Neat Genealogy Tools

I think it behooves me to pause here, half-way through the month and make mention of some of the record-keeping, data-hunting, and family tree analysis tools that I have been using. Each of these, in my opinion, have their own share of "neat factor" as well. I'll give them a Useful ranking and a Neat ranking.

FamilySearch:  Useful: 10, Neat:10

This is the main storehouse where I am centrally building my family tree.  It's got facilities to do just about everything I need to do.  As global leaders in Genealogy research, I'm not surprised that the FamilySearch.org website has so much functionality.   I can search original records, attach references to those sources to the people in my family tree, port dates directly from the source .  As such, some of the conflicting records need periodic review, but that's the beauty of crowd-sourced information gathering and sharing.  I like to clean up a record, then "star it" which puts it on a watch-list.  If anyone changes something, I get a notification, and I can check their work to make sure it's consistent.  And the beauty is that more features are being added and refined, so I expect it will be an increasingly useful utility.

My welcome page at FamilySearch.org.

PUZZILLA:  Useful: 10, Neat: 9

The first is Puzzilla.com.  It works in conjunction with FamilySearch.org and basically helps clean up navigate through and clean up their database.  Through it's pictoral representation of the family tree, it makes it easy to see where hints are available, sources are already attached, and where ordinances are needed.  It also makes it very easy to see where the end of the line is on each of the family branches.

Generated from Puzzilla.com

Taken from the other direction, it makes it very easy to have a top-down look at the descendancy research that has already been done.  Sometimes it's already fleshed out pretty well, as in the case of William Jackson/Jones.  It looks like there have been lots of genealogists working to fill in the details of all of these generations of Jackson, starting with William highlighted in the middle, and the deceased members of my Grandfather's generation around the outer ring.

Descendancy chart for William Jones or Jackson.  Follow the yellow line to get to me.  The key to the left gives helps on understanding what information is further available beyond what is properly linked together in FamilySearch, and a pretty good indicator what the next steps are.  Lots of these folks still have orange hints that represent records that could be linked to individuals.  Not so many ordinances required (green).

 In other families, where there has very little family history work done, the descendancy charts look a bit sadder.  This is my Papa's Grandfather, Thomas Christopher Thompson, from the same generation as the image above, but where there are fewer genealogists on the lurk, and I'm willing to bet there are more cousins that need identified here.  I'll start to find them by clicking through each of the nodes where hints are already available (orange), then looking through the sources that FamilySearch thinks are pertinent to that person.  Most of the time, the suggestions are correct.  Also, most of the time, there are additional documents that I can find for people for whom no hints are given, just by going through the typical search process.  Southerners weren't always very good spellers, it seems.

Descendancy tree assembled as of 11/12/14 for Thomas Christopher Thompson.  The yellow line shows how I am connected to him.  Granted, my mother's generation is living (not charted), my grandmother was an only child, as was her father (this line), but still, I expect fewer "only children" in general.  Lots of work remaining to help fill out the generations here!  And lots of green dots representing ordinances available.

Find A Grave: Useful: 8, Neat 6.

I actually just stumbled upon FindAGrave.com one day when I was experimenting with the "memories" section on FamilySearch.org.  I had heard you could attach pictures to your ancestors' entries, so I thought I would give it a try.  I just picked a generation, and went for the first entry on my mom's side where things were mostly blank, hoping to find a hit.  I typed into my search bar "Allen Shanklin picture 1813" or something like that, and this neat resource came up.  

It turns out there is a posse of people who either as a game or hobby, or out of sincere interest for records preservation, go out to cemeteries and photograph headstones.  They transcribe the records into this database so people who can't travel to, for example, Weakley County, TN have a way to "walk through the cemetery."  Not all cemeteries have been entered.  This must be a huge undertaking.  But I got a hit.  And more than that, I found that one of my mom's cousins had some family photos and a collection of obituaries, and so I emailed him to say thank you for contributing online, and he emailed me back another 18 pages (line after line of lists!) of descendancy research for Allen Shanklin already!  WOW!  Crowd-sourced genealogy works!  Not to mention I would never have had access to these pictures otherwise.  THIS must be the reason the internet was invented.  I'm sure of it, now.

From FindAGrave.com

Ten Gen Chart:  Useful:3, Neat: 7

TenGenChart.com is mostly just to put some pretty pictures together, similar to how you can get the fan charts from FamilySearch.org.  But sometimes you might want other options.  I have access to an 11x17 printer, so can do some bigger images.  If I really wanted to go big, I would send it to my local print shop for plotting.

From TenGenChart.com

 
TreeSeek: Useful 7, Neat:5

This was the first fan chart tool I stumbled upon a few years ago.  I like TreeSeek.com, because I find their's more visually appealing.  They produce a high-definition .pdf for printing or other uses.  (I'm pretty sure the church bought license to use theirs on the official FamilySearch.org website, because they look pretty much identical).  You can do fan charts, pedigrees, blanks, for multiple sizes of generations.  I stumbled on them several years ago and made a fan chart.  Maybe at the end of the month I'll make an animated .gif to show how the tree is slowly getting filled out.

Screenshot of the TreeSeek 9 Generation Fan chart.

Look familiar?  FamilySearch's 7 Generation chart.

AllMyCousins: Useful: 1, Neat: 7

I discovered AllMyCousins.com when I was poking around FamilySearch, and it showed me what websites have met the authentication criteria for being a FamilySearch partner.  Someone has written a "crawler" to basically take a count of how many people you are related to at certain generations.  It's kind of pointless, because this is only for known relatives who have passed away... and you don't know who you don't know.  But someday, maybe you'll want to tell someone, "Hey, I've 32 great-great-great Grandparents and 122 great-great-great Aunts and Uncles!"   If nothing else, you'll get a chance to refresh your memory on what it means to be a 3rd cousin once removed. 

From AllMyCousins.com.  Going down and back 7 generations, it looks like I am related to 19,865 identified deceased people!  Granted, these are people who I share a common ancestor with within 7 generations, but this constitutes ALL branches of my tree, so they aren't all closely related to each other.  But if you want to know how people are related to each other, there's a tool for that, too.

Relative Finder: Useful: 3, Neat: 10

There's this other website, located at https://relativefinder.org/, which must have been a pretty cool Computer Science problem to solve.  Basically the problem is this: Take two people who have started to build a tree through FamilySearch, and find the shortest path between them.  We solve this type of problem at work as well, though it's typically for path planning unmanned air vehicles from a launch point to a point of interest.  There are several lists to choose from (Presidents of the United States, Famous Americans, Authors, LDS Prophets, Members of Congress, etc).  Here's how Jen is related to some of the Prophets.  (We're all related after, all!)

Jennifer Relation Chart

As a matter of fact, I found that Jen and I are 10th cousins, twice removed.  Don't worry, that means that in the 1600s, we had a common ancestor somewhere back in Britain.   I found out that I'm pretty much just as closely related to President George Washington as she is to the Prophet Joseph Smith.

I guess what I learned through this exercise, is that with enough data, we can piece together how the whole human family is related.

Roots Mapper: Useful:8, Neat:10

Then there's this cool one, RootsMapper.com that shows the maps.  I had made my own, just to show the GGG Grands at each move along their journey (and I hadn't heard of this one at that point!).  If you don't care so much about the intermediate moves and just want to see birth and death location, Rootsmapper.com does it automatically.  Here are some examples:

This should look pretty familiar.  It's just me through the GGG Grands.

If I extend my tree back to the 10 Generations, wherever there is already pieced together information, we see that I have some pretty significant clustering around Northampton and Stoke-on-Trent.

In the big-picture, though, not everyone is British (just out 10 generations, that is).  German and French, too?  Who knew!

On the other side, going back 10 generations, I've got quite a few early American mid-Atlantic colonials.

Just for fun, We see that Jen is ALMOST completely a New Englander.  A few Hawaiian connections, someone in Chicago, a few who made it to the South...  but still overwhelmingly Maine/Massachusetts/New Hampshire.

Thus ends my survey of a few neat tools.  By the way, all of these are free.  I'm sure there are many more cool genealogy tools, and I'd appreciate the recommendations! Leave a comment if you can think of a good one.