Cousin Faustine passed away January 5, 2010 in Oliver, British Columbia. She was 90 years old and had been suffering from declining health the past few years.

I received a surprise in the mail yesterday – the copy of Johann Judas’s death certificate I ordered a month ago.  I wasn’t expecting to get it so fast – thank you Wisconsin Dept of Vital Statistics!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide me with the name of Johann’s parents like I was REALLY  hoping. But it does confirm the birth/death info and place of burial.

I can’t post an actual copy of the certificate, but I’ve transcribed it. You can view the transcription here: http://www.estacaille.org/genealogy/docs/CloozDeath_WI-Judas-Johann1908.pdf

Mom called me an hour ago to give me the news that her uncle Raymond Judas passed away suddenly sometime in the early morning.  He would have been 89 in September. As far as we know, the funeral will be this coming Friday.

We wish we could be there together in person… mom has been wanting to take a trip back to Ontario for some time now.

Since my last post, Geni.com has revised the limits on how many generations I can see.  It has been upgraded from 3rd cousins to 4th cousins.  That means I can easily see cousin Delphine’s information again! That’s great as Delphine is an Estacaille cousin, orginally from France, who has probably as much interest in contacting family as me!

I’ve posted on my blog at http://estacaille.ning.com but wanted to share right here what is going on.

If you’re a regular visitor to my site, you probably read about my uploading the database to www.geni.com back in January 2009.  As a free user there were a couple of restrictions – one being that the automatic links for activity updates/photos I could easily see, was restricted to 5th cousins and closer.

That was fine by me as the most “distant” cousin I’m in contact with is Armin, Delphine & Maite – 3rd cousins once removed or 4th cousins.  It’s been my hope that using Geni would help increase the chances of breaking through some of my brick walls on the Judas and Dingwell branches.  Plus it allowed other cousins doing research to easily upload their data & merge it, upload photos and videos. And family members could easily add photos, videos, make date/location changes, etc.

Geni, has been slowly eroding these free features. Citing privacy changes, the latest change is the highest default for each persons family group setting is reduced from 5th cousins to 3rd cousins. (each user could restrict their profile more to no blood relatives, 1st cousins, 2nd cousins even limit in-laws which is at its maximum inlaws out to 1st cousins)

Now in my list of photo albums I no longer see the photos uploaded by 3rd cousin, once removed Delphine.  I can no longer send emails through Geni to Delphine, Maite, Armin (or their 1st cousins, descendants). They no longer appear in my tree list. Yes, I can still view their tree & photos/videos by finding our common ancestor, viewing that ancestor’s tree and following the branch till I find them – a more labour intensive search.

Time will tell how much these new limitations affect my tree life on Geni. I may just revert to using my estacaille.org website as my one database & work more on marketing the surnames I’m searching for.  And inviting more researching cousins to post copies their GEDCOMs/photos/documents here.

Geni online family tree

I started off my 2009 by uploading my entire Estacaille database to the free online tree site at www.Geni.com. (This upload included all the new Schmudlach info, which I haven’t uploaded here yet as of today)

I’ve since been busy sending email invitations to cousins, asking them to join and claim their leaf in the tree.  I’ve also been busy uploading family photos and linking them to individuals in the tree.

Members can share family news, upload photos and videos, send emails to other family members, start family discussions.

Response from the cousins has been fantastic! Almost all the invites I’ve sent out so far have been accepted.  The one major drawback we have at the moment is that the site is only in English. Our German and French cousins are having problems translating all the various labels.

If you are a cousin of mine, would like to join but haven’t received an invitation from me – email me with the email address you’d like to use as a member and I’ll send you a sign up message.