Archive for February, 2013

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Yesterday, Family Tree DNA announced that their 12-marker Y-DNA test, normally $99, will be only $39 for a limited time only (until February 28, 2013).  Although I typically will recommend a minimum of 37 markers to clients and readers, this is a great way to get someone’s DNA into FTDNA’s system for future upgrades.  For example, I have at least two lines of my family that I’ve been wanting to get tested, but it’s really just for curiosity’s sake rather than any pressing genealogical question.  This would be the perfect opportunity for this type of testing.

See what others have written about the sale:

• Family Tree DNA Lowers the Price of the 12-marker Y-DNA Test to $39 in Step Toward Universal Access
• 12 Marker Y DNA Test for $39

From the Press Release:

HOUSTON, Feb. 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – FamilyTreeDNA.com, the genetic genealogy arm of Gene By Gene, Ltd., is dramatically lowering the price of one of its basic Y-DNA tests to $39, making it the lowest-cost DNA test available on the market, in order to take a major step toward universal access by individuals to their personal genetic data.

By dropping the price of its basic Y-DNA test by 60 percent to $39, Family Tree DNA — the world’s largest processor of Y-DNA and full mitochondrial sequences — is working to eliminate cost as a barrier to individuals introducing themselves to the insights and knowledge to be gained from personal genetic and genomic research.

Family Tree DNA pioneered the concept of direct-to-consumer testing in the field of genetic genealogy more than a decade ago, and has processed more than 5 million discrete tests for more than 700,000 individuals and organizations since it introduced its Y-DNA test in 2000.

The test investigates specific Y-DNA locations for males that provide individuals with their haplogroup, or the deep ancestral origin of the paternal line.  In addition, it can indicate if different individuals are likely to share a common male line.

Gene By Gene is also working to lower the cost of Family Tree DNA’s comparable mtDNA test, which would be applicable to both females and males and provides data on the direct maternal line.  The company expects to unveil new pricing for this test in spring 2013.

As the sponsor DNA Workshop of “Who Do You Think You Are – Live” in London this February, Family Tree DNA expects that the reduced price test will add a great number of individuals to its already large database – the largest of its kind in the world.

“We believe the first step to unearthing your personal and family history is to better understand your DNA,” Gene By Gene President Bennett Greenspan said.  “That’s why we are continuously investing in new technology and experienced scientists at our Genomics Research Center, enabling us to conduct tests more accurately, efficiently and at lower prices.  Our $39 Y-DNA test is just the latest example of how we are working to help individuals gain access to their genetic data.”

Customer Inquiries
Individuals interested in Family Tree DNA’s $39 Y-DNA test, or any of its ancestral testing products, can visit www.familytreedna.com for more information.

About Gene By Gene, Ltd.
Founded in 2000, Gene By Gene, Ltd. provides reliable DNA testing to a wide range of consumer and institutional customers through its four divisions focusing on ancestry, health, research and paternity.  Gene By Gene provides DNA tests through its Family Tree DNA division, which pioneered the concept of direct-to-consumer testing in the field of genetic genealogy more than a decade ago.  Gene by Gene is CLIA registered and through its clinical-health division DNA Traits offers regulated diagnostic tests.  DNA DTC is the Research Use Only (RUO) division serving both direct-to-consumer and institutional clients worldwide.  Gene By Gene offers AABB certified relationship tests through its paternity testing division, DNA Findings. The privately held company is headquartered in Houston, which is also home to its state-of-the-art Genomics Research Center.

Media Contact:
Kate Croft
for Gene By Gene, Ltd.
Casteel Schoenborn
888-609-8351
croft@csirfirm.com

SOURCE Gene By Gene, Ltd.

RELATED LINKS
http://www.genebygene.com

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A few years back, I returned from a trip to France with a stack of the typical tourist photos. My father, apparently disinterested, sat quietly as I talked my way through them. But his eyes flickered to one picture, and he leaned forward and pulled the photo toward him as he spoke. His words stunned me.

“I lived there. At the Palace of Versailles.”

I didn’t know whether or not to believe him. Dad was, after all, eighty-two, with a touch of dementia.

“I was an intelligence officer serving with General Eisenhower during World War II. My unit lived in the petite écurie, or small stable.”

With one flash of disclosure, my vision of my father shifted. The man who was a wizard with numbers and sequences, who had a passion for detail and who could see patterns from the inside-out had served as an intelligence officer. One sentence and fact gave me a new understanding of my dad — a World War II hero who I suddenly saw with new eyes.

Opening Doors to Understanding
The events in our past are the key that provides significance for our present and future. Our memories show us who we are and bring shape, focus, and purpose to our lives.

Reminiscing tells us where we fit into the master narrative of life and what our existence means. When we reminisce, we draw meaning from the past that tells us who we used to be and who we are today. Reminiscing is normal — for teenagers looking back with embarrassment on childhood memories or older adults reflecting on their past. Because reminiscing helps us learn, it also helps us adapt to change.

And reminiscing can also be a useful tool in helping us develop genealogies by drawing meaningful stories from our family members.

The Value of Reminiscing
Reminiscing can be an especially useful activity for those who are committed to collecting and preserving family stories. Reminiscing serves a number of important purposes:

1. It promotes understanding and connection among individuals and families.
2. It helps us preserve history.
3. It helps us understand our past and create significance for our present and future.

Reflecting can even help us cope with change and adapt to new environments. And when we do it collaboratively, it helps create community and broaden our understanding.

9 Tips for Reminiscing
So how can you start?

First of all, reminiscing is often successful as a group activity of five or six people. If you choose a group setting, be sure

• the room is quiet.
• everyone has equal opportunity to contribute.
• to provide objects or props to stimulate conversation.
• participants are instructed to be comfortable with pauses and silences.
• someone is assigned to record shared memories.
• confidentiality is honored.

The following tips provide a general starting place for reminiscing with elderly:

1. Ask open-ended questions that help the person remember their stories and experiences. Use photos, historical photography books, objects, or mementos to stir memories.
2. If possible, ask others to join you who may have shared the memories or similar memories during that era. Shared experiences often help others remember their own memories.
3. Ask questions that center around the person’s areas of interest and life experiences. Not all memories will be pleasant. Be sensitive to the emotional context of what is being shared and provide encouragement and reassurance. Respect the individual’s right to privacy and need for confidentiality.
4. Break down your questions into particular areas of interest: How did your family member say goodbye to loved ones during the war? What do they remember about seeing their family for the first time when they came home? Where did that take place? Where were they when they first heard the war was over? How did they feel?
5. Record what you learn and use that book, timeline, recording, video, etc. to stimulate future sessions.
6. Show an interest in your loved one’s shared memories. Body language, eye contact, and verbal affirmations indicate that we connect with the individual sharing their story and their experience.
7. Make reflective comments and ask meaningful and appropriate questions.
8. Empathize sensitively, especially if your loved one relates painful emotions.
9. Respond positively to both verbal and non-verbal attempts to communicate.

Reminiscing can help family members connect cross-generationally as you explore common threads of your shared stories. No matter where you may be in your exploration of ancestry, reminiscing can provide keys to growth within your family and your community.

Shelly Beach, MRE, is an expert on Caring.com, the leading online destination for caregivers seeking information and support as they care for aging parents, spouses, and other loved ones. Shelly answers family caregivers’ questions about spirituality and the Christian faith. She’s also the author of Precious Lord, Take My Hand: Meditations for Caregivers; Ambushed by Grace: Help and Hope on the Caregiving Journey; and It Is Well with My Soul: Meditations for Those Living with Illness, Pain, and the Challenges of Aging. For more information about spending time with older adults, see 11 Tips for a Terrific Visit With an Elderly Loved One.

 

Contributed by Shelly Beach
Caring.com Expert

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Who Do You Think You Are? Live is now upon us (22^nd – 24^thFebruary) and as always, there are lots of exciting and interesting things to see and do this year, so we wanted to let you know what we’ve got happening at the show then you can plan you day. So, grab your candy floss and toffee apples and get ready for the show.

We are bringing the Ancestry.co.uk Academy to you LIVE this year in a full live stream from The Olympia Exhibition Center in downtown London. Watch the live stream here below:

 

See the Academy Schedule for the weekend below (times shown are in GMT):

 

 

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Say you’re a blacksmith and some of your customers just might be members of the Ku Klux Klan. It takes some guts to mark their horseshoes so you can look at the tracks after a raid and finger the riders. The way Brawley Gilmore tells it—or told it in 1937—John Good had the guts.

 

 

Good’s is one of thousands of stories you can find in first-person slave narratives like this one, collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s.

You can learn how to look for the African American heroes in your family’s past at ancestry.com/africanamerican.

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• Ancestry.com has opened its AncestryDNA test to
  all US residents. From last May until now, the test was open just to Ancestry.com
  subscribers. This autosomal test analyzes more than 700,000 DNA marker locations and
  cross-references them with Ancestry.com’s catalog of DNA samples.

  The AncestryDNA test also breaks down your ethnic heritage by percentage from 20 populations.
  See the September
  2012 Family Tree Magazine for The
  Genetic Genealogist blogger Blaine Bettinger’s take on the AncestryDNA test.

• Planning that long-awaited trip to the Family
  History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City? Take note that the library will change
  its Saturday hours in April. Beginning April 13, the FHL’s Saturday operating hours
  will be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (current Saturday hours are 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.).  “This
  change is being made so that valuable staff and volunteer resources can be allocated
  to other busier times during the week that have greater patron demand,” says library
  director Don Anderson.

• The National Genealogical Society (NGS) is seeking Official Bloggers for the 2013
  Family History Conference, May 8-11 in Las Vegas. Bloggers can register
  at the NGS website to request “Official Blogger, NGS 2013 Family History Conference”
  designation.

  These bloggers will be able to use the NGS logo on their blogs and get access to the
  Media Center on the exhibit hall floor. Apply
  to be an Official Blogger for the  NGS 2013 Family History Conference here.

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As we enter the last week of Black History month, I wanted to make
sure those researching African-American roots know about this new
Value Pack of genealogy tools:  our Jump
Start Your African-American Genealogy Value Pack.


Slavery and segregation present unique obstacles to tracing African-American family
history—but finding those roots isn’t always impossible.

The books, articles and classes in this new value pack will help you formulate strategies
and uncover sources to help you deal with brick walls in African-American genealogy
research. You’ll also learn about resources that exist just for African-American ancestors.

The Jump
Start Your African-American Genealogy Value Pack contains:

• Find Your African-American Ancestors: A Beginner’s Guide
• Best African-American Genealogy Sources article download
• Best African American Genealogy Websites half-hour video class
• Reconstruction 101 for African-Americans half-hour video class 

Getting all these resources in one Value Pack means they’re yours for just $29.99
(instead of $75-plus).

Click here for more details on the Jump
Start Your African-American Genealogy Value Pack.

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No, I’m not blogging about The
Clash. I’m posting about what’s drawn some of your favorite American genealogy
bloggers across the Atlantic this week: the Who
Do You Think You Are? Live! genealogy show Feb 22-24 in London.

That’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” as in the BBC
television program that inspired the American version, which NBC cancelled after
last season (boo!).

Who Do You Think You Are? Live! is known for its high attendance (about 13,000 last
year) and large, vibrant exhibit hall. The 2013 show has more than 160 exhibitors
and sections for:

• National Archives Theater with workshops on using British
  national archives resources
• Celebrity Theater with guests from the “Who Do You Think You Are?”
  
• Photography Gallery focusing on old family photos (and featuring our own Photo
  Detective and Family
  Photo Detective book author Maureen A. Taylor)
• Military Pavilion where experts from museums display artifacts and answer military
  research questions
• Ask the Experts area for 20-minute consultations with genealogy pros
• DNA workshop area

The British Society of Genealogists also
is offering family history workshops.

We’ll bring you conference-related news announcements, as well as Maureen’s reports
on the Photography Gallery.

Feeling left out? Don’t: There’s no need to spring for an airline ticket, book a hotel
or wear holes in your walking shoes to attend our Winter
2013 Virtual Genealogy Conference—it also takes place this weekend, but at a computer
near you. You can view 15 video classes, interact with instructors and your fellow
exhibitors, and open up a swag bags of genealogy goodies, all while sporting your
bunny slippers. Click
here for more information.

The Virtual
Genealogy Conference is sponsored by

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And so we continue our peeks inside the video courses you can
watch if you attend the Family Tree University Winter
2013 Virtual Genealogy Conference, taking place this weekend, Feb. 22-24.

Here’s Family Tree Magazine contributing
editor David A. Fryxell with a scoop on his class Making the Most of Mocavo (Mocavo being
a genealogy search engine that also offers records and lets you upload your tree and
genealogy documents):

My presentation will walk you through getting the most out of Mocavo, which bills
itself as “the world’s largest genealogy search engine.” Like Google for genealogy,
it searches sites containing more than 6 billion indexed names; unlike Google, though,
Mocavo focuses strictly on sites with genealogy information. Mocavo also offers its
own specialized collections of digitized books, most notably 3.5 million yearbook
pages, and family trees and documents uploaded by its users.

Beyond the ins and outs of search, though, we’ll also explore uploading trees and
your own photos and documents to Mocavo. Once your tree is online, Mocavo will begin
scouring for “Smart Tree” suggested matches and sending you alerts based on your tree
and your saved searches.

But trees aren’t the only things you can upload to Mocavo, which does all the dirty
work of making documents searchable—by you and other researchers. Uploading to Mocavo
is also a handy way of storing your family-history finds “in the cloud.”

We’ll also look at Mocavo’s mobile app for iOS and Android, which lets you view your
documents on the go. When you search using the mobile app, too, those searches get
saved for the next time you login on the Mocavo website. You probably didn’t know
Mocavo could do so much. After my presentation, you’ll be a Mocavo pro!

Register
for the Winter 2013 Virtual Genealogy Conference here.

See these guest posts from other Winter 2013 Virtual Genealogy Conference instructors:

• Genealogical
  Cold Cases: A Step-by-Step Process with Lisa Louise Cooke
• Simple
  Tips for Solid Source Citations with Sunny Jane Morton  
• Things
  You Didn’t Know Your Genealogy Software Could Do and Using Irish Censuses, both with
  Rick Crume
  

The Virtual
Genealogy Conference is sponsored by

Surname Forum Activity
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if you are still looking, I would be interested in more. My grandfather was a joseph manley born in 1893. I think his mothers name was malinda. Grandpa married Bessie Pottenger and had several children, including my mother norma. the 1930 census listed some of the children’s name as Bundey instead of Manley… if you can give me more leads, I will share more information…. any help would be appreciated.
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Wouldn’t it be fun to review detailed proposals about new genealogy projects and be able to provide funding to support those projects that you think are especially worthwhile?

Crowdfunding might be one way to do just that.  For those not familiar with “crowdfunding,” it is essentially a way for people to contribute a varying degree of money to a project they are interested in, usually in exchange for a special perk.  Wikipedia describes crowdfunding as:

Crowd funding or crowdfunding (alternately crowd financing, equity crowdfunding, or hyper funding) describes the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowd funding is used in support of a wide variety of activities, including disaster relief, citizen journalism, support of artists by fans, political campaigns, startup company funding, movie or free software development, inventions development and scientific research.

Some of the more popular crowdfunding platforms already in existence are Kickstarter and indiegogo, among many others.  One of the advantages of crowdfunding is that contributions can be as low as $5 or as high as you want to contribute.

Rewards for contributing would be priority in receiving the results of the research, an advance copy of a funded documentary, free access to scanned records, and so on.

Here are just a few examples I came up with for projects that might be suitable for genealogy crowdfunding:

• Example 1 – A documentary about the War of 1812

For this project, the filmmakers might propose a documentary about Upstate New York in the War of 1812, including the towns of Oswego, Sackets Harbor, and Plattsburgh, NY.  The film might look at the lives of everyday citizens as they struggle through the war years, and could follow the stories of the war in this region (like “The Battle of Big Sandy and the Carrying of the Great Rope in 1814“).  This project might be of interest to people who live in these regions, or had ancestors in this region, including ancestors who fought or otherwise participated in the War of 1812 and may have been at these battles.

Funders could receive advance access to copies of the film, free copies of the film, special recognition in the credits, and so on.

• Example 2 – Research an early New England colonial family

For a project such as this one, a researcher or group of researchers would propose researching a particular family or individual from the colonial period.  The researcher(s) could briefly summarize the known facts and conclusions, and then set forth any hypotheses or goals they’d like to accomplish with the funding, such as identifying three generations of descendants, or finding a female surname, or uncovering the day-to-day facts of a certain key family.

One advantage of this project is that most early colonial families have hundreds of thousands of descendants and thus a large pool of genealogists who might be interested in funding the project.

As a reward for funding this project all funders might receive, for example, a free report of the research along with all discovered primary records, and/or special recognition in any publication that results from the project.

• Example 3 – The Colonial DNA Project

The Colonial DNA Project might seek to test descendants of colonials to identify shared DNA (autosomal, Y-DNA, and/or mtDNA).  For example, it could be descendants of a particular family, or a town, or a region.  A particularly ambitious project would be – as just one example – to characterize the Y-DNA and mtDNA profile of every individual living in Hebron in 1725.

Funders could receive advance or free access to research, results, summaries, and so on.

• Example 4 – Scan a historical society’s newspaper collection from the 1800s

For this project, a historical society might propose scanning their entire 1800s newspaper collection, which is currently degrading in the basement, into an electronic database.  This project might be particularly relevant to genealogists who have ancestors from that town or county in the 1800s, and would like to see these records.

People who helped fund the project might receive advance access to the database as the records are being scanned, or could receive free access to the database instead of paying a fee.

What are some other ideas or projects you would support?

Let’s Try It!

I’m interested in trying a project like one of the above on an existing crowdfunding platform such as indiegogo.  Do you have any proposals you’ve been kicking around?  Are you interested in giving this crowdfunding idea a shot?

If I received a suitable, affordable, and intriguing proposal that I thought the genealogy community could really get behind as a “kick start” for this concept, I would gladly promote that project here on my blog, Twitter, Facebook, and at presentations, for example.  And I’d also be happy to contribute to the funding of that project!