The Stuff You Find When You're Looking for Something Else

Sometimes, ya just need a Wordless Wednesday.

Yes, I know today is Thursday. But yesterday was a rough day. I wasn't sure there were enough words left in me to make an adequate post.

Handily, I remembered something I had just stumbled upon while looking for something else: a CD with old photos from my husband's Tully ancestors.

Remember that Family Tree Maker program I just loaded onto my computer—the updated version to bring me into the twenty-first century? Well, when I was gifted with that CD, I had tucked another CD into the folder with it, to remind me that I needed to load that one onto the computer, as well.

That was then. This is now—a time when I apparently no longer remember what was on that CD labeled "Tully Photos."

All I could think of was a trip to Chicago, years ago, where my husband thought the best way to capture those near-antique photos of hundred-year-old family wedding parties was to use his digital camera to snap a picture of the picture. The photo frames would have been too fragile to disassemble carefully enough to return everything to its former condition after scanning. We settled for next best thing.

Where were those photos now? Apparently not, as it turned out, on that CD.

Dashed were the hopes of sharing some really neat family photos. Perhaps that is a silent nudge to remind us it is high time to make plans for another trip back to Chicago. Who knows.

It is also a reminder that often, when you're on a mission to find something else, you may get a bonus surprise.

What was on the CD, you ask? Oh, they were Tully family photos, all right. But this was a collection you've already seen—at least, if you were a regular here, back in 2011, when I told about the surprise special package I received and the photograph-scanning path it set me on. A treasure trove too precious to lose, I had made myself a backup copy.

Maybe soon—and on a Wednesday, this time!—I'll uncover the secret stash where I stored those Chicago wedding photos so I can share those with you, too. And all the other items found on my way to locate this file, too.

 

Just the Push a Procrasinator Needs

Sometimes, it just takes time to get the ball rolling. Especially for procrastinators.

It took the effective date of a mid-December announcement to push me to take action: Ancestry.com was discontinuing support of its once-popular program, Family Tree Maker. The date—December 31, 2015—was the last day a new customer could buy the product. Despite the promise that Ancestry would provide support for the program for an additional year, that date somehow stuck in my mind.

Of course, being a procrastinator, I missed that deadline.

Not to worry, though. In thanks for participating in a focus group exercise at a conference a couple years ago, I had been gifted with a much more up-to-date version of Family Tree Maker than my old clunker at home.

You may not be surprised to learn that I never had uploaded the program to my computer.

Well, last night was the night. After all, we're already six days past the deadline. Even a procrastinator can feel the urgency of the moment. I downloaded Family Tree Maker 2014. And uploaded all my family trees from my Ancestry account.

And live to tell of it.

The virtue of that move—at least according to those who use the program on a regular basis—is that I can now capture all the graphics of the documents linked to each supported fact in my Ancestry trees, and keep them resident on my own computer, without having to oversee the process of retrieving each document, one by one, on my own.

I rather like that little convenience.

Perhaps there is something about the cleaning and organizing ambience brought on by a brisk new month in a brand new year. It's not quite the same thing as the spring cleaning urge—too cold for that—but the organizing urge seems to blend well with the post-holiday clean-up.

Of course, along with those new tools from GEDmatch downloaded the other day, the reconfigured genealogical database manager will come in handy as I head to the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy next week for more training about genetic genealogy. In addition to more snow and less degrees than I'm used to in "sunny" California, the Salt Lake City experience will provide ample opportunity to put some head knowledge to practical use, and I want to have all the tools at my disposal during next week's class to maximize that experience.

So yes, better late than never—at least as far as class time is concerned. There are just some things you don't want to show up to class without.

Past Performance is no Guarantee of Future Failure

Perhaps I've been paying too much attention to those somber investment ad warnings. I take such cautions to heart.

Of course, it doesn't help when the sentiment crosses over to an uneasy mix of technophobia and computer-aided genetic genealogy analysis. I've had priors for computer stuff going abysmally wrong. Nevertheless, I held my breath (and my husband's hand) and pushed the button. My task was to download my autosomal DNA results—and X-DNA data file, but only in that order!—from Family Tree DNA, and then upload each file to my newly-established account at GEDmatch.

For some reason, my computer didn't explode. And, best I can tell, I now have the complete range of my readout from Family Tree DNA's autosomal DNA results uploaded to my new account at GEDmatch.

Of course, that doesn't mean I get to play with possibilities quite yet. I noticed, after the several minute wait while the first stage of the upload was processing—the instructions warned it could take five to ten minutes to complete; mine took sixteen; I headed to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich after finishing chromosome six—that the final line said it "may take a couple of days" for batch processing to finish. By that time, I'll have enough inventory to open a sandwich shop, if the nervous energy doesn't persuade me to eat them all, first.

After the uploads were completed, the first wait was for "tokenization." Whatever that is, it was supposed to take another twenty minutes. Fine. Have another sandwich.

Then, mired in all the instructions, blue-inked commentary and red-caps warnings screaming at me, I noticed there was a final line to heed:

We suggest you use the "DNA File Diagnostic Utility" on your Gedmatch.com account home page to verify your FTDNA upload.

Oh. Yeah, maybe I better follow through on this one additional step. A student genetic genealogist's work is never done. Checking, though, simply told me what I already knew. First, my kit was uploaded. Second—though I still don't know what that means—it was tokenized. Third—oh, what a surprise—my kit has not yet completed the batch process, so I can't play around with the one-to-many comparison resources that people are flocking to this site to use.

And, one more thing: just in case I have missed this, in the final red-letter sea of paragraphs, I was told, "no matches were found" for my kit.

Ya think?

The last paragraph of this double-check page provides instructions on how to delete my kit from the site. After all this, I scarcely think that would be foremost on my mind. 

More Toys

Just when I had thought the Christmas season was finally over, I received one more gift. Perhaps I had prematurely discounted Epiphany.

Flipping open my email, in that lazy holiday weekend sort of way, I was jolted out of my reverie by the arrival of an announcement from AncestryDNA.

That DNA test result they had promised would take them six to eight weeks to process? The one I mailed in mid December?

Yeah, that one.

They're done. I now have the results, ethnicity estimates and eighty two matches at the level of fourth cousin or closer.

Just ducky. I now have another toy er, tool to add to the genealogy toolbox.

There's only one problem with that, though: when I sent the return mail back to AncestryDNA in the middle of last month, I didn't mail just one package. There were two. And just like that time our family mailed off three passport applications with one that really, really, REALLY needed to get done quickly, guess which one didn't finish first?

I'm beginning to get that hazy déjà vu feeling.

Fortunately, my DNA sample did make it to the AncestryDNA lab about three days after my husband's did. Hopefully, that will calculate out to a three day delay in getting my results back.

What's really good about this unexpected (half of a) surprise is that, after deciding to snag that holiday sale at AncestryDNA, I realized—too late—that it would have been a wonderful thing to have the results in pocket in time for my genetic genealogy class at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. After all, we'll have an entire week's worth of classes focused specifically on how to use DNA test results for genealogical purposes.

Thus, the gift of this early arrival. It couldn't have been more perfectly timed.

Which reminds me of the one other task I had planned on completing before heading to SLIG: upload my DNA data to GEDmatch. (If that last sentence sounds like alphabet soup to you, take a peek at The Legal Genealogist Judy Russell's explanation of what GEDmatch does.) And that, in the true manner of the genealogical guinea pig that I am, I will save for a review in tomorrow's post.

   

Good Intentions

If I had been one to make New Year's resolutions, I would already have broken one. That's just how good I am...at escaping being boxed in.

There is something about the "resolutions" mentality that I just can't help but rebuff. You can call them goals. Perhaps dub them dreams. Or vision. And I'd be okay with that. But no resolutions.

"But they're all the same thing," you might protest. And I would be quick to disagree. Resolutions mean there's no backing out—no way to get around doing that very thing you've determined to do. For some perverse reason, that is exactly what conjures up that twisted obstinate something deep inside to find a way to rebel.

That certainly doesn't get the job done.

So I bank on good intentions. If they work, great. If they don't...hey, at least I have a dream. And you know what? Somehow, I stand a better chance of approaching that intention when I call it a dream than when I call it an absolutely-gotta-get-done resolution.

Then there was January first. I really had intended this year—perhaps "intend" slides perilously close to "resolution"—to get back to regularly indexing records at FamilySearch.org. And, just as I do for my bi-monthly research report, include an accountability post for how my indexing progress is going. (Of course, there is the side story of the hope that you might read and get inspired to follow suit and sign up for some indexing projects of your own.)

The only problem was, it's been a while since I last did any indexing. Like, long enough to buy a new computer. And take a year to migrate from my old one. (Did I mention I am a technology Luddite?)

That meant, of course, that I had to upload the entire indexing program on to my "new" computer. Which I did.

And nothing happened.

Who knows. Perhaps that was the very moment at which the IT gurus at FamilySearch decided to take the system down for those annoyingly inconvenient regular updates. At any rate, after installing the indexing program on my system, I got...a blank screen.

I tried everything, to no avail. Well...everything short of calling my technologically precocious daughter or her brilliant father.

Shutting down the computer, rebooting, scanning for bugs, standing on my head, batting my eyelashes: nothing worked. It was time to put the project to bed for the night.

The next morning, I was at it again. Chalk me up for foul mood number one of 2016. I don't like it when things don't work. Especially computer things.

Now, you may be wondering: "Isn't that the way things always go with computers?" Keep in mind, though, I've done indexing on my older, slower, clunkier computer with nary a problem—in the past. Generally, you can download a batch—selected at your preferred level of difficulty, even—and be done with it in a half hour. It is a logical progression, with instructions to take you, step by step, through the process. If you can read and type (with at least two fingers), you can index.

Somehow, that wasn't in the works for Indexing 2016. Not, at least, for me. This is not how I intended to start out my New Year of Good Intentions.

Eventually, I wangled my way into the indexing project for "U.S.-Illinois County Naturalization Records, 1848 to 1945." The program served up a batch that someone else had started and—apparently—run from, screaming. Lovely.

It wasn't so bad. I quickly got my bearings and soldiered through. Even went back and fixed up what had been entered incorrectly at the beginning (discarding duplicate pages).

But the one I had wanted to index was a project with a bit higher level of challenge—in a gradation of difficulty ranging from #1 to #5, this one landed safely in the middle at #3. It was for the Illinois-Chicago-Northern District Petition for Naturalization, 1906-1991. I hadn't been able to upload the batch the previous evening, nor even earlier in this attempt.

Not to worry, though. Among those good intentions is my plan to stick to a schedule of indexing a batch twice a month. To help me keep on track, I'll make an accountability post of it, here at A Family Tapestry. See how you keep me on the straight and narrow? So, if not today, I will get back to that Northern District Petition for Naturalization file, soon.

As another conqueror was reported to have famously said in history, "I shall return." 

Above: An 1897 landscape, "Snow Fall," by Russian artist Mikhail Germashev; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

A Year of New Cousins

No sooner had 2016 begun than I got one of my wishes for the new year: new cousins. An email arriving on the first day of the year, sent to me as administrator for my brother's DNA tests, introduced me to someone who recently got results back from an mtDNA test. Now, somewhere in the distant past, we know we share a common ancestor.

That is a nice appetizer, but I want the main course! After having worked with all three of the tests used in genetic genealogy—the Y-DNA test (for my husband, brother and brother-in-law), the mitochondrial DNA test, and the autosomal test—it's been no secret that my preferred tool is the autosomal test. I'm into this for tree-building, and the autosomal will be the one DNA test yielding the most practical outcomes, in my opinion.

And yet, even this most promising of the three has its down side. While it gives guidance in the close range—up to sixth cousin, as opposed to tens of thousands of years in the distant past—it doesn't divulge its secrets in a very self-organizing manner. The results may come out with predicted levels of relationship tidily arranged in catagories—second to fourth cousin, for instance, instead of fourth to distant cousin—but it still resembles a splat on the wall. There is no great dividing line, for instance, between maternal as opposed to paternal relatives. We are all in this gene pool together.

That down side means a lot of grunt work. Combing through other people's trees, trying to seek a familiar surname is one aspect of that work. But hidden behind that obvious task is the great untangling of branches of that family tree. Trying to group DNA matches into branches of the family can be very difficult at first, although thankfully, once the process gets rolling, it becomes easier through devices such as the "in common with" button at Family Tree DNA. Once a match becomes a known entity on my family tree, I can seek others with similar genetic matches. It's all a process of elimination to find each DNA match's place on the proper branch of the family tree.

Since one of my hopes for 2016 is to make more progress with these genetic genealogy tools, I'm elated to have the chance to travel to Salt Lake City this month to attend the Institute of Genealogy there. At SLIG, I'll have a week-long hands-on opportunity to apply these genetic genealogy tools to practical examples—and ply the experts with all my questions. Considering I have, in my own autosomal DNA test alone, nearly one thousand matches, to gain more expertise in manipulating the data yielded by these tools should provide a year full of connections to new cousins, indeed.

Above: "Boulevard de Clinchy," 1886 oil on canvas by French Impressionist artist, Paul Signac; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

It's a Bright New Year!

If only by its newness, the year of 2016 holds out a promise for each of us: a promise of possibilities. What becomes of those possibilities, of course, depends on what we do with the other three hundred sixty five days.

Why, yes, that would be a bonus day we get this time around the sun. Schedule that one in on February 29. We each get an extra day to catch up on our dreams.

If you've been hanging around A Family Tapestry for any amount of time, you may have realized that I'm not big on resolutions, so you won't see any of mine fly around here.

And I'm not a fan of predictions—although I have to admit an appreciation for marketing guru Seth Godin's wry handling of the customary year's-end prognostications.

But I do have dreams. And this year, I'll get even closer to touching them.

Perhaps something as elusive as that would be better called a vision. Nonprofit organizations and corporations are encouraged to have them, so why not people like you and me?

Goals can be missed, resolutions can fall by the wayside. Predictions can turn into much ado about nothing.

But dreams? No one can take away your dreams. They are yours—as long as you keep holding on to them.

Whatever your dreams are, I wish you good speed in running with them, day in and day out, this year—for it's only in the persistent chipping away at the monolith that is our life that we will carve away the excelsior to reveal its true form, realized.

And so we start: Day One.

Above: "The Magpie," 1868 oil on canvas by French Impressionist painter Claude Monet; courtesy Google Art Project via Wikipedia; in the public domain.