of adjacent pieces of land.  This is great for genealogists as it puts a person on a given location at a point in time.  The authors went through a bunch of deeds and found ten that over time list Nicholas Hollinger and then George Hachenberger as the owners of the same piece of land, with the ownership changing after Nicholas’ death and around the time of George’s marriage to Anna Maria Hollinger.  This gave pretty good evidence that Anna Maria is the daughter of Nicholas, and that George acquired the land through marrying Anna Maria.

I knew to look at deeds before, and even had some deed index films waiting for me upstairs in the special collections room, but the idea of looking at surrounding properties to determine ownership was new to me.  I’m not sure that I’d want to have to rely on this all the time, as it will require reading through a lot of deeds, but it is another useful tool in difficult cases.

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Setting up the Polish keyboard on a Mac

Posted on 11 November 2012 by

If you are doing Polish genealogy and use a Mac, eventually you will want to type Polish characters.  This could be for entering city names, such as Żyrardów or for transcribing documents.  Your Mac can work fine for entering Polish, but setting it up is not intuitive.  Here are the steps:

  1.   Go to System Preferences
  2.   Select Language & Text from the Personal section at the top.
  3.   Select Input Sources.
  4.   Scroll through the languages until you find Polish Pro.  Check the box to the left to enable the keyboard.
    Polish Pro checked
  5.   Close Language & Text.
  6. You should now have a flag on your menubar.  This is where you will select which keyboard you want to use.
    Flag menu on menubar
  7. When you are ready to enter Polish text in program such as Mail, Evernote, etc. click on the flag and select Polish Pro.
  8. You can now enter Polish text with all of the diacritics.  The problem here is usually that nothing says how to enter them.  The easy answer is that you hold down the Option or Alt key at the same time you type the letter that has a diacritic.  Since only Z has more than one type of possible diacritic, for most everything else you will get the mark you want.  If you do need one of the marks on the z, though, you can type Option-z to get ż and Option-x to get ź.  Hold shift while typing these sequences for a capital letter with its diacritic.
  9.  You may wonder how you would know all this.  To find out what different keyboard sequences type, use the Keyboard Viewer from the flag menu where you selected Polish Pro.  This provides an interactive keyboard that shows what the keys produce.  When you first open it the keyboard looks normal.  Hold down the Option key, either on your physical keyboard or the Viewer and you will see that the keys then produce different characters, including diacritics in the case of Polish.
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