Genealogy Puzzles

[fauxklore]

Celebrity Death Watch: Mario Cuomo was a governor of New York. Bess Myerson was the first Jewish Miss America and later became a consumer affairs activist. Edward W. Brooke III was the first African-American elected to the Senate, back in the days when the idea of a liberal Republican from Massachusetts was easier to believe.

Weather: I know it is January. But I also know I live in Virginia. Please turn the dial back up.

Genealogical stuff: There are a lot of new vital records on Litvak SIG (on jewishgen) and they raise as many questions as they answer. There are a number of records I need to obtain and, in particular, I am hoping that the internal passports for my grandfather and my great-grandmother may address some, though the latter is what may be the most puzzling. There is ambiguity about her maiden name and potential new information about where she was born. Of course, there could also have been more than one Tzvia Nodel who was a dressmaker in Kaunas, but I am reasonably sure I am finding the right record because there is another name right next to it which I know as the name of someone who worked for her in her dress factory (and who later lived near my family in the Bronx).

But, really, the first thing I should be doing is computerizing the various notes and records I have. I’m a bit torn re: software in that it doesn’t appear that any of it really handles some of the ambiguities well. Right now, I am leaning towards Family Tree Maker for Mac but there also appear to be some pluses to Reunion. Gramps also looks interesting, especially because it is open source.

I’m also debating where the best place to publish information (aside from jewishgen, which is obvious). I want to scan in various photos and make them available to family members, so I will probably do this via a password protected website. Research info will probably go here.

Any and all advice accepted, though not necessarily obeyed.

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I use FamliyTreeMaker (for Windows) and Ancestry for my tree-like presentations, but I also make extensive use of Emacs and plain text files for my research logs. I can interleave URLs, transcriptions, hypotheses, comments, etc. I can quickly grep for matching (or near-matching) names and addresses. (I did try and abandon GRAMPS as having all the usability polish of an open-source package.)

I use dropbox both to back up my images and to be able to share links with family.

I use LiveJournal to share research in progress, and as cousin-bait.

Finally, I create two kinds of documents in Word, and share the resulting PDFs via Dropbox.

The first is a "research dossier" -- it contains one big question, and all the evidence I've found to date that bears on that question. This is useful (a) to remind myself what I've already found and what I'm still looking for; and (b) as a way to easily share that with someone else who may be able to help me -- a distant cousin, a friend who has expertise in that area, or a paid researcher.

The second is a "narrative" -- a way of presenting information about a particular subset of people which is more interesting to a casual reader than a database of source material. For many of my family, that is the end product, not the tree or database. And that's something that no genealogy software can handle.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

I've been using Rootsmagic (http://rootsmagic.com/), going back to the days it was a Parson's product (Family Origins for Windows). Online, I use Ancestry (but I haven't paid for it for a few years -- I do research in bursts and they are pricy).

[mortuus.livejournal.com]

I like Ancestry. Since I'm LDS, FamilySearch is actually where I have all of my family history stuff stored (can be used by anyone, though; don't have to be Mormon), but I've found Ancestry more user friendly so use that far more often for research.