5 Years Ago Today, I Retired - Wed, 24 Nov 2021

Exactly 5 years ago today, which coincided with my 60th birthday, several hundred co-workers, friends and family met in the large conference room at the Manitoba Hydro head office in downtown Winnipeg on my last day of work to help see me off into “retirement”.

I had a wonderful 41 years with the company and enjoyed being able to make use of all my computer, maths and statistics skills in all sorts of wide-ranging and exciting projects.

Today, it is 5 years later, so I’m sure you can guess what age I became today.

Now it’s time to look back and see what I have accomplished so far in my first 5 years of retirement.

DNA Testing and Analysis

These past 5 years I’d call my DNA testing years. I did my first DNA test with Family Tree DNA in Nov 2016 and subsequently tested myself at MyHeritage, 23andMe, Ancestry and LivingDNA. I then took two WGS (Whole Genome Sequencing) tests from Dante Labs, a short read test and a long read test.

I took all these tests primarily to learn about them and gain expertise in the genetic genealogy field. I have written many articles about DNA analysis in my blog, and have given talks about DNA at several genealogy conferences. I also wrote the program Double Match Triangulator to help analyze your DNA matches. I’m currently working on modifications to DMT that will be released as Version 5.

Year 1 Started with a Bang!

I had been an avid squash player 3 times a week for 30 years. We had a great group who would get together and whoever came out would play each other at a pretty competitive level. My expectation was to continue this into my retirement years as long as I could … which turned out to be less than a month. During one game, I displaced my peroneal tendon and a week and a half later had an operation to repair it.

So that started off my year 1, 2017, which included 4 genealogy conferences: RootsTech in Salt Lake City, the IAJGS at Disney World Florida, the Great Canadian Genealogical Summit in Halifax and FTDNA’s Genetic Genealogy Conference in Houston. I came out with 3rd place at the RootsTech 2017 Innovator Showdown for my program Double Match Triangulator, and I did it wearing a walking boot from my operation.

Genealogy Conferences and Vacations

So there were the 4 conferences in 2017. I attended and spoke at the Kelowna District Genealogy Conference in 2018. My first-ever online presentation was in January 2020 at the Family History Fanatics DNA eConference and I have made several others since.

Vacation-wise, my wife and I took a western Caribbean cruise in Feb 2017 just after RootsTech (and I was still in my walking boot). My wife and I and my older daughter went to Walt Disney World in June 2017 where my younger daughter was working for the summer. I went there a month later for the IAJGS conference and saw my younger daughter again while there. My wife and I took an eastern Caribbean cruise in Feb 2019. Then in July 2019, my wife and I went to Niagara Falls for a 40th anniversary reunion of my Europe Trip people from 1979. And in Feb 2020, my wife and I took a southern Caribbean cruise with my best friend Carl and his wife who now live near Vancouver. We got back just as Covid was taking over.

I was scheduled to attend the 3rd MyHeritage Live conference in Tel Aviv, Israel in the Fall 2020, but that was kiboshed like everything else by Covid. It would have been my first trip to Israel and my wife and I were looking forward to making a vacation in Israel around it. That will have to wait now until some future time.

With the onset of Covid in March 2020, so many conferences, webinars and discussions started coming online. Zoom became a word of our vocabulary. Between Legacy Family Tree Webinars, Dear Myrtle, Geneablogger, Family History Fanatics, WikiTree and all the other content providers, you could spend 24 hours a days in front of your computer being totally immersed in genealogy without getting a smidgen of your own genealogy done.

GEDCOM

I’ve always been interested in GEDCOM, the standard for transferring genealogy data because my program Behold uses it. I kept up with what FHISO was doing to advance the standard. In 2018, I was one of a number of people who contributed to Tamura Jones’ GEDCOM 5.5.1 Annotated Edition, and then a year later to Tamura’s GEDCOM 5.5.5.  I followed along as FamilySearch released its 7.0.earlier this year.

Genealogy

My one greatest accomplishment over the past 5 years has to be my advances in my own genealogy research. This summer I wrote the article: So How’s My Genealogy Going? In it, I described how I selected MyHeritage as my platform of choice and now use it and their Family Tree Builder program to store the working copy of my family tree data.

I’ve been involved in some major projects that include working with my wife’s cousin Terry Lasky, helping with his DNA project. In that project, I’m still trying to solve how the early Zaslavsky families from Tetiev were connected by using my Double Match Triangulator program. My Romanian Fossaner side has been aided by working with my genealogist cousins Joel Koenig and Phil Rodd who have been doing a lot of research and have found new living cousins in Australia who we have Zoomed with.

But my major breakthroughs have come in the past 4 years with researchers finding me records of my ancestors in Romania and Ukraine that have taken 5 of the 9 lines I’m researching back another 3 generations to the 1800’s. New records are being photographed and digitized all the time and the next few years should continue to be exciting on this front.

In order to better understand the records I’m getting, I just finished a fantastic 10 week online Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) course on Researching Russian Records, and now I can read, pronounce and transliterate Russian print and (with a bit more difficulty) Russian handwriting, which is essential to know for anyone researching their Russian Empire roots.

I was honored in July to be selected as a genealogy guest on the WikiTree Challenge. About 20 WikiTreers all worked together on my tree to make it better and find new sources for me.

The Next 5 Years

So much to do, so little time. First step is to try to complete my Zaslavsky project and release Version 5 of Double Match Triangulator. Then I really want to get back to working on Behold which has sort of been in limbo the past 5 years. Now that I don’t mean to make it my primary genealogy editor (that being MyHeritage), I’ve got ideas to take it into a new and interesting direction.

My genealogy will still take front and center stage. If any new records come up, or I get contacted by relatives or possible family, I will attend to that first. And those boxes of my and my wife’s family material still needs to be gone through, digitized and recorded.

I also had two little munchkins sprout up in the past 5 years (my sister’s grandchildren) who will be so fun to follow and be a part of during their next 5 years.

Other than that, I’ll try to keep in shape (walking, swimming and bike riding – did over 1000 km of the latter last year), plus lots of family stuff, house maintenance, errands, appointments, shows and sports on TV, socializing on Facebook and Twitter, keeping up my website, my GenSoftReviews, Behold and DMT sites, and blogging and Zooming from time to time. Hopefully this Covid thing will end soon and we’ll be able to see people and travel again.

I’ll report back in 5 years from now and let you know how it went.