About About My Mom

With Mother's Day coming up I have been thinking a lot about my precious Mom.  My Mom was the Queen of Apple Pie baking.  She was well-known for her scrumptious apple pies.  Seriously, nearly famous.  I have never tasted an apple pie that even came close.  I don't know what was so magical about her pies but they just seemed to say "I love you!"  They were simply unforgettable.

She was a beauty inside and out!
Don't you think?

These were her beautician days when

Finger waves were all the rage...

I looked at a lot of images to find a pie that 

looked like Mom's but none were exactly like hers.

Mom and Dad always made the pies together with the help of us kids.  They bought a huge sub-zero freezer for the garage and many years we would get lugs of apples and over the weekend we'd make 52 pies.  One for each week of the year.  There were apple peelings all over the place and everything was sticky as we all peeled and generally made a giant mess in the process. I can still remember the apple juice running down my arms and trying to pare the peeling off in one long strip.  I didn't mind the slicing but I didn't love the coring.  But a good bath at the end of the long hot sticky days and the satisfaction of seeing those pies frozen one layer at a time, and stacked in the freezer was amazing.

Mama would always wear a pretty apron even when she was doing this kind of work, she was lovely and such a classy lady to the end. And the fact that Daddy helped her was a heart print for me and a really cool memory now.  I can still see him in his white grampa t-shirt and his suspenders on those hot days in Sacramento working in the kitchen.  It made me want to marry a man just like him.  And I did.

 Working together as a family was very strengthening to us.  Mom gave away a lot of those pies so there really wasn't one for every week and that was fine.  It was a great learning experience in so many ways.  I am definitely going to try this again and get good at it.  It is about so much more than the pie.

This week I have been scanning old papers, documents, photos and even a few recipes.  I was pretty good at saving things like this when I was a young woman, never fully realizing what they would mean to me now.

Mom's recipe in her own handwriting~
priceless to me now!

I found another card written in my handwriting and
 thought maybe someday our posterity might
 like to see it in my writing.
Mom was not kidding on hers
when she said,
"All generous measurements!"

The Apples are Pippins

Or Gravensteins
Tart crispy green apples are the best for pies.

After assembling all the ingredients...

On top of the bottom crust, add a large, heaping,

 round mound of apples and 
sugar mixture and butter.

Add the top crust and pinch closed around the edges.
Poke the top with a fork for air vents.
Sprinkle a little sugar and cinnamon on the top crust.

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes and then turn 
down the oven to 350 for 55 minutes.
Cool and enjoy!

Thin slices promote even baking

For the Crust:

Flour, Crisco, Salt and Water

Although some people do,

Mom did not use any butter in her crust~

Just Crisco for a light and flaky texture.

The butter went into the pie filling.

For the Pie Filling:

Here's Everything you need!
Apples, Flour, Sugar, Cinnamon,
Salt, Nutmeg, Butter and of course 
a little Water.

So as you can see there was nothing extraordinary about the ingredients or the way the pies were made.  This is just a little slice of life with my Mom.  I think the magic in the pies was simply my Mom's touch.  Or maybe it was that old beat up 1/4 cup tin measurer that did it.  I have it around here someplace I'll have to dig it up and see it if helps!  But neither my Mom nor I were ever very good at exact measurements.  You can tell that by the slight variation in her measurements between her original recipe and the one she dictated to me as she was making a pie years later.  She varied the recipe until it was pure perfection. She just have a sense for how much to use, I guess.  The most important ingredient is the love. And a lot of it.  That I know for sure.

Grandma's Pie A New Way To Look To Your Family With FS Data

This sight was a developed by the BYU technology engineers to interface with Family Search.  Relative Finder originated through a group of students in the same department.  

There is a video on the home page of the website that explains how to us it. I have only looked at it briefly but it looks fun and is also a new tool to find people, estimate where unknown family members are most from, etc. Think of it as a fan chart that takes everything to the next level.
 

Serendipity With My Heritage ~ Book Matching

For decades I have noticed that the view from Highway 24 of Mt. Diablo is gorgeous especially in the spring.  I've wanted to get a photo of it that was unobstructed by buildings, road signs, traffic, electrical wires and humankind. 

I wanted to capture something that celebrated to earth view and not the world view.  We've lived in the shadow of it for most of our lives, Sunday's drive by came close to my goal!
Serendiptity equals a happy accident...which did occur.  How does this apply to family history you are probably thinking.

Well when we learn about something new like book matching technology it is a good idea to check it out.  I thought about my family tree and considered who I might want to get more information about.  I chose my paternal 3rd great-grandfather, Newcomb Godfrey. Born in NY in 1806.

I went to the website http://myheritage.com.  >

On My Heritage you click on the Research Tab>

You see a search box but on the right hand sidebar you have some filtering choices.>

Select Books and Publications>

Now enter your person's information in the search box at the left upper corner>

Select Enter and Voila!  You will see some things that hopefully will be as much of a surprise as I did.

https://www.myheritage.com/research?s=208942181&formId=publication&formMode=&action=query&exactSearch=0&useTranslation=1&catId=8020&qname=Name+fn.Newcomb+ln.Godfrey

I  then looked at the very first entry for Newcomb.  I opened it and read it and save it and entered it into my sourcebox and attached it to my 3rd Great-Grandpa.  Now that book reference is captured and saved to Family Search.  

In the process of doing that I remembered that I had been trying to get another person to release the sealing of Newcomb to his parents Elijah Godfrey and his wife Hannah Reynolds.  No response from the person in two years.  This family work was begun over ten years ago.  I checked last night and Family Search had finally released it so I quickly reserved the sealing for us to do soon! 

 From the article that I saved from this first book entry I learned for the first time that Hannah Reynold was of Irish descent.

I 'd say that was serendipity wouldn't you? Below is the source I created in Family Search to attach to my ancestor's Person Details Page in the Family Tree.

My Heritage and Book Matching Technology

Redwoods in Oakland CA

Each of the the big genealogy companies have a lot to love but My Heritage stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to advanced searching technology.

Here is a current press release from My Heritage on their new and exciting Book Matching Technology.

EL AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah, April 7, 2016 — MyHeritage, the fastest-growing destination for discovering, preserving and sharing family history, has launched today a revolutionary addition to its suite of technologies: Book Matching. This innovation automatically researches users’ family trees in historical books with high precision.

In April 2012 MyHeritage launched SuperSearch™, a search engine for historical records, which has since then grown to include 6.6 billion historical records, including birth, marriage, death and census records. By implementing its vision of enhancing genealogy with technology, MyHeritage then developed a line of unique and sophisticated technologies that automatically match the records from the search engine to the 32 million family trees uploaded by its users.

In December 2015, MyHeritage expanded its data collections to include digitized historical books, with an initial corpus of 150,000 books of high genealogical value. This collection was tripled last week to 450,000 books with 91 million pages. With a team of more than 50 dedicated curators, MyHeritage aims to add hundreds of millions of pages of digitized books to the collection each year.

As of today, MyHeritage users will receive matches between profiles in their family trees and the books from this collection. The Book Matching technology analyzes the book texts semantically, understanding complex narrative that describes people, and matches it to the 2 billion individuals in MyHeritage family trees with extremely high accuracy. This breakthrough technology is the first of its kind, and is exclusive to MyHeritage.

Book Matching has produced more than 80 million matches, and this number will continue to grow as the collection grows and as the family trees on MyHeritage continue to expand. Book Matching is currently available for English books, and the technology is being enhanced to cover additional languages. In addition, de-duplication technology is being added in the next few weeks to remove duplicate books that have been scanned and OCRed more than once by different sources.

“No one has ever done this before,” said MyHeritage Chief Technology Officer, Sagi Bashari. “Our Book Matching technology reads hundreds of thousands of books for you, every hour, comparing them to your family tree and pointing you to relevant excerpts about your ancestors with almost no false positives. MyHeritage is the first to offer full semantic text analysis in this way, and the genealogical breakthroughs speak for themselves. You will be amazed at the value of books for your research.”

“I’ve personally seen what this new technology can do, using my own family tree,” said blogger and lifelong genealogist Leland Meitzler. “It found well over 500 books with information on my family, most of which I’d never seen before. All kinds of ancestors and relatives can now be added to my tree! To say that this new search technology changes everything would be an overstatement, but not by much.”

Genealogist James Tanner said: “This advanced technology from MyHeritage opens up a whole new world of research possibilities that were almost completely unavailable in the past. I have always valued the content of the older genealogy books because the people who wrote them were contemporaries with my ancestors. Being able to search these books on a large scale will change the way most of us have been doing genealogy and our attitude towards the books that have been there all along but were not searchable.”

Dick Eastman, of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, summed up MyHeritage’s latest innovation: “MyHeritage Book Matching is like having a huge library at your fingertips, with a twist; there is a magical librarian who tells you exactly which books have information about your ancestors.”

Book Matches are available at www.myheritage.com and are generated automatically for any family tree built on the website or imported into it. A Data subscription is required to view Book Matches."

Dick Eastman has written about this new technology.

https://blog.eogn.com/2016/04/07/myheritage-releases-exclusive-book-matching-technology-for-family-historians/

Family Search YouTube Channel

To use YouTube go to YouTube in your url bar.  it will bring up YouTube.   Then you go to the place on the homepage where you can search.  Enter Family Search.  A page will come up, select a video to watch.  Some are lengthy.  Many are under 4:00 Minutes.  The length of the video will be visible on the place where you select it.They are just little snippets of information that often comes in very handy.

This is one way I try to learn little nuggets to fill in the holes in my Swiss Cheese Genealogy/Family History brain.

Here are three random ones I selected to give you an idea of how these work.  All are very short.  You can subscribe to this channel and any other on YouTube.  YouTube is one of the biggest and best search engines on the internet.  If you want to know how to do anything...check with YouTube.

https://youtu.be/-9vA8juUpYs

https://youtu.be/n7wVn4oFjH0

https://youtu.be/QdQkN7DB7uo

Hashtags And the Proper Way To Use Them

Technology is moving so quickly as we all know.  For most of us over 50 there is a struggle to keep up with it all.  I don't know how interested I'd be in Hashtags if we didn't have kids and grandkids that do keep up.  So as a result I we want to keep up with them, we need to learn it.

Jim pointed out today that working in the library we should also be aware of what hashtags are and how they are used in social media. 

Social Media sites are a great place to keep our family history, to learn family history and to share photos and stories with others. 

As an example, Facebook had thousands of user groups about genealogy, localities, and surnames.  It is a great place to find relatives that are also Facebook users.  Pinterest and Twitter are also fantastic sources for what we do.  Instagram is another one that is great for sharing family history and photos. 

All of them use hashtags.  The caveat is the hashtag rules are different for them all.  They differ in purpose.  Even General Conference for the Church uses Twitter. You can follow it during conference at #genconf .  Next time you are watching General conference take not of the hashtag right in the screen down in the lower left corner of the scree.   People give commentary on things they like, etc. 

 #Rootstech did the same thing at that big conference.
They post all kinds of messages relevant to the conference like room changes, etc.  You are out of the loop without access.

Ahh...Social Media!  That stuff is coming at us from every angle now if we connect with people other than through email.  We have to self educate ourselves to survive in this techie world.

Again if you have a younger family they don't really use email much.  When I send something via email I have to send them a text alert to even check their email!  

So hashtags.  Here is a link to the article I found on Thomas Mac Entee's blog this morning. 

https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use-hashtags/

A previous post I did on Instagram and hashtags:

http://alegacythatmatters.blogspot.com/2016/01/using-instagram-for-your-family-history.html

Ancestry DNA Alert

Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist

Meet Judy if you don't already know her.  The Legal Genealogist is a very popular blogger among people who enjoy Genealogy and learning.  She is an expert on many things and one of them is DNA.  She posted a good alert today.

I am going to quote a part of her post and redirect you to the full message.  Ancestry deleted some DNA test results, including DNA samples that had a lot of people up in arms a few years back.  I remember reading a lot of commentary on the "whys" but bottom line for many people was that they now had no way of reclaiming the information and things were lost.  For many their their DNA donor was then deceased.  Hmm.  So when I saw this alert I wanted to share if you are an Ancestry customer for DNA.

"AncestryDNA alert Posted: 19 Apr 2016 07:00 AM PDT Act now to preserve data There are changes coming soon — possibly very very soon — to the matching system at AncestryDNA that may make some of the folks who’ve tested there lose some bits and pieces of information they have now. This isn’t going to be altogether a bad thing, since the theory is that most of the things that will drop out of sight will be bits and pieces that are unlikely ever to lead to a common ancestor. In short, the hope is all of our matches will be better, stronger and more accurate. But there are some aspects that will be problematic, and folks need to act now to minimize any collateral damage from the change. Here’s what’s happening: AncestryDNA is revising its system for evaluating matches in two ways. First, it’s revising its phasing data to more accurately identify bits and pieces of DNA that are genealogically significant. Second, it’s changing its matching system to use actual segments from start to end rather than artificially designated windows. What does that mean? In plain English, some of the people who are showing up as matches at AncestryDNA right now will stop showing up as matches. Not huge numbers (not like the last time AncestryDNA revised its system and some folks lost as many as 90% of their matches) — but some. At the same time, some people who now don’t show up as matches may appear in the match list. So in terms of sheer numbers of matches, there isn’t going to be any big change. AncestryDNA says no-one who now appears as a second cousin or closer will drop off anyone’s match list. And it’s promised that we will be able to download data on anyone in the current match list where we’ve either added a note to that match’s record or added a star to the record for our own research. But — and here’s a big but — " Discover the rest of her post here:  http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2016/04/19/ancestrydna-alert/ Judy has some fascinating posts on the law, her family and other things of interest.  Check it out! If you ever see her speaking in the area by all means go.  She is an amazing presenter as well as writer.