My nephew invited me to help him figure out our family’s genealogy. I volunteered by uploading pictures and some stories of what my dad told me about our grandparents and great grandparents. I found out my memory isn’t so good so I had to ask my 92 year old dad to help me. Yep, he has all the little details and he’s sharp as a tack. If only I could be that sharp.

Anyway, I ended up setting up my own account and my own tree and thought we could compare the two afterwards. It seems we have different people on some of the legs of the tree. But I know I’m right. Sure. The problem is people on the Ancestry site have trees made out from other families that you can import into your tree if it matches the same people. But I found out some are wrong, just like I could be wrong on some of the entries. So I erased most of the tree and started over and only fill in when I have more than one record document that verifies everything. Now I’m going along pretty good.

The people that transcribed the old records and put them into computers have made lots of spelling errors and put in wrong initials. You can’t depend on that. You have to enlarge the actual document and look for yourself. I can see how they made the errors, though. The handwritten documents are hard to interpret. Is it an I, a T, a J? I have found about 5 errors so far that cost me hours of extra work because you either ignore the record when it really was the right one or you put one in that doesn’t belong because of the misprint. You have to check children and the ages birthplace and so much more to be sure.

I’ve hit the wall, I can’t go any further on some of branches of the ancestry tree. I did find records of one of my family coming to America in the 1860s aboard a ship from Germany and arriving at NY Harbor. I haven’t double verified it is the right people but so far it looks really promising. It would be fun to be able to verify it.

I found out I have French Canadian in me. I guess I shouldn’t make Canadian jokes anymore, Ehh?. I’m Scottish, German and one record says Sweden and Minnesota country bumpkin. And so far that’s about it.