Genealogy
September 4, 2021
I’ve been working with some families lately, helping them with their genealogical research. I love to help them explore the historical context of their ancestor’s lives and the question usually comes up about how to share their trees with other family members. I’ve worked with a few different methods to share. One client wrote out the history of each branch and we created a beautiful video where she read the history which was interwoven with lots of photos and elements that showed the descendants of each branch. I’ve also done several genealogy book. Some have trees in them which can be difficult if yours is particularly large. But there are ways to display each branch in a section and then focus in on each node. Adding photos, stories and other things to describe each ancestor provides a lot of interesting information. And of course an actual tree in the form […]
October 11, 2020
My grandmother, Esther Kronenberg, is in the front row, the third on the left from the center gentleman in a dark suit. I’ve seen this photo 100 times. My dad put a sticky note with an arrow over the class, pointing to his mother’s head. Bronx High School, graduating class of 1922. Today was the first day I have really given some consideration to what that meant for her and her family. Esther was the first generation in her family born in the United States. She was born in 1904. Her father was a shoemaker from Koden Poland. My father told me that he was a learned man. Perhaps not formally educated, but always had his nose in a book. Esther’s mother Anna was a housewife, no education at all, guided by superstition and concern about the “evil eye.” According to my father, she was frequently found throwing away or […]
May 1, 2019
Around 10 years ago, I scanned all of my parents’ photographs for them. It was a huge project which I did at my dad’s request. My company Legacy Multimedia was beginning to do some archival projects and I wanted to do this for my parents but also as a way of experimenting with different scanning and archiving techniques as I worked out a process for clients. And I did it all wrong. I’m not going to go into the list of mistakes that I made but there were many. Over time, I organized and re-organized the structure of the archive and at one point, had one of my employees work on it for a few weeks; sorting out duplicates, and breaking up some photos that were in large page scans. What I meant to do was to sit down and finally get everything sorted out correctly, re-scan the badly scanned […]
April 17, 2019
I’ve been doing family genealogy for a long time but have only dug into the DNA aspect of it a couple of years ago. During these years, I’ve learned about chromosomes, centimorgans, MtDNA, Y-DNA, autosomal DNA, triangulation, phasing and some other aspects of testing. I’ve learned a lot. But what I want to share with you falls more into the category of DNA etiquette. It WILL help you find descendants of your ancestors by making it easier for others to figure out how they might be related to you and make contacting you easier. I have spent a fair amount of time looking for my own descendants of ancestors as well as helping others learn about their matches. And over time, what I have learned is that most people are not making it easy to connect. It’s okay if you don’t know anything, and it’s important to tell people that […]