It wasn't long after I had written, last Tuesday, about using F.A.N. Club research techniques to ferret out who, among Nicholas Snider's neighbors in Adams County, Pennsylvania, might have been fellow immigrants from Germany, when I received an offer I couldn't refuse. There on my screen was a banner posted from Ancestry.com, offering one month's free trial to their Pro Tools. Could I use that to help pursue my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor and his F.A.N. Club? You betcha.
Granted, I had long thought about springing for Ancestry.com's Pro Tools. I had first heard about their Pro Tools development from DNA researchers, who mainly focused on Ancestry's "Enhanced Shared Matches" mainly because it provides a research boost similar to the tools we once had at 23andMe before their security woes initiated their long spiral downwards (at least from a user's perspective).
But listening to fellow genealogical society members who at the first had sprung for the additional subscription cost at Ancestry gave me pause. Some felt the tree checker and accuracy ratings were more stress-inducing than helpful. The bottom line was something like this one friend's sentiment: "Well, I'll try it out for a while, just to see what it's like, but then cancel the subscription." For me, that equated to a wait and see message.
Granted, the boost to DNA matching is a big plus. I can see how some of those multiple dozens of DNA cousins who never made the cut to ThruLines recognition could still be pencilled in to my trees, simply by examining shared matches' strength of relationship to key known relatives among my DNA cousins. My half-brother's daughter, for instance, makes an automatic connector to my paternal line, as does my mother's cousin to my maternal grandmother's line, leading to clues I otherwise would not have, since Pro Tools offers a way to see shared matches and determine how closely they might be related, not only to me, but to each other.
But it is not only DNA for which that new Ancestry tool set catches my research imagination. Their Pro Tools include a network creation option. Granted, that option is still in a beta phase, so it might not be available to every subscriber who opts for the additional cost of Ancestry Pro Tools. But here's what I see, specifically pertinent to this month's research project, finding family connections for my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider. I want to know: for the brief time his family lived in Adams County, Pennsylvania, after arriving from Germany, did he live with relatives? Did he travel with a F.A.N. Club or cluster of people known to him from life in his native Germany?
I've been exploring possible connections to the other Snyders listed in Adams County for the one census in which Nicholas appeared: the 1810 census. Now that I'm using Pro Tools, Ancestry.com has made a provision for just that: a work space for creating networks of neighbors or associates who might not turn out to be family.
In other words, I now have a genealogical sandbox to play in as I dabble with the neighborly connections Nicholas Snider and his wife and children may have made during the decade in which they stopped in Pennsylvania before moving on to their final dwelling place in Perry County, Ohio. I've already created one network which I've labeled Snyders at Conewago Chapel, the church where some of Nicholas' children were baptized. And I'll use that network sandbox once again to explore Snyder listings throughout that 1810 census for all of Adams County, not just the Mount Pleasant location where Nicholas was enumerated.
Starting this week, I'll have a month to decide whether it's yay or nay for Ancestry.com's Pro Tools. And I have less than a week remaining to work on this Twelve Most Wanted project for April, so it's really time to get busy and see whether Pro Tools can give me the boost I need to build out Nicholas Snider's F.A.N. Club network.
No comments:
Post a Comment