When Your 2nd Great Grandfather Steals Bacon

One of the great things about genealogy research is discovering the ridiculous and dumb things that your ancestors and relatives managed to do.  Or were they quite ridiculous for the times in which that ancestor lived?  Today, one would say stealing bacon is a pretty stupid thing to do.

Getting Started – Family Tree 101

So now that you have a reasonable expectation of what expect as you embark on your journey, let’s discuss the tools that you will need to actually construct a family and the information and components that make a family tree. I strongly suggest that you invest in family tree software that can create a GEDCOM file. Everyone is going to have an opinion on what you should use. Ultimately driving factors such as cost, functionality and ease of use will be your primary determining factors in selecting software.

We Share X-DNA But No Autosomal DNA...Now What?

Just like autosomal DNA, there's no rhyme or reason why certain family members receive specific segments or specific amounts and others don't.  X-DNA isn't exactly useless, but it kind of sort of is without autosomal DNA.  So what do you do when you have a match in which you share X-DNA but no autosomal DNA?

Tracing Your Family Roots: Expectation & Level Setting

So you want to dig deeper and discover more about your family and figure out what it all means in the grand scheme of things.  Great!  This means you'll need to construct a family tree.  You have to start somewhere and now is just as good as a time as any to get started.  This particular post will help you level set as well as give you a gauge as to what you should expect when embarking on a constructing a family tree.

So here are some things you need to know and some things that you need to consider before constructing a family tree and tracing your roots:

Where's Uncle Eddie

I came by my love of family history honestly.  My grandmother was kind of obsessed with relatives, particularly the dead ones.  I think she had seen so much death in her life, outliving my grandfather and half of her children, her siblings as well as other relatives and friends that death and dead people weren’t far from her mind.  As child I spent my summers with my maternal grandmother and my aunt Cleo and almost every week there was talk of this relative or that relative. 

How I Met My 4th Cousin

Modern technology is an awesome thing!  It's given people the ability to connect and form relationships with anyone on the globe. One of the most fascinating aspects about genealogy research is that although we are searching for the dead, we often come across the living.  It was March 2011 and I had been building my tree and doing a little research on Ancestry.com.  A hint appeared.  Normally I would just look at the little shaky green leaf and ignore the hint.  Most of the time the hints were regurgitated information or family trees that had family members who had the same or similar names as my family members.  Well that day in March I opted to click on the leaf for my 3rd great grandparents Charles and Cynthia Hendricks.

8 Years and I'm Just Now Blogging

Okay, so I really do not have an excuse or at least a valid excuse as to why I haven't blogged about my 8 year journey tracing my family roots. So this year I've decided was THE year to get up off of my ass and actually blog. How hard can it be, right? Well after mulling over all the various free platforms, I opted to use Blogger. Setting up this blog site wasn't exactly a piece a cake and it's always going to be under construction because I am my own worst enemy when it comes to design. So it is officially Spring 2015 (although I can't get a 70 degree day to stick) and I am officially a genealogy blogger! YAAAAAAAY! So my hope is to chronicle my journey moving forward and provide some insight of my past activities while making friends along the way.