Every year on December 31, I have been summarizing my website page views, family tree counts and DNA matches and putting that on my What’s New page of my lkessler.com website so that I can see how much they’ve changed from the year before. But I’ve never before posted these stats on my blog. This year, I ...

A couple of months ago, Ancestry came out with a new feature called Parental Matches, that shows which parent a DNA match is connected to. My own DNA should be a good test for this. I have 100% endogamy on all my ancestral lines, but my parents are not related according to GEDmatch’s test. Both my parents ...

Yesterday was the final wrapup of the challenge week at WikiTree to try to add as much as possible to the Mark Cuban @mcuban family tree. Mark Cuban is the the American billionaire who co-founded Broadcast.com and owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He is widely known as one of the sharks on the TV ...

I've paid my deposit and my wife Cheryl and I will be going on the Find Your Roots on the River Cruise with Blaine Bettinger and Judy Russell from October 17 to 24, 2024 (yes, almost 2 years away), from Amsterdam through Germany to Basel, Switzerland. This is an opportunity no genealogist should miss. With ...

In an earlier post, I reviewed the Family Statistics that MyHeritage provides. It pointed out that I had some data that wasn’t correct. So at the end of that post, I ran MyHeritage’s Consistency Checker and it found that my tree of 9,050 people has 492 issues and MyHeritage’s desktop software Family Tree ...

Michael Kaplan, a user of my Double Match Triangulator program sent me information about how he was using DMT and also asked a number of questions. I thought this conversation would be very good for other DMT users to read. Michael gave me permission to post the relevant parts of his email to me and to give his ...

MyHeritage has just enhanced its Family Statistics feature. See their blog post from yesterday on this. Being a numbers guy, I really like this sort of information. It it interesting, provides great insights and can point to errors that need correction. I believe MyHeritage has one of the best sets of analytics ...

I was shocked to notice that I hadn’t blogged in over 3 months. I think it’s time to catch up with what’s been going on. The Last 3 Months To be honest, I’ve had another non-genealogy project distracting me and taking some of my genealogy/programming time away. Also, we had a beautiful summer ...

I’ve opened my MyHeritage account in 2014 and I’ve been a subscriber to their Complete Plan since February 2018. It was then that I started using MyHeritage as my primary site for storing my family tree information. I took a MyHeritage DNA test in 2007 and uploaded my uncle’s test from FTDNA in 2018. I ...

My last post defined base pairs and centimorgans, explained their relationship with each other, checked the accuracy of one genetic map, and described 3 converters that will calculate cM from base pairs. Before leaving this topic, I wanted to document what I tried in an attempt to create an accurate bp to cM ...

DNA Testing companies provide you with your matches and quantify how closely you match each person by giving you a total value in centimorgans (cM). In addition, companies other than Ancestry DNA also provide you with all your individual segment matches and tell you the centimorgans of every segment. For each ...

Visual Phasing is a technique to assign DNA segments of 3 siblings to their four grandparents. I don’t happen to have 3 siblings who all tested their DNA, so up to now, I’ve never had a personal use for the technique. A few months ago for a DNA study we are doing, my wife’s 3rd cousin Terry was kind ...

I’ve released version 5.0 of  Double Match Triangulator (DMT), a tool to help you analyze your autosomal segment matches and help you determine how you might be related to your DNA matches. Six Months of Analysis Over the winter and spring, I was working hard on on a project with Terry, my wife’s ...

A few questions that plague me. …Why Some Genealogists Keep Their Main Tree Private Isn’t the purpose of genealogy to preserve and share the history and stories of your ancestors and their families? So what then is the purpose in a genealogist designating their main tree as private and preventing ...

About 4 years ago, I selected @MyHeritage as my platform to record my genealogical information. I liked MyHeritage best for several reasons. Their customers and datasets were less USA-centric than Ancestry’s, and that fit right into my Eastern European origins. Their free Family Tree Builder program ...

Among that family materials I’ve been going through was a photocopied Memorial Book for the town of Mezhiritch in the Ukraine. My mother received this pile of paper from her cousin many years ago. The Memorial Book was printed in Israel in 1955 and it is 442 pages.. So I have it on about 250 sheets of paper. ...

I’d like to bring up the topic of having witnesses in your genealogy data, and then how these should be represented in GEDCOM, the standard for transferring genealogical data. What is a Witness? A Witness is a person who sees an event. Often genealogical documents include signatures of witnesses, ...

Judy Russell just released a very interesting post: The 2022 DNA goals on her blog The Legal Genealogist. In it, Judy resolves to try to identify her “top who-is-this-person-match” at each testing company. Judy was the person who prompted, well um, pushed me into getting into DNA testing. It was during the ...

Happy 25th birthday to my lkessler.com website! On January 7, 1997, I added my initial content to my website for public view. Technically, it became available August 27 the year before, but that was only a “Coming Soon” page and 2 test pages. So January 7 is the official launch date. My first pages ...

Sometimes, website changes go smoothly. Sometimes they don’t. On December 28, I had a couple of rare free days, and I thought I’d finally get around to seeing if I could upgrade my sites from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.4. The programming language PHP is what runs WordPress and does most of the automation of the ...