I’ll be spending my Christmas here at home with my parents and brother. So far our winter has been wet, hovering close to the freezing mark so we’re definitely having a white Christmas, although we’ve been above 3 or 4 degrees above freezing this week so the snowbanks have receded a fair amount and are looking a bit dirty.

Wishing you a peaceful, loving Christmas. All the best for 2012!

Cousins, I’m planning on sitting down and writing my xmas letter next week. I’ll be emailing it to those of you I have email addresses for…

I haven’t done much research, but I’m starting to get the itch again. I’m debating about ordering some birth/death records from Wisconsin related to the Judas tree.

I’m also scratching my head trying to figure out a way to better merge my database software with the WordPress software that runs the site/blog. So you’ll see some strange things happening around here and not all menu links are going to work properly while I tinker with coding…

“Five ways to use social media to find your family”There’s several good tips, here’s my favorites:

- use Twitter to ask short questions about people/items your looking for. Add a hashtag like #surnames or #SurnameSaturday to help tag your tweet for the public search engine.

- got online, public photo galleries (Flickr, Picassa) of ancestral photos? Tag your photos with surnames so search engines like Google can pick them up.

I’ve been busy with college courses, web design clients & job hunting.  The little bit of genealogy research I’ve collected is Estacaille, maybe a tiny bit of Braniff and Judas.I’ve been fortunate the last couple of months to have received a CD of old Judas/Baker photos collected by a researching cousin who has since passed on.  I’ve also received an old photo album from an aunt in the same branch. I’m working towards scanning in the photos, but it’s taking a bit of work as the album pages are usually bigger than the scanning bed of my multi-function printer/scanner/fax.

I’ve just finished uploading my latest GEDCOM.  As far as I can see, the links from the media/photos/histories still works without any errors.  Let me know if you come across any errors, including any errors in the “living” flag. I’m constantly on the watch for this in the site and my offline database.

I updated the database software about a month ago.  No big surprises there, just minor adjustments.  I want to work on the actual database site design, but don’t look for it too soon as I’ll need to put on my thinking cap and learn how to customize the design coding.

S.

The idea is that each family unit has an ID – I designate this ID starting with an F to separate it from the individual IDs which start with an I.  Example my individual ID would be I1 as I am the first individual in my database, but my family unit ID is F1 until I get married/have kids.  Then my spouse/children & I will be assigned a new family ID. I can also use this family ID to index transcribed documents in my Clooz electronic filing cabinet.

Unfortunately not all genealogy software assigns a family ID.  So I was using my website genealogy database family IDs.  Problem with that is when I upload a major update, the family IDs may change. I then code the original document with the family unit ID and file them in 3-ring binders with numbered indexes 1-100.  Depending on how many families you have in your database, this could run into several binders.  Each binder is also numbered so the first binder holds families 1-100, the second binder holds families 101-200… I also make sure in my computer database to record the family ID I’ve used in each individual.

The database records can be indexed for multiple individuals.  These individuals can be sorted/viewed by last name, first name, ID #…

You can also link to these records digital images of source documentation or website links (I prefer to make digital PDFs of website data so if the website in question permanently disappears, I still have a copy of the data in storage)

I also use their free online family tree to post some of my older brick walls, hoping to find that little flashing leaf leading me to that elusive record that will give the breakthrough I’ve been searching for.

Check it out at www.ancestry.com or www.ancestry.ca. They are both the same site, but the site will try to direct you to either the US or Canada site depending on where your computer IP geographically maps you.

The FamilySearch.org website is also valuable with an online catalog of sources that can be rented from Salt Lake City, downloadable forms, indexed transcribed records. And growing more valuable as they undertake the huge project of transcribing all the records they possess – microfilm, microfiche, books…  I’ve used the new pilot project to view census records that I would usually have to pay a fee to view on sites like Ancestry.com