So How’s My Genealogy Going? - Thu, 2 Jul 2020

I’ve written over 1100 genealogy-related blog posts since I started blogging in 2002. But very rarely have I written about my own genealogy research.

It’s actually going okay now.

This blog was started to document the development and progress of my software program Behold, that I’m building to assist me with my genealogy. About 8 years ago, I started attending international conferences and became a genealogy speaker myself. Then about 4 years ago, DNA testing started to become a thing, and I jumped fully in, finding everything about it fascinating, and I wrote my program Double Match Triangulator to help decipher matches. About 2 years ago, the Facebook era of genealogy groups began. I joined and started participating in many groups that were of interest to me and relevant to my own family research.

I got interested in my genealogy in my late teens when one of my father’s aunts was in from Los Angeles and she started drawing a tree showing her and her 8 brothers and sisters. Then I started researching. The first program I started entering my data into was Reunion for Windows. When Reunion sold their Windows product to Sierra in 1997, I became a beta tester for their release of the program which they called Generations. I added all my genealogy data into Generations by 1999 and was using it to display my information until 2002, when Genealogy.com purchased it along with Family Origins and Ultimate Family Tree, and then subsequently dropped all three programs in favour of their own product Family Tree Maker.

What I had was a GEDCOM with my family tree information updated up to 1999. And until about 2 years ago, I had made no updates to that at all, waiting for Behold to become the program I’d enter all my genealogy data into. Working full time, the onset of DNA testing, becoming involved in genealogy conferencing and speaking, plus family and life in general prevented that from happening.

But then a simple step recently rebooted me and my genealogy work.

The MyHeritage Step

In February 2018, I took advantage of a half-price subscription for MyHeritage’s Complete Plan. I loaded my 16 year-old GEDCOM up to MyHeritage. I downloaded their free Family Tree Builder program which syncs with their online system, and I went to it.

The special price enticed me, but I liked what I saw in MyHeritage. They had lots of users. Billions of records. They had plenty of innovation, especially in their Smart Matching. And they were less America-centric than Ancestry. All my ancestors come from Romania and Ukraine ending up here in Canada, so I have eastern European needs. I’ll need to write names in Romanian, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, and language handling is one of MyHeritage’s strong points.

The one place MyHeritage was weak was Canada. So I also subscribed to Ancestry as well, but just their Canadian edition. The main database I wanted that Ancestry gave me was the passenger lists for arrival to Canadian ports.

Once I uploaded my 1400 people I had from 2002 via GEDCOM, MyHeritage’s Smart Matches started working for me. Over the course of a year, I added about 500 people to my tree and attached 5000 source records to them.

Filling Out My Tree

The sides of my family I am researching include my 5 grandparents and my wife’s 4 grandparents. My father’s parents are both from Romania. My mother’s parents are both from Ukraine as are all my wife’s grandparents.

My 5th grandparent is my father’s step-father Kessler. He is my mystery side. I know very little about him and his first wife. I don’t even know where he came from other than some unidentifiable place Ogec somewhere in Russia. He has no living blood relatives that I know of, and since no one I know is related to him, I can’t even use DNA to help me on his or his first wife’s side.

In addition to my 9 grandparents, I am also sort of doing a one-place study of Mezhirichi in the Ukraine, where my mother’s father came from. The reason why that town is more of interest than the other towns of my grandparents is because in the 1920’s, a synagogue in Winnipeg was formed called the Mezericher Shul made up only of immigrants from that town, including my mother’s father. I am trying to trace back all the people in Winnipeg whose parents or grandparents went to that synagogue, back to their roots in Mezhirichi. I’m sure many of us are related in ways that we don’t know. So to be more precise this is not really a one-place study of Mezhirichi, but is really a study of the families of the people who attended this synagogue in Winnipeg who likely came from Mezhirichi.

On my wife’s father’s mother’s side is a cousin in the United States who has done an extensive study on that side of the family. He wrote a 255 page book listing about 1000 people who descended from his and my wife’s common ancestors. He graciously allowed me to add the data to my MyHeritage tree as another way to preserve his research. I enjoyed the month and a half I spent manually adding people and their birth and death years to my family tree. That was enough to let MyHeritage’s Smart Matches do the dirty work of finding  record matches and easily allowing me add dates and places from the records to our people.

Shortly after that, I ran into a problem. MyHeritage is supposed to privatize living person information. And when you look at a person in the tree who is living, it looks like they have been privatized. But it isn’t quite:

It shows the surname of the person, and the spouse’s maiden name. This wasn’t that bad, but the real problem were the Smart Matches. When someone Smart Matches to you over living people that they may have in their tree, they get all the information you have: names, dates, places, children, etc. I had a cousin email me and tell me he got a Smart Match from my tree, and his birthday was displayed to him. He wasn’t happy and neither was I.

I really was hoping I wouldn’t have to delete all the living people from my online tree, keeping them only in my local files on my computer. Fortunately there was a solution. When editing a person in Family Tree Maker, the “More” tab contains a privatization selection for the person. You check the box to make the person private:

They had no automated way to check this selection for all living people, so I manually opened up each of my 1500 living people and marked them private one-by-one, another week-long project.

Once those private people synced up to MyHeritage, the living couples now displayed as:

That’s much better. Every person still has a box online, but they are all now marked as “Unknown” rather than “private” with a surname.  Also, no more information about living people is given to anyone through Smart Matches. As a consequence, I also don’t get smart matches for any of my privatized people. But this latter aspect might be a blessing in disguise. Now the Smart Matches I get are only for my deceased people who are the ones I’m most interested in researching and tracing further back. And the number of Smart Matches I now get are manageable. I can clean them out in a few days until I get a few hundred more a few weeks later.

Cousin Bait

I love this term cousin bait. You don’t want to put your data in one place. You want to put it everywhere you can. And you don’t want to put it all up for everyone to see and take. You want to make enough available to get people to contact you, so you can communicate with them and then share what you both have.

For the past 20 years, I have maintained a page of My Family Research and Unsolved Mysteries on my personal website:

That page is well indexed on Google. For instance, searching for “Braunstein Tecuci” on Google brings my page up in 3rd place out of 11,500 results:

Over those 20 years, I’ve had about 200 people email me inquiring about some of the names and places that I identify. And maybe one third of those have been actual relatives whom I’ve shared data with.

The 2nd best resource I’ve used for a long time to find family has ben the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF). I have just 17 entries, but those have been enough to get maybe 100 people to contact me to see if we have part of our family tree in common. And again, in maybe a third of those cases, we did.

Also, 2 decades ago, I uploaded my GEDCOM to JewishGen’s Family Tree of the Jewish People. As of March 2017, the collection had 7,310,620 records from 6,266 family trees. I’ve recently updated my tree there with my MyHeritage tree.

One of the best successes from my family webpage and through JewishGen was my connection to about 10 relatives on my father’s mother’s Focsaner side. We all have been emailing each other for many years and have been sharing information about our common family. I have only met one of these relatives in person, when our family went to New York City for a vacation about 10 years ago. But despite most of us never having met, and being 3rd cousins or further, we feel like we’re close family.

In the past 2 years, I have also added some of my own family tree (not my wife’s) to other sites, usually just my ancestors.

• Ancestry:  Just ancestors, but I’ve connected them down to any DNA matches who are relatives.  This has given me a number of useful ThruLines that have led me to identify a couple of DNA testers who were relatives that I didn’t have in my tree.
• Family Search:  I just added my ancestors, but I’m connecting them to anyone else in this one-world tree who I know are relatives.
• Geni: Same as for Family Search.
• Wikitree:  I’ve only put myself and my parents in so far. If in the future I notice a relative, I’ll connect to them.
• Geneanet: About a year ago, I uploaded my tree from MyHeritage, so I have about 4000 in my tree there.
• GenealogieOnline:  Just ancestors.
• Family Tree DNA:  Just ancestors but connected down to DNA matches
• GEDmatch:  Up to yesterday, just ancestors.

Unfortunately, other than the ThruLines results at Ancestry, these trees have not led to people contacting me. So they are not as good at being cousin bait as I hoped they would be.

But yesterday, GEDmatch added their MRCA Search Tool, that compares the GEDCOM file you uploaded to GEDmatch to the GEDCOM file of your DNA matches. So I downloaded my GEDCOM from MyHeritage (which already had all living people privatized) and I uploaded it to GEDmatch and ran their new tool.

The GEDmatch tool compared 766 of my DNA matches’ trees to mine, and 933 of my uncle’s DNA matches trees to my uncle in my tree. Mine is a very problematic family for these sorts of comparisons. All my ancestors are Jewish so I have endogamy to deal with on the DNA side, and they are all from Romania or Ukraine, so I have lack of records and ability to only go back 5 generations to deal with on the tree side. The result sort of expectedly was that neither I nor my uncle had any MRCA matches.

Other Findings

Of course, one goal every genealogist has is to expand our ancestral tree as much as we can. With all my ancestors coming from Romania and Ukraine, the records there only start in the early to mid 1800s. I can only hope to go back about 5 generations with the known records available.

Over the past few years, I found some researchers who have been able to acquire records for me and translate them from the Romanian or Russian they are written in.

Researcher Gheorge Mireuta obtained 10 birth and death records from Tecuci, Romania on my father’s father’s side.

Sorin Goldenberg obtained about 70 records from the Dorohoi region of Romania on my father’s mother’s side.

Viktoria Chymshyt has obtained records from the Mezhirichi area of Ukraine, trying to find people for me on my mother’s father’s side, but we haven’t been successful yet.

Boris Malasky has obtained about 70 records on two of my wife’s sides from Kodnya and Zhitomir in the Ukraine.

This record research is really the only possible way to expand my tree into the “old country” and provide the physical evidence to back it up.

Where I Am Now

Currently, I sit at over 5100 people in my family tree at MyHeritage, including all the people I’ve privatized.

I really love MyHeritage’s Fan View. It give me a good representation as to where I am. Here’s the Fan View of my tree today:

And a new record I just got a few days ago from Sorin Goldenberg gave me the first names of the parents of my great-great-great-grandfather Manashcu Naftulovici.

So Naftuli and Sura are the first two ancestors I’ve identified in my 6th generation! Their son Manashcu was the first in his line to start using a surname, and he selected the patronym: Naftulovici.

My wife’s Fan View is currently this:

We have two of her 7th generation ancestors identified in records acquired from Boris Malasky.

Still To Do

In one word, lots!  All genealogists know this is a never ending task. Every new ancestor you find leads to two new questions.

But my three major tasks over the next few years will be:

1. Going through and organizing the dozens of boxes in my closet and basement and binders in my bookshelf of unorganized genealogical material and pictures from my early years of research and from my parents and my wife’s parents and grandparents.
2. Digitizing what’s valuable from #1.
3. Entering data obtained from #1 into my family tree along with source citations.

That should keep me busy for a while.

And in the meantime, I’ll still be developing Behold so that it will continue to assist me as I go.