Darned Carcinogenic Names

We depend upon records to reveal the “truth” about the past. Yet sometimes records have anomalies. Some are amusing or humorous. Some are interesting or weird. Some are peculiar or suspicious. Some are infuriating, or downright laughable. Records say the darnedest things!

What parent names their child after some kind of cancer?!

• Brain Cancer
• Lung Cancer
• Prostate Cancer
• Skin Cancer
• Cancer de la Laringe (larynx)
• Cancer de la Matriz (uterus)
• Cancer Primitivo del Higado (Primitive Cancer of the Liver)
• Cancer del Riñon (kidney)

Yes, records say the darnedest things!

Darned Undertaking

We depend upon records to reveal the “truth” about the past. Yet sometimes records have anomalies. Some are amusing or humorous. Some are interesting or weird. Some are peculiar or suspicious. Some are infuriating, or downright laughable. Records say the darnedest things!

Kenneth H. Rich was the undertaker. He was also the decedent. Weird.

After 30 years as an undertaker, Kenneth retired just 7 weeks before his doctor started treating him for interstitial nephritis. Less than 6 weeks later, Kenneth was gone. His son, Robert, took over the family business. Six years after his father’s passing, Robert had his first born son. He named him Kenneth.

Reader Naomi Martineau shared this record with me. Thanks, Naomi!

Image credit: Ancestry.com.

Funny AncestryDNA Commercial Parody

A coworker alerted me to this video from the CBC show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes. It is titled, “"Have you ever questioned your family’s ancestry?"

The Old Find A Grave to Live On?

The specter of a new design for Find A Grave has many a Graver rolling over in his grave photos. As I reported earlier, Ancestry showed the new Find A Grave website design at RootsTech. (See “The New and Improved Find A Grave Shown at #RootsTech.”) Users have provided a variety of responses. I will publish some of them on Monday.

As the feelings continue to rise, rumors have started surfacing of the chance that the old design for the Find A Grave website might live on. A Chinese-language website reports that a student at 愚人节大學 University has created a website that is indistinguishable from the current Find A Grave website. (See “Find A Grave to Live On.” Warning: the article is in Chinese and Google does a terrible job translating it. What follows is a cleaned up version of the Google translation for a portion of the article.)

Student Yu Renjie said, compared to what you imagine, the distinguished website to meet the modern standards, while still maintaining the old appearance, it is easier. The student's website even complies with Ancestry's global intentions and has been available in English or Chinese. While the original "Find Grave" site requires a lot of scrolling on a small smartphone screen, the student site can be seamlessly integrated and automatically slide the view into the view as needed. Students want to sell their work to their ancestors. [I think they meant, “to Ancestry.”]

Ever the skeptic, this development seemed too good to be true. It all became clear, though, when I translated the name of the university into English. So… What do you think? Too good to be true?

Credits: Headstone image, public domain from pixabay. Chinese calligraphy and engraving produced by http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/seal.html. Image manipulation by the author.

Monday Mailbox: Oops

A user posted a comment about my article, “Darned Records: I’m My Own Grandmother.” It appears we’ve been had.

Dear Ancestry Insider,

I regret to inform you that the Florida Sun Post is a fake or satirical news publication: http://www.dailydot.com/irl/florida-man-granddaughter-marry-hoax/.

Signed,
Joe Lowry

Dear Joe,

Oops.

Signed,
The Ancestry Insider

---

Dear Ancestry Insider,

I have been busy of late and decided after reading [“FamilySearch Adds 141 Million New Record Hints] article that for a few hours today I would have some fun and go back to the LDS site but alas they wouldn't let me sign on so I tried to make a new membership and password and they said I was already a member and to please sign in but when I tried to sign it it said I wasn't a member and would I please create a new password and so I did and on and on and on until I finally thought they got it and a sign came on that said, "timed-Out." I do hope that others don't have as much trouble as I had or they will lose more members than they will ever gain. Trick or treat?

Signed,
Connie

Dear Connie,

If it is still happening, send me your username and email address and I will look into it.

Account management is one of the most difficult aspects of FamilySearch. In fairness, account management is difficult on many websites. Mastering the art of username and password recovery is a good skill to have. For many websites I use infrequently, I don’t bother writing down a password; I just use password recovery every time I use the website. To recover a username or password, you do need to have access to email. And unless you are on your own computer, you will need your email username and password.

I helped a lady in the Family History Library one day. She was in your same predicament, but she could not remember her email password. If you forget both your email password and website password, it can be hard recovering access to that website.

Signed,
---tai

GEDCOM Lives!

For many years users have hoped for a GEDCOM standard extension that would enable the reliable transfer among genealogy programs of sources, citations, and media. Users and vendors alike have looked to FamilySearch to spearhead a community effort to upgrade GEDCOM to do just those things. Several attempts by just the community, and several attempts by just FamilySearch, have failed. Now, after several missteps, FamilySearch and a team of vendors together have successfully extended the standard and it looks like it will finally succeed. FamilySearch and a small group of vendors will announce today (or may have already done so by the time you read this) the GEDCOM-2016 standard.

GEDCOM was created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and released to the genealogical community in 1984. It was actively supported and updated for a number of years. After version 5.5 in January 1996 support waned. GEDCOM.org was abandoned and the GEDCOM specification was removed from FamilySearch.org. FamilySearch discontinued testing and registering compliant products.

Since then, FamilySearch has made several missteps in trying to replace the GEDCOM standard. They attempted to produce GEDCOM 6.0 in 2001 and started pushing GEDCOM X in recent years. I think both were pretty much new standards in GEDCOM clothing. They were much more complicated than the original and were expensive to implement. Neither FamilySearch nor other vendors ever produced products that would import or export GEDCOM 6.0 or GEDCOM X files. Version 5.5 remains the de facto standard 20 years later.

That is, until now. With GEDCOM-2016, FamilySearch has returned to their roots (so to speak). It is totally downwards compatible.

“These extensions were so straight forward, Mike and I implemented them all last Wednesday," said Bruce Bush, developer and owner of Enchanted Roots. “By keeping the data model simple, they finally came up with something anyone can implement.”

GEDCOM has human-readable lines of information beginning with four letter keywords like BIRT, DEAT, CHIL, HUSB, and WIFE for birth, death, child, husband, and wife. The new standard adds to these, as well as bringing back the compatibility testing and vendor registration.

In addition to addressing the lack of standards regarding sources, citations, and media, GEDCOM-2016 adds support for DNA.

The author of the “Dear Aunt Pearl” website has been a driving force in user efforts to establish GEDCOM extensions to address these needs. When I asked her opinion on this newest attempt, she said, "This is great. This is the GEDCOM extension that genealogists have been waiting for for a long, long time. I am so grateful that FamilySearch has stepped up to make this happen. Inclusion of DNA results is icing on the cake. This is wonderful."

Some of the newly added four-character GEDCOM codes are:

• CITE - citation using specified template compatible with Evidence Explained.
  
• DNA – raw DNA data
  
• DROP - link to shared multimedia file in Dropbox
  
• GOO – link to shared multimedia file on Google
  
• EVER - link to shared file in Evernote
  
• AWS - link to shared file in the Amazon cloud
  
• STRIP - remove source citations
  
• FAKE – perform a bad merge
  
• DUPL – add duplicate to FamilySearch Family Tree
  
• FEES - send to external website where fees may apply
  
• RT - register for RootsTech
  
• JPEG - remove details from photographs
  
• RAND - randomly change the user interface on FamilySearch.org
  
• SSN - commit identity theft
  
• SALT - change all locations to Salt Lake City
  
• FOOL - change all dates to April 1

Are there other codes you’d like to see implemented?

The Water Bottle Dream

I had a dream that my dishwasher deformed my Ancestry.com water bottle. Do you believe in dreams?

Ancestry Insider Caught at #NGS2015GEN

Someone snapped a picture of the Ancestry Insider at the 2015 annual conference of the National Genealogical Society. I was investigating the “Preserve the Pensions” money raising campaign. Someone caught me reading their brochure:

The Federal of Genealogical Societies is raising money from genealogists like you and me to have pension applications from the War of 1812 digitized and published for free access online.

It’s a worthy cause. Check it out at http://www.preservethepensions.org.

Astonishing New iPhone App: Lick It DNA

“There’s an app for that.” Now there is an app that will perform a DNA test for you. It is free. It only takes seconds. And no additional hardware is needed. All you do is lick your phone. Really. I remember being similarly dismissive when someone told me there was an app to take your pulse. But that turned out to be true, too. Well, prepare to be astonished.

Lick It DNA is a recently released iPhone 6 app from Tongue In Cheek Swab, Inc. “It is easy to say that this is the most innovative app, ever,” said company president, Averyll Nabal. All you do is lick the screen, wait several moments, and the app gives you a view into your deep ancestry.

But you must have an iPhone 6. Nabal happened upon the idea when she started using the iPhone 6’s Retina HD Display with Apple’s new ResearchKit. ResearchKit is an open source technology Apple developed to encourage the creation of medical apps on the iPhone. (See “Now Everybody Can Do Their Part to Advance Medical Research” at https://www.apple.com/researchkit/.) She realized the display could be used to read a person’s DNA.

The breakthrough is not so unbelievable once you understand the chemistry. Sequences of nucleotides in our DNA are programmed to produce proteins. While DNA nucleotides are too small to resolve without expensive lab equipment, proteins are much larger. Different protein molecules have fairly unique electromagnetic signatures because protein molecules are asymmetric. If you can identify the proteins, you can deduce the DNA that produced them.

That’s where the iPhone 6 HD Retina display comes in. When you touch a capacitive touch screen, the phone registers differences in electromagnetic fields at each pixel of the display. Previous displays lacked the resolution to accurately detect something as small as a protein molecule. But the iPhone 6 has the necessary resolution and ResearchKit provides access to pixel-by-pixel measurements of the electromagnetic field.

A big hurdle faced by Lick It DNA was starting its database from scratch. It takes a large database for a DNA company to accurately predict deep ethnicity. The app description warns, “During our beta phase, ethnicity estimates may change each time you run the app. Over time, your results will get better and better. Check back often. As an early adopter, your results will always be free.”

“We’re getting over 5,000 downloads a day so it won’t be long before we top a million samples,” said Nabal.

The app utilizes the phone’s built in GPS to determine the location of the person providing the sample. I’m guessing that they use that data to try and determine what DNA belongs with what place. If that’s true, they may have problems with highly mobile populations, mass migrations, and melting pot localities. And they are going to need a really large database from all over the world. But at the rate they are going, that just may happen.

I showed the app to a friend, Scott Ward, who knows a lot about biochemistry. He was not impressed.

“The resolution of these displays is still not enough to detect any but the longest of STRs (short tandem repeats),” Scott said. STRs are repeated sequences of DNA nucleotides called markers. Each marker has a value indicating the number of times the sequence is repeated. The closer two people are related, the more alike their markers are. “To be big enough to be detected, a marker would have to have a value of at least 20 and there are few genealogically useful markers that long. This will never be anything more than a toy.”

Still, you can’t beat free. Download the app from the Apple iTunes Store.

No Posterity? Buy Some!

I regularly get chided for my failure to proofread. I guess I’m not the only one blind to my own typos. A friend forwarded this email to me.

Gosh! I’ll say that’s miraculous!

Darned Records: When You Let Gollum Index

You remember Gollum, don't you?

“Yes, precious, we hates little hobbitses.”

That's the one.

 

This is what happens when you let Gollum index:

Source: “United States Census, 1880,” index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MCVH-35X : accessed 1 January 2015), William L We-Hates, Virginia, Union, Dakota Territory; from p. 8 (handwritten), lines 26-32, NARA microfilm publication T9 (National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.: n.d.), roll 115; FHL microfilm 1,254,115.

While this is an obvious indexing error, most are not so easily discernable. You’ve heard me say it before. Always check the image!

Darned Gollum!

Thank you, Larry Webster Turner, for sharing this example.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

I had to laugh. I hadn’t even noticed.

A couple of days ago I was walking through the lobby of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building where the headquarters of FamilySearch are located. A magnificent Christmas tree stretches from ground to the chandelier of the magnificent, two-story lobby. A family member turned to me and said,

“The person who decorated the bottom half of that tree should have coordinated with the person who decorated the top!”

Do you think FamilySearch was trying to send a subtle message as to what happens to your tree when you’re cavalier about proving intergenerational kinship? <smile>

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all!

P.S. To see what Mormons think of Christmas, watch a touching, three minute video at http://www.mormon.org/christmas titled “He Is the Gift.”

Dumbfinding Census Enumerator

We depend upon records to reveal the “truth” about our pasts. Yet sometimes records have anomalies. Some are amusing or humorous. Some are interesting or weird. Some are peculiar or suspicious. Some are infuriating, even downright laughable.

Yes, “Records Say the Darnedest Things.”

In 2000 the census showed that 12% of Chautauqua County, New York was Swedish. Fortunately, 93.0% of the county spoke English.¹ The census enumerator wasn’t so lucky in 1870.²

Obviously, the enumerator didn’t understand patronymics. The children of Swedes Can’t Talk should have had surname Swedeson and Swedesdotter. The neighbor’s children would have been Moreswedeson and Moreswedesdotter.

You are dumb if you can’t speak. You’re not dumb or dumb if you can’t speak another’s language. But if the enumerator finds you can’t speak his language, are you dumbfounded?

Darned dumbfinding enumerator.

---

Sources

     1.  Various authors, “Chautauqua County, New York,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chautauqua_County,_New_York&oldid=624976731 : 10 September 2014, 18:21).
     2. 1870 U.S. Census, Chautauqua County, population schedule, Busti, p. 36, dwellings 341-2, families 309-310; digital image, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-267-11082-119802-12 : accessed 4 October 2014), New York > Chautauqua > Busti > Image 36 of 48.

Darned Census Enumerators: Harmonica Shea

We depend upon records to reveal the “truth” about our pasts.

Yet sometimes records have anomalies.
Some are amusing or humorous.
Some are interesting or weird.
Some are peculiar or suspicious.
Some are infuriating, even downright laughable.

Yes, “Records Say the Darnedest Things.”

Harmonica Shea

Dear Ancestry Insider,

My aunt was named Regina Monica Shea. She didn't use Regina and signed herself  “R. Monica.” The 1900 US Census for Lawrence, MA lists her as “HARMONICA SHEA.”

mlamkin

That’s funny. That poor census enumerator.  The informant probably said “R Monica” and the enumerator heard “Harmonica.”

Interestingly, there really is a “Harmonica Shea” (although it is a nickname). You can find him in the Ancestry.com collection, “U.S. School Yearbooks, 1880-2012.”

Darned Alien Ancestors

We depend upon records to reveal the “truth” about our pasts.

Yet sometimes records have anomalies.
Some are amusing or humorous.
Some are interesting or weird.
Some are peculiar or suspicious.
Some are infuriating, even downright laughable.

Yes, “Records Say the Darnedest Things.”

Records Say the Darnedest Things: Darned Alien Ancestors

Are you one of those people who feel like your ancestor must have come from another planet? One of my readers found evidence of his alien ancestry in the 1940 census:

Darned alien ancestors!

Ancestry Insider Photographed at FGS Conference

A reader caught this photo of me at the recent Federation of Genealogical Societies conference:

New readers may not be aware that I am the Wilson of genealogy bloggers. Diane Haddad, the Genealogy Insider at Family Tree Magazine, started the tradition when she published this photograph of me:

Diane Haddad, “Secret Genealogy Blogger Revealed! (Partially),” Genealogy Insider: Family Tree Magazine(http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/insider/2009/01/11/SecretGenealogyBloggerRevealedPartially.aspx : 11 January 2009).

Here are some other photos of me, several with famous people:

There are also pictures of me on other bloggers’ websites:

DearMYRTLE, “AncestryInsider makes appearance at RootsTech 2011,” Dear MYRTLE (http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2011/02/ancestryinsider-makes-appearance-at.html : 13 February 2011).
Stephen J. Danko, “The Son of Blogger,” Steve’s Genealogy Blog (http://stephendanko.com/blog/4897 : 29 June 2009).

Scientists Discover Oldest Citation Ever

Photo by Fabricio Cardenas

In the Abri de la Madeleine archeological site of southwest France, scientists think they have discovered the oldest citation ever found.

“We were actually evaluating a possible connection between the Magdalenian culture and the earlier Aurignacian,” said paleontologist Jean-Marie Hillaire. “As we compared and contrasted artifacts at La Madeleine with those at Chauvet [Cave in France], we were excited to find what we thought might be the same written thought in both locations. However, because the information documented an event of the solar calendar, there was the real possibility that the correspondence was coincidental. But the more we studied the two, the more convinced we became that the two were connected. The breakthrough came when we were able to deduce that some symbols at La Madeleine are a quote. Once we knew we were working with a quote, it was relatively easy to spot the name of the author in both locations.”

They, literally, had discovered the first source citation.

“This discovery proves, once again, the need to cite one’s sources,” said Kate L. Turabian, creator of the Turabian citation guide. “Until a people learn to civilly build upon the ideas of those who have come before them, they will never develop the discipline necessary for modern thought.”

Coincidentally enough, the quoted information—the information about an event in the solar calendar—is best translated into English as “Happy April Fool’s Day.”

Family Tree Rhapsody

This video appeared on YouTube Wednesday. This is funny, must see genealogy.

If you like Bohemian Rhapsody, so much the better.

Hat’s off to FamilySearch engineer, Randy Wilson, and his talented family.